Elon Musk shares new details on plan to colonize Mars …

Elon Musk addresses the International Astronautical Congress, Sept. 27, 2016.

SpaceX

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has given more details about his plan to colonize Mars.

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Space entrepreneur and Tesla founder Elon Musk unveiled a plan this week for putting a permanent human colony on the red planet. Musk estimates i...

Musk answered what he called great questions in a RedditAsk Me Anything session on Sunday. Many of the questions were highly technical, coming from SpaceX fans who have been following Musks public plans for colonization since the beginning.

The session was a follow up to Musks comments at a space conference in Mexico last month during which he unveiled his plan to send up to one million people to Mars over the next 100 years.

In that speech, Musk said that his companys rocket, spacecraft and economies of scale would bring the cost of Mars travel down to $200,000 per ticket compared to $10 billion per ticket, the estimate in todays dollars for sending an astronaut using the Apollo moon mission architecture.

Musk envisions 1,000 passenger ships flying en masse to the red planet, Battlestar Galactica style.

He elaborated on that plan Sunday, explaining that first an unmanned ship will be sent to Mars with equipment to build a plant to create refueling propellant for return trips to Earth. He says the first manned mission would have the job of constructing the plant.

The initial crew would comprise about a dozen people. After that, Musk wrote, he hopes to double the number of flights with each Earth-Mars orbital rendezvous, which is every 26 months, until the city can grow by itself.

Musk said last month SpaceX is already working on equipment for the project.

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