so you want to live on Mars obviously sounds cool in theory but in practice we're talking about the most complicated dangerous and straight up expensive proposition in all of human history imagine building Rome launching Apollo 11 deploying the ISS and settling North America all happening at the same time 150 million miles away from the earth on a frozen desert rock in outer space colonizing Mars is going to require the most epic team-up event in space flight history the established Old Guard of NASA joining forces with the lunatic Genius of SpaceX to smash through the great
filter defy the Fermi Paradox and make Humanity a true multi-planetary species and here is how they're gonna do it foreign musk likes to talk about this idea of a window in time life on Earth has existed in one form or another for over three billion years and it's only now in our lifetime that the human species has achieved the technology required to leave the Earth and visit an entirely new planet while that makes us an incredibly special generation of people it also shoulders us with an incredible new responsibility a window has opened for the first
time in 3 billion years but we have no way of knowing how long it will stay open and if we squander this opportunity now it may never come again best case scenario the Earth has another billion years remaining as a habitable environment for life to exist worst case scenario it could all be over today so the desire the will for human beings to explore the solar system and seek out strange new worlds is fundamental to our existence we are explorers and we are survivors it's coded into our DNA so all we really need is the
vehicle to get us there someone needs to show us the way this is the basic principle that guided Elon Musk when he was founding SpaceX 20 years ago we know that Humanity can provide the will to explore SpaceX only needs to provide us the way that idea has now manifested itself in the Starship super heavy rocket the first vehicle ever created to solve the fundamental problem with sending people into deep space because a person can't make a journey like this on their own they're going to need to bring some stuff along with them a lot
of stuff and putting Mass into space requires an excessive amount of power so far the most powerful Rockets to leave the Earth have been NASA's Saturn V in the 1960s and their space launch system in November 2022 both these machines were designed and built for one purpose sending human beings beyond the Earth Saturn V had the capability of delivering 50 metric tons to the surface of the Moon and that was enough Mass to support a crew of three astronauts on a one-week Excursion to the moon and back again now let's just try and fathom the
amount of mass that would be required to support a crew of 10 on a two-year round trip to the planet Mars this is the reason why starship's super heavy booster is already generating more than double the thrust of the old Saturn V it is a Monumental increase in rocket capability and we are only talking about the earliest prototypes here SpaceX is already developing a version 3 of their Raptor engine that will push the envelope even further SpaceX was already targeting a hundred metric tons to the surface of Mars back in the Raptor version 1 days
that's almost certain to increase when they reach a fully matured Starship design maybe 150 tons to Mars that's a lot of weight but it it's still not enough is it if we're using an Apollo Mission as our Benchmark then the mission to Mars is obviously going to need more than just three times the capacity and that's the second revolutionary concept behind the Starship it's not just a game of raw power it's a game of numbers over the course of seven years between 1966 and 1973 NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets and they successfully launched 13
of them carrying a total of 24 astronauts to the moon so not only does Starship need to drastically increase the power it also needs to up the production and flight volume by an even greater magnitude so we don't just send one Starship We send a fleet this is why SpaceX has been making promises that they will build one Starship vehicle every single day that's not just a flex it's a necessity to achieve this goal Elon Musk has thrown around numbers like having 1 000 Starships in Opera operation between Earth and Mars 2022 was already a
record year for space flight with a total of 180 rocket launches worldwide so elon's full Starship Fleet would be over five times the current Global volume just in Starship launches alone and with each Starship carrying between 10 to 100 times the mass to orbit of a conventional rocket elon's end game for all of this would be to deliver up to 1 million metric tons of stuff to Mars and that should be enough to have a fully self-sustaining human City on another world that's what it takes to go through the open window and never return to
the way things were before but what if I told you that even with all of its awesome potential the Starship is still not enough to actually colonize Mars that Starship is so fundamentally flawed that it will only achieve its Mission with help from the Elders of human spaceflight much like Luke Skywalker needed the guidance of an elderly dying Yoda to complete his Jedi training SpaceX is going to require some help from the OG Aerospace technology to make human flight to Mars sustainable allow me to explain please don't just get angry and click off the video
we are going somewhere with this the Starship is making the absolute most out of the rocket technology that is available today that's one thing that you have to admire about Elon musk's companies they don't just sit around waiting for the perfect technology to be invented they dive in and make the best possible thing with what they have this is how Tesla got established no one else in 2008 thought that the technology was ready to do a fully electric sports car but Tesla figured it out and they made it work that ended up going pretty well
for them the problem for Starship is that the best rocket engine technology they have to work with is chemical propulsion that's where you take an extremely flammable fuel mix it together with liquefied oxygen and blow it up at high pressure pressure inside a combustion chamber the resulting exhaust gas that gets fired out of the back of the engine through a nozzle and that creates thrust that moves the rocket forward this has been the status quo since the 1960s and there have been many incremental improvements over the decades but the potential for a chemical rocket is
limited by physics and we've basically hit the plateau already Elon Musk has said that the Raptor engine has a combustion efficiency of 99.99 meaning that nothing short of God himself could possibly do a better job at exploding those molecules SpaceX can mess around with their turbo pumps and expansion ratios increase chamber pressure but they're not going to unlock a five times increase in potential thrust the laws of the universe just don't allow for it in a conventional rocket this isn't such a big deal but when we're talking about an Earth to Mars transport ship now
being able to move five times faster through the void of space and arrive at your destination in a mere 45 days instead of 8 months that would be massively beneficial but more than that really a faster Transit time to Mars and back again is going to be a necessity for any legitimate shot at colonizing the planet as it stands right now Starship is too slow it's tough to say but it just is and there's no way to make it substantially faster not without help this is where NASA comes into the picture and the ancient Jedi
wisdom that they bring to the table is called nuclear thermal propulsion a nuclear-powered rocket engine this is the way that SpaceX unlocks a five times increase in power for the Starship to make a nuclear-powered rocket all that you need is a small fission reactor that splits the atoms of uranium fuel to release energy which comes in the form of heat and then to convert that heat into thrust you pump liquefied hydrogen directly into the Reactor Core contact with the heat will cause the liquid to violently expand into a gas which is then fired out the
back of the engine through a nozzle and that creates thrust that moves the rocket forward it's kind of like a steam-powered spaceship compared to the performance of a chemical rocket engine used in the vacuum of space the nuclear thermal rocket should provide somewhere between three and five times greater efficiency and that is going to translate to a spaceship that can travel faster carry more payload travel further distances and maneuver through space much more quickly and easily than any vehicle we've used to date this type of engine is something that NASA has been studying on and
off for decades now they even built a few prototypes back in the 60s but the technology ended up on the back burner until now with their updated nuclear thermal rocket engine project Draco NASA is aiming to deploy their first nuclear spacecraft within the next five years now that is an ambitious timeline and the odds that NASA can actually develop and build a whole new vehicle in five years are basically zero but they could build a nuclear engine obviously for a company like SpaceX their access to nuclear fuel for the purpose of Rocket experiments is going
to be heavily regulated which is a very good thing but it does make the development of this technology prohibitively expensive for the private sector so this is going to be one of the few incidents where a government body is actually the best candidate for the job so if NASA brings an engine and SpaceX brings a vehicle then maybe the two of them could perform some kind of a rocket science fusion dance to produce a nuclear-powered Starship the ideal Earth to Mars transport and the use case for nuclear power in deep space goes beyond just engines
nuclear will be incredibly useful for powering the colonial Martian Frontier solar power isn't going to cut it on Mars at least not until we can figure out how to build a gigantic solar Farms on an alien planet and rig up all of the battery backups and everything to go along with it if we want abundant reliable energy on Mars from day one then we'll need something like NASA's kilopower which is a small modular nuclear reactor that is specifically designed to be deployed in space NASA intends to test their first 10 kilowatt reactor on the Moon
by the end of this decade and they are eyeing this technology to power human outposts on the moon and Mars so NASA might be a dinosaur but they do bring some useful stuff to the table and that goes beyond just nuclear Tech NASA is also pretty good at Logistics Elon Musk talks a lot about Amar City but that dude has yet to get into the logistics of how such a thing would actually come together how do you build it who are you going to send to Mars who's in charge how do you do project management
of a space Colony on an alien planet these are not questions Elon Musk can or should answer the guy couldn't even make a social media company work if Elon tries to run a Mars colony the way he runs Twitter a lot of people are gonna die luckily this is something that NASA is already working on take Mars do an alpha for example this is a simulated Mars habitat constructed using 3D printing technology that could someday be deployed on Mars and NASA is conducting their first round of human experiments by placing four people in their Mars
mission Simulator for an entire year they've already locked a crew in there and we are going to see how they deal with the isolation and the environment of a space Colony this is the kind of research that needs to be done before we just blast people off into deep space and that's not to mention the sheer volume of data and experience that NASA brings to the table they've been studying Mars from the ground level for decades now no one knows more about landing on Mars and operating a long duration mission on the surface than NASA
as satisfying as it would be to imagine some Rogue genius billionaire just going off and colonizing Mars punk rock style that would certainly end in a disaster so SpaceX needs NASA and in turn NASA needs SpaceX like a symbiotic relationship and together they might just be able to colonize the planet Mars don't forget to give this video a thumbs up today if you liked it that is so important for getting our content out to more people if you enjoy the content then you'd probably also enjoy our Weekly Newsletter so sign up the link down below
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