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Mars Colonial Transporter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Colonial_Transporter

Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) is the name of the privately funded development project by U.S. company SpaceX to design and build a spaceflight system[1] of reusable rocket engines, launch vehicles and space capsules to transport humans to Mars and return to Earth.

As of 2014, SpaceX has begun development of the large rocket engine for the Mars Colonial Transporter, but the MCT is not projected to be operational until the mid-2020s.

Mars Colonial Transporter has been notionally described as being a large interplanetary spacecraft capable of taking 100 people at a time to Mars,[10] although early flights are expected to carry fewer people and more equipment.[4] The spacecraft has been notionally described as using a large water store to help shield occupants from space radiation and to possibly having a cabin oxygen content that is up to two times that which is found in Earth’s atmosphere.[4]

The Mars colony envisioned by Musk would start small, notionally an initial group of fewer than ten people. With time, Musk sees that such an outpost could grow into something much larger and become self-sustaining, perhaps up to as large as 80,000 people once it is established. Musk has stated that as aspirational price goal for such a trip might be on the order of US$500,000, something that “most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together [to make the trip].”[4]

Before any people are transported to Mars, a number of cargo missions would be undertaken first in order to transport the requisite equipment, habitats and supplies.[11] Equipment that would accompany the early groups would include “machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet’s subsurface water ice” as well as construction materials to build transparent domes for crop growth.[4]

Super-heavy lift launch vehicle

The super-heavy lift launch vehicle for MCT will consist of one or three 10-meter (33 ft)-diameter cores and use nine Raptor LOX/methane engines to power each core.[10][1] The rocket has not yet been named by SpaceX.[12] As of March 2014, no launch site has been selected for the super-heavy lift rocket, but SpaceX has indicated that their leased facility in Florida at Launch Pad 39A is not large enough to accommodate the vehicle, and that a new site would be built in order to launch the 10-meter diameter rocket.[12]

The MCT launch vehicle is intended to be reusable—making use of the SpaceX reusable technology that is currently being developed for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy[1]—and producing approximately 40 or 120 meganewtons (9,000,000 or 27,000,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff.[1][10]