Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is planning to colonize Mars with his company SpaceX.
When Musk presented this idea, he said that the earth may not be inhabitable anymore in the near future.
So a new colony on mars might be an alternative for survival!
Mars is a fitting alternative because they have sunlight and an atmosphere.
Also, there is the possibility to grow plants because of the similar length of night and day time.
Currently, a trip to Mars would cost 10 Billion per passenger.
Musk plans to reduce the cost to $ 200.000 !
To make it that much more affordable, SpaceX is planning to build huge space ships that have enough space for 100 passengers.
They will be re-usable (which lowers the cost once again) and re-fueled in the orbit.
The trip would take about 6 months (if the constellations are beneficial), with a distance of 50-400 million kilometers.
He plans to start trips about once every 26 months, when the constellation of Mars is close to the earth.
The space ships will be equipped with many entertaining facilities like Cinemas, and also rooms to train with zero gravity.
For this journey, SpaceX has developed the driving mechanism "Raptor", which was used recently for the first time. It's 3 times as powerful as the current "Falcon 9" !
The fuel for the motor is a mixture of Oxygen and Methane - which could also be attained on Mars.
The engine is one of the biggest challenges when building a space shuttle.
To achieve the different power for the Raptor, the pressure has to be increased to 300 Bar. This is extremely difficult on a technical level, as the Raptor burns almost 1 ton of Methane and Oxygen per second.
Musk's vision is to create a self-sustaining colony of about 1 million people on Mars.
Starting in 2018, SpaceX will begin sending shuttles to Mars - without any human passengers at first.
And humans should be able to come along from 2025.
When asked if Musk wants to be one of the first colonists, he refused - answering that he wants to see his children grow up, and that the first trip could potentially be "quite dangerous".
Who knows - maybe we'll soon have a martian here on Steemit?
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