Many wonder if life could exist on Mars, but one scientist may be able to actually make it happen with a new plan that outlines how to build a city on the planet. “It’s possible to make a self-sustaining city on Mars by 2050 if we start in 5 years & take 10 orbital synchronizations,” Musk told his 25 million Twitter followers. Elon Musk the SpaceX CEO told that he is looking forward to building a city in Mars, Elon Musk has been known for his revolutionary innovations. And now he is working on the starships that could send humans to Mars and set up a City in there.
Elon Musk has released new details of his vision to let humans colonize parts of the solar system. He plans to make humans a multiplayer species in case civilization collapses. He aims to launch flights to maars as early as 2023.
The means of transport
The SpaceX CEO tells that people could go to Mars within 30 years and now he is preparing the starships. According to him, the starships are designed to send 100 people in space at once. It uses a realtor engine that uses liquid oxygen and methane instead of rocket propellants used for the Falcon 9s Merlin engines.
If you think that going to Mars won’t be possible then let me remind you that musk is a silicon valley daydreamer and he already had tremendous success in rocket launching in space.
Self-sustaining City?
What’s more important is that the City that musk is trying to make will be self-sustaining, this idea depends on the cheaper access to space, the cost of transport to Mars will be reduced by “five million percent”. The idea behind self-sustainable City will be reusable space technology. In order to actually get to the Red Planet, Elon Musk said they would send the BFR into Earth’s orbit, refill its tanks, and then send it to Mars, where it will land. He noted that an essential part of trying to colonize Mars is the ability to produce propellants locally.
Because the planet’s atmosphere has carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plenty of water, he suggests using the Sabatier Process to manufacture methane and molecular oxygen. After the propellant is manufactured, the rocket can then be refilled for a return trip for Earth. He explained that no booster is needed to launch from Mars because it has less gravity.
Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer for SpaceX, said in September 2018 that “The idea would be to expand out, start off not just with an outpost, but grow into a larger base, not just like there are in Antarctica, but really a village, a town, growing into a city and then multiple cities in Mars”. The moxie experiment of NASA 2020 rover will investigate whether we can produce oxygen from atmospheric CO2 on Mars, that might be possible.
But Musk is willing to make methane as well – it would be cheaper and more reusable. This is a tricky reaction which requires a lot of energy.
What is an orbital synchronization?
Since reaching Mars is not a mere piece of cake, reaching Mars would only be possible during an orbital synchronization. as the distance between the two is reduced to around 33.6 million miles. Because the two planets follow an egg-shaped orbit, not every alignment is equal. If you don’t know what an orbital synchronization is then it is the point when the Earth and Mars are in closest alignment, which occurs around every 26 months.
All the space programmes and launches of NASA has been dictated by this synchronization for 20 years.
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Mars Odyssey (orbiter, 2001)
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Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit (rover, 2003)
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Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity (rover, 2003)
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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (orbiter, 2005)
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Phoenix Mars Lander (lander, 2007)
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NASA skipped the opportunity to complete a launch during the 2009 alignment.
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Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity (lander/rover, 2011)
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Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, aka MAVEN (orbiter, 2013)
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NASA skipped the opportunity to complete a launch during the 2016 alignment.
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Mars InSight (lander, 2018)
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Mars 2020 (rover, planned for 2020)
How will SpaceX build a City?
Musk wants to launch enormous spaceships into orbit around Earth where they will be refueled several times using boosters launched from the ground while waiting to head to Mars. Each will be designed to take 100 people and Musk wants to launch 1,000 such ships in the space of 40 to 100 years, enabling a million people to leave Earth.
There would also be interplanetary fuel-filling stations on bodies such as Enceladus, Europa, and even Saturn’s moon Titan, where there may have been, or may still be living. Fuel would be produced and stored on these moons. The aim of these would be to enable us to travel deeper into space to places such as the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.
The “Red Dragon” capsule is proposed as a potential lender on such missions, using propulsion in combination with other technology rather than parachutes as most Mars missions do. Musk plans to test such a landing on Mars in 2020 with an unmanned mission. But it’s unclear whether it’s doable and the fuel requirements are huge.
When will humans become multi-planetary?
Musk said they’re currently aiming to launch SpaceX’s first cargo missions to Mars in 2022, although he also called that an “aspirational” target, which means it seems rather unlikely that they will make it on time. It’s interesting that he set a timeline of 2022 in his paper, given that another commentary he’s given this year suggests they could launch a mission to Mars in 2019.
By 2024, Musk wants to fly two cargo missions and two crew missions to locate water and then build the plant to manufacture the propellant needed for a return trip to Earth.
Elon Musk even described his plan for building a base to use when they colonize Mars, starting with a single ship and then adding multiple ships before starting to build out the city. Overtime transforming Mars into a place of humans and letting us have our known ones at Mars.
What will the houses look like?
Musk explained that the colony would most likely comprise of glass geodesic domes on the surface of the planet, with large pressurized spaces for infrastructure created underground by robots. Describing the construction, Musk said that the city would initially consist of “Glass panes with carbon fiber frames to build geodesic domes on the surface, plus a lot of miner/tunneling droids. With the latter, you can build out a huge amount of pressurized space for industrial operations and leave the glass domes for green living space.”
Why be multi-planetary?
As Earth is being exploited so much one day will come when everything on Earth will be over and according to researchers there will be a sudden extinction.
And musk is the person who is thinking a lot to keep human beings in existence.
Musk’s rocket and spacecraft company, SpaceX, tends on building a reality where it is possible for humans to live on other planets. “The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets,” SpaceX says on its website.
An inspired life depends on humans moving beyond Earth, says Musk. “I’m going to talk more about what it takes to become multiplanet species. And just a brief refresher on why this is important. I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not,” Musk said at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress.
“You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. And that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than in the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. That’s why,” Musk said.
The red planet, Musk says, is the best option for life beyond Earth.
