[0:00:00] Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure coming back here. It's a really awesome place and I always like talking to people from the aerospace industry. By the way, can you hear me okay? While recent years have been good, those three flights, about 30 seconds, and then... But I think we'll wait a few years. So, yeah, myself and the rest of the team, we actually had to... And that was... It still makes it to orbit. That's why commercial airliners have multiple engines, so that if you're...
[0:04:24] Going across the Pacific at night in loose engine. I have to use that life raft. The next generation of that flight was to about five meters. And in the coming months, we'll be increasing the envelope, just doing the sort of thing that you do with the aircraft where you have envelope expansion. You gradually increase the altitude and speed. And as you see things getting a little wobbly, then you take corrective action, ideally before you.
[0:06:43] Before there's a crater. And you can iterate to a successful outcome. I do think there probably will be a few craters along the way. So make sure that, I just think that's the likely outcome. We're very, very lucky if there's no craters along the way of creating a vertical landing rock. Obviously we know how to do vertical takeoff, but we need to do vertical landing. And the reason to...
[0:07:11] I think it's extremely important for rocketry, which is rapid and complete reusability. And it's important that it be both rapid and complete, like an aircraft, or like a car, or a horse, or a bicycle. And even if you had to repaint a plane between flights, you would probably more than double the cost of the ticket.
[0:07:41] You've really got to be able to just reload propellant and fly again. And that's going to take a bit of effort. So it's not going to happen overnight, but you want to keep going in that direction until ultimately it's as close to aircraft-like dispatch capability as one can achieve. And if you compare the cost of the rocket to the cost of propellant, you can see why. Because the cost of propellant is only...
[0:08:11] About 0.3% of the cost of the rocket. And we have a low-cost rocket. So sometimes our rocket is expensive. The Falcon 9 is $60 million. And that's for something with four times the thrust of the 747 and about the same lift-off mass. So that's a good deal. The propellant was only $200,000. And so if we could use the...
[0:08:38] Let's say I've technically used the Falcon 9 rocket 1,000 times, then the capital cost would go from being $60 million a flight to $60,000 a flight. Obviously, that's a humongous difference. Now, there would be some incremental costs in terms of servicing, just like you have an aircraft or you've got to have inspections and servicing and do all that sort of thing. So there'd be that cost to take into account. But still, it would be dramatically
[0:09:07] And I think it would open up opportunities today that are hard to appreciate. Just as in the early days when they were just doing the early days of aviation, I was just in the camel room looking at the software camel. I don't think people could have envisioned that you'd be able to take a 747 non-stop from Los Angeles to London.
[0:09:37] So it's difficult for us to say, oh, we can see today where things will be in the future. But if we enable that capability and dramatically improve the technology, then I think we'll see all sorts of things happen. But we've got to make that happen. We've got to achieve that goal. And I think it's a pivotal step on the way to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. If we don't do that, I just don't think we'll be able to afford it.
[0:10:07] It's the difference between something costing half a percent of GDP and all of GDP. Obviously, it can't be all of GDP. We get a lot of complaints about that. But half a percent of GDP, or maybe a quarter percent of GDP, OK, that's manageable. And I think most people would agree that even if they don't intend to go themselves, that, let's say, spending somewhere between a quarter and a half percent of GDP
[0:10:35] On establishing a self-sustaining civilization on another planet. It's probably worth doing. You know, sort of life insurance for life collectively. And, you know, that seems like a reasonable insurance premium. And plus it would be a fun adventure to watch even if you don't participate. Just as we're going to the moon. So I think there's value even if someone doesn't go themselves. But this is not easy. It's possible, but not... If we lived on Mars, this would actually be quite an easy thing. It would be just barely possible.
[0:12:03] The reason it hasn't occurred in the past is because when people have tried to design a rocket, even one that's expendable, then after a lot of smart people have worked on the rocket and done using advanced materials and analytical techniques, you typically get 2% to 3% of lift-off mass to orbit. And then that's expendable. And now you say, OK, well, what if you want to add in the reusable bits? Well, adding in the reusability, it turns out, takes another 2% to 3%. So then you end up with zero or negative.
[0:12:33] There's not much point in just sending a rocket to orbit with nothing on it. And so in the past, things have been canceled when it looked like success was not one of the possible outcomes. In fact, usually they were canceled after it was clear that success was. A few years after it was clear that success was not one of the possible outcomes. So the trick then is to make a rocket that's so mass efficient that it gets .
[0:13:15] So you get a net 4-2. And so that's what we're seeing in the games. And it'll take a while. I'm not sure how long it'll take. But bring something back from old. And we can start to require it to come back from old. So that mold shielding and the strengthening of the structure is only just what is needed to come back and not any more. So full reusability is...
[0:14:57] And in parallel we're doing things like the Falcon Heavy, which will have two additional side boosters, two additional first stages of side boosters. And with the upgraded thrust of Falcon 9, that will take it to about maybe 60% to 65% of the thrust of a Saturn V, just to put it into perspective. So maybe around the...
[0:15:36] Four and a half million pounds for us, which is about twice as powerful as any other automotive. But I think, obviously, if you want to go to Mars, you need something even substantially bigger than that. So some future vehicle, I think, would probably aim to be. Yeah, so that's sort of where SpaceX is. So stay tuned for more developments. But I'm happy to answer those from the audience. Yeah?
[0:16:25] I think we have volunteers who are going to bring microphones, so can I ask that anyone who asks a question gives their name and affiliation before asking the question. In addition to people in the room asking questions, the society has also been putting out on Twitter the ability to ask questions, and I have several on this sheet, so I will at some point ask some of these questions. But I think first of all we'll start with questions from the floor here. Will you be able to cover this side, Pat?
[0:17:28] Actually, I should have remembered to play this video. This gives you a sense of what I'm talking about for the reusability. Now, this was done by sort of a modeling team. It wasn't done by SpaceX. The SpaceX engineering team. So it's not entirely physically accurate. But it gives you a sense for things, at least. So now we've gone through stage separation.
[0:17:58] So the first stage is going to turn around and reignite. It's actually going to reignite three of the engines, no? Yeah, so chug three there. It sort of magically got rid of the interstage. And the rear legs are much bigger than that. Those are the little guys. But that's approximately, imagine much bigger legs and a much taller stage with an interstage on top. It's approximately what it would look like. So yeah, that's like a middle class house in California, basically. That's why I get one for everyone.
[0:24:00] So there's something on that order. That's about the right order of magnitude. Working backwards will definitely need to have more reusability. Even partial expendability would kill that price. And then you need to use a source propellant for a source of fuel, I should say. Liquid oxygen is incredibly cheap. Liquid oxygen is like 2% to 3% a pound. So it really comes down to the fuel and the pressure. And the fuel is methane.
[0:24:43] And also the nice thing about methane is that you can create it on Mars. Because Mars has a CO2 atmosphere, and there's a lot of water ice in the soil. And conceivably, I mean, you might be able to extract water vapor from the atmosphere, but that may be harder than simply mining water. But then with water, you've got H2O plus CO2. That gives you CH4 plus O2. And bingo, you can replenish propellant.
[0:25:12] Now, you can do this either with hydrogen or with methane. And for a while, we were sort of going down the hydrogen path. And then I was looking at the numbers. And you get to roughly equivalent delta B with methane or hydrogen because of the better mass fraction of the methane system. And then you combine that with the fact that methane is much easier to deal with. It's not a hyper-cryogen. And it doesn't have that sort of wiggly.
[0:25:40] It's a hydrogen molecule that likes to get into all sorts of unpleasant places. And it does sort of like metal impregnable and create sort of invisible high temperature fires and that kind of thing. So methane is just sort of a much easier thing to deal with. So the form is about the same, easy to deal with, obvious move in retrospect. And actually with the properly designed methane engine,
[0:26:09] You know, a staged combustion engine, then you can achieve with decent combustion efficiency in the 99% range and a reasonable sort of area ratio, 380 ISP is quite achievable. In fact, the Russians, in terms of ground tests, have achieved 380 ISP. So this is really, with six months there, it's science delivery.
[0:28:05] I think that booster usually refers to a pressure-fed stage, which usually means minus the 2.5. I think that's actually...
[0:28:51] Not a good way to go. Toilet pump, you want the toilet pump, otherwise your rocket is just too heavy. And you also, because if you go to the pressure pit stage, you have your entire stage is going to have to operate at something close to the chamber pressure, and then you're going to have a ton of pressure gaps that live there at the end of the flight. So it's just not a great way to go. And toilet pumps are hot, but they're not that hot, really. It's just a spinning centrifugal pump.
[0:29:22] It's tricky, but it's not that tricky. And the hot thing about a rock mansion is just getting those last incremental seconds of ISP. That's where it's really quite difficult. And those last seconds of ISP matter a lot for something that's going to go beyond where every very tiny bit of ISP is important.
[0:29:53] So I really think you need to push everything to the limit in terms of advanced materials, smart design of everything, high-efficiency engines. It's all got to be pushed to the limit. What you don't want to do, though, is have insufficient margin in your engines or structures such that you have to rebuild them after returning. And that's an error that was made with the shuttle.
[0:30:20] The SSMEs were just really difficult to reuse. They required a lot of inspection and partial placement in between clients. So I think we need to back off a little bit on chain of pressure. Still aim for a high combustion efficiency, but back off a little bit on chain of pressure.
[0:30:49] Where SpaceX does quite well is in the mass ratio of the stages. Very good stage mass ratio with the current version of Falcon 9.
[0:31:16] We're in the first stages around the 94%, a little above 94% propellant by mass. And with the new design of Falcon 9, we're closer to 96, maybe 95.5%. And with a slight improvement in ISP. But the Merlin architecture is an open cycle architecture, so it doesn't have the ISP advantage of a station combustion system.
[0:31:45] And it's using RP1. So you were talking ISP for the BlueStage engine. That's maybe around 310 to 312. And for the vacuum version, that's around the 340 to 345. The penalty for an open cycle engine is much less in the vacuum.
[0:32:14] So that's where we are. So we definitely need a new engine for sending people to Mars and that kind of stuff. But I think we can still get to full reusability with the current engine, despite having a bit of an ISP disadvantage relative to, say, the Russian kerosene station engines.
[0:32:57] UCL. Just wanted to ask, you said that Falcon 9 has got a maximum acceleration of 6 or 7G. Once it becomes... Dragon. Dragon, sorry. Is that human-certified 6, 7G, or would you have to change the acceleration profile when you put people on it? Actually, to be clear, when going through escape, the SuperDragon engines on Dragon will generate a minimum of 6Gs.
[0:33:27] And depending upon the scenario, actually that could go up to 8 Gs. It kind of depends on how much weight you have loaded on and whether you're at altitude or not. The rocket actually limits the thrust to 5 Gs on ascent. So in a normal, it will actually throttle down or shut down engines in a normal scenario to limit the acceleration to no greater than 5 Gs. And that's set really by...
[0:33:56] I should point out though is that we've got about 46 or so launches on our manifest. And not all of them are actually on the website. Almost all of them are, but not all. But the remainder are commercial. So sometimes people are under the impression that NASA is the vast majority of our business, but actually it's...
[0:34:59] They were the biggest single customer, but they were about a quarter of our orders. Given that you had the anomaly in the most recent part of the Lion Lodge, and there's been a slip in the next space station resupply mission, how will that impact the number of flights you can get during 2013? Yeah, I don't think anything that's happened will affect the number of flights we get for next year. I think we'll probably do four flights, that's my best guess. Five if we're lucky.
[0:35:39] And one of those flights will be the last of the Falcon approach ones. And then you expect to do at least three flights of the upgraded Falcon 9. And then we might do a fifth flight. We'll see. But we'll certainly have the rockets produced. I feel very comfortable about how the rocket production rate is rampant. So we'll have the rockets on the ground. And it's just a question of if the satellites are ready or if there are any other constraints there.
[0:36:09] I think at this point I'll ask one of the questions from the people on Twitter. This question is from Deathloat Cruiser. He says, what do you think is the next great challenge for rocket technology after reusability? It's a big one, reusability. Better reusability. Once we have reusability, improvements in reusability are going to be incredibly important.
[0:36:54] I think that's really a fundamental one. I wouldn't say that there's... I can't think of anything that's on par with that, sort of like Warp Drive. It would be very cool. Maybe I'll link it to another question. Once you've cracked that problem, this question came from Paolo Sergio Martins. You've done online writing with PayPal, you've done electric cars with Tesla.
[0:37:25] You've done private spaceflight with SpaceX. What are you going to do next? Well, I think I'll just focus on SpaceX and Tesla for a while. And in fact, I'd like to just slightly decrease the amount of time that I work. And I think I'll be able to do that when Tesla's cash flow is positive, which hopefully is quite soon. And then I definitely do not want to run a third company.
[0:37:54] So I have some ideas, like the Hyperloop, which I think could be cooler than just having another little train. And hopefully I'll get a promotion like that later this year, or something like that later this year. I want to embed it with the team at SpaceX and Tesla, and really feel that people put it out there, and then ask people to contribute ideas and see if there's some better way to deal with it, to make it better.
[0:38:23] Wiki version of it or something. And then there could be some collaborative, static design that people sort of flexibly think is a good way to go. And then anyone who wants to build it can just build it. I think that would be great. And I do think that there's potential to have a supersonic vertical table landing electric jets. And I think that's where things will eventually end up, which is a question of how long it takes to do that.
[0:38:54] My question is, in your opinion, who will be the first to put people on Mars?
[0:39:26] The first human mission tomorrow is actually some collaboration of private industry and government. But I think we also need to be prepared for the possibility that it has to be just commercial. So that might take longer because it would require more resources or you have to get the money together to do it.
[0:39:53] I want to prepare for a scenario where either path is possible. Basically, it needs to happen one way or another. That's the important thing. I'm not dogmatic, it's just whether, not how it occurs, just how it occurs. Over the next decade, China is going to be a very large force in a lot of technology.
[0:40:26] I think we'll probably be competitive. Collaboration is difficult. I'm not sure they want to collaborate.
[0:40:57] And sometimes competition is good. So my guess would be there's probably not collaboration, but hopefully friendly competition. Sorry, what was the beginning?
[0:41:36] I think it's going to disappear. It won't be too bad. I mean, clearly we know that people can survive in deep space because the astronauts that went to the moon lived long lives, and it's none the worse. And we also know that people can live in zero-g for long periods of time. I think the record is almost two years or something like that.
[0:42:04] There are plenty of cases where it's six months to a year, which is the journey time to Mars. So you do need to exercise along the way and make sure you don't have muscle and bone atrophy, but I think it'll be okay. In terms of shielding against solar radiation, you know, sort of a solar storm, I think sometimes that problem is stated as you need an enormous quantity of water. You can just have a column and make sure that you're mostly in front of that column. It's certainly not a showstopper. We've got ways to make it better.
[0:42:58] Hi, this is Nikhil and I'm from Imperial College. I wanted to ask you what is your opinion on horizontal air launches?
[0:44:49] Bear in mind that the payload to orbit advantage from an air launch is negligible. This is perhaps not, I mean, I think this audience probably understands that, but most people don't. It seems like, well, you're high up there, and so surely that's good. And you could be going at, say, 0.8 or 0.7 Mach, and so you've got some speed and altitude. You can use a higher expansion ratio on the nozzle.
[0:45:18] Doesn't all that add up to a meaningful improvement in payload to orbit? The answer is no. It's not, unfortunately. It's quite a small improvement. So it's maybe a 5% improvement in payload to orbit, something like that. And then you've got this humongous plane that you've got to deal with, which is just like having a stage. So if you said, well, from a SpaceX standpoint,
[0:45:49] How many people do you expect to go on each journey to Mars?
[0:49:00] In the beginning, you'd go with a smaller number of people and you'd have a higher proportion of cargo and emergency equipment and that kind of thing. Once you really got rolling, you'd increase the number of people on the flight because you'd have supplies there. So you wouldn't need to worry about carrying with you all the supplies for the journey there, staying on the surface and coming back. So initially, you start off with maybe a handful of people, less than 10.
[0:49:30] I'm just trying to get orders of magnitude here. But then you go to 100 or more in steady state down the road. Say you're top flight global, I'm just asking you about the MCT engine that you've mooted, being about 1.5 million pounds thrust. Are you planning to build a really big booster vehicle like SLS class? MCT is not an engine.
[0:50:05] We're only doing one engine, one major engine, and that's the Raptor engine, which is the methane engine. We can talk more about details of that next year, but we're not doing another engine. On the subject of methane, are you going to work with Russians at all? No. We might hire a few Russians, but yeah.
[0:50:38] I'm one of the first generation. I'm just asking, would you envisage yourself going to space or Mars? I would have to go to Mars, yeah. I'd want to make sure that things are going well on Earth. Basically, if I die, then I want to make sure that things keep going the way they should. As long as I felt confident with that, then I would go.
[0:51:10] I think we got used to see first NASA leading the way in space in the 70s and 80s and then now that the private sector is taking a seat, US companies are leading the way again. So what do you think of this formation in Europe and what do you think are the main obstacles that the Europe has to approach? My advice with respect to, say, Ariane is that I think any variant of the Ariane 5 is not going to be competitive with Falcon.
[0:51:40] The right move, I think, would be to rethink the architecture of RN6 or, I'm not sure if one wants to call it RN6 or something else, but think very carefully about that architecture and make sure it has a chance of competing against Falcon. Otherwise, it's kind of a pointless exercise. I feel like I'm saying a super obvious thing.
[0:52:09] I'm from the Space Center. Just off the topic, what do you think about technology, far-fetched technology like the Space Elevator and stuff? Do you see any opportunity or any point in that? I'm not too sure about the Space Elevator. That sort of tells me too early to be appealing. I always sort of think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As I mentioned, Space Elevator.
[0:52:38] I mean, the problem with space elevators, first of all, you need a lot of launches just to get the carbon nanotube rope up there in the first place. And then this thing would be anywhere from 40 to 60,000 miles long. That's long. And nobody's yet built a little footstool out of carbon nanotubes, as far as I'm aware. So having something that's
[0:53:07] It's a big leap. And then there are other issues. It ends up being this big sweeper going through Earth orbit. And any orbital debris is going to be really good at capturing it. And it's going to be very high impact. And then once you get to the end of the elevator, you've got to do something. You can't just be flung out into space. So you still need rockets.
[0:53:39] This is essentially a means of reducing cost of transit as a long-term optimization, not anything worth working on right now. Chris Brownlee, Starlight Magazine. I just wanted you to tell us what stage SpaceX is at towards the crew capability in the Dragon capsule. So in terms of crew, we expect to fly our first crewed mission in about three years. Technically, if someone were to stow aboard the
[0:54:26] I mean, if it came back, it'd be fine. Because in the pressurized volume, we actually maintain sea level pressure, we remove humidity, we maintain the temperature very precisely because we're required to transport experiments that have plants and mice and fish and that kind of thing.
[0:54:56] As a young engineer, the work you've done is very inspiring. What was your largest inspiration?
[0:56:01] I really like the Asimov books and the Heinlein books, and I'll see Claude, obviously. And I like all the obvious stuff, like Star Trek, Star Wars. From an inspiration standpoint, I guess I just want to, having read all those books and seen the movies, and many other books and movies.
[0:56:33] Just the idea of having a future where that didn't come true just seemed terrible. So that's why I started with these things. Why are you focusing on Mars rather than on the moon? Well, we're happy to take people to the moon. If somebody wants to go to the moon, we'd definitely do it. But as far as making life healthy planetary, I think you sort of...
[0:57:10] Photologically, one must have a second planet. And the moon also is a small rock orbiting Earth, no atmosphere, 28-day period, very little water, lacking in a lot of the key elements that one needs for creating a civilization. It's analogous, I think, to the Arctic. The Arctic is close to Britain, but it kind of sucks over there.
[0:57:37] And so that's why America is not there. It's where it is. Even though it's a lot harder across the Atlantic than it is to be from Norway to practically go to the Arctic. In fact, I think they did. So it's really because it's a place where one can establish a self-sustaining civilization and really grow into something significant, really big.
[0:58:06] And in a worst-case scenario, if something were to happen to Earth, that you have a redundancy. Whereas it would be much harder to do on the Moon. And plus, if something happens on Earth, the Moon's very close, so it might affect the Moon, too. The Gerard K. O'Neill idea was that he spoke of planetary chauvinism, I believe. Did you give him talk to building...
[0:58:33] Space colonies as opposed to building colonies on a planetary surface. Well, the problem with space colonies, it's not that it can't be done, it's just that's doing it the hard way. In order to create a substantial space colony, you have to transfer mass from a planet or from some asteroid or something. You have to move mass from one place to another. So why move mass from one place to another instead of just going to where that mass is in the first place?
[0:59:03] Any sort of orbiting space colony is always, in order to expand, is always going to have to pull mass from somewhere. And why bother doing that? It seems like a much harder thing to do than just... Well, the argument there would be to use asteroid or material in colonies so that you haven't got the gravity world which you're going to have in Mars or planetary surface. Yeah, it would actually be harder to travel to the asteroid belt than it would be to travel to Mars.
[0:59:34] So if you're talking about people coming from Earth, it's going to be easier to go to Mars. And while it's having the atmosphere, you can use atmospheric braking as well. And you just have an enormous number of resources in Mars. Mars is like, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It's got a 24 and a half hour rotational period. It's got a CO2 atmosphere, which means that if you just have a transparent dome, a pressurized dome and a pump,
[1:00:04] You can actually grow earth plants in Martian soil. In fact, it's recently turned out that Martian soil is non-toxic. So you can actually grow earth plants in Mars soil just by heating it up and pressurizing it with CO2. Simple find. You need a little fertilizer. Actually, Mars has, I think, 2.7%, something like that, nitrogen in the atmosphere, which means you can synthesize fertilizer as well.
[1:00:33] So, yeah, it's a pretty good option. That's the only option, right? At this point, I'll ask one final question from the quiz feed. This question is from Chris Davies. If spaceflight becomes accessible to the general public, what will it mean to the idea of... We're a very exciting future. We start off with space and ice, and then eventually... ...and seismic shifts to other star systems.
[1:01:24] This is more of a commercial question. What kind of business model do you see operating within SpaceX in the few years time we have?
[1:02:09] Do you plan on selling them to airlines or do you plan on operating them?
[1:02:36] Do you have any idea of market forecasts and how many you think you'll be able to sell?
[1:03:19] Does SpaceX have any plans for, let's call them esoteric engines, things like NERV and upper stages or nuclear light bulbs?
[1:03:48] You dismissed the space elevator. I love it, but it's 50 years away. Yeah. Do we have, does SpaceX have any other statements that are a little bit more interesting than just liquid-fuel rockets? Hey, I think liquid-fuel rockets are pretty interesting. Throw me a bomb. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's...
[1:04:17] Interplanetary transport, having high-efficiency, high-thrust ion drives, I think could be helpful. I think that's something you'd want to do anyway, because if you had a big spacecraft with a lot of excess power generation, might as well strap an ion drive to that. So there's this question of how efficiently can you convert power to thrust. So that's one thing.
[1:04:53] Potentially something like an electromagnetic sail. So it's really tough taking nuclear power stations. Would you like one that's flying over your head and might crash? I mean, we all might think that's a good idea, but in RRT. The video you showed on your plans for port usability, it reminded me of a game I'm sure some of you have seen. It's called Kerbal Space Program. Have you heard of it? No, what's it called? Kerbal Space Program. Kerbal, okay.
[1:05:50] A very fun game and it does exactly what the video does. Oh, well, okay. Last question then. There was the first half. I understand that one of the reasons SpaceX is so fast and cheap at making rockets and spacecraft is that you have all the design engineers and the manufacturing engineers located on the same site and you design and make a lot of your stuff in-house. Yeah.
[1:06:18] I was wondering, is that the key, do you think, or is it key? Do you think it is going to be that way? And how much do you actually make in-house and how much do you make? Is it what we should be looking to in Europe? I do think vertical integration is sensible. And we're really, I mean, you just need to look at it and say, okay, if we made it ourselves, how much would it cost? And if somebody else made it, how much would it cost? And then go with the one that is more efficient. I mean, that's really how we operate. And that's resulted in,
[1:06:47] I don't know, 70 plus percent, depending on how you count it by mass, by cost, 70 plus percent of the rocket is built from raw material at SpaceX. I mean, I actually would like to do less. It's not as though we want to do all this. If we could find more efficient suppliers, it would be great to offload some of that stuff.