SpaceX is thinking beyond Mars as evidenced by reports that the company’s Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) will have a huge range and can go beyond the Red Planet.
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The multi-billionaire tweeted: “Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name”. Musk’s revelation required a change.
This last offering was also the name of a ship in Douglas Adams’ iconic sci-fi novel “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, which is apparently close to Musk’s heart.
But, in a series of tweets on Saturday (Sept. 17), Musk announced that he had settled on “Interplanetary Transport System”, or ITS. Musk is expected to shed some light on his ideas during the upcoming International Astronautical Congress. If things remain as per schedule, the ITS will be launched with the first human beings on board and it will be headed for Mars in 2024. He even says in a tweet last Friday that the heavy duty Mars Colonial Transporter of SpaceX is now under development and will be very helpful in transporting people and resources to Mars. Alternatively, it can be used to transport almost 100 tons of cargo. “And then they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will be very comfortable”. Thus, the first time for such event to happen. Some observers have wondered whether Musk should really be focused a lot on roaring off to Mars and the rest of the solar system before he gets whatever bug that caused the accident identified and fixed.
The heavy duty spacecraft has been created to travel 225 million miles to the Red Planet.
SpaceX plans to have missions every 26 months.
We wonder what Elon Musk has in store for the ITS, but as per Mashable, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and the planet Venus (which is, on average, closer to Earth than Mars, but a worse candidate for terraforming, which is something Musk is interested in), are the most likely candidates for a visit. It is when launches are feasible.
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Musk said that SpaceX intends to drive Mars colonization by 2018, six years before what he had initially planned. At a hefty price of $62 million, SpaceX is willing to send building materials or habitation systems to Mars using the company’s heavy-duty rockets.
