IAC 2016 — Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species
Transcript
0:00Elon MuskI am Jean Rib Le Galle. I am president of cnes, the French space agency and president elect of the International Astronautical Federation. And it is my pleasure to welcome you here at the 67th International Astronautical Congress.
0:18Elon MuskElon Musk is founder, CEO and lead designer of SpaceX. Elon founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing space technology and ultimately enabling humans to become a multi planetary species.
0:35Elon MuskAnd that the plan is going to lay out for us today. SpaceX has had a number of firsts, including as the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station and the first entity to land an orbital class booster back on land and on ships out at sea.
0:55Elon MuskPlease join me in welcoming Elon Musk.
1:16Elon MuskThank you very much for having me. Look forward to talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture. And what I really want to try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go.
1:34Elon MuskAnd is there really a way that anyone could go if they wanted to? I think that's really the important thing. So I mean first of all, why go anywhere, right?
1:48Elon MuskThe. I think there are really two fundamental paths history is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event.
2:03Elon MuskI don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space faring civilization and a multi planet species, which I hope you would agree that is the right way to go.
2:21Elon MuskYes,
2:29Elon MuskThat's what we want. Yeah.
2:39Elon MuskSo how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self sustaining city? A city that is not merely an outpost, but could become a planet in its own right.
2:53Elon MuskAnd thus we could become a truly multi planet species. Sometimes people wonder, well, what about other places in the solar system? Why Mars? Well, just to sort of put things into perspective, this is, this is an actual scale of what the solar system looks like.
3:14Elon MuskSo we're currently in the third little rock from the left, that's Earth. Yeah, exactly. And our goal is to go to the fourth rock on the left, that's Mars.
3:29Elon MuskBut you can get a sense for the real scale of the solar system, how big the sun is and Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus, and then the little guys on the right are Pluto and friends.
3:45Elon MuskThis sort of helps see it not quite to scale, but it gives you a better sense for where things are. So our options for going to, for becoming a multi planet species within our solar system are limited.
4:00Elon MuskWe have in terms of nearby options. We've got Venus, but Venus is high pressure, super high pressure hot acid bath. So that would be a tricky one. Venus is not at all like the goddess.
4:18Elon MuskThis is not in no way similar to the actual goddess. So really difficult to make things work on Venus. Mercury is also way too close to the sun. We could go potentially on the Mars, one of the, on one of the moons, Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out, much further from the sun, a lot harder to get to.
4:40Elon MuskIt really leaves us with one option. If we want to become a multi planet civilization and that's Mars, we could conceivably go to our moon. And I certainly have nothing against going to the moon, but I think it's challenging to create a become multi planetary on the moon because it's much smaller than a planet, it doesn't have any atmosphere, it's not as resource rich as Mars.
5:06Elon MuskIt's got a 28 day day, whereas the Mars day is 24 and a half hours. And in general Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to be a self sustaining civilization.
5:20Elon MuskJust to give some comparison between the two planets that they're actually remarkably close in a lot of ways. In fact, we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth.
5:37Elon MuskAnd in fact if we could warm Mars up we would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. So but where things are right now, Mars is about half again as far from the sun as Earth.
5:52Elon MuskSo still decent sunlight. It's a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere which in the case of Mars being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.
6:15Elon MuskAnd, and it has nitrogen too, which is also very important for growing plants. It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you'd have gravity which is about 37% that of Earth.
6:29Elon MuskSo you'd be able to lift heavy things and bound around and have a lot of fun. And the day is remarkably close to that of Earth. So we just need to change that bottom row because currently we have 7 billion people on Earth and zero on Mars.
6:51Elon MuskSo there's been a lot of great work by NASA and other organizations in early exploration of Mars and understanding what Mars is like. Where could we land? What's the composition of the atmosphere?
7:06Elon MuskWhere is there water? Water ice I should say. And so we need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city. The issue that we have today is that if you look at a Venn diagram, there's no intersection of sets of people who want to go and can afford to go.
7:32Elon MuskIn fact, right now you cannot go to Mars for infinite money.
7:38Elon MuskUsing traditional methods. You know, if taking sort of Apollo style approach, an optimistic cost number would be about $10 billion a person. So for example, the Apollo program, the cost estimates are somewhere between 100 to 200 billion dollars in current year dollars.
7:59Elon MuskAnd we sent 12 people to the surface of the moon, which was an incredible thing and I think probably one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But that is a steep price to pay for a ticket.
8:14Elon MuskThat's why these circles only just barely touch. So you can't create a self sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion a person. What we need is a closer is to move those circles together.
8:29Elon MuskAnd if we get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to a median house price in the US which is around $200,000, then I think the probability of establishing a self sustaining civilization is very high.
8:45Elon MuskI think it would almost certainly occur. Not everyone would want to go. In fact, I think a relatively small number of people from Earth would want to go. But enough would want to go and who could afford the trip that it would happen.
8:58Elon MuskPeople could get sponsorship. And I think it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved up and this was their goal, they could ultimately save up enough money to buy a ticket and move to Mars.
9:12Elon MuskAnd Mars would have labor shortage for a long time. So a jobs would not be in short supply. So it is a bit tricky because we have to figure out how to improve the cost of trips to Mars by 5 million percent.
9:29Elon MuskSo this is not easy. I mean, it sounds like virtually impossible, but I think there are ways to do it. This translates to an improvement of approximately four and a half orders of magnitude.
9:46Elon MuskThese are the key elements that are needed in order to achieve the 4.5 order of magnitude improvement. Most of the improvement would come from full reusability, somewhere between two and two and a half orders of magnitude.
10:00Elon MuskAnd then the other two orders of magnitude would come from refilling in orbit, propellant production on Mars and choosing the right propellant. So I'm going to go into detail on all those.
10:12Elon MuskFull reusability is really the super hard one. It's very difficult to achieve reusability for even an orbital system. And that challenge becomes even substantially greater for a system that has to go to Another planet.
10:33Elon MuskBut as an example of the difference between reusability and expandability in aircraft and this, you could actually use any form of transport. You could say a car, bicycle, horse.
10:45Elon MuskIf they were single use, almost no one would use them. It would be too expensive. But with frequent flights, you can take something like an aircraft that costs $90 million.
10:56Elon MuskAnd if it was single use, you'd have to pay half a million dollars per flight. But you can actually buy a ticket on Southwest right now from LA to Vegas for $43, including taxes.
11:10Elon MuskSo that's, I mean, that's a massive improvement right there. It's showing a forward order of magnitude improvement. Now this is harder. The reusability doesn't apply quite as much to Mars because the number of times they can reuse the spaceship is the spaceship part of the system is less often because the Earth Mars rendezvous only occurs every, every 26 months.
11:33Elon MuskSo you get to use the spaceship part roughly every two years. Now you get to use the booster and the tanker as frequently as you'd like. And so it makes, that's why it really makes a lot of sense to load the spaceship into orbit with essentially tanks dry and have it have really quite big tanks that you then use the booster and tanker to refill while it's in orbit and maximize the payload of the spaceship so that when it goes to Mars, you really have a very large payload capability.
12:11Elon MuskSo as I said, refilling in orbit is one of the essential elements of this. Without refilling in orbit, you would have a half order of magnitude impact roughly on, on the cost by half order of magnitude.
12:27Elon MuskI think audience mostly knows, but what that means is each order of magnitude is a factor of 10. So not, not refilling in orbit would mean a 500% roughly increase in the cost per ticket.
12:42Elon MuskIt also allows us to build a smaller vehicle and lower the development cost. Although this vehicle is quite big. But it would be much harder to build something that's five to ten times the size.
12:55Elon MuskAnd it also reduces the sensitivity of performance characteristics of the booster rocket and tanker. So if there's a shortfall in the performance of any of the elements, you can actually make up for it by having one or two extra refilling trips to the spaceship.
13:16Elon MuskSo this is very important for reducing the susceptibility of the system to a performance shortfall.
13:25Elon MuskAnd then producing propellants on Mars is actually also very obviously important. Again, if we didn't do this, it would have at least a half order of magnitude increase in the cost of a trip.
13:38Elon MuskSo 500% increase in the cost of the trip. And it would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just kept staying on Mars and not going back to Earth.
13:51Elon MuskYou have this massive graveyard of ships, you have to do something with them. So it really wouldn't make sense to leave your spaceships on Mars. You really want to build a propellant plant on Mars and send the ships back.
14:08Elon MuskSo, and Mars happens to work out well for that because it has a CO2 atmosphere, it's got water ice in the soil. And with H2O and CO2 you can produce CH4, methane and oxygen, O2.
14:24Elon MuskSo picking the right propellant is also important. So think of this as maybe there's three main choices and they have their merits, but kerosene or rocket propellant grade kerosene, which is also what jets use.
14:40Elon MuskRockets use a very expensive form, a highly refined form of jet fuel essentially, which is a form of kerosene. It helps keep the vehicle size small, but because it's a very specialized form of jet fuel, it's quite expensive.
14:56Elon MuskThe reasonability cash flow is lower. Very difficult to make this on Mars because there's no oil. So really quite difficult to make the propellants on Mars. And then propellant transport is pretty good, but not great.
15:15Elon MuskHydrogen, although it has a high specific impulse, is very expensive. Incredibly difficult to keep from boiling off because liquid hydrogen is very close to absolute zero as a liquid.
15:30Elon MuskSo the insulation required is tremendous. And the cost of the energy cost on Mars of producing and storing hydrogen is very high. So when we looked at the overall system optimization, it was clear to us that methane actually was the clear winner.
15:52Elon MuskSo it would require maybe anywhere from 50 to 60% of the energy on Mars to refill propellants using the propellant depot. And just the technical challenges are a lot easier.
16:07Elon MuskSo we think methane's actually better on just really almost across the board. And we started off initially thinking that hydrogen would make sense, but also ultimately came to the conclusion that the best way to optimize the cost per unit mass to Mars and back is to use an all methane system or technically deep cryo methodics.
16:31Elon MuskSo those are the four elements that need to be achieved. So whatever system is designed, whether by SpaceX or anyone, we think these are the four features that need to be addressed in order for the system to really achieve a low cost per cost per ton to the surface of Mars.
16:57Elon MuskAnd this is a simulation of the overall system.
17:15Elon MuskSam it,
18:12Elon MuskSam it's.
21:33Elon MuskSo what you saw There is really quite close to what we will actually build. It will look almost exactly like what you saw. So this is not an artist impression.
21:45Elon MuskThe simulation was actually made from the SpaceX engineering CAD models. So this is not, you know, it's not just, well, this is what it might look like, this is what we plan to try to make it look like.
22:01Elon MuskSo in the video you got a sense for what the system architecture looks like. The rocket booster and the spaceship take off, loads the spaceship into orbit, the rocket booster then comes back.
22:13Elon MuskIt comes back quite quickly, within about 20 minutes. And so it can actually launch the tanker version of the spacecraft, which is essentially the same as the, as a spaceship, but filling up the unpressurized and pressurized cargo areas with propellant tanks so they look almost identical.
22:34Elon MuskThis also helps lower the development cost, which obviously will not be small. And then the propellant tanker goes up and actually it'll go up multiple times, so anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the, of the spaceship in orbit.
22:51Elon MuskAnd then once the spaceship is, the tanks are full, the cargo has been transferred and we reach the Mars rendezvous timing, which as mentioned is roughly every 26 months, that's when the ship would depart.
23:05Elon MuskNow, over time, there would be many spaceships. You'd ultimately have, I think, upwards of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so that the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse, kind of like Battlestar Galactica.
23:20Elon MuskYou've seen that thing, that's a good show. So a bit like that. But it actually makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you've got two years to do so, and then make frequent use of the booster and the tanker to get really heavy reuse out of those.
23:38Elon MuskAnd then with the, with the spaceship you get less reuse because you have to say, well, how long is it going to last? Well, maybe 30 years. So that might be 12 to maybe 15 flights of the spaceship at most.
23:51Elon MuskSo you really want to maximize the cargo of the spaceship and reuse the booster and the tank aligned. So the ship goes to Mars, gets replenished and then returns to Earth.
24:12Elon MuskSo I'll go into some of the details of the vehicle design and performance and I'm going to gloss over or just I'll only talk a little bit about the technical details in the actual presentation and then I'll leave the detailed technical questions to the Q and A that follows.
24:32Elon MuskThis is to give you a sense of size.
24:45Elon MuskIt's quite big.
24:56Elon MuskThe funny thing is, I think in the long term, the Ships will be even bigger than this. I think that this will represent, this will be relatively small compared to the Mars interplanetary ships of the future.
25:09Elon MuskBut it kind of needs to be about the size because in order to fit 100 people or thereabouts in the pressurized section, plus carry the luggage and all of the unpressurized cargo to build propellant plants and build everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to, you name it in the.
25:31Elon MuskWe need to carry a lot, a lot of cargo. So it really needs to be roughly on this, on this order of magnitude. Because if we say like the, say a minimum threshold for self sustaining city on Mars or civilization would be a million people.
25:48Elon MuskWell, and you can only go every two years. If you have 100 people per ship, that's 10,000 trips. So I think at least 100 people per trip is the right order of magnitude.
26:01Elon MuskAnd I think we actually may end up expanding the crew section and ultimately taking more like 200 or more people per flight in order to reduce the cost per person.
26:12Elon MuskSo. But 10,000 flights is a lot of flight. So you really want ultimately I think on the order of 1,000 ships, it would take a while to build up to 1,000 ships.
26:24Elon MuskAnd so I think if you say when would we reach that million person threshold from the point at which the first ship goes to Mars, it's probably somewhere between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous.
26:43Elon MuskSo it's probably somewhere between maybe 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self sustaining civilization on Mars.
26:57Elon MuskSo that's the sort of a cross section of the ship. And in some ways it's not that complicated really. It's made primarily of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon fiber part is tricky when dealing with deep cryogens and trying to achieve both liquid and gas impermeability and not have gaps occur due to cracking or pressurization that would make the car fiber leaky.
27:30Elon MuskSo it, this is a fairly significant technical challenge to make deeply cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber. And it's only recently that we think that the carbon fiber technology has gotten to the point where we can actually do this without having to create a liner, some sort of metal liner or other liner on the inside of the tanks, which would add mass complexity.
27:59Elon MuskSo particularly tricky for the hot gaseous oxygen pressurization. So this, this is designed to be autogenously pressurized, which means that the fuel and the oxygen, we gasify them through heat exchanges in the engine and use that to pressurize the tanks.
28:16Elon MuskSo we'll gasify the methane and use that to pressurize the fuel tank, gasify the oxygen, use that to pressurize the oxygen tank, and this compares. This is a much simpler system than what we have with Falcon 9, where we use helium for pressurization and we use nitrogen for gas thrusters.
28:36Elon MuskIn this case, we would autogenously pressurize and then use gaseous methane and oxygen for the control thrusters. So really only you only need two ingredients for this, as opposed to four in the case of Falcon 9, and actually five if you consider the ignition liquid.
29:00Elon MuskWe use a sort of complicated liquid to ignite the engines that isn't very useful. In this case, we would use spark ignition.
29:17Elon MuskSo this gives you a sense of vehicles by performance, sort of current and historic, if you can actually read that. But in expandable mode, the vehicle push that we're proposing would do about 550 tons and about 300 tons in reusable mode.
29:35Elon MuskThat compares to Satnam's 5 max capability of 135 tons. But I think this really gives a better sense for things. The white bars show the performance of the vehicle, like, in other words, the payload to orbit of the vehicle.
29:54Elon MuskSo you can see essentially what it represents is what's the size efficiency of the vehicle. And most rockets, including ours, as they're currently flying, the performance bar is only a small percentage of the actual size of the rocket.
30:14Elon MuskBut with the interplanetary system which will initially be used for Mars, we've been able to, or we believe, massively improve the design performance. So it's the first time a rocket's sort of performance bar will actually extend exceed the physical size of the rocket.
30:41Elon MuskThis gives you a more direct sort of comparison. This is the thrust level is quite enormous. We're talking about a liftoff thrust of 13,000 tons. So it's quite tectonic when it takes off.
31:00Elon MuskBut it does fit on pad 39A, which NASA's been kind of to allow us to use, where they somewhat oversized the pad in doing Saturn V. And as a result, we can actually do a much larger vehicle on that same launch pad.
31:18Elon MuskAnd in the future we expect to add additional launch locations, probably probably adding one in on the south coast of Texas. But this gives you a sense of the relative capability.
31:31Elon MuskIf you can read, those.
31:37Elon MuskVehicles have very different purposes. This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people, ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. So you really need something quite large in order to do that.
31:54Elon MuskTo talk about some of the key elements of the interplanetary spaceship and rocket booster, we Decided to start off the development with what we think are probably the two most difficult elements of the design.
32:10Elon MuskOne is the Raptor engine. And this is going to be the highest chamber pressure engine of any kind ever built, and probably the highest thrust to weight. It's a full flow staged combustion engine, which maximizes the theoretical momentum that you can get out of a given source fuel and oxidizer.
32:39Elon MuskWe subcool the oxygen and methane to densify it. So compared to when it, when propellants are normally used close to their boiling point, in most rockets, in our case, we actually load the propellants close to their freezing point and that can result in a density improvement of up to around 10 to 12%, which makes an enormous difference in the actual results of the rocket.
33:04Elon MuskIt also makes the, it gets rid of any cavitation risk for the turbo pumps and it makes it easier to feed a high pressure turbo pump if you have very cold propellant.
33:17Elon MuskReally one of the keys here though, is the vacuum version of raptor. Having a 382 second ISP. This is really quite critical to the whole Mars mission. And we're confident we can get to, to that number or at least within a few seconds of that number, ultimately maybe exceeding it slightly.
33:43Elon MuskSo the rocket booster in many ways is really a scaled up version of the Falcon 9 booster. You'll see a lot of similarities, such as the grid fins, obviously clustering a lot of engines at the base.
33:57Elon MuskAnd the big difference really being that the, the primary structure is an advanced form of carbon fiber as opposed to aluminum lithium, and that we use autogenous pressurization and we get rid of the helium and the nitrogen.
34:15Elon MuskSo this uses 42 Raptor engines. It's a lot of engines, but we use an ion on a Falcon 9 and with Falcon Heavy, which should launch early next year, there's 27 engines on the base.
34:29Elon MuskSo we've got pretty good experience with having a large number of engines. It also gives us redundancy so that if some of the engines fail, you can still continue the mission and be fine.
34:41Elon MuskBut the main job of the booster is to accelerate the spaceship to around 8,500 km an hour. For those that are less familiar with orbital dynamics, really it's all about velocity and not about height.
35:01Elon MuskSo really that's the job of the booster. The booster is like the Javelin thrower, so it's got to toss that javelin which is the spaceship. And in the case of other planets though, which have, which have a gravity well which is not as deep.
35:19Elon MuskSo Mars the moons Jupiter. See, if we one day, maybe even Venus. Venus will be a little trickier. But for most of the solar system, you only need the spaceship.
35:34Elon MuskSo you don't need the booster if you have a lower gravity well. So no booster is needed on the moon or Mars or any of the moons of Jupiter or Pluto.
35:43Elon MuskYou just need the spaceship. The booster is just there for heavy gravity wells. And then we've also been able to optimize the propellant needed for boostback and landing to get it down to about 7% of the liftoff propellant load.
36:01Elon MuskWe think with some optimization, maybe we can get it down to about 6%. And we also are now getting quite comfortable with the accuracy of the landing. If you've been watching the Falcon 9 landings, you'll see that they're getting increasingly closer to the bullseye.
36:16Elon MuskAnd we think particularly with the addition of additional, with addition of some thrusters, some maneuvering thrusters, we can actually put the booster right back on the launch stand. And then those bins at the base are essentially centering features to take out any minor position mismatch at the launch site.
36:41Elon MuskSo it looks like at the base. So we think we only need to gimbal or steer the center cluster of engines. So there's the seven engines in the center cluster.
36:52Elon MuskThose would be the ones that move for steering the rocket. And the other ones would be fixed in position, which gives us the best concentration of. We can max out the number of engines because you don't have to leave any room for gimbaling or moving the engines.
37:07Elon MuskAnd like I said, this is all designed so that you could actually lose multiple engines, even at liftoff or anywhere in flight, and continue the mission safely.
37:22Elon MuskSo for the spaceship itself, in the top, we have the. The pressurized compartment. I'll show you a fly through of that in a moment. Then beneath that is the.
37:33Elon MuskIs where we have the unpressurized cargo, which would be really flat, packed in a very dense format. And then below that is the liquid oxygen tank. The liquid oxygen tank is probably the hardest piece of this whole vehicle because it's got a handle propellant at the coldest level.
37:52Elon MuskAnd it and the tanks themselves actually form the airframe. So the airframe structure and the tank structure are combined as it is in all modern rockets and in aircraft.
38:07Elon MuskFor example, the wing is really a fuel tank in wing shape. So it has to take the thrust loads of ascent, the loads of reentry, and, and then it has to be impermeable to gaseous oxygen, which is tricky and non reactive to gaseous oxygen.
38:28Elon MuskSo that's the hardest piece of the spaceship itself, which is actually why we started on that element as well. And I'll show you some pictures of that later. And then below the oxygen tank is the fuel tank.
38:41Elon MuskAnd then the engines are mounted directly to the thrust cone on the base. And then there are six of the vacuum, the high efficiency vacuum engines around the perimeter.
38:52Elon MuskAnd those don't gimbal. And then there are three of the sea level versions of the engine which do gimbal and provide the steering, although we can do some amount of steering if you're in space.
39:05Elon MuskWith differential thrust on the outside engines, the net effect is a cargo to Mars of up to 450 tons depending upon how many refills you do with the tanker.
39:23Elon MuskAnd the goal is at least 100 passengers per ship, Although I think ultimately we'll probably see that number grow to 200 or more. This chart's a little difficult to interpret at first, but we decided to put it there for people who want to watch the video afterwards and, and sort of take a closer look, analyze some of the numbers.
39:44Elon MuskThe column on the left is probably what's most relevant and that gives you the trip time. So depending upon which Earth Mars rendezvous you're aiming for, the trip time at 6 kilometers per second departure velocity can be as low as 80 days.
40:03Elon MuskAnd then over time I think would obviously improve, improve that. And ultimately I suspect that you'd see Mars transit times of as little as 30 days in the more distant future.
40:17Elon MuskSo it's fairly manageable considering the trips that people used to do in the old days that routinely take sailing voyages that would be six months or more.
40:30Elon MuskSo on arrival, the heat shield technology is extremely important. We've been refining the heat shield technology using our Dragon spacecraft and we now have, we're now on version three of Pica, which is phenolic impregnated carbon ablator.
40:45Elon MuskAnd it's getting more and more robust with each new version with less ablation, more resistance, less need for refurbishment. The heat shield is basically a giant brake pad. So it's like how good can you make that brake pad against extreme reentry conditions and minimize the cost of refurbishment and make it so that you can have many flights with no refurbishment at all.
41:13Elon MuskThis is a flight through of the crew compartment.
41:21Elon MuskIt.
41:51Elon MuskJust want to give you a sense of what it would feel like to actually be in the spaceship. I mean, in order to make it appealing and increase that portion of the Venn diagram of people who actually want to go.
42:04Elon MuskIt's got to be really fun and exciting, and it can't feel cramped or boring. So the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so that you can do zero G games.
42:18Elon MuskYou can float around. There'll be, like, movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant. It'll be, like, really fun to go. You'll have a great time.
42:36Elon MuskServing the propellant plant on Mars. Again, this is one of the slides that I won't go into in detail here, but people can think about offline. The key point being that the ingredients are there on Mars to create a propellant plant with relative ease.
42:52Elon MuskBecause the atmosphere is primarily CO2 and there's water ice almost everywhere. You've got the CO2 plus H2O to make methane CH4 and oxygen O2 using the reaction. The trickiest thing really is the energy source, which we think we can do with a large field of solar panels.
43:17Elon MuskSo then to give you a sense of the cost, really, the key is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go. And we think based on this architecture, this architecture, seemingly optimization over time, like the very first flights wouldn't be, Would be fairly expensive.
43:37Elon MuskBut the architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000, maybe as less, maybe as little as $100,000 over time, depending upon how much mass a person takes.
43:51Elon MuskSo we're right now estimating about $140,000 per ton to the surface of Mars. So if a person plus the luggage is less than that, Taking into account food consumption and life support, then we think that the cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000.
44:16Elon MuskSo funding. We thought about funding sources, and so we've got steel underpants. Launch satellites send cargo to space station Kickstarter, of course, followed by profit. So the. Obviously, it's going to be a challenge to fund this whole endeavor.
44:41Elon MuskWe do expect to generate pretty decent net cash flow from launching lots of satellites and servicing the space station from NASA, transferring cargo to and from space station. And then I know that there's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars.
45:06Elon MuskAnd then perhaps there'll be interest on the government sector side to also do that. Ultimately, this is going to be a huge public private partnership. And I think that's how the United States was established and many other countries around the world is a public private partnership.
45:29Elon MuskSo I think that's probably what occurs. And right now we're just trying to make as much progress as we can, with the resources that we have available and just sort of keep moving both forward and hopefully.
45:44Elon MuskI think as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream, it's something that can be made real. I think the support will snowball over time.
45:59Elon MuskAnd I should say also that the main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. So I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi planetary.
46:32Elon MuskTimelines. Not the best at this sort of thing. But.
46:42Elon MuskJust to show you where we started off in 2002, SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band. That was it. That's all of SpaceX in 2002. As you can see, I'm a dancing machine.
47:02Elon MuskAnd yeah, I believe in kicking off celebratory events with mariachi bands. I really like mariachi bands. But that was what we started off with in 2002. And really, I mean, I thought we had maybe a 10% chance of doing anything of even getting a rock orbit, let alone getting beyond that and taking Mars seriously.
47:28Elon MuskBut I came to conclusion that if there wasn't some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a space faring civilization and be out there among the stars.
47:49Elon MuskBecause in 69 we were able to go to the moon and the space shuttle could get to low Earth orbit and then obviously the space shuttle got retired, but that trend line is down to zero.
47:59Elon MuskSo I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem that it improves.
48:15Elon MuskAnd there are many examples in history where civilizations have reached a certain technology level and then have fallen well below that and then recovered only millennia later. So we go from 2002 where we basically were clueless, and then felt with Falcon 1, the smallest useful orbital rocket that we could think of, which would deliver half a ton to orbit.
48:49Elon MuskAnd then four years later we developed the first, the first vehicle. So we dropped the main engine, the upper stage engine, the airframes, the fairing and the launch system, and had our first attempted launch in 2006, which failed.
49:06Elon MuskSo that lasted about 60 seconds, unfortunately. But 2006, four years after starting, is also when we actually got our first NASA contract. And I just want to say I'm incredibly grateful to NASA for supporting SpaceX despite the fact that our rocket crashed.
49:27Elon MuskIt was awesome. I'm NASA's biggest fan, so thank you very much to the people that had the faith to do that. Thank you.
49:46Elon MuskSo then 2006 followed by a lot of grief and then finally the fourth launch of Falcon 1 worked in 2008 and we were really down to our last pennies.
50:00Elon MuskIn fact I only thought I had enough money for three launches and first three bloody failed and we were able to scrape together enough to just barely make it and do a fourth launch.
50:12Elon MuskAnd thank goodness that fourth launch succeeded in 2008. That was a lot of pain. And then also at the end of 2008 is when NASA awarded us the first major operational contract which was for resupplying cargo to the space station and bringing cargo back.
50:35Elon MuskThen a couple years later we did the first launch of Falcon 9 version 1 and that had about a 10 ton to orbit capability. So it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1.
50:48Elon MuskAnd also it was assigned to to carry our Dragon spacecraft. Then 20, 2010 is our first mission to the space station. So we're able to finish development of Dragon and dock with the space station in 2010.
51:09Elon MuskSo sorry, 20, sorry, 2010 is expandable. Expendable dragon. Expendable dragon. 2012 is when we delivered and returned cargo from the space station. 2013 is when we first started doing vertical takeoff and landing tests.
51:24Elon MuskAnd then 2014 is when we were able to have the first orbital booster do a soft landing in the ocean. The landing was soft, fell over and exploded. But landing for seven seconds, it was good.
51:40Elon MuskAnd we also improved the capability of the vehicle from 10 tons to about 13 tons soleil and then 2015 or last year in December, that was definitely one of the best moments of my life.
51:57Elon MuskWhen the rocket booster came back and landed at Cape Canaveral. That was really. Yeah.
52:16Elon MuskSo that really showed that we could bring an orbit class booster back from a very high velocity all the way to the launch site and land it safely and with almost no refurbishment required for reflight.
52:34Elon MuskAnd if things go well, we're hoping to refly one of landed boosters in a few months. So yeah. And then 2016 we're also demonstrate landing on a ship. The landing on the ship is important for the very high velocity geosynchronous missions and that's important for feasibility of Falcon 9 because about roughly a quarter of our missions are sort of servicing this space station.
53:06Elon MuskAnd then there's a few other low earth orbit missions. But most of our missions probably 60% of our missions are commercial GEO missions. So we've got to do these high velocity missions that really need to land on a ship out to sea.
53:21Elon MuskThey don't have enough propellants on board to boost back to the launch site. So looking at the future next steps, we were kind of intentionally a bit fuzzy about this timeline, but we're going to try to make as much progress as we can.
53:42Elon MuskObviously it's with a very constrained budget, but we're going to try to make as much progress as we can on the elements of the interplanetary transport booster and spaceship.
53:57Elon MuskAnd hopefully we'll be able to do to complete the first development spaceship in maybe about four years and start doing suborbital flights with that. In fact, it actually has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit if you limit the amount of cargo with the spaceship.
54:20Elon MuskBut well, you have to really, you have to really strip it down. But in tanker form it can definitely get to orbit. Can't get back. We can get to orbit.
54:31Elon MuskIt actually starts thinking like maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world, provided we can land somewhere where noise is not a super big deal.
54:44Elon MuskRockets are very noisy, but we could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest. So most places on Earth would be maybe 20, 25 minutes.
54:57Elon MuskSo maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of the coast of New York, say 20, 30 miles out, you could go from, you know, New York to Tokyo in 25 minutes, across the Atlantic in 10 minutes.
55:22Elon MuskReally most of your time would be getting to the ship and then it'll be real quick after that. So there's some intriguing possibilities there, although we're not counting on that.
55:34Elon MuskAnd then, and then development of the booster. We're actually thinking the booster part is relatively straightforward because it amounts to a scaling up of the Falcon 9 booster. So we don't see a lot of sort of showstoppers there.
55:54Elon MuskYeah, so then trying to put it all together and make this actually work for Mars, if things go super well, it might be kind of in the 10 year time frame, but I don't want to say that's when it will occur.
56:10Elon MuskIt's like there's a huge amount of risk, it's going to cost a lot, good chance we don't succeed, but we're going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible.
56:27Elon MuskAnd we're going to try to send something to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from here on out. So Dragon 2 which is a propulsive lander we plan to send to Mars in a couple years and then do probably another dragon mission in 2020.
56:46Elon MuskIn fact, we want to establish a steady cadence that there's always a flight leaving like a train leaving the station. With every Mars Friday we will be sending a Dragon, at least a Dragon to Mars and ultimately the big spaceship.
57:02Elon MuskSo for people that are interested in putting payloads on Dragon, you know you can count on a ship that's going to transport something on the order of at least 2 or 3 tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars.
57:27Elon MuskYes, that's part of the reason why we designed Dragon 2 to be a propulsive lander, is as a propulsive lander you can go anywhere in the solar system. So you could go to the moon, you could go to, well, anywhere really.
57:41Elon MuskWhereas if something relies on parachutes or wings, then you can pretty much only. Well, if it's wings, you can pretty much only land on Earth because you need a Runway.
57:52Elon MuskMost places don't have a Runway. And then any place that doesn't have a dense atmosphere, you can't use parachutes. But propulsive works anywhere. So Dragon should be capable of landing on any solid electric surface in the solar system.
58:14Elon MuskAnd then I was really excited to see that the team managed to do the all up Raptor engine firing. In advance of this conference. I just want to say thanks to the Raptor team for really working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the presentation.
58:38Elon MuskI really wanted to show that we've made some hardware progress in this direction and, and the Raptor is a really tricky engine. It's a lot trickier than Merlin because it's a full flow stage combustion, much higher pressure.
58:53Elon MuskAnd I'm kind of amazed it didn't blow up on the first firing. But fortunately it was good.
59:10Elon MuskIt's kind of interesting to see the mach diamonds forming.
59:25Elon MuskSo the, and part of the reason for making the engine sort of small like Raptor, although it has three times the thrust of a Merlin, is actually only about the same size as a Merlin engine because it has three times the operating pressure.
59:43Elon MuskAnd that means we can use a lot of the production techniques that we've honed with Merlin. We're currently producing Merlin engines at almost 300 per year. So we understand how to make rocket engines in volume.
59:56Elon MuskSo even though the Mars vehicle uses 42 on the base and mine on the upper stage, so we're 51 engines to make, that's well within our production capabilities for Merlin.
1:00:09Elon MuskAnd this is a similarly sized engine to Merlin, except for the expansion ratio. So we feel really comfortable about being able to make this engine in volume at a price that doesn't break our budget.
1:00:25Elon MuskAnd then we also wanted to make progress on the primary structure. So as I mentioned, this is really a very difficult thing to make, is to make something out of carbon fiber, even though carbon fiber has incredible strength to weight when you want to then put super cold liquid oxygen and liquid methane, particularly liquid oxygen in a tank is subject to cracking and leaking.
1:00:58Elon MuskAnd it's a very difficult thing to make. Just the sheer scale of it is also challenging because you've got to lay up the carbon fiber in exactly the right way on a huge mold.
1:01:07Elon MuskAnd you've got to cure that mold at temperature. And then it's just really hard to make large, large carbon fiber structures that can do all of those things and carry incredible loads.
1:01:24Elon MuskSo that's the other thing we wanted to focus on, was the Raptor and then building the first development tank for the Mars spaceship. So this is really the hardest part of the spaceship.
1:01:41Elon MuskThe other pieces are, we have a pretty good handle on, but this was the trickiest one. So we wanted to tackle it first. You get a size for how big the tank is.
1:01:52Elon MuskIt's really quite big. Also big. Congratulations to the team that worked on that. They also were working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the iac.
1:02:04Elon MuskAnd so we managed to build the first tank and, and the initial tests with cryogenic propellant actually look quite positive. We have not seen any leaks or major issues.
1:02:17Elon MuskThis is what the tank looks like on the inside.
1:02:25Elon MuskSo you can get a real sense for how much just how big this tank is. It's actually completely smooth on the inside, but the way that the carbon 5 applies, lay up and reflect the light makes it look faceted.
1:02:44Elon MuskSo then what about beyond Mars? So as we thought about the system, the reason we call it a system, because generally I don't like calling things systems, because everything's a system, including your dog,
1:02:59Elon MuskIs that it's actually more than a vehicle. There's obviously the rocket booster, the spaceship, the tanker and the propellant plant. The in situ of propellant production. If you have all of those four elements, you can actually go anywhere in the solar system by planet hopping or moon hopping.
1:03:21Elon MuskSo by establishing a propellant depot on, in the asteroid belt or on one of the moons of Jupiter, you can go to, you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter, no problem.
1:03:35Elon MuskIn fact, even from, even without a propellant depot at Mars. You can do a flyby of Jupiter without a propellant depot. So but by establishing a propellant depot, say, you know, Enceladus or Europa or any of those few options, and then doing another one on Titan, Jupiter, Saturn's moon, and then perhaps another one further out on Pluto or elsewhere in the solar system.
1:04:15Elon MuskThis system really gives, gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system, so you can actually travel out to the capable to the Oort cloud.
1:04:25Elon MuskI wouldn't recommend this for interstellar journeys, but this basic system, provided we have filling stations along the way, means full access to the entire greater solar system.