CHAPTER 11
MARS
or
BUST
I want to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
—Elon Musk139
Imagine a colony on the Red Planet, people moving there and setting up the first Martian city. It will require engineers, medical crew, entrepreneurs, and scientists. To get started they’ll need basic supplies, life-support systems, propellant, and a way to produce power. First, they’ll build a base, then a city, and ultimately a civilization that sustains itself. That is Elon’s dream, and he has a plan to achieve it.
Concept art of Starship and Mars colony. (© SpaceX.)
The plan calls for a new type of spaceship originally called the Big Falcon Rocket. It has since been renamed Starship. Construction of Starship is underway. The rocket will consist of a booster and a ship that can carry one to two hundred people on board.
But long before Starship attempts to take the first colonists to Mars, unmanned supply missions will drop off those critical necessities. The goal is to deliver cargo to Mars by 2022.
Concept art of sending Dragon to Mars. (© SpaceX.)
After launching the ship carrying the colonists into orbit, the Starship’s booster would quickly return to Earth, load up on fuel, and rejoin the colonists in space, resupplying the ship with enough fuel to make it to Mars. The trip would take about eighty days. SpaceX says the target date for crewed missions to Mars is 2024.
Elon’s bigger vision is that SpaceX will take a million people to Mars over a hundred year period. But the plan is constantly evolving as technology evolves.
“I think we are working on one of the most important things we possibly can, and that’s to find another place for humans to live and survive and thrive. If something happened on Earth, you need humans living somewhere else,”140 SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said.
ROUND-TRIP ROCKET TICKETS
Because a human civilization on Mars is an idea with a huge price tag, you need a way to pay for it. Elon’s solution: Develop a spacecraft that can not only ferry people back and forth to Mars, but carry out a number of other jobs, like launching satellites for governments and businesses and providing transportation from Earth to the moon.
Starship would more than double the power of the Falcon Heavy, which dramatically increases the type of payloads the spacecraft can carry and where those payloads can be delivered. It could place much larger satellites and telescopes into space, giving scientists the opportunity to “see really incredible things and discover incredible things in space,”141 Gwynne explained in a recent TED Talk. All of those missions would bring in revenue.
But this rocket could also take you to the other side of this planet—in just forty-five minutes. True space-age travel on a spaceship that can take you from one point on Earth to another. And the best part is, the longest part of the trip will be the boat ride to and from the landing pads.
“It’s definitely going to happen,”142 Gwynne said during her onstage interview.
“If I can do this trip in half an hour to an hour, I can do dozens of these a day, right?” Gwynne explained. “And yet, a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day. So even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive, I can run ten times, at least, what they are running a day and really make the revenue I need to out of that system.”143
When could rocketing to Asia become a real thing? Well, according to Gwynne, by 2028.
Okay, so there are plans in place for getting to and for colonizing the Red Planet. Um, but what about when they get there? You are going to want the Internet available to keep in touch with Earth while chilling (or engaging in your daily fight for survival) on Mars. In January 2015, Elon announced his plans to develop a space-based Internet called Starlink.
The first step is providing satellite-based Internet for all of Earth. The satellites, some four thousand of them, would beam down broadband Internet from low Earth orbit. The price tag for a space-based Internet? $10 billion. And the number of people on the planet who would have improved access or their first access at all to the Internet? Roughly three billion.
“Yeah, there is no question,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said. “It will change the world.”144
It took a while, but in 2018 Elon finally won approval from the Federal Communications Commission for his plan to build a global broadband network using SpaceX satellites. Elon has approval to launch a whopping 4,425 satellites to create his Starlink network.
When Elon first announced the project, he made his ultimate goal clear. Eventually he wanted his network to deliver an Internet to Mars. “It will be important for Mars to have a global communications network as well,” he said, adding, “I don’t see anyone else doing it.”145