ColdFusion - Elon Musk: "We're Going to Mars by 2024"

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. We're not gonna get home tonight. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. The future is now. Just in my last video, we talked about how Stanford researchers are making people speak again, move limbs again, and even walk again after injecting adult stem cells directly into the brain. In this video, we'll be talking about going to Mars. From Doom to the Martian and Total Recall, it's been the stuff for science,

Starting point is 00:00:37 It's been the stuff of science fiction for the longest time, but now, going to the red planet is getting some serious thought by Elon Musk. So what exactly is going on? Elon Musk just announced his plans to begin colonizing Mars. He proposes that he could have humans on Mars by 2024 and use the same tech to get people to travel anywhere around the world in under one hour. This is all going to be done using a spacecraft codenamed the BFR. In a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide Australia, Musk outlined

Starting point is 00:01:10 his plan. It's not the first time that has talked about Mars. His first public interest in the Red Planet was expressed back in 2001, and last year he claimed that a million people could be on Mars by the 2060s. This latest announcement was more of a fine-tuning of that plan. So here's the rundown. The BFR will stand 100 meters tall with 31 engines to lift a payload of more than 4,000 tons into space. Each of these engines will have multiple redundancies built in in an attempt

Starting point is 00:01:38 to bring the probability of failure towards zero. The BFR is slightly larger than a Saturn V rocket which propelled astronauts to the moon during the Apollo missions. To give you an idea, it can carry a cargo payload with a living space that's eight stories tall and holds more volume than an Airbus A380s passenger cabin. It also has a fin so that it could be more easily controllable in any atmosphere that it comes across. The payload section or the part that's the intraplanetary ship will be 48 metres long and feature 40 cabins each capable of carrying three people. Despite this, Musk claims that the overall cost will be much cheaper than other launch

Starting point is 00:02:16 vehicles currently available because it can safely return to Earth and be reused. He gave the example of throwing away a $2 million Cessna Light aircraft after every one-way trip instead of investing in a large passenger jet and footing the bill for for a half million dollar return trip. The point being that although the initial capital is higher, in the long run, the jet will turn out to be much cheaper. In one case, you have to build an entire aircraft, in the other case, just have to refuel something.

Starting point is 00:02:43 So it's really crazy that we build these sophisticated rockets and then crash them every time we fly. This is mad. Must believes that he could send two BFR cargo ships to Mars by 2022 with the first two crude crafts touching down just two years later. In the presentation, he went on to talk about how the BFR could be used in other ways. For example, the same technology could fly people anywhere in the world in less than one hour,

Starting point is 00:03:09 potentially revolutionizing global transportation, with passengers paying essentially the same as they do now for a commercial airline ticket. Another use for the BFR was to help build an outpost on the moon. It's 2017. I mean, we should have a lunar base by now. What the hell's going on? Another brief suggestion was space services. This includes launching many satellites at once, or just one large satellite, satellite with a surface area 10 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope without a need for a complex unfolding procedure once released. This is possible due to the large cargo area.

Starting point is 00:03:40 Taking the idea further, old satellites and space debris could be collected at much lower costs. Construction of the BFR is set to start in 2018 and the machinery for building the engines has already been ordered and is on its way. The end goal is to have as many as a thousand ships in a holding pattern in orbit around Earth, Then every 26 months or so, when Earth and Mars are aligned, the ships would unravel their solar panels and leave for Mars. The journey would last three to six months and human cargo and supplies will be dropped off every trip. So a lot of people are doubtful as if this timeline is realistic or even possible. Elon's company, Space X, has been late on their promise for the Falcon Heavy Rocket by at least five years. But still, some experts are hopeful.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Bobby Braun, NASA's former chief technologist, states, quote, While the timeline and capabilities are certainly ambitious, I'm bullish on the US industry's ability to carry out challenging and far-reaching goals. It's great to see the private sector lead in this way, and I hope we see more of it, end quote. It's not just building the rocket, though. Landing humans on Mars will be one of the biggest technical undertakings of all time.

Starting point is 00:04:54 That being said, the company has beaten the odds before, the main example being reusable rocket boosters. As for paying for the project, Musk's plan is as follows. Space X will build a stockpile of their older Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules and sell as many rights to space as possible for cargo missions. The revenue from launching satellites and servicing the space station will go towards the BFR, which the company will now focus its attention on. As it stands right now, by human standards, Mars will kill you.

Starting point is 00:05:24 It has unbreathable air and most of its water, is within subsurface ice deposits. There's certainly a lot of work ahead to make this a reality, but it seems like it just could be possible. A 2016 paper by NASA detailed exactly how to enable a Mars colony from their data received by the Mars Rovers. According to NASA,

Starting point is 00:05:44 quote, the currently known resources on Mars are massive, including extensive quantities of water and carbon dioxide, therefore carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen for life support, fuels, and plastics, plastics, and much else. Recent technologies combined with the vast natural resources should enable serious pre- and post-human arrival, end quote. This all seems like a very long shot, but not so long ago, air travel was thought not to be possible. So I'm interested to know what you guys think.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Do you think this is going to be possible, or do you think unforeseen challenges will cripple the project? For me personally, I think the BFR is a pretty good idea, a standardized rocket to carry out many space services. And I think at least that part of the plan will go ahead. So let's close out this video with some images of the alien planet in HD glory brought to us by NASA and the Mars Rovers. This has been Degogo who have been watching Cold Fusion. If you've just stumbled across this channel, feel free to subscribe. Thanks for watching and let's see what the future holds.

ColdFusion - Elon Musk: "We're Going to Mars by 2024"

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.