SpaceX founder Elon Musk laid out some exciting changes to his vision for helping make humans an interplanetary species, with a presence on Mars and potentially beyond.
“The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space-faring species than if we’re not,” Musk said as he took the stage. “It’s about believing in the future and thinking the future will be better than the past.”
This plan will obviously be very expensive, and Musk led with that since it was a considerable criticism of what wasn’t addressed in his last talk at IAC last year. Musk said that he believes SpaceX has figured out how to pay for it now, and much of his talk was given over to what SpaceX intends to do to achieve cost efficiencies, and potentially open up new revenue streams to fund Mars missions.
One big part of the plan is to essentially render all current SpaceX vehicles redundant by focusing in the so-called BFR rocket. This will be scaled down from its initial huge concept design, and will instead be one booster and ship that replaces Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon, with capabilities both in terms of servicing the International Space Station and SpaceX’s current Earth orbital satellite customers, as well as reaching Mars and helping establish a moon base.