Elon Musk Reveals His Plan for Colonizing Mars

[Applause] thank you very much for having me look for to talk about the spacex mars architecture and what i really want to kind of achieve here is to make mars seem possible make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go and and is there really a way that that anyone can go if they wanted to I think that's that's really the important thing so I mean first of all why go anywhere right the I think there's a really two fundamental paths history is going to bifurcate along two directions one one path is we stay on earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy but there's it's eventually history suggests there will be some some doomsday event well the alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species which I hope you would agree that is the right way to go yes that's what we want yeah so how do we figure out how to how to take you to Mars and couldn't create a self-sustaining city a city that it's not really an outpost but could become planet in its own right and for us that's we could become a truly multi-planet species there you know but sometimes people wonder well what about other places in the solar system why why Mars well just to sort of put things into perspective this is this is what this is an actual scale of what the solar system looks like so we're we're currently in the third Little Rock from the left that's earth exactly the and our goal is to go to the fourth rock on the left that's Mars but you get a sense for the real scale of this whole system how big the Sun is Jupiter Neptune you're Saturn Uranus and then the little guys on on the right are Pluto and Friends this sort of helps see it not quite to scale but it gives you a better sense for where things are so our options for we're going to be coming in multi-planet species within our solar system are unlimited we have in terms of nearby options we've got Venus but Venus is a high pressure and super-high pressure a hot acid bath so that that would be a tricky one Venus is not at all like the goddess this is not in no way similar to to the actual goddess so it really difficult to make things work on Venus a mercury is also way too close to the Sun we could go potentially on the Mart of them on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn but those are quite far out from the Sun a lot harder to get to it really leaves us with one option if we want to become a multi-planet civilization and that's that's Mars we could conceive if we go to our moon and I today I'm running against going to the moon but I think it's it's challenging to create a it become multi planet or in the moon because it's it's much smaller than than thinner planet it doesn't have any atmosphere it's not as resource rich as Mars it's got a 28-day day whereas the tomorrow's days 24 and a half hours and in general Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to be a self-sustaining civilization so just to give some comparison between the the two planets that they're actually fitted they're remarkably closed in a lot of ways and in fact we don't believe that that early Mars was a lot like Earth and in fact if we could warm ours up we would once again have a thick thick atmosphere and liquid oceans so but way things are right now you want this Mars it's about half again as far from the Sun as as Earth so still decent sunlight it's a little cold but we can warm it up and it has a very helpful atmosphere which in the case of Mars being primarily co2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressed in the atmosphere and and it has nitrogen too which is also very important for growing plants it requite fun to be on Mars because you'd have gravity which is about 36 37 cents out of earth so you'd be able to lift heavy things and bound around and like a lot of fun and that the day is remarkably close to that of and so we just need to change that bottom row because currently we have 7 billion people on earth and zero on Mars so there's been a lot of great work by NASA and other organizations in early exploration of Mars and understanding that what Mars is like where could we land what's the composition of the of the atmosphere where where is their water order ice I should say and and so we need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city the the issue that we have today is that if you look at a Venn diagram we the there's no intersection of sets of people who want to go and can't afford to go in fact right now you cannot go to Mars for infinite money using traditional methods you know if taking sort of Apollo style approach the an optimistic cost number would be about 10 billion dollars a person so for example the Apollo program the costs estimates are somewhere between 100 to 200 billion dollars in current current year dollars and we sent 12 people to the service amoun which was an incredible thing and I think probably the one of the greatest achievements of humanity but but that's there's a steep price to pay for a ticket that's why these circles only just barely touch so you can't create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is ten billion dollars person what we need is a closer is to move those circles together and if we get a cut the cost of moving to Mars be roughly equivalent to a median house price in in the u.s. which is around $200,000 then I think the probability of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high I think I think it would almost certainly occur no not everyone who wants to go and I think a relatively small number of people from earth would want to go but enough would want to go and who could afford the trip that it would happen and you people get sponsorship and and I think it gets the point where we're almost anyone if they saved up and and this was their goal they could ultimately save enough money to survive it and move to Mars and Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time so jobs are not being short supply so it is a bit tricky because we have to forgot how to improve the costs of trips to Mars by five million percent so this is just not easy and I mean it's and it sounds like virtually impossible but I think I think there ways to do it this is this translates to an improvement of approximately four and a half orders of magnitude there these are the key elements that are needed in order to achieve the four and a half order of magnitude improvement most of the improvement would come from full reusability somewhere between two and two and a half orders of magnitude and then the other two orders of magnitude would come from refilling in orbit propelled production on Mars and choosing the right propellants so I'm gonna go into detail on all of those full reusability is really the the super hard one it's very difficult to achieve reusability for for even an orbital system and that challenge becomes even you're substantially greater for a system that has to go to another planet but as an example of the difference between reusability and expandability and aircraft and this you could actually use any form of transport you could say a car bicycle horse if they were single-use almost no one would use them it'd be too expensive but with with with frequent flights you can take something like an aircraft that costs ninety million dollars and if it were single-use you'd have to pay half a million dollars per flight but you can actually buy a ticket on Southwest right now from LA to Vegas for $43 including Texas so that's I mean that's a massive improvement right there it's showing a four order of magnitude improvement now this is harder the reasonability doesn't apply quite as much to Mars because the number of times they keep reuse the spaceship is if the spaceship part of the system it is left less often because the Earth Mars rendezvous only occurs every every 26 months so you get to use the spaceship part roughly every two years now you get to use the booster and the tanker as frequently as you'd like and so it makes that that's why it really makes a lot of sense to to load the spaceship into orbit with essentially tanks dry and have it have really quite big tanks that you then use the booster and tanker to refill while it's in orbit and maximize the the payload of the spaceships that when it goes to Mars if you really have a very large payload capability so I said refilling it over is is one of the essential elements of this without refilling in orbit you you would have a half order of magnitude impact roughly on on the cost but by half order of magnitude I think audience mostly knows but what that means is each order of magnitude is a factor of 10 so not refilling in orbit would mean a 500 percent roughly increase in the cost per ticket it also allows us to build a smaller vehicle and lower the development cost although this vehicle is quite big but it would be much harder to build something that's 5 to 10 times the size and it also reduces the sensitivity of performance characteristics of the of the booster rocket and tanker so if there's a shortfall and the performance of any of the elements you can actually make up for it by having one or two extra refilling trips to the spaceship so this is it's very important for reducing the susceptibility the system to a performance shortfall and then producing propellants on unwise actually you know also very obviously important again if if we didn't do this it would have at least a half order of magnitude increase in the in the cost of a trip so five hundred percent increase in the cost of trip and if we pretty absurd to try to build a city on on Mars if your spaceships just kept staying on Mars are not going back to earth you have this like massive grade yacht graveyard of ships you ever like do something with them so it really wouldn't make sense to to to leave your spaceships on Mars you really want to build a propellant plants on Mars and send the ships back so and Mars happens to work out well for that because it has a co2 atmosphere it's got water ice in the soil and with h2o and co2 you can do ch4 methane and oxygen o2 so you're picking the right propellant is also important that sort of thing this is maybe this there's three main choices and I'm gonna have that they have their merits but a kerosene or rocket propellant grade the kerosene which is also what jets use Rockets use are very expensive form a highly refined form of jet fuel essentially which is a form of kerosene that it helps keep the vehicle size small but because it's a very specialized form of jet fuel it's it's quite expensive the you reasonably casual is lower very difficult to make this on Mars because there's no oil so really quite difficult to make the Council Mars and and then propellant transfers is is pretty good but not not great hydrogen although it has a high specific impulse is it's very expensive incredibly difficult to do to keep from boiling off because liquid hydrogen is very close to absolute zero as liquid so the installation required is is tremendous and the the cost of the energy cost on Mars of producing and storing hydrogen is very high so when we looked at the overall system optimization it was clear as best that that methane actually was the clear winner so it would require maybe anywhere from you know 50 to 60% of the energy on Mars to reach to refold propellants using the propellant Depot and just that the technical challenges are a lot easier so so we think we think methane is actually better on you just really almost across the board and and we started off initially thinking that hydrogen would make sense but I'll make a inclusion that the the best way to optimize the cost per unit mass to Mars and back is is to use an all methane system or technically deep-fryer methodologies so those are the four the four elements that need to be achieved so this so whatever our kitchen whatever a system is designed whether by SpaceX or or anyone we think these are the four features that need to be addressed in order for the system to to really achieve a low cost for a cost per ton to the surface of Mars and this is simulation of the overall system [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so what you saw there is it's really quite close to what we will actually build it will look almost exactly what you saw like what you saw so this is not an artist's impression these the simulation was actually made from this basic engineering CAD models so this is not you know it's not just well this is what it might look like this is what we plan to try to make it look like so in the video you see you got a sense for what the system architecture looks like the the rocket booster and the spaceship takeoff loads the spaceship into orbit the rocket booster then comes back it comes back quite quickly within about 20 minutes and so it can actually launch the tanker version of the spacecraft which is essentially the same as the as a spaceship but filling up the unpressurized and pressurized cargo areas with propellant tanks as they look almost identical this this also helps lower the development cost which obviously will not be small and and then the propellant tank it goes up it'll go actually it'll go up multiple times anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the of the spaceship in orbit and then once the spaceship is the tanks are full the Congress been transferred and we reached the Mars rendezvous timing as messages roughly every twenty six months that's when the ship would depart you know over time there would be many spaceships you to ultimately have I think upwards of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit and so that the Mars colonial fleet would depart on mass they're kind of like Battlestar Galactica we've seen that thing that's good so it's bit like that but if it actually makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you've got two years to do so and then make frequent use of the booster and the to get really heavy reduce out of those and then with the with the spaceship you get less reuse because you have said well how long is it gonna last for maybe thirty years so that might be 12 to maybe 15 flights of the spaceship at most so you really want to maximize the cargo of the spaceship and and and reuse the booster and the that the tanker align so there's the ship goes to Mars gets its propellant replenished and then returns to Earth so I'll go into some of the details the vehicle design and performance and I'm gonna close over or reduce I'll I'll only talk a little bit about the technical details in the actual presentation and then I'll leave the the detailed technical questions to the Q&A that follows this is to give you a sense of size it's quite big and the funny thing is I think in the long term the strips will be even bigger than this I think this will represent this will be relatively small compared to the Mars interplanetary ships of the of the future but it kind of needs to be about the size because if in order to fit a hundred people there abouts in the pressurized section plus carry of the luggage and all of the unpressurized cargo to pull propellant plants and both everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to you name it in the we need carry a lot a lot of cargo so it really needs to be roughly on this on this order of magnitude because if we say like the the same threshold for self-sustaining city on Mars or civilization would be a million people well and you can only go every two years if you if you if you have 100 people per ship that's 10,000 trips so they at least 100 people per trip is is the right order of magnitude and I think we actually may end up expanding the the crew section and and ultimately taking more like 200 or more people per flight in order to reduce the cost per person so it's 10,000 flights is a lot of flight so you really want help me I think on the order of a thousand ships it would take a while to build up to a thousand ships and so I think if you say when we reach that million person threshold from the point of which the first ship goes to Mars it's probably served between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous so it's probably somewhere between there maybe 40 to a hundred years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars so that's the sort of quest section of the ship and in some ways it's not that complicated really the it's made primarily of an advanced carbon fibre the common fiber part is tricky when dealing with deep cryogens and and trying to achieve both liquid and gas in permeability and have and not have gaps occur due to cracking or pressurization that would make the common v Aliki so this is this is a fairly significant technical challenge to make deeply cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber and it's only recently that the that we think that the carbon fiber technology has gone to the point where we can actually do this with without having to create a liner on the in some sort of metal liner while the liner on the inside of the tanks richard add mass and complexity so a particularly tricky for the haunt gaseous oxygen pressurization so this is going to be for toxicity pressurize which means that the fuel and the oxygen would we gasify them through heat exchanges in the engine and use that to pressurize the tanks so we're guessed by the methane and use that to pressurize the fuel tank gas by the oxygen use that pressurize the oxygen tank and this compares that this is a much simpler system than what we have with with Falcon 9 where we use helium for pressurization and we use nitrogen for gas thrusters in this case we're talking like sabotage asleep fresh rise and then use gaseous methane and oxygen for the control thrusters so really you only need two ingredients with us as opposed to four in the case of top nine and actually five if you consider the ignition liquid so we were use was a like it's sort of complicated liquid to ignite the engines that isn't isn't very usefulness in this case we would use spark ignition so this give you a sense of vehicles by performance sort of current and historic you can actually read that but in expendable mode that the vehicle first that were proposing would do about 550 tons and about three hundred tons in reusable mode that compares to your satisfy matched capability of 135 tonnes but I think this this really gives a better sense for things the white bars show the performance of the vehicle like there was a payload to orbit of the vehicle so you can see essentially what it represents is what's the size efficiency of the of the vehicle and most drugs including ours that are currently flying the worse the performance bar is only a small percentage of the actual size of the rocket but with the interplanetary system with traditionally the use for Mars we've been able to or we believe massively improve the design performance so it's the first time a rockets sort of performance bar will actually exceed the physical size of the rocket this gives you a more direct sort of comparison if this is the thrush that was quite a moment talking about a liftoff thrust of 13,000 tonnes so it'd be quite quite tectonic when it takes off but it is it is a fit on pad 39a which nASA has been kind of to allow us to use where because they sort of oversize that the pad in doing Saturn 5 and as a result we can actually do a much larger vehicle on that same launch pad and in the future we expect to add additional most locations probably Pollyanna wanted on the south coast of Texas but this gives you a sense of the relative capability if you read those but these vehicles have very different purposes the this is really intended to carry huge numbers of people ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars so you really need something quite large in order to do that so talk about some of the key elements of the interplanetary spaceship and rocket booster we've sighted start off the development with what we think of are probably the two most difficult elements of the of the design one is the Raptor engine and but this is gonna be the highest chamber pressure engine of any any kind of revolt and probably the highest thrust-to-weight it's a it's a full flow stage combustion engine which maximizes the theoretical momentum that you can get out of a given source fuel oxidizer we sub cool the oxygen and methane to densify it so compared to when it when propellant only use they're used close to their boiling points in in most rockets and in our case we actually load the profiles close to the freezing point and that can result in a density improvement of up to around 10 to 12 percent which makes an enormous difference in the in the actual results of the rocket it also makes the it gets rid of any cavitation risk for the turbo pumps and it makes it easier to feed a high-pressure turbo pump if you have very cold propellant really one of the keys here though is the the vacuum version of rapture having a 382 second ISP but this is really quite critical to to the whole last mission and we're talking with we can get to to that number or at least within a few seconds of that number ultimately maybe exceeding it slightly so the rocket the rocket booster in many ways is is really a scaled up version of the Falcon 9 booster you'll see a lot of similarities such as the Griffins obviously clustering a lot of engines at the base and if the big difference really being that the primary structure is advanced form a carbon fiber as opposed to aluminum lithium and that we use autogenous pressurization and and get rid of the helium and the nitrogen so this uses 42 raptor engines it's a lot of engines but we use an iron on a falcon 9 and with falcon heavy which should launch early next year there's this 27 engines on the base so we've got a pretty good experience with having a large number of engines it also gives us redundancy so that if some of the engines fail you can still continue the mission and be fine but the main job of this of the booster is to accelerate the spaceship to around eight and a half thousand kilometres an hour before for those that are less familiar with orbital dynamics really it's all about velocity and I'm not about night so really that's the job of the booster the boosters like the javelin thrower serve it's got a class that javelin which is the mr. spaceship in in the case of other planets though which happen which have a gravity well which is not as deep so Mars of the moons of Jupiter see if one day maybe even Venus the Venus will be a little trickier but for most in the solar system you only need the spaceship so you don't you don't need the booster if you have a lower gravity well so no booster is needed on the Moon or Mars or any of the moons of Jupiter or Pluto you just need the spaceship the booster is just there for heavy gravity wells and then we've also been able to optimize the propellant needed for boosts back in landing to get it down to about seven percent of the liftoff of propellant load and we think with some optimization we can get it down to about six percent and we're also are not getting quite comfortable with the accuracy of the landing if you've been watching the Falcon 9 landings you'll see that they're getting increasingly increasingly closer to the bullseye and we think particularly with the addition of additional with this room of some thrusters some maneuvering thrusters we can actually put the booster right back on the water stand and then those bends at the base are essentially centering features to take out any minor position mismatch at the lower side so it looks like at the base so we think we only need to gimble or steer the center cluster of engines so there's the seven engines in the center cluster those would be the ones that that move or steering the rocket and the other ones would be fixed in position which gives us the best concentration of we can max out the number of engines because you don't have to leave any room for gambling we'll move in the entrance and and thank said this is all designed so that you could actually lose multiple engines even at liftoff or anywhere in flights and continue the mission safely so the for the spaceship itself in the top we have the the pressurized compartment I'll show you a flying through of that in a moment then beneath that is the is where we'd have the unpressurized cargo which would be really flat packed in a very dense format and and it below that is the liquid oxygen tank the the production tank is probably the hardest piece of this whole vehicle because it's got a handle propellant to call this level and it and the tanks themselves actually form the full form the airframe so the the airframe structure and the tank structure are combined as it is in all modern rockets and in aircraft for example the the wing is really a fuel tank in wing shape so that it has to take the thrust loads of a sense the loads of reentry and and then it has to be impermeable to gaseous oxygen which is which is tricky and and unreacted to gaseous oxygen so that's that's the hardest piece of the the spaceship itself which is actually why we started on that element as well and I'll show you some pictures of that later so and they blow the oxygen tank is the fuel tank and then the engines are mounted directly to the thrust cone on the base and then there there are there six of the vacuum the high-efficiency vacuum engines around the perimeter and those are those those don't gamble and and then there three of the c-level versions of the engine which do gamble would provide the steering although we can do some some amount of steering if you're in space by it with differential thrust on the outside engines the net effect is a car go to Mars of up to 450 tons depending upon how many refills you do with the the tanker and the goal is at least 100 passengers per ship although I think ultimately we'll probably see that number go to 200 or more this charts a little difficult to interpret it first but I can we decided to put it there for people who want to watch the video afterwards and and so take a closer look analyze some of the numbers look the the column on the left is probably what's most relevant and that's that gives you the trip time so depending upon which Earth Mars rendezvous graining for the trip time at 6 kilometres per second departure velocity can be as low as 80 days and then over time I think would obviously improve that and ultimately I suspect that you'd see Mars transit times of as well as 30 days in the more distant future so it's fairly manageable considering the trips that people used to do in the old days that routinely take sailing voyages that would be six months of war so on arrival the the heatshield technologies is extremely important we've been refining the the heat shield technology using our Dragon spacecraft and we now have we're now in version 3 of pika which is phenolic impregnated carbon ablator and it's getting more and more of us with each new version with with less ablation more resistance less need for government the heat shields basically a giant brake pad so it's like how good can you make that brake pad against extreme reentry conditions and minimize the the cost of refurbishment and and I guess that you could have many flights with no refreshment at all this is a fly through of the the crew compartment so to give you a sense of what it would feel like to actually be in the spaceship I mean in order to make it appealing and increase that portion of the Venn diagram where people actually want to go it's got to be really fun and exciting and it can't feel cramped or boring so the the Kirk the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is setups that you can do zero-g games you can float around they'll be like movies liquor poles your cabins a restaurant it'll be like really fun to go you have a great time serve it the propellant plants on Mars again it's one of those slides that I would go into in detail here but people can think about applying the the key point being that the ingredients that there are Mars to create a propellant plant with relative ease because the atmosphere is primarily co2 and there's water ice almost everywhere but the co2 plus h2o to make methane ch4 and oxygen o2 using the savatya reaction that the the trickiest thing really is the the energy source which we think we can do with a large field of solar panels so then to give you essentially class really the key is is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go and we think based on this architecture this architecture assuming optimization over time at the very first place would be would be fairly expensive but the architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000 maybe is less but maybe as little as $100,000 over time depending upon how much mass a person takes so we're right now estimating about a hundred and forty thousand dollars per ton to if a person plus the luggage is less than that takings about account food consumption and life support then we think that the cost of moving tomorrow's ultimately could drop below a hundred thousand dollars so funding these are put about funding sources and so we could steal Underpants launch satellites same cognitive Space Station Kickstarter of course followed by profit so the obviously it's gonna be a challenge to to fund this whole endeavor we do expect to generate very decent net net cash flow from launching lots of satellites and servicing the space station for NASA transferring hugger to and from space station and and then I know that there's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars and then perhaps there will be interest on the government sector sites you also do that ultimately this is going to be a huge public-private partnership and I think that's that's how the United States was established and many other countries around the world is a public-private partnership I think that's probably what what occurs and right now we're just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available and just sort of keep keep moving both forward and hopefully I think I think as we as we show that this is possible that this dream is real not just a dream it's something like we made real I think the support will snowball over time and I should say also the that the main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is in order to fund us so I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary [Applause] time liens not the best at this sort of thing but just to show you where we started off in 2002 SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band but that was it that's that's that's all of SpaceX in 2002 as you can see I'm a dancing machine and yeah I believe in kicking over celebratory events with mariachi bands I really like Maury insurance that was what we started off with in 2002 and really I mean I thought we had maybe a 10% chance of doing anything of even getting a rocket to overt let alone getting beyond that and and and taking Mars seriously but if I came conclusion that if there were if there wasn't some new entrance into it into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a spacefaring civilization and be out there among the stars because you know in 69 we were able to go to the moon and the Space Shuttle could get to low-earth orbit and then after the Space Shuttle got retired but that trend line is down down to zero so I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve it only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem that it improves and there many examples in history where civilizations have reached a certain technology level and then have fallen well below that and and then recovered only millennia later so we go from 2002 we're basically we're clueless and then I felt with Falcon one the smallest useful orbital rocket that we could think of which would deliver half a turn to orbit and then four years later we developed both of the first the first vehicle so we dropped the main an Shin the upper stage engine the the airframes the fairing and the launch system and had our first attempt at launch in 2006 which failed that lasted about 60 seconds unfortunately but but it's 2006 four years after starting is also when we actually got our first national contract and I just want to say I'm incredibly grateful to NASA for supporting SpaceX you know despite the fact that our rocket crashed was awesome well I lie I'm NASA's biggest fan so yeah I think thank you very much to the people that have the faith to do that thank you so then 2006 followed by a lot of grief and then finally the fourth launch of Falcon one worked in 2008 and we were really down to our last pennies in fact I only thought I had enough money for three launches and first three buddy failed and we were able to scrape together enough to just barely make it and do do a fourth launch and that think their goodness that fourth launch succeeded in 2008 I was a lot of pain and and then at the end of 2008 is when we're NASA awarded us the first signature operational contract which was for resupplying cargo to the space station of bringing cargo back then a couple years later we did the first launch of Falcon 9 version one and that had about a 10 ton to over capability so it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1 and it also was signed to to carry out Dragon spacecraft then 22 2010 is our first mission to the space station so we were able to finish development of Dragon and docked with the space station in 2010 so sorry two points where 2010 is expendable swindle a dragon expendable Dragon 2012 when we delivered and returned hugger from the space station 2013 where we first started doing a vertical takeoff or landing tests and then 2014 is when we were able to have the first orbital booster do a soft landing in the ocean the landing was soft wood pellet burner exploded but landing for seven seconds it was good and we also improved the capability of the vehicle from ten tons to about 13 tons Tulio and then 2015 or last year in December I was definitely when the best moments of my life where the rocket booster came back and landed it at Cape Canaveral that was really yeah so they think that really sure that we could bring an orbit class booster back from a very high velocity all the way to the launch sites and landed safely and and with with almost no refurbishment required for a flight and if things go well we're hoping to reef lie one of landed boosters in a few months so yeah and then 2016 we're also demonstrated landing on on a ship the landing on the ship is important for the very high velocity geosynchronous missions and that's that's important for feasibility of Falcon 9 because about a roughly a quarter of our missions are servicing the space station and within there's a few other low-earth orbit missions but most of our missions probably 60% of our missions are commercial geo missions so we've got to do these high velocity missions that really need to land on a ship out to sea they don't have enough propellants on board to boost back to the launch site so looking into the future next steps we were kind of intentionally a bit fuzzy about this timeline but we're going to try to make as much progress as we can obviously it's with a very constrained budget but we're gonna try to make as much progress as we can on the elements of the country transport rooster and spaceship and and hopefully we'll be able to do to complete the first development spaceship in maybe about four years and start doing several flights with with that in fact actually has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit with if you limit the amount of cargo with the spaceship of it well you have to really have to really strip it down but in tanka form it can definitely get to open check it back we can get to over it actually starts thinking like maybe there is a market for really fast transport of stuff around the world provided we can land somewhere where noise is not a super big deal Rockets are very noisy but we could transport cargo to anywhere on earth in 45 minutes at the longest so most places on earth would be maybe 20 25 minutes so maybe if we had a floating platform out off the coast of you know say of course to New York I said 20 30 miles out you could go from you know New York to Tokyo in out of 25 minutes for cross the Atlantic in ten minutes as really most your time would be getting to the ship and then every real quick after that so there's so many possibilities there although we're not counting on that and then and then develop another booster we actually think the booster part is is relatively straightforward because we've it's it amounts to scaling up of the Falcon 9 booster so this we don't see a lot of sort of showstoppers there yeah so then but they're trying to put it all together and and and make this actually work for Mars if things go super well it might be kind of in the 10 year time frame but that this is look I don't want to say that's when it will occur it's like there's a huge amount of risk it's going to cost a lot good chance we don't succeed but we're gonna do our best and try to make as much progress as as possible all right and we're gonna try to send something to Mars on every Monday for you from here on out so dragon 2 which is a propulsive Lander we plan to send Mars in in a couple years and and then do probably another dragon mission in 2020 in fact we want to establish a steady cadence that there's always a flight leaving like a train leaving the station with every morning we will be transferred we will be sending a dragon at least a dragon to Mars and ultimately the big spaceship so if they've people that are interested in putting payloads on on Dragon you know you can count on a ship that's going to transport something an order of at least 2 or 3 tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars yes that's that's about the reason why we designed Dragon 2 to be a propulsive lander is as a propulsive landing you can you can go anywhere in the solar system so you could go to the moon you go to both anywhere really whereas if something relies on parachutes or wings then you can pretty much only well if it's if it's wings you can finish on the land on earth because you need a runway most places don't have a runway and then any place doesn't have a dense atmosphere you can't use parachutes so but propulsive works anywhere so so dragon should be capable landing on any solid or liquid surface in the in the solar system and then as I was really excited to see that the team managed to do the all up rapture engine firing in advance of this conference the ice core say thanks to to the Raptor team for really working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the presentation so I really want to show that we've made some hardware progress in this direction and and the Raptor is a really tricky entrance it's a lot trickier than Dan Mullen because it's a full flow stage combustion much higher pressure and I kind of amazed didn't blow up on the first firing but unfortunately it was it was good it's kind of interesting to see the markdown is forming [Applause] so the apart and Padres before making the engine sort of small like Raptor although it has three times the thrust of a melon is actually only about the same size as a real intention because it has three times the operating pressure and that means we can use a lot of the production techniques that we've honed with Merlin we're currently producing Merlin engines at almost three hundred per year so we understand how to make rocket engines in volume so even though the mas vehicle uses 42 on the base and Mayan on the upper stage so we're 51 engines to make that that's well within our production capabilities for Merlin and this is a similarly similarly sized engine to Melanie except for the expansion ratio so we feel really comfortable about being able to make this engine in volume at at a price that doesn't doesn't break our budget and then we also want to make progress on the primary structure so as I mentioned this is really a very difficult thing to make is to make something out of carbon fiber even the compiler has incredible strength to weight when when you want one of them but super cold liquid oxygen and liquid methane a particular particular liquid option in the tank is subject to to cracking and leaking and it's it's a variable thing to make just the sheer scale of it is also challenging because you've got to lay out the carbon fiber and exactly right way on a huge mold and you've got to cure that mold at temperature and and then it's and then it's just really hard to make large large carbon fiber structures that could do all of those things and carry incredible loads so so that's that's the other thing we want to focus on was the rapture and then the first development tank for the Mars spaceship so galaxy this this this is that this is really the hardest part of the spaceship the other pieces are we we have pretty good handle on but this was the trickiest one so we want to tackle it first you get a size for how big the tank is it's really pretty quite big also big congratulations to the team that worked on that they also work in seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the IAC and so the way we managed to both the first tank and the initial tests with the cryogenic propellant actually looked quite quite positive we have not seen any leaks or major issues this is what the tank looks like on the inside so you can get it to get a real sense for how much just how big this this tank is the it's actually completely smooth on the inside but the way that the carbon fiber plies lay out and reflect the light makes it look look faceted so then what about beyond Moz so as we thought about the system and the reason we call it a system because generally I don't like pulling things systems because everything's a system including your dog the is that is that it's actually more than a vehicle there's this absolute the rocket booster the spaceship the tanker and the propellant plant the the Institute of propellant production if you have all of those four elements you can actually go anywhere in the solar system by but by planet hopping or moon hopping so by establishing a propellant Depot on in the asteroid belt or on one of the moons of Jupiter you can go to you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter no problem in fact even from even without a propellant Ipoh at Mars you can do a flyby of Jupiter without a penalty boat so but by establishing propellant Depot let's say you know in slightest or grow up over or just a few few options and then doing another one on Titan Jupiter Saturn moon perhaps another one further out on Pluto or elsewhere in the solar system if this system really gives gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system so you can actually travel out to the kaepa Bell to the earth cloud I wouldn't recommend this for interstellar journeys but this just this basic system provided we have filling stations along the way it means full access to the entire Greater Solar System we're really great to do mission to do rope but particularly alright so any questions that I can answer [Applause] hello yeah Derrick Stanley I can't see a thing by the way so they're all upset I would try to look at you girls here there's some party boys calm okay can you talk a little bit about from the video looks like launching complex 39a is gonna be initial launch site can you talk about some of the initial test flights modifications to the pad and where the booster and spacecraft may be built so I think we need to speak a little bit about it sure the video showed launching from launch complex 39 can you talk a little bit about initial test flights booster construction site and where the spacecraft may be built as it seems to be too large to transport by Road or any other terrestrial transport yeah so we are expecting to do the initial flights from 39a so we're setting airplane to set up 39 days such that it can launch either Falcon Heavy or the interplanetary system the it's it's quite a big launch site so I think we we can do that in terms of construction of these the ship and booster you're right it is quite big that's something you can really transport on the roads so the I think we would probably look at construction of the the booster and the spacecraft at some of the Gulf Gulf states were actually looking at server should Louisiana as one of the possibilities and [Music] but but I think we would end up constructing the booster and spacecraft in probably multiple states and then perhaps doing final assembly at the launch site thank you hi Ellen okay very nice to meet you my name is Aldo and three weeks ago I was at Burning Man in the Nevada desert right and it felt like I was in Mars it was a dusty storm and it was really cold at night and there was no water but there was one problem at Burning Man with a population of only 75,000 there was a lot of [ __ ] and there was no water to take it into the rivers which is kind of what we do today you know current sanitation system so I was like is this what Mars is going to be like just a dusty waterless sheet storm so I was like hey Ellen are you working on a sustainable sensation are we gonna have toilet a Mars that doesn't use water today on earth there's three billion people that don't have a nice actually I have to say we have to keep no NSA's only questions all right so are you getting Mars yeah I think mines actually has a huge amount of water and water ice so I think we'll really suffer a water shortage and laws the main thing about Mars is actually gonna be energy if you have energy there's plenty of water because there's this massive amounts of ice so it's really just about getting huge numbers of solar panels out there and potentially doing thermal energy and ultimately I think if serving the public is receptive we you know there might be nuclear I think certainly if you've built new for you're on Mars as to where the transport nuclear the Mars would be up to the public to the side all right next question I'm George lordose from my mighty SDM and MIT GSL I along the first humans on Mars will be in the history books as we all know who should these men and women be maybe children - who should these people be carrying the light of humanity to Mars for all of us thank you well I think can be really very dangerous the risk of fatality will be high there's no way around it so I would not just have ascending children or it would be basically are you prepared to die then that's okay then then you know your candidate for going but really this is this is less about like you know who goes there first or it's the thing that really matters is making a self-sustaining civilization on Mars as fast as possible it is this different from Apollo this is you know this is really about minimizing existential risk and and having a tremendous sense of adventure I mean a thing that Mars really represents I mean there's the whole life insurance and protecting life and ensuring that the land of consciousness is not extinguished which i think is incredibly important you know backing up the biosphere and to be clear this is not about everyone moving to Mars it's about becoming multiplanetary I think earth will be a good place for a long time but but it's just it's the problem I span of human civilization we much greater for a multi-planet species now that's the defensive argument but the yeah the other that actually find most compelling is that is that would be an incredible adventure I think would be the most inspiring thing that I could possibly imagine and life needs to be more than just solving problems every day you need to wake up and be excited about the future and be inspired and want to live [Applause] you're the best everybody get up for ulong please stay inspired the [ __ ] out of us come on I've got a gift for you two comic book called the future inclusion it's about the first man on Mars it's like you I can't get past all Chapo's militia though so I don't know should I just throw this on this stage sorry my question is going to give you this gift so if you the future of fusion thank you all right thank you hi Lauren rush from the verge you talk about how the Mars colonization architecture is meant to serve as a back-up plan and somebody might see yeah you can see me okay the Mars architectures supposed to serve as a back-up plan for Humanity but you didn't touch much on how you will keep humans safe on the way over there for me there are deep space radiation or how they will live on the planet can you give give us some insight into the life support systems habitats stuff like that oh sure thing is that there's certainly some risk of radiation but it's not it's not it's not deadly there was some slight increased risk of cancer but it's it's I think relatively minor you need to have some shielding particularly if there's a solar flare or sort of a baked any cuts or solar storm we'd want to basically point the rocket at this at the Sun and maximize your shielding effect before you put the rear of the rocket with Sun so you maximize your shielding effect and and have the passengers cluster around a column of order I think the radiation was clearest is relatively small once you're on Mars obviously you cut your radiation in half just because you've got the planet shielding you and then at least some atmosphere and I think then what you could construct it over time is an artificial magnetic field to deflect high-energy particles so I actually the radiation thing is something brought up but I think it's not not too big of a deal and then there's what happens once most people are there I mean the goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system it's like building the Union Pacific Railroad and and once once that transport system is built then there's a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to go to Mars and create something new or build the foundations of a new planet so it's like who wants to sort of be you know among the founding members of a new planet and and Mike said both everything from iron refineries to so the first pizza joint them all and then things on Mars that no people can't even imagine today that might be unique or would be unique to to Mars and but but that that's that's really where it tremendous amount of entrepreneurship and talent would flourish just just as happened in California when the Union Pacific Railroad was completed and when they're building the Union Pacific though a lot of people say well that's a super dumb idea because there's no you know because hardly anybody lives in California but now today we've got sort of the at least the u.s. epicenter of technology developments and entertainment and it's the biggest state in in the nation so but you need that transport link if you can't get there and none of those opportunities exist so our goal is just to make sure you can get there I would like to ask you the following thing I'm Russian and a lot of people here are from many different countries you're going interplanetary but you're not going international when are you gonna hire people from other countries than the US yes I think people are a bit confused about this unfortunately this is not up to us so the US government regulations well they meet they make getting a job in the u.s. hard as it is to get just getting a job as hard as it is but if you're working on rocket technology that's considered an advanced weapons technology so even a normal work visa isn't sufficient unless you get a special permission from the secretary defense of the state or the secretary State so I want to be clear this is not some out of some desire of SpaceX to just hire people with with green cards it's it's because we're not allowed to do anything else and I mean I think this is not a wise thing for this is not a wise policy for you know for the US because there's so many talented people around the world that we would love to have work at our company but unless the beste can somehow get a green card we can't we're just a we're legally prevented for from hiring anyone but for example this is not the case at Tesla Tesla we're about that a quarter of our engineering team is from outside the US and we're either 30 percent because we don't have the ITAR restriction so I really wish we could do more it's just a hands with time thank you hey you on so can't wait for the SpaceX improbability drive but you often talk about wanting to inspire the masses and kind of push technology forward for conquest and I'm developing a series with Funny or Die which like questions none essays yeah yeah so it's about you sending someone to Mars but kind of like that first monkey that got shot into space they're never coming back it's gonna be a one-way trip so mr. B well maybe so you mathematically determine the world's most expendable human being to make the journey and that's Michael Cera so wanted to see if this is like a project that you might have any interest in supporting Funny or Die just drove 31 million views to a like Hillary Clinton's egg elephant egg is few a few days ago I think I think it's pretty important to give people the option of returning the number of people who will be willing to move to Mars is much greater if they know that they have the option of returning even if they never actually return I mean most people that went to the original English colonies in North America they never returned to Europe even once but but some did and just knowing that if you don't like it there you can come back I think makes a big difference in people's willingness to to go there in the first place and in in case we need the spaceship back so it's gone it's coming you can jump on board or not that's cool you get you get a free return trip if you want high-heel on camera - car here from the outer space education Alliance over the years we watched an admiration as you drawn up great blueprints of how we are going to get to Mars I'm just curious about what type of initiatives you have in mind for answering the question of why an increasing public interest and actually desiring to do such a thing that's so vast and complex exactly that's that's what I really want I start the talk by saying what really matters is the intersection of sex about the intersection of sets of people that want to go and can't afford to go so that anything it could be done to increase the desire of people to go I think is a good thing and this I mean there's been a lot of marsh shows most you know movies and and this TV shows that I know that are getting written and you really want to create the the dream of Maz in people's minds and have it be like you know it's the new frontier and it's and make it as exciting and fun and desirable as possible so I think this is where this is where the entertainment industry play a huge role and just make it just you just imagine you know putting putting that dream in people's heads showing them what it could be like and I think this is really something that appeals to anybody with with an exploratory spirit if you if you're an explorer if you want to be on the frontier and I push the envelope and you know be where things are super exciting even if it's dangerous that's I mean that's really - we're appealing to you and I think anything anyone here could do in that direction would would be great getting people excited about going getting the public behind this and the truth is like right now on earth you can basically go anywhere in 24 hours I mean anywhere good you can get you can go you PI over the Antarctic Pole and parachute out 24 hours from now if you want you can get you can get passionate it's the top of Mount Everest from the right plane and that you can go to the bottom of the ocean from a physical standpoint you can go anywhere anywhere so there is no real physical frontier on earth anymore but space is is that frontier and so I think it's going to appeal to anyone with that without exploratory spirit thank you very much thank you man it's really hard to figure out with a disembodied voices coming from I was I wanted to ask you like for some normal people like me what would it take physically do you need some requirements to get more sorry I can't tell you yeah like if normal people want to travel to Mars do we need some specific requirements I mean we're trying to make it such that anyone could go that way I bet you know a lot of training or something nope maybe a few days of training training or if you want the ladies can I go upstairs and give your kids a good luck kids that's sauce sauce great I don't have him here but appreciate thank you appreciate the thought hi Jeff house spaces over on your right question on the resources how much resources are you putting into development right now in terms of funding employees and so on and how do you expect that to change as the development of the booster and spaceship grandfather well right now the resources that have been put into the interplanetary transport system are are pretty low I mean certainly well under five percent of the company and maybe we're spending a few tens of millions of dollars on it right now so it's it's relatively small and but then as we finished development of the sort of the final version of Falcon 9 which should be sometime next year and Dragon 2 and get the reusability of the boost stage and reasonability Dragon 2 sorted out then regret will gradually apply more more resources to the interplanetary system and so hopefully over time we'll be able to have most of our engineering team well we will help perhaps within a year and a half to two years we should have most those basics engineering working on the interplanetary system and hopefully be able to spend maybe more on the order of a couple hundred million dollars a year maybe three hundred leave us here on on the system so not a lot relative to the overall thing and it ought to make this whole thing work and work reliably before it starts generating maybe some kind of positive cash flow is he's probably investment on the order of ten billion dollars so it's you know a lot of money to get there can you talk a little bit about the future of humans in space and are you gonna go yeah I would definitely definitely like to go to a little bit and maybe visit the space station and then also put the go to Mars you're gonna make sure that if something goes wrong in the flight and you know I died then you know that there's a good succession plan and that the mission of the company continues and and then it doesn't somehow get taken over by investors who just want to you know maximize the profit of the company and not go to Mars that would be my biggest fear in that situation hi mr. mosque this is Nancy warp zone with outer space education Alliance and I know you've been talking about getting to Mars okay zero arms okay so and I know we need to get first Mars but I have a question in the back of your head have you been thinking about interstellar travel interstellar yes I mean I think if we were to do interstellar travel the best way to do it would be with kind of an antimatter drive that would give you the best obviously mass efficiency typical to be antimatter i but even in the best case scenario that's really quite a long journey even get to Proxima Centauri I think the key thing is to establish a base on on Mars and as soon as there's a base on Mars then there's a very powerful forcing function for improving space transport technology I mean right now there just isn't that forcing function cuz what we do is it's very local stuff in Earth orbit so as soon as we've got a base on on Mars we can see you leaving a base on the moon but but certainly based on laws that creates a very powerful forcing function for making space technology better and better every year and and and that's ultimately what will lead us to interstellar travel I think trying to do interstellar travel right off the bat is would be very tricky you know sort of like if you're developing aircraft you really want to first do the Wright Flyer and then maybe get to a dc-3 and then a 707 and a and then you know 747 but but trying to build the 747 right off the bat would be a tall order so yeah I agree but you agree that is something that we need to start talking about yeah I think it's definitely worth talking about I mean I think the technical solution likes it is it is I think ultimately antimatter Isaac yes okay thank you for coming to the IAC 2016 by the way thanks thanks I was cursed to know if you ever considered the idea of using a cycler in the semi cycler to go to Mars on a routine basis and if yes why didn't you eventually go for it yeah I think when we do the truck try to figure out the best cost per unit mass to see the surface of Mars the I mean you could do a cycler but I would our calculations at least show that it's just better to go directly there and and not have a cycler the transit time actually matters quite a lot before we use it for reuse of the spaceship spaceship so if you can reuse that spaceship very frequently then your cost per times Mars drops drops alive so we could be wrong about that and it could turn up interview for that having a cycler is is a good way to go but I would consider that to be in the realm of potential future optimization along with having a propellant propellant Depot on the moon that that might make sense but I say put that in the category of the future optimization thank you hello Ilana Tim Dodd here the everyday astronaut was Space Flight now and now in the animation you showed the passengers loading up onto MCT and or sorry the interplanetary IPT yeah and then going into orbit we're thinking about names the name thing is really cheap really hard I think like maybe for the name of the first ship that goes to Mars not the name of the whole sort of the ship line or whatever necessarily but the first ship that goes to Mars like my current favorite is heart of gold from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy I think I probably will name the first ship that goes to Mars heart of gold and and I like the fact that it's that is driven by infinite improbability because I think our ship is also extremely improbable so so on I like the infinite improbability drive but the acronym is not the best you know but you show it going into orbit with the hundred passengers and then refueling it three to five times and then doing your Mars injection right is this the plan or is it have a fully fueled you know I PT or MCT or whatever and then co-passengers on border can you tell me a little bit about that process yeah so the it really kinda depends on how quickly we do the propellant replenishment and how many missions are pure cargo versus have people on board if we can do the refueling very quickly then we can send people up there and maybe complete the refueling process in a few weeks if we're loading spacecraft into orbit with crew compartments say year in advance you wouldn't want people on both ends so what we would do is probably just launch a one of the it's just your mission which all business transfer people so it would wait until the spacecraft is fully fueled they launch another spacecraft which docks and transpose people from the empty to have one which to a tanks and chief to one with tanks full yep that makes sense thank you hello Amy so I think what you presented today is just incredible topic I have a startup to make electric transport buses a space questions only sorry sorry the thing is I just have my prototype outside the awesome you could go out and see it it's a 30-ton electric bass a great space questions this is the IAC so we're space questions only and looks like we just have time for a few more questions we'll take two or three more questions and then and use your solicitor just of the lunar missions instead and also do you intend to be the first man on Mars I think it's good for there to be multiple paths to to Mars so you know I wouldn't suggest any anything you know any attempt at interplanetary travel VB cancelled I think it's good to have multiple irons in the fire and and in fact a big part of me coming here today was to really try to encourage the international community to to think about building architectures like this I think it's actually much better for the world if there are multiple companies or organizations building interplanetary spacecraft you know the more the better anything I think that improves the probability of the future is good and multiple companies doing that I think would be would be would be great so I wanted to come to describe the architecture in actually in the hopes that this would encourage companies and organizations around the world to perhaps do something like this or maybe they've got a better architecture that's why I wanted to do it at the IC was to really encourage everything coach people to compete with SpaceX or potentially team up or just just get a kept community in general to think about grandma's taking Mars seriously but but effuse more funding for massive cool sorry usable funding from NASA and also will you be the first man on Mars I I don't think so maybe but I I'm not really sure I have to I don't know the person cost that because I said I if I I would definitely need to have a very good succession plan because the probability of death is quite high on the first mission so and I'd like to see my kids grow up and everything so some pros and cons they're like hey I'm sorry work how's our time and have to make way for a new session so this is gonna be our last question each session sorry guys thank you for going thanks for listening [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 1,788,026

Rating: 4.7946391 out of 5

Keywords: Elon Musk, Mars, SpaceX, colonizing, space, interstellar travel, electric cars

Id: W9olSzNOh8s

Length: 94min 46sec (5686 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Ewok_Samurai]

For me this was the single most inspiring line of the presentation. Ambitious people will always have plenty of doubters, but this man is willing to throw literally everything he has at his dream, and his dream will leave humanity a better place. Have to respect the hell out of that.

[u/iflutterfly]

Totally from the future. How can we not see that he is a time traveler from the 23rd C? His name is Elon Musk for godssakes

[u/cp5184]

I don't understand accumulating millions of dollars in wealth just to accumulate it. This makes much more sense to me. What Musk is doing with the mars program, and what bill gates and warren buffet are doing with charity.

Maybe somebody should start a charity to donate to the mars mission...

[u/Charyou-Tree]

Honestly, if this was any other man I would have called bullshit. But I believe him. He put everything on the line back in December 2008, and was getting ready to move back in with his parents if he failed again.

Elon Musk literally believes that humanity will go extinct if somebody doesn't succeed at what he's trying to do. That's why he's all in.

[u/Deathoftheages]

Elon is a fucking genius that is going to cement himself in human history forever if he pulls this off. He is trying to single handedly be the one that makes sure our species survives anything that happens to this planet. He wants to be like the dude from Startrek First Contact that discovered the warp drive that was be in the history books for generations. Just a lot less drunk than that guy.

[u/CarnageINC]

I think it would be great if other billionaires such as Gate, Zuckerberg or Bezos to collaborate to push forward privatization of space and move our species to the rest of the Solar System. I hope Mr. Musk can succeed in his endeavor!

[u/olafwillocx]

I wonder, is he legally allowed to invest, let's say 5 billion USD in the project? He can definitely afford it, but the money is mostly in Tesla shares.

[u/IrishNinjah]

The man is truly inspiring. He will change the human thought process forever on manned space flight. By literally ushering us into the age of being an Interplanetary Species.

Whether or not it may be fantastical (as we already see naysayers). You must dare to dream and create the impossible into reality. Unless we wish to stagnate and become complacent as a species on Earth.

Anything I can do to support this man, his team and his dream. Even if just by spreading the idea. I will.

[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
DoD	US Department of Defense
ITS	Interplanetary Transport System (see MCT)
RUD	Rapid Unplanned Disassembly
	Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
	Rapid Unintended Disassembly

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