JEAN LEGALL: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen. I'm Jean LeGall. I'm
President of the French Space Agency and
the President elect of the International
Astronautical Federation, and it is my
pleasure to welcome you here at the 67th
International Astronautical Congress.
Elon Musk is founder, C.E.O., and lead
designer of SpaceX. Elon founded SpaceX
in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing
space technology and ultimately enabling
humans to become a multiplanetary
species, and that's the plan he's going
to lay out for us today.
SpaceX has had a number of firsts
including as the first private company
to deliver cargo to and from the
International Space Station and the
first entity to land a nautical thrust
booster back on land and on ships out at
sea.
Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk.
[APPLAUSE].
ELON MUSK: Thank you. Thank you very
much for having me. I look forward to
talking about the SpaceX Mars
architecture. And what I really want to
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 is
there really a way that anyone can go if
they wanted to?
I think that's really the important
thing.
So, I mean, first of all, why go
anywhere?
Right?
I think there are really two fundamental
paths. History is going to bifurcate
along two directions. 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 eventually history
suggests there will be some doomsday
event. The alternative is to become a
space-faring civilization and a
multiplanet species, which I hope you
agree that is the right way to go.
Yes?
[APPLAUSE].
That's what we want.
[APPLAUSE].
Yeah. So how do we figure out how to
take you to Mars and create a
self-sustaining city, a city that is not
really an outpost but can become a
planet in its own right and thus we can
become a truly multiplanet species?
You know, sometimes people wonder, Well,
what about other places in the solar
system?
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
currently in the third little rock from
the left. That's Earth. Yeah, exactly.
And our goal is to go to the fourth rock
on the left. That's Mars. But you can
get a sense for the real scale of the
solar system, how big the sun is and
Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus. And
then the little guys on the right are
Pluto and friends.
This sort of helps to see, it's not
quite to scale, but it gives you a
better sense for where things are. So
our options for going to -- for becoming
a multiplanet species within our solar
system are limited. We have, in terms of
nearby options, we've got Venus. But
Venus is a high-pressure -- super
high-pressure hot acid bath. So that
would be a tricky one. Venus is not at
all like the goddess. This is not in no
way similar to the actual goddess.
So it is really difficult to make things
work on Venus.
Mercury is also way too close to the
sun. We could go potentially on to one
of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but
those are quite far out, much further
from the sun, a lot harder to get to.
Really, it leaves us with one option if
we want to become a multiplanet
civilization, and that's Mars. We could
conceivably go to our moon, and I have
nothing against going to the moon, but I
think it's challenging to become
multiplanetary on the moon because it's
much smaller than a planet. It doesn't
have any atmosphere. It's not as
resource rich as Mars. It has a 28-day
day, whereas the Mars day is 24 1/2
hours. And in general, Mars is far
better suited to ultimately scale up to
a self-sustaining civilization.
Just to give some comparison between the
two planets, there are actually --
they're remarkably close in a lot of
ways. In fact, we now believe that early
Mars was a lot like Earth. And, in fact,
if we could warm Mars up, we would, once
again, have a thick -- a thick
atmosphere and liquid oceans.
So, where things are right now, Mars is
about half again as far from the sun as
Earth. So it has decent sunlight. It's a
little cold, but we can warm it up. 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 compressing
the atmosphere. And it has nitrogen,
too, which is also very important for
growing plants.
It will be quite fun to be on Mars,
because you will have gravity which is
about 37% that of Earth, so you will be
able to lift heavy things and bound
around and have a lot of fun. And the
day is remarkably close to that of
Earth.
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
what Mars is like, where could we land,
what's the composition of the
atmosphere, where is there water, or
ice, we should say. And we need to go
from these early exploration missions to
actually building a city.
The issue that we have today is that if
you look at a Venn diagram, there's no
intersection of sets of people who want
to go and can afford to go. In fact,
right now you cannot go to Mars for
infinite money. Using traditional
methods, you know, if taking sort of a
holistic style approach, an optimistic
cost number would be about $10 billion
per person. For example, the Apollo
program, the cost estimates are
somewhere between $100 billion to $200
billion in current-year dollars, and we
sent 12 people to the surface of the
moon, which was an incredible thing and
I think probably one of the greatest
achievements of humanity.
But that's -- that'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 $10
billion a person. What we need is a
closer -- is to move those circles
together. And if we can get the cost of
moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent
to a median house price 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 it would almost certainly
occur -- not everyone would want to go.
In fact, 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 people could get
sponsorship. And I think it gets to the
point where almost anyone, if they saved
up and this was their goal, they could
ultimately save up enough money to buy a
ticket and move to Mars. And Mars would
have labor shortage for a long time so
jobs would not be in short supply.
But it is a bit tricky because we have
to figure out how to improve the cost of
trips to Mars by 5 million percent. So
this is -- this is not easy. I mean,
it's -- and it sounds like virtually
impossible but I think there are ways to
do it. This translates to an improvement
of approximately 4 1/2 orders of
magnitude.
These are the key elements that are
needed in order to achieve the 4 1/2
order of magnitude improvement. Most of
the improvement would come from full
reusability, somewhere between 2 and 2
1/2 orders of magnitude. And then the
other two orders of magnitude would come
from refilling in orbit, propellant
production on Mars and choosing the
right propellant. So I'm going to go
into detail on all of those.
Full reusability is really the super
hard one. It's very difficult to achieve
reusability for even an orbital system,
and that challenge becomes even
substantially greater for a system that
has to go to another planet. But as an
example of the difference between
reusability and expendability in
aircraft -- and you can 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 would
be too expensive. But with frequent
flights, you can take something like an
aircraft that costs $90 million and if
it was single use, you would have to pay
half a million dollars per flight. But
you can actually buy a ticket on
Southwest right now from L.A. to Vegas
for $43, including taxes. 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 reusability
doesn't apply quite as much to Mars
because the number of times they can
reuse the spaceship is -- the spaceship
part of the system is 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's why it makes a lot
of sense 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 payload of the spaceships that when
it goes to Mars, you really have a very
large payload capability.
So as I said, refilling in orbit is one
of the essential elements of this.
Without refilling in orbit, you would
have a half order of magnitude impact
roughly on the cost. By "half order of
magnitude," I think the audience mostly
knows, but what that means is each order
of magnitude is a factor of ten. So not
refilling in orbit would mean a 500%,
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 five to ten times the
size. And it also reduces the
sensitivity of performance
characteristics of the booster rocket
and tanker. So if there's a shortfall in
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 of the system to a
performance shortfall.
And then producing propellants on Mars
is actually also very obviously
important. Again, 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 500% increase in the cost
of the trip. And it would be pretty
absurd to try to build a city on Mars if
your spaceships just kept staying on
Mars and not going back to Earth. you
would have this, like, massive graveyard
of ships. You would have to, like, do
something with them. So it really
wouldn't make sense to -- to leave your
spaceships on Mars. You really want to
build a propellant plant 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 rights in the soil, and
with H2O and CO2 you can produce CH4,
methane, and oxygen, O2.
So picking the right propellant is also
important.
Think of this as maybe there's three
main choices. And they have their
merits, but kerosene or rocket
propellant-grade kerosene which is also
what jets use.
Rockets use a very expensive form of
highly refined form of jet fuel
essentially which is a form of kerosene.
It helps keep the vehicle size small,
but because it's a very specialized form
of jet fuel, it's quite expensive. Your
reusability potential is lower. Very
difficult to make this on Mars, because
there's no oil.
So really quite difficult to make the
propellant on Mars. And then propellant
transfer is pretty good but not great.
Hydrogen, although it has a high
specific impulse, is very expensive,
incredibly difficult to keep from
boiling off because liquid hydrogen is
very close to absolute zero as a liquid.
So the insulation required is
tremendous, and 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 to us that
methane actually was the clear winner.
So it would require maybe anywhere from
50 to 60% of the energy on Mars to
refill propellants using the propellant
depot. And just the technical challenges
are a lot easier.
So we think -- we think methane is
actually better on just really almost
across the board.
And we started off initially thinking
that hydrogen would make sense, but
ultimately came to the conclusion that
the best way to optimize the cost per
unit mass to Mars and back is to use an
all-methane system, or technically
deep-cryo Methalox.
So those are the four elements that need
to be achieved. So whatever system is
designed, whether by SpaceX or anyone,
we think these are the four features
that need to be addressed in order for
the system to really achieve a low cost
per -- a cost per ton to be of service
on Mars.
This is a simulation about the overall
system.
(Music).
(Video).
[APPLAUSE].
So what you saw there is 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. The simulation was
actually made from the SpaceX
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.
In the video, you got a sense for what
this system mock architecture looks
like. The rocket booster and the
spaceship take off, 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 the spaceship but
filling up the unpressurized and
pressurized cargo areas with propellant
tanks. So they look almost identical.
This also helps slow the development
cost, which obviously will not be small.
And then the propellant tanker goes up.
It will go -- actually, it will go up
multiple times, anywhere from three to
five times, to fill the tanks of the
spaceship in orbit. And then once the
spaceship is -- the tanks are full, the
cargo has been transferred, and we reach
the Mars rendezvous timing, which as I
mentioned is roughly every 26 months,
that's when the ship would depart.
Now, over time there would be many
spaceships. You would ultimately have, I
think, upwards of a thousand or more
spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the
Mars colonial fleet would depart en
masse. Kind of like Battlestar
Galactica, if you have seen that thing.
Good show. So it's a bit like that.
But it actually makes sense to load the
spaceships into orbit because you have
got two years to do so and then make
frequent use of the booster and the
tanker to get really heavy reuse out of
those. And then with the spaceship you
get less reuse because you have to
prepare for how long is it going to
last?
Well, maybe 30 years. So that might be
12 to maybe 15 flights with the
spaceship at most. So you really want to
maximize the cargo of the spaceship and
use the booster and the tanker a lot.
So the ship goes to Mars, gets
replenished, and then returns to Earth.
So going into some of the details of the
vehicle design and performance -- and
I'm going to gloss over -- I'll only
talk a little bit about the technical
details in the actual presentation, and
then I'll leave the detailed technical
questions to the Q and A that follows.
This is to give you a sense of size.
It's quite big.
(Laughter).
[APPLAUSE].
The funny thing is in the long-term, the
ships will be even bigger than this.
This will be relatively small compared
to the Mars interplanetary ships of the
future. But it kind of needs to be about
this size because in order to fit a
hundred people or thereabouts in the
pressurized section plus carry the
luggage and all of the unpressurized
cargo to build propellant plants and
build everything from iron foundries to
pizza joints to you name it, we need to
carry a lot of cargo.
So it really needs to be roughly on this
sort of magnitude, because if we say
like the -- that same amount of
threshold for a self-sustaining city on
Mars for civilization would be a million
people. If you only go every two years,
if you have a hundred people per ship,
that's 10,000 trips. So I think at least
a hundred people per trip is the right
order of magnitude, and I think we may
actually end up expanding the crew
section and ultimately taking more like
200 or more people per flight in order
to reduce the cost per person.
But it's -- you know
10,000 flights is a lot of flights. So
you really want ultimately on the order
of a thousand ships. It will take a
while to build up to a thousand ships.
And so I think if you say, When would we
reach that million-person threshold?
From the point at which the first ship
goes to Mars, it's probably somewhere
between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous.
So it's probably somewhere between maybe
40 to 100 years to achieve a fully
self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
So that's sort of the cross-section of
the ship. In some way, it's not that
complicated, really. It's made primarily
of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon
fiber part is tricky when dealing with
deep cryogens and trying to achieve both
liquid and gas impermeability and not
have gaps occur due to cracking or
pressurization that would make the
carbon fiber leaky.
So this is a fairly significant
technical challenge, to make deep and
cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber. And
it's only recently that we think the
carbon fiber technology has gotten to
the point where we can actually do this
without having to create a liner, some
sort of metal liner, quad liner on the
inside of the tanks, which would add
mass and complexity.
It's particularly tricky for the hot
gaseous oxygen pressurization.
So this is designed to be autogenously
pressurized, which means that the fuel
and the oxygen, we gasify them through
heat exchanges in the engine and use
that to pressurize the tanks. So we will
gasify the methane and use that to
pressurize the fuel tank. Gasify the
oxygen. Use that to pressurize the
oxygen tank.
This is a much simpler system than what
we have with Falcon 9, where we use
helium for pressurization and we use
nitrogen for gas thrusters. In this
case, we would autogenously pressurize
and then use gaseous methane and oxygen
for the control thrusters.
So really, you only need two ingredients
for this, as opposed to four in the case
of Falcon 9 and actually five if you
consider the ignition liquid. It's sort
of a complicated liquid to ignite the
engines.
That isn't very usable. In this case we
would use spark ignition.
So this gives you a sense of vehicles by
performance, sort of current and
historic. I don't know if you can
actually read that. But in expandable
mode, the vehicle, of course, we are
proposing would do about 550 tons and
about 300 tons in reusable mode. That
compares to satisfy max capability of
135 tons. But I think this really gives
a better sense of things.
The white bars show the performance of
the vehicle; in other words, the
payload-to-orbit of the vehicle. So you
can see essentially what it represents
is what's the size efficiency of the
vehicle. And most rockets, including
ours -- ours as they're currently flying
-- the performance bar is only a small
percentage of the actual size of the
rocket.
But with the interplanetary system which
we will initially use for Mars, we've
been able to -- or we believe massively
improve the design performance. So it's
the first time a rocket's sort of
performance bar will actually exceed the
physical size of the rocket.
This gives you a more direct sort of
comparison. This is -- the thrust that
is quite enormous, talking about liftoff
thrusts of 13,000 tons. So it's quite
tectonic when it takes off. But it is --
it is a fit on Pad 39A, which NASA has
been kind enough to allow us to use,
where -- because they somewhat oversized
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
launch locations, probably adding one on
the south coast of Texas.
But this gives you a sense of the
relative capability, if you can read
those.
But these vehicles have very different
purposes. 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 decided to start off
the development with what we think are
probably the two most difficult elements
of the design. One is the Raptor engine.
And this is going to be the highest
chamber pressure engine of any kind ever
built and probably the highest
thrust-to-weight.
It's a full-flow staged combustion
engine which maximizes the theoretical
momentum that you can get out of a given
source fuel and oxidizer. We subcool the
oxygen and methane to densify it. So
compared to when -- propellants normally
use close to their boiling point in most
rockets. In our case, we actually build
the propellants close to their freezing
point. That can result in a density
improvement of up to around 10 to 12%,
which makes an enormous difference 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 vacuum version of Raptor having a
382-second ISP. This is really quite
critical too to the whole Mars mission.
And we can get to that number or at
least within a few seconds of that
number, ultimately maybe exceeding it
slightly.
So the rocket booster in many ways is
really a scaled-up version of the Falcon
9 booster. You will see a lot of
similarities, such as the grid fins.
Obviously clustering a lot of engines at
the base. And the big difference really
being that the primary structure is an
advanced form of carbon fiber as opposed
to limited lithium and that we use
autogenous pressurization 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 I.N. on
the Falcon 9. And with Falcon Heavy,
which should launch early next year,
there's 27 engines on the base. So we've
got pretty good experience with having a
large number of engines. It also gives
us redundancies. So that if some of the
engines fail, you can still continue the
mission and be fine.
But the main job of the booster is to
accelerate the spaceship to around 8 1/2
thousand kilometers an hour. For those
that are less familiar with orbital
dynamics, really it's all about velocity
and not about height. So really that's
the job of the booster. The booster is
like the javelin thrower. You've got to
toss that javelin, which is the
spaceship.
In the case of other planets, though,
which have a gravity well which is not
as deep, so Mars, the moons of Jupiter,
conceivably maybe even one day Venus --
the -- well, Venus will be a little
trickier. But for most of the solar
system, you only need the spaceship. So
you don't need the booster if you have a
lower gravity well. 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
boost-back and landing to get it down to
about 7% of the liftoff prop propellant
load. We think with some optimization
maybe we can get it down to about 6%.
And we also are now getting quite
comfortable with the accuracy of the
landing. If you have been watching the
Falcon 9 landings, you will see that
they are getting increasingly closer too
to the bull's-eye. And we think,
particularly with the addition of
additional -- with the addition of some
thrusters and maneuvering thrusters, we
can actually put the booster right back
on the launch stand. And then those fins
at the base are essentially centering
features to take out any minor position
mismatch at the launch site.
So that's what it looks like at the
base. So we think we only need to gimbal
or steer the center cluster of engines.
There's seven engines in the center
cluster. Those would be the ones that
move for 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 we don't have to leave any room
for gimbaling or moving the engines.
And, like, this is all designed so that
you could actually lose multiple engines
even at liftoff or anywhere in flight
and continue the mission safely.
So for the spaceship itself, in the top,
we have the pressurized compartment. And
I'll show you a fly-through of that in a
moment. And then beneath that is the --
is where we would have the unpressurized
cargo, which would be really flat packed
in a very dense format.
And then below that is the liquid oxygen
tank. The liquid oxygen tank is probably
the hardest piece of this whole vehicle
because it's got to handle propellant at
the coldest level and the tanks
themselves actually form the air frame.
So the air frame structure and the tank
structure are combined, as it is in all
modern rockets. And in aircraft, for
example, the wing is really a fuel tank
in wing shape. So it has to take the
thrust loads of ascents, the loads of
reentry, and then it has to be
impermeable to gaseous oxygen, which is
tricky, and non-reactive to gaseous
oxygen. So that's the hardest piece of
the spaceship itself, which is actually
why we started on that element as well.
And I'll show you some pictures of that
later.
And then below the oxygen tank is the
fuel tank, and then the engines are
mounted directly to the thrust cone on
the base. And then there are six of the
vacuum -- the high efficiency vacuum
engines around the perimeter, and those
don't gimbal. And then there are three
of the sea-level versions of the engine
which do gimbal and provide the
steering. Although we can do some amount
of steering if you're in space with
differential thrust on the outside
engines.
The net effect is a cargo to Mars of up
to 450 tons, depending upon how many
refills you do with the tanker. And the
goal is at least 100 passengers per
ship. Although I think we will see that
number grow to 200 or more.
This chart is a little difficult to
interpret at first, but we decided to
put it there for people who wanted to
watch the video afterwards and sort of
take a closer look and analyze some of
the numbers.
The column on the left is probably
what's most relevant. And that gives you
the trip time. So depending upon which
Earth-Mars rendezvous you are aiming
for, the trip time at 6 kilometers per
second departure blast speed can be as
low as 80 days. And then over time, I
think we could probably improve that.
Ultimately, I suspect that you would see
Mars transit times of as little as 30
days in the more distant future.
It's fairly manageable, considering the
trips that people used to do in the old
days would routinely take sailing
voyages that would be six months or
more.
So on arrival, the heat shield
technology is extremely important. We
have been refining the heat shield
technology using our Dragon spacecraft.
We are now on version 3 of PICA, which
is the phenolic-impregnated carbon
ablator. And it's getting more and more
robust with each new version, with less
ablation, more resistance, less need for
refurbishment.
The heat shield is basically a giant
brake pad. How it's like how good can
you make that brake pad against the
extreme conditions and the cost of
refurbishment and make it so you could
have many flights with no refurbishment
at all.
This is a fly-through of the crew
compartment.
I just want 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 of people who actually
want to go, it's got to be really fun
and exciting, and it can't feel cramped
or boring. But the crew compartment or
the occupant compartment is set up so
you can do zero-G things, you can float
around. It would be like movies,
ElectroPuls, cabins, a restaurant. It
will be, like, really fun to go. You are
going to have a great time.
(Laughter).
So the propellant plant on Mars, again,
this is one of those slides that I won't
go into in detail here, but people can
take that offline. The key point being
that the ingredients are there on Mars
to create a propellant plant with
relative ease, because the atmosphere is
primarily CO2 and there's water ice
almost everywhere. You've got the CO2
plus H2O to make methane CH4 and oxygen
O2 using the Sabatier reaction. The
trickiest thing really is the energy
source, which think we can do with a
large field of solar panels.
So then to give you a sense of the cost,
really the key is making this affordable
to almost anyone who wants to go. And we
think, based on this architecture, this
architecture, assuming optimization over
time, like the very first flights would
be fairly expensive. But the
architecture allows for a cost per
ticket of less than $200,000, maybe as
less -- maybe as little as $100,000 over
time, depending upon how much mass a
person takes. So we're right now
estimating about $140,000 per ton to the
trips to Mars. So if a person plus their
luggage is less than that, take into
account food consumption and life
support, then we think that the cost of
moving to Mars ultimately could drop
below $100,000.
So funding, talking about funding
sources. So we have steel underpants;
launch satellites; send cargo to space
station; Kickstarter, of course;
followed by profit. So obviously it's
going to be a challenge to fund this
whole endeavor. We do expect to generate
pretty decent net cash flow from
launching lots of satellites and serving
the space station for NASA, transferring
cargo to and from space station, and
then I know 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 side to 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. So I think
that's probably 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 moving both forward.
And, hopefully, I think as we -- as we
show that this is possible, that this
dream is real, not just a dream, it is
something that can be made real, I think
the support will snowball over time.
And I should say also the main reason
I'm personally accumulating assets is in
order to fund this. 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 lines. 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.
That was it. That's all of SpaceX in
2002. As you can see, I'm a dancing
machine. And, yeah, I believe in kicking
off celebratory events with mariachi
bands. I really like mariachi bands.
But 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
orbit, let alone getting beyond that and
taking Mars seriously. But I came to the
conclusion if there wasn't some new
entrant into the space arena with a
strong ideological motivation, then it
didn't seem like we were on a trajectory
to ever be a space-faring 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 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 are many examples in
history where civilizations have reached
a certain technology level and then have
fallen well below that and then
recovered only millennia later.
So we go from 2002 where we're basically
-- we're clueless. And then with Falcon
1, the smallest useful little rocket
that we could think of which would
deliver a half a ton to orbit, and then
four years later we developed the -- we
built the first vehicle. So we dropped
the main engine, the upper stage engine,
the air frames, the fairing and the
launch system and had our first attempt
at launch in 2006, which failed. So that
lasted about 60 seconds, unfortunately.
But it's 2006, four years after
starting, is also when we actually got
our first NASA 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. Of
course, I'm NASA's biggest fan. So, you
know, thank you very much to the people
that had the faith to do that. Thank
you.
[APPLAUSE].
So then 2006, followed by a lot of
grief. And then, finally, the fourth
launch of Falcon 1 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 the first
three bloody failed. And we were able to
scrape together enough to just barely
make it and do a fourth launch. And
thank goodness that fourth launch
succeeded in 2008. That was a lot of
pain.
And then also at the end of 2008 is when
NASA awarded us the first major
operational contract, which was for
resupplying cargo to the space station
and bringing cargo back.
Then a couple years later we did the
first launch of Falcon 9, version 1. And
that had about a 10-ton-to-orbit
capability. So it was about 20 times the
capability of Falcon 1, and also was
assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft.
Then 2010 is our first mission to the
space station. So we were able to finish
development of Dragon and dock with the
space station in 2010. so -- Sorry, 2010
is expendable Dragon -- expendable
Dragon. 2012 is when we delivered and
returned cargo from the space station.
2013 is when we first started doing boat
take-off and 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. The
(inaudible) exploded. But the landing --
for seven seconds, it was good. And we
also improved the capability of the
vehicle from 10 tons to about 13 tons to
LEO.
And then 2015, last year, in December,
that was definitely one of the best
moments of my life when the rocket
booster came back and landed at Cape
Canaveral. That was really ...
[APPLAUSE].
Yeah. So that really showed that we
could bring an orbit-class booster back
from a very high velocity all the way to
the launch site and land it safely and
with almost no refurbishment required
for reflight. And if things go well,
we're hoping to refly one of the landed
boosters in a few months.
So, yeah -- and then 2016, we also
demonstrate landing on a ship. The
landing on the ship is important for the
very high-velocity geosynchronous
missions. And that's important for
reusability of Falcon 9 because about
roughly a quarter of our missions are
sort of servicing the space station. But
then 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 time line. But we were
going to try to make as much progress as
we can. Obviously, it's with a very
constrained budget. But we are going to
try to make as much progress as we can
on the elements of interplanetary
transport booster and spaceship, and
hopefully we'll be able to complete the
first development spaceship in maybe
about four years and start doing
suborbital flights with that.
In fact, it has enough capability that
you could maybe even go to orbit if you
limit the amount of cargo with the
spaceship. Well, you have to really --
you have to really strip it down. But in
tanker form, it could definitely get to
orbit. It can't get back, but it can get
to orbit.
Actually, I was thinking like maybe
there is some market for really fast
transport of stuff around the world,
provided we can land somewhere where
noise is not a super big deal, because
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 off the coast of, you know, say
-- off the coast of New York, say 20, 30
miles out, could you go from New York to
Tokyo in, I don't know, 25 minutes;
across the Atlantic in ten minutes.
Really most of your time would be
getting to the ship, and then it would
be real quick after that.
So there's some intriguing possibilities
there. Although, we're not counting on
that.
And then development of the booster --
we actually think the booster part is
relatively straightforward because it's
-- it amounts to a scaling up of the
Falcon 9 booster. So there's -- we don't
see a lot of sort of show-stoppers
there. Yeah.
But then trying to put it all together
and make this actually work to Mars, if
things go super well, it might be kind
of in the ten-year time frame. But I
don't want to say that's when it will
occur. It's, like, this huge amount of
risk. It's going to cost a lot. Good
chance we don't succeed, but we're going
to do our best and try to make as much
progress as possible.
And we're going to try to send something
to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from
here on out. So Dragon 2, which is a
propulsive lander, we plan to send to
Mars in a couple years, 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 there's a train leaving
the station. With every Mars rendezvous
we will be sending a Dragon -- at least
a Dragon to Mars and ultimately the big
spaceship.
So if there's a lot of interest in
putting payloads on Dragon, you know you
can count on a ship that's going to
transport something on the order of at
least two or three tons of useful
payloads to the surface of Mars.
[APPLAUSE].
That's part of the reason we designed
Dragon 2, to be a propulsive lander. As
a propulsive lander, you can go anywhere
in the solar system. So you can go to
the moon. You can go to -- well,
anywhere, really. Whereas, if something
relies on parachutes or wings, then you
can pretty much only -- well, if it's
wings, you can pretty much only land on
Earth because you need a runway, and
most places don't have a runway. And
then anyplace that doesn't have a dense
atmosphere, you can't use parachutes.
But propulsive works anywhere. So the
Dragon should be capable of landing on
any solid or liquid surface in the solar
system.
I was real excited to see that the team
managed to do the -- all our Raptor
engine firing in advance of this
conference. I just want to say thanks to
the Raptor team for really working seven
days a week to try to get this done in
advance of the presentation, because I
really wanted to show that we've made
some hardware progress in this
direction. And the Raptor is a really
tricky engine. It's a lot trickier than
Merlin because it's a full-flow stage
combustion, much higher pressure.
I'm kind of amazed it didn't blow up on
the first firing. Fortunately, it was
good.
It's kind of interesting to see the mock
diamonds forming.
[APPLAUSE].
And part of the reason for making the
engine sort of small, Raptor, although
it has three times the thrust of a
Merlin is only about the same size as a
Merlin engine because it has three times
the operating pressure.
That means we can use a lot of the
production techniques that we've honed
with Merlin.
We are currently producing Merlin
engines at almost 300 per year. So we
understand how to make rocket engines in
volume.
Even though the Mars vehicle uses 32 on
the base and 9 on the upper stage, so we
are at 51 engines to make -- that's well
within our production capabilities for
Merlin. And this is a similarly sized
engine to Merlin except for the
expansion ratio. So we feel really
comfortable about being able to make
this engine in volume at a price that
doesn't break our budget.
We also wanted to make progress on the
primary structure. So, as I mentioned,
this is really a very difficult thing to
make, to make something out of carbon
fiber.
Even though carbon fiber has incredible
strength-to-weight, when you want to
then put super cold liquid oxygen or
liquid methane -- particularly liquid
oxygen -- in a tank, it's subject to
cracking and leaking, and it's very
difficult to make. Just the sheer scale
of it is also challenging, because
you've got to lay out the carbon fiber
in exactly the right way on a huge mold,
and you've got to cure that mold at
temperature.
And then -- it's just hard to make large
carbon fiber structures that could do
all of those things and carry incredible
loads. So that's the other thing we want
to focus on is the Raptor and then
building the first development tank for
the Mars spaceship.
So this is really the hardest part of
the spaceship. The other pieces we have
a pretty good handle on. But this was
the trickiest one. We wanted to tackle
it first.
You get a size for how big the tank is,
which is really quite big. Also big
congratulations to the team that worked
on that.
They were also working seven days a week
to try to get this done in advance of
the IAC. We managed to build the first
tank, and the initial tests with the
cryogenic propellants actually look
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 a real sense for
just how big this tank is. 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
faceted.
So then what about beyond Mars?
So as we thought about the system -- and
the reason we call it a system, because
generally I don't like calling things
systems because everything is a system,
including your dog -- is that -- is that
it's actually more than a vehicle.
There's obviously the rocket booster,
the spaceship, the tanker, and the
propellant plant, the in situ propellant
production.
If you have all of those four elements,
you can actually go anywhere in the
solar system 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 depot at
Mars, you can do a fly-by of Jupiter
without a propellant depot.
So -- but by establishing a propellant
depot, let's say, you know, Enceladus or
Europa or -- there's a few options, and
then doing another one on Titan,
Saturn's moon, and then perhaps another
one further out on Pluto or elsewhere in
the solar system, this system really
gives you freedom to go anywhere you
want in the greater solar system. So you
can actually travel out to the Kuiper
belt or 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, is -- means full
access to the entire greater solar
system.
[APPLAUSE].
