Elon Musk’s Mars mission: all the news from the big announcement – The Verge

The race to Mars: here’s how SpaceX ranks against the competition

2016-09-30T10:45:09-04:00

On Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced his ambitious - if crazy - plan to colonize Mars within the next 40 to 100 years. But Musk isn't the only one with Mars dreams and ambitions. In fact, people have been drawing out missions to the Red Planet for at least the last 70 years - and we're still waiting for one to take flight.

How do the most prominent plans stack up?

One of the early proposed missions that set the stage for today's Mars plans was the Mars Direct proposal, which was published by aerospace engineers Robert Zubrin and David Baker in 1991. They thought it might be possible to land the first crewed mission to Mars as early as …

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Elon Musk’s ideas aren’t enough to turn humanity into a multi-planet species

2016-09-28T12:58:04-04:00

I admit it: I'm an optimist. I wanted Elon Musk to show me a strong Mars plan with real finances and real life-support design. I was hoping he'd talked some of his billionaire friends into financing this Mars dream. I wanted the dream to be real.

Optimists, of course, are frequently disappointed, which is why we're often mistaken for cynics. And so, listening to Musk talk about a ticket to Mars that costs less than $200,000 - the median price of a house in America - I must say: I was disappointed. That number doesn't square with what is likely to be the enormous cost of making Mars habitable for humans.

Optimists are frequently disappointed …

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The biggest lingering questions about SpaceX’s Mars colonization plans

2016-09-28T12:06:03-04:00

On Tuesday, thousands of people stampeded into a lecture hall in Guadalajara, Mexico, to hear SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talk about how he wants to colonize Mars. The fervor of the audience gave the room an electric charge as Musk's speech got underway; people cheered as he avowed to create a self-sustaining Mars colony of 1 million people over the next 40 to 100 years.

Musk dazzled the crowd with concepts for two new types of vehicles: a massive reusable rocket booster and a giant transporter to carry people and cargo to Mars. He also laid out critical details about them - such as how big they would need to be and the materials they would be mad …

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Elon Musk wants to build a transit system that lets humans tour the entire Solar System

2016-09-27T19:04:52-04:00

Elon Musk today announced plans for a giant rocket and spaceship that will theoretically be capable of sending humans to Mars. The theory, according to him, is that we could find a way to colonize Mars in just a century or two. In typical Musk fashion, he wasn't done there. During the latter stages of his presentation, the SpaceX CEO explained why he decided on Twitter a few weeks ago to rename the Mars Colonial Transporter to the "Interplanetary Transport System" - he wants the ITS to go so much farther beyond Mars. With a proposed 77-meter-tall rocket acting as a "javelin thrower" for the massive ITS spaceship, Musk teased the idea of Spac …

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Watch Elon Musk explain how SpaceX will colonize Mars in under five minutes

2016-09-27T17:58:22-04:00

As Elon Musk is wont to do, he took the stage in front of a rabid crowd this afternoon to lay out an extraordinarily ambitious vision of the future that at times felt inspiring, brilliant, and unbelievable, if not all at once. This time around, Musk was outlining the first details for how SpaceX planned to bring people to and from Mars and ultimately facilitate human colonization of the Red Planet. The full presentation lasted an hour - longer if you count the bizarro Q&A that followed - but we've boiled the event down to under five minutes in case you're looking for more of a crash course.

Check out the video above. For more, you can go he …

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Elon Musk might name his first Mars-bound spaceship after Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

2016-09-27T16:53:48-04:00

Today, Elon Musk revealed his ambitious multi-decade roadmap for human colonization of Mars, including the Interplanetary Transport System he believes will get us there. But while the event was full of technical detail on the new rocket and ship, it appears the crafts have yet to be named.

"We're thinking about names," Musk told the crowd. "The first ship that goes to Mars, my current favorite for it is Heart of Gold from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

The Heart of Gold is one of the ships at the center of Douglas Adams' 1978 radio play and subsequent book, stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox at the ship's official launch and later used to …

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Why didn’t Elon Musk mention where colonists will live on Mars?

2016-09-27T16:38:57-04:00

During his hour-long announcement of the SpaceX Mars colonization plan, CEO Elon Musk didn't say where exactly Martian colonists will live once they arrive on the planet - and how exactly they'll survive given the harsh environment.

Musk seemed particularly unconcerned about solar radiation. "The radiation thing is often brought up, but it's not too big of a deal," he says. There is a "slightly increased risk" of cancer, he says, and there will probably be some sort of shielding. He talked of creating an artificial magnetic field on Mars to deflect high-energy particles, especially to protect colonists from solar flares. But Musk didn't pro …

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SpaceX wants to be the railroad of the future

2016-09-27T16:37:18-04:00

SpaceX's plans for getting people to Mars are big and still a bit vague. Its plan for helping colonists actually live there for long periods of time is even more nebulous. But company founder Elon Musk suggests the latter part is by design - because SpaceX's job is to be the railroad of the space age, opening up the Martian frontier to people who will make the most of living there. "The goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system. It's like building the Union-Pacific Railroad," said Musk during today's event. "And once that transport system is built, then there's a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to go to Mars and crea …

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Elon Musk wants to collect fuel on Mars to send spaceships back to Earth

2016-09-27T16:30:12-04:00

Elon Musk wants SpaceX to send people to Mars and then bring them back to Earth on the same rocket they came in on. Nothing has ever been launched from Mars before, and Musk didn't go into all that much detail about how SpaceX would accomplish it. But he did says that it would all hang on one thing: methane.

Rather than carrying fuel from Earth for use on Mars, Musk wants SpaceX to create fuel when it gets there. Musk says SpaceX would rely on methane - "deep cryo-methalox," to be specific - because it can be created on Mars with "relative ease." SpaceX says it would "build a propellant farm" used to create new fuel and send its spaceships …

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Elon Musk: First humans who journey to Mars must ‘be prepared to die’

2016-09-27T16:24:19-04:00

Elon Musk just wrapped up an intricate and thorough presentation that covered his and SpaceX's vision of humans building a city on the surface of Mars. But throughout that talk, he didn't actually address exactly who should go. During the Q&A session that followed, the question inevitably came up: what sort of person does Musk think will volunteer to get strapped to that big rocket and fired toward the Red Planet? "Who should these people be, carrying the light of humanity to Mars for all of us?" an audience member asked. "I think the first journeys to Mars will be really very dangerous," answered Musk. "The risk of fatality will be high. Th …

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