Jean LegallGood afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Jean LeGall. I'm President of the French Space Agency and the President elect of the International Astronautical Federation, and it is my pleasure to welcome you here at the 67th International Astronautical Congress. Elon Musk is founder, C.E.O., and lead designer of SpaceX. Elon founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing space technology and ultimately enabling humans to become a multiplanetary species, and that's the plan he's going to lay out for us today.女士们先生们，下午好。我是 Jean LeGall，法国国家空间研究中心主席，同时也是国际宇航联合会候任主席。非常荣幸在第 67 届国际宇航大会上欢迎各位的到来。Elon Musk 是 SpaceX 的创始人、首席执行官及首席设计师。Elon 于 2002 年创立 SpaceX，目标是彻底革新航天技术，并最终使人类成为多行星物种——这正是他今天要向我们阐述的计划。
Jean LegallSpaceX has had a number of firsts including as the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station and the first entity to land a nautical thrust booster back on land and on ships out at sea. Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk. [APPLAUSE].SpaceX 创造了多项历史纪录，包括：首家向国际空间站运送并返回货物的私营公司，以及首个将轨道级火箭助推器成功降落回陆地和海上无人船的机构。请大家热烈欢迎 Elon Musk。【掌声】
Elon MuskThank you. Thank you very much for having me. I look forward to talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture. And what I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go. And is there really a way that anyone can go if they wanted to? I think that's really the important thing. So, I mean, first of all, why go anywhere? Right? I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event.谢谢，非常感谢你们邀请我。我很期待今天能聊聊 SpaceX 的火星架构。我真正想在这里实现的，是让火星看起来触手可及——让它看起来像是我们在有生之年就能做到的事情，而且你自己也可以去。关键问题是：任何人只要想去，真的能去吗？我觉得这才是最重要的。首先，为什么要去任何地方？我认为历史其实面临两条根本性的路径。历史将沿着两个方向分叉：一条是我们永远留在地球上，然后终将遭遇某个灭绝事件。
Elon MuskI don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multiplanet species, which I hope you agree that is the right way to go. Yes? [APPLAUSE]. That's what we want. [APPLAUSE]. Yeah. So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city, a city that is not really an outpost but can become a planet in its own right and thus we can become a truly multiplanet species?我没有立即的末日预言，但历史表明，最终一定会有某个末日事件到来。另一条路是成为一个航天文明和多行星物种——我希望你们同意这才是正确的方向，对吧？【掌声】这就是我们想要的。【掌声】所以，我们如何想清楚怎么带你们去火星，并创建一座自给自足的城市——一座不只是前哨站、而是能够真正成为一颗独立行星的城市，从而让我们真正成为多行星物种？
Elon MuskYou know, sometimes people wonder, Well, what about other places in the solar system? Why Mars? Well, just to sort of put things into perspective, this is -- this is what -- this is an actual scale of what the solar system looks like. So we're currently in the third little rock from the left. That's Earth. Yeah, exactly. And our goal is to go to the fourth rock on the left. That's Mars. But you can get a sense for the real scale of the solar system, how big the sun is and Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus. And then the little guys on the right are Pluto and friends.有时候人们会好奇：太阳系里的其他地方怎么样？为什么是火星？为了给大家一个直观的概念——这是太阳系的真实比例图。我们目前在从左数第三颗小石头上，那是地球。没错。而我们的目标是从左数第四颗石头，那是火星。你可以从中感受到太阳系的真实尺度——太阳有多大，还有木星、海王星、土星、天王星。右边那几个小家伙是冥王星和它的朋友们。
Elon MuskThis sort of helps to see, it's not quite to scale, but it gives you a better sense for where things are. So our options for going to -- for becoming a multiplanet species within our solar system are limited. We have, in terms of nearby options, we've got Venus. But Venus is a high-pressure -- super high-pressure hot acid bath. So that would be a tricky one. Venus is not at all like the goddess. This is not in no way similar to the actual goddess.这张图有助于理解，虽然不是严格等比例，但能让你更好地感受各个天体的位置。在太阳系内成为多行星物种的选择其实非常有限。就附近的选项而言，我们有金星。但金星是一个超高压的热酸浴环境，那会非常棘手。金星跟那位女神可完全不一样，和真正的女神毫无相似之处。
Elon MuskSo it is really difficult to make things work on Venus. Mercury is also way too close to the sun. We could go potentially on to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out, much further from the sun, a lot harder to get to. Really, it leaves us with one option if we want to become a multiplanet civilization, and that's Mars. We could conceivably go to our moon, and I have nothing against going to the moon, but I think it's challenging to become multiplanetary on the moon because it's much smaller than a planet. It doesn't have any atmosphere. It's not as resource rich as Mars. It has a 28-day day, whereas the Mars day is 24 1/2 hours. And in general, Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to a self-sustaining civilization.要在金星上让任何东西运转都极其困难。水星又离太阳太近了。我们也许可以去木星或土星的某个卫星，但那些地方很遥远，距离太阳更远，到达的难度也大得多。所以，如果我们想成为多行星文明，真的只剩一个选项，那就是火星。我们当然也可以去月球，我对登月没有任何异议，但我认为要在月球上实现多行星化很有挑战性，因为它比一颗行星小得多，没有大气层，资源也不如火星丰富。月球的一天有 28 天，而火星的一天是 24.5 小时。总体来说，火星在发展成一个自给自足文明方面远比月球更具优势。
Elon MuskJust to give some comparison between the two planets, there are actually -- they're remarkably close in a lot of ways. In fact, we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth. And, in fact, if we could warm Mars up, we would, once again, have a thick -- a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. So, where things are right now, Mars is about half again as far from the sun as Earth. So it has decent sunlight. It's a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere which, in the case of Mars being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. And it has nitrogen, too, which is also very important for growing plants.简单比较一下这两颗行星，它们在很多方面其实相当接近。事实上，我们现在认为早期的火星曾经很像地球。而且如果能让火星升温，我们将再次拥有厚厚的大气层和液态海洋。就目前情况而言，火星距太阳的距离大约是地球的 1.5 倍，所以阳光还算充足，只是有点冷，但我们可以让它升温。它有一层非常有用的大气，火星大气主要由 CO2 组成，还有一些氮气、氩气和少量其他微量元素，这意味着只要压缩大气，我们就可以在火星上种植植物。而且它也含有氮气，这对植物生长同样非常重要。
Elon MuskIt will be quite fun to be on Mars, because you will have gravity which is about 37% that of Earth, so you will be able to lift heavy things and bound around and have a lot of fun. And the day is remarkably close to that of Earth. So we just need to change that bottom row, because currently we have 7 billion people on Earth and zero on Mars. So there's been a lot of great work by NASA and other organizations in early exploration of Mars and understanding what Mars is like, where could we land, what's the composition of the atmosphere, where is there water, or ice, we should say. And we need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city.在火星上生活会相当有趣，因为那里的重力约为地球的 37%，所以你能举起很重的东西，还能蹦蹦跳跳，玩得很开心。而且那里的一天长度和地球惊人地接近。所以我们只需要改变最后那一行数据——目前地球上有 70 亿人，而火星上是零。NASA 和其他机构在火星早期探测方面做了大量出色的工作，了解了火星的样貌、着陆地点、大气成分，以及哪里有水，应该说是冰。我们需要从这些早期探索任务迈向真正建造一座城市。
Elon MuskThe issue that we have today is that if you look at a Venn diagram, there's no intersection of sets of people who want to go and can afford to go. In fact, right now you cannot go to Mars for infinite money. Using traditional methods, you know, if taking sort of a holistic style approach, an optimistic cost number would be about $10 billion per person. For example, the Apollo program, the cost estimates are somewhere between $100 billion to $200 billion in current-year dollars, and we sent 12 people to the surface of the moon, which was an incredible thing and I think probably one of the greatest achievements of humanity.我们现在面临的问题是，如果你画一个维恩图，想去火星的人和负担得起旅行的人这两个集合没有交集。事实上，现在即便花无限多的钱，你也去不了火星。用传统方法——如果从整体角度来估算——一个乐观的成本数字大约是每人 100 亿美元。比如 Apollo 计划，按当前年份美元计算，成本估算在 1000 亿到 2000 亿美元之间，而我们送了 12 个人去月球表面，那是一项令人难以置信的成就，可能是人类最伟大的成就之一。
Elon MuskBut that's -- that's a steep price to pay for a ticket. That's why these circles only just barely touch. So you can't create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion a person. What we need is a closer -- is to move those circles together. And if we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to a median house price in the U.S., which is around $200,000, then I think the probability of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high. I think it would almost certainly occur -- not everyone would want to go.但那是一张价格非常昂贵的船票，这就是为什么这两个圆圈只是勉强相切。如果票价是每人 100 亿美元，你根本无法建立一个自给自足的文明。我们需要让这两个圆圈靠近，甚至重叠。如果我们能把移居火星的成本降到大约相当于美国房价中位数——也就是大约 20 万美元——那么我认为建立一个自给自足文明的概率就会非常高。我认为这几乎肯定会发生——当然不是每个人都想去。
Elon MuskIn fact, I think a relatively small number of people from Earth would want to go. But enough would want to go and who could afford the trip that it would happen. And people could get sponsorship. And I think it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved up and this was their goal, they could ultimately save up enough money to buy a ticket and move to Mars. And Mars would have labor shortage for a long time so jobs would not be in short supply. But it is a bit tricky because we have to figure out how to improve the cost of trips to Mars by 5 million percent. So this is -- this is not easy. I mean, it's -- and it sounds like virtually impossible but I think there are ways to do it. This translates to an improvement of approximately 4 1/2 orders of magnitude.事实上，我认为地球上只有相对少数的人会想去。但会有足够多想去的人，而且他们能负担得起这趟旅程，那么这件事就会发生。人们也可以获得赞助。我认为最终会到达这样一个程度：几乎任何人只要努力存钱，以此为目标，最终都能攒够钱买一张票移居火星。而且火星将在很长一段时间内面临劳动力短缺，所以工作机会不会匮乏。但这确实有点棘手，因为我们必须想办法把火星旅行成本降低 500 万倍。这不容易，听起来几乎是不可能的，但我认为是有办法做到的。这相当于大约 4.5 个数量级的改进。
Elon MuskThese are the key elements that are needed in order to achieve the 4 1/2 order of magnitude improvement. Most of the improvement would come from full reusability, somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 orders of magnitude. And then the other two orders of magnitude would come from refilling in orbit, propellant production on Mars and choosing the right propellant. So I'm going to go into detail on all of those. Full reusability is really the super hard one. It's very difficult to achieve reusability for even an orbital system, and that challenge becomes even substantially greater for a system that has to go to another planet. But as an example of the difference between reusability and expendability in aircraft -- and you can actually use any form of transport. You could say a car, bicycle, horse. If they were single-use, almost no one would use them. It would be too expensive. But with frequent flights, you can take something like an aircraft that costs $90 million and if it was single use, you would have to pay half a million dollars per flight. But这些是实现 4.5 个数量级改进所需的关键要素。大部分改进将来自完全可重复使用，大约 2 到 2.5 个数量级。另外两个数量级则来自在轨加注推进剂、在火星上生产推进剂，以及选择正确的推进剂。我会逐一详细讲解这些。完全可重复使用才是真正难攻克的那一关。即便是对于轨道系统来说，实现可重复使用就已经非常困难，而对于一个必须前往另一颗行星的系统，这个挑战就更大了。但举个例子，来说明可重复使用与一次性使用在飞机上的区别——你其实可以用任何交通工具来类比，比如汽车、自行车、马。如果它们是一次性的，几乎没有人会用，那将太昂贵了。但通过频繁飞行，你可以把一架造价 9000 万美元的飞机——如果它是一次性的，每次飞行就要花半百万美元——变得截然不同，
Elon Muskyou can actually buy a ticket on Southwest right now from L.A. to Vegas for $43, including taxes. So that's -- I mean, that's a massive improvement. Right there it's showing a four order of magnitude improvement. Now this is harder -- the reusability doesn't apply quite as much to Mars because the number of times they can reuse the spaceship is -- the spaceship part of the system is less often because the Earth-Mars rendezvous only occurs every -- every 26 months. So you get to use the spaceship part roughly every two years.而现在你在 Southwest 航空上，从洛杉矶飞拉斯维加斯的票价只需 43 美元，含税。这是巨大的改进，正好体现了四个数量级的提升。当然，可重复使用对火星任务的适用程度稍低一些，因为飞船的可重复使用次数——飞船这部分——没那么频繁，因为地球与火星的交会窗口每 26 个月才出现一次。所以飞船大概每两年才能用一次。
Elon MuskNow, you get to use the booster and the tanker as frequently as you'd like. And so it makes -- that's why it makes a lot of sense to load the spaceship into orbit with essentially tanks dry and have it have really quite big tanks that you then use the booster and tanker to refill while it's in orbit and maximize the payload of the spaceships that when it goes to Mars, you really have a very large payload capability.但助推器和油轮则可以随心所欲地频繁使用。这就是为什么把飞船以基本上空箱状态送入轨道是非常合理的做法——让飞船配备真正容量很大的燃料箱，然后利用助推器和油轮在轨道上为它加注推进剂，从而最大化飞船的载荷能力。这样一来，飞船飞向火星时，你真的拥有了非常强大的运载能力。
Elon MuskSo as I said, refilling in orbit is one of the essential elements of this. Without refilling in orbit, you would have a half order of magnitude impact roughly on the cost. By "half order of magnitude," I think the audience mostly knows, but what that means is each order of magnitude is a factor of ten. So not refilling in orbit would mean a 500%, roughly, increase in the cost per ticket. It also allows us to build a smaller vehicle and lower the development cost, although this vehicle is quite big. But it would be much harder to build something that's five to ten times the size. And it also reduces the sensitivity of performance characteristics of the booster rocket and tanker. So if there's a shortfall in the performance of any of the elements, you can actually make up for it by having one or two extra refilling trips to the spaceship. So this is -- it's very important for reducing the susceptibility of the system to a performance shortfall.正如我说的，在轨加注是这个方案不可或缺的要素之一。如果不在轨加注，对成本的影响大约是半个数量级。所谓「半个数量级」——我想听众大多知道这个概念——每个数量级是十倍。所以不在轨加注意味着每张票的成本大约会增加 500%。在轨加注还让我们能够建造更小的飞行器，降低研发成本，尽管这个飞行器已经相当大了，但制造一个五到十倍大的东西会难得多。它还降低了对助推火箭和油轮性能特性的敏感度。如果任何一个组件的性能有所不足，实际上可以通过让油轮多飞一两趟来弥补。这对于降低整个系统对性能不足的脆弱性非常重要。
Elon MuskAnd then producing propellants on Mars is actually also very obviously important. Again, if we didn't do this, it would have at least a half order of magnitude increase in the -- in the cost of a trip. So 500% increase in the cost of the trip. And it would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just kept staying on Mars and not going back to Earth. you would have this, like, massive graveyard of ships. You would have to, like, do something with them. So it really wouldn't make sense to -- to leave your spaceships on Mars. You really want to build a propellant plant on Mars and send the ships back.在火星上生产推进剂显然也非常重要。同样，如果我们不这样做，旅行成本至少会增加半个数量级，也就是增加 500%。而且，如果你的飞船只是不断停留在火星上、不飞回地球，那么试图在火星上建造一座城市将显得非常荒谬——你会留下一大堆飞船的坟场，得想办法处理它们。所以把飞船留在火星上真的没有意义。你真的需要在火星上建造一个推进剂生产厂，然后把飞船送回来。
Elon MuskSo and Mars happens to work out well for that because it has a CO2 atmosphere, it's got water rights in the soil, and with H2O and CO2 you can produce CH4, methane, and oxygen, O2. So picking the right propellant is also important. Think of this as maybe there's three main choices. And they have their merits, but kerosene or rocket propellant-grade kerosene which is also what jets use. Rockets use a very expensive form of highly refined form of jet fuel essentially which is a form of kerosene.火星恰好在这方面很合适，因为它有 CO2 大气层，土壤中含有水冰，而用 H2O 和 CO2 你可以生产 CH4（甲烷）和 O2（氧气）。选择正确的推进剂也很重要。可以把它想成大约有三种主要选择。它们各有优缺点：煤油，或者说火箭级煤油——这也是喷气发动机使用的燃料。火箭使用的是一种经过高度提炼的昂贵特种煤油，本质上是一种煤油形式。
Elon MuskIt helps keep the vehicle size small, but because it's a very specialized form of jet fuel, it's quite expensive. Your reusability potential is lower. Very difficult to make this on Mars, because there's no oil. So really quite difficult to make the propellant on Mars. And then propellant transfer is pretty good but not great. Hydrogen, although it has a high specific impulse, is very expensive, incredibly difficult to keep from boiling off because liquid hydrogen is very close to absolute zero as a liquid.它有助于缩小飞行器的体积，但由于是一种非常特殊的喷气燃料，价格相当昂贵，可重复使用的潜力也较低。而且在火星上很难生产，因为那里没有石油，所以在火星上制造这种推进剂相当困难。推进剂转移还算不错，但不够理想。氢气虽然比冲高，但非常昂贵，而且极难防止蒸发，因为液氢作为液体时温度非常接近绝对零度。
Elon MuskSo the insulation required is tremendous, and the cost of -- the energy cost on Mars of producing and storing hydrogen is very high. So when we looked at the overall system optimization, it was clear to us that methane actually was the clear winner. So it would require maybe anywhere from 50 to 60% of the energy on Mars to refill propellants using the propellant depot. And just the technical challenges are a lot easier.所需的隔热材料量是巨大的，而且在火星上生产和储存氢气的能量成本非常高。所以当我们从整体系统优化角度来看，甲烷显然是最优选择。在火星上用推进剂储存库补充推进剂，大约需要消耗 50 到 60% 的能量，而且技术挑战也容易得多。
Elon MuskSo we think -- we think methane is actually better on just really almost across the board. And we started off initially thinking that hydrogen would make sense, but ultimately came to the conclusion that the best way to optimize the cost per unit mass to Mars and back is to use an all-methane system, or technically deep-cryo Methalox. So those are the four elements that need to be achieved. So whatever system is designed, whether by SpaceX or anyone, we think these are the four features that need to be addressed in order for the system to really achieve a low cost per -- a cost per ton to be of service on Mars.我们认为甲烷实际上在几乎所有方面都更胜一筹。我们最初以为氢气会是更合理的选择，但最终得出结论：优化往返火星每单位质量成本的最佳方式，是采用全甲烷系统，技术上称为深冷 Methalox（甲烷液氧）体系。以上就是需要实现的四个要素。无论是 SpaceX 还是任何其他机构来设计这个系统，我们认为这四个特性是实现低每吨成本、真正服务于火星任务所必须解决的核心问题。
Elon MuskThis is a simulation about the overall system. (Music). (Video).这是关于整体系统的模拟动画。（音乐）。（视频）。
Elon Musk[APPLAUSE]. So what you saw there is really quite close to what we will actually build. It will look almost exactly what you saw -- like what you saw. So this is not an artist's impression. The simulation was actually made from the SpaceX engineering CAD models. So this is not -- you know, it's not just, well, this is what it might look like. This is what we plan to try to make it look like.【掌声】你们刚才看到的，与我们实际将要建造的非常接近，看起来几乎就是那个样子。这不是艺术家的想象图，这个模拟动画实际上是由 SpaceX 的工程 CAD 模型生成的。所以这不是「这大概可能长这样」，这是我们计划努力让它呈现的样子。
Elon MuskIn the video, you got a sense for what this system mock architecture looks like. The rocket booster and the spaceship take off, loads the spaceship into orbit. The rocket booster then comes back. It comes back quite quickly, within about 20 minutes. And so it can actually launch the tanker version of the spacecraft, which is essentially the same as the -- as the spaceship but filling up the unpressurized and pressurized cargo areas with propellant tanks. So they look almost identical. This also helps slow the development cost, which obviously will not be small.在视频里，你们对这套系统架构有了直观的感受。火箭助推器和飞船起飞，将飞船送入轨道。火箭助推器随即返回，返回速度相当快，大约 20 分钟内。然后它可以发射飞船的油轮版本——基本上与飞船相同，只是把加压和非加压货舱区域填满了推进剂箱。两者看起来几乎一模一样。这也有助于降低研发成本，而研发成本显然不会是一个小数目。
Elon MuskAnd then the propellant tanker goes up. It will go -- actually, it will go up multiple times, anywhere from three to five times, to fill the tanks of the spaceship in orbit. And then once the spaceship is -- the tanks are full, the cargo has been transferred, and we reach the Mars rendezvous timing, which as I mentioned is roughly every 26 months, that's when the ship would depart. Now, over time there would be many spaceships. You would ultimately have, I think, upwards of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, if you have seen that thing.然后推进剂油轮上升，实际上会上升多次，大约三到五次，为轨道上飞船的燃料箱加注。一旦飞船的燃料箱装满、货物完成转移，并且到达火星交会时机——如我所说大约每 26 个月一次——飞船就会出发。随着时间推移，飞船会越来越多。我认为最终将有 1000 艘甚至更多的飞船在轨道上等待。火星殖民舰队会集体出发，有点像《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》，如果你看过那部剧的话。
Elon MuskGood show. So it's a bit like that. But it actually makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you have got two years to do so and then make frequent use of the booster and the tanker to get really heavy reuse out of those. And then with the spaceship you get less reuse because you have to prepare for how long is it going to last? Well, maybe 30 years. So that might be 12 to maybe 15 flights with the spaceship at most. So you really want to maximize the cargo of the spaceship and use the booster and the tanker a lot.很棒的剧。有点类似那个感觉。把飞船送入轨道这样安排实际上很合理，因为你有两年时间来完成，然后让助推器和油轮频繁使用，从这两个部分获得非常高的重复使用率。而飞船的重复使用率则较低，因为你要考虑它能用多久——也许 30 年，那可能最多只有 12 到 15 次飞行。所以你真的想最大化飞船的载货量，同时让助推器和油轮大量运转。
Elon MuskSo the ship goes to Mars, gets replenished, and then returns to Earth. So going into some of the details of the vehicle design and performance -- and I'm going to gloss over -- I'll only talk a little bit about the technical details in the actual presentation, and then I'll leave the detailed technical questions to the Q and A that follows. This is to give you a sense of size.所以飞船飞往火星，补充推进剂，然后返回地球。现在来介绍一些飞行器设计和性能的细节——我会略讲，在正式演讲中只简单谈一下技术细节，把更详细的技术问题留到后面的问答环节。这张图是为了让你们对飞行器的体量有个概念。
Elon MuskIt's quite big. (Laughter). [APPLAUSE]. The funny thing is in the long-term, the ships will be even bigger than this. This will be relatively small compared to the Mars interplanetary ships of the future. But it kind of needs to be about this size because in order to fit a hundred people or thereabouts in the pressurized section plus carry the luggage and all of the unpressurized cargo to build propellant plants and build everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to you name it, we need to carry a lot of cargo.它相当大。（笑声）【掌声】有意思的是，从长远来看，飞船还会比这更大。与未来的星际飞船相比，这个将显得相对小巧。但它大约需要这个量级，因为为了在加压舱段容纳大约 100 人，再加上行李以及所有的非加压货物——用来建造推进剂工厂、冶铁厂、披萨店之类你能想到的一切——我们需要携带大量货物。
Elon MuskSo it really needs to be roughly on this sort of magnitude, because if we say like the -- that same amount of threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars for civilization would be a million people. If you only go every two years, if you have a hundred people per ship, that's 10,000 trips. So I think at least a hundred people per trip is the right order of magnitude, and I think we may actually end up expanding the crew section and ultimately taking more like 200 or more people per flight in order to reduce the cost per person.所以它确实需要大约这个量级，因为假设火星自给自足城市文明的门槛是 100 万人，如果每两年去一次，每艘船装 100 人，那就需要 1 万次飞行。所以我认为每次至少 100 人是正确的数量级，而且我认为我们最终可能会扩展乘员舱，最终每次飞行搭载 200 人或更多，以降低每人的成本。
Elon MuskBut it's -- you know 10,000 flights is a lot of flights. So you really want ultimately on the order of a thousand ships. It will take a while to build up to a thousand ships. And so I think if you say, When would we reach that million-person threshold? From the point at which the first ship goes to Mars, it's probably somewhere between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous. So it's probably somewhere between maybe 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars.但 1 万次飞行确实是很多。所以最终你真的需要大约 1000 艘飞船的规模。建立这 1000 艘飞船的舰队需要一段时间。所以我认为，如果你问「什么时候能达到 100 万人的门槛？」——从第一艘飞船飞向火星那一刻算起，大概需要 20 到 50 次火星交会。也就是说，要实现火星上完全自给自足的文明，大约需要 40 到 100 年。
Elon MuskSo that's sort of the cross-section of the ship. In some way, it's not that complicated, really. It's made primarily of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon fiber part is tricky when dealing with deep cryogens and trying to achieve both liquid and gas impermeability and not have gaps occur due to cracking or pressurization that would make the carbon fiber leaky. So this is a fairly significant technical challenge, to make deep and cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber. And it's only recently that we think the carbon fiber technology has gotten to the point where we can actually do this without having to create a liner, some sort of metal liner, quad liner on the inside of the tanks, which would add mass and complexity.这是飞船的横截面图。从某种角度来说，其实并不复杂。它主要由先进碳纤维材料构成。当要处理深冷液体，并试图同时实现液态和气态的不渗透性、防止因裂纹或加压导致的间隙而使碳纤维产生泄漏时，碳纤维部分就非常棘手了。因此，用碳纤维制造深冷低温储箱是一个相当重大的技术挑战。直到最近，我们才认为碳纤维技术已经发展到可以真正做到这一点的程度，而不必在储箱内壁增加一层金属内衬或复合衬层，那会增加质量和复杂性。
Elon MuskIt's particularly tricky for the hot gaseous oxygen pressurization. So this is designed to be autogenously pressurized, which means that the fuel and the oxygen, we gasify them through heat exchanges in the engine and use that to pressurize the tanks. So we will gasify the methane and use that to pressurize the fuel tank. Gasify the oxygen. Use that to pressurize the oxygen tank. This is a much simpler system than what we have with Falcon 9, where we use helium for pressurization and we use nitrogen for gas thrusters. In this case, we would autogenously pressurize and then use gaseous methane and oxygen for the control thrusters.高温气态氧加压部分特别棘手。所以这个系统被设计为自生增压，意思是推进剂和氧气通过发动机中的热交换器气化，然后用来给储箱加压。我们会气化甲烷为燃料箱加压，气化氧气为氧气箱加压。这比我们在 Falcon 9 上用氦气加压、用氮气作为气体推进器的系统要简单得多。在这个系统中，我们会采用自生增压，然后用气态甲烷和氧气作为姿控推力器。
Elon MuskSo really, you only need two ingredients for this, as opposed to four in the case of Falcon 9 and actually five if you consider the ignition liquid. It's sort of a complicated liquid to ignite the engines. That isn't very usable. In this case we would use spark ignition. So this gives you a sense of vehicles by performance, sort of current and historic. I don't know if you can actually read that. But in expandable mode, the vehicle, of course, we are proposing would do about 550 tons and about 300 tons in reusable mode. That compares to satisfy max capability of 135 tons. But I think this really gives a better sense of things.所以实际上你只需要两种成分，而不是 Falcon 9 那样需要四种，如果算上点火液的话实际上是五种——那是一种相当复杂的点火液体，用起来很不方便。在这个系统中我们将使用火花点火。这张图从性能角度给你展示了当前和历史飞行器的对比，我不知道你们是否真的能看清那些数字。但在一次性模式下，这款飞行器当然可以做到约 550 吨，可重复使用模式下约 300 吨。相比之下，航天飞机的最大运载能力是 135 吨。但我认为这能更直观地说明问题。
Elon MuskThe white bars show the performance of the vehicle; in other words, the payload-to-orbit of the vehicle. So you can see essentially what it represents is what's the size efficiency of the vehicle. And most rockets, including ours -- ours as they're currently flying -- the performance bar is only a small percentage of the actual size of the rocket. But with the interplanetary system which we will initially use for Mars, we've been able to -- or we believe massively improve the design performance. So it's the first time a rocket's sort of performance bar will actually exceed the physical size of the rocket.白色条柱显示的是飞行器的性能，也就是入轨运载能力。你可以看到，这本质上反映的是飞行器的尺寸效率。大多数火箭，包括我们目前正在飞行的型号，性能条柱只占火箭实际尺寸的一小部分。但对于我们最初将用于火星任务的星际运输系统，我们已经——或者说我们相信——极大地改进了设计性能。这将是有史以来第一次，火箭的性能条柱实际上超过了火箭的物理尺寸。
Elon MuskThis gives you a more direct sort of comparison. This is -- the thrust that is quite enormous, talking about liftoff thrusts of 13,000 tons. So it's quite tectonic when it takes off. But it is -- it is a fit on Pad 39A, which NASA has been kind enough to allow us to use, where -- because they somewhat oversized the pad in doing Saturn 5 and, as a result, we can actually do a much larger vehicle on that same launch pad. And in the future, we expect to add additional launch locations, probably adding one on the south coast of Texas.这给出了一个更直观的对比。这款飞行器的推力相当惊人，起飞推力高达 13,000 吨，起飞时简直像地壳运动一样。但它确实可以在 39A 号发射台上使用——NASA 好意允许我们使用这个发射台——因为他们为 Saturn 5 建造发射台时稍微超出了规格，结果我们实际上可以在同一个发射台上发射一个更大的飞行器。未来我们还计划增加额外的发射场地，可能会在德克萨斯南部海岸增加一个。
Elon MuskBut this gives you a sense of the relative capability, if you can read those. But these vehicles have very different purposes. This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people, ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. So you really need something quite large in order to do that. So talk about some of the key elements of the interplanetary spaceship and rocket booster. We decided to start off the development with what we think are probably the two most difficult elements of the design. One is the Raptor engine.这给你展示了相对运载能力的对比，如果你能看清那些数字的话。但这些飞行器有着截然不同的用途。这款飞行器真正的目的是运载大量的人，最终要向火星运送数百万吨的货物。所以你确实需要相当大的运载器才能做到这一点。现在来谈谈星际飞船和火箭助推器的一些关键要素。我们决定从我们认为可能是设计中最困难的两个要素开始研发，第一个是 Raptor 发动机。
Elon MuskAnd this is going to be the highest chamber pressure engine of any kind ever built and probably the highest thrust-to-weight. It's a full-flow staged combustion engine which maximizes the theoretical momentum that you can get out of a given source fuel and oxidizer. We subcool the oxygen and methane to densify it. So compared to when -- propellants normally use close to their boiling point in most rockets. In our case, we actually build the propellants close to their freezing point. That can result in a density improvement of up to around 10 to 12%, which makes an enormous difference in the actual results of the rocket. It also makes the -- it gets rid of any cavitation risk for the turbo pumps and it makes it easier to feed a high-pressure turbo pump if you have very cold propellant.它将成为有史以来任何类型发动机中燃烧室压力最高的，推重比可能也是最高的。它是一台全流量分级燃烧发动机，可以最大限度地提取给定燃料和氧化剂的理论动量。我们对氧气和甲烷进行深冷处理以提高密度。相比之下，大多数火箭的推进剂通常在接近沸点时使用；在我们的情况下，推进剂实际上在接近凝固点时使用。这可以带来高达约 10 到 12% 的密度提升，对火箭的实际效果产生巨大差异。这也消除了涡轮泵的空化风险，而且如果推进剂非常冷，给高压涡轮泵供料也更容易。
Elon MuskReally one of the keys here, though, is the vacuum version of Raptor having a 382-second ISP. This is really quite critical too to the whole Mars mission. And we can get to that number or at least within a few seconds of that number, ultimately maybe exceeding it slightly. So the rocket booster in many ways is really a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster. You will see a lot of similarities, such as the grid fins.这里真正的关键之一，是 Raptor 真空版本具有 382 秒的 ISP（比冲）。这对整个火星任务来说至关重要。我们可以达到这个数字，或者至少接近这个数字几秒以内，最终甚至可能略微超越它。火箭助推器在很多方面确实是 Falcon 9 助推器的放大版，你会看到很多相似之处，比如栅格翼。
Elon MuskObviously clustering a lot of engines at the base. And the big difference really being that the primary structure is an advanced form of carbon fiber as opposed to limited lithium and that we use autogenous pressurization and get rid of the helium and the nitrogen. So this uses 42 Raptor engines. It's a lot of engines, but we use an I.N. on the Falcon 9. And with Falcon Heavy, which should launch early next year, there's 27 engines on the base. So we've got pretty good experience with having a large number of engines. It also gives us redundancies. So that if some of the engines fail, you can still continue the mission and be fine.当然，底部集群了大量发动机。主要区别在于主结构采用了先进碳纤维，而非有限锂合金，并且我们使用自生增压，去掉了氦气和氮气。这台助推器使用 42 台 Raptor 发动机，数量不少，但我们在 Falcon 9 上使用了 9 台（原文用词 I.N.，应为笔误，Falcon 9 使用 9 台 Merlin）。而 Falcon Heavy 应该会在明年初发射，底部有 27 台发动机。所以我们在使用大量发动机方面已经积累了相当丰富的经验，这也提供了冗余性——即使部分发动机发生故障，仍然可以继续完成任务并安全运作。
Elon MuskBut the main job of the booster is to accelerate the spaceship to around 8 1/2 thousand kilometers an hour. For those that are less familiar with orbital dynamics, really it's all about velocity and not about height. So really that's the job of the booster. The booster is like the javelin thrower. You've got to toss that javelin, which is the spaceship. In the case of other planets, though, which have a gravity well which is not as deep, so Mars, the moons of Jupiter, conceivably maybe even one day Venus -- the -- well, Venus will be a little trickier. But for most of the solar system, you only need the spaceship. So you don't need the booster if you have a lower gravity well. No booster is needed on the moon or Mars or any of the moons of Jupiter or Pluto. You just need the spaceship. The booster is just there for heavy gravity wells.但助推器的主要任务是将飞船加速到约每小时 8,500 公里。对于不太熟悉轨道动力学的人来说，关键其实是速度而不是高度。所以这就是助推器的工作——它就像标枪投掷手，你必须把标枪（也就是飞船）投掷出去。但对于重力势阱没有地球那么深的其他行星——火星、木星的卫星，甚至某天也许是金星——金星会更棘手一些——对于太阳系中的大多数地方，你只需要飞船本身。所以在月球、火星、木星的任何卫星或冥王星上，你不需要助推器，只需要飞船。助推器只在引力势阱较深的地方才需要。
Elon MuskAnd then we've also been able to optimize the propellant needed for boost-back and landing to get it down to about 7% of the liftoff prop propellant load. We think with some optimization maybe we can get it down to about 6%. And we also are now getting quite comfortable with the accuracy of the landing. If you have been watching the Falcon 9 landings, you will see that they are getting increasingly closer too to the bull's-eye. And we think, particularly with the addition of additional -- with the addition of some thrusters and maneuvering thrusters, we can actually put the booster right back on the launch stand. And then those fins at the base are essentially centering features to take out any minor position mismatch at the launch site.我们还优化了返航点火和着陆所需的推进剂，将其降至起飞推进剂总量的约 7%。我们认为通过一些优化可能还能降到约 6%。我们现在对着陆精度也越来越有把握。如果你一直在关注 Falcon 9 的着陆，会发现它们越来越接近靶心。我们认为，特别是加装一些额外的机动推力器之后，我们实际上可以把助推器精确放回发射台上。底部的那些格栅翼基本上起定心作用，消除发射台上任何微小的位置偏差。
Elon MuskSo that's what it looks like at the base. So we think we only need to gimbal or steer the center cluster of engines. There's seven engines in the center cluster. Those would be the ones that move for steering the rocket, and the other ones would be fixed in position, which gives us the best concentration of -- we can max out the number of engines because we don't have to leave any room for gimbaling or moving the engines. And, like, this is all designed so that you could actually lose multiple engines even at liftoff or anywhere in flight and continue the mission safely.这是底部的样子。我们认为只需要对中央发动机集群进行摆动或导向就够了。中央集群有 7 台发动机，这些是负责导向的可动发动机，其余发动机位置固定，这让我们能够最大化发动机数量，因为不需要为摆动或移动发动机留出空间。整个设计使得即便在起飞时或飞行中途多台发动机发生故障，也能安全地继续执行任务。
Elon MuskSo for the spaceship itself, in the top, we have the pressurized compartment. And I'll show you a fly-through of that in a moment. And then beneath that is the -- is where we would have the unpressurized cargo, which would be really flat packed in a very dense format. And then below that is the liquid oxygen tank. The liquid oxygen tank is probably the hardest piece of this whole vehicle because it's got to handle propellant at the coldest level and the tanks themselves actually form the air frame. So the air frame structure and the tank structure are combined, as it is in all modern rockets. And in aircraft, for example, the wing is really a fuel tank in wing shape. So it has to take the thrust loads of ascents, the loads of reentry, and then it has to be impermeable to gaseous oxygen, which is tricky, and non-reactive to gaseous oxygen. So that's the hardest piece of the spaceship itself, which is actually why we started on that element as well.飞船顶部是加压舱段，我等会儿会带你们穿越一遍。加压舱段下方是非加压货舱区域，货物会以非常紧凑的平铺格式存放。再往下是液氧储箱。液氧储箱可能是整个飞行器最难制造的部分，因为它必须处理最低温度的推进剂，而且储箱本身还构成了飞行器的承力结构。所以承力结构和储箱结构是合而为一的，这在所有现代火箭上都是如此，飞机上也一样，比如机翼其实就是翼形的燃油箱。它必须承受上升阶段的推力载荷、再入时的气动载荷，同时还必须对气态氧具有不渗透性——这很棘手——以及对气态氧无反应性。所以这是飞船本身最难的部分，这也是我们同样从这个要素开始研发的原因。
Elon MuskAnd I'll show you some pictures of that later. And then below the oxygen tank is the fuel tank, and then the engines are mounted directly to the thrust cone on the base. And then there are six of the vacuum -- the high efficiency vacuum engines around the perimeter, and those don't gimbal. And then there are three of the sea-level versions of the engine which do gimbal and provide the steering. Although we can do some amount of steering if you're in space with differential thrust on the outside engines. The net effect is a cargo to Mars of up to 450 tons, depending upon how many refills you do with the tanker. And the goal is at least 100 passengers per ship. Although I think we will see that number grow to 200 or more.我稍后会展示一些这方面的照片。氧气储箱下方是燃料储箱，发动机直接安装在底部的推力锥上。外围有 6 台真空版本的高效真空发动机，这些不可摆动。还有 3 台海平面版本的发动机可以摆动，用于导向，不过在太空中也可以通过外侧发动机的差动推力来实现一定程度的控制。最终效果是运往火星的货物最多可达 450 吨，具体取决于油轮加注几次。目标是每艘飞船至少搭载 100 名乘客，尽管我认为这个数字最终会增长到 200 人或更多。
Elon MuskThis chart is a little difficult to interpret at first, but we decided to put it there for people who wanted to watch the video afterwards and sort of take a closer look and analyze some of the numbers. The column on the left is probably what's most relevant. And that gives you the trip time. So depending upon which Earth-Mars rendezvous you are aiming for, the trip time at 6 kilometers per second departure blast speed can be as low as 80 days. And then over time, I think we could probably improve that.这张图乍看起来有点难以理解，但我们决定把它放在这里，供想在视频发布后仔细观看和分析数字的人参考。左边的列可能是最相关的，它给出了旅行时间。根据你瞄准的地球-火星交会窗口，以 6 公里/秒的出发速度，旅行时间最短可以低至 80 天。而且随着时间推移，我认为我们还可以进一步改进。
Elon MuskUltimately, I suspect that you would see Mars transit times of as little as 30 days in the more distant future. It's fairly manageable, considering the trips that people used to do in the old days would routinely take sailing voyages that would be six months or more. So on arrival, the heat shield technology is extremely important. We have been refining the heat shield technology using our Dragon spacecraft. We are now on version 3 of PICA, which is the phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator. And it's getting more and more robust with each new version, with less ablation, more resistance, less need for refurbishment.我预计在更遥远的未来，你会看到火星转移时间缩短到只需 30 天。考虑到以前人们在旧时代的旅行方式——航海航行常规上要花六个月甚至更长——这其实还挺好接受的。到达时，隔热盾技术极为重要。我们一直在用 Dragon 飞船来精炼隔热盾技术，现在已经是 PICA 的第三版——即酚浸渍碳烧蚀材料。每一个新版本都更加耐用，烧蚀更少，抗性更强，需要翻修的次数也更少。
Elon MuskThe heat shield is basically a giant brake pad. How it's like how good can you make that brake pad against the extreme conditions and the cost of refurbishment and make it so you could have many flights with no refurbishment at all. This is a fly-through of the crew compartment.隔热盾基本上就是一块巨大的刹车片——在极端条件下能做到多好、翻修成本有多低、甚至能不需要任何翻修飞多少次。这是乘员舱的穿越预览。
Elon MuskI just want to give you a sense of what it would feel like to actually be in the spaceship. I mean, in order to make it appealing and increase that portion of the Venn diagram of people who actually want to go, it's got to be really fun and exciting, and it can't feel cramped or boring. But the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so you can do zero-G things, you can float around. It would be like movies, ElectroPuls, cabins, a restaurant. It will be, like, really fun to go. You are going to have a great time.我想给你们一个实际身处飞船内的感受。为了让它更有吸引力、扩大维恩图中真正想去的那部分人，它必须真的有趣刺激，不能让人感到逼仄或无聊。乘员舱或居住舱的设计让你可以体验失重，可以漂来漂去。里面会有电影、ElectroPuls、客舱、餐厅，真的会非常好玩。你们会玩得很开心的。
Elon Musk(Laughter). So the propellant plant on Mars, again, this is one of those slides that I won't go into in detail here, but people can take that offline. The key point being that the ingredients are there on Mars to create a propellant plant with relative ease, because the atmosphere is primarily CO2 and there's water ice almost everywhere. You've got the CO2 plus H2O to make methane CH4 and oxygen O2 using the Sabatier reaction. The trickiest thing really is the energy source, which think we can do with a large field of solar panels.（笑声）火星上的推进剂工厂——这也是那种我在这里不会深入讲解、但大家可以事后自行研究的幻灯片。关键点在于：火星上具备建立推进剂工厂所需的原材料，而且相对容易实现，因为大气主要是 CO2，而且几乎到处都有水冰。你可以用 CO2 加 H2O，通过 Sabatier 反应生产甲烷 CH4 和氧气 O2。最棘手的其实是能源，我认为可以用大面积太阳能板来解决。
Elon MuskSo then to give you a sense of the cost, really the key is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go. And we think, based on this architecture, this architecture, assuming optimization over time, like the very first flights would be fairly expensive. But the architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000, maybe as less -- maybe as little as $100,000 over time, depending upon how much mass a person takes. So we're right now estimating about $140,000 per ton to the trips to Mars. So if a person plus their luggage is less than that, take into account food consumption and life support, then we think that the cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000.然后来谈谈成本。真正的关键是让这件事对几乎任何想去的人都负担得起。基于这个架构，假设随着时间推移不断优化——最早的几次飞行成本会相当高——但这个架构允许实现每张票不到 20 万美元的成本，随着时间推移甚至可能低至 10 万美元，这取决于每个人携带多少质量。我们目前估算的成本约为每吨 14 万美元。所以如果一个人加上行李不超过这个重量，考虑到食物消耗和生命维持系统，我们认为移居火星的成本最终可能降至 10 万美元以下。
Elon MuskSo funding, talking about funding sources. So we have steel underpants; launch satellites; send cargo to space station; Kickstarter, of course; followed by profit. So obviously it's going to be a challenge to fund this whole endeavor. We do expect to generate pretty decent net cash flow from launching lots of satellites and serving the space station for NASA, transferring cargo to and from space station, and then I know there's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars and then perhaps there will be interest on the government sector side to also do that.谈谈资金来源。我们有钢铁意志；发射卫星；向空间站运送货物；当然还有众筹；然后是盈利。所以资金这个问题确实很具挑战性。我们预计通过发射大量卫星、为 NASA 服务国际空间站、往返运输货物来获得相当可观的净现金流。另外，我知道私营部门有很多人有兴趣资助在火星上建立基地，或许政府部门也会有兴趣参与。
Elon MuskUltimately, this is going to be a huge public-private partnership. And I think that's -- that's how the United States was established, and many other countries around the world, is a public-private partnership. So I think that's probably what occurs. And right now we're just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available and just sort of keep moving both forward. And, hopefully, I think as we -- as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream, it is something that can be made real, I think the support will snowball over time.最终，这将是一个庞大的公私合作项目。美国就是这样建立起来的，世界上许多其他国家也是，都是公私合作的产物。所以我认为这大概就是它会发展的方向。目前我们只是在竭尽所能，用现有资源尽快推进，一步一步往前走。我希望，当我们不断证明这是可能的——这个梦想是真实的，不只是梦想，而是可以实现的现实——随着时间推移，支持力量将像滚雪球一样越来越强。
Elon MuskAnd I should say also the main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. So I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary. [APPLAUSE]. Time lines. Not the best at this sort of thing. But just to show you where we started off. In 2002, SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band.我还应该说，我个人积累资产的主要原因就是为了资助这件事。所以我个人积累资产真的没有任何其他动机，就是为了能够对让生命成为多行星物种这件事做出最大的贡献。【掌声】时间线。我在这方面不是很擅长。但只是让你们看看我们从哪里起步。2002 年，SpaceX 基本上只有地毯和一支墨西哥流浪乐队。
Elon MuskThat was it. That's all of SpaceX in 2002. As you can see, I'm a dancing machine. And, yeah, I believe in kicking off celebratory events with mariachi bands. I really like mariachi bands. But that was what we started off with in 2002. And really, I mean, I thought we had maybe a 10% chance of doing anything, of even getting a rocket to orbit, let alone getting beyond that and taking Mars seriously. But I came to the conclusion if there wasn't some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars.就这些，那就是 2002 年所有的 SpaceX。如你们所见，我是个舞蹈机器。是的，我确实喜欢用墨西哥流浪乐队来开启庆典活动，我真的很喜欢墨西哥流浪乐。但那就是我们 2002 年的起点。说实话，我当时认为我们大概只有 10% 的概率能做成任何事情，哪怕是把火箭送入轨道，更不用说超越那一步认真考虑火星了。但我得出的结论是：如果航天领域没有一个带着强烈使命感的新进入者，我们似乎不太可能走上成为航天文明、走向星辰大海的轨道。
Elon MuskBecause, you know, in '69 we were able to go to the moon and the space shuttle could get to low-Earth orbit, and then after the space shuttle got retired. But that trend line is down to zero. So I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem that it improves. And there are many examples in history where civilizations have reached a certain technology level and then have fallen well below that and then recovered only millennia later.因为 1969 年我们能够登月，航天飞机能到达近地轨道，然后航天飞机退役了。而那条趋势线趋向于零。我认为很多人没有意识到的是，技术不会自动进步。它只有在大量顶尖工程人才被投入到这个问题上时，才会取得进步。历史上有很多例子，一些文明达到了某个技术水平，然后远远跌落，直到数千年后才重新恢复。
Elon MuskSo we go from 2002 where we're basically -- we're clueless. And then with Falcon 1, the smallest useful little rocket that we could think of which would deliver a half a ton to orbit, and then four years later we developed the -- we built the first vehicle. So we dropped the main engine, the upper stage engine, the air frames, the fairing and the launch system and had our first attempt at launch in 2006, which failed. So that lasted about 60 seconds, unfortunately.所以我们从 2002 年开始，基本上一无所知。然后是 Falcon 1——我们能想到的最小的实用小型火箭，可以向轨道运送半吨载荷。然后四年后我们开发并建造了第一枚飞行器。所以我们研发了主发动机、上面级发动机、气动结构、整流罩和发射系统，并于 2006 年进行了第一次发射尝试，结果失败了。可惜那次只撑了大约 60 秒。
Elon MuskBut it's 2006, four years after starting, is also when we actually got our first NASA contract. And I just want to say I'm incredibly grateful to NASA for supporting SpaceX, you know, despite the fact that our rocket crashed. Of course, I'm NASA's biggest fan. So, you know, thank you very much to the people that had the faith to do that. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]. So then 2006, followed by a lot of grief. And then, finally, the fourth launch of Falcon 1 worked in 2008. And we were really down to our last pennies.不过 2006 年，也就是创业四年后，我们也拿到了第一份 NASA 合同。我想说，我非常感谢 NASA 对 SpaceX 的支持，尽管我们的火箭坠毁了。当然，我是 NASA 最大的粉丝。所以，非常感谢那些有信念支持我们的人。谢谢。【掌声】2006 年之后，历经了很多痛苦挣扎。终于，2008 年 Falcon 1 的第四次发射成功了，而那时候我们真的快山穷水尽了。
Elon MuskIn fact, I only thought I had enough money for three launches and the first three bloody failed. And we were able to scrape together enough to just barely make it and do a fourth launch. And thank goodness that fourth launch succeeded in 2008. That was a lot of pain. And then also at the end of 2008 is when NASA awarded us the first major operational contract, which was for resupplying cargo to the space station and bringing cargo back.事实上，我当时只以为有足够的钱支持三次发射，结果前三次他妈的全失败了。我们勉强凑到了足够的资金，挣扎着完成了第四次发射。感谢老天，2008 年第四次发射成功了。那段时间真的很痛苦。然后也是在 2008 年底，NASA 授予我们第一份重大运营合同，用于向空间站补给货物并带货物返回。
Elon MuskThen a couple years later we did the first launch of Falcon 9, version 1. And that had about a 10-ton-to-orbit capability. So it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1, and also was assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft. Then 2010 is our first mission to the space station. So we were able to finish development of Dragon and dock with the space station in 2010. so -- Sorry, 2010 is expendable Dragon -- expendable Dragon. 2012 is when we delivered and returned cargo from the space station.几年后我们进行了 Falcon 9 第一版的首次发射，它有大约 10 吨的入轨运载能力，大约是 Falcon 1 的 20 倍，同时也被分配用来搭载我们的 Dragon 飞船。然后 2010 年是我们首次飞往空间站的任务——我们在 2010 年完成了 Dragon 的开发并与空间站对接。对不起，2010 年是 Dragon 一次性版本。2012 年才是我们真正向空间站运送并返回货物的时候。
Elon Musk2013 is when we first started doing boat take-off and landing tests. And then 2014 is when we were able to have the first orbital booster do a soft landing in the ocean. The landing was soft. The (inaudible) exploded. But the landing -- for seven seconds, it was good. And we also improved the capability of the vehicle from 10 tons to about 13 tons to LEO. And then 2015, last year, in December, that was definitely one of the best moments of my life when the rocket booster came back and landed at Cape Canaveral. That was really ...2013 年我们首次开始进行海上起降测试。然后 2014 年，我们实现了首个轨道级助推器在海上软着陆。着陆很软，但（听不清）发生了爆炸。不过着陆——有七秒钟是成功的。我们还把飞行器的运载能力从 10 吨提升到约 13 吨（低地球轨道）。然后是 2015 年——去年——12 月那一天绝对是我人生中最美好的时刻之一，当火箭助推器飞回来在卡纳维拉尔角着陆的那一刻，真的太……
Elon Musk[APPLAUSE]. Yeah. So that really showed that we could bring an orbit-class booster back from a very high velocity all the way to the launch site and land it safely and with almost no refurbishment required for reflight. And if things go well, we're hoping to refly one of the landed boosters in a few months.【掌声】是啊。那真的证明了我们可以把一个轨道级助推器从非常高的速度带回发射场，安全着陆，而且几乎不需要任何翻修就能重新飞行。如果一切顺利，我们希望在几个月内让一枚已着陆的助推器重新飞行。
Elon MuskSo, yeah -- and then 2016, we also demonstrate landing on a ship. The landing on the ship is important for the very high-velocity geosynchronous missions. And that's important for reusability of Falcon 9 because about roughly a quarter of our missions are sort of servicing the space station. But then there's a few other low-Earth-orbit missions. But most of our missions, probably 60% of our missions, are commercial geo missions. So we've got to do these high-velocity missions that really need to land on a ship out to sea. They don't have enough propellants on board to boost back to the launch site.然后 2016 年，我们还演示了在船上着陆。在船上着陆对于高速的地球同步轨道任务非常重要，这对 Falcon 9 的可重复使用性至关重要，因为我们大约四分之一的任务是服务空间站。另外还有一些低地球轨道任务。但我们大多数任务——大约 60% 的任务——是商业地球同步轨道任务。所以我们必须执行这些高速任务，真的需要在海上的船上着陆，因为没有足够的推进剂用于返航助推回发射场。
Elon MuskSo looking into the future, next steps, we were kind of intentionally a bit fuzzy about this time line. But we were going to try to make as much progress as we can. Obviously, it's with a very constrained budget. But we are going to try to make as much progress as we can on the elements of interplanetary transport booster and spaceship, and hopefully we'll be able to complete the first development spaceship in maybe about four years and start doing suborbital flights with that.展望未来的下一步，我们有意在时间线上保持一些模糊。但我们会尽力在预算非常有限的情况下尽可能推进。我们打算在星际运输助推器和飞船各要素上尽力取得进展，希望能在大约四年内完成第一艘开发版飞船，并开始进行亚轨道飞行测试。
Elon MuskIn fact, it has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit if you limit the amount of cargo with the spaceship. Well, you have to really -- you have to really strip it down. But in tanker form, it could definitely get to orbit. It can't get back, but it can get to orbit. Actually, I was thinking like maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world, provided we can land somewhere where noise is not a super big deal, because rockets are very noisy. But we could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest. So most places on Earth would be maybe 20, 25 minutes. So maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of, you know, say -- off the coast of New York, say 20, 30 miles out, could you go from New York to Tokyo in, I don't know, 25 minutes; across the Atlantic in ten minutes.实际上，如果限制货物量，飞船甚至可能达到轨道。不过你真的需要把它精简到极致。但以油轮形式，它肯定可以到达轨道——飞不回来，但可以到达轨道。其实我在想，或许有一些极速货运市场——在地球上任何地方运输货物，只要能找到一个噪音不太成问题的着陆地点，因为火箭非常嘈杂。但我们可以在最长 45 分钟内把货物运到地球上的任何地方。大多数地点大概只需要 20 到 25 分钟。所以如果在，比如说纽约海岸外 20 到 30 英里有一个浮动平台，你能不能从纽约飞到东京只需 25 分钟？跨越大西洋只需十分钟？
Elon MuskReally most of your time would be getting to the ship, and then it would be real quick after that. So there's some intriguing possibilities there. Although, we're not counting on that. And then development of the booster -- we actually think the booster part is relatively straightforward because it's -- it amounts to a scaling up of the Falcon 9 booster. So there's -- we don't see a lot of sort of show-stoppers there. Yeah. But then trying to put it all together and make this actually work to Mars, if things go super well, it might be kind of in the ten-year time frame. But I don't want to say that's when it will occur. It's, like, this huge amount of risk. It's going to cost a lot. Good chance we don't succeed, but we're going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible.实际上大部分时间都花在赶去飞船的路上，之后就会非常快了。这里有些很有意思的可能性，不过我们并不指望这个。然后是助推器的研发——我们实际上认为助推器部分相对来说比较直接，因为它本质上是对 Falcon 9 助推器的放大。所以我们在那方面没有看到太多所谓的「拦路虎」。但把所有东西整合在一起，真正让这个系统飞向火星，如果一切超级顺利，可能大约在十年时间框架内实现。但我不想说这就是它发生的时候，这里有巨大的风险，成本会很高，成功的概率不太大，但我们会尽全力，争取尽可能快地推进。
Elon MuskAnd we're going to try to send something to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from here on out. So Dragon 2, which is a propulsive lander, we plan to send to Mars in a couple years, and then do probably another Dragon mission in 2020. In fact, we want to establish a steady cadence, that there's always a flight leaving, like there's a train leaving the station. With every Mars rendezvous we will be sending a Dragon -- at least a Dragon to Mars and ultimately the big spaceship. So if there's a lot of interest in putting payloads on Dragon, you know you can count on a ship that's going to transport something on the order of at least two or three tons of useful payloads to the surface of Mars.我们打算从现在起，在每一个火星交会窗口都向火星发送些什么。Dragon 2 是一款推进式着陆器，我们计划在几年内把它送去火星，然后可能在 2020 年再执行一次 Dragon 任务。事实上，我们想建立一个稳定的节奏——总有一列「火车」即将出发。每个火星交会窗口我们都会发送一个 Dragon——至少一个 Dragon 去火星，最终是大飞船。所以如果有人对在 Dragon 上搭载有效载荷感兴趣，你可以指望一艘能够向火星表面运送至少两到三吨有效载荷的飞船。
Elon Musk[APPLAUSE]. That's part of the reason we designed Dragon 2, to be a propulsive lander. As a propulsive lander, you can go anywhere in the solar system. So you can go to the moon. You can go to -- well, anywhere, really. Whereas, if something relies on parachutes or wings, then you can pretty much only -- well, if it's wings, you can pretty much only land on Earth because you need a runway, and most places don't have a runway. And then anyplace that doesn't have a dense atmosphere, you can't use parachutes.【掌声】这就是我们将 Dragon 2 设计成推进式着陆器的部分原因。作为推进式着陆器，你可以去太阳系的任何地方——月球，还有，好吧，任何地方其实都可以。而依赖降落伞或翼面的飞行器——如果是翼面的话，基本上只能降落在地球，因为你需要跑道，而大多数地方没有跑道；任何没有稠密大气层的地方都没法用降落伞。
Elon MuskBut propulsive works anywhere. So the Dragon should be capable of landing on any solid or liquid surface in the solar system. I was real excited to see that the team managed to do the -- all our Raptor engine firing in advance of this conference. I just want to say thanks to the Raptor team for really working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the presentation, because I really wanted to show that we've made some hardware progress in this direction. And the Raptor is a really tricky engine. It's a lot trickier than Merlin because it's a full-flow stage combustion, much higher pressure.但推进式可以在任何地方起作用。所以 Dragon 应该能够在太阳系中任何固体或液体表面着陆。我真的很兴奋地看到团队成功完成了 Raptor 发动机的点火测试，就在这次大会之前。我想向 Raptor 团队致谢，他们真的一周七天连轴转，努力在发布会前完成这件事，因为我真的想展示我们在这个方向上已经有了一些硬件进展。Raptor 是一台非常复杂的发动机，比 Merlin 复杂得多，因为它是全流量分级燃烧，压力高得多。
Elon MuskI'm kind of amazed it didn't blow up on the first firing. Fortunately, it was good. It's kind of interesting to see the mock diamonds forming. [APPLAUSE].我有点惊讶它第一次点火没有爆炸，幸好没有。看到那些模拟钻石图案形成还挺有意思的。【掌声】
Elon MuskAnd part of the reason for making the engine sort of small, Raptor, although it has three times the thrust of a Merlin is only about the same size as a Merlin engine because it has three times the operating pressure. That means we can use a lot of the production techniques that we've honed with Merlin. We are currently producing Merlin engines at almost 300 per year. So we understand how to make rocket engines in volume. Even though the Mars vehicle uses 32 on the base and 9 on the upper stage, so we are at 51 engines to make -- that's well within our production capabilities for Merlin. And this is a similarly sized engine to Merlin except for the expansion ratio. So we feel really comfortable about being able to make this engine in volume at a price that doesn't break our budget.把发动机做小的部分原因是：Raptor 虽然推力是 Merlin 的三倍，但尺寸和 Merlin 大致相当，因为它的工作压力是三倍。这意味着我们可以沿用大量在 Merlin 上磨练出来的生产工艺。我们目前 Merlin 发动机的年产量接近 300 台，所以我们知道如何批量生产火箭发动机。尽管火星飞行器底部使用 32 台、上面级使用 9 台，共 51 台发动机，这完全在我们 Merlin 的生产能力范围之内。而且这是一台和 Merlin 尺寸相近的发动机（膨胀比除外）。所以我们对能够批量生产这台发动机并保持在预算范围内非常有把握。
Elon MuskWe also wanted to make progress on the primary structure. So, as I mentioned, this is really a very difficult thing to make, to make something out of carbon fiber. Even though carbon fiber has incredible strength-to-weight, when you want to then put super cold liquid oxygen or liquid methane -- particularly liquid oxygen -- in a tank, it's subject to cracking and leaking, and it's very difficult to make. Just the sheer scale of it is also challenging, because you've got to lay out the carbon fiber in exactly the right way on a huge mold, and you've got to cure that mold at temperature.我们还想在主结构方面取得进展。正如我提到的，这确实非常难以制造——用碳纤维做出这样的东西，尽管碳纤维有令人难以置信的强度重量比，但当你想把超低温液氧或液态甲烷——尤其是液氧——放进储箱时，它容易开裂和泄漏，制造起来非常困难。光是尺寸本身就是一个挑战，因为你必须在一个巨大的模具上以精确正确的方式铺设碳纤维，还必须在一定温度下固化模具。
Elon MuskAnd then -- it's just hard to make large carbon fiber structures that could do all of those things and carry incredible loads. So that's the other thing we want to focus on is the Raptor and then building the first development tank for the Mars spaceship. So this is really the hardest part of the spaceship. The other pieces we have a pretty good handle on. But this was the trickiest one. We wanted to tackle it first. You get a size for how big the tank is, which is really quite big. Also big congratulations to the team that worked on that.然后还有——制造能够承受所有这些条件并承受巨大载荷的大型碳纤维结构实在太难了。所以这是我们另一个关注重点：Raptor 发动机，以及建造火星飞船的第一个开发版储箱。这是飞船最难的部分，其他部件我们都有相当好的把握，但这个是最棘手的一个。我们想率先攻克它。你可以感受到这个储箱有多大——真的相当大。也要向为此努力的团队表示祝贺。
Elon MuskThey were also working seven days a week to try to get this done in advance of the IAC. We managed to build the first tank, and the initial tests with the cryogenic propellants actually look quite positive. We have not seen any leaks or major issues. This is what the tank looks like on the inside. So you can get a real sense for just how big this tank is. It's actually completely smooth on the inside, but the way that the carbon fiber plies lay out and reflect the light makes it look faceted.他们也是一周七天连轴转，努力在 IAC 之前完成。我们成功建造了第一个储箱，用低温推进剂进行的初步测试结果相当乐观，没有发现任何泄漏或重大问题。这是储箱内部的样子，让你直观地感受到这个储箱有多大。它内部其实完全光滑，但碳纤维铺层的方式和对光线的反射使它看起来像是有棱有角的。
Elon MuskSo then what about beyond Mars? So as we thought about the system -- and the reason we call it a system, because generally I don't like calling things systems because everything is a system, including your dog -- is that -- is that it's actually more than a vehicle. There's obviously the rocket booster, the spaceship, the tanker, and the propellant plant, the in situ propellant production. If you have all of those four elements, you can actually go anywhere in the solar system by planet hopping or moon hopping. So by establishing a propellant depot on -- in the asteroid belt or on one of the moons of Jupiter, you can go to -- you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter no problem. In fact, even from -- even without a propellant depot at Mars, you can do a fly-by of Jupiter without a propellant depot.那么，火星之后呢？当我们思考这个系统的时候——我们之所以称它为「系统」，是因为我通常不喜欢把东西叫做「系统」，因为什么都是系统，包括你家的狗——是因为它实际上不只是一个飞行器。显然有火箭助推器、飞船、油轮、推进剂工厂，以及原位推进剂生产。如果你拥有这四个要素，实际上就可以通过行星跳跃或卫星跳跃去太阳系的任何地方。比如在小行星带或木星的某个卫星上建立推进剂储备站，就可以从火星飞往木星，没有任何问题。事实上，即便没有火星的推进剂储备站，也可以不需要储备站直接飞越木星。
Elon MuskSo -- but by establishing a propellant depot, let's say, you know, Enceladus or Europa or -- there's a few options, and then doing another one on Titan, Saturn's moon, and then perhaps another one further out on Pluto or elsewhere in the solar system, this system really gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system. So you can actually travel out to the Kuiper belt or the Earth cloud. I wouldn't recommend this for interstellar journeys, but this -- just this basic system, provided we have filling stations along the way, is -- means full access to the entire greater solar system.但是通过建立推进剂储备站——比如说，在 Enceladus、Europa 上，有几个选择——然后在 Titan（土星的卫星）上再建一个，也许在冥王星或太阳系更远的地方再建一个——这套系统真的可以给你自由，去大太阳系中任何你想去的地方。你实际上可以一直飞到柯伊伯带或奥尔特星云。我不建议用这个系统进行星际旅行，但就这个基础系统而言——只要沿途有加油站——就意味着可以完全畅达整个大太阳系。
Elon Musk[APPLAUSE].【掌声】