If you listen to Elon Musk talk about it, the prospect of landing people on Mars seems far off.

He engaged in a 45-minute debate with Jack Ma at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai recently and it got…weird.

What started out as a conversation about getting people to the red planet, ended with a thread about whether or not consciousness would continue – because of aliens, or rather the lack thereof.

Regardless, SpaceX is on the lookout for the best places to touch down on Mars, as confirmed by images that the company has requested from NASA.

Here’s Business Insider:

SpaceX is scouting for prime real estate to populate Mars, according to a database of NASA spacecraft photography.

The entries suggest the rocket company, founded by the tech mogul Elon Musk, is looking for relatively flat, warm, and hazard-free landing sites for its coming launch vehicle, called Starship.

SpaceX is developing the towering two-stage rocket ship to land 150 tons and up to 100 people at a time on Mars, with the first missions starting in the mid-2020s.

Each of the sites have one thing in common. They are all spots where frozen water might be buried, making it accessible to humans and robots. In theory, that ice could be melted down and reworked as air, water, and rocket fuel.

The space-history writer Robert Zimmerman first posted about the images on his site, Beyond the Black, after perusing a fresh batch of data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Zimmerman noticed several photos with titles that included the words “Candidate Landing Site for SpaceX Starship.”

“To put it mildly, it is most intriguing to discover that SpaceX is beginning to research a place where it can land Starship on Mars,” Zimmerman wrote, adding that each site was a probable location to find buried ice.

Zimmerman noticed four potential landing sites, but Business Insider picked up on nine image requests.

All of the Starship image requests were filed by Nathan R. Williams, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Williams has previously requested dozens of images in support of NASA’s coming Mars 2020 rover mission, which will attempt a landing in Jezero crater. He has also asked for dozens of photos to support SpaceX’s now-defunct Red Dragon mission to Mars.

NASA/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) via Google Earth Pro; Business Insider

“He was bound by a nondisclosure agreement with SpaceX and could not comment,” Zimmerman said after contacting Williams about the Starship image requests. (Neither Williams nor NASA JPL immediately responded to Business Insider’s request for comment.)

In total, two images per site were requested.

In order for a Starship mission to be successful, the ability to refuel on Mars is key.

The company [SpaceX] hopes to make Starship fully reusable – the first such rocket of its kind – to lower launch costs by a factor of 100 or even more than 1,000. Refuelling on Mars is key to making Musk’s scheme work, which is why SpaceX chose methane as its fuel of choice.

By using solar (or perhaps nuclear) energy, Musk says, a process called the Sabatier reaction could turn water and carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere into methane. That fuel, along with oxygen extracted from the water, could be used to refuel Starships for return flights to Earth as well as provide breathable air and drinking water.

Eight of the sites are located on the border of two major regions called “Arcadia Planitia (to the north) and Amazonis Planitia (to the south)”.

NASA/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) via Google Earth Pro; Business Insider

These regions are likely to have large deposits of ice evident in nearby craters which sink when ice is exposed to Martian air.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona; Business Insider

Plans are in place for new rocket ships and launches in the future.

You can read about that here.

In the meantime, there’s no word on how we’re going to hang onto “consciousness” once we’re up there.

Because ya know, aliens.

[source:businessinsider]