Elon Musk: SpaceX BFR can colonize Mars, build moon base
He thinks company can pay for it now
Humans venturing to Mars as soon as 2024, establishing a moon base or hopping from New York to Los Angeles in 25 minutes.
Those things would be possible with the giant rocket and spaceship that SpaceX hopes to have off the drawing board within five years, CEO Elon Musk said Friday.
“It’s 2017 — I mean, we should have a lunar base by now,” Musk said in a presentation to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
Musk unveiled a system he jokingly calls the “BFR,” for Big Freaking Rocket, updating a Mars system he first proposed a year ago.
Standing 348 feet tall and 30 feet wide, and lifting off with 31 engines blazing, the revised design is downsized slightly from last year’s but still comparable to NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket.
The biggest difference, Musk said, is cost. “I think we’ve figured out how to pay for it,” he said. “This is very important.”
SpaceX would use the new rocket for everything from launching satellites to ferrying supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station to Mars voyages.
The system eventually would replace the company’s current fleet of Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules, building upon the technologies they developed.
Most important among those: the ability to precisely land and then reuse rockets, a breakthrough that has disrupted the industry's historic one-and-done approach with big rockets.
“It’s really crazy that we build these sophisticated rockets, and then crash them every time we fly,” he said. “This is mad.”
Musk said SpaceX’s existing operations could fund the BFR’s development. Last year, he had joked that he might resort to a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the estimated $10 billion cost of his larger Interplanetary Transport System. So far, SpaceX has invested in prototypes of a massive composite propellant tank and the methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine, both of which Musk showed last year.
The company’s interest in a lunar outpost was new.