Despite the tough challenges now facing his SpaceX company, Elon Musk has made clear that he’s as determined as ever to get humans on Mars in the next 10 years. But now Musk has raised the stakes, tweeting that the MCT can go “well beyond Mars”, so it needs a new name.
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The announcement was made by Elon Musk on Twitter where he was asking for suggestions for the name of the system before he zeroed it to ITS. For that, SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk proudly announced the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT), a spacecraft created to carry both cargo and astronauts to the Red Planet. We know that was originally conceived to move either 100 tons of cargo or 100 people to Mars, which is 225 million miles away. 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.
As Wired reports, some details about the colonial transporter have trickled out, including claims it might be powered by methane and use the company’s powerful new Raptor engine. The ship is thought to be up to 200 feet tall. Colonizing Mars had been his goal since he founded SpaceX.
The revelation has come as a surprise to some people after the company has seen a spate of its unmanned rockets explode in recent years, leading to fears that its manned-missions could prove disastrous.
The more we get to know about the MCT/ITS, the more intriguing it gets, mainly because Musk has been keeping most information about the spacecraft under wraps and plans to disclose more about the Mars mission on September 27, during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. Musk said at the tech gathering in Hong Kong.
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The good news also marks a new resilience of SpaceX as it comes close on the heels of the Falcon 9 rocket mishap when it caught fire and exploded at Cape Canaveral, destroying the Amos-6 satellite employed by Facebook.
