Watch A Sneak Peek Of SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System
With a terraforming bonus thrown in
Elon Musk is heading for Mars. Or, at the very least he’s making plans to send other people to Mars.
Today, Musk’s company SpaceX tweeted an enticing teaser trailer showing off the planned SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System, a three part system that is intended to send humans to live on Mars.
The massive spaceship will be carried into orbit by a large booster, similar to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy in that it is designed to be reusable, but much larger. Musk has already started testing a version of this rocket, currently called the Raptor, in Texas.
The booster will carry the spaceship into orbit, at which point the booster will detach and fall back to Earth, ready to pick up another load, a fuel tanker. The booster will head back into space and drop the tanker off to refuel the spaceship, at which point both the tanker and the booster will return to Earth, and the spaceship will continue on to Mars, powered in part by massive solar arrays.
In the video it appears that Musk plans to take off from launch pad 39A in Cape Canaveral–the same launchpad, the video notes, that set the stage for the Apollo 11 rocket, which took the first astronauts to the moon.
At the end of the short video we see the red planet turn a familiar greenish blue. Maybe sometime soon we’ll be watching Musk introduce his Interplanetary Terraforming System.