MAKING LIFE MULTIPLANETARY MARS Becoming a multi-planet species beats the hell out of being a single planet species. We would start off by sending a mission to Mars MARS ENTRY where it would be obviously just landing on rocky ground or dusty ground. For Mars entry, you are entering very MARS TRANSPORTATION ARCHITECTURE quickly, going seven and a half kilometers a second. For Mars, there will be some ablation It is the same approach that I mentioned before, which is to send of the heat shield, sort of like a brake pad wearing the spaceship up to orbit, refill it until it has full tanks, and then it away. It is a multi-use heat shield, but unlike for Earth travels to Mars and lands. For Mars you will need local propellant operations, it is coming in hot enough that you really will see production. But Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and plenty of water ice. some wear of the heat shield. That gives you CO2 and H2O, so therefore you can make CH4 and O2 MARS LANDING using the Sabatier Process. I should mention that, long term, this can also be done on Earth. Sometimes I get some criticism along Because Mars has an atmosphere, albeit not a particularly dense the lines of: “Why are you using combustion in rockets and you have one, you can remove almost all the energy aerodynamically. And we electric cars?” Well there is no way to make an electric rocket, have proven out supersonic retropropulsion many times with Falcon I wish there was, but in the long term you can use solar power 9, so we feel very comfortable about that. to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket. The same thing that we’re MARS MISSION GOALS doing on Mars, we could do on Earth in the long term. Similar to the Moon, you land on Mars, but the tricky thing with We are targeting our first cargo missions in 2022—that’s not a Mars is we do need to build a propellant depot to refill the tanks and typo, although it is aspirational. We’ve already started building return to Earth. Because Mars has lower gravity than Earth, you do the system—the tooling for the main tanks has been ordered, the not need a booster—you can go all the way from the surface of Mars facility is being built and we will start construction of the first ship to the surface of Earth just using the ship. You need a max payload around the second quarter of next year. In about six to nine months number of about 20 to 50 tons for the return journey to work, but it we should start building the first ship. I feel fairly confident that we is a single stage all the way back to Earth. can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Fig.14. Mars transportation architecture abridged transcript 9/28/2017 © SpaceX 2017 spacex.com/mars 8