Elon Musk - 2020 Mars Society Virtual Convention

okay he's here i want right here okay perfect okay so uh well elon you need no introduction but for those who don't know you are the founder and chief engineer of spacex and into the mars society and we're delighted to have you back we've got 9 000 people registered to hear you today all right cool sounds good okay so you should like change this perspective let's see if i can change perspective is that better or is that worse i think you were better before okay okay so listen uh why don't we just start out with the basics you started uh spacex to make humanity multi-planetary um yeah why do you see that as a critical goal yes um i think uh we want to be on track to become a multi-pass species and and a space breaking civilization in order to find out what the universe is all about like what you know uh and ensure the continuance of consciousness as we know it as far as we know we're the only life i mean people think there's aliens but honestly i haven't seen any sign of aliens um so as far as we know we're the only the the only life uh whether we could be the only life so let's put that away and we need to take the set of actions that are most likely to make the future good and result in the continuance of consciousness as we know it okay so okay well obviously your means to that end is if you open the space frontier with reusable launch vehicles and uh you've gone through some partially useful ones and now it's starship can you explain the basically the line of thinking that led you to the starship design i forgot what i need to look at just look like i'm looking at the camera um so let's see well on the starship front um we've gone through many iterations uh starting from not really knowing how to build rockets at all uh with with falcon one and having four failures actually in reaching orbit uh through yeah there's sorry three failures and then the fourth one got to open so fourth one is a charm um so we only barely survived um i was at zero cash basically when we got that fourth one to orbit um and if that fourth one hadn't worked we would have been curtains so it's definitely not been smooth sailing uh it's been a very difficult uh ride um with just a lot that has been discovered along the way uh i'm just just trying to figure out what questions to ask about the design was was quite difficult i think it's helpful to have as the objective the creation of a self-sustaining city on mars i think this is this has to be the objective not simply a few people or a base but a self-sustaining city um the acid test really is if these if the ships from earth stop coming for any reason does mars die out for any reason it could be from but it could be banal or it could be nucleon again it doesn't matter if the if the ship stop coming for any reason does the city on mars die out if it does we have not we're not in a secure place um so i mean i think this really might come down to you know on the the great filter front is this are we going to create a self-sustaining city on wash before or after world war three and i think the probability of it being created after world war iii hopefully that hopefully there's never a world war iii but of after is low so we should try to create let's make this city self-sustaining before any possible world three this is just a risk this is not you know i think sometimes people have difficulty dealing with with probability to see that this way or that way but it's really we just face a series of probabilities um and uh there's some chance that we will have a giant war or through a volcano or you know a comet might hit the earth or we might just self-extinguish in some uh it might be more of a more of a whimper than a bang um yeah and frankly right now civilization's not looking super strong you know this is looking a little rickety right now frank clearly more able to divert asteroids from hitting the earth and uh uh otherwise help yeah um it's not it's not an escape vehicle it's it's a it's simply uh something that it's like you can i mean less modest mars is made self-sustaining which will probably not happen in my lifetime um it is certainly not it's mean it's meaningless to have an escape uh you know life boat or or or escape hatch or something if you will you're simply moving to another place where you will soon die out that doesn't count so much of a lifeboat really um so this is really about actually minimizing existential risk for civilization as a whole and and then uh having an exciting future that you can look forward to and a future where we are a space breaking civilization and uh multi-planet species is far more exciting than one where we are not um i mean that's an exciting future and being forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event is depressing and not fun and we need things that make you want to get out of bed in the morning and be excited about the future and i think being a spacefaring civilization is one of those things that everyone get can get excited about um but can you um maybe just kind of leave people on the path that led you from the design but from falcon 9 to falcon heavy but now starship is is rather different than falcon heavy um yeah the engineers really absolutely didn't quite answer your original question you first have to say what what is the goal um and once you have what is the goal you can then measure the various designs against that goal if otherwise you're saying how are you evaluating why is one design better than another what's your goal it's gotta be a goal so the goal is get enough tonnage to mars to enough people to make mars self-sustaining as quickly as possible so then you say okay let's back back out the math on this we're going to need we're going to need a lot of tonnage uh maybe i don't know 100 000 tons maybe a million tons so you can't be faffing around with these expandable rockets they're a joke they're absurd even saturn five is tiny potatoes um we need it because if you want to get like let's say first order approximation um a million tons the surface of mars um inclusive of people uh you know that that means probably something around four or five million useful tons of payload in the into a low earth orbit you know for every time you get to low with over you're going to get four or five tons pro hopefully closer to five it's it's you know these this math is is you really start squeezing like tiny percentages but let's say it comes to confidently if you've got five tons to low earth orbit you can get one time to mars that's that's confident maybe you can get i mean maybe you only need four anyway the point is you need five million tons into earth orbit to get one million tons to mars now let's put this into perspective total global capacity to orbit of all expandable rockets is around around five for 600 tons i think and if you said okay the world's going to end if you do not increase your capacity perhaps they could do a thousand tons okay so that's uh one five five thousandth one five thousandth of what's needed this is ridiculous um you know um it's it's not even you know point one percent would be you know one thousandth so way less than point one percent we have way less than point point one percent of the capability needed to create a if everyone went full tilt with expandable rockets experimental rockets are the absolute are just utterly stupid in my opinion utterly stupid um they're a complete waste of time people should stop wasting their time if you try to sell an expendable plane people would laugh you out of the room if you're trying to sell an expendable car they would laugh you out of the room if you're trying to access an expandable horse they would laugh you out of the room and think there's something wrong with you mentally so all these things are reusable it's essential to be reusable now creating a reusable rocket orbital rocket is very difficult doing a suborbital reusable rocket is easy doing a reusable oval rocket is hard um even when a lot of smart people have put quite a bit of effort into it they might get two or three percent of the electric mass to lower the orbit um and a really epic rocket would get four um i'm not sure every i think anyone's ever gotten four um so but you basically need to have something that in expendable form would probably get about four percent of its payload to orbit such that you can spend about half of that four percent uh on reusability and and still net out to around two percent of paler toolbooth um so you have to make both the booster and the upper stage and the fairing everything reusable with falcon 9 so so with falcon 1 we did actually attempt to do this so we had a parachute in the first stage um but really did not appreciate that that first stage was going to hit the atmosphere like a concrete wall so at first i got pretty mad at the parachute supplier until i realized yeah it's not their fault yeah we were just being cool that that thing was exploding as soon as it hit the atmosphere and uh you know so you really got to do something uh to um ease the transition into the atmosphere at high mach number it's very hot and there's a lot of force and a lot of heat so then with falcon 9 we made a bigger rocket um and our scale matters here because you do get basically economies of scale you can't have a tiny rocket um there's a tiny rocket you basically just end up carrying your electronics to orbit so your avionics you know so in a little rocket uh you if you're small enough the just your your avionics loan uh ends up being a significant percentage of your payload and then you and you know if you had a rocket that was i don't know they're trying to get a 10 000 pound rocket for example or even a ten thousand kilogram rocket to orbit i think you would basically get zero payload now as you get bigger the rocket gets bigger but the brain doesn't get bigger the brain can stay the same size so your avionics for example uh become almost not almost zero percent of the weight at a for a big rocket um then for big rockets you also get uh gauge advantages so this is we're really in the nuances of rocket design and manufacturing here if things are very small it's difficult to get your gauge accurate um so basically how thick is the material um like you want to do castings for example there's a minimum gauge or thickness for a casting there's a minimum kind of error bar on the [Music] you know on this the the material skins uh even for a composite rocket you've got you know you start getting granularity issues as you get bigger uh you know you're no longer gauge limited um and you can get your percentage accuracy on the thickness of walls and castings can be can be very good um these are nuances that i think almost no one appreciates but it's nice to say that there are advantages to size um and you can certainly see this in many walks of life where uh if you've got a truck that's carrying cargo you it's more efficient to have a big semi truck not a bunch of little trucks um for ships uh it would be pretty silly to see container ships uh or containers going across the ocean one at a time with little outboard motors that would be silly you put them on a container ship you have big ships not little little tiny ships um so anyway so size matters it really does um and full reusability matters so with falcon 9 after immense effort we were able to achieve reusability of the booster um and um we're mostly achieving reusability at this point with the fairing as well um but this is a this is a monumental effort uh and i think within its architecture falcon 9 is close to a local maximum if you say your gas generator cycle kerosene oxygen vehicle of this particular size with a 12 foot or 3.6 meter diameter which is which is that size for because of road transport limitations so if you go bigger than that you can transport it over the road and your logistics costs become extreme um so but having a long thin rocket is not very mass efficient um you're you're not having to have thicker skins to take out the bending moment um so and then having like kerosene is not the right fuel methane is a much better fuel you can get higher isp um a specific impulse basically efficiency i mean for those who i think probably a lot of us are listening know what the rocket equation is but in simple terms it's actually it's very simple it's like a rocket is going to go further yeah if if the gas if it shoots the gas out of the end faster and if a bigger percentage of its mass is propellant it is obvious so that's what that's what the rocket equation says um so should gas out faster um in the right direction and increase the propellant uh the percentage profile that's going to get you go allow you to go further with methane you can shoot it out faster and you can make it on mars you make it on mars for sure um exactly so um being able to do institute profound development is production is very important um so you don't have to carry your return fuel with you or return fuel and oxygen it's like um rockets are mostly oxygen or oxidizer so um and there's there's some other subtle advantages with a oxygen methane system in that you can go to a higher percentage uh a higher mass ratio of oxygen so with kerosene you'd be about roughly two and a half to one oxygen to fuel mass ratio with uh methane you're more like three and a half to one and you actually want that higher mass ratio because oxygen is very dense um and it's inexpensive um especially on earth so you're gonna you know you have all these plants just making oxygen all day long and plant them just making oxygen um never do anything so the cost of oxygen is basically the cost of electricity um anyway so going from falcon um going from you know um kerosene which is basically the same as jet fuel it's like rp1 rock profound great kerosene is just um a tighter grade of jet fuel um you want to go from that to something which has where the gas shoots out faster and that's methane and where um in situ production of propellant is easier um so that's that's why the change from from kerosene to methane methane is just ch4 it's one carbon four hydrogens um and then the oxygen pairs pairs together so you have it's it's called o2 because oxygen pair bonds um and obviously you know all this stuff i'm just basically hoping for that for the audience together large size uh twice to take off thrust of a saturn v but about the same payload but that gives you reusability much cheaper in situ propellant it all is coherent uh and uh so let me ask you with the thing that i think everybody wants to know uh which is uh when um when are we gonna see starship do a high fly to the stratosphere went to orbit when first payload to mars the first humans to mars all right well it's not like i i we're obviously venturing into unknown territory so it's not as though i i have all these secret dates and i i and i i'm you know just keeping them from people but so so that might these are just guesses obviously um i i'm pretty i'd say i'm 80 to 90 confident that we will reach orbit with starship next year um i i think probably 50 or 60 50 confident that we'll be able to bring the ship and booster back that's that's more of a dicey situation um we'll probably lose a few ships before we we really get the atmospheric return and landing right uh we might lose hopefully we don't you lose it uh hopefully we don't lose any boosters because that's a lot of engines um our initial booster flights will just have maybe two to four engines um not twenty eight twenty eight selected engines so um yeah and then i think we'll probably be in um good doing high volume flights i think probably in 2022 so a couple years from now um i'm trying to make sure that that our rate of innovation increases it does not decrease this is really essential in fact if we do not see something close to an exponential improvement in our rate of innovation we will not reach mars like a pure linear doesn't get there not well i'll be down anyway before it gets there if it's pure linear it's exponential i think we could get to mars we could probably send an uncrewed mission there in maybe four years um you know there's a mass conjunction every 26 months there's one this year so that means in a couple years from now is another one and then four years from now is another one i i i think we've got a fighting chance of of making the that second uh moz transfer window so one thing that is really um amazing uh about uh spacex to those of us who have experience in the aerospace industry is is the rate of innovation uh you know okay last time you spoke to the mars society convention was 2012 since then you've made the falcon unusable introduced falcon heavy uh crude dragon a satellite constellation and you're in the middle of developing starship um so what what is your you know what would you say is your methodology that allows you to innovate so swiftly i don't really know uh we're focused on like said it's it is important to have that that have the objective your right um that's why i was talking so much about the importance of making well mars a self-sustaining is building a self-sustaining city on mars if if that's the objective then obviously you know just putting some satellites in orbit or is not that that's not important you have to achieve full and rapid reusability amp size full and rapid reusability is only relevant to the degree as rapid and complete and and then you also have to do orbital refilling this is essential as well and uh and then propellant production on mars also essential so uh you know and with that as the goal and you know that that means that that that creates i think a good forcing function for radical innovation because in the absence of radical innovation we have no chance of meeting that goal um whereas if i go simply you know defeat lockheed and boeing or something like that that we would probably achieve we've already done it that really wasn't even a thing you know i wish it was um yeah like they're they're not really trying to do not even trying to do reusability which is bizarre because they make planes that are reusable um so i mean if they if they talk to the you know if they talk to one of their customers about bias or a lucky fighter jet or a boeing aircraft like hey we're going to sell you a 737 it can be used once and it's not 737 max but that was that turns out that was the thing that you started playing at times um but it really uh would it would be an absurd thing for them to sell a single-use aircraft but they feel quite comfortable selling a single-use rocket um and anyway but if our goal is simply we're gonna have to be the leaders in uh launching the conventional satellites that exist uh we would probably approach that in on a sort of a logarithmic basis where you know you get there and you sort of slowly make progress towards doing 10 launches a year 12 launches a year and while they do six or something like that um but since the goal is hey we need to make life multi-planetary before it's too late um and time really matters so we're our states also it's like we're shooting for mars not just the moon it's not much suit for the moon shoot for mars and then and then the you know these these competitive things are are kind of small things along the way unless somebody else is shooting for mars they will not be competitive with something as pedestrian as launching a few satellites into earth orbit so how how can the mars society help you well i do think there's in order to for there to be a self-sustaining city on mars there's we're going to need an intersection of sets here um one set is the set of people that want to go and can either find sponsorship you can either for themselves or find government sponsorship or take out a loan whatever the case may be um and but somehow you've got to have the set of people who want to go to mars and can se and can come up with the funds somehow to do that and then then you know it's it's i should say there's two sets desire to go to mars and can afford to go to mars when it's when desire to go to the people who want to go to mars uh and people who could afford to go to mars when that intersection of sets reaches a million roughly then i think we will have this city on mars um so we need both the the motivation and the the you know we need both the means and the way i mean we need away so when the will and the way intersect then we will have a well-dependent species the world in the way must intersect so i think the mars society can really help with the will okay you provide the way we'll provide the will yes exactly uh okay now uh your assistant jen uh told me earlier that you have a hard cut off at the uh half hour is that true or do you want to uh stay and take some questions from the audience yeah we could do maybe 5-10 minutes of questions all right great so um i i've got a hundred question questions so uh with the uh jim do you want to read a question or two yeah sure thing uh hi elon my name is james burke i'm from seattle washington where's the best place to land on mars do you think yeah actually i'm not super sure um i can tell you what the criteria are that you'd want you'd want to be um right anyway i think the the short answer is middle attitudes um probably on the north uh so you want to be close to ice uh you don't be too you you don't be too far away from the sun so you can get solar power um and you want to uh land at a low altitude so you can take maximum effect of atmospheric braking what do you think uh i like uh millis chasma it's a nice little area at the bottom of valles marineris the air pressure's high okay is there a lot of ice there there's ice around there we'd have to look for it though okay that kind of brings me to my next question and i'm going to turn it over to carrie to ask you one um how would you prioritize like missions like 2 through 10 are you going to focus on exploration or building up the infrastructure or science we're going to i think the first order of business is build a propellant plant i mean we can for sure lop out a bunch of droids you know that's no problem um i think why not you know we're going you know and probably if anyone wants to put their droid on we could just take it um and you know it's like hey it's basically a remote control car a solar powered remote control car and we could provide the the communication relay so you know you could just basically connect your car from uh your computer at home and try you know cruise your electric you could have legs too no matter your rubber device slash car that would be pretty cool um and um you know there's a lot of people worried about like you know life contamination it's like listen anything that can survive on mars is very so freaking tough it's insane um that it is cold and there's like a lot of uv radiation and it if it's not going to be too worried about anything we send from earthlings but that way um it's just tougher than anything on earth um so but but i think the first word of business is we've got to build a propellant a plant to make propellant and that is we said we've got a little lot of energy um we gotta mine some ice um and uh we've got you got co2 from the atmosphere so from the ice you got the h2o combine that h2o with the co2 you get ch4 and o2 um but that's a lot of energy and that would be quite hard i think to make that propellant uh plans reliable um so but that that's that's the primary order of business and then we can also look around and see if we can learn anything from a scientific standpoint carrie do you want to go next thank you james um i'm carrie fade i live in denver colorado um thank you for joining us today mr musk um that we do have a lot of questions um from 13 14 year olds i'm just going to pick one and ask you um it's from a teenager and her name is dara and she wants to be an engineer and build starships and robots and her dream is working for spacex what should she focus on to be an engineer well i think there's all kinds of engineering that's needed so you don't have to be an aerospace engineer you could be in electronics being a mechanical engineer uh electrical engineer you could be software engineer uh i mean there's a lot of engineering basically almost any kind of engineering um we'll need chemical engineering i think also for figuring out how to make a good propellant depot or pro super sleep repellent production plant um and uh yeah i think physics in general is a good background for thinking you know i just generally remember recommend people take physics courses because physics has the best tools for critical thinking thank you elon james yeah thanks carrie um another question the boring company now is that just kind of a an outfit to build tunneling machines that can work on mars uh no the boring company actually started as kind of a joke um and i for a lot of times people would ask me what what do i think the opportunities are out there and for i don't know five years or more i kept saying can someone please start a telling company because i think tunnels have a lot of opportunity for alleviating traffic in cities and just improving quality of life overall i mean there's a lot of streets you could turn into parks um certainly you wouldn't need parking you could just park cars underground so um and i just everyone throws joking and i was and i was like well i guess we'll just see what it takes to draw a ton to dig a tunnel and and um you know all these like so-called traffic experts and like haven't really made much progress uh you know cities like l.a and dc or solar traffic nightmare i'm like okay guys well if you've got such great ideas when why is this little traffic nightmare um so if you build tunnels you've got to go 3d somehow either underground or above ground like either air or ground and the problem with air is like you know anything that can carry persons can generate a lot of noise and a lot of wind force so and can fall in your head and also kind of not be good for privacy and like you know just sit in your backyard and something like flying over you it's like not that cool so but tunnels are working all those things they're also weatherproof um yeah um don't have any privacy issues and safe and anyway they will leave they would make a big difference to traffic and we have the first uh production tunnel or useful tunnel in vegas that's gonna open like in a month or two so a few months i guess um and hopefully we'll be ready for prime time around the consumer electronics show so and now for mars i think tunnels and digging in general is good but you need to build a very light system compared to what would matter on earth you don't really care all that much about mass on earth you care a lot about mass going to mars is it fair to say that you're learning some techniques that might apply to mars with the boring company yeah yeah probably when do you think starship will be able to be demonstrating refueling in low earth orbit i think we've got a shot at doing that in 22. about two years and then when do you guys think you'll have a moonship prototype um probably two or three years as soon as you've got overall refilling you can you can send significant payload to the moon like significant meaning 100 tons of useful payload at a shot so then from there i think you mentioned mars is a couple years after that it's only a couple years after that because the mars transit window is every 26 months um like i think we maybe have a shot of standing or you know trying to send something to mars in three years but the windows is four years away because of the being in the different parts of the solar system kerry asked a question from a young person i'd like to also ask do you have any tips for young people who love mars but don't know how to help with the settlement of mars well i think definitely i you know anyone who is a strong advocate for mars i think this really makes difference you know a lot of times it's not even people aren't even thinking about it and you know you talk to people at a party and they or talk to friends they're like it's just even not even a topic of conversation so i think it could really help if for everyone out there who thinks this is important for the future of humanity and consciousness as a whole um to make it part of what people are thinking about bringing up at parties and talking to friends and online it's like it should be a thing that we do um and i think it's worth uh you know maybe one percent of our resources at least um and that's not going to fundamentally change change things your quality of life if we have one if we spend one of our resources you know much less than health care obviously um maybe probably even less than we spent on cosmetics frankly um then that that would be enough to make life multiplanetary but we really need to make this a thing people talk about at least one percent of the time and that really matter um like that as we talked about earlier we need we need the will which is we need a critical mass of people wanting to make it happen and and then we need the way and state spacex is going to try hard to provide the way and then once we show that there's a way probably there'll be other companies that also try to do it as well so we need the will in the way they can provide either the will is extremely important it makes a huge difference what's the coolest part of starship development well i guess the coolest part of software development is working with uh just a great team of engineers um and coming up with uh interesting solutions um yeah you know i think it's just fundamentally enjoyable if you're working with a lot of good smart people creatively towards solutions that have never existed before that's very rewarding so i guess probably like that the most can you talk a little bit about how starship can be used for other destinations in the solar system like venus and the outer planets starship is is definitely a general generalized uh ship it it basically can it it's it solves for transport anywhere in the solar system that where there is a uh solid surface to land so if you land there we're going to take there we will also actually go into the atmosphere of venus for example just like going to orbit and and perhaps to the upper atmosphere venus's atmosphere is extremely down it's also quite high um so because that dense atmosphere you could you could have something you could have a kind of like a some sort of derivable know some kind of like like things that could float on venus that could not float on earth in the atmosphere because of the dense atmosphere so you could go to venus i mean it's not a super friendly place um and then like mercury's super hot um but i think that we could go to cerris or any of the asteroids uh the moons of jupiter although quite high radiation around there um and then out to saturn you know eventually getting out to uh you know these sort of cable belt or cloud and that kind of thing the outer solar system so so starship once you have propelled depots you can kind of like planet hop or moon hop around the solar system um it's not it's not a vehicle that would enable us to go interstellar but it's um that that's that's a that's a tough one but we need to make this the leap we're going to another planet first once we are multi-planet species we will create a forcing function with a rapid improvement of of space flight and and we'll figure out new technologies that will ultimately allow us to go to other star systems what do you look for in the people you hire especially the engineers i'd really just look for evidence of exceptional ability so it's not at least aspirationally like sometimes these things get messed up in recruiting or the recruiting photo beings it ends up being wrong like i sometimes wonder with tesla if nikola tesla applied to tesla would we even give him an interview it's not clear you know this guy came from like some weird college and somewhere in eastern europe i think he's got some odd mannerisms no we don't know if we should give an interview like i i worry that that's actually what we do instead of like right it should be like man [ __ ] this this this kid's super smart what does he want we'll pay him anything that should be that should be the reaction if nikola tesla applies you know to tesla um ironically but so i can tell you the intent is we're looking for evidence of exceptional ability uh and it really doesn't matter if you want to graduate high school or college or anything we're just looking for evidence of exceptional ability uh such that it would be a good predictor for doing exceptional things spacex all right you have some more questions from the audience there jim i've got one um so have you thought about communication networks between earth and mars and kind of i mean you're working on starlink what about like an internet around mars have you thought about that yeah i mean you could certainly do some variants of starlink i'll probably probably have to be the last question uh because i've got a bunch of things piled up but um yeah you could just do it versus starlink around mars and then you just need a big laser coming from earth probably want it to be in orbit so it doesn't get atmospheric diffraction or attenuation um you want to go from a big laser from earth orbit to mars orbit and then you're going to need some relay stations for when mars is on the outside of the sun so you can't just shoot a laser through the sun all right thank you thank you so much elon we're all pulling for you good luck very much appreciate it and just like thank you to all the people out there that that are that are fighting hard for the course of mars there's not that many and we need more thank you all right thank you okay and so listen uh elon has to go but i i'm willing to take questions uh um uh for the next 15 minutes until the next session starts so ask me anything got some questions there jim i've got a lot of questions robert um let's see what's the current uh it's a lot of these are for elon so i'm gonna have to adopt one for you um do you see electric rockets happening in the next hundred years well electric propulsion is already in use um the problem with electric propulsion it's a low thrust system intrinsically so uh if if if time is not an issue but delta v is that is the total amount of velocity changes you need to do then electron propulsion is a good system for that so for instance the dawn spacecraft visited several different asteroids when puttering around the asteroid belt that was done with electrical propulsion that was great uh but electric propulsion uh is for instance not the way we're going to get quick trips to mars um the we'll get quick trips tomorrow we cheapen the cost of the space launch we can put more propellant on a rocket um you know if that's what we want to do actually if we can get more stuff to orbit i'd prefer to deliver more payload but um electric repulsion is a useful ancillary uh technology um but uh until we have very high energy uh high power to mass ratio space power systems uh very high power a very high power to weight uh space nuclear power systems or fusion power systems electric propulsion uh will remain in auxiliary technology if we do get that kind of stuff well then the situation will change and especially for uh the outer solar system we've got more time to pick up speed um but if it takes you six months to pick up speed this you can get to mars in six months with chemical propulsion but right now it takes several years to reach jupiter so an electric propulsion system might be useful for that here's a classic for you um do you like the current plan of going to the moon from the moon to mars or do you think we should go straight to mars uh well if you want to go to mars you need to go to mars okay there there's reasons to go to the moon for going to the moon but the moon is not the way to go to mars going to the moon is the way to go to the moon do you have any advice i kind of asked him about advice for young people that are interested in mars but don't know how to help directly do you have any advice for those well uh you know first of all if you want to participate directly learn all the science and math you can uh and uh that way you can become a scientist or an engineer although there's going to be other fields necessary for colonizing mars agronomy we're going to want to have automated highly productive greenhouses genetic engineering of new crops all the sciences come into play this is a vast human endeavor and if if you're not inclined towards the sciences you know if you've got a way of spreading the vision as elon said uh we need both the will and the way and people who can recruit other people to the cause are um as valuable as people who can uh participate directly here's a really good one do you think the first civilization on mars will be more of small living spaces like small bubbles and such or more normalized like tall buildings well i i don't think tall buildings um are an appropriate architecture for mars i i think that uh what we'll have is we can have extensive living space uh underground like whole metro systems and then domes on the surface so uh i think you know people can spend you know about 20 percent of their time in the domes in the sunlight above the surface uh and 80 percent uh you know sleeping downstairs and doing other things downstairs where you're completely shielded from space radiation that that's my personal view of the most probable mars architecture do you think mars colonization can be done solely by spacex or will it be done collaboratively uh no this is a much bigger endeavor spacex is taking on the biggest single challenge which is the transportation system there's all sorts of other systems that are going to be needed we're going to need a propellant making systems we're going to need uh automated food factories we're going to because there's going to be a tremendous labor shortage on mars mars needs people and it's going to be shorthanded for a long time so all kinds of labor saving machinery robotics artificial intelligence um you know energy technology uh whether it's nuclear or solar or even perhaps geothermal uh for mars or fusion power would be terrific for mars because mars has got six times the deuterium that earth has as a percentage of its hydrogen um so you know there's a lot of things uh that one good thing is all sorts of engineering problems that need to be addressed and uh you know my personal hope is that you know we're going to see starship reach the stratosphere before this year's out and if elon's right reach orbit next year or the year after and this will change people's minds as to what is possible and then you know we'll have nasa uh uh seeking to fund the remaining pieces of the puzzle or entrepreneur stepping forward to develop remaining pieces of the puzzle space nuclear power reactors you know uh we had a great talk today from david poston uh but uh it would sure help us some private money gone into that game um to to move the most advanced concepts along uh faster than the pace that doe is willing to support and um and frankly okay you know we could use people playing the political game who are on our side uh so there's a lot of ways people can help and there's a lot of other technologies that need to be developed but by making the transportation system by showing that we can deliver large payloads to mars then all of a sudden all sorts of other technologies can get a chance to play carrie did you want to ask a question robert i do hi robert this is from one of the questions from our q a um have your thoughts outlined in the case for space changed with the progress and current direction of spacex since the most recent publication of that book if so how have they changed well uh i haven't changed that much in the case for space i talk about how the entrepreneurial uh uh space launch revolution is uh basically is changing the game relative to what it was when i wrote the case for mars uh now um musk is moving pretty fast um and it's become more clear to me how he intends to accomplish orbital refilling because that's a hard thing to do no one's ever done orbital refilling of a cryogenic propellant but i think it's got a good plan uh which is to take two starship space to base accelerate them just slightly uh in the direction of the tanker that is in the direction of the one that is supplying the propellant so it is in the up position as it were from the gravity and then uh point of view and then just drain its tanks down into the other one and by the way another advantage of methane oxygen uh that uh i'm sure musk is quite aware of but he didn't have a chance to mention is that the two propellants store at the same temperature so the tanks can be an intimate contact there's there's no issue of thermal contact between the methane tank and the oxygen tanks or which there is say with kerosene and oxygen okay kerosene would freeze at liquid oxygen temperatures thank you robert james what do you think is the biggest or hardest challenge that spacex has to pull off what they're trying to do with starship well they have a um a challenging system there i mean first of all the booster it's got about last time i saw 31 engines i heard one design where they might reduce it to maybe 28 or so but still order of 30 engines on the base stage um and uh all firing they you know that of course with that many engines you can afford uh engines going out they have a massive reliable engine out capability but if an engine should explode that would be very bad um uh the and there's so there's a lot more things that could go wrong there's more resiliency against things going wrong um so this thing's got twice the thrust of the saturn v um and it's reusable now that's the other thing the upper stage the starship proper um it's going to go to orbit now we saw you know shuttle coming back from orbit uh it had these tiles and they would take quite a while to refit them after each landing uh and of course in the case of columbia the tiles came off and failed on re-entry um now there are more shuttle tiles is 1970s technology and it's unfortunate that nasa never went beyond that never refitted shuttles with more advanced thermal protection that became uh available over the following decades and certainly musk is starting from the point of view of the most advanced technologies available today but um he is basically attempting to uh repeat or solve in a new way all the development that went into the saturn v and all the development that went into the space shuttle uh and additional development being orbital refilling uh now this guy he's got the best rocket team since von braun uh that's why i asked him several questions about who does he hire how does he approach this uh because uh you know as impressive as the actual uh space flight hardware of spacex is the organization itself it it it's just from the point of view you know i i run a company i have 20 employees it doesn't compare to spacex but still it is hard to hire the right people and to hire so many people and choose the right ones on such a scale and organize them to be effective and um this is this incredible management skill here it kind of reminds me of the story you told at one of our banquets a couple years ago when elon was uh just thinking about starting spacex and wasn't he actually involved with the mars society before that well yeah uh eulan was actually a member of the board of the mars society for a while um but you know he decided that he could accomplish much more by creating a launch company to open the space frontier uh you know that he set himself the hardest task that needs to be done uh to make all this possible and what we need to do is go and recruit uh more elon musk's to solve the problem of space nuclear power to solve the problem you know of a a a good life support of solve the problem of automated uh agriculture there's a whole bunch of technical problems here that need to be solved and and there's money to be made doing it by the way there's a lot of money waiting to be doing it and uh these are hard problems um there are people working on small modular nuclear reactors right now they are small relative to commercial reactors on earth uh but they're large relative to any power system that has ever been done in space these are entrepreneurial efforts and um you know the this is a hard thing to do to make money in that business um i mean frankly uh if all musk had done was make money in the electric car business he would have uh uh you know defied the odds um because no one ever did that before either um but there's a lot of other businesses here that need to be taken on okay and um i see our job in the mars society is inspire people to want to take them on and hopefully some of them will succeed and all the pieces will come into play what do you think of the operation he's got going on down in boca chica i've heard you describe it as a starship production line essentially that he's building not just one vessel yeah i i went and i visited him down in boca chica in february and i saw this thing uh growing there it was a sight to see uh you know he at that point had about 250 people there my guess i wouldn't ask him today but my guess is he probably has tripled that by now and he'll triple it again uh in the next six months um he's not just developing a ship he's developing a ship yard um the starship in addition to its uh performance characteristics in terms of how much payload it can do and and so forth is designed to be mass-produced okay this is a mass production fully reusable heavy lift booster he wants numbers and um you know uh he's learned that uh you know the first launches of vehicles it could very well fail he he is is turning out these prototypes right now at a rate on the order of one a month um so he's prepared to take losses and you heard him today say we expect the first several to fail okay nasa could never afford a space shuttle to fail um of course two did over the course of the program and that was a total those were total disasters mega disasters um and and both from the human life point of view but also from the financial point of view and the program capability point of view um you know he he's not going to launch a humans to mars program with four starships he'll he'll probably have a hundred by then and and and and more after looks like we're at four o'clock um carrie do you have one more question are you good i'm good thank you okay i think we're gonna need to leave it there robert we've got a bunch of track talks starting at our conference all right well thanks to everyone and let you know this year the one piece of good news was crew dragon in the midst of all this mess we've been living through that was the one light in the darkness and i'm hoping for one more starship reaching the stratosphere by december um maybe it'll happen i hope it will thanks everybody this is the mars society signing off see you on mars thank you robert thank you james see you on mars

Channel: The Mars Society

Views: 522,811

Rating: 4.9244585 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: y5Aw6WG4Dww

Length: 56min 48sec (3408 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Smoke-away]

Timestamp for the start of the talk.

[u/pns0102]

Key milestones: First orbital launch: 2021, First fuel transfer in LEO: 2022, First ship to Moon: 2023, First ship to Mars: 2024,

[u/spcslacker]

In addition to to points others have brought out:

• Elon said he expect so lose a few upper stages because belly flop and re-entry is going to be hard to get right
• but he hopes no lose of 1st stage, because of the sheer number of engines that would be killed
• Elon said "no" to if boring company is for mars
  • It really is aimed at improving city livability using 3-D to avoid congestion
  • Mars requires mass-optimized boring, which is not what they are working on
  • When asked of TBM lessons apply to Mars, he answered probably in manner showing he doesn't really think/care on that front right now
• Main thing normal people can work on is enthusiasm for space, and vision of being multiplanetary
  • SpaceX working on mechanism to get there
  • If there's enough people who believe in the vision, others will join the effort
  • and qualified settlers and the money to send can be found
• Likes idea of evolved starlink to communicate on Mars:
  • Need very large laser at earth, probably in orbit to avoid atmosphere interference
  • Need satellites in middle for when Mars occluded

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
L4	"Trojan" Lagrange Point 4 of a two-body system, 60 degrees ahead of the smaller body
L5	"Trojan" Lagrange Point 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body
LEO	Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)
	Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)

---

^{Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 41 acronyms.
[Thread #6371 for this sub, first seen 18th Oct 2020, 23:33] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]}

[u/ThreatMatrix]

I don't know what to think about Elon saying that to get to Mars they will need and "exponential" increase in innovation. i.e. the current rate of innovation isn't enough. And a simple increase isn't enough. It will require an "exponential" increase. Exponential is a lot. ;-) I hear that and I think that there are a lot of challenges that they haven't figured out how to solve.