it's quite windy here its side down well though I good if it's this is Oh actually wasn't expected to be this windy hopefully you can actually hear what I'm saying okay great great so this is this is I think the most inspiring thing that I've ever seen and I just like to thank the SpaceX team and the the suppliers and the the people of Boca chic and Brownsville thank you for your support and just like wow what an incredible job by such a great team to build this incredible vehicle so it's like the first of all wants out of that I'm just so so so proud so proud to work with such a great team and it's really ripping here by the way if you're watching this online it is like yeah it was really windy so the point of this this presentation and this is this event it is really there are two elements to
it one is to inspire the public and get people excited about our future in space and and get people fired up about the future the you know what what there are so many things to worry about so many things to be concerned about there's there are many troubles in the world of course and we are important and we need to solve them but we also need things that make us excited to be alive that make us glad to wake up in the morning and be fired up about the future and think yeah the future is gonna be great you know and and this space exploration is one of those things and becoming a spacefaring civilization being out there among the stars this is one of the things that I know it makes it makes me glad to be alive I think it makes many people glad to be alive it's one of the best things this this really weird face with a
choice which future do you want do you want the future where we've become a spacefaring civilization and are in many worlds and now out there among the stars or one where we are forever confined to earth and I say it is the first and I hope you agree with me yeah so so what the critical breakthrough that's needed for us to become a spacefaring civilization is to make space travel like air travel so with with air travel you could be when you fly a plane you fly that plane many times I'm at the risk of stating the obvious it really almost any mode of transport whether it's a plane a car a horse the bicycle is reusable you use that motor transport many times and if you had to get a new plane every time you flew somewhere and even get have two planes for a return journey very few people could afford to
fly or if you could use a car only once very few people could afford to drive a car so the critical breakthrough that's necessary is a rapidly reusable orbital rocket this is this is basically the holy grail of space and the fundamental thing that's best required and it is a very hard thing to do it's only barely possible with with the physics of of Earth I mean if gravity first gravity was a little heavier it would be it would be impossible and if the Earth's gravity was a little lighter it would be quite easy so we're really right on the cusp of what is physically possible so you know in order to create a rapidly reusable rocket and fully reusable over a rocket you have to have engines that are have incredibly high specific impulse that have that essentially are extremely efficient you need you have a
structure that is also incredibly mass efficient and and then that all needs to come back to the launch pad and be able to be refilled with propellants and flown again very quickly just like aircraft so it's just it's just because of the physics of earth being being quite a deep gravity well and having quite a thick atmosphere this is this is a a virgin as this is a tough but not impossible thing but it is the most fundamental thing so with SpaceX we we started out 17 years ago and the first rocket we designed was the the Falcon 1 which was that guy right there Randolph state separation your separation confirmed so so Falcon one we thought yeah I we started off we were very naive and in fact the reason I should say the reason it's September 28th was this is the 11th anniversary of the first time
SpaceX reached orbit so 11 years ago today SpaceX made over for the first time and it it was actually uh it was our fourth launch and if we if that launch had not succeeded a SpaceX that would have been the end of SpaceX that was all I'd run out of money they would know it or no more investors and and that would have been it so if that fourth launch had not succeeded that would have been curtains but fortunately fate smiled on us that day and we made it to of it now I've great respect for anyone who makes it to orbit that was a hard thing and then we were very naive obviously very much money about naive on many levels back back then because we did actually try to recover the first stage so the first stage had a parachute on it and and okay we'll just pop the parachute when it comes back into the
atmosphere and then it'll land summer in the ocean we'll go fish it out of the ocean with a boat this is not this does not work so and I actually remember getting mad at the parachute supplier like yeah your parachute didn't work like now wasn't their fault when the rocket comes in from from space it's coming in the first stage is coming in like you know Mach 10 to 12 and it hits the atmosphere like it's a concrete wall and boom so you actually have to orient the rocket carefully you have to have aerodynamic surfaces you have to do an entry burn to slow it down you got then you've got a guided through the atmosphere and then your propulsive landing this took us many many attempts and we actually did like a video of a blooper reel of all the times we failed which was a line I think it might have
taken us like 14 attempts or something before we finally successfully landed the rocket so so we've gone to the next slide you can take a look at this is grasshopper this is the set that's actually Falcon 9 it's hard to tell the scale but that's that's a falcon 9 size booster with one engine and and big legs with giant shock absorbers we don't know what the heck we're doing now amazingly grasshopper
hahaha the cows are confused yeah so the that was a so that they have Falcon one what you saw there was a falcon 9 sized vehicle and and then what's really kind of hard to grasp at a at a visceral level is that this giant ship will do the same thing that grasshopper did so this is this thing is going to take off fly to 65,000 feet about 20 kilometres and come back and land in about one to two months so that time thing it's really going to be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back and then hopefully yeah
yeah as well is it so now I there's this is a quite radical I'll talk about it later their presentation is this is a quite quite a new approach to controlling controlling a rocket much more akin to a skydiver than a plane but I'll talk about that later so it going from from Falcon Falcon 9 to talk and heavy which we launched actually the first launch of tonkin heavy was only February of last year so it's only been about a year and a half since the first of all can have you launch when we did two side-by-side booster landings and I was like this video that was done by my friend Jonah it's a god-awful small affair to the goal of the mousie air but till mommy is yelling no and the daddy's toes but a friend is nowhere to be seen now she walks through the sunken dream to the seats with the clearest view
and she's look to the silver screen but the bill is a sad thing for but she's missed it 10 times oh my
let's say
life on Mars
and never thought that would happen actually that that it did yeah that's money like the the people one like why why why do we have the Roadster with the astronauts you know storm and and it was actually just came from discussion of my friend Jonas I was at his kitchen and I was like you know normally when they do a rocket launch the launch of Walker concrete but that sounds doesn't sound very inspiring so what do you think the most is what you doing the most sort of fun thing is that we could launch and he was like what are you slaughter Tesla and that's a great idea yeah and they're not for any wins she said why don't you put a tiny Tesla on the dashboard so we put a tiny treasure on the dashboard with a tiny storm and in the tiny Tesla this is just to confuse the aliens in the future so
yeah you know just weren't something to capture the imagination get people excited about space so let's see starship so this is a what you can really see it right there obviously there's a picture more rendering it's about 150 about 550 meters so you know sort of 165 feet or so and yeah so this trip I think actually I noticed we have an error in our ship dry mass here my apologies I wish it was 85 tons the ship prime has to be approximately 120 tons but this the the initial Mach 1 prototype is closer to 200 tons and the in series production I think it'll probably be about 120 tons if we get really lucky it might get down to 110 99 would be super epic so but in terms of its usefulness it'll be able to do about 150 tons with full reusability to orbit and back so this is this is a very you know big number for full
reusability the the very the very initial versions we're confident will do over 100 tons but I think we've there's a clear path to 150 tons and the the cost of of a fully reusable system is basically the cost of the propellant which is mostly oxygen this is through three and a half tons of oxygen oxygen for every one ton of fuel so one of the advantages of the of this architecture over the Falcon architecture is that we actually use more oxygen per unit of fuel rather than less so Marilyn or the the the Falcon architecture is about two and a half tons oxygen for every one ton of fuel this is three and a half tons of oxygen for every one ton of fuel so when this ascends it's really mostly liquid oxygen because when you get to vacuum there's no air basically so yeah the next slide earlier I was talking about
how starship enters and how its controlled it's it's really quick it's quite different from anything else it's really falling and so we're doing a controlled fall so with a rocket you're actually trying to break as opposed to you're trying to create drag instead of lift it's really the opposite of an aircraft you want the most amount of track that you can produce and you want some lift especially when you're in the upper atmosphere mostly so that you don't you can control the maximum heating rate you want enough lift to keep yourself high in the the low density portion of the atmosphere so you can you can you can burn off velocity and and then you say you won't and and but but then you know basically it goes like if this is the this is the earth it goes it goes at about a sixty degree my hand is rugged it's going at about sixty
degrees or so when twin in orbit you're actually going at around 25 times the speed of sound horizontal to the ground so this is a very important concept that is counterintuitive to our normal daily life being in orbit being in zero-g is not about altitude it's about velocity how fast are you going horizontally so when something's you know but it's zooming around the earth so fast that the outward acceleration outward radial acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity and then you have zero gravity this is why you actually have zero gravity but Space Station people often think the space station is stationary but it's actually going around the world at 25 times the speed of sound or about 17,000 miles an hour they look it always look stationary in the pictures and since there's no error
you don't have to have a an aerodynamic structure so you can be a totally crazy structure that doesn't look like you should be able to go 25 times to beat a sound but it does and you can only feel acceleration you can't feel velocity so people sometimes like to wonder what does it feel like to go 25 times speed of sound actually it feels like nothing only accelerating to there feels like something so so that so the starship is coming in this is the if this this platform is the earth it's coming in at hypersonic velocity like this sort of at around a 60 degree angle so it comes like this and then starts falling and then just Falls like a skydiver and it's just controlling itself and then it turns and Lance like that incredibly elaborate explanation and then you can get a sense for you this is
much better there you go see look at the end but it'll look totally nuts to see that thing laughs yeah crazy Wow cool so let's see - Matt the Raptor engine so this the ship will have a total of six engines three of the c-level variety of Raptor and those are actually on the rocket right now so we have the three sea level in fact that's a picture of just inside that skirt that's what it looks like so we've got the three sea level Raptor engines and they take gimble which is which means that the whole engine moves so the way to rocket steers is by moving the entire engine so whereas an aircraft engine is static and you move by moving like the control surfaces like the airlock ailerons and rudder and elevator and flaps this in this the rocketship when the engines are powered you move the entire engine to steer it but so the
starship will have three c-level engines that move up to about 15 degrees angle and three vacuum engines that are optimized for efficiency that will be that will not move so they will be just fixed in place and that allows us to have the biggest Bell nozzle for the for the Raptor before for the for the vacuum Raptor engines and aspirationally the the target is a 380 second ISP for the vacuum engine this is a very in sort of space geek terms this is like a really a great number and and even for the steel all engines to get over 350 second ISP is also really great so actually yeah sorry I'm looking at the slide you're not so that's what I meant by it books like that on the inside and get back was like that's the that's the inside of the starship right now that's what it looks like at the base all right and then heat shield so
we've gone through various iterations of heat shield there's a lot of ways to skin the cat here the ultimately recited to have heat shield hexagonal tiles ceramic tiles that are basically like a tiny glass vermicelli about a micro structure level very very light but but but very crack resistant essentially glass tiles and they are we could because the starship is a steel construction but first it feels like oats deal is that mean it's heavy no actually it's the lightest construction this is steel is the best thing is the I think the best thing about best design decision on this whole thing is a 301 stainless steel because at cryogenic temperatures a 301 stainless actually has about the same effective strength as an advanced composite or aluminum lithium unlike most Steel's which get brittle at
low temperature a 301 stainless gets much stronger and if it's in the in the in the in the extra hot condition meaning it's cold role to extra hard condition it also gets way stronger so it gets it's actually gets its it strength to weight ratio at cryogenic temperatures is is equivalent or even perhaps slightly better then then advanced composites or aluminum lithium this is this is not well appreciated because if you just look at the materials manual and say like what what is the strength of stainless steel it it looks much weaker than is you say what is the strength at cryogenic temperature Oh much much stronger or you know if at very low temperature almost twice as strong that's when it becomes better than then carbon fiber or so or aluminum lithium and this is another benefit it also has a high melting temperature so
for a reusable ship you're coming in like a meteor you want something that does not melt at a low temperature you want something it melts at a high temperature and this is where steel is extremely good as well so it's you know steel has a melting temperature around sort of 1,500 degrees centigrade whereas aluminum you you know maybe 300 or 400 degrees and same thing for carbon fiber and that's really pushing it you know you so this is how having that much high melting temperature means that you don't need any shielding on the the leeward side of the roof of the ship when it comes in for entry and and the shielding you need on the windward side the hot side is massively reduced because the the thickness of the tile is actually for a reusable system is dependent on what backshell temperature
like how hot does the back of the tile that interfaces with the airframe get and because the steel can take a much higher temperature your your heat shield even on the windward side as much it is much lighter that the net effect is that a 301 stainless steel rocket is actually the lightest possible reusable architecture then then it comes to come to cost the their carbon fiber we were using was a hundred and thirty dollars a time the steel is $2,500 a time it's 32
yeah 25 the say the $130,000 a time versus twenty-five hundred others time there was much percent so if it's one hundred thirty thousand dollars a ton for the carbon fiber and twenty five hundred dollars a ton for the steel so the steel is about two percent of the cost of the carbon fiber so this is a good thing we changed from corn fiber steel by far and and very easy to weld stainless steel the evidence being that we welded it outdoors without a factory so great skills by the team but with with carbon fiber this is impossible with aluminum lithium also impossible but steel is very easy to weld and it is resilient to the elements and also actually as Torsten earlier say like on mars you can like cut that up you can weld it you can modify it no problem yeah that's a good point you're out there on the moon or
mars you you want something that you can modify that you can cut up and use for other things that's like for sure great thing so anyway steel obviously I'm in love to steal you know it's time I had to say it you know so great so let's see going onto the booster so the booster is designed to take up to 37 rafter engines I'm not sure if we go that high but you can really you know have a 31 I think like the minimum number you'd want is you know maybe around 24 but the booster is designed to be able to take multiple engines out so you can actually add or subtract engines as you'd like you just need a lot of force pushing up over time I think the product you probably want around a 7,500 ton force rocket which is about twice the thrust of a Saturn 5 a little more than twice to start thrust and and on a
roughly 5,000 ton lift lift off gross little mass so for roughly one-and-a-half thrust to weight for a reusable rocket you actually want to high thrust-to-weight rather than it with an expendable rocket where you want a low thrust to weight because any thrust away below 1 is not useful like if you if you if you have a less thrust than your weight you don't move so you actually want to hide for us to wait for a reusable rocket this is a very important design optimization change so that's why I think you know more inches probably good and getting up to around 7,500 tons over time and it why don't have to one-and-a-half thrust to weight ratio that one more so and we think we're probably going to adjust the griffin design to be kind of like a more of like a diamond shape it looks cooler and it works better too and then the the
rear fins are actually just legs so they're not they don't need it for stabilization or guidance they're they're essentially therefore four legs alright so some let's go into some of the development testing this is a raptor firing
all right and then obviously we had a raptor a fire on the star hopper yeah it's kind of hard to see it to appreciate scale but it's the same diameter as starship and obviously it's just right over there so it's kind of hard to tell if it's the size of a trash can or you know how big it is but it's it's a it's about the body diameter is about 39 meters or 30 feet not including the leg span
so this gives you a sense of size so the little pixels there and that's a little little pixels or a human and then this the hopper next to it the Millennium Falcon for comparison then a starship which is what you see before you and then that's what it's look will look like with the full stack which is almost two-and-a-half times as tall as this vehicle this simulation will give you a sense of the scale of things slightly reminds me the scene from spaceball
orbital refueling is extremely important for getting some awesome it's supposed to happen sugar city to seven establish video on utilize missus final step
to Mars
so yeah so they're a rapidly reusable over the launcher a rocket is a rapidly reusable rocket is required for liberation before achieved if we're getting a breakthrough in cost of access to space that you don't throw the Rockets away every every flight but an another key step is refilling on orbit so that the starship can get to orbit with let's say a hundred and fifty tons of payload for the Moon or Mars or beyond and then it can get tankard to fill up its propellant tanks and so they could it can depart from low-earth orbit with twelve hundred tons of propellants this is a very big thing so that you're your Delta velocity is enough to transport 150 350 tons to the surface of the Moon or Mars with with full reusability and orbital refilling which is essentially the overall refilling is actually a
simplified version of what SpaceX does in or in docking with the space station so it's actually harder to dock with the space station than it is to do orbital refilling but in practicing in talking with the space station SpaceX has also learned how to rendezvous and dock in orbit in a complex environment so this is one of the other critical pieces of the puzzle needed needed to establish a base on the moon Mars city ultimately and yeah those are the critical ingredients so we think will be very exciting to have a base on the moon even if it's just a science base that you know we have a crew array for example we have a base at and Antarctica many many countries have bases in Antartica for science research and this would be an incredible area of research so whether or not people want to live on the moon
there's definitely a lot of science to be done and I think this is close as well so that's that would be quite exciting to do and then of course we can go other to other places in the solar system like Center and but the critical thing that we need to focus on I think is the fastest path to a self-sustaining city on Mars this is the this is the fundamental thing
as far as we know as far as we know we are the only consciousness or the only life that's out there there might be other life but we've seen no signs of it and people often ask me if you worry what do you know about the aliens in that you know I'm like man I tell you if I'm pretty sure I'd know you know if there were aliens I have not seen any sign of aliens and the boy is the military hiding aliens in area 51 or something you know that's a popular meme yeah well let me tell you the biggest the fastest way to increase defense funding would be to bring out like hey we found an alien you're like more money for defense definitely guaranteed they're out that would be like on display in two seconds so now so there the reality is as far as we know this is the only place at least in this part of
the galaxy or in the Milky Way where there is consciousness and it's taken a long time for us to get to this point you know according to the the geological records it's been around for about four-and-a-half billion years well there was mostly molten magma for about a half a billion years so but still several billion years with at least bacterial life and multicellular life for several hundred million years but here's the interesting part like the the Sun is gradually getting hotter and bigger and over time even in the absence of global warming man-made stuff the the Sun will expand and will it will overheat the earth my guess is probably this is on human timescales this is a long time but it's that there's only you know several hundred million years left that's all that's all we got okay several hundred
million years but but it but sort of in if from an evolutionary standpoint basically if it took an extra ten percent longer for conscious life to evolve on earth it wouldn't evolve at all because it would have been incinerated by the Sun so so what I'm saying is that it appears that consciousness is a very rare and precious thing and we should take whatever steps we can to preserve the light of consciousness and the window the window has been open only now after four and a half billion years is that window open as there's a long time to wait and it might not stay open for long I'm pretty optimistic by Nature but there's some chance there's some chance that window will not be open for long I think we should become a multi planet civilization while that window is open and if we do I think the probable
outcome for Earth is even better if because then you know Moss could help earth one day you know and so I think we should really do our very best to become a multi-planet species and to extend consciousness beyond Earth and we should do it now thank you
ladies and gentlemen we'll be commencing a QA session in just five minutes so please hang hang out and hang tight
once again ladies and gentlemen please sit tight we're gonna be doing a Q&A session with Elon in just five minutes please stick around
oh yeah any questions yeah hi hi Ellen Irene Klotz with aviation we can hear any yep um thank you for the overview um can you tell us a little bit more details about the flight test program for this and the mark - I'm sorry just turn the music off I can't quite hear because of this music playing oh no I'm sorry trouble you just again yes thank you um can you talk a little bit more details about the flight test program for both this mark 1 and the mark 2 vehicle and Florida and what the progression is to get to orbital flight and then a test flight or a commercial mission with the full vehicle sure so with any development into uncharted territory it is difficult to predict these things with precision but I do think things are going to move very fast so our plan is in basically one to two months to do the the 20 kilometer or 65
foot flight with starship Mach 1 our next flight after that might actually just be all the way to orbit with a booster and the ship most I'm giving you just literally stream-of-consciousness here most likely most likely we would not fly to over it with Mach 1 but we would fight over it with Mach 3 which will be built after rock one right here in fact we'll start building it in about a month so yeah and actually so sorry to say this mid question but I did want to make sure to thank you suck umezawa for his great support yeah he's awesome you suck 2020 that's his handle that's great handle anyway he's super cool dude and he's like you know we're putting a lot of serious resources to helping out starship so I want to thank him very much for that the okay so yeah just to frame things we are going to be building
ships and boosters at both Boca and the Cape as fast as we can and each successive yet absolutely I mean it's gonna be really nutty to see a bunch of these things I mean not just one but a whole stack of them and we're improving both the design and the manufacturing method exponentially so for example with the current way that we built the way that Mach 1 and Mach 2 cylindrical sections were built was in with basically plates so a series of plates to create each some of the section with Mach 3 and beyond we will literally take the coil of steel from the mill unspool it change the curvature to a 9 meter diameter and do a single seam weld and it would also be thinner which makes it lighter and cheaper so the rate at which we will be building ships is going to be quite quite crazy by space standards I think we'll
probably have Mach 2 built within a couple of months or or less and Mach 3 maybe three months that type of thing Mach 4 four months maybe five months and we would seek to go to orbit with probably mark four or Mach five so we would I mean this is gonna sound totally nuts but I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months I mean provide provided the rate the rate of technical design improvement and manufacturing improvement continues to be exponential I think that is you know accurate to within a few months hi Elon my name is Steve Clark I'm with the Brownsville Herald back in September 2014 at the groundbreaking you said that the first crewed interplanetary mission could possibly leave yes can you hear me could possibly leap from Boca Chica do you think that's still the case yes is I
think definitely possible that the first crewed mission on starship could leave from Boca the we actually are internally competing the Cape the Cape and and Boca so I think I think both will both places will to the best of my knowledge both places will launch crewed missions so I think it is extremely likely that we will launch crewed missions from Boca and there is a at least a 50% chance that it is the first mission yeah thank you very much Halon tim dad the everyday astronaut how are you I was good good yeah you have great questions online thanks you have great answers so uh that belly-flopped a tail down maneuver I know that's something to see is that first one this one right here you know 20 kilometers is it gonna come in that hot and do that that flip that fast yeah right here or is it gonna be out on
the drone ship like no it's gonna it's basically right where hopper took off that's basically where it's gonna take off you know within you're very close to where it's just right over there you know so yeah it that maneuver that you see you so it will execute now with you know when we get to I think maybe Mach 3 certainly Mach 4 I think probably that will be a good time to transition to hot hot gas thrusters and from cold gas thrusters so using essentially compressed nitrogen of gas as the coal gas thruster this is a pretty low ISP you know sort of 67 if you're very lucky but very close to the 60 with with ethics thruster you can get without really even trying hard to 300 ISP even if you just boom cool the walls without even regen cooling if you if you regen cool it 350 no problem 360 even so
you're talking about something that's that then five or six times the mass efficiency of the nitrogen thrusters that are Mach 1 and if you have thrusters of that efficiency then we don't need to use the use the Raptors to correct the horizontal velocity because right right now it's actually winter doing the Raptors fire the Raptors kick it up kick it over but but they're they're actually accelerate the vehicle in the wrong direction then they have to cook over correct and they come back whereas if you have strong enough thrust row so you can just using the onboard maneuvering thrusters without lighting the main engines you can just go kick it hard light the engine land that be you know that's better yeah and then are those pressure fed then those yeah yeah yeah just pressure fit a high pressure
gas of mythix and so you have a high pressure you know ch4 what a high pressure o2 bottle and then the great thing is like those those don't they don't care what attitude you're at you me at any attitude any you know any G's any attitude it'll still fire yeah yeah hi Yvonne I'm Tim Fernholz from quartz thanks so much for taking the time I don't know two questions if I may one just technical following up on the presentation do useful stuff in orbit you're gonna need the booster as well as the starship right yes you would get this Sasha you cannot get to Earth orbit without the booster but anywhere except Earth pretty much well not counting Venus but like the Mars or the moon the ship provided you have a propellant plant on Mars or moon the ship can easily get a single-stage from the surface of the Moon all the way to the -
to the surface of Earth without a booster so it shows you how to eat like Earth has a deep gravity well in a thick atmosphere so but but definitely cannot I mean well I mean if we if we really went crazy lights you could probably do single-stage-to-orbit non-reusable with the ship but that would be pointless Ilana I just wanted to ask NASA Administrator Jim bridenstine had a tweet last night about this presentation concerned about enthusiasm for SpaceX as various programs I'm just curious if you have any comment or response to that I mean we have for sure the from a SpaceX resource standpoint our resources are overwhelmingly on Falcon a dragon that is very clear but it was really quite a small percentage of SpaceX that did this starship you know less than 5% of the company basically the like the really hard part that
requires a lot of resources is optimizing something past the initial prototype phase and bringing it into volume production so to be clear like the vast majority of our resources are on dragon or Falcon especially crew dragon thank you hey Ilana Chris got part with NASA space flight how do you guys envision keeping the methane and oxygen inside the tanks from boiling off in any significant quantity during a multi-month interplanetary trip to Mars and on a more earth grounded question what's your contamination mitigation strategy since these things are being built outside and the element seems not not in a factory well these are pretty far in the distance questions these questions are relevant but in the end of future years the keeping the the landing propellants a cold on the way to Mars is a lot
easier than it may seem because you can essentially vacuum just like you'd keep cryogenic propellants stored on earth for long periods of time you vacuum jacketed we would essentially have header tanks that are bigger than these header tanks and and invent them to to vacuum so you just basically have a tank inside a tank with multi-layer insulation and and this way you can keep things cryogenic for months no problem it requires very little energy to you don't even really need to worry about boil off you could you could apply some energy to cryo cool it but you don't really need to it's not you to have a tiny amount of oil off you know in in in vacuum things are things are kind of weird they're not like on earth because you have no convective cooling really in surgery so you you actually have the Sun
side of your rocket is very hot and then the not Sun side of the rocket is at 3 degrees Kelvin so it's super cold so you're just like keep your cold stuff on the cold side and the hot stuff on the hot side and it's pretty this is not a problem to manage you know the for the long-term stuff for cert of what's called contamination of Mars you know they I think this this concern first of all we'll do everything we can to mitigate it obviously and but at the end of the day if you're going to send people to Mars that's a pretty big contaminant I know but I really don't think that some earth-based bacterium is gonna be able to migrate much through Mars but the thing that makes Mars very difficult is that it is both cold and has high ultraviolet so if it was either cold or ultraviolet you could evolve to
deal with it but the the cold slows down metabolic processes and the and then ultraviolet red to the straight to the DNA so you're colder shredded this is very difficult for things to exist on the surface of Mars and that's why we have not found any traces of life on the surface of Mars to date if there is any life it'll be very deep underground and I think very resilient yeah cool thank you all right it's also worth noting that over time there have been meteors that have been trunks of Earth that have been shipped off by meteors and chunks of Mars they've been shipped off from Mars and Earth and Mars have actually exchanged material many times over the last several hundred million years hey long it's Chris Davenport from the Washington Post I'm curious about your vision for this area I mean when you drive by and you
see this it's surreal this is real yeah and but I know your vision isn't maybe like a government launch site like a Cape Canaveral but what does this look like a private operational commercial space board yeah I mean it's it's you know I mean it will definitely get fancier than it currently is you know because the the the reason it's not fancier is it's just because it would have taken too long to build the buildings so since it was gonna take so long to build the buildings we just built it outside yeah this is like my new thing as a management by rhyming if the schedules long it's wrong and if it's tightest right yeah it works sr-71 you know fastest plane in history ever you know what's the coolest plane ever you know it had no anti-missile defenses except one accelerates yeah zero they try to shoot it down many
times zero successes you just give us a quick sense of what you think this area will look like it's a 10 years when you are flying cruise oh my think would be like a lot lot more buildings and a lot more stuff like way way more stuff than is currently here as you can tell the wind is really quite vigorous the like one of the things that I think would be quite important to have locally is propellant production so trucking massive you know thousands of tons of liquid oxygen to the site it doesn't make a ton of sense we should really produce the ox that the liquid oxygen here and by the way it's we have gaseous oxygen in the atmosphere so basically just need electricity and oh I've got to mention one of the things over time is propelled production on Mars will be completely renewable because we will use solar panels pull
the co2 out of the atmosphere Mars is a primarily co2 atmosphere get the h2o the water from the ice Mars has a mess amount of ice you combine h2o and co2 and you get ch4 and O 2 this is a very long understood process of run it over Athenian catalysts this is a body a process to create a ch4 no.2 out of co2 and h2o and that same system that we developed for Mars will long-term be used on earth so long term this is like a long term we will produce the propellant for the rockets using solar power and pull the co2 from this atmosphere use water combine that in to create ch4 and o2 on earth and so the long-term outcome will be quite sustainable and renewable for Earth and Mars Geoff Mouse's space news you spend a lot of time this summer working with the FAA getting approval to do a single star
hopper fly of 150 meters now you're talking about flying a much bigger vehicle to much higher altitudes and ultimately flying to orbit where are you in the FAA in terms of getting approval for that and will those flight Opportunities be able to coexist with say the local residents around here yeah absolutely the FAA administrator for space has been excellent to work with very forward-leaning really I would just like to say thanks to the FAA for their support actually I mean really this you know I minimal delays related to regulatory activity and they've been really very reasonable and so you know the sports very much appreciate it so I think the FAA I asked you know good questions and what you want to make sure things are safe as do we and so we're gonna make sure that this the risk of the public is extremely you
know vanishingly small there was nothing basically so you know it's the same sort of thing that we've had to deal with on Falcon 9 and Dragon and has gone very well you know for the 17 years that SpaceX has been around so so you know I think I feel pretty optimistic about things I don't I don't see any fundamental obstacles we are working with the the residents of Boca Chica Village because we think oh it's time it's going to be quite disruptive to their to living in Boca Chica Village because it'll end up getting needing to get cleared for safety a lot of times so I'd say probably not very you know there would be just not very comforting to the book chica village it I mean I think the actual but dangerous to work sheet villages is low but it's not it's not tiny so therefore when we want super tiny
risk so you probably have a time better to buy out the villages and we've made an offer to that effect yeah Thank You vielen it's a Tariq Malik from space calm and I was curious with the design update here if a hundred person crew size for base flights is still kind of the target now and how the life support story could you talk about that is the wind is like howling in my ear unfortunately sure yes with the design update here I'm curious if the 100 person crew size target is still the main target for base crew flights and how the life support system for that is being developed for both the initial test flights and then maybe for mr. Mia's hours flight 2 in the upcoming years thank you yeah I think you it's really I think you could still do a hundred people like the the the pressurized volume on the starship is
around a thousand cubic meters so if you had a hundred people you'd have ten cubic meters per person which is you know and especially in like a zero-g situation that's actually quite a lot of room unlike a 1g situation you you only get to use one surface really live on one surface in a 1g situation but in a in a zero-g situation you can live on six surfaces you know you can like all six sides of a cube so it things away roomier then they may seem and and by the way a thousand cubic meters I think is close to what the Space Station pressurized volume is so it's you know starship is like basically like the launching space station pressurized volume on every flight this is quite a lot we can make it bigger if as needed yeah high-heel on Steven Clark from Space Flight now thanks for taking our
questions we see the starship prototype here mark one you talked a little bit about how you're gonna build the super-heavy vehicle can you update us a little bit more detail about how that development is going where exactly it'll be built and when we might see it on the on a test stand or on a pad sure yeah a good question so the priority is to build at least two starships at each site at poke at the gamma cape and then start building the booster so we'll complete you know Mach one through four before doing Mach one of the booster and then we'll do you know Mach one and walk two of the boosters at the Cape and and invoke oh look there main constraints on on on launching the booster is but is it's engines because obviously boost has a lot of engines so spooling up the Raptor production rate is extremely
important to vital obviously essential to completing the booster doing the the tanks and the legs and say the Griffins betters not a constraint like that we can get done fast but we need I think we would want to have at least probably 24 engines but I think really at least 31 engines to launch so you add that up you've got a lot of engines there you know we need to put four four four four starships we need to well these these have just have three Brock wanted to just have three three Raptor engines mark three and four will have six so yeah this looks like a lot of engines basically including development engines from now through through orbit we're probably 200 rapture engines and our production race right now is maybe one every sort of eight to ten days and but it should be one every couple of
days in a few months and then out to our target is to get to a raptor engine every day by q1 next year or sooner and if I may when we when will we see people flying on this vehicle into space well I think we could potentially see people flying next year you know if we if we get two orbits in about six months then and we have a it's designed to be a reusable rocket so a reusable booster reusable ship so we can do many flights to prove out the reliability very quickly so whereas with an expendable vehicle you have to build if you want to do ten flights let's say to prove out the viability of an expendable vehicle you need to build and destroy ten vehicles whereas we can do ten flights you know it within basically a ten days so when I say rapid reusability I mean you know it you you can fly it's like
you can fly the booster 20 times a day you fly the ship three or four times a day that's what I mean by reusability and the only reason they're ship it takes more time than that is more time than the booster is that you need a couple of you need you know three or four orbits to synchronize for the ship so that it is over you know like I don't getting those complicated thing of orbital dynamics and the rotation of the earth relative to satellite but as anyone who's like knows the space you know the track of a satellite unless there's an equatorial satellite is it's a sinusoidal track on the earth unless it's equatorial or sun-synchronous so so it you know launching sort of due east you have to kind of wait for the orbits just the the the ground path to sync up with the launch light and that's the only reason
it really takes like you know maybe six hours or something like that to sync up and land back at Boka or the Cape you know one of the really interesting interesting things to contemplate is the total mass to orbit capability of a large reusable system where you have a significant fleet in operation the if you've got something like Sasha where you bet maybe 150 tons capable to orbit and the ship can fly' is capable of say theoretically flying four times a day but you know they call it like 75 percent uptime so theoretical three times a day three or sixty-five days a year so that's like about a thousand flights a year for the ship the booster can do a lot more than that this is obviously max theoretical and you've got you know 150 tons that service 150,000 tons to orbit per year per ship and if
you've got say ten ships you'd have a hundred and your one and a half million tons so of it per year twenty ships you've got three million tons over two year I think the total rest of world capacity if you take all Rockets on earth including Falcon the total capacity to orbit I think is around two to three hundred tonnes currently total Earth capacity to orbit is about two to three hundred tons if all rockets launched at max rate so we're talking about something that is with with the fleet of starships a thousand times more than all earth capacity combined all all other rockets combined would be 0.1% including ours but you kind of need that if you're gonna build a city on Mars so it's got to be done it's got to be done Elon highest bill Harwood with CBS News I just wanted to follow up on a an
earlier question about life support systems because that's not trivial and obviously you're you're building a very sophisticated piece of hardware you're thinking about closed-loop regenerative systems are you're thinking about developing these in-house or you looking at designs that already exist on space station for example and what are you shooting for initially I know you're not going to be launching a hundred people on your first flight but what sort of a crew complement can we expect on those initial test flights and what how sophisticated does that life-support system need to be Thanks yeah I think for sure you'd want to have a regenerative life support system so that just means you're recycling everything you know that's for sure important if you're on a several months journey to Mars and then you you know on the
surface for 18 months regenerative is a kind of a necessity so I I don't think it's actually super hard to do that relative to the spacecraft itself the life-support system is pretty straightforward yeah you're going to take - you know - yeah it's pretty straightforward you take out the water vapor and the co2 you can read that back
OH - it's not not super hard the the early flights of starship would not have any people on board it would just be an automatic mode it would only be later flights that would have people on board so things like the foot even the first flights to Mars we were to attend at least a couple of ships have them just land automatically before sending people yeah take about two more questions hyeyeon eric burger with Ars Technica I would just argue the x-15 was the coolest plane of all time and and my question I guess is you know we're not really used to seeing Hardware build in less than a year can you talk about the timeline for this vehicle like when you started fabricating it and how you went so quickly on it thank you yeah actually I'm not sure I think I cap until October last year we were pursuing
a completely different design so it was really I switched the design to steel I think yeah proxy up maybe October last year and there's like okay let's so what's the fastest we can build a steel you know ship in Texas and there we got I think your Bolton built it in about four months or something maybe five months and then this the ship I think we I'm not sure exactly when we started loading it bird yeah but maybe about four months ago that we started building the ship maybe five so it's maybe four or five months since we started building this ship from nothing I think yeah something like that and how did you go so fast well I guess I have this mantra you called if the schedules long it's wrong if it's tightest right yeah and just basically just go recursive improvement on schedule and say with
feedback loop did this make it go faster okay if it didn't we need to fix it if the design machine is takes a long time to build it's the wrong design this is the fundamental thing over and over it's like the tendency is to complicate things and I have another thing which is like the best part is no part the best process is no process it weighs nothing costs nothing can't go wrong so as obvious as that sounds the best the best part is no part like the the thing I'm most impressed with in we're gonna have the design meetings at SpaceX is what did you undesigned undesigning is the best thing just delete it that's the best thing yeah hey Ilan Robin here from super cluster calm my question is about potential fund synergy between SpaceX and your other projects one is there a concept for a Tesla Mars rover - are you gonna be
launching yeah is there a concept already uh well actually yeah the Tesla's will work on Mars you know the if you can either there's a little you can just drive them pretty much because electric cars don't need oxygen they don't need air so you can just drive them around no problem are you gonna bring a boring machine to the Moon or Mars I think that would be a good good idea we do yeah because you could just like make like as much room as you want underground and and you protect it from radiation and everything and I could probably use the materials for building and you need to find ice and dirt anyway so why not yeah totally thanks Elon and uh I don't believe you about the aliens I hope I hope I'm wrong I mean I hope they're like well if they are how you here I'm hope they're nice you know they
haven't killed us yet so it must be not that bad all right any other questions hi Ellen Martin Avenue from the SpaceX subreddit we crowd sourced a few questions it sounds like I only have time for one but oh well I was wondering could you elaborate on the number of engines that will be used for the booze back and entry burns on starship and what the dry landing weight of the super-heavy will be oh yeah so starship wouldn't really if we're poor there's the 20-kilometer thing which you know it's mostly just gonna have three engines you know but you only really needs like these two of them to work at any given point in time but but the ship when it's an orbital operation will will only need a tiny bit of impulse to deorbit like you only issue me like a very tight like less than five percent of the mass of the vehicles needed to do
'but so you just like really puff one of the engines and the main thing is like trying to get the control like how do you shut off the thrust precisely it really precisely so that you don't over or undershoot your target and and then so yeah for the booster the booster has seven engines that gimbal and then the rest whether it's a total of 31 or 37 are fixed the the fixed engines would not be used for boost back so the only the center 7 would be used for for boost back and then I really want to try to avoid an entry burn if at all possible that worked because I yeah that that would now you have to have a high the system has to be capable of a very high Q entry in order to avoid an entry burn but I think we might be able to make the booster buff enough that it you know it doesn't need an entry burn hopefully so
then it just needs a landing burner yeah all right great thanks everyone thanks for coming after you enjoyed it