There were many failures in the chronicles of the European Age of Discovery. The age officially started when Columbus bumped into the New World on the way to India. But it unofficially began centuries earlier as ships and navigation gradually became reliable enough for explorers to make a run across an unknown ocean. We’ll never know for sure how many ships sank or how many crews were lost along the way, but over the preceding millennia it was surely in the thousands. Exploring new worlds with new technology is dangerous. It always will be. If humans are to become a multi-planet species there’s something we need to accept: failure has to be an option.
If loss of equipment or loss of life stops a program in its tracks, and that program happens to be sailing across uncharted oceans in small wooden boats through storms and waves by the light of strange stars, or blazing through 100 million miles of vacuum at Mach 100 pelted by exotic rads and rays, that program is doomed from the start.
No doubt some recent and relatively minor failures keep SpaceX CEO Elon Musk up at night. No one was hurt, but it’s the kind of thing that threatens to set back Musk’s ambitious voyages to Mars—which are the whole reason he started SpaceX. The goal is not to “save” Earth. The end goal is to create a self-sustaining colony that can grow, independently, of our home-world. Think of it as biospheric reproduction.
On Tuesday, speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Musk showed he wasn’t kidding about his original motive, laying out his plan on how a colony might be sustained and developed:
The trip will work like this: First, the spaceship will launch out of Pad 39A, which is under development right now at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At liftoff, the booster will have 127,800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28,730,000 pounds of thrust. The spaceship heads to orbit, while the booster heads back to Earth, coming back within about 20 minutes. Back on Earth, the booster lands on a launch mount and a propellant tanker is loaded onto the booster. The entire unit — now filled with fuel — lifts off again.
The problem might be best broken down into two parts: the spacecraft that gets people and cargo to the surface of Mars, and the initial strategy those first colonists follow to survive and create the conditions necessary for sustainability. We’ll introduce the first part and have some thoughts on other issues below.
At the heart of Musk’s interplanetary strategy is a proposed vehicle that was more legend than fact until this week. In a presentation worthy of Apple unveiling the first smartphone, Musk introduced us earthlings to a booster that was heretofore dubbed alternatively the Big Fucking Rocket or Mars Colonial Transport. He now calls it the Interplanetary Transport System or ITS, emphasizing the spacecraft’s potential capacity to go beyond Mars. Powering the giant spacecraft will be the new Raptor engine, a methane breathing monster rivaling the old F-1 rocketdyne engines that lofted the Saturn V and its Apollo capsule with the lunar lander tucked inside half a century ago. The ITS is the first realistic shot at what could turn into a sort of covered wagon system for foraging into and taming the wild, wild waste of deep space.
The first booster and spacecraft will be named The Heart of Gold, after the spaceship in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Even as the ITS booster is being developed, SpaceX plans to land two or more unmanned Dragons on the surface of Mars loaded with supplies, and perhaps fully fueled for a fast getaway, for the first pioneers who will follow. These “Red Dragons,” as they’re being called by industry watchers, will be launched by the company’s Falcon 9 Heavy. Musk is hoping to begin launching as early as 2018 and to hit every 26-month Earth-to-Mars launch window afterward for several years. That would put the first Mars colonial assessment team on the Red Planet as early as 2025.
One of the first orders of business will be setting up a rocket fuel propellant station. It was analysis of Martian raw materials that informed the decision to utilize methane as a fuel for the ITS Raptor engine. Methane is cheap and easy to make on Earth, based on analysis of NASA and ESA missions, so it’s at least possible and probably practical to make it on Mars with materials immediately available or just below the surface.
The video below has a well-done animated sequence showing the life cycle of the ITS, from Earth surface to orbit to Mars reentry.
Of course, skeptics say that SpaceX is trying to do too much, too fast. It’s a fair point in light of the recent accident at the Kennedy Space Center where an unmanned Falcon 9 blew up during routine pre-launch procedures. Others point out that this endeavor will cost anywhere from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. It's far more than even Elon Musk, cofounder of Paypal and CEO of Tesla and Solar City, could possibly afford alone or raise collectively. These kinds of question have yet to be fully answered, although Musk does mention in the video that reusability and a strong public-private partnership will play a big role in dramatically lowering costs.
Other big questions are: where will the first assessment team land, how will they live, and what will they use for gas? Mars may look like the desert southwest in images returned by robotic explorers, with clear crisp lines of desert and dune against pink and blue skies, but it is not. The surface of Mars is instantly lethal to humans in a dozen different ways. The rarefied air is mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen with no free oxygen at all. The surface is bombarded by radiation, even the soil is toxic by most standards, and these are just some of the hazards we know about.
In his presentation (below), Musk did not dwell much on these topics. But at least we have the beginnings of a strategy that might work, beyond a dream; an actual plan that builds on itself and that’s integrated into a long-term goal. Whatever your feelings on space exploration or colonization, one thing is clear: the men and women of SpaceX are absolutely serious, and this is not a one shot stunt or a PR gimmick or a scam to raise capital.
They are designing a system for planting and sustaining the first off-world colony, and their motive is nothing less than the long-term survival of the human species. That’s not just a first for all mankind, it may turn out to be the biggest first in history.
Personally, I sure hope they succeed.