The rocket and spacecraft BFR, designed to fly to Mars, will initially be tested during short flights from one point to another on Earth, Elon Musk said in a discussion with users of the Internet forum Reddit.
“We will begin the development of the BFR with the construction of a full-fledged spacecraft that will make short flights between two points on Earth, rising to an altitude of several hundred kilometers and flying the same distance. Such tests will be simple enough for a ship - they will not require a heat shield, which will allow us to have large supplies of fuel on board and will eliminate the need for us to use the powerful Raptor engines designed for deep space flights,”said the entrepreneur.
At the end of September this year, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, spoke about updated plans to colonize Mars, announcing the development of a new multipurpose rocket, the BFR, that will be used both for flights to the red planet and as a "space taxi" on Earth.
This rocket and its associated spacecraft for interplanetary travel, the entrepreneur hopes, will help him raise about $ 10 billion needed to realize his main dream - to create an independent colony on Mars with a population of about a million people. The transformation of the BFR into a space "taxi" capable of delivering a person to an arbitrary point on the Earth's surface in 30 minutes, in his opinion, will help raise these funds.
For this reason, the first tests of the BFR will be carried out in precisely this "ground" mode - the super-powerful Raptor engines, capable of competing in thrust with the propulsion system of the super-heavy Saturn V rocket of the Apollo program, will be tested after the BFR has completed the take-off and landing procedure. land surface.
In this configuration, the BFR, as Musk noted, can in principle reach space, but only if the mass of the cargo on board is minimal. For a full-fledged flight to the Moon or Mars, "real" engines will be needed, the new version of which, as the entrepreneur admitted, will have half the thrust than the first Raptor prototype. This, he said, is due to the fact that the mass of the BFR will be noticeably less than he originally planned.
In addition, SpaceX engineers are modifying the design of the engines themselves, making them more suitable for landing on Earth, which is necessary for transporting especially heavy loads from one point on its surface to another, and also changing the number and design of landing "legs" to improve stability and safety …
Musk said he is now confident that the company will raise the necessary amount of money to build a BFR and a flight to Mars, but the construction of the city itself, he believes, will require assistance and will be carried out by other space startups.
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“Our main goal is to bring humanity to Mars and create an infrastructure there that allows for the production of fuel and ensures the survival of people. Industrial enterprises and infrastructure will be built on Mars by completely different companies and millions of future colonists,”the entrepreneur concluded.