WATCH: (Scroll Down For Video)\u00a0Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket is grounded, after blowing up for a second time. The maiden flight of its more powerful Falcon Heavy has been delayed again and again.<\/p>\n
But Musk, never one to shy away from grand pronouncements, introduced SpaceX’s conceptual plans here Tuesday for a rocket and spacecraft designed to start a “self-sustaining city on Mars” that he said could be achieved within 40 to 100 years.<\/p>\n
In an hour-long speech titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” at the International Astronautical Congress here Tuesday he said his goal was to “make Mars seem possible. To make it seem like it’s something we can do in our lifetimes. That you can go.”<\/p>\n
Musk, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, who also runs Tesla Motors, knows how to attract attention, and thousands of people packed the conference hall here, cheering on his much-hyped and long-anticipated presentation.<\/p>\n
Wearing a suit and open collar, Musk stood before a large orb of Mars that over time morphed into a habitable planet with oceans and greenery. And he showed a tantalizing video of the rocket taking off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 100 people on board, refueling in orbit and then landing on the surface of Mars.<\/p>\n
The design of the Mars rocket shows that it is a towering 400-feet tall, far more powerful than the Saturn V that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He acknowledged the immense, if quixotic, challenge he was undertaking would begin not just with creating a spacecraft that could keep dozens of humans alive for extended periods but with producing rocket fuel from the resources on Mars. And he acknowledged the difficulties of lowering the cost of the flights from $10 billion a person to $200,000 or less, in part by reusing rockets to fly repeat missions ferrying lots of people.<\/p>\n
But less clear was how SpaceX would pay to get to that point, and outside of the technical details of the rocket and spacecraft he offered few specifics on how a city on Mars would get built.<\/p>\n
“In terms of the presentation today, I was particularly keen to learn about [research and development] costs, venture capital and other investments, returns on investments, manufacturing costs, and why and how one sustains a population on Mars,” said Phil Smith, a space analyst at the Tauri group, a consulting firm. “Musk did provide some insight into manufacturing costs, pricing, and sources of funding, but I need to study those to see if they are realistic.”<\/p>\n
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