Category Archives: Mars Colonization

Falcon 9 rocket launches Inmarsat 5 from Kennedy Space Center. Photo: Joey Roulette.

What happens if a Martian astronaut goes bonkers? 90.7sSpace reporter Brendan Byrne and WKMGs Emilee Speck take a look at the questions scientists are asking about mental well-being for Mars-bound astronauts.

Byrne says its a question which former astronaut Buzz Aldrin has been thinking about.

Hes really worried about people that get there and realize theyve made a terrible mistake.

Scientists are trying to figure out the psychological impact of a one-way mission into deep space.

Anthropologists can tell us about early colonization and how when they got on a boat they didnt know where they were going and they thought they would never return, says Speck.

And so we can look at the psychology behind that, she says.

Theres also the practical challenge of getting to Mars. SpaceX founder Elon Musk is working on a plan for a giant space craft to ferry large numbers to Mars to establish a colony.

Its an insane idea, says Byrne.

But Elon Musk has had a lot of insane ideas that have worked before.

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Intersection: Keep Calm And Go To Mars - WMFE

For those of us who wonder whether life once existed on Mars either in the ancient past or present day, there is a particular feature that piques our interest.

It is a massive feature Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Grand Canyons.

The Red Planet may be decidedly smaller than our homeworld, but it is home to some truly gargantuan features, including Valles Marineris and Olympus Mons, an enormous volcano.

The former stretches the length of Los Angeles to New York, if we could somehow transport the United States to Mars. Arizonas Grand Canyon is, well ... its a bit smaller than that.

Here are some hard numbers. Valles Marineris is 4 miles deep, up to 370 miles across and 2,500 miles long.

The Grand Canyon, in comparison, is 1 mile deep, 18 miles wide and 280 miles long.

I dont need to tell you that this is an enormous feature.

So you think of something four time as deep as the Grand Canyon. About 20 times wider. And much, much longer.

Valles Marineris is a crack in Mars surface forged as the planet cooled that covers 1/5th of the planets circumference, said Rick Davis, assistant director for science and exploration in NASAs Planetary Science Division. Subsequently, it offers unprecedented insight into the geological history of the Red Planet.

The valley offers a mural of Martian history that would captivate geologists and astrobiologists alike with rock strata that stretch back to the days when Mars was still wet.

Imagine being at the bottom of that forever-deep canyon and being able to peer into Mars ancient past. What might be found down there? First and foremost, though, what are the possibilities of sending scientific instruments down to study Mars past life?

While the opportunities for science are tantalizing, the challenges of landing in such a deep canyon with imprecise guidance, navigation and control (GNC) systems are signficiant, Davis said.

For any landing site, we have a desired landing spot, but due to limitations in our GNC systems and our understanding of Martian winds and atmospheric density, the actual landing can occur anywhere within an ellipse which we refer to as a landing error ellipse.

Initial landing error ellipses at Mars were very large. For Viking, the first successful lander at Mars, the error ellipse was 174 x 62 miles. But, the precision of our landing systems has improved over time. Curiositys error ellipse was just 15 x 12 miles.

There is another upcoming rover mission to Mars, called Mars 2020, that will conduct geological surveys, determine environmental habitability, search for signs of ancient Martian life and assess the risk and reward humans face in colonization.

Davis said the Mars 2020 team is trying to reduce the error ellipse to an even smaller 11 x 8 miles. There was a site at Valles Marineris considered as a possible landing site, but it was judged to be too small (6 miles across at its narrowest).

In the meantime, scientists have come up with a short list of three potential landing sites: Northeast Syrtis (a very old part of the planet), Jezero Crater (once home to an ancient lake) and Columbia Hills, which possibly once held a hot spring long, long ago.

In other words, Valles Mariners is pretty much out. For now, anyway.

But not all hope is lost. Davis said that human landings will demand pinpoint accuracy; accuracy, in other words, that would be conducive to landing inside the giant canyon.

Of course, we dont know exactly when we will be able to send humans to Mars, but, as far as decades go, it will probably happen quite soon.

For now, we can only imagine what well find in the most ancient strata of Valles Marineris.

Perhaps there is a discovery waiting that will change the course of history; one that will alter our view of our place in the solar system and its past.

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Valles Marineris landing would leave little room for error - Enid News & Eagle

I recently had a chance to quickly try out the new colony sim from Paradox Interactive, Surviving Mars. In this sandbox sim, players can craft their custom colonization experience from designing a sprawling Martian civilization to recreating the Matt Damon sci-fi classic (too early to call it a classic? It feels like a classic). Since the normal playtime to build a multi-domed colony can take on the order of hours, I got to play through several save files that represented different stages of colony development.

The initial phase of the game actually starts out with choosing how to set up your mission to Mars. In the quick demo I played through I just went through the defaults, but you can choose which countrys space program you want to sponsor you, how much of each material to take, and your initial colony population. Once, you have your program funded and resourced, you choose a landing site on the surface of Mars. Similar to many other colony sim games, your starting location will determine how many resources are available to you and the likelihood of natural disasters. If you happen to be fairly Mars savvy and can spot Mons Olympus from the site selection menu, it will actually register as the famous Martian landmark. Once you determine the ideal landing site for your mission, the real colony sim starts.

Surviving Mars progresses like a real colonization mission would play out in the fact that drones are doing all of the initial building and resource gathering. You start with some building materials but will quickly realize that you need more raw materials to really get a colony up and running. Based on the demo I played there seems to be a fairly default build order early on: build a concrete plant to build a power plant to power the drone hub. After that its fairly open what you can do next in terms of logistical infrastructure; however, if you want to bring humans to you colony at some point youll need a habitat along with air and water to survive. Once humans arrive you can assign them to various jobs like farming for food or research for upgraded buildings. As of now, that about wraps up the core game loop of survival.

This wasnt covered much in the demo I played, but there will be a sci-fi mystery element that becomes apparent after several hours of play, so maybe thats where the great challenge will be. From what I played though, the basic sandbox loop didnt present much of a challenge when trying to expand the colony. It seemed fairly easy to build up a colony that could be self-sufficient and robust enough to weather any catastrophic event. That being said, what I found most impressive was the level of detail in the simulation. Some elements of Surviving Mars are game-ified so as players can enjoy the simulating a colony over the course of hours and not real years, but many of the physical interactions are pulled straight from the textbooks. Solar panel efficiency will change based on your latitude, oxygen will disperse through biospheres at a non-instantaneous rate, and even the colonists will develop traits based on their activities.

Overall it looks like its shaping up to be a great sandbox colony sim that Im excited to see progress.

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E3 2017: Surviving Mars Preview A Casual Colony Sim with a Hidden Mystery - COGconnected

According to Kris Lehnhardt, an assistant professor at George Washington University, if we want to attempt long haul space travel, or even one day colonizes Mars, then we really need to study sex in space. A real concern he called it during an Atlantic Live panel recently, that we havent even considered yet.

Although there are many challenges maintaining human life over the course of longer and longer space missions maintaining good mental health, combating radiation, providing food sources to name a few yet no one has taken to studying the human life cycle.

Something we really dont know about is a human reproduction in space, Said Lehnhardt to the panel audience.

Lehnhardt added: If were talking about colonization, theres a key component to colonization that makes it possible and that is having babies and this is something we have frankly never studied.

If we want to become a spacefaring species and live in space permanently this is a crucial issue we need to address that has not been fully studied yet.

So far, the only space-related reproduction study has involved freezing and transporting frozen sperm. Recently a team of Japanese scientist successfully birthed a set of newborn mice from sperm that was frozen and kept aboard the International Space Station.

The scientists have said that the result will help in the space age. Without pointing to specifics, they say that this technique will help long-haul space flight and even colonization.

The team even go so far to suggest that the ability to freeze and transport sperm into space could help today by starting the path to a future lunar sperm bank where the organic DNA material could be stored for safe keeping in the event of a manmade or natural catastrophic disaster on Earth.

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If We Want To Colonize Mars, First We Need to Study Sex in Space - TrendinTech

Elon Musk

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that building a self-sustaining colony on Mars is necessary to our future survival as a species.

Musk's blueprint, titled "Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species," outlines the executive's vision for making the human race a multi-planetary, space-faring society.

The paper, a summary of Musk's presentation at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara last year, suggests that a future Doomsday event will force us to look at other planets to stave off extinction.

Out of all the options currently open to us, Venus is a cooking pot of pressure and acid, Mercury is too close to the sun and the planet's moons are difficult to reach, and our own moon is small and has no atmosphere.

Musk argues that Mars, despite the distance, is the best option -- especially if we are able to warm the planet up to thicken the atmosphere and access the planet's frozen oceans.

With a day and night cycle similar to our own planet, we may also be able to cultivate plants as the atmosphere is primarily CO2, nitrogen, argon, and a few trace elements.

"It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37 percent of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around, furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth," Musk says. "We just need to change the populations because currently, we have seven billion people on Earth and none on Mars."

The cost of such travel, however, must come into the equation. It is estimated that sending a single person to Mars could cost up to $10 billion at the moment. To create a self-sustaining community, the cost must be significantly reduced, as very few people could afford to join the project.

Therefore, Musk wants to eventually reduce the cost to the average price of a house in the US -- roughly $200,000 -- but in order to reach this goal and slash the expense by five million percent, a number of steps will need to be taken.

Musk says that the so-called "interplanetary spaceship" used to get to Mars would need to launch with fuel tanks that are basically empty in order to refuel while in space to keep costs down.

It will also be necessary to make the tankers and rockets reusable at least for a few return trips and to create propellant on Mars rather than make constant trips back and from Earth for fuel.

The executive says that due to Mars' atmosphere and elements already available, it is possible to produce the methane and oxygen required. Kerosene will not work without oil reserves on the planet and methane is cheap enough.

"It would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just stayed on Mars and did not go back to Earth," Musk writes. "You would have a massive graveyard of ships; you have to do something with them."

The Raptor engine and rocket booster, used in the spaceship, are some of the most challenging elements of the Mars vision.

Not only will the Raptor engine be the "highest chamber pressure engine of any kind ever built," but the full-flow combustion engine will need to condense oxygen and methane for fuel, have capacity for 100 passengers, and multiple ships will need to leave Earth during each launch window to Mars to shuttle one million people to the Red planet in a matter of decades, rather than centuries, to make colonization a success.

The ship's characteristics are described below:

The rocket will also need to be extremely powerful and far beyond what we have produced so far.

"We are talking about a lift-off thrust of 13,000 tons, so it will be quite tectonic when it takes off," Musk writes. "This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people, ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars."

SpaceX hopes that with engineering and research over the coming years, the cost to reach Mars could eventually be reduced further to $100,000.

See also: Musk storms out of Trump advisory council over climate change decision

The executive is intentionally vague when it comes to timing in the paper, but Musk hopes to complete the first development spaceship in roughly four years. At that point SpaceX will begin testing the ship in suborbital flights.

"If things go super-well, it might be in the 10-year timeframe, but I do not want to say that is when it will occur," Musk says. "There is a huge amount of risk. It is going to cost a lot. There is a good chance we will not succeed, but we are going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible."

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Elon Musk claims Mars colony dreams critical to avoid 'Doomsday' event - ZDNet

Mars as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2003.

After the red dust settles from President Barack Obama's reiteration of his ambitious goal to have humans reach Mars in the next two to three decades, the next question becomes: What will it take to get there?

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com yesterday (Oct. 11).

NASA has laid out detailed plans for the journey to Mars. It's feasible to get there by the 2030s if that deadline is stretched out to the last year of the decade, said John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions]

Other experts say Obama's stated timeline is not bold enough.

"We are far closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later," said Robert Zubrin, president of nonprofit organization The Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet," (Free Press, 2011). The next president should announce an ambitious goal to get to Mars by the end of the second term, or by 2024, Zubrin said. Otherwise, the momentum for the mission could be lost, and space exploration could be delayed further, he added. [SpaceX to Mars: Awe-Inspiring Video Shows Vision for Red Planet Exploration]

Either way, before astronauts start packing their spacesuits and intergalactic playlists, scientists have to sort out a few problems.

Currently, the United States relies on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to the International Space Station. That is set to change, as private spaceflight companies have taken on the challenge of building a system to launch humans and cargo spaceward: Elon Musk's SpaceX is working on the Dragon robotic launch vehicles, while Boeing is building its CST-100, Logsdon said. Musk has also said that SpaceX's robotic launch vehicle could head off to Mars as soon as 2018. (A launch vehicle is a rocket-powered vehicle designed to send spacecraft or satellites into space.)

A Mars voyage requires a spacecraft that can carry multiple people, along with all the supplies for a three-year round-trip, including potential cargo items, said Bret Drake, an engineering specialist with Los Angeles-based Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit organization that researches launch vehicles, satellite systems, ground control systems and space technology for the federal government.

"To sustain a crew all the way to Mars means being able to launch rather heavy payloads, because you have to have the fuel and supplies for the round-trip," added Logsdon. "And there's no 7-Eleven on Mars where you can stock up to come home," he told Live Science.

One alternative is to create a giant spacecraft; another is to develop multiple smaller modules that can be launched separately into orbit and then assembled in space, Logsdon said. (Some of these modules could hold people while others could hold supplies, for instance).

Either way, the basic technology is there, Zubrin said. "It has to be larger than any we've built before," he said. Even so, "there isn't new science here."

Currently, Lockheed Martin is developing a four-person spacecraft called the Orion, which will sit atop the heavy-lift launch system, called the Space Launch System (SLS), that NASA is developing to take people into deep space. Orion already completed one successful test flight on Dec. 5, 2014, and is set to take a trip around the moon in 2018.

Launching a bigger spacecraft into deep space requires bigger rockets on any launch vehicles used. NASA plans to conduct a second test of what will be the world's largest rocket, which will be part of the SLS, sometime in 2021, according to NASA. SpaceX is also developing the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is designed to launch heavier payloads, including people, into space.

After people enter Mars' orbit, they need to land on the Red Planet. With past missions, friction, thermal effects and parachutes could provide the deceleration needed to land. But a parachute won't have enough stopping power for such heavy crafts.

However, scientists are making progress on that front.

For instance, SpaceX has shown that high-speed crafts can decelerate using supersonic retropropulsion, which involves firing engines while landing, Drake said. "We now have a feasible technical solution for how to get large vehicles to the surface of Mars," Drake said.

Astronauts have logged many weeks and months on the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the feasibility of long-term habitation systems, such as those that provide safe water, process waste, and filter air in space. Similar systems could be used for a stay on Mars, experts say.

The difference, however, is that the ISS is in low Earth orbit, just a few hours' trip to the home planet. If anything breaks, Earth can still come to the rescue. That won't be possible on Mars, which is at least a six- to nine-month journey, even when the planets are at their closest point to each other.

"One key advancement for the life-support system is increasing the reliability of the systems," Drake said. "For Mars missions, there are no quick-abort modes back to Earth, nor ground-up resupply if systems fail. So the life-support systems need to be reliable, and maintainable by the crew, for long periods of time many years," Drake said.

Astronauts going on a Mars mission will need protection from two forms of radiation: solar proton events (or solar flares) and galactic cosmic radiation.

The first "can be mitigated by proper vehicle design, along with a dedicated storm shelter, such as a water wall made from the life-support system water supply," Drake said. (This would involve literally lining the walls with the water used for drinking and showering.)

Shielding people from galactic cosmic radiation is trickier. In free space, cosmic radiation levels are extremely high. However, the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed on the Martian surface aboard the rover Curiosity, has measured cosmic radiation levels and showed that radiation exposure at the surface of the red planet is similar to levels seen aboard the ISS, Drake said. Because the ISS is located in low Earth orbit, it is below the two doughnut-shaped radiation belts called Earth's Van Allen belts, which block from Earth many of the charged particles spewed from the sun, as well as from cosmic rays, Logsdon said.

One strategy may be to make the trip through free space very quickly, minimizing the exposure to the area with the highest radiation, Drake said.

"It's safer to be on the surface of Mars than free space," Drake said.

Before making the three-year round-trip to Mars, many of these long-term space systems will be tested in cislunar orbit, according to NASA's timeline of the journey to Mars. Sometime between 2018 and 2030, NASA plans to send crewed missions on spacewalks in the region of space near the moon. Some of these missions could last a year, in preparation for the epic voyage to Mars.

The plans also include a trip to redirect and sample material from an asteroid.

This will provide an opportunity to test out all of the elements of the Mars mission, while not being too far from Earth in case something goes wrong, Logsdon said.

Once people have taken the effort to get to Mars, they won't just turn around. The outbound voyage would take six to nine months, but explorers can't return until Mars and Earth are in good alignment relative to the sun, which could take 14 months, Logsdon said. (The return trip will be much shorter if the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun, rather than on opposite sides.)

In a way, Mars pioneers would be similar to "the explorers of the 16th century that went on ships across the ocean and were gone from their home country for a long time," Logsdon said.

Given that, it makes sense to make some kind of permanent structure, Logsdon said.

"You need, on the Martian surface, some sort of habitat," Logdson said. "You're not going to live inside a spacesuit all the time. Though it seems far-fetched, the movie "The Martian" showed a relatively realistic depiction of a potential Mars living setup, he added.

Original article onLive Science.

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Sending Humans to Mars: 8 Steps to Red Planet Colonization

Artist's illustration of a "Mars Transfer Habitat" that could carry 100 colonists 96 of them in a hibernation-like torpor state to Mars.

Colonizing Mars may require humanity to tap into its inner bear.

Researchers are working on ways to induce a hibernation-like torpor state in astronauts a breakthrough they say would slash costs and make the long journey to the Red Planet safer and far less taxing for crewmembers.

Such benefits could help lay the foundation for the first footsteps on Mars, and they're essential to the establishment of a long-term human outpost there, project team members said.[Red Planet orBust: 5 Crewed MarsMission Ideas]

"We're not going to colonize Mars, or really settle it, sending four or six or eight people at a time every two years; we're going to have to send larger numbers," principal investigator John Bradford, president and chief operating officer of SpaceWorks Enterprises in Atlanta, said last week at the 2016 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina. "I don't know any other way that you're going to send hundreds of people to Mars."

With current rocket technology, a one-way trip to Mars takes six to nine months. That's a long time to keep astronauts alive, healthy and happy, Bradford said.

He and his team think there's a way to ease this journey lowering astronauts' body temperatures by about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius). This would induce a "hypothermic stasis" that cuts crewmembers' metabolic rates by 50 to 70 percent, Bradford said.

"That reduces the need for consumables in both nutrition and hydration, [and] oxygen demand," he said during the NIAC talk. "That translates to mass, and mass is a critical item trying to support these Mars missions."

Allowing astronauts to more or less sleep through the long trek would also minimize the psychological and social challenges of a crewed Mars mission, Bradford said.

"You kind of get mad at somebody; there's really no place to go," he said. "These are real issues associated with extended-duration spaceflight. If we can cut out the transit phases, we think they'll be much happier when they get to Mars, [and] much more productive." [Buzz Aldrin: How To Get Your Ass To Mars (Video)]

Bradford and his team have received two rounds of funding through NIAC, a NASA program that seeks to encourage the development of potentially revolutionary space exploration technologies.

The researchers don't think any huge leaps should be required to make their vision a reality. They're not shooting for a sci-fi-like "suspended animation" state; rather, they seek to leverage the "therapeutic hypothermia" that's already common practice in hospitals around the world, often as a way to help people recover from traumatic injuries, Bradford said.

"We're trying to pull on this technology that's already in use," he said.

Therapeutic-hypothermia patients generally endure the treatment for just a few days, but there's no reason to think it couldn't be applied to astronauts for much longer durations, Bradford added. (He said he'd like to be able to put Mars crewmembers in stasis for the entire journey but that cycling periods of two weeks or so would have significant benefits as well.)

Stasis could be induced in astronauts via evaporative cooling systems already in use for therapeutic hypothermia for example, two small tubes inserted into the nose that pump in inert gas, cooling the brain. (Sedatives would also be administered to dampen the body's instinctual shivering response.)

Crewmembers would be fed intravenously and catheterized; they would also be "lightly restrained" within the habitat to prevent them from floating around, Bradford said.

Extended exposure to microgravity conditions has a variety of negative health effects, from muscle atrophy and bone weakening to vision problems. But torpid astronauts wouldn't have to worry about such issues, because their habitat would be rotated, generating artificial gravity on board, Bradford said.

There are some inherent challenges in the torpor approach, of course. For example, while the process of going into hypothermic stasis is relatively rapid, waking up from such a state appears to be quite slow; research suggests that body temperature can be safely raised by only about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) every hour, Bradford said.

And it's unclear just how long the recovery process would take, or what the long-term mental effects of prolonged hypothermic stasis would be, he added. In addition, significantly cooling the body suppresses immune function, so torpid astronauts would likely be more susceptible to infections.

But Bradford and his team are attempting to address such issues via their NIAC-funded work, and they haven't found any deal breakers yet.

"It's all manageable," Bradford said. "We think this is a very promising approach."

Bradford and his colleagues think such torpor tech could not only help get astronauts to Mars (which NASA aims to do by the end of the 2030s), but also allow humanity to establish a permanent colony on the Red Planet.

Settling Mars would probably require sending about 100 people there at once, the researchers wrote last year in a study outlining their approach.

"The first settlements at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, for example, started with 102 and 104 settlers, respectively," they wrote.

Launching that many Mars pioneers in the standard fashion would require 17 six-person habitats, with a total weight of about 700 tons. But that could be reduced to 200 tons by putting the settlers into hypothermic stasis, the researchers argued.

Their plan calls for building a "Mars Transfer Habitat" employing three habitat modules, two of which would hold 48 dormant colonists apiece. The third (much smaller) module would house four fully alert settlers, who would act as "caretakers" and keep everything running smoothly.

"The reduced metabolic rates that are achieved through torpor relax the mission requirements on consumable food and water, and positively impact the design of the habitat environmental control and life support systems," they wrote in the study, which was presented at the 66th International Astronautical Congress in Jerusalem last year.

"Overall, the application of long-duration torpor for humans to space exploration missions appears to be both medically and technically feasible, and shows great promise as a means to enable settlement of the solar system," the researchers added.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter@michaeldwallandGoogle+.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published onSpace.com.

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'Hibernating' Astronauts May Be Key to Mars Colonization

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the private spaceflight company SpaceX, says he will unveil his concepts for Mars colonization later this year.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk poses with the firm's manned Dragon V2 spacecraft during an unveiling event at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California on May 29, 2014.

In an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit Monday evening (Jan. 5), Musk told readers that the details of his Mars Colonial Transporter would be unveiled by the end of the year, and that the plan would be different from the Dragon capsules and Falcon 9 rockets SpaceX is flying today.

"The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture,"Musk wrote in the Reddit AMA. "Am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn't do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon." [SpaceX's Plan for Mars & Reusable Rockets (Video)]

The goal will be to send 100 metric tons (110 tons) of "useful payload," he added. "This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system," Musk said.

This year, SpaceX will also reveal plans for spacesuits that will meet both design aesthetics and utility requirements, Musk noted. Although he did not specify where the spacesuits would be used, it is possible that they could form the basis for future Mars exploration.

SpaceX is the first private company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, which it did for the first time in 2012. The company has a $1.6 billion contract to provide 12 delivery missions to the station for NASA. A second company, Orbital Sciences, has a $1.9 billion deal with NASA for eight delivery missions.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX, where he is both CEO and chief designer, in 2002 with the goal of flying people in space. Last September, NASA picked the company as one of two firms to fly U.S. astronauts to the station beginning in 2017 under a separate contract. (Boeing was the other company selected.)

SpaceX's next flight to the space station, its fifth delivery flight so far, is set to launch at 4:47 a.m. EST (0947 GMT) on Saturday (Jan. 10) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. During that mission, a Dragon resupply ship will launch toward the station, and SpaceX will also attempt to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on an "autonomous spaceport drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission was initially set to launch on Tuesday (Jan. 6), but a last-minute rocket issue delayed the flight.

While Musk discussed space travel possibilities that extend far into the future, he also mentioned some of the systems that the company is currently developing, including the reusable rocket test this week.

In response to a question about the planned Falcon 9 first-stage rocket landing, Musk said the stage would use "mostly gravity" to stay on the robotic ship, with "steel shoes over the landing feet as a precautionary measure."

Previously, Musk had said there was a 50 percent chance of mission success. But when he was pressed by a reader as to how he came up with that percentage, he said, "I pretty much made that up. I have no idea."

Musk did write that the innovative "hypersonic grid fins" on the rocket are vital for the landing attempt.

"The grid fins are super important for landing with precision," he wrote. "The aerodynamic forces are way too strong for the nitrogen thrusters. In particular, achieving pitch trim is hopeless. Our atmosphere is like molasses at Mach 4!"

Musk also suggested that SpaceX could work on making the second stage of the Falcon 9 reusable, as the company is attempting to do with the first stage, but he said the resources would be best suited for a mission to Mars. In the meantime, he is working on making the rocket as light as possible. [Red Dragon: Mars Mission Idea with SpaceX Capsules]

"With sub-cooled propellant, I think we can get the Falcon 9 upper stage mass ratio (excluding payload) to somewhere between 25 and 30. Another way of saying that is the upper stage would be close to 97 percent propellant by mass," Musk wrote.

One reader asked how Musk is able to learn so quickly. "I do kinda feel like my head is full!" he responded. "My context-switching penalty is high, and my process isolation is not what it used to be."

"Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can," he added. "They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details, or there is nothing for them to hang on to."

Musk also answered questions, ranging from the mundane (he gets six hours of sleep a night) to what games he plays (the Kerbal Space Program).

And aside from Mars, readers wanted to know what other places in the solar system would be good to explore. One reader asked if Jupiter's icy moon Europa should be a target.

"There should definitely be a science mission," Musk said.

You can watch SpaceX's Falcon 9/Dragon launch live on Saturday, courtesy of NASA TV. The webcast will begin at 3:30 a.m. EST (0830 GMT).

Follow Elizabeth Howell@howellspace, or Space.com@Spacedotcom. We're also onFacebookandGoogle+.Original article on Space.com.

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SpaceX's Elon Musk to Reveal Mars Colonization Ideas This Year

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These Valkyrie R5 robots will help pave the way for future Mars colonization.

NASAs Space Robotics Challenge awarded Northeastern University with a $2-million Valkyrie Robonaut 5 (R5) robot, which is now undergoing tests in a Massachusetts warehouse to prepare for the finalist round this June in a virtual simulation of a red-planet landing.

The robot arrivedat Northeastern in 2015 as part of a proposal that Engineering Professor Taskin Padir sent to NASA for the Space Robotics Challenge software testing, reports Tech Crunch.

Theyve done all of the hardware and were developing these high-level capabilities so Valkyrie does more than just move limbs, Northeastern PhD student, Murphy Wonsick told Tech Crunch. She can autonomously make decisions, move around, and accomplish tasks.

Researchers moved the R5 toNERVE (New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation) Center, a large warehouse space operated by UMass Lowell that houses large obstacle courses designed to put test robots and drones through their paces, just outside of Boston.

On-board vision systems, bipedal locomotion, and navigation in tight spaces are some the criteria being tested at the NERVE research site, according to the same report.

NASA reportedly produced three other R5 models. One was held in-house, and NASA awarded two as research loans to Northeastern University and nearby MIT, while a fourth was acquired by Scotlands University of Edinburgh.

According to NASA, in the finalist round, each teams R5 will be challenged with resolving the aftermath of a dust storm that has damaged a Martian habitat. This involves three objectives: aligning a communications dish, repairing a solar array, and fixing a habitat leak.

The Space Robotics Challenge is part of NASAs Centennial Challenges program set to award $1 million to the team that can developcapabilities of humanoid robot dexterity to better enable them to work alongside and independent of astronauts in preparation for future space exploration.

NASA announced the 20 finalists in February.

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Meet NASA's Mars robot - Digital Trends

The article is adapted from Musk's presentation at the International Astronautical Congress and begins with an argument for why we should focus on Mars for our move towards interplanetary life. Musk then notes that with current technologies, a ticket to Mars would cost around $10 billion, which he correctly deduces is a prohibitive amount if we want to actually colonize another planet.

Getting that cost down to the median price of a house -- around $200,000 -- is key to making the Mars plan viable, says Musk. And he outlines four essential steps that will need to be taken if there's any hope of doing that. First, the transportation would have to be fully reusable because any amount of waste would significantly increase the cost. And ships would need to be refilled while in orbit. Additionally, we would need to be able to produce propellant on Mars and it would have to be optimized for cost, reusability, and easy production -- Musk proposes methane.

Musk then proceeds to detail the proposed engine, rocket booster and ship as well as how many ships we would need and how many people each one should be able to carry. For the crew compartment Musk says, "There will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, and a restaurant. It will be really fun to go. You are going to have a great time!"

Musk sketches a rough timeline for these events, but keeps it purposefully vague. It's clear, however, that this is something he's actively working towards. The fifteen-page journal article is not quite what you expect to see in a peer-reviewed journal -- there are some humorously unnecessary venn diagrams and a few tables that are nothing more than bullet points. But it's a much more flushed out write-up than we usually get from Musk. To see the presentation the article is based on, check out the video below.

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Elon Musk brings his Mars plan before the scientific community - Engadget