How Elon Musk Plans to Take Humans to Mars and Beyond

SHYNE EARL                  PERIOD3                  10/11/16




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2.It sounds virtually impossible, but I think there are ways to do it,” said Musk. “Most of the improvement would come from full reusability; somewhere between two and two and a half orders of magnitude.


3.“In some ways it’s not that complicated, really,” he said. “It’s made primarily of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon fiber part is tricky when dealing with deep cryogens and trying to achieve both liquid and gas impermeability and not have gaps occur due to cracking or leaking.”


4.The most optimistic estimates put the cost of getting to Mars at USD $10 billion per ton, according to Musk. The SpaceX goal is to reduce that cost by roughly four and a half orders of magnitude to around $200,000 per ton. 


5.When it came to comparing the Mars vehicle to other spacecraft, Musk was more grandiose. The projected payload to low Earth orbit for the Mars vehicle is 550,000 kg, compared to 135,000 for the Saturn V