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Here's what we know about the biggest space rocket ever conceived

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Flickr/SpaceX

SpaceX pulled off the world's first orbital rocket landing just before the New Year, but there's one promise the company made in 2015 but didn't deliver.

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One year ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teased the plans for a monstrous rocket-and-spacecraft system that might fly 100 people to Mars at a time.

Called the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT), Musk said he would release the preliminary designs by the end of 2015.

Now he says we'll have to wait for the designs to come out sometime in 2016.

However, Musk's silence hasn't stopped a dedicated community of SpaceX fans, including engineers, from speculating on how this potentially revolutionary space rig might look and function.

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Getting 100 people and 100 tons to Mars

Details were sparse in January 2015, when Musk first teased the idea of the MCT in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) chat.

We know it'll be some kind of massive spaceship propelled by a massive rocket. And with 100 people on board and enough rocket fuel to get to Mars, the MCT is going to be big and it's going to be heavy.

"Goal is 100 metric tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars," Musk wrote.

One metric ton is roughly 2,205 pounds (or about the weight of an elephant). That means the rocket that powers the MCT will have to be able to carry at least 220,500 pounds — 100 elephant's worth of mass (or, if you prefer, about nine Hubble Space Telescopes). And that's not including the fuel required to leave Earth's grasp.

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We know that's already possible, though. NASA's giant Saturn V rocket lifted about 260,000 pounds of payload back during the Apollo missions.

However, there's an important difference between the two rockets. The Saturn V moon rocket only had to get its payload 239,000 miles to the moon. The MCT has to get everything 140 million miles to Mars.

"This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system," Musk wrote.

Musk nicknamed the booster the "BFR," short for "Big F***ing Rocket," and it's rumored that SpaceX is working on a completely new type of methane-fueled engine to power it.

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Rocket speculation

The delay in any concrete plans has inspired deep speculation on Reddit.

Self-described engineer John Gardi even crunched all of the numbers to make a conceptual sketch of the MCT, which he estimates is 200 feet tall and 50 feet wide, and what its various sections might look like.

The passengers would sit in a section near the top. The capsule is structured into several levels, a lander, and escape systems. Below that is a crew and cargo section.

Then, below the crewed section is the upper stage of the BFR itself (the first stage isn't shown). This part of the sketch depicts a fuel tank (for methane), an oxygen tank (to burn the fuel), and a mount for the engines (which aren't depicted):

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mct concept sketch john gardi justatinker
John Gardi

"I put that out there on a whim, but did take a week to work out the rough design with a bit of help," Gardi told Tech Insider via Twitter. "My primary focus was on passenger safety and modularity, being able to repurpose the various components of MCT at Mars."

Gardi also sent us this rough image, which shows how all of the sections of the lander look when separated into pieces:

mct concept mars sketch john gardi justatinker
John Gardi

While Gardi and others imagine what MCT might look like, based on the few limited details and rumors out there, there are still no specifics on how Musk will safely land 100 metric tons and 100 passengers on Mars.

The biggest problem is Mars' thin atmosphere.

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There's so little air on Mars — the planet has about 1% of Earth's atmopsheric pressure on the surface — that landing even half of a ton is a years-long engineering challenge. (Without air to slow down a spacecraft, rockets or some other technology has to get the job done.) Landing 200 times as much mass will be that much trickier of a feat.

So as much as we enjoy imagining SpaceX's next engineering marvel, we're really looking forward to seeing the official preliminary designs for the MCT. We can only hope Musk or others at SpaceX will unveil them later this year.

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