The principle landing zone will be located on the boundary between Arcadia Planitia and Amazonis Planitia. This is a low elevation region with many extinct lava chmabers that colonists can use as protection against the fierce solar radiiation that bleaches the martian surface, The area is west of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, at 14 miles high it is rimmed by a sheer cliff that is the height of Mount Everest.
Arcadia Planitia region is less than 40° latitude for best solar power production, relatively warm temperature, and near a massive sub-surface water ice deposit.
SpaceX Principal Mars Development Engineer Paul Wooster at the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention said: “There are quite significant quantities of water in the mid-latitudes.
“There’s definitely ice up at the poles, but balancing that against power and thermal considerations and general operational aspects we will aim for a location closer to the equator.
“Martian dust and other mobility considerations along with probably just having interesting things to do will affect where we decide to locate the first base.
The establishment of Mars Base Alpha will be enabled with the development of SpaceX’s Starship & Super Heavy, capable to bring large quantity of cargo and passengers to the surface of Mars.
First there will be sent at least two cargo Starships to separate locations to confirm the best site for building the colony.
There were four regions considered by SpaceX for the landing site – Deuteronilus Mensae, Phlegra Montes, Utopia Planitia and southern Arcadia Planitia with the later one being the most promising.
On August 2019 it was found SpaceX is evaluating 5 candidate sites on the border between Amazonis Planitia and Arcadia Planitia.
JUST IN: SpaceX Starhopper: Elon Musk vows Starship will land on ‘rusty Mars’
Musk’s company SpaceX is building a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship duo called the BFR to help our species explore and settle Earth’s moon, Mars and other worlds throughout the solar system.
The billionaire entrepreneur’s long-term vision involves the establishment of a million-person city on the Red Planet in the next 50 to 100 years.
But we could get the founding infrastructure of such a settlement, an outpost Musk calls Mars Base Alpha, up and running much sooner than that, he said.
“Probably 2028 for a base to be built,” Musk said on Twitter, in response to a question about when Mars Base Alpha could graduate from artistic rendering to reality.
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Musk’s timelines are famously aggressive, and a lot would have to go right to hit that 2028 target.
After all, the BFR (which stands for “Big Falcon Rocket”) is still in the development phase.
The first orbital flights of the 100-passenger spaceship and its giant booster probably won’t come until 2020 or 2021 at the earliest.
Elon Musk is designing a round trip moon mission with Japanese billionaire nor Yusaku Maezawa.
Elon Musk said Maezawa has already made a substantial down payment for the round trip to the moon, called Dear Moon, and that his purchase is a big help in defraying the BFR’s development costs.
Those expenses will probably run around $5 billion (£4 billion).
Elon Musk said: “This has done a lot to restore my faith in humanity, that somebody’s willing to do this, to take their money and help fund this new program that’s risky, might not succeed and is dangerous,”
He added: “He is ultimately helping to pay for the average citizen to be able to travel to other planets. It’s a great thing.”
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