Now we know how Elon Musk plans to get 1 million people to Mars.
At a conference in Mexico Tuesday (Sept. 27), the SpaceX founder and CEO unveiled the company’s Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which will combine the most powerful rocket ever built with a spaceship designed to carry at least 100 people to the Red Planet per flight.
If all goes according to plan, the reusable ITS will help humanity establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years, Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara. [SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport for Mars in Images]
The ITS rocket will be more or less a scaled-up version of the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster, Musk said. But the 254-foot-tall (77.5 meters) ITS booster will feature 42 Raptor engines, whereas the Falcon 9 is powered by nine Merlins. When combined with its crewed spaceship, the ITS will stand a full 400 feet (122 m) high, Musk wrote on Twitter. That would make it the largest spaceflight system ever built, taller even than NASA’s legendary Saturn V moon rocket.
[vc_btn title=”More on plans to colonize Mars” style=”outline” color=”primary” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2F34210-elon-musk-unveils-spacex-mars-colony-ship.html%3Futm_source%3Dsp-newsletter%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_campaign%3D20160928-sdc|title:More%20on%20plans%20to%20colonize%20Mars|target:%20_blank|”][vc_message message_box_style=”3d” message_box_color=”turquoise”]By Mike Wall, Space, excerpt posted on SouthFloridaReporter.com Sept. 30, 2016 [/vc_message]
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