What has hitherto remained the stuff of sci-fi books and films may become a reality as early as 2023 as Elon Musk reveals that SpaceX has been doing a lot of hard work at building a massive spaceship designed to reach Mars.
The SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket, as the spaceship is being called, is unlike any launch system designed before and has been equipped to be able to rocket up to 100 people and 150 tons of food, water, and other supplies to the surface of Mars. With the fate of planet Earth being constantly brought to question by environmentalists, BFR comes as another step in a series of attempts being made to create a backup planet suitable enough for sustaining human life.
While revealing the BFR spaceship’s design this September, Musk said that the spaceship comprises of two giant stages: a fully reusable rocket booster, measuring 219 feet, on the bottom, and a fully reusable spaceship, measuring 80 feet, on top. The first crewed mission has been scheduled for 2023 and is expected to carry a Japanese billionaire and a group of artists around the moon.
On a recently announced budget of $2-10 dollars, Musk’s project is puzzling the aerospace industry with its ambitiousness; since the budget of the private company is almost negligible to the amount of money NASA is investing in building its latest and non-reusable Space Launch System.