Elon Musk Fuels Speculation With Cryptic Clue About New Vehicle

A Mystery Machine

When its founder and CEO, Elon Musk, confirmed that SpaceX is abandoning the plan to use a powered Dragon landings for Mars, it didn't come as a surprise. Musk had previously announced that the initial ideas for SpaceX's Mars mission had been reviewed and changes were coming.

The original plan included testing a Dragon 2 capsule for surface landings on Mars, supposedly by 2020. Last week, Musk announced during the International Space Station Research and Development Conference that SpaceX has scrapped the design that put landing legs on the Dragon 2 capsule. However, this didn't mean that SpaceX would no longer do power landings on Mars.

"[The] plan is to do powered landings on Mars for sure, but with a vastly bigger ship," Musk said on a tweet. Currently, SpaceX's space capsules are capable of splashdown landings, but surface landings are more ideal for missions to Mars.

Throwing a bone to SpaceX redditors, Musk revealed yet another detail.

The cryptic post has been making a buzz on the SpaceX Reddit, and some have offered their interpretations as to what this nine-meter (30-foot) diameter machine could be. One possibility is that it could be the Boring Company's tunneling machine, as the current standard tunnel diameter is roughly 8.53 meters (28 ft).

However, it's highly unlikely that Musk was referring to a tunneling machine. Keep in mind that the Boring Company's plan is to reduce the standard tunnel diameter in half or "less than 14 feet," as it says in its website. "Reducing the diameter in half reduces tunneling costs by 3-4 times."

A Surprise for September

So, if not a tunneling machine, what else could it be? A more interesting suggestion is that SpaceX may be building a smaller version of its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Musk has said that they plan on keeping the costs of making and maintaining rockets reasonable — or, at the very least, at par with the $200,000 per person cost of getting on a flight to the Red Planet. Could a mini-ITS be that solution?

"[Nine] meters is 3/4 of the size of the 12 meter full sized ITS," one redditor commented. "There also happened to be 4 layers of engines in the original ITS design. I would guess that this is basically an ITS with the outer layer of 21 engines removed. A 50 percent scale vehicle. Still the most powerful rocket in history, and [roughly] 50 percent more powerful than [the Space Launch System]."

Whether Musk is building a smaller ITS, the Boring Company's tunneling machine, or something else entirely, we won't know for sure until he reveals what this really is all about. We need not wait that long, though, as Musk said that all will be revealed at this year's International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in September.

The serial entrepreneur is scheduled to speak on the final day (Sept. 29) of this event to be held in Adelaide, Australia. It was during the IAC back in 2016 that Musk first unveiled SpaceX's plans to make humanity into a multi-planetary species.