2024-09-01 20:04:16
Elon Musk has one goal in mind: within at least 20 years, humanity must have colonized Mars. To achieve this, he has been implementing a plan in which space flights play a key role.
At a recent meeting with experts on the subject and journalists at SpaceX’s development facility in the remote town of Boca Chica, Texas, The businessman talked about his plans to reach the Moon and Mars in the future.
“The critical breakthrough we need to achieve in order 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 the time of takeoff.
Musk hopes to use it to colonize Mars, turning it into a sort of “interplanetary Noah’s Ark” in case Earth suffers a disaster.
The path to Martian colonization has already begun to take shape. SpaceX has conducted two Starship launch tests in 2023, both with mixed results. The first attempt in April ended with a controlled explosion four minutes into the flight. The second, in November, showed progress with the successful separation of the first stage, but ended in a collision eight minutes into the liftoff.
Musk announced that the third launch is scheduled for February 2024hoping to overcome the previous obstacles. In addition, the entrepreneur is already preparing an improved version of the ship, to increase its current height, which is 122 meters, to 150 meters.
Additionally, the entrepreneur wants this ship to be part of a much more ambitious model that will allow humanity to carry out space exploration throughout the solar system.
Beyond the technical issues involved in creating a safe route of travel from Earth to Mars. There are also a host of political, ethical and financial challenges that would push Musk’s plans to at least 20 years.
For example, the cost of a mission of this magnitude has not yet been accurately estimated, but NASA’s Apollo program, which cost more than $280 billion in today’s dollars, serves as a reference.
Another reason is the lack of profitable resources on Mars, which makes the stability and viability of colonization difficult. The Red Planet’s atmosphere, 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 problem, Musk proposes warming the planet for many years. This process would melt the frozen CO2, thickening the atmosphere and bringing it closer to Earth conditions.
However, terraforming is just one of many environmental challenges, as the thin Martian atmosphere has little protection from solar radiation, and Extreme temperature variations, 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