Elon Musk has revealed his new grand vision for the colonization of other planets.

Musk has been saying from the beginning that SpaceX's goal is to make humans "a multi-planetary species," with a particular focus on Mars. On September 29, at the 68th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, Musk proclaimed SpaceX has discovered the path to the Red Planet: a single rocket, nearly as tall as the Saturn V, with a first-stage booster and an enormous second-stage spacecraft that could fly to the moon, Mars, or a city on the far side of the Earth, making rocket flights a potential super high-speed alternative to airlines.

To pay for the development of the new multi-use rocket—which Musk referred to in the presentation as the "BFR," or Big Fucking Rocket—Musk said SpaceX would someday discontinue the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon spacecraft programs, rolling all of those resources into the BFR. The rocket would then be used for all SpaceX commercial spaceflight services, including launching satellites and depositing supplies at the International Space Station (ISS).

Moon Base Alpha, SpaceX's envisioned lunar outpost supplied with the BFR. SpaceX

While Musk didn't announce the estimated cost of a BFR launch, he did provide plenty of engineering details about the launch vehicle. The 106-meter-tall monster rocket would have a first stage booster with a diameter of 9 meters and 31 Raptor methane-oxygen engines, currently under development by SpaceX. The new BFR is a step down in size from a previous rocket design, the Interplanetary Transport System, which Musk unveiled at last year's IAC in Mexico.

The BFR's second stage and spaceship is the most intriguing ppart of the design, however. Stretching 48 meters long, the stage of the rocket that would carry crew and cargo would be longer than the Space Shuttle orbiter. The large payload bay on the spacecraft would allow multiple satellites to be launched at once and could house as many as 100 people on a voyage to Mars, Musk said. The rocket could put as much as 150 metric tons into low Earth orbit and return to Earth with 50 metric tons. Both stages would land vertically, capitalizing on the technology SpaceX has developed landing the Falcon 9.

The BFR (bottom) and second stage spaceship (top). SpaceX

Although Musk's ultimate goal is a colony on Mars, he said the BFR could and should be used to return to the moon first. "It's 2017, we should have a lunar base by now," he said, speaking 45 years after human last set foot on the moon. "What the hell is going on?"

The BFR's spaceship would also include in-orbit refueling capabilities, allowing it to fly beyond the moon to Mars. Musk displayed a concept Martian base that grows into a full city, which he said could be accomplished with repeated flights of the BFR. The spaceflight billionaire said two cargo spacecraft could be delivered to the Red Planet by 2022, with four more spacecraft to follow in 2024, two more with cargo and two with crews.

"That's not a typo, although it is aspirational," he said when he revealed the Mars landing timeline. "But if not this timeframe, I think pretty soon thereafter."

The growth of a colony on Mars. SpaceX

The BFR could also, Musk said, potentially fly customers from city to city, launching into orbit and then separating as the first stage returns to land and the spaceship continues on to the destination, also to land vertically on a pad. Elon Musk has always compared landing rockets to the reusability of airliners, and now it looks like he wants to use the former to provide a much faster alternative to the later—New York to London in 29 minutes and anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.

The best part: Even with all these capabilities, Musk says the BFR will still be the cheapest orbital rocket to ever fly, cheaper than the Falcon 9 because the entire thing will be reusable. SpaceX will begin construction work on the first BFR in the second quarter of next year, which will include composite fuel tanks and autonomous docking and rendezvous capabilities, and "I feel fairly confident we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years," Musk said. SpaceX is going to ultimately transition nearly all of its resources into the Big Fucking Rocket program, mothballing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy (which hasn't flown) and Dragon spacecraft (which hasn't carried humans).

"This is really quite a profound—I won't call it a breakthrough, but a realization—that if we can build a system that cannibalizes our own products, makes our own products redundant," then SpaceX can apply all of its resources "to one system"—a rocket to launch satellites and cargo, fly humans to the moon and Mars and also Shanghai.

Reality Check

Landing a single person on Mars before 2025, let alone a large ship full of dozens of humans, would be an accomplishment to dwarf mighty Apollo. Elon Musk says with in-orbit refueling capabilities, the spaceship of the BFR could take as much as 150 metric tons to Mars. While it is possible to launch an enormous payload to Mars if the rocket is already in space, it can be refueled, and then launched again without the impediment of gravity, the problem arises when that 150 metric tons of supplies arrives at its new red home.

Mars base concept with BRF second stage spaceships. SpaceX

The Curiosity rover is the heaviest object humans have ever landed on Mars by a good margin, and the entire craft including its capsule and sky crane weighed in at less than two metric tons, while the rover itself had a dry mass of only 899 kg. The second stage spaceship of the BFR, the part SpaceX wants to land on Mars, has a dry mass of 85 metric tons, and 1,100 tons of fuel capacity, of which it will need a significant portion to conduct a vertical propulsive landing as planned.

There is only one institution in the world that has landed on Mars, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The European Space Agency crashed a small spacecraft trying to land on Mars last year. Propulsive landings, or using rocket engines to slow down and land, are certainly the best way to land something big on Mars, as the atmosphere is too thin to use parachutes to slow down all the way, and there is no denying SpaceX is the king of vertical propulsive landings. But the ambitious company canceled plans to land its Dragon spacecraft on Mars earlier this year, citing engineering and safety certification challenges, and now it plans to land a much larger spaceship, with more payload, that hasn't been built or tested, in five years.

BRF compared to Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy. SpaceX

When SpaceX developed the Falcon 9, it crashed numerous rockets as aerospace engineers crunched the data and refined the rocket's landing systems. It stands to reason that a similar process of trial and error will be required for a new rocket that is planned to be eight times the mass of a Falcon 9.

SpaceX has never launched a human before, but it seems to be on track to start launching astronauts to the International Space Station next year, or perhaps shortly thereafter if more gremlins reveal themselves. The company is also gearing up to try its first Falcon Heavy launch, including landing all the three first stage boosters, which would be an incredible feat, though Elon Musk has warned the first launch might not be successful. If the Big Fucking Rocket is actually built in the next five years, docking it to the ISS like the Space Shuttle and certainly landing it on the moon would be enormous strides, though mundane satellite launches and resupply missions will surely come first.

SpaceX

And then there are the safety concerns. As the species expands to Mars, lives will be lost. Many people would gladly risk their lives to truly settle new frontiers, but the regulatory certification for sending a ship with a hundred people to Mars is unimaginable—it won't even begin to truly get ironed out until a spacecraft that could land people on Mars does land in a test without them.

Yet, SpaceX might be be on the path to something truly monumental—landing humans on the Red Planet before all the governments and superpowers of the world. The 2030s or 2040s is more realistic, but with its advances in vertical rocket landings, SpaceX just might be the engineering operation to take us all the way to Mars.

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