Making Life Multiplanetary

it's a pleasure for me as president of the International Astronautical Federation to welcome all you today to the concluding session of the global networking forum for this is C 2017 which has been a huge success in particular I want to thank premier was a real minister and that means and Lord may our faith for the support and presence now let me present adduce our distinguished speaker for today Elon Musk is founder CEO and the designer of SpaceX alone founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionising space technology and ultimately enabling humans to become a

multiplanetary species today he will provide an update on those plans first chair at ISC 2016 in weather our last year SpaceX as the number of firsts including the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station the first entity to land an orbital class booster back on land and on on ships out of sea and the first to be fly an orbital class booster in addition to SpaceX is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and Sharmon of Solar City please join me in welcoming anonymous yeah I just good all right -

I'll walk come here on and I'm gonna talk more about what it takes to become multi-planet species and I just a just a brief refresher on why this is important I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we're or not it you want to be inspired by things you want to wake up in the morning and think the future is gonna be great and that's what what bring a spacefaring civilization is all about it's about believing in the future and thinking that

the future we've gathered in the past and I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars that's why so becoming up we go into more detail and becoming multi-client species this is the updated design for the the what we're sort of searching for the right name but the code name at least is bfr and the the the probably the most important thing that I want to convey in in this presentation is that I think we have figured out how to pay for it this is very important so you

know in last year's presentation you know we're really searching for what the right way you know how do we pay for this thing we went through various ideas what kickstarter you know collecting underpants these didn't pan out but but now we think we think we've got a way to do it which is to have to have a smaller vehicle so pretty big but one that can serve that were the one that can do everything that's needed in in the greater Earth orbit activity so essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant we want to

have one system one ship ones one booster and ship that replaces Falcon nine Falcon Heavy and Dragon so if we can do that then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9 heavy and Dragon can be applied to this system so that that's really fundamental so let's see what progress have we made in in this in this direction so last lesson you saw the giant tank that's actually a 12 meter tank and you can see the relative scale of it it's a thousand cubic meters of volume inside that's actually more pressurized volume than an

a380 just to put that into perspective we developed a new carbon fiber matrix that's much stronger and more capable at higher than anything before and it holds 1200 tons of liquid oxygen so we we tested it so we successfully tested it up to its design pressure and then we're a little further so we want to see where it would break and we found out where we're break it shot about 300 feet into the air and landed in the ocean we're fishing it out and but now get a pretty good sense of what it takes to

create a huge carbon-fiber tank that can hold cryogenic liquid that's actually extremely important for making a light spaceship then the next key element is on the engine side we have to have an extremely efficient engine so the the raptor engine will be the highest thrust-to-weight engine we believe of having any engine of any kind ever made we already have now 1200 seconds of firing across 42 main engine tests we fired it for 100 seconds it could it could fire for much longer than hundred seconds that's just the size of the of the test tanks and

then the duration of the firing you've seen right now is it's 40 SEC 40 seconds which is the length of the firing for landing on Mars the test engine it currently operates at 200 atmospheres to a 200 bar the flight engine will be at 250 bar and then we believe over time we could probably get back to a little over 300 bar the next key element is propulsive landing so in order to land on right on face like the moon where there is no atmosphere and certainly no runways or to land on Mars with Avenue

atmosphere is too thin to land even if there were on ways to land with with the wing you really have to get put pulp propulsive landing perfect so that's what we've been practicing with Falcon 9 so this is just a series of landing but I think he's quite mesmerizing but we now have 16 successful landings in a row and that's with so it's six in a row and that's with it with with really without any redundancy so Falcon nine lands on a single-engine and that the final landing is always done with with a single engine

whereas the wish PFR will always have multi engine out capability so if you can get to a very high reliability with even a single engine and then you can you can land and and then you can land with either of two engines I think we can get to a landing reliability that is on par with the safest commercial airliners so you can essentially count on the landing it's not like the you want minimum pucker factor on landing so and it can land with also very high precision in fact you believe the precision at this point

is good enough for propulsive landing that we do not need legs for the next version it will literally land with so much precision it will land back on its launch mounts so the C's launch the launch rate is also being it has been is increasing exponentially the particularly when you take attacking or refilling on-orbit into account and taking the idea of establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars or the moon or elsewhere seriously you need thousands ultimately thousands of ships and tens of thousands of recovery of rethinking or refilling operations which means you need many launches

per day the key the you really need to be looking in terms of how many landings are occurring you need to looking at you watching out your calendar so while this is a quite a high launch rate that we're talking about here you know by conventional standards it's still a very small launch rate compared to what it will ultimately be needed but just for those who are favored how many Ober launches occur every year it's approximately approximately 60 over launches occur per year which means if SpaceX does do something like 30 launches next year it'll

be approximately half of all over launches that occur on earth and the next thing is a key technology is automated rendezvous and docking so in order to retain or refill the spaceship in orbit you have to be able to rendezvous and dock with the spaceship with very high precision and and transfer propellant so that's one of things that we've perfected with with dragon dragon 1 we'll do an automated rendezvous and docking without any pilot control to the space station dragon 1 currently uses the canadarm2 before the final placement onto the space station dragon 2 which

launches next year will not need to use the the caterpillar hump so dragon 2 will directly dock with the space station and can do so with zero human intervention you just press press go and it will dock a dragon is also allowed us to perfect heat shield technology so when you enter at a high velocity you bet you'll melt almost anything the reason the reason meteors don't reach earth is they they mail to disintegrate before they reach the ground unless they're very big so you have to have a sophisticated heat shield technology that can withstand

unbelievably high temperatures and that's what we've been perfecting with with dragon and also a key part of of any planet colorized colonizing system so Falcon 1 this is where we started out you know a lot of people but we really only heard a SpaceX relatively recently so let me think say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was but if it wasn't we start off with just a few people who really didn't know how to make rockets and the the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief

designer there's not because I want it to you it's because I couldn't hire anyone yet nobody good were join so I ended up being that by default and I messed up the first three launches first three launches failed unfortunately the fourth launch which was the that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1 the fourth launch worked or it would have been that would have been it for for SpaceX but fate liked us that day so the fourth launch worked and it interesting - today is the is the ninth anniversary of that launch

I didn't realize that until saying until I was told that just just earlier today but this is a very emotional day actually so but the point is is there's quite a small rocket when we're doing Falcon we're really trying to figure out what is the smallest useful payload that we'd get to orbit it okay something around half a ton to orbit would be able to launch at you know that's an order to a decent size a small satellite to low-earth orbit and that's why we sized Falcon one but it's it's really quite small compared to

falcon 9 so Falcon 9 particularly when you factor in payload if Falcon 9 is as many times more it's not sort of on the order of 30 times more payload than Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 has reuse of the primary booster which is the most expensive part of the rocket and hopefully soon reefs of the of the fairing the big nose cone at the front so we think can probably get to something like somewhere between 17 80% reusability with the Falcon 9 system and then and hopefully towards the end this year we'll be launching heavy

which is its Falcon have you ended up being a much more complex program than we thought it sounds easy electro falcon heavy actually it's it sounds like it should be should be easy because it's two first stages of Falcon 9's strapped on as boosters it's actually not you have to read we have to redesign almost everything except the upper stage in order to take be increased loads so Falcon Heavy ended up being much more a new vehicle then we realized so took us a lot longer to to get it done but the the boosters have

all now been tested and they're on their way to to the Cape Canaveral and we are now beginning serious development of VFR so you can see the the payload difference is quite dramatic VFR in you fully reusable configuration without any oval refueling we expect to have a payload capability of 150 tons to low Earth orbit and that you know it compares to about thirty four four four four Falcon Heavy yeah we're rich is partial partial are useful where this really makes a tremendous difference isn't a cost which all comes to in some of the later

slides so this go to the next line and just by the way if ya so with VFR you can get a sense of scale by looking at the tiny person there it's really quite quite a big vehicle main body diameter is about is about nine meters or 30 feet and it consists of the booster is lifted by thirty one Raptor engines that produce I throw that's about 5,400 tons lifting forty at forty four hundred ton vehicle straight up so then it's just a basics about the ship 48 meter Blanc dry master expecting to be about

85 tons I technically I design says 75 tons but inevitably this mass growth and that ship will contain 1,100 tons propellant with a design a design of 150 tons and return mass of 50 so you can think of this as essentially combining the upper stage of the rocket with dragon it's like your Falcon nine up a stage and dragon were combined so as we I'll go into each of these items in detail but you've got the engine section on the rear the propellant tanks in the middle and then a large payload Bay in the front

and that that payload Bay is actually eight stories tall in fact you can foot you can fit a whole stack of felt for and rockets in the payload Bay and compared to the design I showed last time you'll see that there is a small delta wing at the back of the rocket the reason for that is in order to expand the mission envelope of the of the VFR space ship it depending on whether you're landing or you're coming you're entering a planet or a moon that has no atmosphere a thin atmosphere or a dense atmosphere

and depending on whether you have your your reentering with no no payload in the front a small payload or a heavy payload you have to balance the rocket out as it's coming in and so the delta wing at the back which will also which also includes a split flap a split flap for pitch and roll control allows us to control the the pitch angle a despite having a wide range of payloads in the nose and a wide range of atmospheric densities so we try to avoid having the but it was necessary in order to generalize

the capability of the spaceship such that it could land anywhere in the solar system just look at a couple of things in detail so the the the cargo area has a pressurized volume of 825 cubic meters this also is greater than the pressurized area of an a380 so really is capable of carrying a tremendous amount of payload in a mass transit configuration since you'd be taking three months in a really good scenario but maybe as much as six months you some number of months a single single injured ones you probably want a cabin not just

a seat so the Mars transit configuration consists of 40 cabins and it sort of depends alone you could conceivably have five or six people per cabin if you really want to crab people in but I think mostly we would expect to see two to three people per cabin and so normally about a hundred people per flight to Mars and then there's a central storage area galley and galley and a solar storm shelter entertainment area and I think probably you know a good situation for at least beer for version one then going to the main body

of the vehicle the center body area this is where the propellant is located and this is sub-cooled methane and oxygen so as you as you to kill the methane and oxygen below its liquid point you get a fairly meaningful density increase you get on the order of ten to twelve percent density increase which makes quite a big difference for the propellant load so we expected up to do to carry two or 40 tonnes of ch4 and in our 60 tonnes of oxygen the you know in the fuel tank our header tanks so when you come

in for a landing your orientation may change quite significantly but you can't have the propellant just sloshing around all over and main tanks you have to have the header tanks that can feed the main engines with precision so that's what you see the most in the fuel tank then the engine section so the the the ship engine section consists of four Raptor forced ford vacuum wrecked referendums and to sea level engines so the all six engines are capable of gambling the the engines with the high expansion ratio have a relatively smaller gimbal area or gimbal

range and slower and a slower gimbal rate thus the two center engines have a very high gimbal range and can able very quickly and you can land the ship with either one of the two Center engines so when you come in for a landing you will like both engines but if if one of the center engines fails at any point it will be able to land successfully with repeat with the other engine and then within each engine this great tool of redundancy so we want the landing risk to be as close to zero as possible

and there's some basic stats about the engines the sea level engines are about a 330 ice psco at sea level the the alpha stage engine is 375 now this is version 1 so I think over time there's potential to increase that specific impulse by 5 to 10 seconds and as measuring also increase the chamber pressure by 50 bar or so and then for refilling we just saw the two ships would actually make at the rear section they would use the same mating interface that they used to connect to the booster on liftoff so we reuse

that mating interface and then and reuse the propellant flow lines that are used when the booster is when the ship is on the booster and then to transfer propellant it becomes very simple use control thrusters to accelerate in the direction that you want to empty so so you shoot sorry in this direction propel goes that way and you transfer the propellant very easily into these from that from the tanker to the ship so going to rocket capability this gives you sort of a rough sense of rocket capability starting off at the low end with the

Falcon one at a half-ton and then going up to be afar at a hundred fifty so I think it's important note that VFR has more carefully than 75 even with full reusability but but here's the here's the really really important fundamental point let's look at the launch cost the order the order of versus I know at first glance this may seem ridiculous but but it's not the the same is true of aircraft if you want to if you if you bought say a a small single-engine turboprop aircraft that would be one and a half to

two million dollars to charter a 747 from California to Australia is half a million dollars there and back the single-engine turboprop can't even get to Australia so a fully reusable system like this so it's fully reusable giant aircraft like 747 costs a third as much as an expendable tiny aircraft and in one case you have to build an attack aircraft in that case just have to refuel something so it's it's really crazy that we will be sophisticated rockets and then crash them every time we fly this is mad at so yeah is that that this

is this is applicant if says how profound this is and how important really is you know and often I'll be told but you could get more payload if you made it expendable I said yes you could also get more payload from an aircraft if you better the landing gear and the flaps and just parachute it out when you got to your destination but that would be crazy and you would sell zero aircraft Surrey's ability is absolutely fundamental no no no one talk about the value of orbital refilling this is also extremely important so if you

just fly VFR to orbit and don't do any refilling it's it's pretty good you'll get a hundred and fifty tons slow orbit and have no and have no fuel to go anywhere else however if you send up tankers and refill in orbit you can refill the tanks all the way to the top and get 150 tons all the way to Mars and if the tanker has highway use capability then you're just paying for the cost of propellant and the cost of oxygen is extremely low and the cost of methane is extremely low so if that's

all you're dealing with the cost of retail of refilling your spaceship on-orbit it is tiny and you can get 150 tons all the way to Mars so automated rendezvous and docking and refilling absolutely fundamental so then getting back to the question of how do we pay for for this system this was really I said quite a profound I don't call it breakthrough but realization that if we can build a system that cannibalizes our own products makes our own products redundant then all of the resources which quite enormous that a useful Falcon 9 heavy and dragon

can be applied to one system you know some of our customers are conservative and they want to see the they want to see PFR fly several times before they're comfortable launching units so what we plan to do is to build ahead and have a stock of Falcon 9 and dragon vehicles so that so that customers can be comfortable if they want to use the old the old rocket the old spacecraft they can do that because we'll have a bunch in stock but all of our resources will then turn towards building VFR and and we believe

that we can do this with the revenue that we with the with the rep with the revenue we receive for launching satellites and for servicing the space station so going to the satellites portion the the size of of this being a 9 meter diameter vehicle it is a huge enabler for new satellites we can actually send something that is almost nine meters in diameter to orbit so for example before if you want to a new Hubble you could send a mirror that has ten times the surface area of the current Hubble as a single unit

doesn't have to unfold or anything and or you can send a large number of small satellites you do what it's like you can actually also go around and if you wanted to collect old satellites or clean up space debris you just use a sort of chopper over there and go around and collect collect satellites or collect space degree if you want so that may be something we have to do in the future but that that fairing would open up and retract and then come back down so it's it enables launching of earth satellites that are

significantly larger than anything we've done before or significant more satellites at a time than anything that's been done before it's also intended to be able to service the the space station I know it looks a little big rose to the space station but the shuttle also looked big so it'll work looks a little out size but it'll work so it's it'll be capable of doing what dragon does today in terms of transporting cargo and what dragon to will do it in terms of transporting crew and cargo so good a space station servicing it can also

go up see much further than that like for example based on calculations we've done we can actually do lunar surface missions with no propellant production on the surface of the Moon so if we do a high elliptic parking orbit for for the ship and retain in high elliptic orbit we can go all the way to the moon and back with no local propellant reduction on the moon so I think that that that enabled that would enable the creation of moon base alpha or some sort of lunar base [Applause] you know quite captivating so the Eagles

to see for example how do you transfer cargo from the cargo bay down to the ground is crane so very complicated and [Music] yeah but but since this will enable the creation of a lunar base and its 2017 I mean we should have a lunar base by now what the hell's going on and there of course Mars becoming a multi-planet species it's a hell about of being a single plant species so yeah so we'd start off by setting Commission to to Mars where it would be obviously just landing on rocky ground or dusty ground and

it's the same approach that I mentioned before which is you send the spaceship up to orbit yuri tank it or refill it until it has full tanks and it travels to mars lands on Mars for mars you will need local propellant production but Mars has a co2 atmosphere and plenty of water ice that gives you co2 and h2o so you've got you can make therefore ch4 no.2 using the Sabatier process and also the you know voice patia process and I should mention that long term this can also be done on earth so as soon as

I get some sort of criticism for why why are using combustion and rockets and you have electric cars like well it isn't some way to make an electric rocket I wish there was but in the long term you can use solar power to extract co2 from the atmosphere combine it with water and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket so the same thing that we're doing Mars we could do on earth in the long-term but that that's essentially what happens similar to the two to the moon you land land on Mars that the tricky thing

with Mars is we do need to build a propellant Depot to refill the tanks and return to Earth but because Mars has lower gravity than Earth you can you do not need a booster so you can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth just using the ship I'll be eight you need to go for two Macs payload number of about twenty to twenty to fifty tons for the return journey to work but it's a single saddle just a single stage all the way back to earth I'll show you

the so this is the true physics simulation it's the last about a minute so you come in you're entering very quickly going seven a half kilometres a second for Mars there will be some ablation of the heat shield so it's just like a sort of brake pad wearing away it is a multi-use heat shield but unlike for Earth operations it's coming in hot enough that you really do you will see somewhere of the heat shield but because Mars has an atmosphere albeit not a particularly dense one you can remove almost all the energy or aerodynamically

and we've proven out supersonic retropropulsion many times with without the nine so if you're very careful about that the this is a because it's sort of you could see a sort of a mesh system it's not it's not meant to be sort of particularly pretty because it's just her simulate the physics of it but the the size of the current gives you a rough approximation for how much thrust the entrance are producing that's not a typo although it is aspirational so we've already started building the system the tooling for the main tanks is has been

ordered the facility is being built we will start construction the first ship around the second quarter of next year so in about six to nine months we should start building the first ship I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years five years seems like a long time to me and I the the area under the curve of resources over that period of time should enable this time frame you met but if not this time frame I think pretty soon thereafter but that's that's how

that's our goal is to try to make the 2022 Maas rendezvous the earth-mars synchronization happens roughly every two years so every two years there's an opportunity for just to fly to Mars so then in 2024 we want to try to fly for ships two of which would be crude and to to cover and to to occur the goal of the of these initial missions is to is to find the best source of water that's what the first mission and then the second mission the goal is to build the the propellant plant so we should with

particular with six ships there have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant Depot which will consist of a large array of solar panels very large array and then everything necessary to mine and refine water and then draw the co2 out of the atmosphere and then create and store deep-fryer ch4 and or to then build up the base starting with one one ship then multiple ships then start building out the city then making the city bigger and even bigger and yeah and over time terraforming was and making it really a nice place to be Thanks

it really I think it's quite a quite a beautiful picture and other prior slide it seriously note that on Mars donor desk or blue and it's the sky that's the sky is blue and or dusk and and red during the day it's the opposite of Earth and but there's there's something else if you if you build a ship that's capable of going to Mars what if you take that same ship and go from one place to another on earth so we looked at that and the results are quite interesting let's take a look at that

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we're traveling 27,000 ponies now a roughly 80,000 miles an hour it's where the propulsive landing becomes very important to be disappear right [Music] [Applause] so most of what people consider to be long-distance trips would be completed in less than half an hour which yes so that the the great thing about going to space is there's no friction so once you're out of the atmosphere you will go it will smooth as silk no turbulence nothing there's no weather no mr. atmosphere and you can get taught most long-distance places like said in less

than half an hour and if we're building this thing to go to the Moon and Mars then why not go to other places on earth as well all right thank you you