Recently, some netizens on Twitter for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk asked a question, about when humans can land on Mars, there is no doubt that this is a question that needs to be answered carefully, the information of this tweet message is most likely not to be responded to, but what I never expected was that Elon Musk not only answered the netizen's question, but also did not have any official Answer to Taiji, directly explaining the time point, 2029. This time also caused a sensation on the Internet.
Asked in an interview earlier this year about achieving a manned landing on Mars, Musk optimistically estimated that the best-case scenario would be 5 years later, and the worst-case scenario would take 10 years. Musk's ultimate plan is to build a self-sufficient free city on Mars that can accommodate 1 million people. So can humans really make their way to Mars in 2029? What are the difficulties in landing on Mars? Today, Xiaobian will talk to you about the mars.
So can we really travel to Mars around 2029?
As early as the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico in September 2016, Elon Musk had announced his "Mars colonization plan", and he would be able to realize the plan to send humans to Mars as early as 2025.
Over time, and in recent days, when the same issue was raised again, he changed the schedule again and set it for 2029. So will 2029 really be the first year of human colonization of Mars? Let's take a look at the possibility of this point in time, first of all, SpaceX already has the ability to transport cargo and astronauts to space, although the technology is not too mature, but there are still 7 years away from 2029, as long as the funds are sufficient to mature SpaceX in this 7 years, it is not impossible.
At the same time, SpaceX has long selected several sites on Mars that may be used for humans to establish a habitation site in the future. In addition, Musk is not blindly alone, he also cooperated with NASA to develop the "Red Dragon Spacecraft" as the vanguard of the interstellar transportation plan or called the pioneer, which will perform the first landing on Mars for site selection and other tasks. Musk also disclosed early on Twitter that SpaceX is developing and improving a new generation of liquid oxygen methane rocket engines.
The engine named Raptor has actually been applied to the Space X rocket, and will continue to be improved and verified in the future, it will eventually be applied to the rocket of the Space X manned Mars mission, compared to the previous commercial rocket "Falcon 9", the output power of the Raptor engine is 2 times higher than the former, and the maturity of this engine technology is also regarded as a barometer of when humans can start their journey to Mars.
Fortunately, it is still going well through the news disclosed by the media, so we have reason to believe that around 2029, we humans are really likely to officially start the interstellar colonization journey, in fact, the timeline of SpaceX and NASA's schedule are not much different, NASA's schedule is to start sending humans to Mars in 2033.
Humans have sent humans to the moon as early as half a century ago, so why can't we send humans to Mars after such a long gap, and what is the difficulty in landing on Mars?
Relative to the moon, Mars is much farther away than the Earth and the moon, Mars is the farthest distance from the earth up to 400 million kilometers, the nearest distance is 55 million kilometers, so whether human beings launch probes or land on Mars need to catch up with the closest distance between Mars and the earth, even so, our distance to Mars is far greater than the distance from the moon to the earth, the sharp increase in distance also makes the uncertainty in the process of going to the process of soaring, the universe is large, many accidents often exceed people's expectations.
In addition, in terms of technology, landing on Mars and landing on the moon is not the same, if you want to establish a permanent base on Mars, in addition to astronauts also have to load a lot of food, daily necessities and even building materials, etc., but also have enough fuel, and it is two-way, which requires a super-large rocket, the super-large rocket needs to reason a more powerful engine, which is not a little difficult to increase in technology.
When these things are ready, we are also facing a big problem is up to a year and at least half a year of space life, these astronauts are in a dormant way or what way, in addition, if the astronauts are in a dormant state, then in the process of going, the spacecraft accidentally hits an asteroid or other interstellar material caused damage, a little careless, the spacecraft may be reimbursed in advance, the entire project will be abandoned. Therefore, human beings in the process of traveling to Mars can be described as difficult, starting from the earth, in the process of space navigation, reaching the landing, returning to every node can not tolerate a little mistake, which is an unprecedented challenge for human beings.