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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Journey to Mars and Beyond. Mexico IAC Conference at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. September 27, 2016 Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk says his space transport company, SpaceX, will build a rocket system capable of taking people to Mars and supporting a permanent city on the red planet. "It's something we can do in our lifetimes," he said in a speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, that was streamed online and watched by more than 100,000 people. "You could go." Musk described plans to send at least a million humans to Mars and establish a self-sustaining city there. He said he expects people to reach Mars within a decade, and described four requirements for a new rocket fleet, which would travel to Mars approximately every two years, when Mars and Earth come closest to each other. The Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), formerly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT), is SpaceX's privately funded development project to design and build a system of spaceflight technology and remote human settlements on Mars— including reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft; Earth infrastructure for rapid launch and relaunch; low Earth orbit, zero-gravity propellant transfer technology; and extraterrestrial technology to enable human colonization of Mars. The technology is also envisioned to eventually support exploration missions to other locations in the Solar System including the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Development work began in earnest before 2012 when SpaceX began design work for the large Raptor rocket engine to be used for both the ITS launch vehicle and spacecraft (ITS tanker and Interplanetary Spaceship). New rocket engine designs are typically considered one of the longest of the development subprocesses for new launch vehicles and spacecraft. By June 2016, the company publicly-announced conceptual plans that included the first Mars-bound cargo flight of ITS launching no earlier than 2022, followed by the first ITS Mars flight with passengers one synodic period later in 2024, following two preparatory research launches of Mars probes in 2018 and 2020 on Dragon/Falcon Heavy equipment. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled details of the system architecture at the 67th International Astronautical Congress on 27 September 2016. As publicly discussed, SpaceX is concentrating its resources on the transportation part of the project as well as a propellant plant that could be deployed on Mars to make methalox rocket propellant from local resources. However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is championing a much larger set of long-term interplanetary settlement objectives, ones that go far beyond what SpaceX will build and that will ultimately involve many more economic actors—whether individual, company, or government—to facilitate the settlement to build out over many decades. As early as 2007, Elon Musk stated a personal goal of eventually enabling human exploration and settlement of Mars, although his personal public interest in Mars goes back at least to 2001. Bits of additional information about the mission architecture were released in 2011–2015, including a 2014 statement that initial colonists would arrive at Mars no earlier than the middle of the 2020s. Company plans as of mid-2016 continue to call for the arrival of the first humans on Mars no earlier than 2025. Musk stated in a 2011 interview that he hoped to send humans to Mars' surface within 10–20 years, and in late 2012 he stated that he envisioned a Mars colony of tens of thousands with the first colonists arriving no earlier than the middle of the 2020s. In October 2012, Musk articulated a high-level plan to build a second reusable rocket system with capabilities substantially beyond the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy launch vehicles on which SpaceX had by then spent several billion US dollars. This new vehicle was to be "an evolution of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster ... much bigger ." But Musk indicated that SpaceX would not be speaking publicly about it until 2013. In June 2013, Musk stated that he intended to hold off any potential IPO of SpaceX shares on the stock market until after the "Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly." In August 2014, media sources speculated that the initial flight test of the Raptor-driven super-heavy launch vehicle could occur as early as 2020, in order to fully test the engines under orbital spaceflight conditions; however, any colonization effort was reported to continue to be "deep into the future"...Watch video Credits: SpaceX, Elon Musk, Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.September 27, 2016 Credits: SpaceX, Elon Musk, Conference at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.September 27, 2016 #ABVideoStudio