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To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space. SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019. Several official graphics of the spaceship's internal structure...

The Mars Human Precursor Science Steering Group was chartered by MEPAG in June 2004 to analyze the priorities for precursor investigations, measurements, and technology/infrastructure demonstrations that would have a significant effect on the cost and risk of the first human mission to Mars. Based on this analysis, the MHP SSG proposes the following revised phrasing for MEPAG's Goal IV, Objective A, and within it the investigations that follow (in priority order). The measurements needed to carry out these investigations are described in the subsequent sections of this white paper. All of the measurements listed below, which are listed in priority...

The US space agency NASA is considering using Norway's Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean as a testing ground for future expeditions to Mars, Norwegian daily Aftenposten reported on Monday. NASA officials are keen to use the area to test robotic equipment and to train astronauts who would make the trip to Mars in the future, the paper said, quoting experts as saying that the Svalbard landscape resembles that of Mars.

Gearing Up to Harvest Mars' Water Resource By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 19 June 2002 The surprising signal from Mars Odyssey is that oceans of ice lie in wait just under the surface of the Red Planet. Scientists have found Martian terrain that is hydrogen-rich, an indicator of water ice. The most abundant reservoirs of that near-surface water stretch from the planet's poles to within about 50 degrees of the equator. The amount of hydrogen detected is huge. So much so that one brimming bucket of ice-rich polar soil, when heated, can yield more...