"...hopefully..."
"Mars, where hopefully colonists can manufacture fuel on the surface to get back home."
They'll probably crash into a truck halfway there.
Elon Musk has released the first pictures of the Raptor rocket engine, which he hopes will deliver a colony to Mars. SpaceX propulsion just achieved first firing of the Raptor interplanetary transport engine pic.twitter.com/vRleyJvBkx — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2016 The Raptor rocket uses liquid methane as fuel, …
Nice engine, but interplanetary it ain't. OK, may be just Mars and Venus and even those for a very short amount of time.
At this rate of development I would expect either USA or Russia to put a system with a working VASIMR (or other advanced plasma/ion) engine at the time when Musk launches this dinosaur into orbit or shortly thereafter. That is the point when the mighty chemical rocket becomes obsolete for anything but Earth to Orbit delivery.
It definitely looks very interesting for next generation Earth to Orbit though (especially as a replacement for those nasty hypergolic 2nd stages).
VASMIR (and other ion engines) have one critical design flaw: they need power. Lots and lots and lots of power. Solar ain't gonna get you there, so that means fission. Fission means fissionable materials. Fissionables can be used in two forms:
1) RTGs, which we can't do because we don't have any more plutonium, and hand-wringing is preventing us from making more.
2) Fission reactors, which we can't do because OMG RADIOACTIVE SPACE NUKES ARE GOING TO KILL THE CHILDREN.
Good luck with those ion engines. They're no match for the mighty NIMBY.