Raptor is three times as powerful as the current engine that powers Falcon 9 rocket and is foreseen to help people get to Mars.
Planet Mars has long been the target abode of the human race should the Earth reach its ends, billions of years from now.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has long been studying to get humans to the red planet in the future. It has officially sent its new engine out for testing with a simple goal and that is to send a rocket to Mars coming 2018.
SpaceX could be the first private company to ever reach another planet.
The new rocket is named Raptor, said to be three times as powerful as Merlin, the current engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket. The company website said that it will have 230 metric tonnes of thrust (about 250 tons), which is about the same as the main engines of the space shuttle. A cluster of nine of these rockets will be used on the Mars Colonial transporter, which was nicknamed Red Dragon by Musk in a tweet last April.
This is good news for the ambitious objective of sending the Red Dragon to Mars in 2018: full-scale testing is usually at the end of the technology development phase.
Although Musk has stated previously that he founded SpaceX to start a human colony on Mars, there are no details on what the 2018 mission is supposed to do. It might have a scientific goal, or could be just a demonstration that SpaceX has the technology to explore the Solar System. Although it’s still early days, this engine might, in the future, be the one to take humans to Mars.
NASA has announced that it will help Musk’s company in exchange for information on the mission. Any data will be important, for the space agency’s journey to Mars, which aims to have astronauts on the red planet in the 2030s.
But do you know who targeted to get to the moon first?
Yes, it is Buzz Aldrin.
According to author, Sue Nelson, Buzz Aldrin’s passion is clear for all to see. It’s not the jeans, jacket or unexpected striped red braces, but on the T-shirt. Beneath the words “Destination Mars” there sits an astronaut’s visor reflecting a red Martian surface. It depicts a human mission that Aldrin hopes will one day become a reality. For him, this means a permanent base.
“The first people that go to Mars are in quite an honorable position but we’re going to bring them back. The president who sets up permanence,” he says, “is going to go down in history.”
Elements of Aldrin’s own history can be found among the five chunky rings adorning his fingers. The two on his left hand represent his pre-lunar existence. “That’s a ring that my grandfather had,” he says, pointing to a gold signet ring.