IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration
Elon will likely reveal more details on his Big Mars Colonization Rocket...
• http://www.nextbigfuture.com,Elon Musk will likely reveal more details about the Interplanetary Transport system on the one year anniversary of the first announcement at the 2016 International Astronautical conference. IAC2017, hosted by the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA) will take place in Adelaide, Australia from 25 – 29 September 2017.
Zubrin was struck by many good and powerful ideas in the Musk plan. However, Musk's plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. Still, with some corrections, a system using the core concepts Musk laid out could be made attractive — not just as an imaginative concept for the colonization of Mars, but as a means of meeting the nearer-at-hand challenge of enabling human expeditions to the planet.
Zubrin explains the conceptual flaws of the new SpaceX plan, showing how they can be corrected to benefit, first, the near-term goal of initiating human exploration of the Red Planet, and then, with a cost-effective base-building and settlement program, the more distant goal of future Mars colonization.