SpaceX is thinking beyond Mars as evidenced by reports that the company's Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) will have a huge range and can go beyond the Red Planet. This was confirmed by CEO Elon Musk in a tweet.
Designed to transport 100 people at a time, the MCT will be powered by a Raptor rocket engine with a first stage booster plus a spaceship.
SpaceX is mulling that its pilot unmanned MCT will go in 2022 and will be followed by a crew-led mission in 2024. It seems SpaceX is leaving no stone unturned in making its MCT's first human mission a mega success.
Raptor Rocket To Drive Beyond Mars
The heavy duty spacecraft has been designed to travel 225 million miles to the Red Planet. In a follow-up to the earlier tweet, Musk suggested that the extra power spacecraft deserves the name "interplanetary transport system."
SpaceX is planning the first unmanned probe to Mars by 2018, and Musk said probes would go on every two years until humans set foot on the planet in 2025.
In the new space vehicle, the fuel will be a mixture of methane and liquid oxygen. What makes the MCT unique is SpaceX deploying the next-generation rocket engine Raptor, which is claimed to be three times more powerful than the Merlin engines used in the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
SpaceX has already been at the action front with developmental tests conducted on the Raptor engines at its McGregor test site since August.
According to Musk's tweet, the company wants to confer a new name to the Red Planet spaceship as it aims to achieve the ability to go beyond Mars.
Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2016
Some names like Heart of Gold, Phoenix, Enterprise, McTransportFace, Musk and Beyond, and Far From Earth are doing the rounds. Musk will be throwing more light on the MCT at a key note address titled "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" at the International Astronautical Congress on Sept. 27.
The good news also marks a new resilience of SpaceX as it comes close on the heels of the Falcon 9 rocket mishap when it caught fire and exploded at Cape Canaveral, destroying the Amos-6 satellite employed by Facebook. The cause of the explosion is still under probe, but Musk described the incident as a "fast fire" and not an explosion.
Nevertheless, SpaceX has put the incident behind and is making sure the Falcon 9 is back in flight mode by November.
