Elon Musk Live Stream: SpaceX CEO Unveils Updated Mars Colonization Plan

UPDATE: 2:31 a.m. EDT Friday — In an Instagram post an hour after he finished his presentation at the International Aeronautical Congress 2017 in Adelaide, Australia, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the cost of flying from anywhere to anywhere else on Earth using the BFR system would be in the range of a full-fare economy ticket that airlines charge. This was a detail Musk forgot to mention during his presentation.

UPDATE: 1:21 a.m. EDT Friday — Perhaps one of the unexpected announcements Musk teased earlier was his hint that SpaceX could use its rockets for transport between places on Earth. In an animated video he showed, a flight from New York to Shanghai was completed in a mere 39 minutes, as the craft traveled at about 18,000 miles an hour. At that speed, most flights would take about 30 minutes and you could get "anywhere on Earth in under an hour."

UPDATE: 1:18 a.m. EDT Friday — Elon Musk said Friday that by 2024, the second SpaceX mission to Mars hopes to fly four BFR spaceships to Mars, two of which will carry cargo — like the 2022 mission — and the other two will carry crew. This trip will see the construction of propellant depot, which will involve extraction of water and carbon dioxide from the local environment.

UPDATE: 1:15 a.m. EDT Friday — After explaining how BFR could get to Mars after being refueled while mid-flight, Musk also said the spaceship could refuel itself on Mars by utilizing local resources — carbon dioxide and water. That would allow the ship to return to Earth. Compared to landing on Earth, a landing on Mars would actually wear away some of the heat shield on the spacecraft.

By 2022, Musk wants SpaceX to "land at least two cargo ships on Mars." By then, he wants to also confirm the availability of water resources on the red planet and identify hazards, as well as create some basic infrastructure for mining, power and life support.

UPDATE: 1:10 a.m. EDT Friday — Elon Musk returned to how he plans to fund the BFR spaceship. And he began with talking about how the first order of the day would be to make existing SpaceX spacecraft redundant. His logic was that all the resources currently spent on other spacecraft could all be utilized to develop BFR instead.

He also said BFR would allow launching satellites larger than any we have sent out so far, as well as cleaning up space debris. Along with that, there would also be BFR missions to the International Space Station, replacing the current Dragon spacecraft. There could also be missions to the moon, Musk said, and referred to the Moon Base Alpha who concept art he shared earlier.

UPDATE: 1:05 a.m. EDT Friday — Accounting for reusability, BFR would have the lowest launch cost for any rocket, Musk said during his presentation. He also said that refilling the BFR with propellant while it is already in low-Earth orbit would be both cost-efficient and allow it to get to Mars, making the refueling absolutely fundamental.

UPDATE: 1 a.m. EDT Friday — The pressurized area in a BFR spaceship will be larger than an A380, and its configuration for a trip to Mars — expected to last a few months, between three and six — will have about 40 cabins, each of which can house about 5-6 people. This would be toward the front, or top, of the nose of the spaceship.

Below that would be a tank holding 860 tons of liquid oxygen, and after a seperation tank, another tank that would have 240 tons of methane.

UPDATE: 12:55 a.m. EDT Friday — The new spaceship that will use the Raptor engines is code-named “BFR” and will have 31 engines, and it can carry total vehicle mass of payload of 4,400 tons. It would have the payload capacity of 150 tons during ascent.

UPDATE: 12:50 a.m. EDT Friday — SpaceX has been perfecting the autonomous docking capabilities of its spacecraft, Musk said. The Dragon-2 cargo ship that the company will launch next year will have the ability to lock onto the International Space Station entirely on its own, with no manual intervention required. This would be necessary for refueling spacecraft while they are already in space, as well as for any journey to Mars.

UPDATE: 12:45 a.m. EDT Friday — The Raptor engine has already been test-fired for over 20 minutes, while the Mars landing needs the engine to fire for about 40 seconds, Musk said. Compared to the Falcon 9 rockets, which utilize only one of the Merlin engines when landing, multiple Raptor engines can function simultaneously when landing on Mars, which might be necessary since the red planet has a very thin atmosphere.

UPDATE: 12:40 a.m. EDT Friday — Elon Musk’s presentation has started at the International Aeronautical Congress 2017 in Adelaide, Australia.

“The future is more exciting if we are a space-faring multiplanetary species than if we are not,” Musk started his presentation, before moving on to talk ahout how he plans to fund his Mars colonizing plan, which he didn’t quite elaborate.

Original story:

SpaceX CEO and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has set his eyes on Mars and making the human race a “multiplanetary species,” will announce Friday the latest version of his plan to achieve that during a presentation at the International Aeronautical Congress 2017 being held in Adelaide, Australia. And a number of times before his talk at IAC, Musk hinted the presentation would include significant details that were not present in the design he announced in 2016.

On his Instagram account, he also shared simulation videos “of how the SpaceX Interplanetary Spaceship and Rocket would work,” while reiterating the new version he will unveil at IAC would have unexpected elements. The simulation — complete with a terraformed Mars at the end that looks more green than the familiar red — could be straight out of science fiction, but then, no one thought for a long time that reusing rockets was possible either.

What else can we expect at Musk’s AIC presentation Friday? Footage of his company’s Raptor engine in action. Compared to the Merlin engines SpaceX currently uses for the Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy rockets, Raptor will generate over three times the thrust by using densified liquid methane instead of RP-1 kerosene, along with liquid oxygen, for fuel.

Earlier Friday, with only a few hours to go for his talk, Musk also shared artist concepts of what the “Moon Base Alpha” and “Mars City” could look like. Maybe he would talk about those two as well in his presentation.

For those who want to compare notes, Musk’s 2016 presentation about colonizing Mars can be watched here.

His presentation at AIC on Friday (starts at 12:30 a.m. EDT) will be streamed live and can be seen below. In case you can’t watch it, we will also be adding updates to the top of this story. So stay tuned.