I think his speaking style, although not something most business people would want to emulate, has a tone of earnestness, humility and honesty. I would be wary of a brilliant orator..
Considering that he is often compared to Steve Jobs in terms of his impact and innovation, I find it endearing that he doesn't have any of Jobs' glibness
Makes him feel more authentic. Like an engineer talking about his stuff, not a marketing guy
That seemed really out of place for Elon. Compared to last year's speech and many other interviews he sounded impaired quite frankly. I guess that's what chronic sleep deprivation will do to a man.
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'.
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?!
I suspect the ambitious timelines are political. Musk has repeatedly stated that others would need to work on a lot of the Mars colony infrastructure. SpaceX only appear to be working on the supporting infrastructure for flights (e.g. propellant plant).
By telling the world that they'll be ready to fly in five years, they're making a statement that other organisations/companies that want to get involved with this effort need to start working on developing the other parts right now.
If the schedule ends up being more like 2028 for the first flight, they stand a much better chance at flying the right stuff there.
That's a good point. This talk sends a pretty clear message to the market - we expect to be flying serious amounts of stuff to Mars in under 10 years, so if you want to start a business in the area, now is a good time.
And the trick is, the more people he can convince of that, the better chances we have the Mars colony will happen.
It's worth remembering too that Bigelow Aerospace put their development on hold some years ago because the launch industry wasn't moving fast enough to actually deploy their habitats.
I expect we'll see them spinning back up on the immediate future. :)
Question: Why do the autonomous cargo missions need to be done in the ideal launch window? It doesn't seem like the systems required to operate and navigate in space should require much energy, once your are up to cruising speed (and there's no air resistance in space to slow you down). Does it matter if the cargo takes 6 months to deliver the cargo instead of 3? Am I missing something?
It is indeed an energy issue, but for the orbital change, not system operations. Every kilogram you have to spend on fuel is a kilogram you can't use for cargo instead. You can use porkchop plots[1] to determine ideal launch windows (least ∆v = least fuel needed). Late summer of 2022, for example, is a good window[2].
For manned missions, you're more interested in the least '∆t' (time spent traveling) since crew sanity/health is more important than fuel. (Yes, astronauts are exceptional and willing to endure a lot of discomfort, but the less time they have to spend in a small tin can, the better.)
Longer exposure of components to radiation? Deterioration of fuel and fuel-touching components (wouldn't be able to get by on relatively inert monopropellant like on tiny probes, probably)? Best guesses.
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).
I was a little disappointed he didn't give any timeline at all on that not even a aspirational one. I also assume it's gonna be really expensive due to frequent heat shield replacement. I wouldn't be surprised if it never became economically viable. Too few passengers and too high cost.
You kidding? There's no way I'm staying in my seat during zero gravity. I might pay more to do a couple of extra orbits and play around before coming down.
I reckon everyone would be out of their seats as soon as boost is done. Getting everyone back into their seats in time for re-entry might be the issue ("take the nearest available").
Earth to earth flights would be sub-orbital though, so no opportunity for extra orbits.
That's really on spot but maybe it won't be your case.
Many people don't like accelerations. Braking and turning a car a little harder than usual is much less that 1 g but some people don't feel comfortable with it, even when there is no danger. Remember motion sickness and the puke bags on planes. Lifting off with a rocket is always going to be higher g than with a plane. Furthermore it's probably going to require some amount of fitness. Too young or too old: fly on a plane. In the middle: it depends.
> He said the heat shield ablates for Mars trips but not Earth trips (not sure why)
Falcon 9 presently lands completely without any heat shield, because it just uses it's engines to reduce velocity until they are not needed. In principle, you can always replace heat shields with fuel like this.
Mars trips need to bleed velocity aerodynamically because the craft cannot bring enough fuel. Presumably a sub-orbital hop on Earth can save enough fuel to act as the brakes.
Falcon 9 has a heat shield around the engines. Since they are going into the atmosphere engines-first it's going to be hot there. The engine bells sticking out from there don't care (much, since the entry burn reduces speed enough). Most of the speed reduction for the landing happens via aerobraking, not by using the engines.
The first stage of a Falcon 9 also flies much slower than a ship arriving to Mars or coming back to earth from orbit. It just needs to slow down a bit with engines when entering the thickest part of the atmosphere.
Honestly, Elon's presentations are some of the most impressive, inspiring I've ever seen. And the way he just stumbles out words and sentences that are completely revolutionary... casually dropping these absurd, incredible statements. I find it incredible.
If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. But I fully believe the SpaceX team can do this.
This has made me feel inspired for the future almost more than anything else has in recent memory.
(For context, and to the doubters, I've been following SpaceX for a long time, through their many failures, and they've already revolutionized the space industry. They have a drive and a vision and they're just going for it. This isn't about profits for them, it's about pushing humanity forwards -- and if that sounds grand, it's because it is.)
"You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. That's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and believing the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than being out there among the stars. "
Not Elon specifically, politics would only get in his way, but inspiring yet pragmatic visionaries... willing to make mistakes, challenge common beliefs, and build the future.
The problem....the ancient problem...is that the kinds of mental makeup that would be very good at running large organizations tend to also not WANT to do such things.
> His presentation style usually seems to be pretty raw, in a good way.
Completely agreed that it's raw in a good way -- you can tell he really has technical detail down too, I noticed one of the times when a slide left too early he still knew the numbers that had been on it. Also he has an understated sense of humor ("mountain").
I also sometimes got the sense he genuinely was in awe at what he was seeing. Like it still took him by surprise. It was interesting to watch.
> It's not as crisp/polished as Jobs' presentations were
All this said, I wish there were a Jobs-like figure to sell SpaceX. I'm sure there are people who'd disagree with me on this, but I can only imagine how popular/well-known SpaceX would be if they had someone who could pitch to the general public. SpaceX keynotes could be tune-in television with the right person, but it'd have to be someone really tied to the company, I don't think you could hire someone to do this. It'd have to be authentic.
Interesting that you mention Jobs in that Musk said, just like Jobs did, that he's reducing the product line to one thing, to increase economies of scale.
There was a thread on HN about Flexport the other day, and about how branding as "unsexy" was actually a selling point because customers appreciated the authenticity – they'd rather you be reliable than sexy as a logistics company.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Elon. He's not overpolished, rehearsed, or manipulative...it's just honest and unapologetic.
This is very well said and accurately describes my impressions of Elon's speeches. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who appreciates his down-to-earth, authentic delivery, and it wouldn't be surprising if Elon and those around him are aware of the attractiveness of this approach themselves.
I would be really excited about a future where everyone had access to clean water.
Going to space is fun and exciting. The future of space travel is going to be interesting, but it essential that when we imagine the future that we do so while recognizing the glaring problems of today.
The lack of access to clean water and most of the bad stuff happening around the world is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem. Elon Musk's passion lies in engineering, not in politics.
So while your sentiment is fine in a vacuum, I don't think it fits on this thread, and it's certainly not a sound criticism against advancing space colonization. In fact, there's a sizable sentiment that this planet is beyond saving due to political failures, and colonizing other planets is the only way for our species to survive.
I don't mean to antagonize Elon Musk himself. What I wanted to point out is that the future doesn't exist in a vacuum. While some people are jumping around on mars others will be unable to put food on their table. It saddens me to see that things that make people most excited about the future are the development of technologies that don't address issues of inequality.
Why would our political failures not follow us to other planets that we colonize?
Not only that - we have more than enough resources available to tackle this problem. The reasons it is not happening have nothing to do with it being underfunded, and thus axing space research will not help it either.
With increased technology comes more liberties for all. With your kind of thinking we would still live in caves because why work on anything unless we solve all our social issues first?
Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers. If you want clean water for all humans, you should be supportive of discovering new stuff.
For example, for humans to survive in hostile environments on other planets we need to create new innovations and that creates a big incentive to figure out technological solutions to hard problems.
Turning salt water into drinkable water is one, this one is actually already solved and being implemented across different countries and if we can improve that and make it cheaper we will have solved the problem of water already.
> Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers.
It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not only about your predecessors that solved engineering problems so you can dive even deeper - it is also about society which found better ways over time for effective financing that allows science&engineering to happen.
Also please read (for example) about Samsung and Nokia - they were forced to change industries by politicians in their respective countries.
> It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
> Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
I think it is true though. I am a bit of a technocrat.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Yep, aka the basic, but always true "guns vs butter" lesson.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
Of course. What about all the other things I mentioned as well? There are so many more--what about for profit prisons?
As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen.
Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just a tool, it's up to us to decide if we are going to end up in a police state with constsnt surveillance and tyranny, colonize Mars, create weapons that can wipe out most of humanity, solve healthcare problems, etc.
All of these things are not related to investment in science or technology for the betterment of society.
But we also live in a time with least war and a lot less suffering in general. Technology may be a tool, but science is not. With science we can prove that x makes more people happy and reduces suicide rates and hence make that choice.
The issue is that science is not really that present in the chamber of politics. With a more science-heavy government investments would look a lot different.
I am not advocating for technology alone, basic science plays an equal or even more important role in shaping the society. Science has values and it is the only true values that exist. I would argue that with help of the scienctific method we can figure out what makes people happy and implement it politically. But the progress still starts with science.
We live in a time where war no longer needs constitutional approval or even traditional military force. We have the longest running war in US history. 26,000 bombs dropped last year.
You need to put that scientific method you are talking about to use. Are people really happier today than in 1950? Why is the suicide rate going up
The difficulty with your argument here is that tech has enormous potential to make life better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will. You may be interested in noting that this is a common idea: I've seen the popular science educators like Sagan, NDT, Nye all say this...
The visibility of suicide is declining. The suicide rate is up, definatly up. They are just "accidents" now - people driving into a truck for no apparent reasons.
Take a black marker, open your local newspaper page and mark any not reasonable accident as suicide (if you dont believe me join a fire-brigade and find out for yourself).
You have a little chess-board in the news every morning.
I think a more toned down, and a more accurate view would be that progress of science and technology is what causes social changes, and not the other way around. As in, the social dynamics move within the space created by existing level of technology.
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
Well yes, but using the tool he made you could argue that very few would deny it since the truth became so obvious. Even if it was known a long time before that, a lot of people still believed that the earth was flat.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
Do you have a source for the claim that a lot of people believed the Earth was flat in Galileo's time? (Galileo was born decades after the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation of the world.)
You make two very, very large claims that require a deep dive to support.
>With increased technology comes more liberties for all.
...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
>Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers.
Again, what? That's an overwhelmingly naive and narrow view of the world. JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
Politicians were not partly responsible for the development of long range rocketry and nuclear fusion that came out of WWII?
It's strange to me that people are assuming that when I question the _kind_ of technological advancement being focused on that I'm critiquing _all_ technological advancement. I challenge you to find that critique in my words. Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality. How can we talk about 'progress' without first talking about the rubric for progress itself? How are we (you) defining progress?
> ...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
Electricity, internet, radio, engines, cameras, etc.
> JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
You're just enforcing my point, this is people who understand that we need technological progress in order for us to move forward as a society. Of course they are part of the progress, they help enable the progress to go faster.
> Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality.
It is my belief that this will never happen, at least not untill we have progressed so far that everyones needs are met. Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality. Just look at history, we've never been able to do this so far so there is no reason to belive that we suddently change our behavior.
I am defining progress as a lot of things, it can be the discovery of something new but it can also be an invention that benefits just a small number of people. In the long run, most new inventions will benefit everyone.
You said in another comment "Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended."
I agree wholeheartedly with that. Let's consider those people, and lets consider some other, mmm, how about Rwandans as well. Has electricity and the radio, cameras and engines increased the liberties of those people? I many cases a lot of those technologies have been used to remove liberties from those people, and sometimes to even kill them.
We have the technology now to meet everyone's need. Right now. We can produce enough food, we can build enough houses and supply everyone with enough calories. What technological things need to happen in order to distribute our resources accordingly? You'll probably say that's not a technological problem, at least not primarily, and I agree. This is the larger point I'm trying to get at and challenge others to address. I don't believe the most exciting future is one that requires enormous technological progress and when we focus on enormous technological progress for the sake of progress, rather than the sake of equality, well then we as a society continue to create a world the mirrors our goals: progress instead of equality.
>Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality.
Well, politicians are responsible for progress only in so far as they're responsible for allocating budget and legal support for research. They do not do the work, but they control large amounts of resources that help make it happen[0].
As for questioning the kind of technological advancement and the reactions to it, I think the defensive comments come from a combination of the following:
1. Questioning spending on space exploration in the topic about space exploration is like questioning the existence of football on a football match. You're talking to an audience who loves it and telling them that it takes resources away from More Important Things. Except that space is at the same time much more underfunded and much more important than football, baseball, basketball, movies, concerts, celebrity gossip and all the other stuff people like[1]. So it kind of feels unfair to single it out here.
2. Basic research is increasingly becoming underfunded. The funny thing about solving the world problems with technology is that, more often than not, what enables those technologies is pie-in-the-sky research with no expected immediate results. This doesn't fly well with the markets, and as countries increasingly treat science in the same way market economy does, the funding for long-term research is in ever greater jeopardy. Attacking space exploration through arguments of other more immediate problems is in a big way attacking basic research.
3. People need to dream about better future. Space exploration is somewhat unique that it captures and nourishes the imagination and hope for a better world.
4. We have enough resources to solve the more important problems like clean water and food for all. And yet they are not solved. Taking the meagre few $B from space research will most likely not help in solving those problems, but it will shut down space research.
--
[0] - Note that in that they're not unique - theoretically, a private institution with large amounts of resources can do the same thing too. Still, to date, it's usually governments that are willing to spend money on actual research.
[1] - Also, there's plenty of money in wasted military spending that could be taken first, even without reducing the actual military capabilities of a country.
Which use of resources is the biggest affront to you, given a preference to spend resources on access to clean water. Humans spending hundreds of billions of dollars on movies per year, or humans spending a coupe of tens of billions of dollars a year on making our species multi-planetary?
How come this argument only gets dragged up when we’re talkign about space, but not when we’re talking about movies, holidays, computer games, etc. It just seems weirdly disproportionate.
The way to address the problems here on Earth are to develop a massive industrial civilization in space that will create the economic surplus that can be diverted home. Fusion power, for example, is more likely to be fully developed in space and only then deployed on Earth.
This is how I've always felt about presentations, not just by Musk but anyone who presents candidly. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Bill Gates also present more or less similar characteristics. They don't prepare/rehearse for the talk. They are thinking on the fly, but they are still confident. This natural behavior is what makes listening and watching to these people so gratifying.
Usually I agree about his presentation. However this one was quite a bit worse then most of them.
The slides were not in sync confusing the audience. Not knowing when to clap, made it really uncomfortable.
He seemed to just drop stuff randomly without a narrative thread. When he showed the BFR/ITS for the first time, he had a much clear threwline, even while rambling in between.
Just to add a small anecdote, I have no involvement on the design side of the house but there isn't a rocket that leaves Hawthorne without touching my hands at some point, and I've always been impressed with Musk and some of the other more senior engineers, Tom Mueller deserves to be called out in particular, for how much they know about the low level technical things that go on here. I'm very, very, very low on the hierarchy here but I've escalated things to Musk and other VP's in the past when I felt it was necessary and they always took the time to respond to me.
Also, and this was particularly true when we where in much more cramped quarters on the production side, I would run in Musk on occasion in my area and he knew way more about the intricacies of my work, and the equipment I was using, or complaining about, than I would have assumed considering all the things he's responsible for.
Hum... you wanna tell the guy who's totally revolutionised the space industry, doing things rational people would have thought impossible not so very long ago... that he's doing it wrong?!
I'd hazard that companies which achieve truly impressive things, often do so because of how decisions are made. You need benign (or not so benign) dictators right in the weeds with their teams. Put layers of bureaucracy between Elon and his engineers, turn him into a board-meeting CEO... and SpaceX would lose one of the fundamentals that makes it special.
They could let Shotwell do some of these talks. She's a much better speaker. One of my favorite Shotwell lines was when congress asked how they can be so much cheaper than the competition. She responded "I don't know how to build a 400 million dollar rocket".
For a CEO, he's an insanely bad public speaker, yes. I'm always surprised by that. Then again, he's doing this without notes, or even just a preview of the next slide coming up, it seems, which is pretty difficult at the best of times in my experience.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Thats why they show the spaceport out at sea, as it kills the standard NIMBY objections. Also the cities they want to fly out of don’t have enough room to easily build a spaceport.
If you think putting it a little out to sea would kill NIMBY objections .... still, we can but dream.
I'm not entirely sure how serious SpaceX are about their E2E idea anyway, I took it as more of a "hey, isn't this neat? totally physically possible and practical too." I imagine it would take a long time to scale up to that point though, probably decades(?) after the Moon/Mars.
International waters start more than 20km out from the coastline (12 nm)[1], that would be a very long ferry just to reach the spaceport, not just a short hop like shown in the video...
That's about half an hour at a not that fast 25 knots.
30 minutes from a city center. For any coastal city, that is likely to be no worse as the time to get to an intercontinental airport.
Still means about 2h00 from NYC to Shangai, door to door. Quite an improvement over the 17hours today.
Non coastal cities have a problem...
In any case it takes care of most nimby as it's to far away for the neighbors to care. So reasonable, in that aspect.
Of course ITAR, fear of nuclear strikes etc... general FAA/EASA regulations remain issues for this business plan.
Weather will also be an issue. Flights rarely get canceled for weather issues. But transferring from a ferry onto a barge at high sea in bad wind seems like an non fun experience in a three piece suit.
> That's about half an hour at a not that fast 25 knots. [...] no worse as the time to get to an intercontinental airport
yes you are right, I wasn't factoring in the fact that currently airline travel requires you to travel to an airport which is usually very far from the city centre.
I suspect putting the spaceport at sea is mainly a security issue. Failing to reach the landing pad is certainly less catastrophic on water than on the ground.
Boats already stop rockets from taking off somewhat regularly. I think a lot of people would be pissed off if they couldn't sail off the coasts of many major cities on a daily (or even more frequent?) basis.
Isn't that done for the safety of the ships, in case of debris coming down on them? If they make rockets reliable enough for passenger transport that wouldn't be an issue anymore.
There's nothing stopping anyone from building them except the one thing that's always stopping people from doing things that need to be done - economics. It's cheaper to get methane from the ground than to make it from air and water.
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.
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.
Look, you can't complain about government inefficiency like you can complain about corporate inefficiency because you are granted real power over the government by way of the constitution.
If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
First of all I'm not american. Second, the US was not created democratically.
With a corporation I can just not use their product, they don't get my money and beyond that I don't really care what goals they have in space.
> If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
Like what channels? Writing a congressmen?
You vote every couple of years on a small group of people and those people are responsible for lots of things, not just space. So when you vote space is a small priority and most people care more about other issues.
NASA needs to given more independence and change the process of NASA budgeting. ESA does a lot better in many ways because they have a longer planning cycles. NASA should use more competitive contracting like they did for Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo.
These changes require evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary change and this is happening a little in NASA now. The Shuttle group has already lost out, the SLS is defensive effort.
The best thing we can do is point out how bad the current system is and oppose the pork projects. Moral outrage compared with workable efficient solutions that save money have the ability to potentially form alternative coalition.
Once the BFR starts flying and putting comparable-sized payloads into space for 1/100 the cost, I imagine there will finally be enough public protest to shut the SLS project down.
So what's the carbon footprint of one of these launches? Did I understand correctly that we can make the fuel by taking CO2 from the atmosphere? That would make the footprint negative, would it? That seems to good to be true.
I suppose some of it would be lost to the vacuum of space, though it would have to be an impressively large space transport market for that to start making a global difference.
Also weird to think about the long-term implications of Earth's resources leaving Earth permanently/irrecoverably.
Carbon neutral assuming you are creating the CH4 using atmospheric CO2. On Earth I suspect that most CH4 comes from natural gas. On Mars it would be carbon neutral - but that's actually a bad thing, assuming that your goal is to increase the atmospheric density on Mars.
Yes, that was the assumption of the parent question. I expect that initially all the fuel for Earth launches will be sourced from natural gas, but if they start doing regular sub-orbital passenger flights they'd have to convert to renewable energy + atmospheric CO2, otherwise they'd just (partially) undo the work Tesla is doing.
CO2 extraction for methane production is planned on mars, where the relative ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere is much higher. On Earth, CO2 is only 0.04%, which makes it quite difficult to extract.
The kicker for Earth is that it's a lot easier and cheaper to make CH4 from biological sources (fossil fuels, fermenters, etc), so nobody does it at scale. All the solutions (IIRC) need high temperature and a catalyst, which isn't surprising as we're un-burning rocket fuel. With cheap plentiful solar energy it's more practical; as Mars has no bio-sources of scale it's essential.
Musk's speaking is always a little awkward (in an endearing way), but did he seem significantly more nervous/emotionally affected than usual in the first part of this speech? It seemed that way to me, curious if anyone else interpreted it like that.
He calms down when he starts talking about risk and it being the anniversary of a launch.
edit: Good and fun presentation regardless!
edit2: Thoughts:
- Maybe he feels in over his head. The timing when he relaxed seemed to coincide with talking about a previous experience that might have felt overwhelming at the time but paid off.
- Maybe he typically takes beta blockers or something for speeches and take them until late this time (the talk did start late)
- Maybe it's just random.
Any spacex watchers have thoughts on cause?
edit3: Definitely not a diss. Love Elon/SpaceX/the vision.
I think it's weighing on him.. I think he'd like to move/iterate faster.. and the costs/stress of doing what he's doing when MANY keep saying 'Can't BE DONE' ... well.. to persevere through that.. takes some real strength of character and determination...but it's still stressful. I think you can hear that in his voice. I bet he's tired as fuck.
I have a feeling it was a very mixed crowd and there are probably lots of people chuckling quietly at his jokes but not the level of full-on laughing required to be heard by the camera way in the back.
I don't think it was the primary factor, but he did have to fly to Australia later that day to give a (battery) presentation. Which is a very different time-zone. A big day, even for Musk.
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.
> 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.
What more amazing is that 1000 ft^3 of methane is 12 tons, you need 1900 tons (in orbit) of propellant to get to mars based on the ITS design since it's about 5 trips of the ITS tanker to refuel the ITS that goes to mars (350-380 tons per refueling).
Lets put E2E propellant requirements for the BFR/Booster and the ITS at 10 times that of the martian transfer that would put the CH4 costs of the trip to less than $6500.... At 100 times that it would be about $65,000.
That will still be much cheaper than the most fuel efficient jets we have like the A380 and the 787-9 with the fuel costs of a 15 hour flight being in the range of 150-200,000$ depending on the aircraft.
Just like everybody else I'm really blown away by what SpaceX does, but at the same time I think the question begs to be asked: Has humanity already given up on earth as a home? Is the future really about planets as disposable habitats?
Given up? We have no choice in the matter. And remember Mars is a dust bowl, where you can't even go outside without a helmet on. Earth is as good as it gets.
Considering how long it will take to get a proper bioshpere on Mars, which will only work IF we can teraform Mars properly, I dont think we'll be able to abandon Earth any time soon. I think the Mars colony will be something more like our base in Antarctica--a place for scientists, but not somewhere anyone would want to live permanently.
Space exploration has given us some of the most profoundly transformative new views of life on Earth, giving us a greater appreciation and a greater understanding of what Earth is, what its value is, and informing our relationship with Earth. Mars colonization will be no different, I suspect.
Not only will it help crystallize our self-conception of who we are and what we're about as a species, it will provide a greater clarity on what it means to create proper "living conditions" here on Earth. On Earth it's easy to take things for granted. Which sometimes means we also allow progress to stall because we perceive things as being just "good enough for now". A lot of that will change with Mars colonization, and for the better I think. On Mars they won't have clean air or clean water without putting in a tremendous amount of work to create them. Which they will do, of course, because the alternative is to live without them, which isn't reasonable. But consider life back here on Earth, where we take our air and water for granted. Where we can approach the issues of a lack of clean water or air in a lackadaisical manner, without it being the highest emergency priority. And that's true not only in the developing world (India or Sub-saharan Africa) but also in the midst of the developed world (the lead tainted water in Flint and elsewhere, Victoria, BC in Canada flushing its toilets directly into the Ocean, etc, etc.) And the way we treat environmental issues as something that our grandchildren might have to finally get around to sorting out, but not something to actually begin tackling right now today.
Imagine what it's like on Mars where the starting condition is a bare rock with zero trees, zero rivers, zero lakes. Will Martians plant forests, will they create lakes and rivers? Of course they will. That'll be one of the first things they begin doing. And those things will be precious treasures to them. Just as with air and water, that simple act will help remind us of the natural treasures we exploit and take for granted on Earth rather than preserve and cherish.
Additionally, the technologies developed on the path of Martian colonization will have immanent applicability to Earth. The BFR alone is a perfect example of that, suitable not just for Mars colonization but also for Earth satellite delivery, and point-to-point travel, among other functions. Colonists will pioneer a lot of new techniques and a lot of new technologies for their own unique needs. But I think we'll find that while those needs are unique, the advances they make will have a lot wider application. One thing that will be necessary on Mars is figuring out how to build stuff using a minimal base of machine tools and industrial infrastructure. That sort of cost/complexity reduction will be just as applicable on Earth. As will figuring out how to use advanced machine tools (CNC, 3D printers, laser/water cutters, etc.) to their maximum utility. Growing high yield crops sustainably. Achieving high efficiency of recycling. And on and on.
I wonder what the greenhouse gas emissions will be like for the Earth-to-Earth trips. Ironic that the display showed a snow-capped mountain after the E2E animation.
Earth-bound BFR flights could be net zero emissions if SpaceX uses solar energy to generate methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide, as Musk discussed in the talk.
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.
An airplane goes roughly 500km/h. Elons rocket was going 20000km/h - so I think it's about 40x worse actually. Not to mention a rocket goes straight down so none of that speed is lost.
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.
> It's a neat idea, but I don't see this funding the Mars colony ambitions, at least not in the short term.
I think you misunderstood him. Musk doesn't plan on founding a mars colony. He plans on giving a solid business plan for a big, fully reusable rocket capable of transporting hundreds of people. He believes transportation is the main obstacle to people building a city on mars.
If I am flying a rocket plane and my normal landing site has bad weather what does the rocket do? Maybe they can have robot boats all around the world to catch them!
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadMakes him feel more authentic. Like an engineer talking about his stuff, not a marketing guy
I'm enjoying this, it's basically laying out goals that he's essentially saying 'hold us to this'.
An extremely aggressive and impressive timeline.
By telling the world that they'll be ready to fly in five years, they're making a statement that other organisations/companies that want to get involved with this effort need to start working on developing the other parts right now.
If the schedule ends up being more like 2028 for the first flight, they stand a much better chance at flying the right stuff there.
And the trick is, the more people he can convince of that, the better chances we have the Mars colony will happen.
I expect we'll see them spinning back up on the immediate future. :)
For manned missions, you're more interested in the least '∆t' (time spent traveling) since crew sanity/health is more important than fuel. (Yes, astronauts are exceptional and willing to endure a lot of discomfort, but the less time they have to spend in a small tin can, the better.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot
[2] http://www.amssolarempire.com/Programs/porkchop_plot.png
Earth to earth flights would be sub-orbital though, so no opportunity for extra orbits.
If he can get the cost down to US $10 million per trip, that's US $12K per person.
Of course this level of reusability and reliability has never been achieved before, but the whole thing depends on it.
I suppose the reentry speed on mars is much higher, since it happens at the end of an interplanetary trip.
Falcon 9 presently lands completely without any heat shield, because it just uses it's engines to reduce velocity until they are not needed. In principle, you can always replace heat shields with fuel like this.
Mars trips need to bleed velocity aerodynamically because the craft cannot bring enough fuel. Presumably a sub-orbital hop on Earth can save enough fuel to act as the brakes.
On earth you just need to survive, the speed is primarily reduced with the engines.
If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. But I fully believe the SpaceX team can do this.
This has made me feel inspired for the future almost more than anything else has in recent memory.
(For context, and to the doubters, I've been following SpaceX for a long time, through their many failures, and they've already revolutionized the space industry. They have a drive and a vision and they're just going for it. This isn't about profits for them, it's about pushing humanity forwards -- and if that sounds grand, it's because it is.)
Not Elon specifically, politics would only get in his way, but inspiring yet pragmatic visionaries... willing to make mistakes, challenge common beliefs, and build the future.
The problem....the ancient problem...is that the kinds of mental makeup that would be very good at running large organizations tend to also not WANT to do such things.
As in, it's not as marketable. It's doesn't seem like it's been a style of preparation for a pure sales/marketing kind of pitch.
Kind of interesting, in my opinion.
Completely agreed that it's raw in a good way -- you can tell he really has technical detail down too, I noticed one of the times when a slide left too early he still knew the numbers that had been on it. Also he has an understated sense of humor ("mountain").
I also sometimes got the sense he genuinely was in awe at what he was seeing. Like it still took him by surprise. It was interesting to watch.
> It's not as crisp/polished as Jobs' presentations were
All this said, I wish there were a Jobs-like figure to sell SpaceX. I'm sure there are people who'd disagree with me on this, but I can only imagine how popular/well-known SpaceX would be if they had someone who could pitch to the general public. SpaceX keynotes could be tune-in television with the right person, but it'd have to be someone really tied to the company, I don't think you could hire someone to do this. It'd have to be authentic.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Elon. He's not overpolished, rehearsed, or manipulative...it's just honest and unapologetic.
Going to space is fun and exciting. The future of space travel is going to be interesting, but it essential that when we imagine the future that we do so while recognizing the glaring problems of today.
So while your sentiment is fine in a vacuum, I don't think it fits on this thread, and it's certainly not a sound criticism against advancing space colonization. In fact, there's a sizable sentiment that this planet is beyond saving due to political failures, and colonizing other planets is the only way for our species to survive.
Why would our political failures not follow us to other planets that we colonize?
Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers. If you want clean water for all humans, you should be supportive of discovering new stuff.
For example, for humans to survive in hostile environments on other planets we need to create new innovations and that creates a big incentive to figure out technological solutions to hard problems.
Turning salt water into drinkable water is one, this one is actually already solved and being implemented across different countries and if we can improve that and make it cheaper we will have solved the problem of water already.
It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not only about your predecessors that solved engineering problems so you can dive even deeper - it is also about society which found better ways over time for effective financing that allows science&engineering to happen.
Also please read (for example) about Samsung and Nokia - they were forced to change industries by politicians in their respective countries.
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen.
Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just a tool, it's up to us to decide if we are going to end up in a police state with constsnt surveillance and tyranny, colonize Mars, create weapons that can wipe out most of humanity, solve healthcare problems, etc.
But we also live in a time with least war and a lot less suffering in general. Technology may be a tool, but science is not. With science we can prove that x makes more people happy and reduces suicide rates and hence make that choice.
The issue is that science is not really that present in the chamber of politics. With a more science-heavy government investments would look a lot different.
I am not advocating for technology alone, basic science plays an equal or even more important role in shaping the society. Science has values and it is the only true values that exist. I would argue that with help of the scienctific method we can figure out what makes people happy and implement it politically. But the progress still starts with science.
You need to put that scientific method you are talking about to use. Are people really happier today than in 1950? Why is the suicide rate going up
The difficulty with your argument here is that tech has enormous potential to make life better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will. You may be interested in noting that this is a common idea: I've seen the popular science educators like Sagan, NDT, Nye all say this...
Take a black marker, open your local newspaper page and mark any not reasonable accident as suicide (if you dont believe me join a fire-brigade and find out for yourself).
You have a little chess-board in the news every morning.
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
That the Earth is not flat has been known since ancient times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
My bad and thanks for correcting and enlightning me :)
>With increased technology comes more liberties for all.
...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
>Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers.
Again, what? That's an overwhelmingly naive and narrow view of the world. JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
Politicians were not partly responsible for the development of long range rocketry and nuclear fusion that came out of WWII?
It's strange to me that people are assuming that when I question the _kind_ of technological advancement being focused on that I'm critiquing _all_ technological advancement. I challenge you to find that critique in my words. Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality. How can we talk about 'progress' without first talking about the rubric for progress itself? How are we (you) defining progress?
> ...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
Electricity, internet, radio, engines, cameras, etc.
> JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
You're just enforcing my point, this is people who understand that we need technological progress in order for us to move forward as a society. Of course they are part of the progress, they help enable the progress to go faster.
> Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality.
It is my belief that this will never happen, at least not untill we have progressed so far that everyones needs are met. Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality. Just look at history, we've never been able to do this so far so there is no reason to belive that we suddently change our behavior.
I am defining progress as a lot of things, it can be the discovery of something new but it can also be an invention that benefits just a small number of people. In the long run, most new inventions will benefit everyone.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. Let's consider those people, and lets consider some other, mmm, how about Rwandans as well. Has electricity and the radio, cameras and engines increased the liberties of those people? I many cases a lot of those technologies have been used to remove liberties from those people, and sometimes to even kill them.
We have the technology now to meet everyone's need. Right now. We can produce enough food, we can build enough houses and supply everyone with enough calories. What technological things need to happen in order to distribute our resources accordingly? You'll probably say that's not a technological problem, at least not primarily, and I agree. This is the larger point I'm trying to get at and challenge others to address. I don't believe the most exciting future is one that requires enormous technological progress and when we focus on enormous technological progress for the sake of progress, rather than the sake of equality, well then we as a society continue to create a world the mirrors our goals: progress instead of equality.
>Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality.
Sure there is, it's called compassion.
As for questioning the kind of technological advancement and the reactions to it, I think the defensive comments come from a combination of the following:
1. Questioning spending on space exploration in the topic about space exploration is like questioning the existence of football on a football match. You're talking to an audience who loves it and telling them that it takes resources away from More Important Things. Except that space is at the same time much more underfunded and much more important than football, baseball, basketball, movies, concerts, celebrity gossip and all the other stuff people like[1]. So it kind of feels unfair to single it out here.
2. Basic research is increasingly becoming underfunded. The funny thing about solving the world problems with technology is that, more often than not, what enables those technologies is pie-in-the-sky research with no expected immediate results. This doesn't fly well with the markets, and as countries increasingly treat science in the same way market economy does, the funding for long-term research is in ever greater jeopardy. Attacking space exploration through arguments of other more immediate problems is in a big way attacking basic research.
3. People need to dream about better future. Space exploration is somewhat unique that it captures and nourishes the imagination and hope for a better world.
4. We have enough resources to solve the more important problems like clean water and food for all. And yet they are not solved. Taking the meagre few $B from space research will most likely not help in solving those problems, but it will shut down space research.
--
[0] - Note that in that they're not unique - theoretically, a private institution with large amounts of resources can do the same thing too. Still, to date, it's usually governments that are willing to spend money on actual research.
[1] - Also, there's plenty of money in wasted military spending that could be taken first, even without reducing the actual military capabilities of a country.
How come this argument only gets dragged up when we’re talkign about space, but not when we’re talking about movies, holidays, computer games, etc. It just seems weirdly disproportionate.
How do you know that?
The slides were not in sync confusing the audience. Not knowing when to clap, made it really uncomfortable.
He seemed to just drop stuff randomly without a narrative thread. When he showed the BFR/ITS for the first time, he had a much clear threwline, even while rambling in between.
Giving speeches is more appropriate for his actual job.
He knows more about the rocket then probably anybody else.
He said that he spends about 80% of his SpaceX time as and engineer.
Also, and this was particularly true when we where in much more cramped quarters on the production side, I would run in Musk on occasion in my area and he knew way more about the intricacies of my work, and the equipment I was using, or complaining about, than I would have assumed considering all the things he's responsible for.
Fair enough, but that leads me to believe he needs to hire more engineers. He shouldn't need to be that hands-on, even if he wants to be.
I'd hazard that companies which achieve truly impressive things, often do so because of how decisions are made. You need benign (or not so benign) dictators right in the weeds with their teams. Put layers of bureaucracy between Elon and his engineers, turn him into a board-meeting CEO... and SpaceX would lose one of the fundamentals that makes it special.
Part of me thinks that the whole moon base thing was a pitch to legislators/NASA.
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.
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.
I'm not entirely sure how serious SpaceX are about their E2E idea anyway, I took it as more of a "hey, isn't this neat? totally physically possible and practical too." I imagine it would take a long time to scale up to that point though, probably decades(?) after the Moon/Mars.
[1] https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
Non coastal cities have a problem...
In any case it takes care of most nimby as it's to far away for the neighbors to care. So reasonable, in that aspect.
Of course ITAR, fear of nuclear strikes etc... general FAA/EASA regulations remain issues for this business plan.
Weather will also be an issue. Flights rarely get canceled for weather issues. But transferring from a ferry onto a barge at high sea in bad wind seems like an non fun experience in a three piece suit.
yes you are right, I wasn't factoring in the fact that currently airline travel requires you to travel to an airport which is usually very far from the city centre.
I suspect putting the spaceport at sea is mainly a security issue. Failing to reach the landing pad is certainly less catastrophic on water than on the ground.
And that would actually be better than aircraft, there isn't such thing as a water landing there it's called crashing in the ocean.
You also want your rocket to land in an uninhabited area, in case something goes terribly bad. Sea makes much sense in this regard.
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.
If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
With a corporation I can just not use their product, they don't get my money and beyond that I don't really care what goals they have in space.
> If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
Like what channels? Writing a congressmen?
You vote every couple of years on a small group of people and those people are responsible for lots of things, not just space. So when you vote space is a small priority and most people care more about other issues.
NASA needs to given more independence and change the process of NASA budgeting. ESA does a lot better in many ways because they have a longer planning cycles. NASA should use more competitive contracting like they did for Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo.
These changes require evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary change and this is happening a little in NASA now. The Shuttle group has already lost out, the SLS is defensive effort.
The best thing we can do is point out how bad the current system is and oppose the pork projects. Moral outrage compared with workable efficient solutions that save money have the ability to potentially form alternative coalition.
Also weird to think about the long-term implications of Earth's resources leaving Earth permanently/irrecoverably.
He calms down when he starts talking about risk and it being the anniversary of a launch.
edit: Good and fun presentation regardless!
edit2: Thoughts:
- Maybe he feels in over his head. The timing when he relaxed seemed to coincide with talking about a previous experience that might have felt overwhelming at the time but paid off.
- Maybe he typically takes beta blockers or something for speeches and take them until late this time (the talk did start late)
- Maybe it's just random.
Any spacex watchers have thoughts on cause?
edit3: Definitely not a diss. Love Elon/SpaceX/the vision.
The talk was on the 9th anniversary of their first successful launch, which basically made SpaceX possible.
Clearly no gamers in the audience, I died.
Compared to F9, BFR is fatter and would have less trouble with high-altitude winds at launch.
Now landing weather, that's another thing.
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.
We know enough to get started and we will have to figure the rest as we go along.
> 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/
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. :(
Almost certainly no pilot.
Cool stuff.
Lets put E2E propellant requirements for the BFR/Booster and the ITS at 10 times that of the martian transfer that would put the CH4 costs of the trip to less than $6500.... At 100 times that it would be about $65,000.
That will still be much cheaper than the most fuel efficient jets we have like the A380 and the 787-9 with the fuel costs of a 15 hour flight being in the range of 150-200,000$ depending on the aircraft.
The ticket is worth much more than economy!
Are our efforts of colonizing space a detriment to our efforts to keep earth habitable?
Or, "Pale Blue Dot" from Voyager 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blu...
Space exploration has given us some of the most profoundly transformative new views of life on Earth, giving us a greater appreciation and a greater understanding of what Earth is, what its value is, and informing our relationship with Earth. Mars colonization will be no different, I suspect.
Not only will it help crystallize our self-conception of who we are and what we're about as a species, it will provide a greater clarity on what it means to create proper "living conditions" here on Earth. On Earth it's easy to take things for granted. Which sometimes means we also allow progress to stall because we perceive things as being just "good enough for now". A lot of that will change with Mars colonization, and for the better I think. On Mars they won't have clean air or clean water without putting in a tremendous amount of work to create them. Which they will do, of course, because the alternative is to live without them, which isn't reasonable. But consider life back here on Earth, where we take our air and water for granted. Where we can approach the issues of a lack of clean water or air in a lackadaisical manner, without it being the highest emergency priority. And that's true not only in the developing world (India or Sub-saharan Africa) but also in the midst of the developed world (the lead tainted water in Flint and elsewhere, Victoria, BC in Canada flushing its toilets directly into the Ocean, etc, etc.) And the way we treat environmental issues as something that our grandchildren might have to finally get around to sorting out, but not something to actually begin tackling right now today.
Imagine what it's like on Mars where the starting condition is a bare rock with zero trees, zero rivers, zero lakes. Will Martians plant forests, will they create lakes and rivers? Of course they will. That'll be one of the first things they begin doing. And those things will be precious treasures to them. Just as with air and water, that simple act will help remind us of the natural treasures we exploit and take for granted on Earth rather than preserve and cherish.
Additionally, the technologies developed on the path of Martian colonization will have immanent applicability to Earth. The BFR alone is a perfect example of that, suitable not just for Mars colonization but also for Earth satellite delivery, and point-to-point travel, among other functions. Colonists will pioneer a lot of new techniques and a lot of new technologies for their own unique needs. But I think we'll find that while those needs are unique, the advances they make will have a lot wider application. One thing that will be necessary on Mars is figuring out how to build stuff using a minimal base of machine tools and industrial infrastructure. That sort of cost/complexity reduction will be just as applicable on Earth. As will figuring out how to use advanced machine tools (CNC, 3D printers, laser/water cutters, etc.) to their maximum utility. Growing high yield crops sustainably. Achieving high efficiency of recycling. And on and on.
Having a civilization that can use resources from space will help earth as well.
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.
In space. I don't think it would survive that in the lower atmosphere. And a lot of danger comes from the fuel, not the kinetic energy.
OTOH, what if terrorists gain access to that system?...
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.
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.
I think you misunderstood him. Musk doesn't plan on founding a mars colony. He plans on giving a solid business plan for a big, fully reusable rocket capable of transporting hundreds of people. He believes transportation is the main obstacle to people building a city on mars.
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.