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Elon Musk has big rocket plans for … Earth?

BFR on moon
An artist’s conception shows the SpaceX vision for “Moon Base Alpha.” (Elon Musk via Instagram)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has added moon missions to his grand plan for Mars, in a bid to capitalize on what’s expected to be the Trump administration’s shift in space policy.

Lunar operations at “Moon Base Alpha” are among the big updates that Musk unveiled today before a packed house at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

The rocket being planned for missions to the moon and Mars — nicknamed the BFR, for “Big Frickin’ Rocket” — could also come into play for trips to the International Space Station, satellite launches and travel between spaceports on Earth.

Today’s presentation followed up on last year’s big reveal at the IAC meeting in Mexico, during which Musk laid out a plan to build a monster rocket and send thousands upon thousands of settlers to the Red Planet starting as early as 2024.

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Lockheed Martin adds a lander to Mars vision

Mars lander
An artist’s conception shows Lockheed Martin’s lander on Mars. (Lockheed Martin Illustration)

Lockheed Martin has fleshed out its picture for sending astronauts to the Red Planet by adding a refuelable lander and a water-based fuel supply chain to its “Mars Base Camp” mission architecture.

The system, updated today at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia, could make use of resources provided by asteroid mining companies such as Redmond, Wash.-based Planetary Resources.

Danielle Richey, a space exploration architect at Lockheed Martin, said the updated Mars Base Camp concept could help NASA “start exploring the Martian system in about a decade.”

Although NASA has said it wants to start sending astronauts to Mars and its moons by the 2030s, the space agency isn’t yet anywhere close to selecting any detailed plan to get there.

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Elon Musk sets up SpaceX fans for a surprise

Elon Musk
One year after unveling his Mars plan at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, SpaceX founder Elon Musk will return to the stage this week in Australia. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he’ll unveil “major improvements and some unexpected applications” this week when he updates his plan for sending thousands of settlers to Mars starting in the 2020s.

The update is coming in a talk Musk is giving to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, set for about 9:30 p.m. PT Sept. 28 (2 p.m. Sept. 29 in Adelaide). The IAC’s organizers say the talk will be live-streamed.)

This week’s talk follows up on Musk’s appearance at the IAC last September in Mexico, during which he laid out a detailed plan to develop a new type of monster spaceship and booster for Mars trips, known as the Interplanetary Transport System or ITS.

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Phobos photobombs Mars in Hubble view

Mars and Phobos
This multiple-exposure photo shows 22 minutes’ worth of Phobos’ orbit around Mars. (NASA / ESA / STScI Photo / Z. Levay)

Leave it to tiny Phobos to horn in on Mars’ glory in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The view of the Red Planet and the larger of its two moons, released today, is actually a testament to the orbiting observatory’s sharper vision.

Phobos is an irregular hunk of rock and ice, measuring no more than 16.5 miles in diameter. It’s small enough to sit comfortably inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C. (although residents of the nation’s capital would be none too comfortable).

Despite its status as one of the solar system’s smallest moons, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 could pick out Phobos easily against the black background of space in a series of images acquired over the course of 22 minutes on May 12, 2016.

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SpaceX leaves Red Dragon out of Mars plan

SpaceX Red Dragon landing
Artwork shows a Red Dragon capsule firing its thrusters for a Mars landing. (SpaceX Illustration)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he expects to see astronauts flying to the International Space Station on his company’s Dragon capsules by mid-2018 – but is downplaying a technology that would have opened the way for robotic “Red Dragon” missions to Mars.

His comments today at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, D.C., lent credence to suggestions that SpaceX was shelving its Red Dragon plan and shifting its focus to an Interplanetary Transport System capable of sending settlers to the Red Planet.

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Congressman sparks buzz with Mars question

Dana Rohrabacher
U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asks about Mars’ ancient past. (House Science Committee via YouTube)

What game was U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., playing when he asked Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley whether there was any evidence of an ancient civilization on Mars?

The question was an add-on at today’s House Space Subcommittee hearing on NASA’s flagship missions to Mars and to Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter.

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Elon Musk to update Mars plan in Australia

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk got a rock-star reception last September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico when he unveiled his long-promised plan to send scads of settlers to Mars. Now he’s working on a reprise, and it just might be announced at this September’s IAC meeting in Australia. Musk dropped the hint overnight when a follower asked him on Twitter to say when he’d unveil Version 2.0 of the plan, which is supposed to explain in more detail how all those Mars missions be paid for. “Maybe the upcoming IAC in Adelaide,” he replied.

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VP vows return to moon and ‘boots on Mars’

Mike Pence at KSC
Vice President Mike Pence addresses a gathering at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a prototype Orion spaceship as a backdrop. (NASA via YouTube)

Vice President Mike Pence, the newly minted chairman of a revived National Space Council, said today that President Donald Trump is committed to a return to the moon and a push onward to Mars.

Pence laid out the broad strokes of the Trump administration’s aspirations for space exploration during a visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Here from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence declared.

He cast last week’s revitalization of the National Space Council, which was disbanded by the Clinton administration in 1993, as a signal that space policy would be given a higher profile.

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Mars rover’s roll echoes moonshot stroll

Opportunity view of Mars crater
NASA’s Opportunity rover snapped a picture of its own tread marks as it passed by Orion Crater on Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU)

Forty-five years after the astronauts of Apollo 16 rode out on a rover to look over a crater on the moon, NASA’s Opportunity rover looked over a crater on Mars – and sparked a chain of coincidences.

To mark the linkage, Opportunity’s science team named the feature on Mars “Orion Crater.” That pays tribute to the Apollo 16 astronauts, who named their lunar module Orion. It’s also the name of the future NASA spaceship that may help astronauts get to Mars someday.

Orion Crater is about 90 feet wide and thought to be no more than 10 million years old.

“It turns out that Orion Crater is almost exactly the same size as Plum Crater on the moon, which John Young and Charles Duke explored on their first of three moonwalks taken while investigating the lunar surface using their lunar rover,” the Planetary Science Institute’s Jim Rice, a member of Opportunity’s science team, said in a NASA image advisory issued today.

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Elon Musk promises update on Mars plan

Mars spaceship
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System lifting off with a refueling tanker sitting beside it. (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision to send a million people to Mars is now in print, but the billionaire visionary says he’s already working on an update.

The newly published print version, appearing on the New Space website, recaps Musk’s 95-minute talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico last September – during which he laid out a decades-long plan to develop and launch fleets of giant spaceships to Mars, each carrying 100 passengers at a time.

The presentation has been online in video form for months, with accompanying slides, but the text-plus-graphics version is arguably easier to scan and digest.

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