how spacex and elon musk will colonize mars
Let’s talk about the future of humanity. Heavy subject, I know. But it’s one that Elon Musk is heavily invested in right now. Is our destiny to remain here on Earth, or does our future lie somewhere far beyond? Somewhere like the planet Mars? That’s the outcome that Elon is betting on, at least, and we’re already in the early stages of his plan to make human life multiplanetary. For the first time in human history we are entering a window of possibility to extend our civilization onto a whole new planet. And it’s thanks in large part to the ambition of Elon Musk. Or the madness of Elon Musk. Depends on how you look at it. Either way, let’s get into the plan to put a human city on the Red Planet.
Starbase
Our most recent update from Elon Musk came at his live presentation from Starbase - this is a SpaceX testing facility at the southernmost point of the State of Texas on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a location pretty far removed from civilization, with the expectation of a quarter mile long row of houses which are now majority owned by SpaceX. This is where the magic happens, this is a staging ground for the mission to Mars. You can actually take a look around for yourself, the area is still fully accessible to the public you can drive right up to the launch pad and rocket manufacturing facility - within reason obviously, don’t be a weirdo. Or tour the grounds from home on Google Street view, the car was just there in August 2021.
Anyway, the reason that Elon gave his presentation at Starbase is because this is where SpaceX are building a gigantic rocket called the Starship - this is the combination of a super heavy rocket booster with a multi function spaceship on top. When it launches later this year, Starship will be the largest flying object in history - I know this is the point where some of you are going to try and mention the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg was a balloon, balloons don’t fly, they float. You’ve been debunked.
This big F-ing rocket is also going to fly to Mars in this decade, and at some point in the not so distant future, it’s going to take people there as well.
The Great Filter
The Starship is Elon Musk’s answer to the concept of the Great Filter, which is the boundary that a civilization must cross before it can become multi planetary. In theory, if there was no Great Filter, then our galaxy would be like the Star Wars universe where everyone is just flying back and forth between different planets and systems on the regular. But since we have so far collected no legitimate evidence of space faring civilizations among the trillions of stars that form the Milky Way, then we can assume that there is some universal obstacle holding us all back- that’s the Great filter.
In Elon’s mind the most important step in crossing that boundary is for us to have a second planet that is no longer dependent on the original planet. That means more than just sending people to Mars, we need to send stuff along with them - resources and infrastructure to create a self-sustaining city on Mars. Elon has it figured out that we will need to transfer about 1 million tons of stuff from the Earth to mars before we can reach the minimum requirement for being self-sustaining. Only the Starship is capable of doing that.
The plan at SpaceX is to mass produce the Starship at a high enough volume that we could have at least a thousand of them all in service at the same time. And each pairing of booster and ship will be rapidly reusable, so rapid that each ship can deliver 100 tons of cargo to orbit 3 times in one day. Elon once promised that the Starship program will deliver one thousand times more mass to orbit than every other rocket on Earth combined.
Starship opens the window that makes this all possible. As Elon says, that window might remain open for a long time, and hopefully it does, but it could only stay open for a short time - and that’s why we need to do this as soon as we possibly can. This is the first time in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history that this feat has been even remotely possible.
The Journey to Mars
Aside from that whole, extending the light of consciousness thing that he does, Elon is promising that the journey to Mars will be an incredibly exciting adventure. But, like crossing any new frontier it will not be a comfortable or safe journey either.
This is Elon Musk’s sales pitch for going to Mars - it will be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work, and you might die. Hope you like it.
Elon wants to make sure everyone knows this will not be like some sort of an escape hatch from Earth to a new paradise. We’re going somewhere incredibly dangerous and hostile. Elon says that Mars is a fixer upper of a planet, it’s going to take some work to make it easy to live there. But still, he does optimistically believe that one day we could make Mars a planet like Earth.
The Mars City
From the new SpaceX renderings, we can see their first ideas of what that self sustaining city on Mars might look like. Multiple Starships cut through the thin Martian atmosphere to come down for landings at a Mars space port. We see a sprawling, low rise settlement laid out in a valley between mountain peaks. There’s a giant glass dome that seems to house a greenhouse or farm. This is what that million tons of stuff would build.
I was looking around the internet for a way to contextualize 1 million tons of material. What I found was the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, which reportedly weighs about 500 thousand tons. So, take the Burj Khalifa, double it, and then try to imagine that mass spread out over a bunch of short, little Mars buildings. It starts to make sense. But it’s going to take a lot to get there.
So, let’s run some numbers quickly. If each Starship carries 100 tons of cargo to Mars, then it’s going to take ten thousand Starship landings to reach 1 million tons. Let that sink in for a second. This is no small task that we are talking about here. With a fleet of 1000 ships, that’s only 10 trips each, right? But it’s complicated by the Earth to Mars transit window, for which we would use something known as the Hohmann transfer orbit - this is the elliptical orbit used to transfer between two circular orbits around a central body, in this case the Sun. We have a launch window for this transfer, but it only happens once every 26 months, and the journey time between the two planets is going to be something between 6 and 9 months.
And it’s more or less the same deal coming back, you have to wait for that window to open again. So round trip, Earth to Mars, we’d be looking at 4 to 5 years, minimum. And that would mean about 4 to 5 decades to complete the mission. If we stick to the formula of one thousand ships carrying 100 tons, that is. Of course a lot can change over a few decades - new advancements with engines and material science can increase maximum capacity, and of course we don’t really expect SpaceX to just stop making ships once they hit one thousand, they’ll obviously keep growing the fleet indefinitely. Maybe at some point along the way they will invent a better vehicle than the Starship. Maybe there will be a new space port on the Moon where SpaceX manufactures a new generation of giant cargo ship that would never be physically possible to build and launch from Earth. It’s quite the rabbit hole to go down.
Terraforming Mars
So, landing a million tons of stuff on Mars and building a city is cool and all. But let’s go back to that bit where Elon said that one day we could make Mars a planet like Earth. That’s a bit more complicated, because when I imagine Mars being like the Earth, I imagine being able to walk outside and breathe the air. That wouldn’t turn out so well on Mars, as it stands right now. If you tried to walk on Mars without a spacesuit, you’d be hit by freezing cold temperature, a complete lack of breathable oxygen and an extreme low pressure environment that would cause your bodily fluids to boil and vaporize. I don’t know which would get you first, but it would suck either way.
So to really fulfill Elon Musk’s dream we have to change the environment of Mars to be more like the Earth - that doesn’t mean it needs to be like perfect Miami weather all the time, it just needs to come within the habitable zone for human beings.
How do we do that? Well the biggest problem with Mars is that it suffered from a reverse greenhouse effect at some point in its past. Instead of greenhouse gasses accumulating in the atmosphere and holding in the heat from the sun and maintaining pressure on the surface, most of those insulating gasses just dissipated out into space. And the reason for that is probably magnetic fields. The Earth’s hot, rotating metal core creates our magnetosphere that works to trap high energy particles from the Sun far away from the planet’s surface; those solar winds never reach us down here and that keeps our atmosphere intact. Mars does not have a magnetic field right now, and that’s allowed the solar winds to blow away most of the atmosphere, reducing the surface pressure on Mars to about 1 percent of that on Earth, which is not suitable for life as we know it because it is physically impossible for water to exist in a liquid state at such a low pressure - it goes straight from frozen to gas.
We know that there is frozen ice on Mars at the poles, and we know that there is frozen carbon dioxide as well in the surface of Mars. So, if we could heat those elements above the freezing point on Mars, then they would vapourize and add their density to the atmosphere and help to begin a greenhouse effect which would begin to terraform Mars into a more Earth-like environment.
How do we do that? Elon Musk has joked about nuking Mars - it’s a good idea in theory, detonating a giant bomb or series of bombs over the pole would super heat the surface below and vaporize anything that’s frozen there. It’s an extreme method and it probably wouldn’t work either. There likely wouldn’t be enough frozen water and C02 at the pole to have a significant effect on the atmosphere, it might increase the temperature and pressure, but not enough to be worthwhile.
Another idea would be to rig up some giant mirrors in orbit around Mars, and use them to concentrate heat from the Sun onto the surface. With enough really big ass mirrors, we might be able to heat the entire surface of Mars all at once and release all of those frozen gasses into the atmosphere. That might work OK, not great, but it’s believed that we might be able to get the atmospheric pressure up to around 8 PSI - on Earth our surface pressure is about 15 PSI, that’s what we like. But once we get the process started on Mars then we could try some other techniques to help it along. We can locate asteroids that contain the ingredients we want and redirect them into the surface of Mars where they’ll explode and contribute to the density of the atmosphere.
Maybe we could scoop up hydrocarbons from the atmosphere’s of other moons and planets like Titan or Venus and import them to Mars?
If we can at least get the pressure and the temperature up on Mars, then we could comfortable walk around without the need for a bulky space suit, we’d need an oxygen mask for sure and probably goggles, maybe even some kind of skin tight condom suit, depending on how toxic the new atmosphere turns out to be. But it would be a good first step.
Why Elon is In a Hurry
So, that’s the reason why Elon Musk has the sense of urgency about this that he does. If we’re going to make Mars a legit second home, just like the Earth, then it’s going to take a really long time. There is no shortcut involved. If he’s lucky, Elon might live long enough to see his city finished if everything goes perfectly according to plan. And it’s going to be an even longer time after that before we can even start to get Mars into any state that’s considered habitable. We have a window to get this done, but we don’t know how long it stays open for. And that’s kinda scary. But at the same time we’ve got hope that people like Elon Musk and his team of incredibly smart people at SpaceX are not wasting any time in getting started.
Who’s ready to sign up for a job in Elon’s Mars city?
