Robert Zubrin, Moon Direct & The Case for Space - 2020 Lunar Development Conference

so now if he's ready i'd like to introduce robert zubrin robert is the president of pioneer astronautics and the founder and president of the mars society robert has been an advocate of human space exploration uh very prominent uh in the last you know 40 years i'd say 30 years um he would talk a lot about his mars direct plan and trying to get uh congress and the the united states and people around the world to support that and more recently he's been focused on the moon and he has a plan called moon direct to uh leverage some of the spacex and other hardware that's available now so robert welcome to the leonard development conference thank you um and thanks to all of you for uh attending this conference and i hope you also uh attend the mars society conference which is going to be october um 15th through 18th you can register for it at marsosociety.org in fact i believe our call for papers is still open if so if you want to speak at it you can send in an abstract um i'm going to talk about um matters that i talk about my new book the case for space um which is subtitled how the revolution in space flight opens a future of unlimited or limitless possibilities um and this emphatically of course includes the moon as well as mars the asteroids and the stars um the um but so let's start with the beginning the revolution um we uh are in the midst right now of uh the most dramatic revolution in space flight since uh the sputnik era that is since the birth of spaceflight um you know from sputnik 1957 through say the moon landing 1969 or 70 more of them um we developed a whole bag of tricks uh that was needed for space flight multi-stage launch vehicles hydrogen oxygen propulsion uh in space life support space rendezvous techniques docking soft landing techniques reentry techniques space navigation deep space communication radio isotope generators um you know and and pretty much everything uh you know we sent people to orbit and to the moon we sent probes to uh venus and mars um in fact we were well on our way with pioneer jupiter by that time and the the the so we did it and uh and in that time the cost of space launch went from truly astronomical levels in 1957 down to around ten thousand dollars a kilogram by 1970. and um okay so that was pretty good uh but from 1970 to 2010 the cost of space launch remained at ten thousand dollars a kilogram that is we went from incredible rates of progress during the space race to a complete stagnation um for 40 years 40 years uh the cost of space launch remained flat like it was a law of nature or something and but since 2010 it has dropped by a factor of five that is 40 years of stagnation 10 years of rapid resume progress and of course the cutting edge for this has been spacex okay uh which is now offering launch at two thousand dollars a kilogram uh and using its mostly reusable uh falcon nines and falcon heavies um i say the falcon 9 is mostly reusable because the first stage is much bigger than the second stage so if you're using the first stage you're using most of the rocket um and this is even more so with the falcon heavy um and um what musk has done is proven that it is possible for a well-led entrepreneurial team to do things that it was previously thought that only the governments of major powers could do and do them in a one-third of the time at one-tenth the cost and even do things that they had deemed completely impossible period such as reusable launch vehicles that fly back and land practically at the landing pad i mean you know this was um heinlein science fiction it was not reality it is now reality and um and not satisfied with that musk is um moving on creating a fully reusable heavier lift vehicle the starship and um which if successful will reduce launch costs by another factor of three or four down to five hundred to seven hundred dollars a kilogram and with much larger payloads too um the the now and it's good that he's doing that because what he has done is he's ignited an entrepreneurial space race um you know of course we're aware of uh other ventures here in the united states blue origin uh virgin galactic but in fact there are are many around the world i'm aware of at least five uh different uh entrepreneurial launch companies in china that have received substantial investment i saw uh the launch of one of them and um they're hot on musk's trail um they within a few years will have a vehicle comparable to falcon 9 um which is to say better than any american launch vehicle except the falcon 9 uh and the um so um and and of course you know new zealand has reached orbit new zealand doesn't even have a space program yet new zealand has reached orbit uh through a private initiative and not funded with discretionary money from a billionaire who wants to you know just see what he can do in the spare time um but by serious investors who got behind some engineers of ordinary means and um and they're flying so this is real so the entrepreneurial space race um is dramatically cheapening things uh it's going to continue to dramatically cheapen things um and it also has made space um fully international uh in principle anyway at this point you don't have to be a citizen of a space what of a country with a serious space program in order to be part of the space program um you know um such entrepreneurial ventures can be started anywhere um now uh the dynamic here is is very healthy um as i say musk is already trying to make his current line which is the best in the world obsolete uh this is not how people were thinking in the old space business at all i mean i i can tell you you know during the period uh early in my career when i worked for martin marietta we had the titan iv was our launch vehicle it was an evolved version that had come out of the titan two and three and uh by various changes in various things but one thing that hadn't changed from the titan ii was the upper stage and as a result it was very underpowered for what should be on top of the titan iv so we then as the engineers went to management and said look here is a design for an improved uh titan for upper stage it will increase the cost of the launch vehicle by 10 but double its payload capability and the management said to us look if the air force wants us to improve the titan they'll pay us to do it knows they had no internal drive uh to to do it uh to and to make the time for much more capable and much more competitive there was no competition and uh going on and it was not not in the commercial sense of the term and but okay uh musk this is silicon valley thinking of working to make your existing product obsolete even though it's working just fine even though maybe it's the best in the business right now um and um it's good that he's doing this because if he was to sit on his laurels with the falcons in a few years there would be other people with um equal capabilities uh and perhaps lower labor costs uh then you can california um and the um uh so um he's he's not gonna let the chinese eat his launching but he you have to keep moving fast now um if you're gonna stay ahead when there's serious competition as there now is now furthermore um reducing the cost of space launch will also reduce the cost of space craft um for a number of reasons first of all um the cheaper the launches are the more launchers they will be and so the more spacecraft there will be and the more people that will be in the game innovating but furthermore um and the larger the production runs which will also cheapen the cost of parts but also when space launch is very expensive it forces spacecraft designers to be very conservative um [Music] you if your launch costs 500 million dollars um you're not going to change a part to a less proven part in order to save one million dollars um or to improve capability by 30 when you are just going to uh well conceivably put this mission at risk so if the launches are cheaper look the spacecraft designers can be less conservative and because i mean for the past half century the the wisdom among spacecraft designers has been don't use anything that hasn't been used before okay this is like someone who says i want to see any movies that i haven't seen before because i don't know if they're going to be good or not so stick with the wizard of oz i saw it as a kid it is a good movie and i'm not going to take any chances um and um so that's a formula for stagnation but that formula is is being broken um and and will be broken in a very big way by this so spacecraft will get cheaper that mean that will also contribute to increasing the number of space launches which will contribute to reducing the cost of space launch and it's a virtuous cycle um so that's a very good thing now uh i believe there is uh another market uh i mean it is certainly fantastic to reduce the cost of space launch from ten thousand dollars a kilogram to two thousand dollars a kilogram to seven hundred dollars kilogram that that's extraordinary change um but for instance um a person who is 100 kilograms together with his or her luggage um can fly uh pretty much anywhere round trip in the united states or even to europe for um five hundred to a thousand dollars so that's five to ten dollars a kilogram how how do we get um uh uh costs down to that so that we have a space age comparable to the air age you know air travel was once exotic air travel even when i was a kid it was it was for the rich it was something very special people would dress up in suits and ties to go on an airplane um vp now masses did do it before covid um the the um well uh there needs to be a bigger market than satellite launch i believe that market um is point-to-point travel on earth you know last year there were about a hundred satellite launches worldwide spacex got a quarter of them which is sort of amazing uh i think that at least half of them were done by governments that like china or russia that spacex could not have competed for those launches they got fully half the launch market that was open um and uh but still 100 launches well you make space launch cheaper okay we're going to go to 200 launches we're going to go to 300 launches um that's that's on the way but there are hundreds of intercontinental flights every hour not every year and uh so how do we do that well that's surface to surface now if you look at starship um [Music] it is a good candidate it's arguably optimized for surface to surface the first stage would take off say from oceanic platform off los angeles and land on it the upper stage then goes uh nearly orbital and lands uh on an orbital platform near sydney australia um you know uh 40 minutes later so that's anywhere to anywhere on earth in in in less than an hour and of course there'd be another first stage that would operate out of sydney to launch things and then the upper stage could go back to new zealand or go back to los angeles or could fly uh to a um a landing platform um you know off the coast of england or somewhere i mean if you do the calculation and especially it's interesting that i mean musk chose methane as the fuel for starship because it's what you can make on mars um as i showed it in mars direct the best way to do mars missions make your return propellant on mars the easiest good propellant combination to make on mars is methane oxygen and but it has another virtue um it's the cheapest propellant liquefied natural gas is much cheaper than kerosene and um so as an aviation fuel or in this case as a surface to surface fuel it has enormous advantages because you know the fuel costs propellant costs for launch vehicles hardly mattered when you're expending the vehicle whether the propellant costs 10 cents a kilogram or a hundred dollars a kilogram it's insignificant compared to the hardware cost you're throwing away but once you have a reusable vehicle as in aviation um then fuel costs do matter and um and takes a lot of fuel to fly from los angeles to sydney either in an airplane or a suborbital vehicle but this is a cheaper fuel and um and if you were to say that uh the propellant costs could only be uh 25 of the total mission cost um then we're talking about uh and i do the math on this it's in the book uh ticket prices uh los angeles to sydney uh buy a vehicle this kind of about twenty thousand dollars to see now um and now in that amount of time in addition to getting to sydney you'd also have about half hour zero gravity and seeing space out the window so uh as a deal that kind of uh dramatically beats um some of these suborbital uh offerings of a few minutes in zero gravity for two hundred thousand dollars but furthermore you're getting somewhere so businesses who have to get to the meeting uh in europe today now they go or executives who you know are so important or feel themselves to be so important that they can't afford to waste 18 hours on an airplane can insist that the company pay for this and 20 000 is the cost of the first class ticket from los angeles to sydney right now um so there are people that pay that uh and um in this case you would actually have a material advantage you would get there in less than an hour um currently first class ticket just offers a bigger seat and a tablecloth and a free drink or two um hardly worth the large surcharge except for the prestige um and um but this would be material now if you did this then um well these are basically orbital vehicles there'd be lots of them that would greatly cheapen their costs i think musk has this in mind you know in boca chica he's not building a ship he's building a shipyard um his plan is to be turning these things out um at a rate of one a week or faster like liberty ships and his whole development program is based on this concept of make him break him find out what went wrong try again um and uh you um one could argue that perhaps he might be productive to have a little tighter quality control on some of these starship prototypes um but in any case he's moving pretty fast and the concept is um um that there'll be hundreds of them thousands of them just as there are thousands of boeing 737s and um and that of course will cheapen the engines the avionics all these things will be produced in mass production runs instead of limited production runs you know you can buy a pretty good car for twenty thousand dollars um and a modern car is a far more complex thing than say um a um space shuttle main engine which is now given a new name rs 25 or something for uh the sls is you know 150 million dollars um and why because they're producing them in lots of one two three not lots of hundreds of thousands um even though as i say the car is a more complex object so this is going to make uh space travel very cheap and spacecraft very cheap and this will make possible orbital enterprise all the things that were advertised for the space shuttle of the industries that you could do on orbit research that you can do on orbit could actually be done they couldn't be done with space shuttle um realistically because of the enormous costs of the shuttle and the bureaucratic obstacles to getting payloads on the shuttle or on the space station of course the few noteworthy experiments made in space showed that they could do terrific fiber optic cables in zero gravity but certainly um you want cheaper transport to orbit if you're going to do this as a real business and so starship should realize the um the promise that was made with the spaceship um and you know shuttles they advertise that they could fly them 40 times a year i think the highest they ever got was eight um but the um you know spacex is currently launching every two weeks um and uh so um they they they could actually realize that now this is a moon conference let's talk about the moon uh because to me um while doing activities like point-to-point travel orbital industry orbital tourism you know whatever these are very interesting uh and they're good things um to me they are a bridge to um something much grander that i would like to contribute to creating and that is humanity as a spacefaring species that is to me the point of of going into space is to travel across space um and to visit explore develop create new branches of human civilization on worlds on the other side of space okay um and um you know that's like ships you can do things at sea you can go fishing and go on cruises but the real value of ships is they take you across the ocean to the lands on the other side of the ocean um so the new lands that's to me what it's all about now nasa of course right now has a program called artemis uh and there are some positive features to artemis [Music] which is the most positive feature about artemis is its deadline which is to land someone on the moon by 2024. you know the obama administration allegedly had a mars program they called journey to mars and i was not particularly a fan uh even though i'm as you know very much a mars person because it had no deadborn it had no drive it was we're going to mars someday well if john f kennedy said we're going to the moon someday we never would have made it to the moon um for the program to be real it has to have uh a deadline and even if the deadline is missed uh by a year or a few at least it represents a commitment to do something and you know that nasa's human spaceflight program has been adrift since the end of apollo it has had no clear goal occasionally goals were stated but they were put so far off in the future that they didn't have to be addressed um and so for example president bush's vision for space exploration announced in 2004 postulated landing on the moon by 2019 uh 15 years later when it only took eight years to do it the first time and so when you say you're going to do something that far in the future you're saying that you're not going to do it you just hope that someone else is going to do it and similarly the obama mars program of you know orbiting mars by 2033 or landing by 2048 um is basically saying uh we hope that someone will do this someday but we're not gonna do it um so artemis has a deadline okay so that's a very good thing um and to a certain extent it has energized nasa um but not enough because the deadline is only being taken semi-seriously um the you know for example um that the obvious thing to do um nasa well nasa right now has available to it'll launch be called a falcon heavy which is fine it has available to it a human rated capsule which has been demonstrated and and the dragon uh which weighs nine tons compared to the orion which does not yet exist which weighs 26. um 26 ton orion is so heavy that even the sls which does not yet exist um cannot deliver into low lunar orbit with enough propellant to fly home and so they have to build a lunar orbiting space station in high lunar orbit for it to go to um in order for it to go anywhere um and of course this lunar orbiting space station does not yet exist and the requirement for a lunar landing in ascent vehicle to go to the lunar surface and back from that position as opposed to low lunar orbit like apollo means that the landing in ascent vehicle needs about twice as much propellant as it would if it was um using the low lunar orbit as its node so the obvious answer here for this is to use a falcon heavy with a dragon to deliver a capsule into low lunar orbit and use a falcon heavy and a lem type vehicle which could be much smaller than the one needed for transport from the space station or the lunar orbiting space station the deep space the lunar orbit gateway or toll booth whatever um uh to use that you could fly an apollo 8 style mission this year okay um the capability is is right there and um but they're not doing it and you say why not and they say politics we would lose support if we didn't use sls or a lie which is another way of saying um that we are doing this mission in the most time-consuming and expensive way possible because when we give out money people like us okay how to make friends give out money um but this is not and this is not how you get to the moon you don't get to the moon by making your program as inefficient and time-consuming as possible okay and so the question here for artemis is is it a purpose-driven program or is it a vendor-driven program a purpose-driven program spends money to do things a vendor-driven program does things in order to spend money a purpose-driven program can accomplish a purpose a vendor-driven program is simply a means of distributing funds um and um and therefore its ability to actually accomplish anything is uh greatly reduced um and um so that that's the question here now um now one can go beyond the i mean the expedient that i just described to you i'm just using an apollo type architecture of it with two falcon heavies one delivering the lamb one delivering the dragon rendezvous with orbit do the mission lor that's straightforward um and frankly anyone who's an engineer can see that that is a much better answer than the current artemis baseline now in my book i described a more creative architecture which i call moon direct um in which um you don't do the mission that way because if you liberate your thinking uh you say well lunar orbit rendezvous is an excellent way to do lunar exploration missions because staging your return propellant in lunar orbit reduces the total mass so forth that's why it was chosen by apollo if you have a moon base you want to be on the moon for long periods of time the correct architecture is directly turned from the lunar surface using lunar propellants because if you can use lunar propellants then lunar orbit rendezvous with terrestrial propellant stage in lunar orbit does not save mass and furthermore direct return from the lunar surface is much better if you're staying any length of time on the surface of the moon because the launch window to earth is always open you're not dependent on a lunar orbiting spacecraft you certainly don't have anybody playing mike collins for four months in lunar orbit minding the store uh while you're kicking up dirt on the surface and you have no one minding the store that's another problem and the but from the the surface of the moon looking at earth the earth is always in the same position in the sky the launch window is always open and in fact um you know a a lamb leaving the gateway has three kilometers a second to go down three kilometers second to come back up six a lamb leaving the lunar surface and going on straight trans earth injection takes three kilometers a second to go on trans earth injection and three kilometers a second assuming it does not have an aeroshell to do a propulsive capture in low earth orbit and then you could refuel it in low earth orbit with something like a falcon 9 and bring passengers to it in a dragon but the dragon in that case would stay in low-earth orbit and um and so with a single falcon 9 launch you could transfer a crew and enough propellant to fly it back to the moon and now you've got uh round-trip lunar missions with a single falcon 9 launch per permissions so that's excellent now of course if starships are available you could do better um but looking at the tool set that is currently flyable there there are far superior alternatives to um the current arm of space line because the current artemis baseline is corrupted by the need to please certain um constituents and and and frankly um artemis would be better off saying okay sls you can have your money but just please don't make us use you um [Music] because they could get to the moon a lot faster that way just saying okay europe attacks you know just don't get in our way it's kind of like europa clipper where someone is insisting that europa clipper uses sls which makes no sense um now uh i'm not um totally on board with everything spacex says uh for instance um this idea of using starship as a lunar landing ascent vehicle does not appeal to me at all and there's a number of issues with that first of all the amount of refueling you would have to do first in low earth orbit and then at the in lunar orbit to land it with enough propellant to fly at home it's about 20 starship launches to fly one starship round trip and the the reason for that is the starship is you know so massively heavy uh that uh i mean here it is it's a dry mass of 100 tons compared to the lim apollo 11 upper stage had a dry mass of two tons uh so it's 50 times as much to refuel a starship on the surface of the moon okay if you have isru you even you you have to do an enormous amount of propellant making so it's not attractive as an ascent vehicle at all now as a one-way lander it offers something because you land a starship on the moon and leave it there now you have an apartment house on uh okay that's fine but then there are some uh technical issues associated with a very large plume impingement that you would generate with a starship while landing in which i do not believe is adequately answered by the proposal to put engines up near the top just the amount of thrust you need to land is very large now perhaps after a moon base is established and a landing pad a hardened landing pad can be created then a starship could be landed there and it greatly enhanced the base capabilities um but certainly not for use as in the synth vehicle but one very attractive use for starship relatively early in the program aside from is a fully reusable heavy lift launch vehicle which is an enormous benefit uh if you want to go beyond that um i would deliver a starship to lunar orbit um and leave it there with a lot of methane oxygen propellant still in its tanks and it could act as a tanker refueling much smaller landing in ascent vehicles that use methane oxygen propellant and for instance the genetics lantern that has been proposed is um a methane oxygen vehicle and it would make an excellent uh landing craft uh to be based off of a starship tanker in low luton orbit and in fact if it um only had to go to low lunar orbit as opposed to back and forth to this the gateway um the genetics lantern could become fully reusable that would also be an attractive architecture so there's a lot of ways to skin this cat and uh but what they have in common is that they only work if you don't let yourself be forced by vendor-driven imperatives you have to be able to design the correct architecture or you're not going to get to the correct architecture you have to be able to optimize the mission based on engineering criteria and not on criteria of paying off various interested parties um because especially in this case where there is a very large divergence between what the interest parties have to offer and um what the best things on offer are and that's the other thing about um the entrepreneurial space race if nasa is to help drive it nasa must be freed to choose the most cost effective choice in other words if you want merit to be incentivized then nasa has to be free to choose launch vehicle spacecraft all other technologies based on merit and not based on um political imperatives that are unrelated to merit this is how nasa can best support um the space revolution simply by being an intelligent customer okay a customer who is free to choose okay free to choose the best solution if the customer is free to choose the best solution the market will provide the best solution if the customer is not free to choose the best solution the market has no incentive to provide the best solution okay so this is very important um i am in total disagreement with people who say we have an entrepreneurial revolution going on we don't need nasa we very much need nasa but we need nasa to be free to choose the best technologies and the best providers available okay if it is okay if it's free to choose the best it will promote the best and the best will succeed uh so i mean that's the thing about a free market okay both the suppliers have got to be free to supply whatever they um would like to offer and the customer has got to be free to choose what it finds best and that's how you get to the best um now one reason why i am well i'm a space advocate so i'm for an effective program to develop the moon but in my particular role as a mars advocate i am very much interested in having an efficient lunar program um because i don't want the lunar program to be a quagmire that ties up our resources and makes it impossible to attempt anything more ambitious for decades to come uh you know the artemis architecture which requires two sls launches for every lunar mission as well as further launches to maintain the gateway is extremely inefficient and and it may not even be workable because it also requires six rendezvous with each mission five spacecraft flight elements all this stuff and um but let's put starship aside for a minute if sls is the heaviest launch vehicle you have do you really want to tie it up doing lunar missions okay you could say well i'll use it for my first lunar mission because i need it until i have lunar oxygen available but after that you want to hand things off um you you you know it's like you take normandy beach with your top combat divisions but after the beach is taken you don't keep your top combat divisions there administering the beach they can be done by rear echelon units okay the best units have got to go liberate the rest of france and so it's the same thing here with moon direct yes it uses heavy lift either falcon heavies or sls if you will uh to establish the base but the first priority is establishing lunar oxygen production or lunar hydrogen and oxygen production if you're at the pole um and after that you can continue doing lunar missions with a single falcon 9 launch and you know here's falcon 9 launching 25 of them a year right now and the you have a moon base and you need one falcon 9 launch permission and each mission spends three months on the moon okay four out of your 24 falcon 9's or dedicate are supporting uh an effective moon base and now you have your heavy lift vehicles free to support mars now um for mars um i believe the first priority immediately is the development of the heavy lander and nasa people um frequently when they came up with ridiculous plans to create luna orbit gateway or a mars orbit gateway or something would say well we're doing this because we don't have a mars heavy lander well if you don't have a mars heavy lander the solution is not to build orbital space stations that don't land the solution is to develop a mars heavy lander and um a falcon not actually not a falcon 9 a falcon heavy uh could throw a sufficient payload to mars um for a correctly designed lander to land 20 tons on mars which is um a sufficient amount to i mean it's of sufficient size you can build human mars missions if you have that capability sls 30 tons starship we use starship is just a reusable earth to orbit vehicle 40 tons um but whether it's 20 30 40 uh you need at least 10 at bare minimum 10 ton landing capability um compared to one ton for the curiosity landing system you need to be in the 10-ton ballpark and as i said falcon heavy can get you up to around 20 which is fine and i'd like to see um development of a heavy mars lander and we can start the mars program straight away um launching these things to mars with falcon heavies demonstrate the entry and landing and start establishing facilities on mars now these could be um massive scientific expeditions you don't land one rover on mars you land 30 you know and you okay normandy beach okay lower the plank and now the lst comes the robot battalion and fan out and many of these will be instruments for all kinds of scientists scientists have numerous competing ideas on what instruments should be on rovers this would allow us to try out a lot of them uh but also many of them could just be photography rovers that could go and image an entire region of mars in uh virtual reality um high definition and all that data could be sent back to earth and we would have on earth a virtual reality simulchrome not of an artist's conception of mars but an actual region of mars where these rovers are operating and human beings could put on vr gear and start walking around the landscape and uh studying uh the rocks and and so forth and say hey this is anomalous this thing over here hey bring a rover over here and hit this thing without a hammer because i want to knock the crust off this this is this a fossil let's have a look at it um so demonstrating a kind of virtual human robot collaboration and scientific exploration it would greatly democratize the explanation process millions of people could participate in it um and that would be a precursor for sending human astronauts to mars and having virtual human assistance in large numbers helping them explore the areas to demonstrate a new kind of thing but also of course heavy landers could start landing power facilities on mars whether these are nuclear reactors or fields of solar panels if you want to go that way set up an isru plant get isru production going uh just prepare the whole landing and since now you've proven the lander and you've proven isru and you have power available well at a certain point you put a hab module on the virtual lander and you send out the crew um so we could get this going straight away um but once again um i think what nasa should do is say okay here's the thing uh we have a vehicle that can send 30 tons on transmars injection if you've got 30 tons and you're approaching mars how much payload can you land on mars what's your design and compete it in some way and um get it done and um now of course starship is developed i once again i like starship much better as a fully reusable heavy lift launch vehicle saturn v capability you know one-tenth or less the cost of an sls uh what's not to like flying starship all the way to mars means you only get to use that starship once every three years instead of once a week if you just went up to orbit and back um but furthermore once again as an earth return vehicle because it's so heavy it greatly increases the isru requirement um one solution for that would be to use mars direct type vehicles of the kind that i designed another would be um to have a mini starship um which would add a fifth the size of the big starship it would be sized to be a reusable upper stage on the falcon 9 um and that in itself would be a very usable commercial vehicle fully usable medium of launch vehicle but that that upper stage that that mini starship uh with all its propellant could be lifted to orbit by the big starship and it could fly to mars and it'd be much easier to refuel that and send it back than the big ship um so these are some of the things on on the horizon um you know i but once again uh and and by the way i i think starship is going to ignite the mars program um i think uh you know i think musk's projections of reaching orbit you know of course he he reached orbit by um this spring and i said no make it two years and i think that's more realistic but whether it's two years or three years i'm pretty sure starship will regularly be flying to orbit by um 2024 and we'll have a new president elected in 2024 and he or she will turn to their advisors and if starships are flying regularly to orbit by then um you know that person will turn to his or her advisors and say look can we have people on mars by the end of my second term and and the answer is certainly going to be yes will it cost hundreds of billions of dollars no uh tens of billions maybe 10 billion well then let's do it and at that point uh we could get a government commitment um to join in a mars program um have nasa meet musk halfway uh because there are things that need to be developed to develop mars that would be very difficult for must to develop for instance space nuclear reactors which require highly enriched uranium um and i think that by making the program practical the musk and the other um space entrepreneurs are are going to make it sellable and it will sell and so we're going to go to mars um now the space launch revolution okay it will take us beyond mars the asteroids outer solar system and beyond um you know also greatly enhanced science programs it already is you know the test space telescope was launched on a falcon 9 and the nasa science directorate which was looking to save money uh not to uh um be the play santa claus um was able to save 200 million dollars compared to launching it on a delta iv um so that helped science uh but this is having effects that are outside of the space community and i talk about this in the book one of the most noteworthy areas is fusion power now you know fusion power people talk about fusion power since the first hydrogen bomb was set off early 50s uh there's been a fusion program um but um and actually did make some significant progress under cold war competition but once that ebbed the fusion program has been stagnating since the 80s [Music] and people have adopted a cynical attitude of well it's always going to be in the future it's never really going to happen well what happened was as a result of the success of spacex some people with very serious money took a second look at fusion and they said huh maybe the problem with fusion was the same probable problem as with reusable space launch maybe it wasn't fundamentally a technical problem maybe it was fundamentally an institutional problem and so entrepreneurial fusion startups are getting funded and i'm talking about with serious money hundreds of millions of dollars uh to try alpha energy in california has gotten 500 million in investment that's more than the us government fusion program and these people are not developing fusion on a multi-decadal timeline they're they they're answering to investors they want to have real accomplishments within three five six years and and they will and i think that so a secondary result of the um space launch revolution is going to be a revolution in fusion energy and just as i think as a result of the space launch revolution we'll have people on mars by the end of the 2020s i think we're gonna have fusion by the end of the 2020s and um this is particularly interesting to me because i actually worked in the fusion program in the 80s at los alamos and i remember one uh departmental uh uh lunch we had and the head of of of division just made an offhand comment and he said you know when fusion power is finally developed it won't be at a place like los alamos or livermore it will be a couple of crackpots working in a garage and well everybody laughed at that because fusion power is hard and requires big machines and expensive stuff and not really the kind of stuff that garage inventors are likely to be able to get but if not a couple of crackpots working in a garage a startup working in a warehouse yes i i think that is what is going to happen and when fusion power comes it's not just going to help the earth it's going to help space bearers because fusion power is not just another way to light light bulbs it's a new kind of energy you can do new kinds of things um for example fusion rockets which in principle can get exhaust velocities up to seven percent the speed of light and a well engineered rocket can achieve velocities up to twice its exhaust velocity uh which means we're talking about transportation systems that can travel at up to 10 the speed of light that is a beginner's capability for interstellar travel so we're opening a road here uh and the road is going to take us to orbit to the moon to mars it's going to take us into stone and this is where it is beginning so i'd be happy to take questions all right well thanks for that interesting talk robert let's uh let's get to a couple of questions connections live asks can you compare how much isru decreases transport costs compared to reducing launch costs well well it depends how much you reduce launch costs but um you want to do both um you definitely want to reduce launch costs but um a long time ago um back in the 80s uh i was a strong advocate at that point of advanced propulsion electric propulsion for example and uh i had a very interesting conversation at that time with the craft erica who um was a member of the von braun team and was a lunar advocate and he made a point to me that has stuck with me ever since um he said to me look you can have electric propulsion system with a space nuclear reactor and it can give you a um a specific impulse of say 3000 seconds um and which is much more than you can get with a hydrogen oxygen rocket which is 450 seconds this is about the number of seconds a pound of fuel can give you a pound of thrust it's how we rate the effectiveness of rockets but now at this time we knew of course you could get oxygen from the moon we did not know that there was water on the moon so he said we go to the moon we make oxygen from lunar iron oxides and we bring the hydrogen so now we have a rocket that has an isp of 450 seconds but uh six sevenths of the mass of its propellant uh is coming from the moon so it has a leverage of seven to one that is you get seven times as much propellant as the amount of propellant you bought well seven times four hundred and fifty is three thousand so you have the same specific impulse as electric propulsion but at high thrust instead of a massive space nuclear reactor that you have to haul all over the place you have a little rl10 and instead of having to exert the thrust over six months or a year you can do the burn in 20 minutes and be on your way um and so that what isru is it's a way of taking energy from say a nuclear reactor or even from a large solar array and storing it in chemical form where it can is very portable and can be released over a very short period of time so um the so that's the advantage of iu and the further out you go um or or the further into a gravity well you go the the the the more it benefits you because the more penalty there would be to take the propellant there and so but it's fundamental and there's a second point about isru okay and by the way i don't really like to call in situ isru i call it local resource creation because you see not in situ resource utilization see i don't believe there is any such thing as a natural resource natural resources do not exist there are only natural raw materials it is technology human creativity in action that turns materials into resources uranium was not a resource until we developed nuclear power okay aluminum was not a resource till we developed means of separating it from aluminum oxide you know the pioneers of the old west i live here in colorado you go into old west antique store you won't see a single item made of aluminum no pioneer ever saw aluminum to them it was dirt okay that oil was not a resource till we developed oil drilling and refining and things that could run on the product iron was not a resource in the bronze age that's why they were using bronze to them iron was dirt and so they were using much more geochemically rare and far more expensive elements so once you develop the technology for smelting iron out of iron or all of a sudden you have this cheap metal that did not exist before land was not a resource until people invented agriculture so the moon and mars have no resources on them now they will once there are resourceful people there and so this is a very important principle a place is habitable for you if you can take the materials there and turn them into resources if you're stranded in the woods and there's a pond and you know how to make fishing gear then the fish in that pond are a resource for you if you don't they are not so this is a very fundamental point if we are going to develop space we must engage in local crete resource creation that is how we settled the earth okay by being able to create resources wherever we went that is how we're gonna sell space okay uh james melton asks what are your thoughts on the new spacex spacesuits that doug and bob are using on demo2 and will they serve a purpose for moon travel also are diva newman's designs being considered for use in the short term okay well these are both innovative designs uh uh the uh okay and i i don't know the specifics of the spacex suit as to whether it could be used on the surface of the moon or not um there are certain additional requirements that would be needed uh on the surface of the moon thermal variations dust and so forth but i imagine they could be modified um to be used on the moon the dava newman who is a professor at mit who uh also has done a few turns and high-level nasa positions um are very innovative they represent a different principle altogether of spacesuit design um which is instead of using pneumatic pressure they use elastic pressure so that uh instead of this big um you know stay puft snowman spacesuits that we've been wearing these would be far more nimble uh um although for instance on mars in addition to the spacesuit you'd want to wear a ski jacket uh but that's easily done uh but but yeah the david newman has done a lot of extremely interesting research and i'd like to see that taken forward okay saga knight asks could musk go to mars without the help of nasa or is it does he have to play with nasa to succeed um strictly speaking he could go but i don't think he will um musk does not have unlimited resources he has a lot more resources than most of us um but he doesn't have unlimited resources and as you can see he is developing spacex on um well he's put a lot of his own money into it but he's also uh attempting to leverage public money wherever he can so he's developed the dragons and falcons uh actually initial development he did on his own but he managed to get himself paid back by creating a logistic capability for the space station that wasn't there before and now a human transportation system he's kind of like a person trying to cross a river by hopping from rock to rock taking maximum advantages of whatever rocks happen to be there now as i said um there's a raft of systems that need to be developed in order to do human exploration of mars these include first and foremost surface power systems and isru systems but other kinds of systems spacex is focused on the transportation system um and um i think that we as american citizens should insist that our space program meet him halfway and develop these other systems that are needed for mars um and not put the full burden on him and i think he's doing very good faith effort i mean the transportation system is the tallest pole uh and he's doing it so nasa should develop space nuclear power nasa should develop isru nasa should develop spacesuits that are designed for the martian surface um nasa should develop mars rovers and lunar rovers um and and and and all sorts of other uh surface technologies um so you know let's meet him halfway great uh owen bonnie asks if starship is going is eventually going to be cheap and reliable enough for point-to-point travel why would the amount of refueling trips be a large consideration especially considering the massive size of starship and its payload and habitation capacity compared to the national team and dianetics landers i think that uh having to do 20 starship launches to land something on the moon and return uh compared to stationing a starship in lunar orbit and having a dinette reusable genetics land or go up and down 20 times off of one starship there's no comparison in the efficiency of that and furthermore as i say landing a starship on a virgin lunar site uh creates major difficulties uh the you know the exhaust velocity of a methane oxygen engine is greater than lunar escape velocity not only would you scatter debris uh all over the region of the moon that you're in you you would could send debris all the way back to earth you um it's it's just doesn't make sense now sending a small lander with a team that could prepare a landing pad and then land starships one way on the moon and now you have a base on the moon uh is is okay uh landing a starship on the moon makes some sense it's an enormous facility using starship as an ascent vehicle um it's like taking uh an aircraft carrier white water rafting it's just the wrong vehicle for the job okay next question is from joseph phillips he asks would you see electromagnetic launch as a good long-term option for lunar material export it could be um electromagnetic launch catapult launch uh paper i wrote back in in 1990 with david baker exploring the tether launch system uh are all very interesting for the moon another very interesting thing for the moon is a skyhook um or i guess the current term is space elevator these are not practical for earth uh because of the gravity is affects uh the mass of the space hook uh exponentially uh but on the moon it's possible and also you don't have to deal with air and um so uh i think a a lunar space elevator would be very interesting so there are are ways to get stuff off the surface of the moon now if you're just sending materials yes catapults and and electromagnetic launchers and mass drivers like gerardo neolite and these are all possibilities uh of course the space elevator would allow you to send uh payloads of any size including human payloads up and down from the surface of the moon to orbit and even uh if the elevator went beyond the orbital point uh on trans earth or trans mars injection for that matter calvin gluck asks can you comment briefly on why you made a strong argument against returning to the moon in the case for mars and now seem more willing to advocate for returning to the moon do you still feel that it would be better to focus all of our efforts on mars alone um well i never advocated focusing all of our efforts on mars alone i have advocated and i still believe that mars should be our primary goal um there were people who agreed with me on that for instance john young who said nevertheless we should integrate a lunar program into the mars program and as a step along the way that's a reasonable proposition it's a debatable proposition um but the thing is is this is um i'm actually not advocating a return to the moon as such what i am saying is if you want to return to the moon let's have a program that actually returns to the moon whereas if you say we have to go back to the moon before we go to mars and i'm saying okay then let's get on with it um if i'm saying if we do have a return to the moon program let's make it an efficient return to the moon program one that gets us back to the moon and gives us an effective capability on the moon uh i've always believed that um as part of becoming a space um civilization uh development to the moon is part of that um but um frankly you know i was 17 when we landed on the moon and if anybody told me then that i'd be 68 and we'd be sitting here talking about can we ever get to the moon i i would have thought they were just crazy um and there really is a tremendous lowering of our ambitions now mars it is sort of incredible that uh here we are um a half century later and uh well today is literally 51 years later to the day of the moon landing and and we're talking about how he can get to the moon i mean this is crazy um we're better than this and um you know we went to the moon okay now goals were not scientific we wanted to astonish the world with what free people could do and i can tell you we did because i was in leningrad when we landed on the moon and we astonished the world what three people could do we really did it and that was really something and um i was a chess player as a kid and and i was over there and all the russians i knew were you know mama jets i mean they thought it was great we had excelled in a sport that they appreciated as it were and and and the leaders may have been having kittens but the people thought wow the americans are really something and the the the the um um well let me tell you how we do it freedom and the the the um okay so that was something but here we are a half century later and are we really going to inspire the world with doing something we did 50 years ago are we really going to inspire the youth of today with something that grandparents did um that you know mars is where the science is it's where the challenge is and it's where the future is it has far richer in materials for development than than the moon um so it's much more promising in that respect um it's um you know it's where we're gonna find out the truth about biology whether uh life is unique to the earth or a general phenomenon of the universe and or whether the life as we find it on earth is the pattern for all life everywhere does all life use dna and rna or is it a far more general phenomena um and and biology by the way you know is real nano technology it's programmable micro machines and we can find out a lot more about fundamental biology the applications of that are going to be fantastic um the the it's like going from vacuum tubes is the only way to build computers to going to to to chips and the the um and and then as i say it's the future but um but sure uh i think we can have a moon program a workable moon mars program but you know here they have a moon program and say well before we land on the moon we really have to build a space station in lunar orbit well screw that we don't need a space station in lunar orbit to land on the moon we did it last time and it wasn't you know the lunar orbit gateway which was previously called the deep space gateway was thought of by the obama administration as an alternative to landing on the moon because they were not committed to going to the moon they just wanted to have a place that orion could go to in order to go somewhere in order to pretend that it was doing something okay so sure let's develop the moon let's develop mars let's develop asteroids let's do each of these as efficiently as they can be done in order to maximize all the things that we can do i'm gonna have to go on about five minutes so um okay well i guess i'm the one taking up all the time but let's ask questions i'll try to give shorter answers no problem uh john chaucey asks are you in discussions with musk on some of your ideas for mission architectures using starship yes easy answer all right the next one's from michael bozzo he has a two-part question the first one is when spacex first started in 2002 did you initially react with skepticism like many others in the space industry when elon made his pitch about reusability and lowering the cost to enable missions to moon mars possible or did you instantly see the compatibility with mars direct well when spacex started in 2002 the central idea was not in fact reusability um it was that you could beat the launch majors on cost by having a much lower overhead company uh which was unquestionably true um that is the overheads that lockheed martin and mcdonald douglas was now boeing were fantastical uh and clearly a more efficient company could beat them on costs the original the falcon 1 was not a particularly innovative vehicle from a technical point of view nor was the fountain mine initially so uh just two-stage kerosene oxygen launch vehicle that was okay the place where there was skepticism though was whether he could do it because um not from a technical point of view per se there was nothing that was his design was far more conservative than saying rotary rocket which had a very innovative and somewhat um disputable principle uh behind its design uh there was no question about uh that his technical approach was workable um it was whether you could really do this with private money there had been a whole parade of zillionaires had come along in the 90s who you know put some money in uh and then quit when the galling got tough and um and people looked at this practically everybody who looked at this said well here comes another rich kid who thinks he can open the space frontier because it looks easy um and um but what musk did was different because musk did not just you know throw you know 50 million dollars or something at some visionary engineer and say have a good time uh and then quit when it wasn't easy um he first of all you know when i first met musk in 2001 he had a scientific background he understood scientific principles i didn't know anything about rockets nothing uh and but he learned and so for instance by 2004 i had a long discussion with him in his factory first factory not the current one um el segundo i think it was and uh he he knew a lot about rockets by then he you know he put his mind into it he didn't this wasn't just play money he he put his mind and his full talent into it both his his his engineering account which he proceeded to develop in a very impressive way and also his political and business talent um he didn't leave this thing to be handled by people who well there are very few people with business talent equal to elon musk um but you needed that much business talent to make this thing happen uh and to political talent to outmaneuver the majors who were shutting them out of the launch sites and all this kind of stuff uh and looking for any excuse to to say well those rockets are unsafe we can't let them be launched near america um and all this and but he was still actually a bit naive because i i'll tell you um he hadn't launched it in 2004 but the falcon 1 was coming along and the time that it would launch was in sight and i said to him you know elon you're going to have to be prepared to do this at least three times because the first two are going to fail and he says to me why what what is the problem with my design tell me why it's going to fail and i said i don't know why it's going to fail i haven't examined your design um certainly not in any detail uh but i just know that these things are really complicated and there's a lot that can go wrong and it probably will and you just have to be ready uh for it to fail because it's going to fail the first couple of times well i then met him again in 2007 at the big factory and by then the first two falcon ones had failed and he says to me i'm good for one more try if it fails then i'm done i'm out well it did fail the third time he stuck with it anyway and the fourth time it succeeded and that's how he learned the truth about rocketry um but he was tough enough and none of his predecessors were he was smart enough to actually learn the field himself and tough enough to stick with it even though um it failed three times on him so yeah fortune favors the brave and fortune favors the tough and fortune favors the smart and he's all three smart brave and tough and that's why this has worked and um but he's opened the door and i will say this musk you know is a risk taker he skates very close to the edge of the ice and this isn't a sure thing it's possible he'll fail it's possible he'll fail because of the technical failure it's possible he'll fail because he tweets something stupid on and and gets himself into trouble with the authorities um but in a sense he's already won he's proven the point he's proven the value of entrepreneurial space and this these this cat can never be put back in the box the world has changed

Channel: The Moon Society

Views: 2,351

Rating: 4.9252338 out of 5

Keywords: Lunar Development Conference, The Moon Society, Moon

Id: 68GYck4MLVg

Length: 76min 56sec (4616 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/burn_at_zero]

I watched this live but didn't take many notes, so the comments below are incomplete.

My main takeaway from this is that although he thinks highly of SpaceX and Musk, he still doesn't think Starship as a single-vehicle architecture is a good idea.
He still wants someone to make a mini Starship for the Mars trip so the return fuel isn't such a burden. He said that the cargo ships shouldn't return, and given how low the manufacturing costs are going to be he's right about that.
He wants lunar Starship to be a low-orbit tanker that basically replaces Gateway, while someone should develop a reusable single-stage methalox lunar lander for crew and someone should develop a heavy disposable lander for payloads of ~40 tonnes.
He wants lunar surface exploration to use fewer Starship launches for refueling than the current approach would involve. I think this stems from skepticism about SpaceX's projected cadence of 2-3 flights per day per pad and projected costs of ~$2 million per launch. If he's assuming we only get one tanker flight a week then the campaign for a lunar landing would take months, with associated boiloff and MMOD complexities.

I disagree with those conclusions for the most part. I certainly would be pleased if his way is the way it happens, but only because that means we got there.
SpaceX has limited cash and talent, and they have to use them in a way that generates cashflow so the company can continue to exist. Spending years and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars on a vehicle they might only use two or three times while establishing a large-scale propellant plant is a terrible idea.
I can see why it's an elegant approach from an engineering standpoint and it would make sense in the context of an exploration-only Mars policy, but a settlement policy has very different objectives and vastly more passengers.

Reusable landers and a depot are good ideas. For some reason the idea of using Starship and methalox landers gets good press but the idea of using a dedicated station (Gateway) and hypergolics gets bad press. Go figure. (Yes there are differences; the Gateway method has lower Isp and higher mission delta-v, so the lander performance requirements are higher. On the other hand it's easier for providers to get material to the station, the station itself is in one of the very few long-term-stable lunar orbits and the propellant doesn't have to deal with boiloff or experimental fluid transfer techniques.)

[u/GreyGreenBrownOakova]

Anybody got a spare 77 minutes?

Please watch this and summarize any new information.

[u/Gamer2477DAW]

I love Dr Zubrins talks.

[u/Gamer2477DAW]

When you're an exec and you need to kiss ass or kick ass in person and can't afford to wait starship is for you. Personally I just want to be able to go to space in my life time. I don't care if it's a loop around the earth. A space station. An amusement park on the moon. I'll take anything over my current option which is basically nothing.

[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
DMLS	Selective Laser Melting additive manufacture, also Direct Metal Laser Sintering
Isp	Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube)
	Internet Service Provider
LEO	Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)
	Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)
MMOD	Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris
SLS	Space Launch System heavy-lift
	Selective Laser Sintering, contrast DMLS

Jargon	Definition
hypergolic	A set of two substances that ignite when in contact
methalox	Portmanteau: methane/liquid oxygen mixture

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^{Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #5763 for this sub, first seen 23rd Jul 2020, 18:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]}