Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has made trips to Trump Tower. Musk and SpaceX have the bold dream of colonizing Mars, and think they can launch the first human mission to the surface of the Red Planet as soon as 2024, when Trump, if reelected, would still be in the White House.
(We understand that Musk also talked with Trump about other issues, including the need for a smart grid, the kind of infrastructure that would give a boost to the solar energy business, in which Musk is a leader via his investments in the company Solar City.)
Trump seems to be cozying up to Elon Musk and is entertaining the idea of financing Musk’s Mars colonization project
Elon’s Vision of the Mars Colony
Initially, glass panes with carbon fiber frames to build geodesic domes on the surface, plus a lot of miner/tunneling droids. With the latter, you can build out a huge amount of pressurized space for industrial operations and leave the glass domes for green living space.
The current Mars plan is:
Send Dragon scouting missions, initially just to make sure we know how to land without adding a crater and then to figure out the best way to get water for the CH4/O2 Sabatier Reaction.
Heart of Gold spaceship flies to Mars loaded only with equipment to build the propellant plant.
First crewed mission with equipment to build rudimentary base and complete the propellant plant.
Try to double the number of flights with each Earth-Mars orbital rendezvous, which is every 26 months, until the city can grow by itself.
The Flight Tank for the Interstellar Transport was the most important part of the announcement
The flight tank will actually be slightly longer than the development tank shown, but the same diameter.
That was built with latest and greatest carbon fiber prepreg. In theory, it should hold cryogenic propellant without leaking and without a sealing linker. Early tests are promising.
Will take it up to 2/3 of burst pressure on an ocean barge in the coming weeks.
The spaceship would be limited to around 5 g’s nominal, but able to take peak loads 2 to 3 times higher without breaking up.
Booster would be nominal of 20 and maybe 30 to 40 without breaking up.
Spacex and Elon Musk have the 61 page presentation of the Interplanetary Transport System and the plan from early exploration to a sustainable colony on Mars
Spacex has built a full sized carbon composite fuel tank.
The Interplanetary Transport system can launch 550 tons to low earth orbit which is nearly four times as much as the Saturn V. It would be over four times as powerful as the SLS in the final version of the SLS