Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with SpaceX. In fact, Musk said during the presentation that the company has already started building a facility for the rocket and tooling has been ordered.
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“There is something else”, Musk said, before showing a video of Earth-to-Earth BFR travel. The company expects to demonstrate later this year the first test flight of Falcon Heavy, a far more powerful rocket capable of heavy payloads and sending paying space tourists on a flight around the moon.
“It’s about believing in the future, and thinking that the future will be better than the past”, Musk said.
SpaceX built a 12-meter carbon fiber development tank created to hold cryogenic fluids.
A grid connection agreement for the 100 megawatt battery array was signed by transmission company Electranet on Friday afternoon, sparking the start of a 100 day deadline for Tesla to complete construction of the battery or build it for free. Ships carrying crews would arrive in 2024, he added.
Not much more is known about these Moon base plans, but the idea alone is a big change for Musk’s vision.
Musk pointed out their scale up from Falcon 9 rockets to Falcon heavy was actually far more of a significant challenge than first expected, with nearly everything having to be re-engineered to support the larger payload.
He’s not done there, however, with the BFR’s real objective being to get humans to Mars, which in turn involves stopping off at the SpaceX moon base. Musk’s goal is to make the BFR reusable, which would significantly bring down the cost of launches.
Musk also shared an image on his Instagram account of SpaceX’s interplanetary rocket on the surface of the Moon.
The congress in the southern Australian city is set to conclude on Friday with new details from Lockheed Martin on its Mars Base Camp, the defence giant’s plans to send humans to the planet by 2028.
“If you built this thing to go to the moon and Mars, then why not go to other places on Earth as well”.
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Musk also sees the BFR and the passenger version of the Transport as making passenger hypersonic travel practical with vertically launched rockets leaving from, for example, New York Harbor and landing on a barge in Shanghai 30 minutes later.
