2024-03-07 05:10:57
Elon Musk has a goal in mind: in at least 20 years, humanity must have colonized Mars. For that he has been executing a plan in which special flights play a fundamental role.
In a recent meeting with experts on the subject and journalists at the SpaceX development facility in the remote town of Boca Chica, Texas, The businessman spoke about his plans to reach the Moon and Mars in the future.
“The critical advance we need to become a galactic civilization is to make space travel as common as air travel,” Musk said.
To achieve this, his company SpaceX, in collaboration with NASA, has been working on the development of Starship, a mega ship that could be the key to colonizing the red planet and allowing this place to become a second home for humanity.
Elon Musk wants space flights to be as common as air flights. (Europa Press)
This spacecraft has a first stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage approximately 50 meters high, and is the largest spacecraft ever created, generating 16.7 million tons of thrust at takeoff.
With it, Musk wants to colonize Mars, turning it into a kind of “interplanetary Noah’s ark” in case the Earth suffers a disaster.
The path towards Martian colonization has already begun to be laid out little by little. SpaceX has conducted two launch tests with Starship in 2023, both with mixed results. The first attempt in April ended with a controlled explosion four minutes into the trip. The second, in November, showed progress with the successful separation of the first stage, but ended in a collision 8 minutes after takeoff.
Musk announced that the third launch is scheduled for February 2024, hoping to overcome the previous obstacles. In addition, the businessman is already preparing an improved version of the ship, to increase its current height, which is 122 meters, to 150 meters.
Additionally, the businessman wants this ship to be part of a much more ambitious model that allows humanity to carry out space exploration throughout the solar system.
Beyond the technical issues involved in creating a safe travel route from Earth to Mars. There are also a number of political, ethical and financial challenges that would make Musk’s plans take at least 20 years.
For example, the cost of a mission of this magnitude has not yet been precisely estimated, but NASA’s Apollo program, which cost more than $280 billion in today’s values, serves as a reference.
Another reason is the lack of profitable resources on Mars, which hinders the stability and viability of colonization. The atmosphere of the Red Planet, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, presents challenges such as the need to intervene on the planet to create a sustainable environment, a process called terraforming.
To solve this, Musk proposes warming the planet for many years. This process would melt the frozen CO2, densifying the atmosphere and bringing it closer to Earth’s conditions.
However, terraforming is just one of many environmental challenges, as the thin Martian atmosphere has little protection from solar radiation, and The extreme variations in temperature, from 20 degrees during the day to -73 degrees at night, are an example of the constant concerns about the safety of human life there.
By: Infobae