Elon Musk has always been vocal about his desire to head to Mars and establish a colony, but today, Sept. 27, he's going to be revealing a little bit more about how he and SpaceX are going to make colonizing the Red Planet a reality.
At 2:30 p.m. ET at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Musk is scheduled for an hour-long speech that will shed light on the future of SpaceX's efforts to get to Mars. The spaceflight company has always been open about developing technologies necessary to fulfill Musk's plans, but hopefully the SpaceX CEO's speech will reveal some exciting new information.
You can watch a live stream of Musk's speech below:
To bring people and cargo to Mars, Musk is looking at a spaceflight system called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Not a lot is known about it, but it used to be called the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT). It was re-christened after Musk tweeted that the MCT could go well beyond Mars, and thus will need a name change.
Aside from its spacecraft itself, the ITS will be fitted with super-heavy-lift rockets powered by the Raptor Engine. SpaceX recently completed a successful test-fire of the engine, taking it a step closer to getting what it needs ready for colonizing Mars.
Musk and SpaceX are looking to launch their first mission to Mars by May 2018, flying an uncrewed Dragon capsule to the Red Planet to test out technologies that will be crucial to Martian living, like supersonic retropulsion, which will see the use of onboard thrusters fired against the flight path to slow down a spacecraft instead of the usual parachutes.
NASA also believes in the merits of supersonic retropulsion that's why it's providing technical support to SpaceX's 2018 mission. However, the agency is also eyeing getting to Mars on its own, which it has set for sometime in the 2030s.
After the Red Dragon mission in 2018, SpaceX is planning to launch two more Dragon capsules in 2020, with help from Falcon Heavy rockets. Another uncrewed mission is scheduled for 2022 and that will mark the ITS' first flight into space. Come 2024, just eight years from now, SpaceX is looking at bringing the first humans to Mars.
SpaceX appears to be ever moving forward with its plans for Mars, but the company suffered a setback a few weeks ago when one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded while being prepped for a static fire test. Static fire tests are used to determine if a rocket is ready for launch. In that particular incident, a Falcon 9 rocket was being readied for the launch of the Amos-6 communication satellite.
An initial review attributed the explosion to a helium tank breach. It is not clear, however, what caused the breach in the first place.
