James Dean

FLORIDA TODAY

Wanted: Adventurous spirits willing to risk their lives to open a new frontier on Mars. Workers needed to run foundries, install solar panels and open the Red Planet’s first pizza parlor.

If that sounds like an exciting future, Elon Musk hopes to offer you a ride in perhaps less than a decade.

The SpaceX founder and CEO on Tuesday in Mexico unveiled ambitious plans for a giant rocket and spaceship that could send up to 100 people to Mars, starting what he hopes could be a million-strong civilization within a century.

“It would be an incredible adventure,” Musk told an audience at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara. “I think it would be the most inspiring thing that I could possibly imagine.”

Musk made clear that early Mars missions will be expensive and extremely risky.

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He acknowledged his optimistic schedule depends on many things going right, including public-private partnerships that might help fund the estimated $10 billion cost to develop SpaceX's “Interplanetary Transport System.”

But Musk said the goal is a worthy one, about more than adventure. Moving to another planet could save humanity from going the way of the dinosaurs.

“The larger point is creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars to provide insurance for life as a whole, life as we know it,” he said. “I think a future where we are a spacefaring civilization and out there among the stars is infinitely more exciting and inspiring than one where we are not.”

Musk’s plan envisions SpaceX developing a massive rocket and spaceship that would stand 400 feet tall.

A booster powered by 42 methane-fueled Raptor engines would blast off with nearly 29 million pounds of thrust — nearly four times that of NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket.

Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A, the launching point for the Apollo moon landings, would host the first launches, with a crew flying in 2024 under best-case scenarios. A prototype spaceship could be ready for tests within four years.

After liftoff, the reusable booster would fly back to the launch pad and be prepared to launch a fuel tanker similar in design to the crew ship. Multiple fuel runs would ready the spaceship for a cruise to Mars lasting at least six months, a duration Musk said could be cut to as little as 80 days.

A concept video showed a spacious ship with rows of portholes and a huge bay window at the nose.

To make the prospect of a Mars trip more appealing, Musk said, crews would ill enjoy zero-gravity games, movies, a restaurant and other amenities.

“It’s got to be really fun and exciting,” he said. "It can’t feel cramped or boring."

A heat shield would protect the craft as it fell through Mars’ thin atmosphere, before it fired thrusters and deployed landing legs for touchdown.

If the system works as planned, Musk believes a ticket to Mars eventually could be had for about $200,000, then as little as $100,000.

“The key is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go,” he said.

Once there, people would grow plants, build a solar farm to generate power and harvest resources from the Martian soil and atmosphere to make fuel for spacecraft returning to Earth. Jobs would be plentiful.

“Who wants to be among the founding members of a new planet, and build everything from iron refineries to the first pizza joint?” said Musk. “We’ll want them all.”

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SpaceX’s goal, Musk said, is to make it possible to get to Mars, akin to building the Union Pacific Railroad. He didn’t dwell much on how to survive there, suggesting other businesses or government agencies might support the enterprise once it became possible.

Musk’s ambitious plans moved discussions about establishing a sustainable Mars settlement, rather than just a few astronauts visiting and coming home, in the right direction, said Andy Aldrin, director of the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.

But, Aldrin added, “In many ways, the problems of sustaining people on Mars are at least as challenging as getting there.”

Scott Pace, head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said it was surprising that Musk’s presentation at one of the largest international space conferences didn’t talk more about international collaboration.

“The scale of the effort seemed to be more of thought exercise than a practical plan,” he said. “If SpaceX were to go to Mars, this is the way SpaceX would want to do it.”

So far, Musk said planning for Mars missions represents less than 5 percent of SpaceX’s business and investment of tens of millions of dollars, including in the Raptor engine. But he hopes that could grwo to $200 million or more per year within a few years.

Musk said any personal fortune he amassed would be committed to the goal of making humanity a multi-planetary, spacefaring species.

“We’re just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available,” he said. “As we show that this is possible, that this dream is real — not just a dream, it’s something that can be made real — I think the support will snowball over time.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at facebook.com/jamesdeanspace.