Image copyright SpaceX Image caption The Raptor engine was fired at SpaceX's test facility in McGregor, Texas

Private firm SpaceX has carried out its first test of the Raptor rocket engine, designed to send humans to Mars.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced that the engine had been fired at the company's facility in McGregor, Texas.

If his vision is realised, it could power a super-heavy launch vehicle that would transport people to the Red Planet in coming decades.

But sending astronauts on round trips to our neighbour remains a formidable challenge.

Beyond the astronomical cost, there are the technical hurdles - currently unsolved - of protecting humans from the radiation levels they would be exposed to, once in deep space.

Mr Musk is set to outline his vision for a programme to colonise Mars at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday.

His announcement is being watched closely because SpaceX has already made several landmark achievements for a private space company, including successful upright landings of orbital rocket stages.

In an earlier series of tweets, Mr Musk pointed out the "Mach diamonds" in a picture of the engine test.

This is the name given to a type of wave pattern that appears in the supersonic exhaust plume of a rocket engine or jet engine.

When the Raptor was first announced in 2012, SpaceX said it would be several times more powerful than the Merlin 1 family of engines designed to power the company's Falcon launch vehicles.

And, unlike the Merlin engines, which use a combination of refined kerosene and liquid oxygen as fuel, the Raptor will be powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

Raptor engines could eventually lift SpaceX's Mars Colonial Transport (MCT) towards the Red Planet.

For Mr Musk, Tuesday's speech should offer welcome respite from dealing with the fall-out of the company's launch pad explosion in September, which destroyed one of the company's Falcon 9 launchers and its payload - an Israeli-built communications satellite for Facebook.</s>For most of its 14 year existence, SpaceX has focused on designing and developing the hardware that will lead to its ultimate goal: colonizing Mars. These plans have remained largely secret from the general public, as company founder Elon Musk has dropped only the barest of hints. But that is expected to change on Sept. 27, during a session at the International Astronautical Congress, when Musk details some of these plans for the first time in a public forum.

However, on the eve of the meeting, Musk dropped a surprise on Twitter. The workhorse spacecraft that will carry approximately 100 tons of cargo or 100 people to the surface of Mars, which until now has been popularly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, can't be called that, Musk said. "Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name..." he tweeted on Friday evening. By Saturday evening he had a new name dubbing the spacecraft the "Interplanetary Transport System," or ITS.

Mars, it turns out, isn't the solar system's only marginally habitable world for would-be new world colonists. The Moon, Venus, the asteroid Ceres, and outer Solar System moons Titan and Callisto all have some advantages that could allow for colonies to subsist. However, Mars has generally been the preferred destination—due to its relative proximity to Earth, a thin atmosphere, and sources of water ice. Musk now seems to be suggesting that some of these more distant destinations, especially moons around Jupiter and Saturn, might be reachable with the Interplanetary Transport System.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Musk's musings on Twitter is the signal that he does not intend to pull back from his grand vision of humanity becoming a multi-planetary species, even for a short time. Rather than pausing after the loss of a Falcon 9 rocket and its payload during the run-up to a static fire test on September 1, and focusing on mastering access to low-Earth orbit, Musk appears to be pushing full steam ahead into deep space.

It is not clear the extent to which Musk will detail his Interplanetary Transport System, or the booster that will launch it (the BFR—figure that acronym out for yourself), during the international meeting in Mexico next week. However, he is sure to have the considerable legion of SpaceX fans hanging on his every word while much of the rest of the aerospace community wonders how seriously to take the mercurial Musk. Yes, he has upended the global launch business with his sleek, low-cost rockets. But the company's credibility is also on the line after two losses of a Falcon 9 booster in just more than a year. Regardless, it will be a fascinating show, watched by all with even a remote interest in spaceflight.</s>SpaceX has successfully tested a new rocket engine it plans to use to take people to Mars within the next 10 years. 

CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the successful first firing of the Raptor engine, and included two photos of it.

The test was conducted Sunday at the company's testing facility in McGregor, Texas, according to a SpaceX spokesman.

SpaceX isn't the only outfit testing rocket engines with an eye on Mars missions. In June, NASA test fired its Space Launch System booster rocket, which it expects to use on its own Mars missions.

Musk started SpaceX with the ultimate goal of transporting humans to Mars, and has spoken about his own dreams of living on the planet and even dying there -- "just not on impact."

He has said he expects SpaceX to make an unmanned mission to Mars by 2018, using existing technology. He plans to use the Raptor engine for a manned Mars mission by 2025.

SpaceX has yet to carry humans into outer space, but it has won a contract from NASA to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as next year.

SpaceX suffered a setback earlier this month when one of its rockets exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. The cause has yet to be determined, although Musk has said safety features on SpaceX's Dragon capsule would have kept astronauts safe, had they been aboard.

Related: Musk says SpaceX could take humans to Mars in 9 years

SpaceX has not said when it will resume flights. A source familiar with the company's plans told CNNMoney last week that it expects to return to space by November, much faster than other companies or space agencies have resumed flights after an explosion.

Musk promised to provide a sneak peak on Tuesday of the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which is the rocket that he expects to send to Mars using the Raptor engine. That's when he's slated to deliver the keynote address at the prestigious International Astronautical Congress, discussing his plans to colonize Mars.</s>GUADALAJARA, Mexico—SpaceX is developing an interplanetary rocket and capsule to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars with the ultimate goal of colonizing the planet, company chief and tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday, Sept. 27.

Musk outlined his plans for a massive Mars rocket, capable of carrying 100 passengers plus cargo per voyage, even as SpaceX is still investigating why a different rocket carrying a $200 million Israeli satellite blew up on a launch pad in Florida earlier this month.

Though he said he envisions humans living in a large colony on Mars, he added that the key will be getting the cost down low enough to attract willing volunteers.

"You can't create a self sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person," he said.

"Our goal is to get it roughly equivalent to cost of a medium house in the United States, about $200,000."

SpaceX, which Musk founded specifically with the purpose of colonizing Mars, is one of several private and government funded ventures vying to put people and cargo on the red planet and other destinations beyond Earth's orbit.

The nearly airless planet is typically around 140 million miles from Earth and landing the first humans there, after a six to nine month journey, is an extremely ambitious goal for anyone.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space venture is designing a heavy-lift vehicle and capsule called New Armstrong, that will be capable of Mars transport, according to company President Rob Meyerson. He spoke during a separate presentation at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, which Musk addressed on Tuesday.

The U.S. government is also stepping up efforts to venture beyond the moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, expected to cost $7 billion through its first test flight, is currently slated for launch in 2018. The U.S. space agency also is developing an Orion deep-space capsule, at a cost of more than $11 billion.

Between 2005 and 2010, NASA spent another $5.8 billion on an earlier version of Orion.

Russia plans a heavy-lift rocket and crewed spaceship for travel to the moon and other destinations, Vladimir Sointsev, director of Russia's RSC Energia, said at the conference on Monday. The capsule, called the Federation Crew Transportation Vehicle, is targeted for an unmanned test flight to the International Space Station in 2021.

Musk did not say how much it would cost SpaceX to develop its Mars transportation system.

SpaceX intends to fly to Mars about every 26 months when Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for flight. Musk said he would like to land people on Mars as early as 2024. NASA's first human mission to Mars is expected about a decade later.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said on Monday it likely will continue its Space Launch System rocket program even if commercial interplanetary transportation systems are available.

NASA is supporting SpaceX's first mission to Mars, which is targeted for launch in 2018. SpaceX wants to send an unmanned capsule, called Red Dragon, to the surface of Mars to test descent, entry and landing systems.

"Ultimately this is going to be a huge public-private partnership," Musk said.

NASA will be providing deep-space and Mars communications relays for SpaceX and consulting services in exchange for flight data. NASA wants to be able to land payloads weighing up to about 30 tons on Mars. So far, the heaviest vehicle to land on Mars was the one-ton Curiosity Rover.</s>The first time Nasa tried to launch a satellite into orbit, in December 1957, the rocket made it 4ft off the ground before crumpling into a blossom of smoke and fire. America’s ambitions to catch up to Russia’s success with Sputnik would have to wait.

Almost 60 years later, private spaceflight company SpaceX is feeling similarly explosive growing pains. From the same launch center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, a reusable Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad on Thursday morning in a blast that could be felt miles away and that destroyed a satellite meant to expand internet access.

The company’s founder and CEO, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has said that the rocket exploded “during propellant fill operation” and that the blast “originated around upper stage oxygen tank”.

Musk has stayed stoical about the company’s accidents, and SpaceX itself only gave an engineer’s euphemism for the explosion in its first statement, describing the blast as “an anomaly on the pad”.

The history of spaceflight is littered with explosions, accidents and disasters: SpaceX has had its share but has avoided tragedy or injury. Nasa has contracted the company to help take supplies to the International Space Station, and together the organizations hope to bring manned launches back to American launch pads in 2017. SpaceX’s year of success and failure has cast that schedule into doubt.

SpaceX has had more success than failure in the 14 years since it was founded, when Musk set out with about 30 employees to revolutionize spaceflight with reusable rockets – the kind that can save small fortunes in fuel and technology with every landing.

In December 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to send a spacecraft into low-Earth orbit and back, and a year and a half later it became the first to dock at the International Space Station. That same year it first resupplied the station, and by 2014 it won a $2.6bn Nasa contract alongside Boeing to take US astronauts into space.

On 21 December 2015, the company managed its first landing of a reusable rocket – just under a month after a rival spaceflight company, headed by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, achieved a similar landing with a smaller vehicle. Then on 8 April 2016, after four failures during the past year, the company landed a reusable rocket on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic ocean, the first ever landing at sea.

In the next eight months the company repeated the feat six times in all, four at sea and twice on land. Since 2012 it has had 18 successful payload deliveries.

Those accomplishments have not come without repeated failures, the most spectacular of which occurred during attempts to land their Falcon 9 rockets, named after Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon. After proving the rockets could lift supplies to astronauts in orbit, SpaceX began testing their abilities to land on a robotic drone ship out at sea – unmanned for safety, and mobile to meet the rocket, if a little unsteady. Musk has described the feat as “like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm”.

On 10 January 2015, the first landing attempt by a rocket “landed hard”, in Musk’s words, crashing onto the ship after it ran out of hydraulic fuel to fire engines that slowed its descent. On 14 April, another landing failed after the rocket’s landing legs struck the barge “too hard for survival” – the rocket tipped over and careered off to the side.

On 28 June, the company’s string of failures continued, when a rocket disintegrated shortly after liftoff and destroyed its cargo of supplies meant for the ISS. The blast was blamed on a faulty strut, supposed to hold a tank of intensely pressurized helium, that Musk said appeared “to be incorrectly made but with no visible way of determining that from the outside”.

On 17 January 2016, Musk and his engineers were back to struggling with the barge. Fighting through rough weather, a Falcon 9 rocket landed at the right speed but one of its legs failed to latch on the platform. The rocket keeled over and exploded, with Musk commenting: “Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating [and] rotating.”

In March they saw another failed landing, but Musk was unfazed by the difficult conditions of attempted landings, tweeting: “Didn’t expect this one to work (v hot reentry), but next flight has a good chance.”

Musk has handled SpaceX’s crashes stoically, reasoning that progress requires failures – science is messy. Nasa, for instance, has had contractors mix up metric measurements, lost a lander somewhere on Mars, and its Kepler spacecraft jerry-rigged into a planet hunter sailing on pressure from radiation off the sun. In recent years, Russia’s space agency has lost control of a cargo ship, and had repeated malfunctions and engine failures.

Like Nasa, Musk remains ambitious. Earlier this year he announced that SpaceX intends to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2018, to investigate the demands of a later crewed mission. The company has also won a contract to launch one of its used rockets with a payload; Thursday’s launch involved a new rocket.



Nasa’s inspector general doused cold water on some of those aspirations in an audit released Thursday. The mission to take astronauts into space from US launchpads “continues to face multiple challenges that will likely delay the first routine flight”, the office said in its report. The US will continue relying on foreign agencies, such as Russia’s Roscosmos, to launch astronauts “until late 2018 – more than 3 years after NASA’s original 2015 goal”, the auditors added.</s>SpaceX CEO: Are you OK with dying? You can go to Mars</s>Elon Musk said Tuesday that a self-sustaining colony of people could be living on Mars within 50 to 150 years.

The SpaceX CEO laid out his plan to colonize the Red Planet at the International Astronautical Congress, a meeting of multiple international space exploration associations in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Musk has long said he wants to make humans an "interplanetary species," and on Tuesday he addressed many of the technical, safety and cost challenges he'll face.

His goal is to bring the price of a ticket to Mars down to around $200,000 per person -- about the median price of a house in the U.S. Compare that to $10 billion, which is what Musk said it would cost to go to Mars using current technology.

He explained that a few crucial technical advancements must be made to make that price point possible, including making rockets that are reliably reusable.

SpaceX has already been heavily focused on that. The company has successfully landed six rockets that completed missions to orbit, and it intends to send one of those "used" rockets back into orbit later this year.

Related: SpaceX plans return to space by November, 3 months after blast

On the technical front, Musk has already introduced the world to the Raptor rocket engine he plans to use to take people to Mars, which is different that the engines used for the Falcon rockets that SpaceX has already sent on missions. The Raptor uses a different fuel and is far more powerful. The company completed a successful test fire of a Raptor rocket on Monday.

Musk said a spacecraft headed to Mars would need to use 42 Raptor engines at once

"You could lose multiple engines," he said Tuesday, "and continue the mission safely."

The initial goal is to pair the enormous rocket with a spaceship capable of carrying about 100 people (plus their luggage.)

Related: SpaceX successfully tests Raptor engine it plans to send to Mars

He admits "not too many people" will want to head to Mars at first. But on the bright side, he says there will be plenty of jobs.

"Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time," he added.

Once people are on Mars, Musk said they'll be able to grow crops in contained buildings with compressed atmosphere. They'll also have the resources they need to make more rocket fuel -- allowing them to send spaceships back to Earth.

About an hour before Musk took the stage to unveil his master Mars plan, a video depicting an artificial rendering of SpaceX's "Interplanetary Transport System" was posted to YouTube.

Musk has already said he wants to make the first unmanned trip to Mars before 2018. Next, he wants to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, with the spacecraft touching down in 2025.

Related: Elon Musk says astronauts would have been safe in the blast

And since Mars and Earth only line up enough to execute a launch once every 26 months, he said it'll take about 40 to 100 years to make all the trips required to get a sustainable colony of people up and running.

Of course, Musk is known for being overly optimistic with his deadlines, and admitted as much on Tuesday. "Timelines," he said, "I'm not the best at this sort of thing."</s>CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — On a personal quest to settle Mars, SpaceX founder Elon Musk envisions 1,000 passenger ships flying en masse to the red planet well within the next century, “Battlestar Galactica” style.

Musk outlined his zealous plan Tuesday to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, complete with iron foundries and even pizzerias. He wants to make humans a multiplanetary species, and says the best way to do that is to colonize the red planet.

“I think Earth will be a good place for a long time, but the probable lifespan of human civilization will be much greater if we’re a multiplanetary species,” he said.

Musk, who also runs electric car maker Tesla Motors, received a wildly warm reception at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. Many in the crowd were avid space buffs.

For now, the aerospace company he founded in 2002 is focusing on satellite deliveries, as well as space station cargo runs for NASA and a future crew capsule for U.S. astronauts. Its Falcon rocket, though, is grounded for the second time in a year because of devastating accidents.

During his address, Musk did not mention the Sept. 1 launch pad explosion that destroyed a Falcon rocket and its satellite.

Instead, he noted that SpaceX already has begun work on the Mars Colonial fleet, recently test-firing a powerful new rocket engine named Raptor. The system ultimately could take people to the moons of Jupiter and beyond, he said.

Musk said it would be a “super-exciting” adventure to Mars but also dangerous, at least for the first few trips. His goal is to get the price down so anyone could afford to go, with a ticket costing no more than a house on Earth. He’s shooting for 1 million Martians.

Would he go, someone asked? Perhaps ultimately, but it would depend on whether he had a good succession plan in place. As for being the first Martian, the risk of fatalities will be high — “there’s just no way around it” — and he wants to see his five young sons grow up.

“It would be basically, are you prepared to die? If that’s OK, then you’re a candidate for going,” he told the audience.

In April, Musk announced plans to send an unmanned Dragon capsule to land on Mars as early as 2018. NASA is offering technical support, but no money. The space agency has its own program to get astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, using its own hardware.

Musk invited industry to join the Mars effort, which will represent a $10 billion investment. SpaceX currently is spending a few tens of millions of dollars on the enterprise, and the amount will soon grow, he said.

Musk described in detail his plans to launch a monster-size rocket — larger than even NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket — from the same launch pad at Kennedy Space Center from which the Apollo astronauts departed for the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The first-stage boosters would return to land vertically — just like his Falcon rocket boosters do now. Reusability, in fact, is essential to any plan for getting humans to Mars, as is refilling fuel tanks in Earth orbit and creating rocket fuel at Mars for return trips, he said.

The rocket would hoist a spaceship big enough to carry 100 to 200 people to Mars, a trip lasting several months, quicker with nuclear propulsion. Musk promised no one would be stuck there; spaceships would return regularly, and “you get a free return trip if you want.”

“Ultimately what I’m trying to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something that we can do in our lifetimes,” he said.</s>SpaceX, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, was fueling a Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad in Florida on Sept. 1 in preparation for a routine test-firing when a bright fireball suddenly emerged around the rocket's upper stage.

"At this stage of the investigation, preliminary review of the data and debris suggests that a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place," SpaceX said in a statement posted on its website.

SpaceX spokesman Dex Torricke-Barton declined to speculate on what triggered the breach of the helium system, saying the company was still investigating a range of possible causes.

No one was hurt in the explosion, which could be heard 30 miles (48 km) away from SpaceX's launch pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The cause of the accident is under investigation.

SpaceX said it had learned enough to conclude that whatever triggered the fireball was not related to a June 2015 accident that occurred about two minutes after liftoff. That accident destroyed a load of cargo heading for the International Space Station.

The company traced that problem to a faulty bracket that was holding a bottle of helium in the oxygen tank of the rocket’s upper stage. SpaceX replaced thousands of brackets throughout its fleet and resumed flying six months later.

"We have exonerated any connection with last year's … mishap," SpaceX said in Friday's statement.

The Sept. 1 launch pad fire damaged "substantial areas" of SpaceX's primary launch site but key areas were unaffected. The company did not provide an estimate of what repairing the damage would cost, nor how long it would be out of service.

Pad 40 would be repaired, Torricke-Barton said, adding it was too early to say when it would be completed.

The California-based firm said it would shift some missions to a new launch site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, adjacent to the Air Force base. SpaceX also operates a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which it uses for high-inclination and polar-orbiting missions.

The company is aiming to resume flights in November.

SpaceX has more than 70 missions on its manifest, worth more than $10 billion, for commercial and government customers.</s>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck a bitter tone in his response to the explosion of the SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite intended for use on his Internet.org project in Africa.

Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”

The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early on Thursday morning – referred to as an “anomaly” by SpaceX engineers – destroyed both the rocket and its cargo: the AMOS-6 satellite, which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa.

“Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well,” Zuckerberg added. “We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided.”

Contrary to Zuckerberg’s description, the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Eutelsat, a French satellite company, to lease the broadband capability of the AMOS-6, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom.

According to Space News, which reviewed Spacecom filings with the Tel Aviv stock exchange, the joint lease cost $95m over five years and included a provision requiring Spacecom to purchase an insurance policy specifically covering Facebook and Eutelsat’s risks, in addition to its own insurance. Space News also reported that both Facebook and Eutelsat would each have additional insurance policies for the satellite.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a query about its own insurance policies.

The tone of Zuckerberg’s response to the explosion was immediately interpreted by many as a sign of a grudge against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

The two billionaires cut markedly different swathes through Silicon Valley. In recent years, Zuckerberg has appeared intent on projecting an image of a philanthropist concerned with connecting the earth’s citizens.

Musk is better known for his eccentric pronouncements and preoccupation with technological moonshots.

The loss of the satellite is just the latest setback for Zuckerberg’s Internet.org, which aims to expand internet access across the globe. The program has long courted controversy by communities who view the free services on offer as a possible Trojan horse for Facebook’s business interests.

In February, India’s telecom authority banned Facebook’s Free Basics – a service that provided free mobile internet access to select web services – because it violated net neutrality. Board member Marc Andreessen subsequently embarrassed the company in a series of tweets that appeared to suggest he believed India was better off under British colonial rule.
SpaceX successfully tests its most powerful rocket to date. The company's goal will be to use the Raptor (rocket engine) to power their "super-heavy" Interplanetary Transport System in facilitation of the colonization of Mars and beyond.