Transcription
It's a pleasure for me, as president of the International Astronautical Federation, to welcome all of 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 their support and presence.
Now, let me present to you our distinguished speaker for today, Elon Musk. Elon is founder, CEO, and the designer of SpaceX. Elon founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing 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 has a 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 at sea, and the first to be fly an orbital class booster. In addition to SpaceX, he is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and chairman of Solar City. Please join me in welcoming [Applause] anonymous.
Yeah, I just, good. All right. So, I'll walk come here on and I'm gonna talk more about what it takes to become a multi-planet species. And I just, I 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 not. 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 brings 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, where 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, one, one booster and ship that replaces Falcon 9, 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 100 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 an 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 9 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.
The C's launch, the launch rate is also being, it has been, is increasing exponentially. The particularly when you take taking 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 Ober launches occur per year. Which means if SpaceX does do something like 30 launches next year, it'll be approximately half of all Ober 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 will 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 of 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. 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 to 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. 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 1. 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 70, 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 Heavy 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 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 the increased loads. So, Falcon Heavy ended up being much more a new vehicle than 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 34, 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, yeah, 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 31 Raptor engines that produce, I throw that's about 5,400 tons lifting, forty, at 4400 ton vehicle straight up.
So, then it's just a basics about the ship. 48-meter long 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 1100 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 9 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 spaceship. 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, you're 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 100 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 10 to 12% density increase, which makes quite a big difference for the propellant load. So, we expected up to do to carry two or 40 tons of CH4 and in our 60 tons 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, four vacuum Raptor engines and two sea level engines. So, the, all six engines are capable of gambling. 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 ISP, SCO 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.
Going to rocket capability. This gives you sort of a rough sense of rocket capability, starting off at the low end with the Falcon 1 at a half-ton, and then going up to be afar at 150. 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 150 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 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 9 meters in diameter to orbit. So, for example, before, if you want a new Hubble, you could send a mirror that has 10 times the surface area of the current Hubble as a single unit. Doesn't have to unfold or anything. 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 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, 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 outsize, 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 2 will do 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 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, you re-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, NO2, 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, 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 max payload number of about 20 to 25 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 7.5 kilometers 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, 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 four 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 red during the day. It's the opposite of Earth. 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.