So the key takeaway for me today compared to 1 year ago, is that Elon has put a lot of thought on how to make this plan economically viable compared to just the vision last year.
Multiple potential streams of revenue:
- Government/intragovernment contracts to cleanup space debris.
- Government/Private satellite launches.
- Earth to earth transportation which Elon announced on Instagram that the cost would be comparable to an economy fare. https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
Back of the envelope calculation for the price of an Earth-to-Earth ticket:
Musk's stated goal is $500k/ticket to Mars.
It's a shorter trip, so perhaps ~5x as many passengers in the same volume (i.e. 500 total; cf. a380 which seats 850).
It takes five (?) orbital refuel trips for the martian journey, but we'd need none of those. Depending on how much less than a full tank the passenger vehicle needs (payload could be smaller; the ship would also not reach fully orbital velocity), the fuel cost would be between 1/5 and 1/10 the Mars fuel cost.
So that would bring the cost down to between $10 and $20k/ticket, within reach of business travelers.
If maximum the number of flight cycles per vehicle is greater for Earth-to-Earth trips than for Mars, then that could further reduce the ticket cost. It's unclear to me which direction that number would go-- Earth's atmosphere is much thicker on re-entry, though the velocities will be much lower than an interplanetary re-entry. Since aerodynamic drag goes as the cube of velocity but only linearly with density, I'm guessing the speed would matter far more. That would imply much better lifetime on Earth.
So if the E2E fuselage gets (conservatively) only 2x as many flight cycles as a Mars trip, that could bring down the per-seat cost to $5k-- now getting close to the cost of an ordinary international ticket. Of course this is all assuming that Musk's baseline of $500k to Mars is reasonable.
Would be curious to hear from some rocket engineers about these guesses at the numbers/efficiency.
Not accounted for is amortized development cost for E2E-only vehicles, as well as all the infrastructure and ground support at the destinations.
Edit: If you wanted to be less conservative, you could pack in 1000 people instead of 500 (0.5x ticket price multiplier), or use a different source for the Mars ticket price (0.4x), which would bring it to $1k.
Ironically, I think SpaceX will have a lot more trouble with any E2E ambitions than they would with missions to Mars. So much red tape, no one's going to want a space-port in their backyard, different/difficult economics, safety concerns, terrorism concerns, etc. etc.
In general, I think the only part which is supposed to need regular replacing is the ablative heatshield. Regarding Earth vs Mars reentry, he said the following during the talk (my quick transcription follows): "You're going in, you're going very quickly, 7.5 km/s. For Mars, there will be some ablation of the heat shield. So, it's just like a brake pad wearing away. It is a multi-use heatshield, but unlike for Earth operations it's coming in hot enough that you will see some wear of the heatshield."
One problem with Earth-to-Earth is noise. A quick google tells me Saturn 5 was 220 decibels. So it has to be sea launches or desert launches. Also, Concorde couldn't go supersonic until it was significantly out to sea.
Highlights for me:
Started ordering stuff for the mars ship now, started facilities construction, possibly hitting a first launch in 2022 and a second launch window in 2024.
Even if they miss 2022 the next window at 2024 is still incredible. Who would have seriously believed we'd fly something of that size to Mars by that time and have a manned mission two years later?!
This plan sounds much more sensible than most of what I've heard from Musk before.
Especially the intercontinental transport part. That is a real business use-case, potentially very lucrative. I also suspect that could get quite a few more billionaires excited (after all they spend a lot of time in private jets and I'm sure they'd like to cut that time off) which could help raising more investment.
I don't believe there is much to do on mars or the moon, not much that would make economical sense anyway. But intercontinental transport? That could work.
Given his aspiration to sell it for prices comparable to economy airline tickets, I feel like the outlay of building the facilities at each end will eat up a lot of the profits. It's a neat idea, but I don't see this funding the Mars colony ambitions, at least not in the short term.
If they can get that infrastructure heavily subsidised, then perhaps it's a different story. That said, I can't see many cities that would be willing to invest in this, except perhaps the ultra-rich ones, like Dubai.
Imagine getting this built for New York or London. I can't.
Edit: I don't mean to sound so negative; I actually think the rest of the talk was super positive in that it feels realistic - it's just the inter-continental travel bit that gave me pause.
> Fly to most places on Earth in under 30 mins and anywhere in under 60. Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.
Wow, can they really make BFR reliable enough to replace long distance airline routes? And how would propellant cost compare with jet fuel? Anywhere on Earth in an hour does sound extremely appealing; better than Concorde, with bonus zero gravity (going to need a lot of barf bags though).
SpaceX is building the BFR and launch facilities, but who is going to build all the equipment and gear required to live there - who is building the cargo?
Because the goal of government action is not to efficiently achieve a goal, but rather build a political coalition capable of capturing and defending budget requests.
The SLS specifically was designed to build a coalition between NASA centers who were involved with the SpaceShuttle, a group of large influential companies who produce the core components for the Shuttle and the SLS and a group of senators who are well located to defend these private and NASA jobs in their state.
Together the bureaucracy, business and the political can enforce this utterly foolish project to continue. This goes for both SLS and Orion, two of the biggest pork projects in US space history.
Great presentation, only thing I'm worried about is human flight in these things. I mean what happens if this thing is 1% off on the landing? Does the whole thing topple over and blow up into a million pieces?
Additionally with the entire flight being automated, what happens if the software gets taken over in space and they just drop it like a rock onto a city? The damage would be catastrophic. We need Elon to invest in city wide force field technology too it would seem.
The earth-to-earth idea is nice, and whilst it would be an improvement, I expect the travelling time to be the biggest obstacle.
You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wait for clearance to take off.
Now is the short flight.
And afterwards we can do the entire thing in reverse.
Some things might be a bit more optimized, like perform customs, safety instructions etc during the boat trip. But the entire trip from arriving at the sea/space-port until leaving it at the destination would probably be making this a diminishing returns and only really interesting for the extremely long flights.
That's a good way to explain Amdahl's law to people: no matter if you travel by plane or by rocket, you don't save that much time if you still have to deal with the TSA.
- Get everybody on a boat in NYC harbor with ferry level security (i.e. not much)
- As the boat is travelling to the platform, perform the more thorough check in, any security scans, etc. Everyone simultaneously straps down in their seats, last minute toilet runs etc.
- Slot the passenger capsule into the rocket like a cartridge and take-off immediately at arrival. Plot twist: the capsule was on the boat. Passengers might not even get to see the rocket.
At the moment there's lots of time wasted walking to some gate at the far end of a massive airport. There's only one company here and one or two flights that go straight up and don't need to taxi. So the travel time in the boat won't be much more than the walk from the terminal to the gate.
One big limitation that was glossed over in the presentation is radiation exposure. The only time it came up was the mention of a 'solar storm shelter'. The radiation exposure during the Martian transit would be much greater than the same time spent on the ISS, somewhere on the order of 200mSv [0] (the composition of this radiation also contains significantly greater proportions of heavy-ion radiation, which appears to be more damaging, so this may need to be adjusted upwards). According to the wonderful xkcd chart [1], this would be in the 'probably no radiation sickness, but certainly not good for you' territory.
I would love to know what their plans are, since shielding is heavy. [2] seems to suggest electromagnetic deflection as viable (which would be insanely cool, and could probably reuse SpaceX's cryogenics work for superconductors).
Also, a quick search didn't turn up much on the anisotropy of interplanetary radiation, but I wonder how much a reduction would be achieved by angling the crewless area of the ship towards the solar wind (which I think Musk had touched on in an earlier talk).
EDIT: Of course these sorts of talks are really exciting! This is just one more in a laundry list of crazy-cool engineering problems that have to be/are being solved.
He has stated a couple of times that the radiation will be there and it will have the same lifetime cancer risk increase as smoking. It seems the plan is to just live with the increased cancer risk.
Making life multiplanetary seems like one of the least important issues of our times to me: either we figure out how to make life on earth sustainable in the medium term (next 50-100 years) or we do not have enough time to become multiplanetary anyway (since that will take centuries, and we will likely never leave the solar system anyway).
So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions before we are even sure if we can maintain our own planet (which is, and will remain for an extremely long time, the only place for autonomous life in space that humanity has).
Then again, maybe I'm nitpicking since it's not like Musk demands the whole world to commit its resources to his ideas. If he wants to play around with adventurous Mars trips that's fine.
Edit: Of course I'm also aware that Musk is still using his money better than many other wealthy people, so more power to him. This comment was mostly about space exploration vs. sustainable life on earth, all other things being equal.
Deeply regretting not going to IAC since it's in Australia this year. A colleague went under his own money and he's had a great time, as well as several of my uni mates who are there due to working in the industry.
I'm enjoying this, it's basically laying out goals that he's essentially saying 'hold us to this'.
I get the impression Elon's stance is, "If somebody else wants to build a Moon Base, you're welcome to buy launches from us. Here's how you'd do it." Elon himself pretty much just cares about Mars.
I think this is a nod to ESA who has stated they want to build a base on the moon:
http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Vi...
Elon's message: "Here's the rocket, it costs this much, go build it".
Basically trying to find more ways to monetize BFR.
Loving this..Big visions, some may work, some not. Inspiring..Going against odds, this is what humanity should stand for. These are the real 'moonshots'.
Would love to see these kinds of big picture roadmaps in other areas/industries. It's a shame so much of our possible progress is politicised.
[+] [-] tsaprailis|8 years ago|reply
- Government/intragovernment contracts to cleanup space debris.
- Government/Private satellite launches.
- Earth to earth transportation which Elon announced on Instagram that the cost would be comparable to an economy fare. https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
- Transporting gear for ESA's moon base plan http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Vi....
- Transporting Government/Private equipment to Mars.
This is very much a realistic business approach compared to last year's vision presentation.
[+] [-] nickik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andygates|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collinmanderson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbabb|8 years ago|reply
Musk's stated goal is $500k/ticket to Mars.
It's a shorter trip, so perhaps ~5x as many passengers in the same volume (i.e. 500 total; cf. a380 which seats 850).
It takes five (?) orbital refuel trips for the martian journey, but we'd need none of those. Depending on how much less than a full tank the passenger vehicle needs (payload could be smaller; the ship would also not reach fully orbital velocity), the fuel cost would be between 1/5 and 1/10 the Mars fuel cost.
So that would bring the cost down to between $10 and $20k/ticket, within reach of business travelers.
If maximum the number of flight cycles per vehicle is greater for Earth-to-Earth trips than for Mars, then that could further reduce the ticket cost. It's unclear to me which direction that number would go-- Earth's atmosphere is much thicker on re-entry, though the velocities will be much lower than an interplanetary re-entry. Since aerodynamic drag goes as the cube of velocity but only linearly with density, I'm guessing the speed would matter far more. That would imply much better lifetime on Earth.
So if the E2E fuselage gets (conservatively) only 2x as many flight cycles as a Mars trip, that could bring down the per-seat cost to $5k-- now getting close to the cost of an ordinary international ticket. Of course this is all assuming that Musk's baseline of $500k to Mars is reasonable.
Would be curious to hear from some rocket engineers about these guesses at the numbers/efficiency.
Not accounted for is amortized development cost for E2E-only vehicles, as well as all the infrastructure and ground support at the destinations.
Edit: If you wanted to be less conservative, you could pack in 1000 people instead of 500 (0.5x ticket price multiplier), or use a different source for the Mars ticket price (0.4x), which would bring it to $1k.
[+] [-] modeless|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osmium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuronexmachina|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiThi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrBazza|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlebrech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_element|8 years ago|reply
An extremely aggressive and impressive timeline.
[+] [-] ajmurmann|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diederich|8 years ago|reply
The other reasons to go to Mars that he has mentioned before are (arguably) valid.
This man might be the most inspirational voice in our lifetime.
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
Especially the intercontinental transport part. That is a real business use-case, potentially very lucrative. I also suspect that could get quite a few more billionaires excited (after all they spend a lot of time in private jets and I'm sure they'd like to cut that time off) which could help raising more investment.
I don't believe there is much to do on mars or the moon, not much that would make economical sense anyway. But intercontinental transport? That could work.
[+] [-] nicktelford|8 years ago|reply
If they can get that infrastructure heavily subsidised, then perhaps it's a different story. That said, I can't see many cities that would be willing to invest in this, except perhaps the ultra-rich ones, like Dubai.
Imagine getting this built for New York or London. I can't.
Edit: I don't mean to sound so negative; I actually think the rest of the talk was super positive in that it feels realistic - it's just the inter-continental travel bit that gave me pause.
[+] [-] karterk|8 years ago|reply
> Fly to most places on Earth in under 30 mins and anywhere in under 60. Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.
[1]: https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
[+] [-] Diederich|8 years ago|reply
1. You can't leave your seat. Very high seat density.
2. No restrooms.
3. No food or any other services.
4. Very few (if any) cabin staff.
5. Fully automated flight; perhaps no pilot.
6. More reliable flight schedule; only a small bit of earth's weather on either side of the flight matters.
Personally, I'd put up with a lot if the whole flight was <40 minutes.
On the other hand, the vomit. So much vomit. :(
[+] [-] modeless|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousgal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perilunar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agildehaus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewwharton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awiesenhofer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tharkun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boznz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickik|8 years ago|reply
The SLS specifically was designed to build a coalition between NASA centers who were involved with the SpaceShuttle, a group of large influential companies who produce the core components for the Shuttle and the SLS and a group of senators who are well located to defend these private and NASA jobs in their state.
Together the bureaucracy, business and the political can enforce this utterly foolish project to continue. This goes for both SLS and Orion, two of the biggest pork projects in US space history.
[+] [-] hacker_9|8 years ago|reply
Additionally with the entire flight being automated, what happens if the software gets taken over in space and they just drop it like a rock onto a city? The damage would be catastrophic. We need Elon to invest in city wide force field technology too it would seem.
[+] [-] internetionals|8 years ago|reply
You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wait for clearance to take off.
Now is the short flight.
And afterwards we can do the entire thing in reverse.
Some things might be a bit more optimized, like perform customs, safety instructions etc during the boat trip. But the entire trip from arriving at the sea/space-port until leaving it at the destination would probably be making this a diminishing returns and only really interesting for the extremely long flights.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Androider|8 years ago|reply
- Get everybody on a boat in NYC harbor with ferry level security (i.e. not much)
- As the boat is travelling to the platform, perform the more thorough check in, any security scans, etc. Everyone simultaneously straps down in their seats, last minute toilet runs etc.
- Slot the passenger capsule into the rocket like a cartridge and take-off immediately at arrival. Plot twist: the capsule was on the boat. Passengers might not even get to see the rocket.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toolbox|8 years ago|reply
I would love to know what their plans are, since shielding is heavy. [2] seems to suggest electromagnetic deflection as viable (which would be insanely cool, and could probably reuse SpaceX's cryogenics work for superconductors).
Also, a quick search didn't turn up much on the anisotropy of interplanetary radiation, but I wonder how much a reduction would be achieved by angling the crewless area of the ship towards the solar wind (which I think Musk had touched on in an earlier talk).
[0]: http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/DATA/bibliography/ICRC200... [1]: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [2]: https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/shieldin...
EDIT: Of course these sorts of talks are really exciting! This is just one more in a laundry list of crazy-cool engineering problems that have to be/are being solved.
[+] [-] krastanov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickik|8 years ago|reply
We know enough to get started and we will have to figure the rest as we go along.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
I disappointingly see F is for Falcon, but still I really like the lack of marketing in the name.
Plus I like the parallel with Roald Dahl's BFG.
[0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-...
[+] [-] Asdfbla|8 years ago|reply
So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions before we are even sure if we can maintain our own planet (which is, and will remain for an extremely long time, the only place for autonomous life in space that humanity has).
Then again, maybe I'm nitpicking since it's not like Musk demands the whole world to commit its resources to his ideas. If he wants to play around with adventurous Mars trips that's fine.
Edit: Of course I'm also aware that Musk is still using his money better than many other wealthy people, so more power to him. This comment was mostly about space exploration vs. sustainable life on earth, all other things being equal.
[+] [-] NamTaf|8 years ago|reply
I'm enjoying this, it's basically laying out goals that he's essentially saying 'hold us to this'.
[+] [-] elefanten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boznz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuronexmachina|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsaprailis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] michelb|8 years ago|reply
Would love to see these kinds of big picture roadmaps in other areas/industries. It's a shame so much of our possible progress is politicised.