Elon Musk revises 'NUKE Mars' slogan, says thousands of solar reflectors to warm the planet instead

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is backing away from his calls to ‘Nuke Mars’ with a new — if equally hypothetical — proposal.

In a second thread of head-scratching tweets about Mars, Musk advanced a new theory of cultivating the planet for human habitation. This one seems to involve harnessing the suns rays using ‘solar reflectors.’

‘Might make sense to have thousands of solar reflector satellites to warm Mars vs artificial suns (tbd),’ he wrote.

While he offered little detail on how the reflectors might actually work, the plan offers an alternative to one reiterated by Musk this past week involving the use of nuclear bombs to heat the planet. 

Musk couldn’t help but elaborate on that plan later in the thread.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is backing away from his calls to ‘Nuke Mars’ with a new — if equally hypothetical — proposal

‘Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low fallout nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial suns. Much like our sun, this would not cause Mars to become radioactive,’ he tweeted.  

He also went as far as to say that the theory isn’t ‘risky.’

‘Not risky [in my opinion] & can be adjusted/improved real-time. Essentially need to figure out most effective way to convert mass to energy, as Mars is slightly too far from this solar system’s fusion reactor (the sun),’ he wrote.

Jarring though the idea may be, Musk’s recent calls to ‘Nuke Mars’ are a re-hash of an idea championed by the tech billionaire in the past.

The theory involves using a nuclear weapon to terraform the red planet for human habitation. 

By detonating nuclear bombs over both of the planet’s poles, Musk has posited that the process would release enough carbon dioxide — locked in frozen reserves beneath the planet’s surface — to warm the atmosphere and help bring it closer to that of Earth. 

Musk’s ‘Nuke Mars’ theory took a back seat to using solar reflectors to warm the planet according to a series of tweets this week

Musk says, theoretically a drastically altered atmosphere would allow humans to live and colonize Mars without the use of support systems or insular habitats. 

In a subsequent statement after he first posited the idea in 2015, Musk said that the idea would be two create two artificial ‘suns’ by launching a nuclear bomb every ‘couple of seconds.’

Those ‘suns’ would melt CO2 reserves and warm the planet’s atmosphere in Musk’s estimation.  

Despite Musk doubling down on the idea the efficacy of using nuclear bombs to unleash CO2 has unsurprisingly drawn criticism from the scientific community.

In a study published in Nature last year, scientists note that Mars likely lacks the requisite levels of CO2 to adequately warm the planet.

‘These results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be emplaced into the atmosphere,’ the wrote.

‘In addition, most of the CO2 gas in these reservoirs is not accessible and thus cannot be readily mobilized.’

SpaceX has long had its eyes on Mars and has worked on developing a rocket capable of carting humans to the Red Planet for the first time.

Secondly, researchers say that Mars’ atmosphere is far too thin to retain any of the CO2 that would be release via the process. 

Musk has nonetheless continued to promote the idea, which is part of a larger mission by the billionaire and his company, SpaceX — a Musk enterprise that has been decidedly less theoretical in its mission to pioneer a new generation of spacecraft. 

Recently, the company has boasted several firsts, including launching military cargo into space and successfully catching rocket parts that fall back to Earth. 

SpaceX hopes that its Big Falcon Rocket will eventually be able to travel to Mars, bringing the first-ever human travelers along with it.

WHAT ARE NASA’S PLANS FOR A MANNED MISSION TO MARS IN THE 2030s?

Mars has become the next giant leap for mankind’s exploration of space.

But before humans get to the red planet, astronauts will take a series of small steps by returning to the moon for a year-long mission.

Details of a the mission in lunar orbit have been unveiled as part of a timeline of events leading to missions to Mars in the 2030s.

Nasa has outlined its four stage plan (pictured) which it hopes will one day allow humans to visit Mars at he Humans to Mars Summit held in Washington DC yesterday. This will entail multiple missions to the moon over coming decades

In May 2017, Greg Williams, deputy associate administrator for policy and plans at Nasa, outlined the space agency’s four stage plan that it hopes will one day allow humans to visit Mars, as well as its expected time-frame.

Phase one and two will involve multiple trips to lunar space, to allow for construction of a habitat which will provide a staging area for the journey.

The last piece of delivered hardware would be the actual Deep Space Transport vehicle that would later be used to carry a crew to Mars. 

And a year-long simulation of life on Mars will be conducted in 2027. 

Phase three and and four will begin after 2030 and will involve sustained crew expeditions to the Martian system and surface of Mars.