Elon Musk’s Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket.

A
Very Big One.

ADELAIDE, Australia — Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to
Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make
money along the way. The key is a new rocket — smaller than the one he described at a
conference in Mexico last year but still bigger than anything ever launched — and a new
spaceship.

Speaking on Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia,

Mr. Musk said he had figured out a workable business plan, although his presentation
lacked financial figures to back up his assertions. Mr. Musk has long talked about his
dreams of colonizing Mars, and at the same conference last year, he finally provided
engineering details: a humongous reusable rocket called the Interplanetary Transport
System. But he did not convincingly explain then how SpaceX, still a company of modest
size and revenues, could finance such an ambitious project.

“Now we think we have a better way to do it,” he said Friday. The new rocket and
spaceship would replace everything that SpaceX is currently launching or plans to launch
in the near future. “That’s really fundamental,” Mr. Musk said. The slimmed-down rocket
would be nine meters, or about 30 feet, in diameter instead of the 12-meter behemoth he
described last year. It would still be more powerful than the Saturn 5 rocket that took
NASA astronauts to the moon. Mr. Musk called it B.F.R. (The “B” stands for “big”; the
“R” is for “rocket.”) The B.F.R. would be able to lift 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit,
Mr. Musk said.

For Mars colonists, the rocket would lift a spaceship with 40 cabins, and with two to three
people per cabin, it would carry about 100 people per flight. After launching, the B.F.R.
booster would return to the launching pad; the spaceship would continue to orbit, where
it would refill its tanks of methane and oxygen propellant before embarking on the
monthslong journey to Mars.

But with the smaller size, the B.F.R. would also be useful much closer to Earth, Mr. Musk
said. He said it would be able to take over the launching duties of SpaceX’s current Falcon
9 rocket, taking many satellites to orbit at once, as well as ferry cargo and astronauts to
the International Space Station. A variation of the spaceship could be used to collect and
dispose of relics of satellite and other debris cluttering low-Earth orbit, he said.

Because all parts of the rocket and the spaceship are to be fully reusable, the cost of
operating them would be low.

Even on Earth, the rockets, traveling at up to 18,000 miles per hour, could make long-
distance trips short — New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes, for example. Any two points
on Earth would be less than an hour apart, Mr. Musk said.

After the presentation, Mr. Musk took to Instagram to elaborate on the price of those
round-the-world rocket flights: “Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare
economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.”
Mr. Musk maintained a highly optimistic schedule for his Mars dreams. He said the
company had already started work to build pieces of the new rocket. A cargo mission,
without any passengers, could launch as early as 2022. “That’s not a typo, although it is
aspirational,” he said. “Five years feels like a long time to me.” Two years later, the next
time that Mars and Earth would swing by each other, SpaceX would launch four B.F.R.s
to Mars — two carrying cargo, two carrying people.

SpaceX is not the only company with proposals for the Red Planet. A few hours before
Mr. Musk’s talk on Friday, Lockheed Martin provided an update of its own Mars mission
vision, called Mars Base Camp. Compared with Mr. Musk’s ambitions, the Lockheed
Martin plan seems quaint and slow. It would not head to Mars until 2028, it would take
only six astronauts, and the first trip would not even land on Mars but instead circle the
planet for a year before returning to Earth. From Mars orbit, astronauts could control
robotic explorers like rovers and flying drones.

Mars Base Camp is more of a suggestion to NASA of what the agency could do rather
than a corporate strategy that Lockheed Martin would pursue by itself.

“This isn’t Lockheed Martin’s vision, and it’s not the only vision of how to get to Mars,
but we put it out here so that we can globally begin the dialogue,” Robert Chambers, an
engineer working on the Mars Base Camp concept, said during the presentation. Unlike
Mr. Musk’s dreams, Mars Base Camp would not require unproven business plans or novel
technologies far beyond what already exists or is already in development. “We know how
to do this,” Mr. Chambers said.

The spacecraft, which looks as one might expect a traditional NASA expeditionary
mission to Mars to look, would incorporate both the Orion crew capsule that Lockheed
Martin is building for NASA deep-space missions and the agency’s plans to put a space
station high above the moon. This week, the Russian space agency announced that it
would like to collaborate with NASA on this lunar space station, called the Deep Space
Gateway.

Lockheed Martin is one of six companies that NASA selected to develop a prototype of
a habitat module that could be used for the Deep Space Gateway. Lockheed Martin
officials said their vision for Mars Base Camp did not depend on their design’s being
selected.The Mars Base Camp proposal would also fit within the NASA budget,
Lockheed Martin officials said.

This year’s update unveiled a reusable, hydrogen-fueled lander that would take astronauts
to the Martian surface on a follow-up mission. Up to four astronauts could live on the
Martian surface for two weeks at a time in the lander.