Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species

JEAN LEGAL: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Jean LeGall. I am President of the French Space Agency and President-elect of the International Astronautical Federation, and it is a pleasure to welcome you here at the 67th International Astronautical Congress. Elon Musk is founder, CEO 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 is the plan he will present to us today. SpaceX has had a number of firsts, including being the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station and the first entity to land a nautical booster on land and on ships at sea.

Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk. . ELON MUSK: Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. I hope to talk about the SpaceX Mars architecture. And what I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, to make it seem like it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that we can go to. And is there really any path that anyone can go down if they want to? I think that's really what's important. So first of all, why go anywhere? Good? I think there are really two fundamental paths. The story is going to branch in two directions.

One path is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some extinction event. I don't have an immediate apocalyptic prophecy, but eventually history suggests that there will be some apocalyptic event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a

multiplanetary

species

, and I hope you agree that is the right way to go. Yeah? . That's what we want. . Yes. So how do we figure out how to get you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city, a city that isn't really an outpost but can become a planet in its own right and thus make us a truly multiplanetary species?

You know, sometimes people wonder: Well, what about other places in the solar system? Why Mars? Well, to put things into perspective, this is... this is... this is a real scale of what the solar system looks like. We are currently on the third small rock from the left. That's Earth. Yes, exactly. And our objective is to reach the fourth rock on the left. That's Mars. But you can get an idea of ​​the real scale of the solar system, the size of the Sun and Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus. And then the little ones on the right are Pluto and his friends.

This helps you see, it's not to scale, but it gives you a better idea of ​​where things are. So our options for becoming a multiplanetary species within our solar system are limited. In terms of nearby options, we have Venus. But Venus is a hot, high-pressure, super-high-pressure acid bath. So that would be complicated. Venus is nothing like the goddess. This looks nothing like the real goddess. That's why it's really difficult to make things work on Venus. Mercury is also too close to the sun. We could potentially go to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but they are quite far away, much further from the sun, and much harder to get to.

Really, it leaves us with one option if we want to become a multiplanetary civilization, and that is Mars. We could possibly go to our moon, and I have nothing against going to the moon, but I think it's a challenge to go multiplanetary on the moon because it's so much smaller than a planet. It doesn't have any atmosphere. It is not as rich in resources as Mars. It has a day of 28 days, while Mars's day is 24 1/2 hours. And overall, Mars is much better prepared to ultimately become a self-sufficient civilization. Just to make a comparison between the two planets, there are actually... they are remarkably close in many ways.

In fact, we now believe that early Mars looked a lot like Earth. And in fact, if we could warm Mars, we would have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans again. So where things stand now, Mars is about half 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 useful atmosphere which, in the case of Mars, which is mainly CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and some other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars simply by compressing the atmosphere.

And it also has nitrogen, which is also very important for growing plants. It will be a lot of fun to be on Mars, because you will have a gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you will be able to lift heavy objects, move around and have a lot of fun. And the day is remarkably close to Earth's day. So we just need to change that bottom row, because we currently have 7 billion people on Earth and none on Mars. So NASA and other organizations have done a lot of work in the initial exploration of Mars and understanding what Mars is like, where we could land, what the composition of the atmosphere is, where there is water or ice, we should say.

And we have to go from these first exploration missions to building a city. The problem we have today is that if you look at a Venn diagram, there is no intersection of groups of people who want to go and can afford it. In fact, right now you can't go to Mars for infinite money. Using traditional methods, if a holistic style approach is adopted, an optimistic cost figure would be approximately $10 billion per person. For example, the Apollo program, the cost estimates are between $100 billion and $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. But that's a high price to pay for an entry. That's why these circles barely touch each other. So you can't create a self-sufficient civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person. What we need is a rapprochement... is to bring those circles together. And if we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to the average home price in the United States, which is around $200,000, then I think the likelihood of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high. I think it would almost certainly happen; Not everyone would want to go. In fact, I think a relatively small number of people on Earth would want to go.

But there would be enough people who would want to go and who could afford the trip to make that happen. And people could get sponsorship. And I think it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved and this was their goal, could ultimately save enough money to buy a ticket and move to Mars. And Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time, so there would be no shortage of jobs. But it's a little complicated because we have to find a way to improve the cost of trips to Mars by 5 million percent. So this is not easy.

I mean, it's... and it seems practically impossible, but I think there are ways to do it. This translates to an improvement of approximately 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. These are the key elements needed to achieve a 4 1/2 orders of magnitude improvement. Most of the improvement would come from full reuse, between 2 and 2 1/2 orders of magnitude. And then the other two orders of magnitude would come from in-orbit refueling, propellant production on Mars, and choosing the right propellant. So I'm going to go into detail about all of them. Full reuse is actually the hardest. Reusability is very difficult to achieve even for 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 airplanes, any form of transportation can actually be used. You could say a car, a bicycle, a 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 a plane that costs 90 million dollars and if it were a single use, you would have to pay half a million dollars per flight. But you can actually buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for $43, including taxes. So that's... I mean, that's a huge improvement.

Right there it's showing an improvement of four orders of magnitude. Now this is more difficult: reuse doesn't apply as much to Mars because the number of times they can reuse the spacecraft is... the spacecraft part of the system is less frequent because the encounter between Earth and Mars It only happens every... every 26 months. So you can use the spaceship part about every two years. Now you can use the booster and tanker as often as you want. And that's why it makes a lot of sense to load the spacecraft in orbit with essentially dry tanks and have fairly large tanks that you can then use the booster and the tanker to refill while it's in orbit and maximize the payload. of the spacecraft that when they go to Mars, really have a very large payload capacity.

As I said, recharging in orbit is one of the essential elements of this. Without recharging in orbit, it would have an impact of about half an order of magnitude on cost. By "half an order of magnitude," I think the audience mostly knows that, but what that means is that each order of magnitude is a factor of ten. Therefore, not recharging in orbit would mean an increase of approximately 500% in the cost per ticket. It also allows us to build a smaller vehicle and reduce the development cost, although this vehicle is quite large. But it would be much more difficult to build something five to ten times its size.

And it also reduces the sensitivity of the performance characteristics of the booster rocket and tanker aircraft. So if there is a shortfall in the performance of any of the elements, you can make up for it by

making

one or two extra trips to refuel the spacecraft. This is very important to reduce the system's susceptibility to a performance deficit. And also, producing propellants on Mars is also very important. Again, if we didn't do this, there would be an increase of at least half an order of magnitude in the cost of a trip. So a 500% increase in the cost of the trip.

And it would be quite absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships continued to remain on Mars and not return to Earth. You would have this huge graveyard of ships. You should do something with them. So it wouldn't really make sense to leave your spaceships on Mars. You really want to build a propellant plant on Mars and send the ships back. Mars works well for that because it has a CO2 atmosphere, it has water rights in the soil, and with H2O and CO2 you can produce CH4, methane and oxygen, O2. Therefore, it is also important to choose the right propeller.

Think of this as maybe there are three main options. And they have their advantages, but kerosene or kerosene suitable for rocket propellants, which is also what jet planes use. Rockets use a very expensive form of highly refined jet fuel, which is essentially a form of kerosene. It helps keep the size of the vehicle small, but because it is a very specialized form of jet fuel, it is quite expensive. Its reuse potential is lower. It is very difficult to do this on Mars because there is no oil. It is actually quite difficult to manufacture the propellant on Mars.

And then the propellant transfer is pretty good, but not great. Hydrogen, although it has a high specific impulse, is very expensive and incredibly difficult to prevent from boiling because liquid hydrogen is very close to absolute zero in the liquid state. So the insulation required is tremendous, and the energy cost on Mars to produce and store hydrogen is very high. So when we looked at the overall optimization of the system, it was clear to us that methane was the clear winner. Therefore, perhaps 50-60% of Mars' energy would be needed to recharge the thrusters using the propellant depot.

And the technical challenges are much easier. So we think... we think methane is actually better across the board. And we started out initially thinking that hydrogen would make sense, but we ultimately came to the conclusion that the best way to optimize the cost per unit of mass to Mars and vice versa is to use an all-methane system, or technically deep cryogenic Methalox. Those are the four elements that must be achieved. So whatever system is designed, whether by SpaceX or anyone else, we think these are the four features that need to be addressed for the system to truly achieve a low cost per ton to be in service on Mars.

This is a simulation about the general system. (Music). (Video). . So what you saw there is pretty close to what we'll actually build. It will look almost exactly as you saw it, like what you saw. So this is not an artist's impression. In reality, the simulation was made from SpaceX engineering CAD models. So this isn't... 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. In the video,You have an idea of ​​what this simulated system architecture looks like. The rocket booster and spacecraft take off and load the spacecraft into orbit.

Then the booster rocket returns. It comes back pretty quickly, in about 20 minutes. And then you can launch the tanker version of the spacecraft, which is essentially the same as the spacecraft, but filling the pressurized and unpressurized cargo areas with propellant tanks. So they look almost identical. This also helps curb the development cost, which obviously won't be small. And then the propellant tanker goes up. It will go... in fact, it will go up several times, between three and five times, to fill the tanks of the orbiting spacecraft. And then once the spacecraft is full, the tanks are full, the cargo has been transferred and we get to the time of the Mars encounter, which as I mentioned is about every 26 months, is when the spacecraft would depart.

Now, in time there would be many spaceships. Ultimately, I think we would have over a thousand or more spacecraft waiting to orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, if you've seen that thing. Good show. So it's a bit like that. But it actually makes sense to load the spacecraft into orbit because you have two years to do it and then make frequent use of the booster and tanker to largely reuse them. And then with the spaceship, it's reused less because you have to prepare for how long is it going to last?

Well, maybe 30 years. So it could be 12 to 15 flights with the spacecraft at most. So you really want to maximize the payload of the spaceship and use the booster and tanker a lot. So the ship goes to Mars, resupplies, and then returns to Earth. So as we get into some of the details of the vehicle's design and performance, and I'm going to skip over it, I'll just talk a little bit about the technical details in the actual presentation, and then I'll leave it to the details. technical questions to the questions and answers that follow. This is to give you a sense of size.

It's quite big. (Laughter). . The funny thing is that in the long term, ships will be even bigger than this. It will be relatively small compared to interplanetary Mars spacecraft of the future. But it has to be this size because to fit about a hundred people in the pressurized section, plus carry the luggage and all the non-pressurized cargo to build propellant plants and build everything from iron foundries to pizzerias, etc. To do this, we need to transport a lot of cargo. So it really needs to be about this kind of magnitude, because if we say like... that same amount of threshold for a self-sufficient city on Mars for civilization would be a million people.

If you only go every two years, if you have a hundred people per boat, 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 upwards of 200 people or more per flight to reduce the cost per person. . But it's... you know, 10,000 flights is a lot of flights. So ultimately what you really want is on the order of a thousand ships. It will take some time to build up to a thousand ships. And so I think if you say: When would we reach that threshold of one million people?

From the point where the first spacecraft heads to Mars, there are probably between 20 and 50 total encounters on Mars. Therefore, it will probably take between 40 and 100 years to achieve a fully self-sufficient civilization on Mars. That's kind of a cross section of the ship. In some ways, the truth is that it is not that complicated. It is mainly made of an advanced carbon fiber. The carbon fiber part is complicated when dealing with deep cryogens and trying to achieve impermeability for both liquids and gases and not create gaps due to cracking or pressurization that would cause the carbon fiber to leak.

So this is a pretty big technical challenge:

making

deep, cryogenic tanks out of carbon fiber. And it's only recently that we think that carbon fiber technology has gotten to the point where we can do this without having to create a liner, a kind of metallic liner, a quadruple liner on the inside of the tanks, which would add mass and complexity. . This is especially complicated in the case of pressurization of hot gaseous oxygen. So this is designed to be autogenously pressurized, meaning we gasify the fuel and oxygen through heat exchanges in the engine and use it to pressurize the tanks.

We will then gasify the methane and use it to pressurize the fuel tank. Gasify the oxygen. Use it 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 nitrogen for gas propellants. In this case, we would autogenously pressurize and then use gaseous methane and oxygen for the control thrusters. So you actually only need two ingredients for this, as opposed to four in the case of the Falcon 9 and five if you consider the ignition fluid. It is a complicated liquid to start engines. That's not very usable.

In this case we would use spark ignition. This gives you an idea of ​​vehicles by performance, current and historical. I don't know if you can really read that. But in expandable mode, the vehicle that, of course, we propose would produce about 550 tons and about 300 tons in reusable mode. That compares with a maximum capacity of 135 tonnes. But I think this really gives a better idea of ​​things. White bars show vehicle performance; in other words, the vehicle's in-orbit payload. So you can essentially see what it represents what the size efficiency of the vehicle is. And on most rockets, including ours (ours as they are currently flying), the performance bar is only a small percentage of the actual size of the rocket.

But with the interplanetary system that we will initially use for Mars, we have been able, or believe, to greatly improve the performance of the design. Therefore, it is the first time that a rocket's performance bar will exceed the physical size of the rocket. This gives you a more direct type of comparison. This is... the thrust which is quite enormous, talking about takeoff thrusts of 13,000 tons. So it's quite tectonic when it takes off. But it's... it fits into pad 39A, which NASA has been kind enough to let us use, where... because they oversized the pad a little bit when making Saturn 5, and as a result, we can actually do a lot more. largest vehicle on that same launch pad.

And in the future, we hope to add additional launch locations, likely adding one on the south Texas coast. But this gives you an idea of ​​relative capacity, if you can read them. But these vehicles have very different purposes. In reality, this is intended to transport large numbers of people and ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. So you really need something pretty big to be able to do that. So let's talk about some of the key elements of the interplanetary spacecraft and rocket booster. We decided to start development with what we believe are probably the two most difficult elements of the design.

One is the Raptor engine. And this will be the highest chamber pressure engine of any type ever built and probably the highest thrust-to-weight ratio. It is a full-flow staged combustion engine that maximizes the theoretical boost that can be obtained from a given fuel and oxidizer source. We subcool the oxygen and methane to densify it. So compared to when, propellants are typically used near their boiling point in most rockets. In our case, we built the thrusters close to their freezing point. This can result in a density improvement of up to 10 or 12%, which makes a huge difference to the actual rocket results.

It also eliminates any risk of cavitation for turbopumps and makes it easier to feed a high-pressure turbopump if the propellant is very cold. However, one of the keys here is that the vacuum version of the Raptor has an ISP of 382 seconds. This is also quite critical for the entire mission to Mars. And we can get to that number or at least within a few seconds of that number, and ultimately maybe surpass it slightly. So the rocket booster is in many ways actually a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster. You'll see a lot of similarities, like the grille fins.

Obviously grouping many engines in the base. And the big difference really is that the primary structure is an advanced form of carbon fiber instead of limited lithium and that we use autogenous pressurization and get rid of the helium and nitrogen. So this uses 42 Raptor engines. There are many engines, but we use an I.N. on the Falcon 9. And with Falcon Heavy, which should launch early next year, there are 27 engines on the base. We have quite good experience with a large number of engines. It also gives us layoffs. So that if any of the engines fail, you can still continue the mission and be fine.

But the main function of the thruster is to accelerate the spacecraft to about 8,500 kilometers per hour. For those less familiar with orbital dynamics, it's actually about speed and not height. So really that's the job of reinforcement. The booster is like the javelin thrower. You have to throw that javelin, which is the spaceship. However, in the case of other planets, which have a gravity well that is not as deep, like Mars, the moons of Jupiter, possibly even someday Venus...well, Venus will be a little more complicated. But for most of the solar system, only the spacecraft is needed.

Therefore, you do not need the booster if you have a lower gravity well. No booster is needed on the Moon, Mars, or any of the moons of Jupiter or Pluto. You just need the spaceship. The thruster is there only for heavy gravity wells. And then we've also been able to optimize the propellant needed for boost and landing to reduce it to about 7% of the takeoff propeller propellant load. We think that with some optimization we can maybe get it down to about 6%. And now we're also getting pretty comfortable with the precision of the landing. If you've been watching the Falcon 9 landings, you'll see that they're also getting closer and closer to the target.

And we believe that, particularly with the addition of some additional boosters and maneuvering boosters, we can get the booster back on the launch pad. And then those fins at the base are essentially centering features to eliminate any minor misalignments in position at the launch site. This is what it looks like on the base. So we think that we only need to stabilize or direct the central group of motors. There are seven engines in the central cluster. Those would be the ones that move to direct the rocket, and the others would be fixed in position, which gives us the best concentration... we can maximize the number of motors because we don't have to leave room for gimbals or moving motors.

And all this is designed so that you can lose multiple engines even during takeoff or anywhere in the flight and continue the mission safely. So for the spacecraft itself, at the top we have the pressurized compartment. And I'll show you a glimpse of that in a moment. And below that is... is where we would have the unpressurized cargo, which would be actually packed in a very dense format. And below is the liquid oxygen tank. The liquid oxygen tank is probably the most difficult part of this entire vehicle because it has to handle the propellant at the coldest level and the tanks themselves form the structure of the air.

In this way the airframe structure and the tank structure are combined, as is the case in all modern rockets. And in airplanes, for example, the wing is actually a wing-shaped fuel tank. So it has to withstand the thrust loads of ascent, the loads of re-entry, and then it has to be impermeable to oxygen gas, which is complicated and non-reactive to oxygen gas. So that's the most difficult piece of the spaceship itself, which is why we started with that element as well. And 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 at the base.

And then there are six high-efficiency vacuum motors around the perimeter, and those don't have a gimbal. And then there are three of the sea level motor versions that act as a gimbal and provide steering. Although we can do some steering if you're in space with differential thrust on the outboard engines. The net effect is a payload to Mars of up to 450 tons, depending on how many refills are made with the tanker. And the goal is at least 100 passengers per ship. Although I think we'll see that number grow to 200 or more. This graph is a little difficult to interpret at first, but we decided to put it out there for people who would like to watch the video later and take a closer look and analyze some of the numbers.

The column of theleft is probably the most relevant. And that gives you the travel time. So, depending on which Earth-Mars encounter you're targeting, the travel time to an exit burst velocity of 6 kilometers per second may be as little as 80 days. And then over time, I think we could probably improve that. Ultimately, I suspect that in the more distant future we will see Mars transit times of as little as 30 days. It's pretty manageable, considering that the trips people used to take in the old days typically took sailing trips that lasted six months or more. Therefore, upon arrival, thermal protection technology is extremely important.

We have been perfecting heat shield technology using our Dragon spacecraft. We are now on version 3 of PICA, which is the phenolic impregnated carbon ablator. And it is becoming more robust with each new version, with less ablation, more resistance and less need for renewal. The heat shield is basically a giant brake pad. How good can you make that brake pad against the extreme conditions and the cost of renewal and make it so that you can have many flights without any renewal? This is an aerial tour of the crew compartment. I just want to give you an idea of ​​what it would feel like to actually be on the spaceship.

I mean, to make it attractive and increase that part of the Venn diagram of people who really want to go, it has to be really fun and exciting, and it doesn't have to be overwhelming or boring. But the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so you can do zero gravity things, you can float. It would be like a cinema, ElectroPuls, cabins, a restaurant. It will be very fun to go. You're going to have a great time. (Laughter). So the propellant plant on Mars, again, this is one of those slides that I won't go into detail here, but people can tune it out.

The key point is that the ingredients are on Mars to create a propellant plant with relative ease, because the atmosphere is mainly CO2 and there is water ice almost everywhere. You have the CO2 plus H2O to make methane CH4 and oxygen O2 via the Sabatier reaction. The most complicated thing really is the energy source, which I think we can do with a large field of solar panels. So to give you an idea of ​​the cost, really the key is to make this affordable for almost anyone who wants to go. And we believe that based on this architecture, assuming optimization over time, like the first flights, it would be quite expensive.

But the architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000, maybe less, maybe as little as $100,000 over time, depending on how much mass a person takes. So now we're estimating around $140,000 per ton for trips to Mars. So if one person plus his luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, then we think the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately fall below $100,000. So, financing, talking about sources of financing. So we have underwear of steel; launch satellites; send cargo to the space station; Kickstarter, of course; followed by profit. Obviously, it will be a challenge to finance this entire effort.

We hope to generate a pretty decent net cash flow by launching a lot of satellites and servicing the NASA space station, transferring cargo to and from the space station, and then I know there are a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping finance a base on Mars and then perhaps there will be interest from the government sector in doing so as well. Ultimately, this will be a huge public-private partnership. And I think 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 happens.

And right now we're trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources we have available and keep moving forward. And hopefully, I think as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream, it's something that can come true, I think the support will snowball over time. And I should also say that the main reason I am personally accumulating assets is to fund this. So I really have no other motivation to personally accumulate assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary. .

Time lines. He's not the best at this kind of thing. But just to show you where we started. In 2002, SpaceX was basically a rug and a mariachi band. That was it. That's all SpaceX in 2002. As you can see, I'm a dancing machine. And yes, I believe in starting celebratory events with mariachi bands. I really like mariachi bands. But that was what we started with in 2002. And really, I mean, I thought we had maybe a 10% chance of doing anything, even putting a rocket into orbit, let alone going further and taking Mars in. Serious. But I came to the conclusion that if there wasn't some new entrant into the space realm with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever become a spacefaring civilization and be among the stars.

Because, you know, in '69 we were able to go to the moon and the space shuttle was able to get to low Earth orbit, and then after the space shuttle retired. But that trend line has reached zero. So I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that technology doesn't automatically improve. It only gets better if you apply a lot of really strong engineering talent to the problem that gets better. And there are many examples in history where civilizations reached a certain technological level and then fell far below that level and then recovered only millennia later.

So we went from 2002, where we basically had no idea. And then with the Falcon 1, the smallest useful rocket we could imagine, which would carry half a ton into orbit, and then four years later we developed the first vehicle. So we abandoned the main engine, upper stage engine, air frames, fairing and launch system and had our first launch attempt in 2006, which failed. Unfortunately, that lasted about 60 seconds. But it was in 2006, four years after starting, when we got our first contract with NASA. And I just want to say that I'm incredibly grateful to NASA for supporting SpaceX, you know, even though our rocket crashed.

Of course, I'm NASA's biggest fan. So, you know, thank you very much to the people who had the faith to do that. Thank you. . Then came 2006, followed by a lot of pain. And then finally, the fourth Falcon 1 launch worked in 2008. And we were really down to our last pennies. In fact, I only thought I had enough money for three launches and the first three flopped. And we were able to gather enough to barely make it and make a fourth pitch. And thank God, the fourth release was successful in 2008. It was very painful. And then in late 2008, NASA awarded us the first major operating contract, which was to resupply cargo to the space station and bring it back.

Then a couple of years later, we did the first launch of the Falcon 9, version 1. And it had a capacity of about 10 tons in orbit. Therefore, it had about 20 times the capacity of Falcon 1 and was also assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft. So 2010 is our first mission to the space station. So we were able to finish development of Dragon and dock it to the space station in 2010. So... Sorry, 2010 is an expendable Dragon... an expendable Dragon. 2012 is when we delivered and returned cargo from the space station. In 2013 we began carrying out boat takeoff and landing tests. And then in 2014, we were able to make the first orbital booster make a soft landing in the ocean.

The landing was soft. He (inaudible) exploded. But the landing... for seven seconds, it was good. And we also improved the vehicle capacity from 10 tons to about 13 tons in LEO. And then in 2015, last year, in December, that was definitely one of the best moments of my life when the booster rocket came back and landed at Cape Canaveral. That was really... Yeah. So that really showed that we could bring an orbital-class booster from very high speed to the launch site and land it safely and with almost no refurbishment needed to get it back into the air. And if all goes well, we hope to fly one of the landed boosters again in a few months.

So, yeah, and then in 2016 we also demonstrated landing on a ship. Ship landing is important for very high-speed geosynchronous missions. And that's important for Falcon 9 reusability because about a quarter of our missions service the space station. But then there are some other missions in low Earth orbit. But the majority of our missions, probably 60% of our missions, are commercial geographic missions. So we have to do these high-speed missions that actually need to land on a ship out to sea. They do not have enough propellants on board to return to the launch site. So, looking ahead, the next steps, we were a little bit intentionally confused about this timeline.

But we were going to try to make as much progress as possible. Obviously it is with a very limited budget. But we're going to try to make as much progress as possible on the spacecraft and interplanetary transport booster elements, and hopefully we'll be able to complete the first spacecraft in development in about four years and begin suborbital flights with it. In fact, it has enough capacity that you can even go into orbit if you limit the amount of cargo with the spacecraft. Well, you really have to... you have to really strip it away. But in tanker form, it could definitely reach orbit.

It can't return, but it can go into orbit. Actually, I was thinking that maybe there is some market for really fast transporting things around the world, as long as we can land somewhere where noise isn't a big problem, because rockets are very noisy. But we could transport cargo to any place on Earth in 45 minutes at most. So in most places on Earth the duration would be 20 or 25 minutes. So maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of, you know, let's say, off the coast of New York, say 20 or 30 miles away, we could go from New York to Tokyo in, I don't know, 25? minutes;

Cross the Atlantic in ten minutes. Really most of your time would be getting to the ship, and then it would be very fast after that. So there are some intriguing possibilities there. Although we don't have that. And then the development of the propellant. In fact, we think the booster part is relatively simple because it's equivalent to an extension of the Falcon 9 booster. So, we don't see many obstacles there. Yes. But then trying to put it all together and make this actually work on Mars, if things go very well, it could be within ten years. But I don't want to say that's when it will happen.

It's like a huge amount of risk. It's going to cost a lot. It is very likely that we will not succeed, but we will do our best and try to make as much progress as possible. And we're going to try to send something to Mars on every Mars encounter from now on. So we plan to send Dragon 2, which is a powered lander, to Mars in a couple of years, and then probably do another Dragon mission in 2020. In fact, we want to establish a constant cadence, that there is always a flight leaving, like There is a train leaving the station.

With each encounter with Mars we will send a Dragon, at least one 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 will carry something on the order of at least two or three tons of payloads to the surface of Mars. . That's part of the reason we designed Dragon 2, to be a propulsion lander. As a booster lander, you can go anywhere in the solar system. So you can go to the moon. You can go... well, anywhere, really. Whereas, if something relies on parachutes or wings, then you can 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 anywhere that doesn't have a dense atmosphere, parachutes can't be used. But propulsion works anywhere. Therefore, the Dragon should be able to land on any solid or liquid surface in the solar system. I was very excited to see that the team managed to get all of our Raptor engine running before this conference. I just want to thank the Raptor team for really working seven days a week to try to get this done before the reveal, because I really wanted to show that we've made some hardware progress in this direction. And the Raptor is a real powerhouse.complicated.

It is much more complicated than Merlin because it is a full flow combustion stage, with a much higher pressure. I'm a little surprised it didn't explode with the first shot. Fortunately, it was fine. It's kind of interesting to see how simulated diamonds are formed. . And part of the reason for making the engine somewhat small, Raptor, although it has three times the thrust of a Merlin, is about the same size as a Merlin engine because it has three times the operating pressure. That means we can use many of the production techniques we've perfected with Merlin. We currently produce Merlin engines at a rate of almost 300 per year.

So we understand how to manufacture rocket motors in volume. Although the Mars vehicle uses 32 in the base and 9 in the upper stage, we have 51 engines to manufacture, which is within our production capabilities for Merlin. And this is a similar sized engine to the Merlin except for the expansion ratio. So we feel really comfortable being able to build this engine in volume at a price that doesn't exceed our budget. We also wanted to advance the primary structure. So, as I mentioned, this is actually a very difficult thing to do, to make something with carbon fiber. Although carbon fiber has an incredible strength-to-weight ratio, when you want to put liquid oxygen or super-cold liquid methane (particularly liquid oxygen) in a tank, it is subject to cracks and leaks, and is very difficult to manufacture.

The simple scale is also a challenge, because you have to place the carbon fiber exactly the right way in a huge mold, and you have to cure that mold at temperature. And then it's hard to create big carbon fiber structures that can do all those things and carry incredible loads. That's the other thing we want to focus on: the Raptor and then building the first development tank for the Mars spacecraft. This is really the most difficult part of the spaceship. We handled the other pieces quite well. But this was the most complicated. We wanted to address it first.

You get a size based on the size of the tank, which is actually quite large. Also many congratulations to the team who worked on it. They were also working seven days a week to try to achieve this before the IAC. We managed to build the first tank and the initial tests with the cryogenic propellants look quite positive. We have not seen any leaks or major problems. This is what the tank looks like from the inside. So you can get a real idea of ​​the size of this tank. It's actually completely smooth on the inside, but the way the layers of carbon fiber are arranged and reflect light makes it look faceted.

So what happens beyond Mars? So as we were thinking about the system, and the reason we call it a system, because I generally don't like to call things systems because everything is a system, including your dog, is that it's actually more than a vehicle. Obviously there is the rocket booster, the spacecraft, the tanker and the propellant plant, the on-site production of propellant. If you have all four of those elements, you can go anywhere in the solar system by jumping from planet to moon. So by establishing a propellant depot in the asteroid belt or on one of Jupiter's moons, you can go... you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter without a problem.

In fact, even from... even without a propellant depot on Mars, you can fly by Jupiter without a propellant depot. So, but by setting up a propellant depot, say, you know, Enceladus or Europa or... there are some options, and then doing another one on Saturn's moon Titan, and then maybe another one further out on Pluto or somewhere else. place in the solar system, this system really gives you the freedom to go wherever you want in the greater solar system. Then you can travel to the Kuiper belt or to the Earth's cloud. I wouldn't recommend this for interstellar travel, but this, just this basic system, as long as we have gas stations along the way, means full access to the entire solar system. .