SpaceX engineer gives new details of Elon Musk’s first Mars missions

Reusable spaceships might
enable SpaceX to colonize Mars.

SpaceX/YouTube

• Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, wants to build cities on
  Mars.
• SpaceX is developing a system called the Big Falcon Rocket to reach
  the red planet as soon as 2022.
• A recent
  presentation by SpaceX’s lead
  Mars mission engineer, Paul Wooster, revealed new details about
  the plan.
• SpaceX seems to view itself primarily as a
  transportation company, and wants outside help to develop its
  surface missions and Mars colonization
  technologies.

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A top engineer at SpaceX has shared new details about the rocket
company’s
as-yet nebulous plans to launch the first people toward Mars
in 2024 and eventually
colonize the red planet.

Paul Wooster, SpaceX’s principal Mars development engineer, gave
a short presentation about the scheme on August 25 at the
21st annual International Mars
Society Convention in Pasadena, California. On Wednesday, the
Mars Society posted the talk to YouTube.

Much of what Wooster said echoes what his boss Elon Musk has
described in
presentations,
academic
studies, and
casual remarks.

Musk has repeatedly said his “aspirational” timeline is to launch
cargo missions to Mars starting in 2022, with crewed missions
following in 2024. However, he ultimately hopes to build cities
on Mars and permanently colonize the planet as a “backup
drive” for humanity, just in case a global cataclysm
ruins Earth as we know it.

Wooster highlighted some specific problems SpaceX faces, plus
some open-ended questions about what happens after the company
lands its first spaceships on the Martian surface.

He also signaled that the company needs outside help to address
these challenges.

“We at SpaceX are very much focused on the transportation,”
Wooster said during his talk. “In terms of what will be needed on
Mars, this is an area where SpaceX is quite interested in the
capabilities, but also something where I think lot of people
beyond just SpaceX can really contribute.”

How SpaceX plans to reach Mars

SpaceX’s ability to not only reach Mars, but also begin setting
up a sustainable outpost, will hinge entirely on its Big Falcon
Rocket, or BFR.

The system is designed with two sections: a 191-foot-tall fully
reusable booster, plus a 157-foot-tall spaceship. The booster
will heave the spaceship dozens of miles above Earth, then detach
and land itself for inspection and refueling. After detaching
from the booster, the spaceship will fire its own engines to
finish reaching orbit around Earth.

Once there, the ship will be nearly out of fuel. So nearly
identical tanker spaceships (maybe a dozen of them, according to
some back-of-the-envelope calculations on Reddit) would be launched
to refuel the main spaceship.

A diagram showing how
SpaceX plans to establish a base and methane-fueling depot on
Mars.

Elon Musk/SpaceX;
New Space/Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Publishers

A large and fully reusable space-launch system has not yet been
realized — nearly all rockets and spaceships are single-use. So
experts say it
would be a game-changer in reducing the
cost of access to space, not to mention reaching new
destinations there.

“That allows us to effectively reset the rocket equation,”
Wooster said. “We go from getting 100 tons or more into low-Earth
orbit, then refill, and we can take that payload pretty much
anywhere — including the surface of Mars, the surface of the
moon, or elsewhere.”

An illustration of
SpaceX’s Big Falcon Spaceship landing on Mars.

SpaceX

SpaceX is now shifting much of its
staff and
funding toward building the BFR, starting with
prototyping the spaceship under a tent at the
Port of Los Angeles.

Musk previously said the spaceship element of BFR is “by far the
hardest” part of the system to get right. He also said he hopes
SpaceX can build the first prototype by mid-2019 and start
launching it on short “hop” tests at the company’s rocket
facility in South Texas.

Each BFR spaceship is also designed to be refilled with methane
on Mars to power its return to Earth. SpaceX plans to manufacture
that fuel using water from Martian soil, carbon dioxide in the
planet’s thin air, and electricity from solar panels.

Some of the new details Wooster revealed

A cutaway illustration
showing the crew and cargo area of SpaceX’s planned Big Falcon
Rocket spaceship.

Elon
Musk/SpaceX

What, exactly, the first missions to Mars would try to accomplish
remains uncertain, but Wooster filled in a few details.

He said the first two uncrewed cargo missions would “confirm the
water resources in the locations that you’re interested in, and
then determine any [landing] hazards for future missions, and
then start to put in place some of the infrastructure that you’ll
need,” such as landing pads.

The two crewed ships that follow, plus two additional cargo
ships, “would be really focused on getting the initial outposts
set up, get going on all their resource work that will be needed
to both provide propellant, along with expand the base for future
activities there,” Wooster added.

Each ship will carry “at least” 100 tons’ worth of supplies, he
said — about 100 times the mass of NASA’s
Mars Curiosity rover. This means all six ships’ payload
combined would weigh about 150%-200% the mass of the entire
International Space Station — a football-field-size structure
that’s still being assembled two decades after its first piece
launched into orbit.

Wooster suggested that this cargo overkill is about redundancy:
By transporting far more supplies than any crew needs for a
years-long Mars mission, along with bulky gear, SpaceX can
circumvent a lot of advanced (and
as-yet-non-existent) technologies that might otherwise be
required to stay on Mars.

“We’re minimizing the number of elements that we need to develop
in order to make early missions happen,” Wooster said. “As we go
forward, there may be future efficiency improvements that we’ll
make, but we’re very much focused on getting to Mars as quickly
as possible and getting set up with robust surface presence
there.”

Wooster also said the first spaceships will likely serve as homes
for astronauts. This may not be the most comfortable setup, but
it could reduce mission complexity and development by skipping
the need to immediately build
Mars habitats.

“You’d be operating out of them using the various systems on them
to support the activities there,” Wooster said. “They’d be
staying there indefinitely.”

Eventually, however, Wooster said that bringing the spaceships
and their crews back home will be necessary to recover costs.
(One expert told Business Insider that SpaceX’s BFR development
program alone may exceed $5 billion.)

“As you move forward, to further reduce the cost, it is
advantageous to be able to use those ships multiple times” on
journeys to and from Mars, Wooster said.

An illustration from Paul
Wooster’s presentation on SpaceX’s Mars mission
plans.

The Mars
Society/YouTube

Finding and mining ice — perhaps as much as one metric tonne per
day, according to a slide (above) that Wooster shared during
his presentation — will be the
prime goal of the first SpaceX Mars missions.

Refining it enough to be combined with carbon dioxide and
converted into methane fuel will also be key, as will preparing
the planet for future settlers.

“The idea would be to expand out, start off not just with an
outpost, but grow into a larger base,” Wooster said. “Not just a
base like there are in Antarctica, but really a village, a town,
growing into a city and then multiple cities on Mars.”

Where SpaceX needs help

Some of the things Wooster said SpaceX needs help with indicate
how far the company is from nailing down a mission plan that is
doable and survivable.

Wooster’s presentation showed that SpaceX has four possible
landing sites picked out in northern Mars. These are locations
where it may be cold enough for huge reserves of subsurface ice
to exist, yet sunlight is strong enough for solar panels to
gather ample energy.

However, Reddit user CapMSFC claims to have attended the talk and heard an
impromptu question-and-answer session afterward, in which Wooster
said SpaceX is working with staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory to figure out which site is the best candidate. That
evaluation is apparently primarily based on Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter images, since there is not yet an
ice-scouting rover mission.

Wooster also said the company isn’t yet sure how it will
construct landing pads on Mars to ensure safer arrivals for
future missions and would be happy to take ideas, according to
CapMSFC.

A
prototype of NASA’s Z-2 spacesuit, which is designed for
astronauts to explore planetary surfaces.

NASA

Spacesuits that’d work on the surface of Mars are still an
enigma, too, Wooster reportedly said. (Not even NASA has
completed development on a suitable model.)

SpaceX’s plans for
protecting people from radiation in space and on Mars are not
yet known either.

“There’s also questions just about, ‘What will people be doing
there? How will they be living and working?'” Wooster said. He
added that it’d be a great opportunity to answer profound
scientific questions, such as whether
life ever existed on Mars or still does.

“These types of things are really opportunities for pretty much
anyone in the broader Mars-related community to engage in,”
Wooster said. “SpaceX is really focused on getting the
transportation architecture set up and achieving that as quickly
as we can. But it’s really to enable all of these types of
activities there as well. That should certainly encourage people
who are able to contribute there to do so.”

With about four years to go until its first mission — at least in
theory — SpaceX has begun
meeting formally with NASA staff, academics, and experts at
other spaceflight companies to workshop the details behind its
Mars landings missions.

Watch Wooster’s full presentation on SpaceX’s Mars plans