The race to Mars is on.

Lockheed Martin and NASA have teamed up. Together, the 2 companies aim to build Mars Base Camp, the first Mars space station.

It's scheduled to send a 6-person crew to orbit Mars by 2028 and scout a site for the first human landing by the early 2030s. From orbit, it'll be easier to control robots on Mars. Astronauts may also leave the base to explore Mars' two moons firsthand.

Eventually, the base could be a haven for future landing missions. Astronauts could take a lander from the base to the surface and back. Surface missions could last 2 weeks and safely abort at any time.

NASA and Lockheed plan to start building the base in 2021. The SLS rocket will launch pieces of the base into Earth's orbit, where it will be fully assembled before launching to Mars.

The big question is, will Lockheed and NASA beat SpaceX to Mars? SpaceX recently announced plans to land humans on Mars by 2024. That's 4 years earlier than Lockheed and NASA. SpaceX's plans may be more ambitious, but only time will reveal who wins the race to Mars.

Join the conversation about this story »

Before we can journey to the stars, we must first go to Mars.

That’s Elon Musk’s philosophy, anyways – and just days ago he revealed new details on his ambitions to colonize the Red Planet, including sending two cargo rockets by 2022 and four rockets (two manned, two cargo) by 2024.

In 40 to 100 years, Musk suggested that up to a million people could live there.

Change of seasons

As Elton John wisely noted, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids”.

Indeed, the average temperature on Mars is −55 °C (−67 °F), dust storms are frequent and potentially deadly, and the planet has extremely low atmospheric pressure (about 1% of Earth). Because of the atmosphere and temperature swings, meaningful occurrences of liquid water on the planet’s surface are almost impossible. And while Mars is thought to have plenty of frozen water at its poles and in underground deposits, the logistics of tapping into these resources could be quite difficult.

In other words, for any meaningful and long-lasting human presence on Mars, we would likely want to alter the planet and its atmosphere to make it more habitable for human life. And while the exact mechanisms we would use to accomplish this are still up for debate, the basics behind what’s needed to achieve Earth-like conditions are actually pretty straightforward.

Terraforming 101

Today’s infographic comes to us from Futurism, and it details what might need to happen on Mars to make it more accommodating to human life.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Here are two steps we could take to get Mars into the “Goldilocks Zone”, where water is liquid – and harmful ionizing radiation like x-rays, UV rays, and gamma rays are not problematic.

Greenhouse Gases
One way to ward off harmful ionizing radiation is to add a thicker layer of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere of Mars. Such an atmosphere would also allows less heat to escape, meaning warmer temperatures on the planet.

Magnetic Field
A strong magnetic field on Earth is something else that makes life easier. Earth’s solid inner core, composed primarily of iron, creates this field when the planet spins – and it deflects cosmic rays and other harmful types of radiation.

One interesting solution to solve this problem on Mars would to have a magnetic field generator in front of the planet at all times, deflecting any such rays coming from the sun.

The realm of possibility

While terraforming is still a mixture of theory and science fiction at this point, we do know some of the major problems that have to be solved for attaining a habitable environment – and it will be interesting to see how plans around Mars develop as the prospect of colonization becomes more real.

"You need to live in a dome initially but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on. … So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet."

– Elon Musk

SEE ALSO: ANIMATION: The demographic future of the world's 10 biggest countries

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The 5 best hidden features from the latest iPhone update

What might it be like to live on Mars?

Bjarke Ingels Group — the architects behind the designs for Two World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Hyperloop One— has an idea.

The firm is designing a city in the desert of the United Arab Emirates meant to simulate a Mars colony. The $140 million development near Dubai is slated to be "a viable and realistic model to simulate living on the surface of Mars,"according to the local government.

The design for the Mars Science City, as it's called, spans 1.9 million square feet — which would make it the largest of its kind in the world. The plan calls for a team of astronauts to spend a year living in the simulated city after it's completed. However, there's no timeline for construction yet.

Check out the plans below.

SEE ALSO: Ikea has debuted an indoor farm that grows greens 3 times as fast as in a garden

A team of Emirati scientists and engineers from the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre plan to conduct research about colonizing the red planet at the Mars Science City.

Source: The Government of Dubai

The city is expected to include a giant greenhouse to test agricultural techniques, as well as laboratories designed to explore how to store food, generate energy, and get water.

The greenhouse plan calls for the use of an agricultural technique called vertical farming. Instead of natural sunlight, crops would grow under LEDs on stacked trays in a climate-controlled environment.

• Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has unveiled a new design for a 100% reusable rocket and spaceship to colonize Mars.
• SpaceX has experience building traditional life support systems for its Crew Dragon capsule, a spaceship built for NASA.
• But independent spaceflight experts say technologies that don't yet exist are necessary to keep Martian colonists alive.
• Musk and SpaceX have yet to detail exactly how hypothetical Mars explorers and colonists will survive.

At a spaceflight conference in Australia on Friday, Elon Musk unveiled an audacious new plan to build giant reusable spaceships and colonize Mars with them.

Industry experts are excited by Musk's vision to back up the human race by putting 1 million people on a new planet, but many have practical questions for the tech billionaire and founder of SpaceX. Above all, they're eager to know how Musk plans to keep people alive on Mars for months or years on end.

Musk's latest talk at the International Astronautical Congress 2017 in Adelaide updated a roughly one-hour presentation that he gave at the same event in September 2016.

"The future is vastly more interesting and exciting if we're a space-faring civilization, and a multi-planet species, than if we're not," Musk said on Friday. "I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there among the stars."

Musk first unveiled his Mars vehicle design — which he used to call the "Interplanetary Transport System" but now calls the "Big F---ing Rocket" (BFR for short) — during IAC 2016.

The original rocket-and-spaceship vehicle was supposed to tower 400 feet, or slightly higher than a Saturn V moon rocket. It was designed to bring up to 300 tons of spaceship cargo — about two blue whales' worth of mass — into orbit around Earth.

Musk's latest BFR design is about 50 feet shorter, and its spaceship is supposed to carry about half the payload. SpaceX has already built and tested key pieces of hardware in hopes of launching its first mission to Mars in 2022.

"That's not a typo. Although it is aspirational," Musk said when the date appeared on-screen at the event. "I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready or launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me."

Musk hopes to fly four additional ships to Mars in 2024, including two cargo missions and two ships carrying the first Martian explorers. From there, an increasing number of missions could establish and grow a colony.

"You can do it, Elon!" a man shouted from his seat after hearing these details at the conference.

Some spaceflight engineers and experts, however, are wondering whether he can.

"Elon lays out an impossibly large vision, and then revises it slightly downward — and people say he's being practical. This is no more practical than it was last year,"John Logsdon, a space policy expert, author, and spaceflight historian at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told Business Insider. "There are so many questions on the viability of this plan."

Big on ambition, thin on details

According to Musk's new plan, two uncrewed missions would pave the way for future human exploration of Mars. The first would locate sources of water in the soil, and the second would set up a chemical factory to turn that water, plus carbon dioxide in the thin Martian air, into oxygen and methane rocket fuel.

After the first people land on Mars, regular cargo launches would resupply them with food and other essentials.

D. Marshall Porterfield, the former director of NASA's Space Life and Physical Sciences Division, said SpaceX's reusable rocket technologies are "a huge game-changer" in terms of lowering steep launch costs and enabling such missions.

"He totally changed the economics," Porterfield, now a professor at Purdue University, told Business Insider during the university's "Dawn or Doom" conference before Musk's latest talk.

For example, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets can reuse their boosters. These enormous parts represent about 70% of the rockets' cost, and by not throwing them away after every launch — the standard industry practice — the savings add up quickly.

A fully reusable rocket and spaceship, as Musk is proposing with the BFR, would compound the savings and open access to space even further by lowering costs 100- or even 1,000-fold, according to Musk.

"We could assemble space exploration capabilities in orbit [around Earth] and launch a mission to Mars from there," Porterfield said, adding that the first crewed Martian missions will be like "vacations" compared to the "camping trips" of the Apollo program.

"The scenario in 'The Martian' is completely doable," he said, referencing the sci-fi book and movie in which a NASA astronaut is accidentally stranded at a Martian outpost.

Indeed, SpaceX may have the expertise it needs to get the first explorers to Mars and back alive.

The company already built the environmental control and life support system, or ECLSS, that keeps astronauts alive and comfortable on its Crew Dragon spacecraft.

NASA is counting on Dragon to ferry its astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting in 2018. (Russia's Soyuz spacecraft is current the only ride to orbit — and it's recently quadrupled ticket prices.) SpaceX is even pondering a privately funded mission around the moon using Dragon and ECLSS.

In his IAC talks, Reddit chats, and other public statements, however, Musk has not detailed how SpaceX will keep the first Martian explorers alive.

When Business Insider contacted SpaceX for details about its Mars life support plans and responses to expert commentary, a spokesperson declined to comment and instead emailed several of Musk's prior public statements.

One came from his IAC 2016 talk, when Musk compared Mars to California in the early US, and said SpaceX is trying to build the Union Pacific Railroad.

"Once that transport system is built, then there's a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to go to Mars and create something new or build the foundations of a new planet," Musk said at the time.

Musk also said he expects SpaceX's Mars effort "to be a huge public-private partnership," and that the company is "trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available." He added that he hopes his plans spur companies to develop their own competing and innovative approaches, and that colonizing Mars — no matter who gets the job done — is his goal.

Porterfield believes the company needs systems that currently do not exist.

"His idea about colonizing? That's going to require ... bioregenerative life support capabilities," he said.

Using life to support life

The idea behind bioregenerative life support, which Porterfield worked on at NASA, is to collect a human crew's breath, liquid waste, and solid waste — then use plants and other life forms to recycle it into food, water, and air.

This would reduce the need for resupply missions and help ensure a crew's long-term survival. It would also make a colony vastly more sustainable, affordable, and independent.

"Biological systems are really resilient," Porterfield said. "They tend to be self-healing, self-repairing, so that's one of the advantages of a bioregenerative life support capability."

Spacecraft today don't rely on bioregeneration to keep people alive. Instead, they use traditional life support systems — pumps, filters, compressors, chemicals, and the like. SpaceX's ECLSS is one such system.

Research into these traditional systems flourished during the Cold War, and more recent developments have turned out new capabilities. For instance, the space station recently got a new chemical-mechanical system that can recycle — with 93% efficiency — an astronaut's urine, evaporated sweat, and breath into drinking water.

Research into biological life support systems also occurred during the Cold War, though to a far lesser extent — for example, one Soviet experiment used algae to generate oxygen inside sealed nuclear bunkers. Since then, a few experiments in orbit and on the ground have shown it's possible to grow edible plants in space and in Martian soil.

Yet Porterfield said "tremendous challenges" must be overcome before any biology-based technology can fully and reliably keeping people alive in deep space.

"It's not just a module you can stick on to grow some plants in, and have some fresh salads every once in awhile," he said. "We're really talking about technology that replaces what the Earth does. This is our current bioregenerative life support system."

In his talk at the "Dawn or Doom" conference, Porterfield brought up the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona as an example of the challenges. Eight people lived in the sealed, three-acre habitat for two years with a bounty of plants and animals — yet they quickly encountered problems severe enough to require outside help, including pumping in oxygen.

A more compact and successful experiment was NASA's Biomass Production Chamber — a giant, sealed greenhouse built inside a hyperbaric chamber at the Kennedy Space Center. The chamber broke world records for food production with a variety of crops from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.

But NASA's space greenhouse was scrapped in the 2000s, along with other research into biological life support, due to congressional budget cuts.

"NASA basically gutted the entire future of spaceflight exploration in order to finish building the space station, and we really haven't fully invested in supporting the sciences required to use the space station today so that we can be competitive," Porterfield said.

He added that China is poised to overtake the US in bioregeneration with its "Lunar Palace-1" experiment, which has sealed four students inside a habitat with plants and animals for a year.

'They really don't have a science program'

A few years ago, when Porterfield worked for NASA, he and some colleagues were invited to SpaceX. Musk pitched a flyby mission to Mars that'd cost about $600 million, and Porterfield and his colleagues were interested.

"They were going to launch a payload, orbit Mars, and bring it back to Earth," he said. "For us it would have been a great opportunity to look at radiation environment out beyond the Van Allen Belts, because right now we're at the space station, where we're shielded from that deep-space radiation." (Musk has downplayed the risks of space radiation, though new research suggests it could be twice as dangerous at Mars as previously thought.)

Porterfield thought NASA higher-ups would bite, but they ultimately passed on SpaceX's offer.

"During that time, though, I learned they [SpaceX] really don't have a science program, per se, that would enable them to really consider ... bioregenerative or even just greenhouse-type of technologies in a Mars architecture," Porterfield said.

Logsdon offered a similarly skeptical assessment.

"SpaceX is a very good engineering firm. Certainly they're going to design a system that makes every effort for high level of safety," Logsdon said. "But they haven't said a word about how people will survive once they get to Mars. It just isn't a part of their capabilities."

Despite NASA's budgetary de-emphasis on bioregenerative programs, Porterfield said he hasn't noticed any staff migrations that suggest SpaceX might be acquiring expertise to research bioregenerative capabilities (though he noted he does not keep close tabs on SpaceX's hiring efforts).

If Porterfield had a chance to ask Musk any questions about his Mars plan, he said he'd focus on life support.

"I'd directly ask him, 'What are you doing in terms of countermeasures for crew health? What's your thinking in that area? Are you just going to, in the moment of finalizing your Mars architecture, are you going to adopt the current countermeasures and polices that NASA is doing?'" he said. "Maybe that's enough. But in terms of other aspects of biological foundations for human exploration, it may not be enough."

Disclosure: The author of this post was also a speaker at the "Dawn or Doom" conference.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk spent $1 billion developing SpaceX's reusable rockets — here's how fast he might earn it all back

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk just released a blooper reel of SpaceX rocket explosion videos with never-before-seen footage

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's most detailed plans yet to start colonizing Mars in just 7 years

• SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to build and launch a giant rocket that can take people to Mars.
• However, the system might also be able to transport passengers anywhere on Earth in less than an hour.
• An astronaut says such a trip would "not be for the faint of heart" and could trigger powerful nausea.

In late September, SpaceX founder Elon Musk debuted a new plan for colonizing Mars with 1 million people.

The centerpiece of Musk's roughly 42-minute talk was the "Big F---ing Rocket," or BFR. Musk hopes to launch the first 35-story BFR toward the red planet by 2022.

But the billionaire tech mogul also teased a bonus use for the BFR: flying people anywhere in the world in less than one hour.

"If we're building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, then why not go to other places on Earth as well?" Musk said during his presentation at the International Astronautical Congress.

The BFR design has two main sections: a rocket and a spaceship. The 191-foot-tall rocket would push the spaceship into orbit around Earth, then the 157-foot-long spaceship would fly about 100 people to Mars.

Everything would run on liquid methane and oxygen. The BFR would land itself and be fully reusable — a scheme that could slash the cost of access to space thousandfold.

The BFR's spaceship could fly more than 4.6 miles per second, according to SpaceX — over 12 times as fast as the supersonic Concorde jets of yesteryear.

At that speed, passengers could get from Los Angeles to New York in just 25 minutes, Bangkok to Dubai in 27 minutes, London to New York in 29 minutes, and Delhi to San Francisco in 40 minutes, said a video Musk showed. (Watch the full clip at the end of this story.)

To understand what it may feel like to ride on Musk's giant spaceship, we asked Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut.

What a BFR ride around the world would feel like

Chiao knows a thing or two about spaceflight — he has flown on three NASA space shuttles, as well as a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, and he has lived nearly 230 days in space.

"What Elon Musk is describing would be a suborbital flight halfway around the world," Chiao told Business Insider in an email.

Suborbital vehicles don't orbit Earth. Instead, they make a fast and high arc through space and careen back toward the surface.

NASA has a long history of launching them, and Virgin Galactic— Richard Branson's aerospace company — is now building and testing a suborbital vehicle called SpaceShipTwo. So is Blue Origin, run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with its New Shepard spacecraft.

"Launch, insertion, and entry would be similar to a capsule spacecraft"— like the Soyuz — "with the difference being in the final phase of landing," Chiao said. "During launch on a rocket with liquid engines ... the liftoff is very smooth, and one really can't feel it."

After the BFR (also called a first stage) runs out of fuel, the spaceship would separate from the rocket and fire its own engines. Chiao said this moment would feel "a bit dynamic," describing the experience in terms of G-force, the equivalent of gravity at Earth's surface multiplied by a certain amount.

"Ignition of the next stage engine(s) causes a momentary bump in G-force," he said. "As you get to the last part of ascent, you feel some G's come on through your chest, but it is not uncomfortable."

When the spaceship's engines cut off, though, Chiao said you'd become "instantly weightless" as you temporarily coasted through space.

"You feel like you are tumbling, as your balance system struggles to make sense of what is happening, and you are very dizzy," he added. "You feel the fluid shift [in your body], kind of like laying heads-down on an incline, because there is no longer gravity pulling your body fluids down into your legs. All this can cause nausea."

This feeling is familiar to anyone who has drifted over a hill on a roller coaster or flown on a parabolic "zero-gravity" flight— often referred to as a "vomit comet" ride because of the intense nausea the experience can trigger.

"As you start to re-enter the atmosphere, you would feel the G's come on smoothly and start to build," Chiao said.

As the spaceship nosed up and down to shed speed, he added, you'd at points feel about 5 G's, which would make you feel roughly five times as heavy.

As the spaceship sped toward the ground, its engines would fire to land it on a floating barge.

"You would both feel and hear" the engines, Chiao said. "As the thrust builds, you would feel the G's come on again, and then at touchdown, you would feel a little bump."

As exciting as such a trip might be — and the hours of aircraft flying it'd save — Chiao said it wouldn't be for everyone.

"This would not be for the faint of heart, and it is difficult to see how this would be inexpensive," he added. "But the one thing I've learned from observing Elon is not to count him out."

Watch the full video of Musk's "Earth to Earth" space-transportation concept:

SEE ALSO: How the used rockets of billionaires just might save humanity from doom

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk revealed a new plan to colonize Mars with giant reusable spaceships — here are the highlights

Join the conversation about this story »

SEE ALSO: It's hard not to feel a bit wary about Ivanka Trump revealing her post-partum depression on the Dr. Oz Show

NOW THIS: Sonia Sotomayor tore apart partisan gerrymandering with one simple, devastating question

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: All blue-eyed people have a single ancestor in common

• The search for life on Mars is paired with fears that we could contaminate our neighbor planet.
• These arguments are misleading — the current danger of contamination via unmanned robots is actually quite low.
• Space agencies have long prioritized preventing contamination over our hunt for life on Mars. Now is the time to reassess and update this strategy.

There may be no bigger question than whether we are alone in our solar system. As our spacecraft find new clues about the presence of liquid water now or in the past on Mars, the possibility of some kind of life there looks more likely. On Earth, water means life, and that's why the exploration of Mars is guided by the idea of following the water.

But the search for life on Mars is paired with plenty of strong warnings about how we must sterilize our spacecraft to avoid contaminating our neighbor planet. How will we know what's native Martian if we unintentionally seed the place with Earth organisms?

A popular analogy points out that Europeans unknowingly brought smallpox to the New World, and they took home syphilis. Similarly, it is argued, our robotic explorations could contaminate Mars with terrestrial microorganisms.

As an astrobiologist who researches the environments of early Mars, I suggest these arguments are misleading. The current danger of contamination via unmanned robots is actually quite low. But contamination will become unavoidable once astronauts get there. NASA, other agencies and the private sector hope to send human missions to Mars by the 2030s.

Space agencies have long prioritized preventing contamination over our hunt for life on Mars. Now is the time to reassess and update this strategy – before human beings get there and inevitably introduce Earth organisms despite our best efforts.

What planetary protection protocols do

Arguments calling for extra caution have permeated Mars exploration strategies and led to the creation of specific guiding policies, known as planetary protection protocols.

Strict cleaning procedures are required on our spacecraft before they're allowed to sample regions on Mars which could be a habitat for microorganisms, either native to Mars or brought there from Earth. These areas are labeled by the planetary protection offices as "Special Regions."

The worry is that, otherwise, terrestrial invaders could jeopardize potential Mars life. They also could confound future researchers trying to distinguish between any indigenous Martian life forms and life that arrived as contamination from Earth via today's spacecraft.

The sad consequence of these policies is that the multi-billion-dollar Mars spacecraft programs run by space agencies in the West have not proactively looked for life on the planet since the late 1970s.

That's when NASA's Viking landers made the only attempt ever to find life on Mars (or on any planet outside Earth, for that matter). They carried out specific biological experiments looking for evidence of microbial life. Since then, that incipient biological exploration has shifted to less ambitious geological surveys that try to demonstrate only that Mars was "habitable" in the past, meaning it had conditions that could likely support life.

Even worse, if a dedicated life-seeking spacecraft ever does get to Mars, planetary protection policies will allow it to search for life everywhere on the Martian surface, except in the very places we suspect life may exist: the Special Regions. The concern is that exploration could contaminate them with terrestrial microorganisms.

Can Earth life make it on Mars?

Consider again the Europeans who first journeyed to the New World and back. Yes, smallpox and syphilis traveled with them, between human populations, living inside warm bodies in temperate latitudes. But that situation is irrelevant to Mars exploration. Any analogy addressing possible biological exchange between Earth and Mars must consider the absolute contrast in the planets' environments.

A more accurate analogy would be bringing 12 Asian tropical parrots to the Venezuelan rainforest. In 10 years we may very likely have an invasion of Asian parrots in South America. But if we bring the same 12 Asian parrots to Antarctica, in 10 hours we'll have 12 dead parrots.

We'd assume that any indigenous life on Mars should be much better adapted to Martian stresses than Earth life is, and therefore would outcompete any possible terrestrial newcomers. Microorganisms on Earth have evolved to thrive in challenging environments like salt crusts in the Atacama desert or hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor.

In the same way, we can imagine any potential Martian biosphere would have experienced enormous evolutionary pressure during billions of years to become expert in inhabiting Mars' today environments. The microorganisms hitchhiking on our spacecraft wouldn't stand much of a chance against super-specialized Martians in their own territory.

So if Earth life cannot survive and, most importantly, reproduce on Mars, concerns going forward about our spacecraft contaminating Mars with terrestrial organisms are unwarranted. This would be the parrots-in-Antarctica scenario.

On the other hand, perhaps Earth microorganisms can, in fact, survive and create active microbial ecosystems on present-day Mars – the parrots-in-South America scenario. We can then presume that terrestrial microorganisms are already there, carried by any one of the dozens of spacecraft sent from Earth in the last decades, or by the natural exchange of rocks pulled out from one planet by a meteoritic impact and transported to the other.

In this case, protection protocols are overly cautious since contamination is already a fact.

Technological reasons the protocols don't make sense

Another argument to soften planetary protection protocols hinges on the fact that current sterilization methods don't actually "sterilize" our spacecraft, a feat engineers still don't know how to accomplish definitively.

The cleaning procedures we use on our robots rely on pretty much the same stresses prevailing on the Martian surface: oxidizing chemicals and radiation. They end up killing only those microorganisms with no chance of surviving on Mars anyway.

So current cleaning protocols are essentially conducting an artificial selection experiment, with the result that we carry to Mars only the most hardy microorganisms. This should put into question the whole cleaning procedure.

Further, technology has advanced enough that distinguishing between Earthlings and Martians is no longer a problem. If Martian life is biochemically similar to Earth life, we could sequence genomes of any organisms located. If they don't match anything we know is on Earth, we can surmise it's native to Mars.

Then we could add Mars' creatures to the tree of DNA-based life we already know, probably somewhere on its lower branches. And if it is different, we would be able to identify such differences based on its building blocks.

Mars explorers have yet another technique to help differentiate between Earth and Mars life. The microbes we know persist in clean spacecraft assembly rooms provide an excellent control with which to monitor potential contamination. Any microorganism found in a Martian sample identical or highly similar to those present in the clean rooms would very likely indicate contamination – not indigenous life on Mars.

The window is closing

On top of all these reasons, it's pointless to split hairs about current planetary protection guidelines as applied to today's unmanned robots since human explorers are on the horizon. People would inevitably bring microbial hitchhikers with them, because we cannot sterilize humans. Contamination risks between robotic and manned missions are simply not comparable.

Whether the microbes that fly with humans will be able to last on Mars is a separate question – though their survival is probably assured if they stay within a spacesuit or a human habitat engineered to preserve life. But no matter what, they'll definitely be introduced to the Martian environment.

Continuing to delay the astrobiological exploration of Mars now because we don't want to contaminate the planet with microorganisms hiding in our spacecrafts isn't logical considering astronauts (and their microbial stowaways) may arrive within two or three decades.

Prior to landing humans on Mars or bringing samples back to Earth, it makes sense to determine whether there is indigenous Martian life. What might robots or astronauts encounter there – and import to Earth? More knowledge now will increase the safety of Earth's biosphere. After all, we still don't know if returning samples could endanger humanity and the terrestrial biosphere. Perhaps reverse contamination should be our big concern.

The main goal of Mars exploration should be to try to find life on Mars and address the question of whether it is a separate genesis or shares a common ancestor with life on Earth. In the end, if Mars is lifeless, maybe we are alone in the universe; but if there is or was life on Mars, then there's a zoo out there.

SEE ALSO: A new study shows that students learn way more effectively from print textbooks than screens

DON'T MISS: A spacecraft graveyard exists in the middle of the ocean — here's what's down there

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the three women who married Donald Trump

In late September, billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk debuted a fresh plan for colonizing Mars with 1 million people.

The focus of Musk's new presentation, which updates a 2016 talk he gave at the International Astronautical Congress, was the "Big F---ing Rocket," or BFR.

Musk told a crowd at the 2017 IAC meeting in Adelaide, Australia, that he hopes to start building the 35-story space vehicle in early 2018, launch the first BFR to Mars in 2022, and use it to land crewed missions on the red planet in 2024 (though he has yet to say how a Martian colony would survive).

In addition, Musk teased the use of the space vehicles as part of a high-speed transportation system around Earth.

After Musk's talk on September 28, a Reddit user transcribed the full 42-minute-long presentation, and SpaceX published a high-resolution version of Musk's slides to its Mars website last week, a company spokesperson confirmed with Business Insider.

We've edited and appended the new transcript and slides here to reproduce Musk's detailed presentation in full. If you're ready to learn a thing or two about rocket science from a tech mogul, keep scrolling.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with SpaceX but has yet to explain how people will survive there

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk wants to fly people from LA to New York in 25 minutes inside a giant spaceship — but it could be a 'vomit comet'

I'm going to talk more about what it takes to become a multi-planet species. And just a brief refresher on why this is important: I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we're not.

You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think "the future's going to be great". And that's what being a space-faring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. That's why.

So let me go into more detail on becoming a multi-planet species. This is the updated design for the — well, we're sort of searching for the right name, but the code name, at least, is BFR [Big F---ing Rocket]. Probably the most important thing that I want to convey in this presentation is that I think we have figured out how to pay for it. This is very important.

In last year's presentation, we were really searching for what the right way... how do we pay for this thing? We went through various ideas, Kickstarter, collecting underpants, these didn't pan out. But now we think we've got a way to do it, which is to have a smaller vehicle — it's still pretty big — but one that can do everything that's needed in the greater-Earth-orbit activity. So essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant. We want to have one system, one booster and ship, that replaces Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon.

If we can do that, then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9, Heavy, and Dragon can be applied to this system. That's really fundamental.

So let's see what progress have we made in this direction.

• Andy Weir, author of sci-fi blockbuster "The Martian", is publishing a novel about the moon, "Artemis", on November 14.
• The book follows the misadventures of a witty female smuggler, Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara.
• Weir told Business Insider he's convinced humans will colonize the moon before Mars because it has one thing the red planet doesn't: an economic rationale.
• The author says Elon Musk's and SpaceX's plan to colonize Mars before the moon is not realistic.

Andy Weir, author of "The Martian", a realistic tale of survival in space, is about to release his second and highly anticipated novel, "Artemis".

"Artemis" takes place on the moon in the 2080s at humanity's first and only lunar city of the same name. It's a riveting story about a high-stakes lunar heist featuring Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara, a Saudi-born woman and witty smuggler who has lived inside the aluminum bubbles of Artemis since she was a kid.

In Weir's typical style, the novel — which goes on sale on November 14— is wildly entertaining and far-fetched, but stays surprisingly believable by leaning heavily on real-life science and engineering.

Business Insider spoke with Weir about the book's genesis, why he thinks humanity will colonize the moon first, his major criticism of Elon Musk's and SpaceX's plans to inhabit Mars, and why he'd never visit Artemis if he could.

Note: This interview has been edited for style, length, and clarity.

BUSINESS INSIDER: You could have picked any place in the universe for your next novel to take place. Why the moon, and why Artemis — a city on the moon?

ANDY WEIR: I wanted to write a story about the first human settlement somewhere other than Earth. And I just really think that's going to be the moon. That'll definitely be the first place that we colonize outside of Earth.

A lot of people who would like us to just leap-frog to Mars, but Mars is so much farther away. It would be like if the ancient British colonized North America before they colonized Wales.

It's just ... The moon is definitely the first place that we will colonize.

BI: And that's your opinion, or what experts have told you?

AW: Well, yeah, it is just my opinion. But it seems ... It's one of those things that I feel pretty confident about that's how it's gonna shake out.

BI: What gave you the idea to write "Artemis"?

AW: I'm not sure exactly when I came up with the idea, but it started off with me saying, "OK, I want a story that takes place in the city on the moon." And I kind of work forward from there.

I had all of Artemis designed and even its history and its economic foundation and stuff before I ever made characters or story for it. So I really wanted to write a story about this — about life on the first colony off of Earth.

"The Martian" was a survival story and I didn't want to just write another one; I wanted a unique story. I love crime novels and I love crime stories, I like heist and caper kind of stories and I thought, "Hey, why not do a caper on the moon?"

BI: Like "The Martian", "Artemis" struck me as very realistic — the claustrophobic hallways in lower-income areas, the local construction materials, the chemistry ...

AW: Every part of Artemis is about the economics of making it a profitable tourist engine. They had to build it there, and they had to build it with resources that they had on the moon. So I had to figure out, how do you make metal on the moon? And to make it cheaper?

Also, I based Artemis' internal economy — and kind of its social structure that emerges as a result — on resort towns, tourism towns. Imagine a resort town in the Caribbean, where there's some high-end hotels, casinos, whatever, along the shoreline. And then behind that are the more, shall we say, "austere" living environments of the people who live and work there.

And so I figured, well, Artemis would be that. It doesn't matter if it's on the moon: Economics determines how these things pan out. Artemis' economy is a tourist economy, so I figured it'd be just like any other tourist town.

BI: Was the realism the goal here, or a product of the story you wanted to tell?

AW: I wanted it to be as realistic as possible. I wanted a very believable and realistic setting. The book would not work if you weren't buying into the setting. You'd just be like, "Nah, every part of this is bulls---"— especially considering so much of the plot revolves around the setting, like the details of how Artemis operates.

So if your suspension of disbelief isn't completely satisfied by what Artemis is, then you're not going to like the book at all, right? So I had to really make that work — and put a lot of work into it.

BI: You seem very invested in the idea of a moon colony. When do you think it's going to happen — and when would you like to see it happen?

AW: "Artemis" takes place in the 2080s, and construction on the city began on the 2060s. So that was kind of the prediction I made.

When would I like it to happen? Later today. When do I think it'll happen? I don't know, it's hard.

The whole premise of "Artemis" is the presumption that the cost to low-Earth orbit would be driven down by a competition in the commercial space industry. And I actually wrote a paper about that. I mean, it's amateur-hour-level economics, but it's good enough for fiction.

It's funny, I always have to remind myself: I find economics fascinating. I think it's really interesting. But I have to remember that most readers ... don't. So I can't just go off on prolonged discussions of economics, or they'll just put the book down and never come back. But it's all stuff that's under the hood — it's all there, I wanted it to work.

BI: You've visited SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk that's intent on colonizing Mars. What's your impression of their goal?

AW: Talking about getting humans to Mars, like getting a flags-and-footprints kind of mission? I think [that] is very realistic to happen this century. I think that could definitely happen.

But colonizing Mars is way, way far in the future, regardless of what everyone says. I just don't see it happening soon. There's a certain appeal to Mars because it's interesting and exciting and people are like, "Oh, that's neat!" But the reality is that there is no economic reason to colonize Mars. At all.

There's a saying in that kind of space industry: "There is no Planet B." It's like, you don't just get to say, "Oh, f--- this, we'll go elsewhere." And I guarantee you that regardless of how bad the problems are on Earth, environmentally or whatever else, it is easier to fix them than to colonize another planet. I guarantee you that.

If you take the trillion dollars that you were going to spend colonizing Mars and put it into environmental amelioration things, you might find that it's better done here. Leaving Earth as an idea of saving it is just not viable. That's not why people will leave. The environment of Earth is not a factor that would affect the colonization of our solar system, in my opinion.

BI: So you don't think humanity will colonize Mars first?

AW: In terms of people bulldozing directly toward Mars like saying, "Ok, we're going to colonize Mars"— I just don't think that's realistic.

It's kind of like building a railroad track, but it's not like it's time for Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, where we have the East Coast colonized, and now we want to colonize the rest of the country. That would be like if we said, "Let's forget about all the stuff in the middle, and just go straight to Nevada. Let's forget about all of this really usable stuff in the middle." It's like, we'll start with New Amsterdam and then we'll go to Carson City — with nothing in between. I just don't see it.

And colonization of the moon would be incredibly useful to colonizing Mars. First off, everything you want to do on Mars you could do on the moon to see if it works. And second off, the moon has a much smaller gravity well. So anything manufactured there out of local resources is a lot easier to get to Mars.

If anybody asks, "Why would you go to the moon?" I'd say, "Why would you go to Mars?"

BI: I'm sure you've heard Elon Musk's Mars colonization talks in 2016 and 2017. What's your overall impression?

AW: I think Musk's plan is overly optimistic. I think that it's a sort of thing that could happen, but not on the timelines that he's talking about.

I think that neither Musk nor anybody else seems to be considering, what economic reason is there to go to this other planet? So far, I've never heard an answer to that. It's like, "We can put people on Mars!" And I'm like, "Why? So they'll be there? Well, we can put people on Antarctica, why not do that?"

I'm not seeing a reason why, aside from people being overly idealistic and thinking, "Man, it'd be awesome to be on Mars." I don't see any reason why they would move there.

The people who are like, "Man, I would totally move to Mars!"— No, you would totally fantasize about moving to Mars. But when it came to the point where someone's like, "All right, it's time to leave your entire life, your family, everyone you know behind and go to another planet forever until you die," people would probably say, "Uh, actually ... no."

BI: You set up an economy on the moon which has a frightening underbelly to it ...

AW: Well, it's not that bad ...

BI: ... OK, "checkered" underbelly. In real life, there's talk about mining helium-3 on the moon for fusion reactors, among other things. What do you think would be an actual lunar economic engine?

AW: I still believe that with the first settlement on the on the moon, the first economic drive behind it will be tourism.

In terms of things like mining helium-3 — even if it does become a thing — anything that's just a task or a labor or anything that's just resource collection or acquisition, you'd just send robots.

Just imagine there were big bricks of gold on the moon and all you'd have to do is go pick them up. All people would have to do is make probes to go pick them up. You wouldn't send humans — why would you send humans? They're so much harder to keep alive on the moon and people get really mad when you fail. Nobody minds if you break your own million-dollar robot.

Most of the explanations for colonizing the moon that I've seen in science fiction are really lacking. They're like, "We colonized the moon to mine things." And I'm like, "Well then send robots."

Or they're like, "We colonized the moon because of population pressure on Earth." And I'm like, "It is so much easier to colonize the Sahara or Antarctica or the ocean than it would be to colonize the moon."

Or they're like, "We came here to avoid persecution." And I'm like, "If you can get there, the people persecuting you can absolutely get there."

So I just don't see it. The only thing that I can think of is if humans being there is inherently part of the economy — and the only way that happens is tourism.

BI: Hence a resort town on the moon and all of its support systems and smuggling and all of that.

AW: Well, what happens is once you have the tourism industry there, then people live there. And then once you have people living somewhere, then that itself becomes the economy, right?

If there's 2,000 people living on the moon, well I'm gonna move there to sell them shoes — and now there's 2,001 people living on the moon. That's how human settlement and expansion works, but there has to be some sort of seed.

If you look in any city anywhere in the world, there is an economic reason why it exists. Maybe it was at a convenient place on the river, it was in a nice valley that's easy to pass through, going from one trade hub to another, or its near some resources that people needed — something.

BI: Would you go to Artemis if it existed today, and would you want to just be a tourist or actually live there?

AW: I don't think I'd like to live in Artemis. First off, I would not like the trip out there. Secondly, I have a lot of friends and family on Earth that I would miss too much.

It takes a certain special kind of lifestyle and personality to live in a frontier town, and I don't have that. I like the comforts of civilization.

SEE ALSO: SpaceX has published Elon Musk's presentation about colonizing Mars — here's the full transcript and slides

DON'T MISS: Scientists have discovered a potentially suicidal problem with going to Mars

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Stephen Hawking just set humanity a 100-year-deadline to colonize other planets — but this astronaut says we’re not ready

In September 2017, SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk revealed his latest aspirations for colonizing Mars. His plan is to send the first humans to Mars in 2024 to build the foundations for the first Martian city. But is Mars really the best place for humans to settle?

Some scientists, like Amanda Hendrix believes we should be looking somewhere else like Titan, a moon slightly bigger than our own that orbits Saturn. Following is a transcript of the video.

Amanda Hendrix: First of all, I don't want to be negative about Mars. I like Mars, I do think we should go there. Humans should go there to visit and check it out and do science. I just don't think it's a good place for living for long-term. And the main reason is because of the radiation problem and Mars offers no natural protection against galactic cosmic rays. It has a thin atmosphere and no magnetosphere so humans who intend to spend any long period in Mars are probably going to have to live underground or in some sort of devices that can shield them from the galactic cosmic rays.

Titan, on the other hand, has got this natural shielding device, which is its nice thick atmosphere.Titan is really unique because it's a moon and it has a solid surface, it's mostly an icy moon but it has this thick atmosphere and it's unique because there's no other moon in the solar system that has such an atmosphere. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. It's about 1 to 2% methane. So, one thing to point out is there's no oxygen in the atmosphere like we have on Earth. And so, humans living in Titan making oxygen to breathe shouldn't be a problem because there's plenty of H²O frozen in the surface and in the sub-surface. So humans could derive oxygen to breathe without a big problem.

Perhaps a good option might be to try out a temporary, short-term colony of humans on Mars and use that as a stepping stone to Titan, use it as kind of a practice run. I think that will be a great idea. But somebody like Elon Musk who has the smarts to be able to work on Titan and make a colony there happen, and make the propulsion system happen, I think that he should be thinking about Titan more than Mars.

Join the conversation about this story »

In 2015, scientists announced something incredible: They had strong evidence that there was liquid water flowing on Mars today. The implications were huge for the possibility of alien life and resources for future crewed missions to the Martian surface. Now, all of those hopes have been put on hold by a new study published in Nature Geoscience. Following is a transcript of the video.

These mysterious marks on Mars are at the heart of a giant controversy. They're called recurring slope lineae (RSL).

Scientists first discovered them in 2011 from images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Almost immediately, scientists noticed something puzzling.

RSL have regular seasonal changes. During warm seasons they grow darker and longer. But in cooler seasons they fade away.

In 2015, scientists announced they had a solution. RSL were likely the result of liquid water flowing downhill on Mars. Later reports speculated that RSL may even be a good place for life. 

Now, all of that has been called into question.

New evidence adds another mystery to the mix most RSL only occur on slopes that are steeper than 27º. The researchers argue that if RSL were from water then they should appear on shallow slopes as well as steep ones.

They report that instead of water RSL are probably made from falling sand and dust. However, their idea doesn't explain why RSL change with the seasons.

Until we visit these unusual Martian features this mystery will remain one of Mars' best-kept secrets.

Join the conversation about this story »

• The rough terrain of Mars is breaking the wheels of NASA's Curiosity rover.
• In response, NASA is trying to reinvent the wheel for space exploration.
• Metals that can "remember" their form, called shape-memory alloys, are key to the new design.
• The wheel won't be used on the follow-on mission to Curiosity, but it could aid future Martian exploration — and vehicles on Earth.

Mars chews up our wheels and spits them out.

Take NASA's one-ton, car-size, nuclear-powered Mars Curiosity robot: After just a year of cautious 0.09-mile-per-hour roving, small rocks began ripping large holes in its tires.

However, NASA engineers have reinvented the wheel into a form that may one day conquer Mars.

They've created a nearly invincible tire made of woven-mesh metal that "remembers" its ideal shape and immediately springs back into form after taking a beating.

The design, highlighted in a recent feature by the space agency, is rooted at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Engineer Colin Creager and his colleagues initially built a woven-mesh wheel made out of spring steel. It gripped soft sand well and supported a lot of weight, yet kept hitting a major snag.

"We always came across this one problem of where the tires would ... get dents in them," Creager said in a NASA video.

Then Creager bumped into materials scientist Santo Padula, who suggested using a shape-memory alloy — a super-elastic metal that pops back into place after intense strain.

"Since then, we've been collaborating ... to come up with this new tire that we think is really going to revolutionize planetary rover tires and potentially even tires for Earth, too," Creager said.

The torture of driving in space

NASA has been developing space-grade tires since the 1960s, starting with its moon-landing program.

Those efforts led to mesh wheels on the Lunar Roving Vehicles, which astronauts drove during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. Stiff metal strips in and on the tires helped keep the LRVs moving on soft moon dust, yet also stood up to the punishment of small rocks.

The space agency later set its sites on Mars, spurring development in off-planet wheels. Yet the list of requirements for roving the red planet is daunting:

• All-terrain: Mars is covered in sand, gravel, and boulders yet also littered with jagged rocks.
• Lightweight: It costs roughly $30,000 per pound to land something on Mars, so every ounce counts.
• Durable: Solar or nuclear energy can help missions last more than a decade on the red planet.
• Able to survive wild temperature swings: Inflated rubber tires wouldn't last on a nearly airless world with temperatures that can shift from nearly -200 degrees to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in some locations.

To handle scaling a veritable mountain, Curiosity's designers made 20-inch-high aluminum wheels. They are toughened by stiff internal rings and outer rims, can grip the soil with V-shaped treads, and absorb bumps and shocks using flexible internal spokes.

Yet mission controllers began noticing worrisome dents, holes, and tears in those tires in 2013 — about a year into the mission. Today Curiosity is instructed to avoid small pointy rocks, limiting damage, but the wheels continue to degrade.

"When the current rover wheel damage occurred, we thought it was worth taking a look at that wheel and adapting it for the future," Creager told Business Insider.

Tires with great memory

After years of research, the team settled on a nickel-titanium (NiTi) alloy and figured out the best process to form and treat it.

Spring steel can only withstand 0.3% of strain (the distance the atoms in the metal shift) before it gets dented and the metal crystals permanently rearrange. The NiTi alloy in question, however, can suffer up to 10% strain — about 30 times better elasticity.

As a result, the new wheels boast some impressive stats: They can bear nearly 10 times the weight of Curiosity's wheels, function between -202 and 194 degrees Fahrenheit, have better grip over rocks and sand, and can climb slopes about 23% steeper.

"We [can] actually deform this all the way down to the axle and have it return to shape, which we could never even contemplate in a conventional-metal system," Padula said of the new spring tire in another NASA video.

Phillip Abel, a mechanical systems expert at NASA Glenn, said the key to the tire's performance are the stretchy bonds of the crystal structure in shape-memory alloys.

"With super-elastic materials, what you're doing is ... storing the energy of deformation in the [crystal structure]. All of the atoms are more or less where they were," Abel told Business Insider, but the crystal structure shifts.  "The alloy, at the temperatures we're seeing, is always in its 'return to my original shape' mode. So after you deform it, it pops back to its original crystal structure."

In the toughest test to date, the wheels aced 10 kilometers of driving — more than half the total mileage of Curiosity on Mars — on punishing simulated terrain.

"The rim was a little dinged up, but the spring mesh tire was like brand-new," Creager said, adding the caveat that the test did not occur at blistering Martian conditions.

"In theory, they should work, but NASA JPL is building a cryogenic test chamber to verify operation at cold temperatures," he said.

The long road ahead

Future and heavier Mars rover missions are in the works, putting pressure on NASA to redevelop its tires.

A rover that's nearly identical to Curiosity yet heavier, called Mars 2020, is scheduled to launch in just a few years. That mission could be a boon in the search for alien life, since it may drill samples that another, similarly built rover can later help launch to Earth.

Curiosity wasn't outfitted with the newer wheels, since they weren't developed before its launch, and Creager said it's probably too late to put them on NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 rover. (It takes a grueling number of tests to prove the viability of a wheel for use on a space mission.)

"You can buy nickel-titanium alloy off the shelf, but you can't just use it on Mars. There's a treatment process," Creager said. Even with years of work, he added, "there's still a lot we need to understand."

However, they could be ready to roll for the Mars-sample-return mission in 2024.

The wheel's applications aren't limited only to the red planet, though; Creager, Abel, and Padula are working with Goodyear to put them on Earth-based vehicles. So far, one they attached to a Jeep hugged around rocks without inflicting any damage to the spring tire.

"I could definitely see it being used for any application where you're driving off-road, and the risk of a puncture and a flat is a big deal, like with a military vehicle," Creager said. "But I would love to see this technology branching off to passenger vehicles."

SEE ALSO: SpaceX has published Elon Musk's presentation about colonizing Mars — here's the full transcript and slides

DON'T MISS: The 15 most incredible plutonium-powered space missions of all time

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: There's a place at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where hundreds of giant spacecraft go to die

• Elon Musk said several times on Friday and Saturday that he plans to launch his red Tesla Roadster to Mars in 2018.
• A SpaceX employee and engineer also said Friday that the first Falcon Heavy payload had been announced, and that "this is legit".
• Musk reportedly walked back his comments Saturday, telling The Verge that he had "totally made it up."
• However, two spokespeople at SpaceX reportedly confirmed Musk's claim as true after Musk's backpedaling.

Update: Elon Musk does plan to launch his Tesla Roadster to Mars with SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy rocket launch, company officials reportedly confirmed on Saturday.

In a series of tweets on Friday night, Elon Musk said he plans to launch his red Tesla Roadster to Mars orbit in 2018.

Multiple sources now confirm Musk is serious, even if the tech mogul and billionaire had a good laugh or two at the expense of journalists over the weekend. Based on Musk's history and the reported capabilities of his new rocket, there's good reason to believe him.

In 2010, Musk launched a wheel of cheese into orbit during the maiden voyage of Dragon, a spaceship built by his aerospace company, SpaceX. And in March, Musk said he plans to launch "[s]illiest thing we can imagine" during the first flight of Falcon Heavy. The rocket is SpaceX's biggest and newest launcher, and one that's capable of sending a payload of 37,000 pounds (or nearly 14 Tesla Roadsters' worth of mass) to Mars.

The inaugural Falcon Heavy launch will occur in January 2018, Musk confirmed this week.

"Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars orbit," Musk tweeted on Friday, referencing the song by David Bowie. "Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent."

Musk seemed to further confirm his plans in an impromptu question-and-answer session that evening.

"Just to reiterate, the payload for the first Falcon Heavy rocket will be a Tesla electric car, playing Space Oditty, heading for Mars,"wrote a user named J.C.

"Yes," Musk answered.

Will it be a first-generation 2008 Roadster?

"Yeah," Musk replied to another user.

Another person asked about the midnight cherry-red paint on Musk's roadster.

"Red car for a red planet," Musk replied.

SpaceX employees also appeared to confirm the claim. Joy Dunn, an engineer at the company, tweeted on Friday that the first Falcon Heavy payload had been announced. She said"this is going to be so awesome" and later added, "oh this is legit and of course there will be cameras!"

Musk also initially confirmed his plans to The Verge on Friday, writing "it's so real" in email to the outlet. However, The Verge updated its story on Saturday, writing that, in a follow-up email, "Musk told us he 'totally made it up.'"

Business Insider reached SpaceX, though the company declined to comment on the record. We also contacted Musk directly, but he did not immediately reply. NASA also did not immediately answer our questions about Musk's stated plan to launch a car to Mars orbit.

Despite the back-and-forth, the claim appears to be legitimate. Musk reportedly told Eric Berger, Ars Technica's senior space editor, that the mission was "100% real" after The Verge's story was updated, and Berger later tweeted that two SpaceX officials had also confirmed his claim.

"The Roadster to Mars payload is real," the second SpaceX official reportedly told Berger.

Later on, Phil Plait, an astronomer and writer, reported new details from Musk at his blog, Bad Astronomy.

"No, it's not going to Mars. It's going near Mars," Plait wrote, specifically in what's called a Hohmann transfer orbit: an elliptical path that goes out to the orbit of Mars and back to Earth orbit on a near-endless loop (hence the "billion years or so" detail from Musk).

And apparently, Musk is also willing to consider launching other objects inside the Tesla suggested by the public.

"Just bear in mind that there is a good chance this monster rocket blows up," Musk reportedly told Plait in an email, "so I wouldn't put anything of irreplaceable sentimental value on it."

This story was originally published on Sat. Dec. 2, 2017, at 3:19 p.m. ET and later updated.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk wants to fly people from LA to New York in 25 minutes in a giant spaceship — but it could be a 'vomit comet'

DON'T MISS: This is not a joke: Elon Musk once rocketed a wheel of cheese into space

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: There's a place at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where hundreds of giant spacecraft go to die

Mars destroys tires — so NASA reinvented the wheel by giving it a memory. Following is a transcript of the video. 

NASA has reinvented the tire. These rover tires are made from a nickel-titanium alloy. A material that can be deformed and return back to shape.

The super-elastic material allows it to “remember” its original shape. Rover tire technology has come a long way.

In the 1960s mesh tires were woven from piano wire. The technology worked well, but could only hold so much weight. In 2013, significant wheel damage was found on the Curiosity Mars Rover. The Curiosity Rover had solid aluminum wheels. The new nickel-titanium tires could allow rovers to explore new grounds and carry heavier loads.

Join the conversation about this story »

NASA has unveiled its plan for its next Mars rover, "Mars 2020," which will collect samples from the surface of the red planet. Following is a transcript of the video.

Since landing Viking 1 on Mars in 1975, NASA has successfully put 7 rovers on Mars. But there's still one major mission left: Send a sample from Mars back to Earth.

NASA is taking a huge step toward that goal in 2020 with its "Mars 2020" rover. The Mars 2020 comes with some major upgrades. Its radar can search for water or ice 30 feet below the surface. It has an ultraviolet laser that can read carbon atoms to see if they could've been left by ancient carbon-based life.

It can also drill into solid rock to retrieve samples. These samples are critical to NASA's plan. The rover will accumulate a collection of samples. A future mission will pick them up and launch them back to Earth. So, any potential life that the Mars 2020 rover may miss could be found in labs here on Earth.

NASA has narrowed the landing site down to 3 possible locations. Each spot once had environments which could have harbored life. The rover will launch in the summer of 2020 and touch down February 2021.

Join the conversation about this story »

• Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk tweeted he would send a Roadster to Mars when the company's new Falcon Heavy rocket makes its maiden voyage.
• It could happen. It could not. Either way, it's a great PR stunt. 

If Loki, that merry prankster, hailed from South Africa rather than Norway, I suspect he might look a lot like Elon Musk.

Earlier this month, founder of start-up space-launch company SpaceX took to the Twitter-ways once again to announce his latest trademark PR stunt. As the SpaceX founder (and Tesla(NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO) explained, when SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy rocket makes its maiden voyage early next year, it will be carrying very special cargo: Musk's personal cherry-red Tesla Roadster sports car.

In subsequent statements, Musk and SpaceX have taken turns saying both that the whole "Tesla to Mars" thing is a joke, and that no, actually, Musk is really serious, throwing the whole situation into confusion and generating additional interest in the process. (We may all have to watch the launch live stream to find out for sure.) But one thing's for certain already: Musk says next month's launch will be "exciting." On the one hand, this will be Falcon Heavy's first-ever flight, and SpaceX's first attempt at launching a rocket with boosters on its sides.

Translation: There's a very real chance that the rocket will blow up.

On the other hand, if Falcon Heavy does not explode in a fiery furnace of rocket fuel miles above its launch pad, one of two other things might happen:

• First, in a choreographed display of technological wizardry, one, two, or even all three of the rocket's nine-engine rocket cores could safely descend to Earth and land safely -- a feat never before attempted by man, corporation, or nation-state.
• Second, the part of Falcon Heavy that does not descend back to Earth -- the payload -- could continue along its flight path, escape Earth orbit, travel for several months between planets, and enter orbit around Mars.

With Elon Musk's cherry-red sports car inside.

What it means to investors

As a PR stunt, you have to admit: Elon's got style, and this one simply beats the band. But it's also got substance, and that's the part that's important to investors. Let me run it down for you.

There's no such thing as bad [free] publicity

SpaceX is valuing Falcon Heavy launches at $90 million. It surely wants to get something for the cost of this launch, but because Falcon Heavy is still an experimental rocketship that has never before flown, SpaceX would have a hard time finding a customer willing to place an expensive satellite onboard for its maiden voyage (or finding an insurer willing to insure said satellite) to help defray the cost.

By stirring up a firestorm of public interest with his "Roadster to Mars" tweet, Musk is maximizing the publicity value of next month's launch. $90 million may be a lot to spend on advertising, but at least SpaceX will get something for its money. (I am curious, however, to learn how his car insurance company will react if the rocket blows up, destroying Musk's Roadster in the process.)

Have space [ship], will travel

Next month, SpaceX will (or won't) successfully launch Falcon Heavy, and set a new standard in spaceflight -- proving its new rocketship can (or cannot) lift payloads twice as massive as those carried by the very biggest Delta IV rockets built by Boeing  and Lockheed Martin at United Launch Alliance.

Worst case, Musk's rocket blows up, and SpaceX gathers data to ensure that the next time it launches a Falcon Heavy it won't blow up. SpaceX still moves closer to building a Moon-capable super-rocket years before Boeing and Lockheed finish their work on NASA's Space Launch System.

Destination: Mars!

Did I say "Moon-capable?" That's actually an understatement. Lest we forget, Elon Musk's ultimate objective remains to prove the feasibility of manned space travel to Mars and establishing a space trade route that will permit the colonization of the Red Planet. If next month's launch goes off without a hitch, SpaceX will become the first private company to visit Mars unassisted. With Musk's Roadster in orbit, it will even have "planted a flag" there, of sorts.

And once SpaceX's Dragon Crew vessel is certified as safe for astronauts to fly in, Musk will have assembled all the parts necessary to make at least an initial attempt at landing people on Mars and sending supplies there to sustain them.

Conclusion: Even if you don't care a fig for Tesla or its electric cars, next month's Falcon Heavy launch gives everyone a reason to watch and root for Elon Musk's success in sending a Tesla to Mars.

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

SEE ALSO: Americans always want a more expensive home — that's a problem

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What 'Dilly Dilly' means — and how Bud Light came up with its viral campaign

• Elon Musk said on December 1 that he'd launch his old red Tesla Roadster toward Mars.
• While Musk said he was serious, doubts have lingered.
• But on Friday, Musk posted a photo to Instagram of the Tesla inside a rocket nosecone.
• The rocket is SpaceX's brand-new Falcon Heavy launcher, scheduled to fly in January.

In a series of tweets on December 1, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who founded SpaceX, said he planned to launch a Tesla electric car to Mars orbit in 2018.

Musk toyed with the popular press, first by confirming his plans with The Verge, then backpedaling, then again confirming it with Ars Technica and several other media outlets.

But if Musk had left any room for doubt, it is now gone.

On Friday afternoon, he posted a striking photo on Instagram of a 2008 red Tesla Roadster sitting in the carbon-fiber fairing of a Falcon Heavy rocket— just as he had promised.

The aerospace company says the launch vehicle, the first of its kind for SpaceX, is the most powerful rocket in the world today. (The Saturn V rocket NASA used to launch astronauts to the moon has been retired since the mid-1970s.)

With enough fuel and the right trajectory, Falcon Heavy has enough thrust to launch a payload heavier than a car to Pluto, let alone Mars.

"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk wrote in his Instagram post. "Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel.

"The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit."

A serious history of silly test payloads

Earlier this week, Musk revealed photos of the first Falcon Heavy ever built inside a hangar in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The 230-foot-tall three-booster rocket is scheduled to make its maiden launch no earlier than January.

But the reusable-rocket system is noticeably missing the clamshell top, or fairing, in the images.

Musk had demanded to be taken seriously before releasing the crucial photo of that missing part, though.

For example, Musk previously said he planned to launch the "silliest thing we can imagine" on Falcon Heavy's first test flight.

And in 2010, he launched a wheel of cheese into orbit during the maiden voyage of SpaceX's Dragon spaceship.

Falcon Heavy is also up to the task: SpaceX says it can ferry a payload of 37,000 pounds— roughly 14 Tesla Roadsters' worth of mass — to Mars.

"Red car for a red planet," Musk said in a Twitter reply in early December.

The Tesla won't be going to Mars, as Musk told Phil Plait, an astronomer and writer.

Instead, Plait wrote in a post for SyFy, it's "going near Mars," specifically in what's called a Hohmann transfer orbit, a highly elliptical path that goes out to Mars orbit and back to Earth orbit on a nearly endless loop – hence the "billion year" detail from Musk.

It's unlikely the Tesla will be empty, just playing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on repeat. Joy Dunn, an engineer at the company, tweeted on December 1, "This is legit and of course there will be cameras!"

Musk also told Plait he was willing to consider launching other objects inside the Tesla suggested by the public.

"Just bear in mind that there is a good chance this monster rocket blows up," Musk told Plait in an email. "So I wouldn't put anything of irreplaceable sentimental value on it."

Below are other photos Musk posted of the Tesla inside Falcon Heavy's fairing.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk wants to fly people from LA to New York in 25 minutes in a giant spaceship — but it could be a 'vomit comet'

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk once rocketed a wheel of cheese into space

Falcon Heavy's fairing stands dozens of feet tall and is made of lightweight yet incredibly strong carbon-fiber composite materials.

Payloads have to be carefully balanced inside a fairing to prevent damaging and leaning the rocket askew during flight.

This might explain why SpaceX engineers will integrate the car front-up on its cone-shaped payload stand...

• Cacao plants are slated to disappear by as early as 2050 thanks to warmer temperatures and dryer weather conditions.
• Scientists at the University of California are teaming up with Mars company to try to save the crop before it's too late.
• They're exploring the possibility of using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to make crops that can survive the new challenges.

Beyond the glittery glass-and-sandstone walls of the University of California’s new biosciences building, rows of tiny green cacao seedlings in refrigerated greenhouses await judgment day.

Under the watchful eye of Myeong-Je Cho, the director of plant genomics at an institute that's working with food and candy company Mars, the plants will be transformed. If all goes well, these tiny seedlings will soon be capable of surviving — and thriving — in the dryer, warmer climate that is sending chills through the spines of farmers across the globe.

It's all thanks to a new technology called CRISPR, which allows for tiny, precise tweaks to DNA that were never possible before. These tweaks are already being used to make crops cheaper and more reliable. But their most important use may be in the developing world, where many of the plants that people rely on to avoid starvation are threatened by the impacts of climate change, including more pests and a lack of water.

Cacao plants occupy a precarious position on the globe. They can only grow within a narrow strip of rainforested land roughly 20 degrees north and south of the equator, where temperature, rain, and humidity all stay relatively constant throughout the year. Over half of the world's chocolate now comes from just two countries in West Africa— Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

But those areas won't be suitable for chocolate in the next few decades. By 2050, rising temperatures will push today's chocolate-growing regions more than 1,000 feet uphill into mountainous terrain — much of which is currently preserved for wildlife, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Mars, the $35 billion corporation best known for Snickers, is aware of these problems and others presented by climate change.

In September, the company pledged $1 billion as part of an effort called "Sustainability in a Generation," which aims to reduce the carbon footprint of its business and supply chain by more than 60% by 2050.

"We're trying to go all in here," Barry Parkin, Mars' chief sustainability officer, told Business Insider. "There are obviously commitments the world is leaning into but, frankly, we don't think we're getting there fast enough collectively."

Its initiative with Cho at UC Berkeley is another arm of that efforts. If all goes as planned, they could develop cacao plants that don’t wilt or rot at their current elevations, doing away with the need to relocate farms or find another approach.

Jennifer Doudna, the UC Berkeley geneticist who invented CRISPR, is overseeing the collaboration with Mars. Although her tool has received more attention for its potential to eradicate human diseases and make so-called “designer babies,” Doudna thinks its most profound applications won’t be on humans but rather on the food they eat.

An avid tomato gardener, Doudna thinks her tool can benefit everyone from large food companies like Mars to individual hobbyists like herself.

”Personally, I’d love a tomato plant with fruit that stayed on the vine longer,” Doudna told Business Insider.

The research lab she oversees at UC Berkeley is called the Innovative Genomics Institute. Many of the efforts by graduate students there focus on using CRISPR to benefit small-holder farmers in the developing world. One such project aims to protect cassava — a key crop that prevents millions of people from starving each year — from climate change by tweaking its DNA to produce less of a dangerous toxin that it makes in hotter temperatures. 

Doudna founded a company called Caribou Biosciences to put CRISPR into practice, and has also licensed the technology to agricultural company DuPont Pioneer for use in crops like corn and mushrooms. 

Regardless of which crop the public sees CRISPR successfully used in first, the technology will be a key tool in a growing arsenal of techniques we'll need if we plan to continue eating things like chocolate as the planet warms. 

SEE ALSO: 11 things people think are terrible for your diet that actually aren't

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's how NYC food institution Eli Zabar's makes its legendary chocolate babka

• SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sought to pique Donald Trump's interest in space colonization shortly after he was elected.
• Musk has previously asserted that people need to leave Earth in order to preserve humanity.
• He was one of several tech titans who courted Trump early on, according to an excerpt from the revealing book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," by journalist Michael Wolff.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk tried to get a newly elected Donald Trump on board with his company's mission to reach Mars, according to an excerpt from a new book on the Trump administration that has dominated headlines this week.

Among the many claims made in Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," one passage described a scene at Trump Tower where then-president-elect Trump was taking meetings with tech titans like the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

"Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration's joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at," Wolff wrote in his tell-all book. Musk's effort was ostensibly an attempt to keep his company front-of-mind in the broad scope of national space exploration.

In response to the excerpt, a SpaceX spokesperson indirectly confirmed to Business Insider that the conversation happened, but that "it wasn't about Elon personally getting to Mars but rather making humans multi-planetary, which is the SpaceX mission."

Musk has been vocal about this goal. Last month, for example, he said it was "high time that humanity went beyond Earth."

"Should have a moon base by now and sent astronauts to Mars,"Musk wrote in a Dec. 13 tweet. "The future needs to inspire."

Trump has previously expressed interest in jump-starting the national space program. He signed the NASA Transition Authorization Act in March last year, a law calling for a $19.5 billion yearly budget for NASA.

The law requests that the space agency put together a plan to get humans to Mars by 2033. But last month, Trump signed a new policy directive that added the moon as a critical destination in NASA's mandate (which spurred Musk's Dec. 13 comments on Twitter).

"This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints," Trump said during a signing ceremony at the White House. "We will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond."

Musk may beat NASA back to the moon with a privately funded mission — that is, if SpaceX successfully test-launches its new Falcon Heavy rocket. The lunar voyage is currently slated to autonomously loop two paying customers around the moon inside SpaceX's Dragon 2 capsule, but neither land nor orbit the pockmarked world, by the end of this year.

SEE ALSO: Trump signed a law that maps out NASA's long-term future — but a critical element is missing

DON'T MISS: China's out-of-control space station may crash to Earth in 2 months

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: There's a place at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where hundreds of giant spacecraft go to die

• NASA scientists discovered eight instances of ice exposed on the Martian surface.
• While scientists have long known about the red planet's sub-surface ice sheets, this is the first time ice has been seen exposed and easily accessible.
• The ice could be a "game-changer" for human exploration and eventual settlement on the red planet. 

There may be a major source of easily accessible drinkable water on Mars, according to a new study in the journal Science. 

Using images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the planet since 2006, scientists working with the space agency discovered ice sheets that are relatively pure and partially exposed on the Martian surface.

Scientists have long known about the existence of subsurface ice on the red planet and about major ice deposits on its frigid poles. But they hadn't seen exposed ice on other parts of the planet's surface before. The newly discovered ice deposits are thick sheets just under the Martian surface, and parts of the sheets are exposed in eight sites on steep slopes up to 100 meters tall. 

Shane Byrne, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and one of the study's authors, told Reuters the discovery a potential "game-changer" for human exploration of Mars.

"Here we have what we think is almost pure water ice buried just below the surface. You don’t see a high-tech solution," Byrne said. "You can go out with a bucket and shovel and just collect as much water as you need."

The scientists believe the ice is consolidated snow that was deposited relatively recently in geologic terms. 

The exposed portions of ice are located at mid-latitudes, where the temperatures are a bit balmier for humans and robots to operate. Other ice that exists at these latitudes is covered by layers of Martian dust, or regolith. Those layers of loose rock make the sub-surface ice extremely difficult to access, Colin Dundas, the study's leader and a geologist with the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center, told Reuters. 

"Previous ideas for extracting human-usable water from Mars were to pull it from the very dry atmosphere or to break down water-containing rocks," Byrne said. But because these newly discovered ice deposits are so much more accessible, they could aid the foundation of a permanent Mars base — or at least, could support future missions to study the planet.

Your move, Elon Musk. 

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with SpaceX but has yet to explain how people will survive there

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The amazing changes intermittent fasting does to your body and brain