Musk new Mars Plan in 12 hours will be far less than $10 billion

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SpaceX and Lockheed Martin will unveil their latest plans for getting people to Mars.

UPDATE – The Full plan is up and Nextbigfuture has all of the screen shots. The plan is to switch all Spacex Rockets to the new 150 ton payload reusable rocket.

Lockheed’s idea centers on a six-person space station, which company representatives have said could be orbiting the Red Planet by 2028 or so. But no one cares about dinky 6 person space stations because Elon is talking about how to make a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship combo designed to help establish a million-person city on Mars in the next 50 to 100 years.

Above is the last years old Mars rocket design

At 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday (0430 GMT; 9:30PM PDT-California time), SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will reveal changes to the company’s Mars-colonization architecture, which Musk first announced last year at the 67th IAC in Mexico.

(BFR stands for Big F***ing Rocket.)

Last year Elon Musk talked about 40-foot-wide (12 meters) booster would feature 42 Raptor engines and be more than twice as powerful as NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket. A 9 meter diameter vehicle fits in Spacex existing factories. This drops the circular area from 113 square meters to 64 square meters. This is 56% of the area, which would be about 23 engines. If the bottom engines flared out then Spacex could squeeze in 24-26 engines.

Look for an announcement about Raptor Engine development which is the key part of the Mars Rocket

The Raptor engine will have over three times the thrust of the Merlin 1D vacuum engine that powers the current Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

In July 2017, Musk made public plans to build a much smaller launch vehicle and spacecraft prior to building the ITS. The new system architecture has “evolved quite a bit” since the November 2016 articulation of the very large Interplanetary Transport System. A key driver of the new architecture is to make the new system useful for substantial Earth-orbit and Cislunar launches so that the new system might pay for itself, in part, through economic spaceflight activities in the near-Earth space zone.

The engine development from 2009 to 2015 was funded exclusively by private investment by SpaceX, and not as a result of any funding from the US government. In January 2016, SpaceX did agree with the US Air Force to take US$33.6 million in defense department funding in order to develop a prototype of a new upper-stage variant of the Raptor engine designed for potential use as an upper stage on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, with SpaceX agreeing to fund at least US$67.3 million on the same upper-stage development project, on a minimum 2:1 private-to-government funding basis. In August 2016, a development Raptor engine was shipped to their McGregor testing facility in Texas, where it is undergoing development testing. The first test firing on a ground test stand was in September 2016