IT’S OFFICIAL, COLONIZATION ON MARS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING 👀🌍🚀

One year after Elon Musk unveiled his grand plans to send humans to Mars, the SpaceX CEO made some refinements. Musk returned to the same annual space conference where he made that original announcement, the International Astronautical Congress, to detail the new version of those plans. 

“Now we think we have a better way to do it,” he said Friday. The key is a new rocket — smaller than the one he described at a conference in Mexico last year but still bigger than anything ever launched — and a new spaceship.For Mars colonists, the rocket would lift a spaceship with 40 cabins, and with two to three people per cabin, it would carry about 100 people per flight. After launching, the B.F.R. booster would return to the launching pad; the spaceship would continue to orbit, where it would refill its tanks of methane and oxygen propellant before embarking on the months long journey to Mars. Because all parts of the rocket and the spaceship are to be fully reusable, the cost of operating them would be low. Even on Earth, the rockets, traveling at up to 18,000 miles per hour, could make long-distance trips short — New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes, for example. Any two points on Earth would be less than an hour apart, Mr. Musk said.

After the presentation, Mr. Musk took to Instagram to elaborate on the price of those round-the-world rocket flights: “Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.” Mr. Musk maintained a highly optimistic schedule for his Mars dreams. He said the company had already started work to build pieces of the new rocket. A cargo mission, without any passengers, could launch as early as 2022. “That’s not a typo, although it is aspirational,” he said. “Five years feels like a long time to me.” Two years later, which will be the next time that Mars and Earth swing by each other, SpaceX would launch four B.F.R.s to Mars — two carrying cargo, two carrying people.