A Red Planet settlement isn’t a mere pipe dream, according to Elon Musk.<\/p>\n
The SpaceX<\/a> founder and CEO thinks humanity can get a sustainable, self-sufficient Mars <\/a>settlement up and running by 2055, as long as we make some key advances with our heavy-lift launch technology.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “I think it can be done in in 30 years, provided there’s an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer window, which is every two years,” Elon Musk<\/a> said via video on Sept. 9<\/a> during the All-In Summit, an event organized by the All-In podcast. (Earth and the Red Planet align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Ramping up the tonnage is important, he stressed, because a Mars settlement will need lots of stuff, from habitat modules to helper robots. And, to be truly self-sufficient, it will also need “to have all of the ingredients of civilization,” Musk said \u2014 the materials that will enable settlers to grow food, generate fuel from the Martian atmosphere<\/a> and build microchips, computers and rockets, among many other things.<\/p>\n Musk has one particular rocket in mind to make this Red Planet dream come true \u2014 SpaceX’s Starship<\/a>, the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built.<\/p>\n Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable \u2014 a booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship, or Ship for short. Both are made of stainless steel and powered by SpaceX’s next-gen Raptor engine, which burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane (both of which can be produced on Mars, Musk has stressed).<\/p>\n The vehicle is still under development. It has flown in a fully stacked configuration 10 times to date, most recently on Aug. 26. Flight 10<\/a> went well; Starship notched all of its main mission milestones, including its first-ever payload deployment in space (eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink<\/a> broadband satellites).<\/p>\n This was an important bounce-back mission for Ship, which was lost prematurely on the previous three Starship test flights.<\/p>\n The next Starship test flight will be the final launch of the vehicle’s current Version 2 design, Musk said at the All-In Summit.<\/p>\n “Thereafter, it’s Version 3, which is a gigantic upgrade, because that’s got Raptor 3, and pretty much everything changes on the rocket,” he said, referring to the next engine iteration. “So, Version 3 might have some initial teething pains because it’s such a radical redesign, but it’s capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable.”<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n That’s about 2.5 times the lift capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy<\/a> rocket in reusable mode, he noted. But the Heavy, like its cousin the Falcon 9<\/a>, is only partially reusable; the vehicle’s upper stage is expendable. Each Super Heavy and Ship, by contrast, will fly many times, if all goes according to plan.<\/p>\n