Want to live on Mars with 1M of your closest friends?

SpaceX has designed the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, which could send a manned Dragon spacecraft into space.The company plans to launch the 70-meter (230-foot) tall rocket, which has a liftoff thrust equivalent to 18 Boeing 747 jets, later this year.

One of the highest profile believers, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, revealed an ambitious plan on Tuesday, to start colonizing the Red Planet in the next 10 years.

Musk shared the dimensions of the two models in a Tweet, writing that the rocket will be 39 feet in diameter, while the spaceship will measure 55 feet in diameter.

“Ultimately, what I’m trying to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something that we can do in our lifetimes”. I mean that in the most basic sense of the word – his presentation, titled Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species, was a spectacle.

Mars colonists would not have to sign up for a one-way journey since reusing the spaceships keeping the transportation costs low, Musk said.

Musk himself acknowledged that the first journeys to Mars will be unsafe, and that travelers must be “prepared to die”. Raptor is part of a new class of engines developed at SpaceX will be powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than the RP-1 kerosene and LOX used in all previous Falcon 9 rockets. “But he has significantly downplayed the technical challenges involved, especially on his projected time scales”, said Justin Karl, coordinator of the commercial space operations program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He said he will contribute as much as he can, personally, but that myriad sources will pitch in.

“I know there’s a lot of people in the private sector interested in funding a trip to Mars; hopefully, there will be interest in the government side as well”.

Carbon fibre has excellent weight to strength ratio, so that’s what the company is going to use to reduce the overall spacecraft’s weight during the launch.

“He’s got the family of SpaceX rockets that have had such success over the last few years”, Delaney said in an interview on CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday. Musk expects his rocket to be able to cut the transit time to as little as three months and released a four-minute video showing the craft.

“Still working on the Falcon fireball investigation”, Musk wrote on Twitter in the wake of the September 1 explosion.

Within two years, Musk aims to be devoting most of SpaceX’s engineers to ITS, and to be spending perhaps $300 million annually on the project.

The reusable rocket booster is key in that a typical mission will begin with the spacecraft atop the booster, which features 42 SpaceX Raptor rocket engines being blasted into Earth’s orbit where the booster will separate and return, upright, to the launch pad. That’s a pretty quick trip; it takes six to nine months for spacecraft to reach the Red Planet using now available technology.

NASA is supporting SpaceX’s first mission to Mars, which is targeted for launch in 2018.

Musk doesn’t have a definite timeline for sending people to Mars. But even as SpaceX faces new doubters in the wake of a string of failures, some say that’s OK. But some did, and just knowing that if you don’t like it there you could come back I think makes a big difference in people’s willingness to go there in the first place.

Once locked and load, the spaceship will fire its boosters and make its journey towards Mars – when the time is right, of course.