Musk announced his plans on Twitter, where he also suggested that the MCT must be renamed.
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The title of his speech and the new name he has chosen for the project shows that Musk is as ambitious as ever in his plans to take humans to our solar system’s other potentially-habitable worlds. Exactly where else the interplanetary transport system might travel remains to be seen. NASA is using SpaceX’ cargo rockets to deliver goods to the International Space Station (ISS) during resupply missions while Musk has always expressed his ambition to colonize Mars and has sought the help of NASA to achieve that.
But keen to remind everyone of his team’s determination to make tangible progress toward its goal, Musk told Y Combinator, “People sometimes think technology just automatically gets better every year, but actually it doesn’t”.
According to Ars Technica, the Mars Colonial Transporter is created to carry up to 100 people to the red planet.
Musk has indicated the BFR will have a single rocket core and will be reusable like the Falcon 9, also by SpaceX. This spaceship’s name can be given the acronym ITS. That is still unknown. That is equivalent to 100 metric tons of cargo, according to Popular Science. A SpaceX IPO will likely be historical! But the company’s credibility is also on the line after two losses of a Falcon 9 booster in just more than a year. NASA has come to the same realization about its Space Launch System, which is now being tasked with sending massive probes to the Outer Planets as well as sending people to cis-lunar space and then to Mars. Considering how the company is yet to launch even one person to space, the deadline seems a bit far-fetched.
A key part of the rocket and spaceship will be the Raptor, a huge engine that the company has been working on since 2009. The vehicle is rumoured to be methane-powered, which could be manufactured from Mars’ subsurface ice and atmospheric CO2.
Musk will reveal his plans on a live video feed of SpaceX’s big announcements on Tuesday, September 27 at 2:30 p.m. EDT.
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Musk had also revealed SpaceX’s plan to launch a series of Red Dragon missions, starting in 2018 whose sole goal will be to see if the vehicle can drop off supplies to the Martian surface to set up the framework of hardware and equipment in preparation for the people journeying from Earth.
