Elon Musk is currently revising his ambitious plans of sending people to Mars, and says that he now knows exactly how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way
The key to his monetization plan is a new rocket, smaller than the one described at the conference in Mexico last year, yet bigger than anything ever launched; he also has a plan for a new spaceship.
At the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, Musk mentioned that he configured a business plan that will work, even though his presentation lacked financial figures to back up his words.
Mr. Musk has been talking about his dreams of colonizing Mars for a long time, and he finally provided engineering details last year: a huge reusable rocket named Interplanetary Transport System.
However, back then, he did not explain how SpaceX, which was still a modest company with modest revenues, could possibly finance such an ambitious and expensive project.
“Now we think we have a better way to do it,” he said on Friday.
Both the new rocket and spaceship would replace everything that the company is currently launching or plans to launch in the future.
The rocket would measure 30 feet in diameter. More than that, it would be more powerful than the Saturn 5 rocket that NASA took to the Moon. Musk named it B.F.R (B stand for “big”, while R stands for “rocket”) and it will be able to lift 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Source: nytimes.com
