SpaceX BFR Lunar Mission Announcement
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:32Elon MuskSam.
1:04Yusaku Maezawa / pressSa.
1:31Yusaku Maezawa / pressIt.
1:58Elon MuskIt's sam it.
5:10Elon MuskSa.
5:37Elon MuskSam sa.
8:50Yusaku Maezawa / pressIt.
12:42Yusaku Maezawa / pressJ.
13:07NarrationIt.
13:33Elon MuskIt's.
13:58Yusaku Maezawa / pressIt.
14:26Elon MuskSam.
14:51Yusaku Maezawa / pressSa.
15:18Yusaku Maezawa / pressSam.
15:44Yusaku Maezawa / pressSa.
25:17Elon MuskAll right, let's see what can you get me. Okay, so you can. Great. Well, welcome. We're incredibly excited to talk more about the BFR rocket and announce the first private astronaut, first a private citizen that's going to go into space.
25:40Elon MuskAnd I'm going to start off with just talking about VFR and you know, kind of how we got to this point.
25:54Elon MuskSo the purpose of SpaceX, the reason for the, for creating SpaceX was to accelerate the advent of humanity, becoming a space faring civilization, to help advance rocket technology to the point where we could potentially become a multi planet species and a true space faring civilization.
26:21Elon MuskSo as we consider sort of the fossil record, the history of civilization, it's important to bear in mind like there could be some natural event or some man made event that ends civilization as we know it and or in life as we know it.
26:44Elon MuskAnd so it's important that we try to become a multi planet civilization, extend life beyond Earth and to do so as quickly as we can. That window of opportunity may be open for a long time, or it may be open for a short time, but we should not assume that it is open for a long time.
27:03Elon MuskWe should take action and become a multi planet civilization as soon as possible. That's kind of like the defensive reason I do want to emphasize it's multi planetary, not single planet, but somewhere else.
27:21Elon MuskWe want to become a multi planet civilization, have life on Mars moon, maybe Venus, the moon's Jupiter throughout the solar system and then ultimately extend life beyond the solar system to other star systems.
27:41Elon MuskI think that's the future that's incredibly exciting. I think that's the future that we want. And you know, there's, there's so many things that make people sad or depressed about the future, but I think becoming a spacefaring civilization is one of those things that makes you excited about the future, makes you excited to get up in the morning.
28:01Elon MuskLike this is something that you can look forward to, that makes you glad to be a human being. I hope that people will see it that way. That is the intent of BFR is to make people excited about the future.
28:33Elon MuskSo this is sort of an illustration of what it'd be like on Mars. Mars base and when I talk about it will show you like this is where we were 10 years ago.
28:45Elon MuskSo we're almost at the 10th anniversary of SpaceX's first flight to orbit. So that was 2008.
28:58Elon MuskYeah, September 2008, first time we made orbit, and we had three attempts before that that did not succeed.
29:30Elon MuskSo we, so we'd had three attempts to reach orbit, and then the fourth one, the fourth attempt, reached orbit in September 2008. And if we had not reached orbit on that attempt, the SpaceX would no longer would not exist.
29:44Elon MuskSo that was the fourth and final possibility of reaching orbit. That was a very, very tough launch, emotional. But fortunately that launch did make it to orbit. And then not long after that, we won our first really major NASA contract or won the Space Station servicing contract.
30:09Elon MuskAnd those are two things that were instrumental in SpaceX's success. Then that brings us to where we were earlier this year, which was the launch of Falcon Heavy. So we went from Falcon 1, being just a little rocket that could launch only half a ton to low Earth orbit and had no reusability, to Falcon Heavy, which is the most powerful rocket in the world by a factor of two, with enough payload to orbit capability to put a fully loaded 737 passengers, Pool passengers, fuel and luggage into orbit.
30:52Elon MuskAnd we're able to launch sort of a fun payload, which is, you know, a Tesla Roadster with sort of a Starman mannequin to Mars orbit. So we able to launch eight quite a heavy payload to Mars orbit and bring the two side boosters back and land them back at Cape Canaveral.
31:22Elon MuskThe center core didn't land successfully, but we'll be able to do that, we think, in a subsequent launch. But it was a massive change over the course of 10 years to go from just barely being able to get to orbit to the most powerful launch vehicle in the world by a factor of two to have a full reusability of the, of the boost stage.
31:45Elon MuskWe've now done missions where there's, we've launched the boost stage several times, which is like quite, quite great. And then we've been able to refly our Dragon spacecraft. So it's an enormous change over the course of 10 years.
32:02Elon MuskAnd I think there would be. If you say, like, okay, how many people predicted in 2008 that SpaceX would have done these things by 2018? I think zero. That's my, I think zero.
32:19Elon MuskLike, I'm not sure it's zero, but I'm, I'm not aware of anyone who had made that prediction, including me, by the way, I would have said this is unlikely.
32:30Elon MuskNonetheless, in 10 years, go from tiny rockets barely making it to orbit to world's biggest rocket by far, with reusable boost stages and sending a car To Mars. A lot of people don't understand like why we sent a car to Mars.
32:47Elon MuskObviously that's a bit confusing. Why would you send a car to Mars? That's bizarre. But the real reason was we want to just have something that was, was fun and that people could identify with.
32:58Elon MuskAnd normally when a company creates a new rocket, they like just launch like a slab of concrete or something. I was like, well, that's pretty boring. So we wanted something that was, that was fun and that felt like you could maybe be there.
33:16Elon MuskAnd that was like the reasoning behind the car and the astronauts north in the car. That was a tribute to David Bowie and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and a few other things.
33:29Elon MuskAnd there's also the Asimov foundation series etched in glass in the glove compartment. So that's. In fact Asimov's foundation series is a key inspiration for SpaceX.
33:52Elon MuskSo just an update on vfr itself.
33:59Elon MuskSo the design, the production design of BFR is different in some important ways from what I presented about a year ago. Overall, it is 118 meters long. The payload is still similar.
34:17Elon MuskIt's about 100 metric tons. That's 100 metric tons to, well, actually technically 100 metric tons to all the way to Mars because of orbital refueling, orbital retanking. So BFR is able to, is likely to be able to take 100 tons of all the way to the surface of Mars or to any, well, surface of Mars, maybe Ceres.
34:44Elon MuskBut. But if you have a propellant depot on Mars, you're able to get from Mars to the asteroid belt to the moons of Jupiter and kind of like planet moon hop all the way to the outer solar system.
34:57Elon MuskSo BFR is really intended as an interplanetary transportation transport system that's capable of getting from Earth to anywhere in the solar system as you establish propellant depots along the way.
35:20Elon MuskYeah, so we've increased the payload section to be over 1,000 cubic meters. I think it'll probably end up being probably something around 1100 cubic meters. There are forward actuated fins and rear actuated fins.
35:41Elon MuskThe way that BFR flies is somewhat counterintuitive. If you apply your sort of normal intuition, it will not make sense. I'll try to illustrate that in this presentation.
36:05Elon MuskSo there's the two forward actuated flaps and then there are two rear actuated wings or fins or flaps, depending on what. They're not exactly comparable to anything else out there.
36:20Elon MuskBut you kind of want, you kind of want four control surfaces to be able to control the vehicle through a wide range of atmospheric densities and velocities.
36:31Yusaku Maezawa / pressSo the
36:34Elon Muskway it operates is kind of more like a skydiver than an aircraft. Almost the entire time when it's reentering, it is just trying to, to break, it's just trying to stop.
36:48Elon MuskSo it's, it's doing everything it can to shed velocity while distributing that force over the most amount of surface area possible. So the two of the three rear fins actuate.
37:03Elon MuskThey're like giant wings. Actually requires an enormous amount of force to move those, to move those wings. Sort of in the Meganewton class of force. The third fin or wing like structure is actually does not actuate and it is not a vertical stabilizer as may appear.
37:29Elon MuskIt is actually just a leg. So during the high velocity portion of entry, it's in the lee of the wind and, and it really doesn't have any aerodynamic purpose and it's really just a leg.
37:42Elon MuskIt looks the same as the other ones for purposes of the symmetry. So this is a true physics simulation of BFR re entering.
38:01Elon MuskSo it is mostly just coming in like this.
38:11Elon MuskAt a very high angle of attack. In fact, one of the things that for the general public is a tricky thing to understand is that orbit means you are zooming around the Earth at a very high speed.
38:24Yusaku Maezawa / pressPeople.
38:25Elon MuskIt's slightly, it's counterintuitive where people think perhaps once you get to a certain altitude, gravity turns off. This is not the case. In order to go up and stay up, you have to move around the earth at approximately 25 times the speed of sound.
38:43Elon MuskSo in fact, the space station is circling the Earth every 90 minutes. This is a very important concept to understand that orbit is, is a, is entirely about your speed.
38:57Elon MuskHorizontal to the ground or parallel to the ground, it isn't. It is going up and staying up is the only reason you need altitude at all is to get out of atmospheric drag.
39:10Elon MuskSo if Earth didn't have an atmosphere, you could orbit 1 meter or like 3.28ft above the ground, no problem. Well, a little dodgy, but it's technically possible. So yeah, if you looked at that simulation, it might be worth playing that again, actually.
39:40Elon MuskSo you can see it's basically coming in if this is the Earth, if this stage is the Earth, it's coming in like that and it's just using its entire body to brake and it sort of goes like that and slows down and then it falls like a skydiver and then it rights itself, fires the engine and lands on the fins I mean this will look really epic in person.
40:05Elon MuskAgain, looks like guaranteed to be exciting.
40:13Elon MuskYou can see it sort of falling body first for quite a while.
40:23Elon MuskIt's really quite gentle. You're just sort of falling at terminal velocity for quite a long time. Very gentle fall, just sort of like floating down and then it writes itself at the end, fires the engines and lands.
40:41Elon MuskIt's very counterintuitive. It's not like anything that people are familiar with. It's not like an airplane or. Yeah.
40:54Elon MuskAnd then obviously if you're landing on the moon, you don't need any aerodynamic surfaces at all because you just, there's no, no error. You just need thrusters.
41:10Elon MuskSo the next steps with BFR are we're obviously we're going to build it or we are building it. This is a picture of the main cylinder section of BFR.
41:22Elon MuskSo VFR is 9 meters in diameter. It's really quite enormous. You can, that, you can get a sense of scale. Like that is the, that's to scale. So that gives you a sense of, of the size of the vehicle.
41:38Elon MuskQuite enormous. But we are, we're already building it. So we've built the first cylinder section. So that's the first actual cylinder section of the BFR prototype. And we'll be building the, the domes and the engine section soon.
42:01Elon MuskAnd then this is the Raptor engine.
42:08Elon MuskThis is the Raptor engine that will power bfr. Both the ship and the booster, it's the same engine. And this is approximately a 200 ton thrust engine that's aiming for roughly 300 bar or 300 atmosphere chamber pressure and depending upon if you have it at a high expansion ratio, has the potential to be having a specific impulse above 380.
42:41Elon MuskBut it's, and it's a stage combustion full flow gas gas for those who are interested in technical details. Like I really, this is, I'm really excited about this engine design.
42:55Elon MuskI think the SpaceX propulsion team has done an amazing job on this engine design and, and the SpaceX structure is an error. Like really, SpaceX team has done a phenomenal job in design of this, of this.
43:06Elon MuskIt's like super great. Like hold on guys. I mean,
43:17Elon MuskBut like this is, this is a stupidly hard problem and SpaceX engineering has I think done a great job with this design. It's like, like I don't think most people even in, in the, in the aerospace industry like know what question to ask.
43:35Elon MuskLike it took us a long time, time to even frame the question correctly, but once we could frame the question correctly the answer was, I wouldn't say easy, but the answer flowed once the engine, once the question could be framed with precision.
43:54Elon MuskFraming that question with precision was very difficult.
44:01Elon MuskOh yeah. So this is the trajectory. So we'll, yeah, take off to have booster separation, going to parking orbits, do a translunar injection fly around the moon and then come back and land.
44:20Elon MuskYeah, that should take a few, you know, basically about four or five days
44:29Yusaku Maezawa / pressand
44:32Elon Muskbe very exciting. Very exciting indeed. We'll do, we'll do a bunch of test launches without any people on board before having people on board. To be clear, it's going to be very important to test this vehicle thoroughly before putting anyone on, on board.
44:51Elon MuskYeah, but I can't wait. Like, I'm super fired up about this. This is amazing. So funding VFR is definitely a key question. And you know, that's really where,
45:08Narrationyou
45:09Elon Muskknow, we need to seek, you know, every possible means of funding. Obviously we've got launching of satellites, we've got servicing the space station. So we've been transporting cargo to and from the space station for several years now.
45:28Elon MuskAnd next year we'll start transporting astronauts to and from the space station. We've got the Starlink global broadband system that we're developing, which will also be at key source revenue.
45:45Elon MuskBut then private customers or any customers for BFR are incredibly helpful in funding the development of the rocket.
45:58Yusaku Maezawa / pressSo.
46:02Elon MuskThat's where I'd like to introduce the first paying customer of bfr. So see would please come forward.
46:18Yusaku Maezawa / pressYeah.
46:40Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you, Hiro. Thank you everyone. Wow. I am from Japan. My name is Usage Maezawa. You can call me M.C. please. Thank you.
46:58Elon MuskThank you.
46:59Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you. Thanks for coming to this conference today and thanks for watching live streaming in the Internet today. Yeah, finally I can say, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon.
47:21Yusaku Maezawa / pressYeah, finally I can say I'm very glad to be here and I really exciting and really honored, really appreciate to be able to share with, to be shared this announcement with you and people all over the world.
47:42Yusaku Maezawa / pressBefore talking about the moon and this project, I'd like to introduce myself a little bit. Okay. Yeah. Oh, I cannot speak English very well. So please listen carefully, please.
48:00Yusaku Maezawa / pressYeah,
48:04Yusaku Maezawa / pressYou can see next photo. This is me. I was at State Boulder. And does anyone know where this is? No. This is Santa Monica. Yay. Yeah, I had been here.
48:24Yusaku Maezawa / pressI had been Santa Monica Los Angeles when I was 18 years old and I was skateboarder. I was so impressed by America, its fashion, music, art and culture. And of course nice people like you kind American people.
48:46Yusaku Maezawa / pressPeople is very kind. Yes. And after six months of staying here, I returned back to Japan and started music. Next photo please. I played drums for the band. Our band music is so loud so you don't have to listen to.
49:07Yusaku Maezawa / pressBut I was ex musician. And after the band I came started my own company. Please. Yes. My company is founded 20 years ago by me. So this year my company's 20th anniversary.
49:27Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you. And finally we started our private fashion label. That name is Zozo. Z O. Z O. And the Zozo slogan is P Unique. P Equal. We are all unique at the same time.
49:47Yusaku Maezawa / pressWe are all equal. It's important for us. Yeah. You can check our website. ZIO0.com Zozo.com later. Thank you. Okay, that's all about me. So let's move talking about the moon and this project.
50:05Yusaku Maezawa / pressOkay? Yeah. Now onto the main topic of the day. Many of you may be wondering, why do I want to go to the moon? What do I want to do there?
50:19Yusaku Maezawa / pressAnd most of all, why did I purchase the entire bfr? Enter your bfr. Very huge. For me, this project is very meaningful. I thought long and hard about how valuable it would be become the first private passenger to go to the moon.
50:43Yusaku Maezawa / pressAt the same time, I thought about how I can give back to the world and how this can contribute to world peace. This is my lifelong dream today. Thank you.
50:58Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you. Today I'd like to tell you about my plans. Okay. Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon just staring. The moon filled my imagination.
51:16Yusaku Maezawa / pressIt's always there and has continued to inspire humanity. That is why I could not pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close. And at the same time, I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself.
51:35Yusaku Maezawa / pressThat would be a little lonely. I don't like being alone. So I want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. So that is why I choose to go to the moon.
51:50Yusaku Maezawa / pressI choose to go to the moon with artists. With artists. From now, I choose to invite artists from around the world on my journey. The first artist I thought of was.
52:09Yusaku Maezawa / pressDo you know Jam Misha Basquiat? You know? As you can see, I am wearing a Comedy Garrison T shirt featuring Jean Michel Basquiat. He already passed away. He's New York artist.
52:26Yusaku Maezawa / pressOne day when I was staring at his painting, I thought, what if Basquiat had gone to space and had seen the moon up close? Or saw the earth in tribute?
52:39Yusaku Maezawa / pressWhat wonderful masterpiece would he have created? Just thinking about it now gets my Heart racing. But once I got started, I could not stop thinking about who else but if Picasso had gone to the moon, or Andy Warhol, or Michael Jackson, or John Lennon or Coco Chanel.
53:06Yusaku Maezawa / pressThese are all artists that I adore. But sadly they are no longer with us. But this is when I thought there are so many artists with us today that I wish to create amazing works of art for humankind, for children of the next generation generation.
53:29Yusaku Maezawa / pressAnd I wished very much that such artists could go to space, see the moon up close and the Earth in full view and create works that reflect their experience.
53:43Yusaku Maezawa / pressThis is a project that I designed and made. Dear Moon,
53:54Yusaku Maezawa / pressI'd like to introduce details about Yamroom in 2023. As a host, I'd like to invite six to eight artists from around the world to join me on this mission to the Moon.
54:12Yusaku Maezawa / pressThese artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us. Needless to say, we have always been inspired by the Moon.
54:31Yusaku Maezawa / pressTake for example Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata, our Van Gogh, the Starry Night and the Beatles. Mr. Moonlight. These are countless number of works that have been inspired the Moon all around the world through the ages.
54:49Yusaku Maezawa / pressThe Moon has fueled our imagination and with utmost love and respect for the Moon, our planet's constant partner, I named this project Dear Moon. At the moment, I have not decided which artists I'd like to invite, but if possible, I would like to reach out to top artists that represent our planet from various spheres, including painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, film directors, fashion designers, architects, etc.
55:28Yusaku Maezawa / pressLuckily, we still have some time before 2023, so I hope to work very closely with SpaceX team and to research out to each artist personally. By the way, if you should hear from me, please say yes and accept my invitation.
55:45Yusaku Maezawa / pressPlease. Please don't say no. Okay? In any case, there is still a lot that I cannot announce today. Sorry. So I will continue to provide regular updates. We have also created a special website for dearMoon which will go live after the press conference, so please take a look.
56:12Yusaku Maezawa / pressDomain will be diamoon us dearMoon us please check out and I will also keep posting on my social media accounts, so please follow my accounts as well. Okay. So what did you think about this project?
56:34Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you, thank you.
56:41Yusaku Maezawa / pressI was so nervous because my English is poor, but I am glad I got through it. Thank you. And I hope my English was not too painful to you to listen to.
56:56Yusaku Maezawa / pressLastly, to give you a summary of what I just tried to describe about the Dear Moon you can see the video from now, please.
57:40NarrationIt has been 50 years since Apollo 8 achieved lunar orbit in 1968, the time has come for civilians to fly to the moon. In 2023, SpaceX will launch the world's first private lunar mission with its spacecraft bfr.
58:05NarrationThe first passenger will be Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, a globally renowned art collector who believes art has the power to promote world peace. Maezawa made a bold decision.
58:24NarrationA painter, photographer, musician, film director, fashion designer, Maezawa will invite artists that represent Earth on his journey to the moon. The distance to the moon is 240,000 miles.
58:50NarrationThe crew will spend a week in space. What will they feel when they see the moon? When they see Earth in full view, and what will they create? Their works will certainly become a legacy for humankind.
59:11NarrationAn awe inspiring global universal art project is about to begin. Dear moon,
59:39Yusaku Maezawa / pressThank you very much and thank you, elon and the SpaceX team for making today possible. I'm very exciting. Thank you very much. That's all, thank you.
1:00:58Elon MuskAll right, so can we do some Q and A? Let's hear. Sorry.
1:01:03Yusaku Maezawa / pressYeah, great.
1:01:06Elon MuskHow did the questions get asked? I'm not actually sure. Hi, Eli. Ken Chang from New York Times. Oh, okay. So in the past two years you've seen three designs for this rocket and it's five years before you plan to send these people to the moon.
1:01:26Elon MuskHave you finalized this? Are you still planning the Hopper test next year? And could you sort of give more details of how you plan all these tests to be ready in 2023?
1:01:37Elon MuskAre you planning an uncrewed mission to the moon and back? Yeah. So you followed the whole progress of the design and indeed of SpaceX itself. So you've got quite a lot of background.
1:01:55Elon MuskThis, I feel like this is the final iteration in terms of broad architecture, architectural decisions for bfr, bfs.
1:02:10Elon MuskThere are a few ways to. There's more than one way to solve this problem. And the prior design, the most iteration before this decoupled the landing legs from the control control surfaces and had essentially six legs and then two actuating rear flaps.
1:02:38Elon MuskI actually did not like the aesthetics of that design. And so we have the three sort of large legs with two of them actually as body flaps or large moving wings.
1:02:59Elon MuskEffectively,
1:03:05Elon MuskI think this design is probably on par with the other one. It might be better. It's slightly riskier technically because of the coupling legs and sort of the actuating wing fin flaps, but I think it's the right decision.
1:03:29Elon MuskOverall, I think it looks beautiful and I love the tintin rocket design. So I kind of wanted to bias it towards that. Yeah, I think that go with Tinson and then additional flights.
1:03:48Elon MuskWe're going to do a lot of test flights. So we still anticipate doing hopper flights next year. And then depending upon how well this go, we'll do high altitude, high velocity flights with the ship in 2020 and and also start doing tests of the booster.
1:04:15Elon MuskAnd if things go well, we could be doing the first orbital flights in about two to three years and then we'll do many such test flights before putting any people on board.
1:04:36Elon MuskI'm not sure if we will actually test a flight around the moon or not, but probably we will try to do that without people before sending people. That would be wise.
1:04:55Yusaku Maezawa / pressHi, I'm Toshi Ogata from the Japanese newspaper called Asahi Shimba. Mr. Musk, you chose a Japanese citizen for the first passenger.
1:05:07Elon MuskHe chose us.
1:05:09Yusaku Maezawa / pressWhat? Oh, okay. But what's your, what's your message behind, behind that you the first passenger was Japanese citizen instead of US citizen or the rest of the world. What's your message to the rest of the world through this announcement?
1:05:32Elon MuskWell, he is I think the bravest person and most willing to do so. And he was the best adventurer.
1:05:46Yusaku Maezawa / pressI think.
1:05:52Elon MuskHe stepped forward to do it. To be clear, this is, you know, it's really, we're honored that he would choose us. This is not us choosing him. Yeah, I would defer to comments, you know, maybe you'd like to make some comments.
1:06:11Elon MuskBut he's a very brave person to do this and because he is paying a lot of money, we're not disclosing the amount, but he is paying a lot of money that will help with the development of this ship and booster and ultimately this system, BFR system, is intended to be able to carry anyone to orbit and to the moon and to Mars.
1:06:37Elon MuskAnd so he is ultimately helping pay for the average citizen to be able to travel to other planets. It's a great thing.
1:06:56Elon MuskYou know, I hope this is really seen as a very positive thing and something that people are excited about. It's dangerous. To be clear, this is dangerous. This is no, you know, walk in the park here.
1:07:12Elon MuskYou know, this will require a lot of training and it's, it's not. Again, it's like, you know, when you're pushing the frontier, it's not a sure thing. You know, it's, it's not like just taking an air flight somewhere.
1:07:29Elon MuskThere's some chance that something could go wrong. You know, we'll do everything we can to minimize that. But whenever it's the first flight of something on a new technology and we're talking about deep space, you have to be a very brave person to do that.
1:07:46Elon MuskThis is not no small matter.
1:07:54Elon MuskDavid Curley from ABC News. Two quick questions. It's impossible to know where the mic's coming from. Sorry.