CRS-8 Post-Launch Press Conference
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:02NASA moderatorD minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Engine ignition. Lift off of the Falcon 9 rocket. With science for today and for deep space exploration tomorrow.
0:23NASA moderatorFalcon 9 has cleared the towers.
0:50NASA moderatorGood evening, everyone. This is the post launch news conference for our SpaceX CRS 8 mission tonight. And here to join us to give us a status on our launch and our mission is Kirk Sharman, manager for the International Space station program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Elon Musk, the SpaceX chief executive officer and lead designer, and Hans Koenigsmann, the Vice president of flight reliability for SpaceX.
1:28NASA moderatorAnd we'll start first with Kirk Scheinman. Kirk.
1:31Kirk ShiremanAll right, thanks. What a wonderful day. It's a beautiful day outside, a great day to launch a rocket and we saw a great one. So I had the pleasure of being in the mission control center at SpaceX, and I can tell you the folks were really excited, as were myself and Bill Gerstenmaier.
1:50Kirk ShiremanAnd then we could hear the roar of the rocket. That was really cool. So after the launch I got on the phone and talked to our colleagues in Houston and there was a roar there too.
1:59Kirk ShiremanSo it was great to hear that. We're very excited to have our cargo and the Dragon safely on orbit and we're very much looking forward to it to arrive to the iss.
2:11Kirk ShiremanI had a chance to speak to our mission control room in Houston and all systems on board the ISS are ready to support, support the mission. And like I said, we're looking great, very forward to having the cargo and all the utilization onboard ISS.
2:26Kirk ShiremanTim Peake will be grappling the dragon at 6:12am Sunday Central Time, and Jeff Williams will be assisting him and those crew members are ready to support that operation. And like I said, we're really happy to have have Dragon up in space and we'll be even more happy to have it on board iss.
2:45Kirk ShiremanSo let me hand it back to you and we'll hear from our SpaceX colleagues.
2:49NASA moderatorAll right, thank you, Kirk. Now to elon Musk, our SpaceX CEO and lead designer.
2:54Elon MuskThanks. Well, it's great to be here and just of course, we love doing a good job for NASA. So thank you for allowing us to live for the cargo and the.
3:14Elon MuskYeah, I think the mice are doing well. That's what I heard.
3:18Kirk ShiremanI'm not sure they're happy, though.
3:20Elon MuskI think they might be a bit confused. So it's probably not on their evolutionary path to be in zero G. But yeah, there's a bunch of mastronauts on board.
3:32Elon MuskSo the thing that was a little different about this mission on the rocket side was, of course, the rocket landed instead of putting a hole in the ship or tipping over.
3:46Elon MuskSo we're really excited about that. And the reason that that's really important is about half of our missions will need to land out to sea. So any missions that are going to, particularly to geostationary orbit or to escape velocity, anything beyond Earth is likely to need to land on the ship.
4:14Elon MuskAnd I thought it would be worth just emphasizing that the reason for that is something that I think it would be good for the three press to educate the public about, which is the difference between space and velocity, space and orbit.
4:31Elon MuskLike, arguably, the space station should be called the orbit station because it's actually zooming around the Earth at 17 and a half thousand miles an hour and it crosses the Atlantic and I think about 20 minutes or so, pretty speedy.
4:46Elon MuskAnd that's, for example, why there's such a short launch window, is because the rocket's got to get into orbit and kind of match the orbit with the space station.
4:57Elon MuskAnd it's moving so quickly that that orbital window is only open for a few seconds. So although a rocket looks like it's going up because it starts off vertical, actually it's going to very quickly turn and go sideways and go horizontal, and it's going to match that space space station velocity of roughly 17,000 miles an hour.
5:23Elon MuskSo basically, the rocket at stage separation is zooming out to speed, zooming out to sea at an incredible velocity, and it doesn't have enough repellent to basically zero out that velocity, boost back in the other direction, and then land.
5:42Elon MuskSo in order to achieve effective reusability, if you want missions to go to high orbit or to escape velocity, you really need the ocean landing. And I just want to make sure that was explained.
5:59Elon MuskAnd we can, you know, in the Q and A, we can go maybe into a little more depth on that. But I think as things make progress, I think it is.
6:11Elon MuskI think it would be good for the public to know a bit about orbital dynamics, because it is a little counterintuitive.
6:19NASA moderatorSo, anyway, thank you, Elon, and Hans Koenigsmann, our vice president for flight reliability.
6:27Hans KoenigsmannI just kind of filled in a little bit on the Dragon side. I talked to mission control on the way up. All thrusters have been fired. So we know Dragon's healthy, it's a good spacecraft.
6:39Hans KoenigsmannEverything's working. Our flight computers are running, commons working, communications working. The next thing that's going to happen is the opening of the GNC Door which then will activate Star tracker.
6:53Hans KoenigsmannThat is going to happen in about 2 hours and 50 minutes. And then the first orbital adjustment burn is going to happen tomorrow morning. And docking with the space station then is currently planned for Sunday morning, I think 6 o' clock early in the morning at Eastern time.
7:17Hans KoenigsmannSo everything's going well. It's an awesome day. I think the team, both on SpaceX side, on NASA side and also on the 45th side, worked awesome together and we did a great launch.
7:31NASA moderatorThank you, Hans. And we'll take questions now. Please give your name. Affiliation when the microphone comes to you, start right here with James here. Sorry. Sure.
7:46James Dean (Florida Today)Thanks so much. James Dean, Florida Today, Elon, do you think this booster, if it checks out okay, will be the first to re fly? How soon could that be?
7:55Elon MuskYeah, that's a good question. I think that that's likely. So the plan is to bring this booster back, should arrive in port on Sunday, and then we're going to do a series of test fires.
8:11Elon MuskWe're hoping to do that at the Cape rather than transport it to Texas and then bring it back. So our thought is to basically fire it 10 times in a row on the ground.
8:24Elon MuskAnd if things look good at that point, we feel it's sort of qualified for reuse and launch. And we're hoping to relaunch on Roblo mission probably around May or June.
8:40Elon MuskSo pretty soon, let's say June, try to recalibrate my timing expectations.
8:49James Dean (Florida Today)Just clarify that you could relaunch this booster within a few months.
8:54Elon MuskYeah, yeah. I mean, in the future, hopefully we'll be able to relaunch them within a few weeks.
9:00NASA moderatorIrene, thanks.
9:02Irene Klotz (Reuters)Irene Klotz with Reuters. Congratulations, first of all, and would this, would that be a test flight or would you hope to have a customer for that? And also this has been kind of a long time coming for you.
9:13Irene Klotz (Reuters)How do you feel about this? And were you surprised to actually see it stick the landing?
9:21Elon MuskYeah, actually we were just talking yesterday, went around the table on odds for success and the consensus was about 2 to 1. So we did, we thought it was more likely than not that this mission would work, but still probably, you know, one third chance of failure.
9:43Elon MuskBut we'd eliminated the reasons, the prior reasons. So we're confident that if it did fail, it would fail for a new reason. So as it turns out, there's a lot of reasons for Orcus to fail.
9:57Elon MuskSo. But this was a beautiful day and I think the circumstances were good. It's still quite tricky to land on a ship and if you on the video, the ship looks quite small relative to the rocket, and so it's quite a tiny target.
10:18Elon MuskIt's really trying to land on a postage stamp there. And it's moving, sort of translating and rotating. It's sort of like a carrier landing versus a land landing. It's a tinier spot and it's moving.
10:36Irene Klotz (Reuters)The use of the reflight, would that be an actual paying customer on it, or would you do that just as an experiment to relaunch it?
10:46Elon MuskWe think it'll be a paying customer, but we got to have some discussions.
10:55NASA moderatorAll right, let's go right here.
10:58ReporterSo, Elon, having achieved this, this milestone here, what does that mean for the future of SpaceX and for the future of spaceflight?
11:05Elon MuskYeah, I think this is a really good milestone for the future of spaceflight. You know, I think it's another step towards the stars. In order for us to really open up access to space, we've got to achieve full and rapid reusability.
11:25Elon MuskAnd being able to do that or the primary rocket booster is going to be a huge impact on cost. Now, it'll still take us a few years to make that smooth and make it efficient, but I think it's proven that it can work.
11:47Elon MuskAnd there probably will be some failures in the future, but we will iron those out, get it to the point where it's a routine. It's routine to bring it back and where the only changes to the rocket are maybe to hose it down or give it a wash and add the propellant and fly again.
12:14Elon MuskThat's the key. Full and rapid reusability is fundamental.
12:19ReporterBill? Oh, well, Marcia was ahead of me. I let Marcia go in front of you.
12:23NASA moderatorOkay, Marcia, go ahead.
12:24ReporterMarcia Dunn, Associated Press For Mr. Musk, where do you expect the stage that landed in December on land? Where's that going to end up? Is that going to be on display at your headquarters?
12:34ReporterUltimately and soon.
12:36Elon MuskHopefully.
12:37ReporterHopefully is that the.
12:38Elon MuskWe just got. Our headquarters are close to the or adjacent to the Hawthorne Airport. So we needed FAA permission because it would be the highest object for quite a distance around the airport.
12:51Elon MuskBut we just, I believe, got that permission. So we're planning on putting the first, the rocket that landed back at the Cape in front of the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, hopefully in the next few months.
13:03Elon MuskOh, okay.
13:04ReporterThank you. And could you tell what was the velocity and the altitude for this booster? What's the highest altitude it reached in this peak, peak speed before it started coming back?
13:14Elon MuskSo actually, I don't actually know. Yeah. For LEO emissions, the Peak altitude is usually not super high, like it would have been something around a couple hundred kilometers. And the velocity also is not as high as it would have been on the last mission.
13:39Elon MuskThe highest velocity missions that we see are the geostationary missions. So for example, for this mission, actually we could have brought it back to land, but we wanted to do a ship landing where we had lots of margin.
13:59Elon MuskSo it would have been a low margin return to land or a high margin ship landing. And so this, I think, really helps us show that the ship landing could work.
14:13Elon MuskBut in terms of the maximum sort of transfer velocity, which is this is really the key figure of merit for the boost stage, the maximum transfer velocity is we think we'll get up to about 9,000, maybe 10,000 kilometers per hour.
14:29Elon MuskAnd that's transferring an upper stage load UpStage with payload plus fairing, you're talking about 120 tons or thereabouts. So it's 120 tons to upwards of 10,000 kilometers an hour.
14:45Elon MuskSo it's sort of quite a javelin throw.
14:49NASA moderatorBill?
14:49ReporterYeah. Bill Harwin, CBS News. Two very quick questions. One is, I realize it was a fairly calm sea today, but those of us not looking used to looking at barges in the ocean looked like it was rocking pretty good.
14:59ReporterWhat is just out of curiosity, the maximum tilt the rocket could stand and stay vertical. Number one and two, can you talk a little bit about increasing your launch pace?
15:08ReporterYou guys have a really busy manifest. You're starting to ramp things up here. And do you need more people? Can you do it with the crew you currently have here and at Vandenberg?
15:16ReporterJust generally about the pace. Thanks.
15:18Elon MuskSure. Well, first of all, I'd say it's a ship. It used to be a barge, but when we added engines and control systems and everything. So now I think it's sort of better.
15:31Elon MuskCall it a ship has four engines, so but today the pitch and roll was about 2 to 3 degrees. So it was actually not too bad in terms of maximum.
15:50Elon MuskWell, probably, you know, I'd say we could do double that easily and maybe triple. So maybe it's 8 or 9 degrees, but that's probably about the limit. But that would be really intense.
16:06Elon MuskThese. And you also see some translation where it's going up and down. So it's both rotating and translating. So it's tricky, just like a carrier landing. And both are going to absolute position.
16:24Elon MuskSo the ship is holding to absolute GPS position with a relative gps. And today was actually holding to with accuracy of below a meter. And it's got four engines, all of which can rotate 360 degrees and they're operating continuously to hold both the attitude and position in the ocean.
16:45Elon MuskAnd in terms of increasing our headcount, I think that's going to continue to grow and our launch rate is going to continue to grow. We're expecting by maybe the third or fourth quarter that we'd be doing a launch every, you know, two to three weeks.
17:09NASA moderatorSteven,
17:12Stephen Clark (Spaceflight Now)thanks. Stephen Clark from Spaceflight. Now, a couple of clarifications. I believe earlier you've talked about securing the rocket on the drone ship with welded shoes. I was wondering if that's still the.
17:23Elon MuskThat's what's happening.
17:24Stephen Clark (Spaceflight Now)That's still the.
17:24Elon MuskWe're welding it down.
17:26ReporterYeah.
17:27Elon MuskMake sure it doesn't tip over. There's potentially some. There's potentially some heavy winds coming in. So the. Once the rocket's safe, the crew's going to go on there and then we've got these steel shoes that we put over the landing feet and welded to the deck.
17:43Stephen Clark (Spaceflight Now)And one more clarification. Is it still coming into Port Canaveral? Is that the plan?
17:48Elon MuskActually, I'm not certain about that. I think that certainly is where it will ultimately be. I'm not sure if that is the initial destination.
17:56NASA moderatorAll right, let's come back over here onto this side of the room.
18:01ReporterRight here. Sawyer Rosenstein with Talking Space kind of going along with that. Can you talk a bit about the process of exactly how it gets to that drone ship, stays on that drone ship, and then the process of what exactly happens from now that it's on until it gets back into port?
18:18Elon MuskSure. We're a little bit like the dog that caught the bus, you know, look, what do we do now?
18:29Elon MuskBut the plan is to bring it into port, then take, there's a load head fixture that we can put on the top of the rocket kind of where the stage separation mechanism attaches.
18:42Elon MuskAnd then we can pick it up with the crane and then put it on to land. And then we've got a. Oh, we actually have a stand that we put it on and then the stand attaches the launch hold downs and then we can fold the legs up.
19:00Elon MuskThen the crane rotates it horizontal for transport and should bring it back to probably 39A. And then we're going to do some do those like those 10 test firings.
19:15Elon MuskAnd. And if that all goes well, then we think we'll be comfortable with an orbital flight.
19:25NASA moderatorOkay, right here.
19:28Jason Rhian (SpaceflightInsider)Jason Ryan with SpaceflightInsider.com and I kind of want to take Back a little bit to ORBCOM OG2. This past December, you successfully landed at landing zone one, kind of carrying out a test flight there.
19:39Jason Rhian (SpaceflightInsider)And today you carried out a test flight more or less on ocean. So can you talk a little bit about SpaceX's plans to actually incorporate its detesting of its technology successfully, I might add, while still sending payloads to orbit?
19:51Jason Rhian (SpaceflightInsider)Thank you.
19:53Elon MuskI'm not sure I totally understand the question.
19:55ReporterSo
19:57Elon Muskyou mean I'm not sure I can understand the question. Incorporating SpaceX's technology to test flights while
20:05Jason Rhian (SpaceflightInsider)you're still sending payloads to orbit. I mean, most people, they break up their test program away from space, sending payloads orbits, but you've actually managed to incorporate the two.
20:12Jason Rhian (SpaceflightInsider)Can you talk a little bit about that philosophy?
20:13Elon MuskOh, yeah, sure. Well, I guess the problem with as soon as you're going to orbit your horizontal velocity, I'm like, I really can't emphasize horizontal velocity enough because it's so counterintuitive.
20:34Elon MuskIt's super high. So it's really hard to do these test flights without actually going to orbit. We could conceivably, I suppose, put a huge weight, 120 ton weight on top of the boost stage and then do these launches, drop the 120 ton weight and then try to land.
21:01Elon MuskBut there's no point doing that. Why not just send a useful payload while you're at it instead of the dead weight? But that's why it's really hard to do these tests.
21:13Elon MuskIt's really basically impossible to do these tests on land unless you had like Siberia or something. Because it's just if something were to happen and the rocket engines didn't relight, it would have a ballistic trajectory and land like hundreds of miles away, like several.
21:31Elon MuskLike anywhere from 500 to 1,000 miles away. So it could randomly smash down on a city somewhere. That's why you want to do the ocean launches. So if it isn't able to turn around and relight the engines, then it's going to sort of smash into the ocean harmlessly.
21:56NASA moderatorWe are taking questions from social media as well. If you use AskNASA, you can also ask some questions. Let's come here to the front to Darrell.
22:04Darrell (Fox 35)Darrell nail Fox 35. This would seem like a big week for you, your car company earlier in the week, big moment for your aerospace, aerospace company today. Can you kind of talk me through what that moment was like?
22:18Darrell (Fox 35)Two questions. What that moment was like, where you were watching it, what you were feeling, you know, did you turn and hug Hans or did you Knuckle bump him.
22:29Elon MuskI have a confession to make. I didn't eat hug, Hans. Yes.
22:38Darrell (Fox 35)And then the tilt of the rocket when it came down.
22:40Elon MuskYeah, yeah, absolutely. I think the whole SpaceX team was super excited. They've all worked incredibly hard to, to get to this day and still a lot of work ahead for sure.
22:53Elon MuskBecause making the landing and the reflight easy is hard and rapid and complete reusability is the thing that's really important for the reusability to be cost effective. Like an aircraft.
23:14Elon MuskSo if an aircraft, you can recycle a 747 that went from London to Los Angeles and you can recycle that in three hours, two, three hours maybe and do another flight.
23:28Elon MuskWe've got to ultimately get rockets to that point.
23:33Darrell (Fox 35)Kind of explain.
23:34Elon MuskThe reason it's tilting is because it was quite windy, so it had winds up to 50 miles an hour on as it was coming down. So it's tilting into the wind.
23:46NASA moderatorOkay, question right here.
23:49ReporterHi, Josh Jenner with the Orbital Dot Space. First off, I just want to say congratulations. Secondly, I want to ask about the Falcon 9 Heavy. Given that it's going to be going further and faster, what will be the reuse capabilities of those stages?
24:05Elon MuskFalcon Heavy? I want to say thinking about that, this is like quite a high poker factor about Falcon Heavy that that's, you know, originally, I mean, maybe we should have named it the Falcon 27.
24:20Elon MuskWe thought maybe that people might balk at that. It's allowed engines to work simultaneously and you have three times as many separation events. So it's a lot more, it's a lot trickier of a proposition than Falcon 9.
24:40Elon MuskBut the payload capabilities are amazing and it's got a lot of potential and yeah, particularly for doing the heavy high altitude geostationary satellites that currently can only be flown by Ariane or you know, if it's a really heavy satellite.
25:07Elon MuskSo that's going to be an important mission for showing that we can do the biggest satellites in the world and then some. If Falcon Heavy, you know, if it reaches orbit, it'll be the biggest rocket to reach orbit since.
25:28Elon MuskWell, yeah, well, since by thrust, since the Space Shuttle and the Saturn V. And it'll be the biggest operating rocket today until SLS is active. So it'd be lift off thrust approaching five million pounds.
25:49Elon MuskSaturn V in the shuttle, we're about seven and a half.
25:53NASA moderatorLet's take a question here and then we'll do some social media.
25:56ReporterJD Taylor with USA in Space Again, congratulations and also congratulations on your Model 3 launch as well. How often do you plan to do ground landings and when is the next one that you're going to attempt to do?
26:11Elon MuskRight now we expect about half of our landings to be ground and then half to be ocean landings. And then over time we do want to, as we refine the performance of the rocket and it can improve the just all the elements of flight.
26:32Elon MuskAnd it's amazing how sort of a few percent improvement here and there sort of adds up and then you're able to achieve enough margin to bring it all the way back to land.
26:40Elon MuskSo we're hopeful that in the long run we'll move from say half of our missions being ocean landing to maybe a third of them or a quarter because it certainly is a lot easier to re fly the rocket if it comes back to land.
26:56Elon MuskAnd so what was the other part of the question?
27:00ReporterJust, sorry, when the next landing,
27:05Elon Musknext land landing? I think it's probably about three months away. So the next one's another, another ocean landing.
27:16Hans KoenigsmannTwo ocean landings to do. There's another CIS mission maybe that.
27:21Elon MuskYeah, I think that's probably the most likely. Yeah. So probably the third mission from now will be a land landing and the next two are quite high velocity GEO missions.
27:35Elon MuskSo these will be quite tough ship landings because it's going to come in really hot. In fact, the thing about the high velocity RE entries is that it's not just a lot of wind force, but it's a lot of heat and that the heat goes, peak heating goes with the cube of velocity.
27:56Elon MuskSo the way to understand the difficulty of achieving a given velocity is actually as the square because the kinetic energy grows as the, the square of velocity, but then the peak heating grows as the cube of velocity.
28:09Elon MuskSo it really wants to melt.
28:13NASA moderatorI think we've got a question on social media. Can you give us that one?
28:17Elon MuskSure.
28:18NASA moderatorWe have a lot of questions on social media. This one's from NASA Watch and he wants to know how many times do you think you can reuse a used first stage?
28:28Elon MuskI think some aspects of the stage will have no meaningful life, meaning you could probably do them a thousand missions. I think almost everything on the stage will be good for 10 or 20 missions and with minor refurbishment you could get to 100.
28:53NASA moderatorThis one is from Bart on Twitter and they ask, can you. This might be for the NASA folks. Can you talk about the schedule for the upcoming beam deployment on iss?
29:02NASA moderatorI don't know first.
29:04Kirk ShiremanSure. So beam's going to be installed. We're thinking about the 15th or 16th of this month. So relatively quickly after Dragon arrives, there's a certain period for thermal stabilization once it arrives and then inflation is probably not until the end of May, somewhere around 25th, 26th of May.
29:23Kirk ShiremanThere's a lot of work involved in preparing for that. And we also want a good quiescent period onboard International Space Station. As I mentioned earlier, we've had four visiting vehicles.
29:34Kirk ShiremanThis will be the fourth in four weeks. So we need a time when vehicles aren't coming and going. It turns out there's a high sun angle in the end of May, which vehicles can't come and go during that time.
29:45Kirk ShiremanAnd so it'll be a great time to inflate beams. So we're expecting, expect about the 20, 25th or 6th of May for inflation and like I said, tax day for installation on iss.
29:58NASA moderatorOkay, let's come up here and take a question right here in the front.
30:09ReporterHi, Thaddeus Cesare with the UTIC Phoenix and for Elon, I was wondering if you foresee any competing launch providers following suit with reliability or reusability. And was that a hope of yours?
30:21Elon MuskIt is.
30:21ReporterAnd what kind of edge does reusability give you over your competitors?
30:28Elon MuskI think I'm hopeful that the other launch providers will head in the direction of reusability. I think it's quite fundamental. I mean it's just as fundamental in rocketry as it is in other forms of transportation such as cars or planes or bicycles or anything.
30:51Elon MuskThe cost to refuel our rocket or reload it's actually mostly oxygen on board, is only about 200 to $300,000. But the cost of the rocket itself is 60 million.
31:04Elon MuskIt's kind of like an aircraft. Aircraft are real expensive, but not to buy, to construct and, and buy, but not expensive to refuel, relatively speaking. So it's really quite fundamental.
31:17Elon MuskLike the potential, if you've got a rocket that can be fully and rapidly reused, it's somewhere on the order of 100 fold cost reduction. In marginal cost you still have your fixed cost, but in marginal cost it's 100 fold reduction.
31:40CNN reporterDreamy mom with CNN. This is for Mr. Musk. Congratulations. And is there anything that you and your companies are working on that can top the experience that you've had today?
31:57Elon MuskThis is a good one for sure, I think. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about you Hans, but I mean, I think getting to orbit for the first time was, I mean that was probably the best one.
32:13Elon MuskWay back up through 2008 we managed to do three launches but they failed. And I actually only had the money for three launches, but we managed to, that was the original plan.
32:24Elon MuskAfter three, if we haven't succeeded, we'll, you know, maybe that should be, that's it. But we managed to scramble and put together the parts for one final launch and it worked.
32:38Elon MuskSo that Launch 4 of Falcon 1 was I think the most profound. And then first launch Falcon 9, first launch Dragon, bringing Dragon back, Landing back at the Cape.
32:54Elon MuskI'd say landing back at the Cape was next best after just getting to orbit in the first place. Absolutely. As for things in the future, I think we'll be successful ironically when it becomes boring.
33:16Elon MuskSo when it's like oh yeah, another landing. Okay, no news there, that's actually when it'll be successful. And there's still a few more things we want to do. We want to try to bring the fairing, the big nose cone back.
33:35Elon MuskAnd that'll certainly help because each of those cost several million. And Falcon Heavy should be quite, quite exciting seeing three boosters come back.
33:51NASA moderatorOkay, let's take a question right here.
33:55ReporterMark Gotch, Historical space imagery. Elon, congratulations once again you have proved to the world that you can land your rockets, whether it be on land or on a drone ship on the water.
34:10ReporterBut looking forward to this future, looking at your rockets being recovered and being reusable, looking at your success with the Dragon capsule in terms of its abort test, protecting astronauts lives for the future, looking at coupling that with your rockets, we see the foreseeable future of manned spaceflight at a very economical rate.
34:40ReporterCan you tell me you pursuing more landings on water versus land, when will you begin to go forward to your future of manned spaceflight?
34:54Elon MuskWell, the first test flights with astronauts working with NASA. Hopefully that first flight will occur towards the end of next year. And so that's going to be real exciting.
35:08Elon MuskWe're nearing the completion of Dragon 2 and we'll first do an unmanned test flight and then add crew. And we obviously want to be super careful and make sure that things are as safe as they possibly can be.
35:28Elon MuskBut yeah, it could be as soon as next year that we do the first crewed space flight. And you know, I just also just like to take a moment.
35:39Elon MuskYou know SpaceX has got 5,000 people and I get a lot of attention but they really do the work.
35:55ReporterAs you say, you come couldn't have done any of this without your dedicated people.
36:00Elon MuskYeah, so awesome team.
36:01ReporterThank you sir.
36:02Elon MuskThanks.
36:03NASA moderatorAll right, let's take a couple on the phone here. Chris Ryan, Chris Davenport from the Washington Post I think is online.
36:16Irene Klotz (Reuters)Mr. Davenport, your line is open.
36:23NASA moderatorAll right, any others on the phone? Okay. Ryan Ruggiero.
36:35Elon MuskMr. Ruggiero, your line is open.
36:42NASA moderatorAll right, let's come back here. We'll take about two more questions and that'll wrap us up. Any more over here? All right, we got one over here.
36:54ReporterRobin C. Mangle with the New York Observer. Elon, you always mention that reusable rockets is the long term goal of that is to make colonization on Mars cheaper and sustainable.
37:07ReporterCan you give us an update on Mars and the company's plans? Long term plans?
37:14Elon MuskWell, I think probably now is not the time to give a full update. I am planning on giving a talk at the International Astronautical Congress, which will be in Mexico this year in September.
37:28Elon MuskAnd I thought that would be a good venue to describe what we think would be a good approach, something that would be effective for establishing a city on Mars.
37:40Elon MuskI think it's going to sound pretty crazy, so it should be at least entertaining.
37:48NASA moderatorAll right, with that we're going to wrap up our launch coverage here for SpaceX CRS 8 and hopefully you'll look forward to our grapple coverage coming up on Sunday morning.
37:58NASA moderatorSo with that, that will conclude our briefing. Thank you very much.
38:01Elon MuskThank
38:04Reporteryou.
38:06Elon MuskCongratulations.