Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000 238
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from the BBC:
"Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars. The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013. ... 'My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars — this is very important — so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there,' he said. 'The whole system [must be] reusable — nothing is thrown away. That's very important because then you're just down to the cost of the propellant.' ... He conceded the figure was unlikely to be the opening price — rather, the cost of a ticket on a mature system that had been operating for about a decade. Nonetheless, Musk thought such an offering could be introduced in 10 years at best, and 15 at worst."
Re:Mars? (Score:5, Informative)
LEO is nearly halfway to Mars surface in terms of delta-v [wikipedia.org].
So yeah, SpaceX is directly addressing the most important component of making Mars missions economically feasible.
If we can make access LEO a relatively cheap commodity, and make it so we don't have to lift every single thing that we're going to take to Mars all at once, and have a way to have robotic manufacture of fuel on Mars for the trip back, then I can totally see Musk's statement playing out.
It does all hinge on that first huge step though. Fortunately SpaceX is hardly neglecting that part, and progress is promising.
Re:Fuel? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no fuel to be found, but you can make fuel from the atmosphere (CO2) and water (and lots of power from solar cells or fission). This has been proposed for decades now. For everything more than a one-off foot print mission it's certainly worth the effort.
Elon Musk may be a bit crazy, but he's not an idiot. In fact SpaceX has done lots of things meanwhile that were deemed plain impossible with the kind of money they had in hand. The crucial point will be if SpaceX will be a profitable company in the next years. If they manage to make sane profits I'm pretty well sure that Musk will put every penny into going to Mars. He's *that* crazy, really.
Re:Fuel (Score:4, Informative)
How does he plan on getting the fuel TO Mars in the first place?
He doesn't want to get it TO Mars, he wants to get it FROM Mars. There's enough CO2 and water there to produce your own fuel and oxidizer from local resources. Has been proposed (and demonstrated engineering-wise) since decades. This is not easy or cheap, but much easier and cheaper than to transport it there from Earth.
Re:Once space elevators are built on both planets, (Score:4, Informative)
Incidentally, fuel accounts for about 1% of the $50 million launch cost of a Falcon 9. That's what Elon Musk is trying to say. If you can get to a point where reassembling and reusing the launch vehicle costs as much as it's fuel, you can bring the cost of space flight down by two orders of magnitude.
Mars Direct - The Case for Mars (Score:5, Informative)
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars [wikipedia.org]
Re:Space Shuttle (Score:5, Informative)
"My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system" ... NASA had that vision with the Space Shuttle, but even excluding all R&D and capital purchases, just the incremental costs per launch were orders of magnitude higher than $500k per seat. And that's just to LEO! OK, that's "halfway to anywhere", but maintenance is a bitch, the staff required is huge, on and on... NASA isn't a role model for efficiency, but I seriously doubt that the commercial sector is going to be able to outdevelop them in just 10-15 years.
I thought the same a few years ago, but SpaceX just did everything right then. Hey, they developed a launcher (two actually), launchpads and a spacecraft, built *and* launched them for about the same amount of money as NASA or ESA need to build a single launchpad. ESA's ATV alone (without the launcher and everything else) did cost *more* than what SpaceX did spend altogether until now and ATV is just a one-way orbital transporter with no reentry capability.
Outdeveloping NASA and the other government-fed entities seems very much possible.
Re:Sounds a bit like... (Score:4, Informative)
If i remember correctly Aldrin's original idea was to use the "main tank" from the Space shuttles as the transport vehicles.
The tank was just jettisoned and left to burn up on re-entry, The extra "cost" to take it into orbit would have been negligible.
Then all they would need to do is vent any residual fuel in the tank to the vacuum of space, install a couple of air locks and some viewing ports and you have a habitable pressure vessel.
All that's left to fit is life support and a few home comforts if it's for human transport or a load of cargo straps... ^_^
Then load it up and give it a nudge in the correct direction...
Re:one word (Score:5, Informative)
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
You're mistakenly equating the cost to send someone to Mars and what YOU would pay to go to Mars. High demand and almost zero supply doesn't drive up what it costs SpaceX to do it, just what it costs you to pay SpaceX to do it.
Musk didn't say he could sell tickets to Mars for $500k in 15 years, he said he could send people to Mars for $500k. That's a HUGE difference, and means there is no question of demand or supply involved.
Re:Mars Direct - The Case for Mars (Score:5, Informative)
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars
Robert Zubrin actually had a piece in the Wall Street Journal last year where he described how to adapt his Mars Direct plan to use SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576317493923993056.html [wsj.com]
Nothing in this plan is beyond our current technology, and the costs would not be excessive. Falcon-9 Heavy launches are priced at about $100 million each, and Dragons are cheaper. With this approach, we could send expeditions to Mars at half the cost to launch a Space Shuttle flight.
Re:Maybe in 2200 or so... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually he said round trip but only after being done in volume and with R&D paid down, he did say towards the end that fuel costs were only $10-20/pound but already the Falcon Heavy would break the $1000/pound barrier - I assume this is to LEO. The capacity is only 40% of that to GTO which is almost the same as Mars transfer orbit, so more like $2500/pound but it still puts a 150 pound person on his way to Mars for $375k. The delta-v needed from Mars to Earth is lower, about as LEO so $150k for a $525k total. Of course you'll still need a lander and life support but I assume at the $500k price point Musk expects there is among other things a working Mars colony that can be expanded using local resources.
Remember that at this price point we could put 36,000 people a year on Mars if we dedicated NASA's budget to it, I'm thinking of a society that makes their own fuel, builds their own domes, produces their own solar panels and expands their own oxygen, food and water supply. The trip costs would be just the trip costs, I don't know how low you could get the lodging cost but surely it can't be that bad in volume. If you assume you start with a fully stockpiled ship on both ends and only think capsule+people+life support for the trip then it doesn't seem that unfeasible. Of course right now we have none of that but it'd be stupid for every mission to bring their own base and supplies forever.
If you could start to approach those rates you could possibly even make a living going to Mars, if you go for a 10 year trip and is a $100k/year software developer - which you can be from a cubicle on Mars - you can probably pay your own trip and boarding. Okay, the millionaire playboys will be first but if they can fund the R&D, get the volume up, cost down, fund the initial base then maybe you can get a snowball effect where lower costs lead to more people lead to lower costs. It won't solve earth's population problems but at $500k/person then colonizing Mars starts to look realistic. Once you're past a few thousand individuals they can procreate on their own too, though I suppose this is at odds with sending software developers ;).