Let's Get Our Asses to MARS !!

All Photos and illustrations, CREDIT Space X

Right now it looks like Elon Musk may beat NASA to Mars with his plan to get us there  sometime in the 2020’s, and the Musk plan calls for COLONIZATION, not just  a short stay to plant the flag and leave some footprints on Mars.

Sounds pretty ambitious, but I wouldn’t bet against a guy who came to the US of A with less than $2k, bought a computer, invented Pay Pal, sold it (Pay Pal., not the computer) a few years later for 200 million bucks, or so, then established Tesla Motor car company, Space X, and other thriving companies that seems to be doing pretty well.

Now Mr. Musk has developed manufacturing facilities to build new and more efficient rocket engines to power his Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) which uses 42 of the new "Raptor" engines in the booster to fling people and supplies to Mars until the colony becomes self sufficient and will be the second planet for us homosapiens to call home.

In case you missed the news, a photo of a prototype fuel tank that will cary the liquid oxygen required to provide power for the huge MCT rocket has already been built - - see below.



                     

Notice the workers standing at the bottom of the tank for size comparison.

Yes, it takes a lot of fuel to power the 42 rocket engines at the base of the booster, shown below.
                                 
  

What will the whole thing look like ?? (you might want know).  The small white blob near the lower right hand corner of the cut-away drawing shown below gives an idea of the size of a human in comparison to the whole rocket including the booster and the cargo/passenger compartments that will separate from the booster and proceed toward Mars from Earth orbit.  Notice that the human is almost as tall as the Raptor Engines
                 

The Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) will be used both for carrying passengers (about 100  on each trip) and/or cargo from Earth to Mars during the colonization process; a process that is intended to transport about a million Colonists to Mars over a period of up to 100 years.  The plan call for about 50,000 colonists to be established on Mars by  2050, or so.

The Musk Mars Plan (MMP) calls for launch Pad #39 at Cape Canaveral to be updated to accommodate the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT).  A fully loaded MCT will weigh in at about 13,000 tons on the launch pad.  Yes, it will be a really B-I-G rocket that dwarfs any rocket ever built (including the mighty Saturn 5 rockets that took astronauts to the moon.  The colonization process will require thousands of the MCT rockets to transport one million, or so colonists to Mars along with the supplies and equipment required to establish the colony.

To me, this goal seems a bit optimistic, but Mr Musk may surprise me, and others who question his ambitions.  Who knows?? - - Mr Trump and Mr. Putin may get excited about Elon’s plan and mobilize our two countries to prioritize the colonization of Mars.  I’m not holding y breath, but that would be better than building more killing machines so we can continue waging crazy bigger and badder wars.  In any event it will require a multi-nation effort to accomplish the full colonization of a large colony on Mars.

But that’s a subject for another day.

The illustration below shows an
 MCT on Launch Pad #39 at Cape Canaveral, read to blast off to Earth orbit where it will be fully fueled for the trip to Mars.  Yes there will be a "filling station" in orbit awaiting the spaceship - more about that part of the plan in a future post.

                 


For my regular readers (both of you) who may not want to dig out all the nitty-gritty details of Elon Musk’s plans for the colonization of Mars, I will continue to provide some of the details in my upcoming posts.  For the past several months I have been neglecting this blog because of some health issues and I hope that is behind me now.

My next MMP post will be ready for prime time soon.  The outline of that post includes information about funding and a few details about the hardware.

Take care, and remember:  Prepare for the worst; Hope for the best; then Deal with what ever comes along, and we can Change the World (thank you, Bill Nye).

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