What is the Musk Mars Immigration Plan?

According to foreign media reports on March 27th, Beijing time, Space Exploration Technology Company and Tesla founder Elon Musk put forward an ambitious Mars immigration plan in September last year, which attracted worldwide attention. Recently, he wrote an article on the website of New Space magazine, introducing the plan in detail. The following is the full text of the article:

Become a multi-planet species

This report will cover the latest design of what we now call BFR heavy rocket. The most important message I want to convey in this report is that I think we have found a way to raise funds for the construction of BFR heavy rockets. This is very important. In last year's demonstration, we really tried to raise funds for BFR heavy rockets and put forward various methods, such as crowdfunding. None of these methods succeeded, but now we think we have found a way to achieve this goal.

Our latest design makes full use of the smaller launch vehicle, but in fact it is still quite large and can do everything needed for a larger earth orbit. We basically want to make the existing launch vehicle "insignificant" and build a system (consisting of rocket propulsion and spacecraft) to replace Falcon 9, Falcon heavy rocket and dragon spacecraft. If we can do this, then all the resources used for Falcon 9, Falcon heavy rocket and dragon ship can be applied to this system. This is the most basic condition.

Concrete progress

Cryogenic liquid oxygen tank

This cryogenic liquid oxygen tank is actually a giant with a diameter of 1 2m-its relative size can be seen from the figure1-its volume reaches 1000 cubic meter, and its pressurized volume exceeds A380. We have also developed a brand-new carbon fiber matrix, which is stronger than anything before and has unprecedented performance at low temperature, and can store 1200 tons of liquid oxygen.

We have successfully tested the design pressure of cryogenic liquid oxygen tank, and further on this basis. We wanted to know under what circumstances it would break, and we succeeded. It flew up about 300 feet (about 100 meters), then landed in the sea, and we salvaged it. Now, we have fully understood how to make a giant carbon fiber oxygen tank that can hold cryogenic liquid. This is indeed extremely important for manufacturing light manned spacecraft.

Next, in 2024, we will send four spacecraft to Mars, including two manned spacecraft and two cargo spacecraft. The goal of the first mission is to find the best water source, and the goal of the second mission is to build a propellant factory. By then, we will have six spacecraft on Mars, with enough materials to build propellant factories, including large solar panels, and then mine and purify water to obtain carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then manufacture and store low-temperature methane and oxygen.

Mars base may be just a spaceship at first, and then a number of spaceships, and then we began to build cities on Mars, and the scale of the cities continued to expand. With the passage of time, under our continuous transformation, Mars will become a place suitable for human survival.