International Astronautical Congress 5. Oktober 2023 Musk nimmt per Videoschaltung am IAC 2023 für ein Kamingespräch über die Fortschritte bei Starship und SpaceX' Pläne teil, die Menschheit multiplanetar zu machen.
Musk nimmt per Videoschaltung am IAC 2023 für ein Kamingespräch über die Fortschritte bei Starship und SpaceX' Pläne teil, die Menschheit multiplanetar zu machen.
Transkript Elon Musk
A great design but did not receive sufficient ground testing so never, never made it to orbit. But that would have been the sort of the closest, probably parallel to, to starship. The, the really the biggest difference, the most fundamental difference of starship is that it is designed to be fully reusable with both the booster and the ship or the, both the first and second stage being are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. So sort of a truly profound revolution in master orbit. You have to have I call it the four. The four Rs rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. Rrrr.
Interviewer
I love it. Like a pirate R R.
Interviewer
so what does success look like for this flight? Number two, what does success look like for you? What are you trying to achieve?
Elon Musk
Well, I do want to set expectations well, not too high. So there's a transform of new technology in this rocket. We have actually changed the entire stage separation system from something that was,
Elon Musk
not sure how to describe this but, but kind of a, a just, just a rotation and flip. We're, we're trying to, we're trying to move to a passive stage subsystem where you don't have pushers essentially in the. To try to eliminate parts. There's no pushers, no interstage like Falcon 9 has. And with Splite 2 we're actually trying to do hot staging. So hot staging would mean that we light the ship or upper stage engines while the boost engines are still partially thrusting. So we throttle down and shut down most of the booster engines. Then we light the, the ship engines and there's, there's a vent area which looks comically small actually,
Interviewer
which hopefully is
Elon Musk
not because you're essentially blasting the top of the booster with the ship. Now this is actually from physics standpoint the most efficient way to do stage separation. And the Soviets, and later the Russians made extensive use of hot staging. But of course this is the first time we're doing it. So I would say that's the riskiest part of the flight for flight two. And if the engine's light and the ship doesn't blow itself up during stage seven, then I think we've got a decent chance of reaching orbit. Now technically it's a scooch below orbit because it's going to do almost a complete circuit of the Earth but then splash down somewhere in the Pacific just off the coast of Hawaii because the ship is designed to re enter and as a heat shield. So we want to make. Now we don't know if this, we think it'll work but we aren't sure if it'll work. So if it doesn't work, we want it to not work over the Pacific, which is a very large body of water with almost no people on it.
Interviewer
Excellent target. Excellent target.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I always think it's funny, you know, people call Earth Earth because Earth is water. Earth is 70% water. And if you take. An actual round version of the Earth, not a Mercator projection, but at the globe and you center it on the Pacific, it just looks like water. It's like, where's the land? So anyway, this is quite helpful when you're doing experimental rocket flights.
Interviewer
So how many more test flights are coming up? And when do you think you're going to try to catch stars ship on
Elon Musk
a tower with our giant Mechazilla?
Elon Musk
listen, I saw Kong versus Godzilla and that's what gave me the idea. In fact, if we gave our tower legs, it could just tromp around like, like Mechazille. In the next year or maybe less than a year. And then hopefully, if we get lucky, we might catch the ship towards the end of next year.
Interviewer
Where does the catch take place? Is it Willie Mays in the middle of outfield over his shoulder, or is it Florida somewhere?
Elon Musk
No. So both the booster and the ship come back to the launch site.
Interviewer
Okay. Fantastic.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that's what I mean by the, in fact, I mean the, the thing that since we need a giant tower with customized arms to lift the booster and the ship onto the launch pad, we don't absolutely need it. We can technically do it with humongous cranes on a low wind day, but that's quite unwieldy. The tower with the arms is capable of lifting the booster and the ship even on a very windy day or moderately windy day. So then it just seemed to me that, well, if we can lift the ship and the booster, the ship onto the launch stand or the booster onto the launch stand and the ship onto the booster with those same arms, we should be able to catch the, the, the boost of the ship with those same models. You know, we've gotten pretty good with, with, with, with the thruster based landing. And in fact we, we can make this, we can make the, the rocket hover in midair. In fact, we were able to do that many years ago. If you look at the old Falcon 9 test videos, which we've called grasshopper, where, where we Falcon 9 booster and we'd have it just go up and, and hover at 100 meters and then translate over another 100 meters. Then translate back and then come back and land. So we're able to do that over a decade ago. It's not obviously very efficient with propellant to have a rocket hover, but it can be done. So that was, I was like, okay, let's just have the rocket come back and you know, hover briefly and how then the arms come together and catch it. So that's the, that's the general ideas going back to what I was saying. It's not just reusability, it's rapid reusability. And it doesn't get more rapid than bringing it back to the launch site. And so in principle, the booster, booster comes back very fast. By the way. One way or another that booster is coming back to land or it's going to land fast because with the high thrust to weight that we're aiming for, which is sort of on the order of 1.3 to 1.4, and a staging ratio which is currently about 3 to 1 in favor of the booster. So propellant to the propellant on booster to propellant on Chevy is about 3 to 1 on the current version, but it's trending closer to 2 to 1 on with future versions. Means that we're shifting more and more of the Delta V burden to the ship side. That means the booster actually uses up its propellant quite quickly and will trend towards only about 100 seconds or so of a booster flight. And the booster will immediately flip around, boost back to the launch site and land. And so it really, we're talking about the booster being back at the launch site in about four or five minutes, which is pretty, pretty wild to think it's like, you know, five minute booster. Basically it's back, it's landed somehow. Whether it's either crashed or it's landed on the, it's been caught by the arms, one of the two and within five minutes. And so, so then you then lands back on launch sand and you can then refill propellants. The ship side obviously is going to take a minimum of an hour and a half to get around the planet, something pretty fast. But you go to circle globe and obviously that depends on what inclination. And so what's your launch azimuth, what's your inclination of the booster as to whether it has a flight coming back over the launch site or not, if it's technically possible to do it in a single orbit before we are confident that the ship, like I said, the hardest part for ship reusability, that is the hardest part of the equation. So but with Falcon 9 we've gotten pretty far with reusability. The booster. It's now highly unusual for the booster to not come back and land. It's gotten quite normal for the booster to come back and land. We now have a couple of boosters that are, I've done 17, I think 18 flights at this point. And then the fairing is also recovered. So the fairing reusability is also solid. But the Falcon 9 design does not allow for a reusability of the upper stage. Loosely. Gigantic. That was my first impression when I first went up there in a man lift and climbed through the little hole for the starship. Initial rough prototype and I was like this, like what have we done? This thing is too, this thing is ridiculously big. So now this actually can be great for science though. So one of the exciting projects that we're working with is with the solar motor at Berkeley on a telescope, a space telescope that is able to use that. It's got an enormous lens. I think it's perhaps a 7 or 8 meter diameter lens and it's actually a satellite that was meant for, or a, the lens was meant for a ground based satellite. But if you then take that same satellite and put it in orbit, its capabilities are greatly enhanced because you don't have the obfuscation of the atmosphere. So that's why for example, the Hubble, which is actually a fairly small telescope can do better than I think any ground, maybe any historical ground satellite, especially in the visual spectrum. So, so we're very excited about what it can do for space science because really at this point, especially for, for any photons that, where there's interference with the atmosphere, so any, any sort of short wavelength photons, you really want your satellite to be in vacuum or your telescope being vacuum. So that's really the future. So I think there's a lot of exciting potential there for planetary, for space science. And, but like really fundamentally the reason it's so, so gigantic is, is that if you're on a, you know, long journey to Mars, I think being cooped up in a, something the size of a minivan would be unappealing to most people.
Interviewer
Just a comparison for the audience here. I think the Hubble telescope was something like 2.4 meter diameter. And so you're talking about I think three times the size somewhere along that order for the Mir. That's incredible. We've seen some changes down there in Texas at Starbase. I don't know if that's where you're streaming from here today, but there's a New factory that you're working on to enable a faster manufacturing rate. Can you talk to us a little bit about bit about that? What are you trying, what are your goals? What do you, what are you trying to achieve with the new factory?
Elon Musk
Yeah, so we are building a giant factory for a giant rocket. And I mean honestly, I recommend people visit Starbase. As it turns out, it's on a state highway. So for the. I think it's one of the rare situations where, and actually I don't mind, I think it's kind of cool that the public can actually drive within a literal stone's throw away from the factory and the launch site and actually see the rocket firsthand. In fact, if you go on the Internet right now, including on the X platform, there are people who are live streaming at 24 7, the entire construction, launchpad, everything. And so if people say like, can I go see it? It's so easy to go see. You can just literally fly to Brownsville and drive down, drive to the beach and you can see it literally a stone's throw away the factory and the launch site. So anyone who wants to do that, I recommend it. It's very, very easy. No permission required. So yeah, we're building this giant rocket factory. The engines are still manufactured in California at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, which is also, that's, it's also an odd location. That's where we built the Falcon 9 rockets and the Dragon spacecraft. Really about five minutes from LAX at the, sort of what used to be a Northrop headquarters, I believe. So that's. So anyway that's. But yeah, we're rolling this, the Strand factory. So the thing is, so in order to, if you look at the, in the grand scheme of things, say okay, what is required to have a self sustaining base on Mars or city on Mars, you have to really think of it in terms of very large tonnage. The. And if we could even get the tonnage estimate to correct with an order of magnitude, I think we're doing well. So the, you know, I think we should probably aim for something like a million tons of useful load delivered to the surface of Mars, which requires roughly 5 million tons to Earth orbit. So, you know, because you get about 20 for whatever mass you get to Earth orbit, you get about 20% of that mass landed to the surface of Mars, you know, give or take, maybe you can get 25% optimistically. So that's why this thing is so gigantic is we've got to get 5 million tons to Earth to orbit, which hopefully Gets about a million tons to surface of Mars and hopefully a million tons is enough to create a self sustaining city on Mars.
Interviewer
Incredible. So talking about Mars, any new predictions on when you, I know this is your ultimate goal, your destination. Any predictions on when starship might land on Mars without crew? Maybe a crewed flight? Any, any prediction there? Well,
Elon Musk
I think three or four years.
Elon Musk
Yeah, something like. All right, I have to check with the Earth. Mars, you know, Earthmods, you know, have orbital synchronization about every 26 months. So you can't just go, you fly to Mars when it's on the other side of the sun from Earth. That's unwieldy. So roughly every 26 months the orbits are in the right relative position and then you, then you have the Mars transport window. So I think, you know, but I think it's sort of feasible within the next four years to do an uncrewed test, test landing there. Yeah.
Interviewer
Didn't have enough on your plate? You're doing a lunar lander version? Yes.
Elon Musk
really starship should be a generalized transport system to anywhere in the solar system. That's the intent with, when you, when you have propulsive landing, you, you, you can land anywhere whether there's an atmosphere, no atmosphere. You know, it's not really dependent on water. You know, obviously, you know, for crude capsules on Earth we've generally gone with parachutes and water or you know, in Russia it's on land. But then they need retro rockets right at the end to sort of slow things down. So a propulsive system should generalize to be able to land anywhere on a solid surface, anywhere in the solar system. So the, the moon, while it's sort of dusty, that, that the moon is actually hotter than, it's not just a big dust pile. So it's, it's hotter than you think. The, the lunar regolith. So I'm, I'm sort of optimistic that we can take a starship that's fairly, you know, unmodified from what would land on Earth or Mars. Obviously you need legs, but apart from that, I suspect you could land the starship with minor modifications on the moon and the same would go for once you have a propellant plant on Mars. You could then go to the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter. If you could establish a propellant plant there, then you could go to, of Saturn and ultimately all the way out into the Kuiper belt and ertlad.
Interviewer
What you're talking about requires propellant transfer obviously in orbit. Can you Explain to everyone watching why that's necessary and how it works and how you work to progress to make that propellant transfer happen.
Elon Musk
Yes. So really propellant transfer is a similar problem to just docking. Now we've gotten pretty good at docking with the Dragon, going to the space station and docking with the space station is really quite difficult because we didn't design the space station and the space station has a lot of complexities and has crew on board. So we have to be extremely careful. And that the docking with the space station takes is like, I would say it's far more difficult to talk with the space station than it would be to dock with our own spaceship. And, and so propellant transfer just really means that we, we send a, a starship up there with no payload and, and it just transfers its propellant to a ship that is already there. So you have to dock with the ship that is going to Mars or the moon and transfer the propellant from a version of the ship that has no cargo. Now there'll be a future sort of tanker, optimized version of starship where we, you know, we stretch the tanks and have little to no cargo space because that's the optimal thing for a tanker. But you don't have to do that. That will increase the propellant load of the tanker or you know, the propellant transferability of the, of the tanker. But it's not, it's not absolutely necessary. You could just, you could in theory use an unmodified starship and transfer balance that way.
Interviewer
So I would imagine that you're doing this and you may have multiple launches in either rapid succession or maybe multiple pads launching multiple versions of the vehicle. Is that all taking place from Texas? And how quickly do those launches have to take place to make this work?
Elon Musk
Yeah, we'll, we'll have a launch site in Texas as well as in Florida. So we've actually partially built a starship launch Pad at Pad 39A, which is where we launch Falcon Heavy and our crewed with the crew Dragon. So we've partially built, and we'll probably, we'll fully build that out over time and probably have at some point a greenfield location for starship at the Cape. Now in the, in the sort of, you say like four or five year time frame where perhaps we're launching several times a day, then we may need to go to an ocean based platform. Just if you're launching, I don't know, 10 times a day, that might be a bit much even for the Cape, I don't know. So we may end up doing platform based launches from a specially designed sort of ocean going platform. But we will need to do a lot of launches. We're talking about thousands of launches per year. So, and so you do get up to the sort of what I was talking about, million tons or 5 million tons to orbit, that if you've got, you know, a thousand launches a year, each of which do over 100 tons, that's 100,000 tons of, you know, per year to orbit. There's still not quite enough. I think we'd want to get to roughly a million tons of orbit per year per year, which would mean that you get to a million tons to Mars in five years. These are very big numbers. Obviously. Just put things into perspective. All of Earth launch capability right now apart from Falcon is about 400 tons to orbit per year. Falcon 9 this year will do, I think, around 15 or 1600 tons. So Falcon 9, you know, is already doing about 80% of Earth mass to orbit. And next year we expect to increase that by about 40 or 50% on the Falcon side. So you know, maybe 2,500 tons to orbit for Falcon next year. But these are still small numbers compared to what's required for essentially making life multi planetary. Making life multi planetary. You've got to be in the sort of hundreds of thousands to millions of tons of Earth orbit per year.
Interviewer
Unbelievable numbers really. As somebody worked in the launch business for several years, it's incredible for me to even try to think about that much mass to orbit in one year. It's.
Interviewer
Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. Ludicrous mode, I think. Yeah. For launch?
Elon Musk
Very much so, yeah. It's either either we do that or we're a single plant species forever. So we either achieve those kind of numbers or we will never have a self sustaining city on Mars
Interviewer
into building this amazing launch system. You're also working on a Polaris mission that's going to allow, I think Dragon to open and have people actually floating in space doing an eva and you're building a spacesuit for that so you can talk about that space suit. And can you use that same suit on the moon and Mars and for other missions?
Elon Musk
Yeah. So SpaceX spacesuit, we do expect to evolve that to be something that can be an EVA suit on the ground, on the moon and Mars. And it started off initially as, as really just a pressure suit just in case there's an emergency, emergency depression pressurization of the spacecraft. So it was basically like a self contained life support system in suit form and obviously we'll retain that capability. But now for an upcoming flight, we want to do an EVA or extra vehicle. You know, basically go float around in space still on a tether. So it's not, it's not going to be an independent little space, little spacesuit that's just flying around. We could do that, but. And maybe that'll happen on a future flight, but it will be a tethered eva. You're just out there floating in the void, connected by a thin cord to the spaceship.
Interviewer
You put a Tesla in space, this was like an amazing thing to see a Tesla actually flying into space. So you've already put one of the vehicles in space. Are you thinking about making a Tesla rover? Maybe Moon or Mars? Any ideas for cybertruck on the moon?
Elon Musk
It would look cool, that's for sure. The nice thing about electric cars is they obviously do not require oxygen to. They're not combustion cars, so they don't have to ingest oxygen from the ambient atmosphere. So yeah, I think Tesla could easily make a car that, you know, like a cybertruck lunar variant, just get the, get the moon option package. So yeah, I mean the reason that we launched the car, the reason we launched the car heavy, I should say, is that we want to have something that was exciting as a initial payload, but, but where the loss of the load would not be catastrophic. So people wonder why is my car orbiting Earth and Mars? Because it's in an elliptical orbit and, and actually it almost touches, it touches like the edge of the asteroid belt and, and goes past the orbit of Mars. It's just that we weren't sure if the first flight of heavy would fail or not. And we wanted to just have a picture that was more exciting than
Interviewer
I thought. It was brilliant, really. A masterstroke in terms of getting attention of the world really, to put that in orbit.
Interviewer
Can Starship be used as a space station? How long could it stay in orbit and what would be the purpose of that? How, how could that work?
Elon Musk
So how long could starship be in orbit?
Interviewer
Yeah. Could it be its own space station? If you wanted to put a starship with a capability, a laboratory, how long could that, could it stay in orbit and still come down?
Elon Musk
Oh, there's no real limit. You could stay in orbit for a very long time. The, the, the, the volume of the Sasha bearing is roughly comparable to the volume of the, of the International Space Station. So there's about, about a thousand cubic meters of volume in the, in the bearing. I think space station is a comparable
Interviewer
amount and would have the power to run a lot of laboratory experiments.
Elon Musk
Sorry, yeah. Given that it's, given that it's similar volume to the space station, you could do what, what you're doing in the space station on a starship if you want, but there's no limit to how long you can sit out to stay out there. It's really just you need, you know, solar panels, battery and some thrusters to maintain orbit.
Interviewer
How about point to point transportation? I know when you were in Guadalajara at the ic, you got, you kind of hinted at a little bit of the point where. Point to point capability of transportation. I can't remember the exact amount of time to get from one side of the world to the next, but can you talk about that? How do you see the future point to point using starship?
Elon Musk
Yeah. So. The fastest way with known physics to get from one place to another on Earth is with inter intercontinental ballistic missile. This is, this is why ICBMs with nukes are kind of like the ultimate weapon. Now in this case it's sort of leave the nuke at landing, but it's, it's, it's certainly very feasible. Obviously if we can take off and transport and land on Mars or the moon, we can take off and land on Earth too. So, so it really comes down to a question of, of is it economically viable compared to long distance aircraft. And I think our backing envelope numbers suggest that it actually has a shot at being economically viable for long distance transport on Earth For a few reasons. The propellant cost is actually quite low. Being liquid methane production. The cost of liquiduction is primarily productions about 77, 78% liquid oxygen mass and roughly 22 or 23% liquid methane. So the propellant cost is quite as low as cost propellant you could possibly get on Earth. And then because rocket's moving so fast, you can use it about, in theory about 10 times more than you could use an aircraft. So Falcon 9 or sorry, Starship can go from, let's say Los Angeles to Sydney or something like that in 20 minutes, basically maybe half an hour at most. So you know, whereas I think, I think an airliner takes about 14 or 15 hours. So you've got something which is really much faster than an aircraft. And so for an airliner that you can do basically an order of magnitude more trips with starship than you can with an airliner. Which means that the, and this. And no pilots are needed. In fact you can't. This is not only a computer can pilot this because human reaction times are not fast enough. So then you don't have the pilot costs, you don't have the food costs, you don't have the, you know, you don't really even need bathrooms if we can get there in half an hour. So it actually would work out that it's actually, we think, lower cost than long distance aircraft.
Interviewer
Okay, you got a little chuckle here in the crowd about the no bathroom line. So I think people are looking forward to it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, less than half an hour. You know, you say like go, just go before you hop on, you know, and yeah, you'll be there fast. I mean, you could technically, you know, have, I don't know, breakfast in la, lunch in London and you know, dinner in Singapore and then be back in LA for bedtime.
Interviewer
All right, you heard it here, guys. Huge, huge round of applause here. So you're connecting now, I think something like 2 million people with Starlink, right. With your, with your satellite communication system and growing rapidly. You're mastering communications from space to Earth. From low Earth orbit. You're now doing inter satellite links with this system. What do you see for Starlink being used as a relay, let's say around the moon, or for comm relay all the way to Mars and back?
Elon Musk
Yeah, Well, for Mars, Mars you'd want basically like a laser relay system. Essentially. It sort of depends on what you, what, what, what bandwidth are you looking for? Obviously, in order to have continuous coverage with Mars, you'd have to have some relay system because you can't transmit through the sun. So when Mars on, you know, when the sun's between you and the, and Mars, you have to do a bank shot through a relay satellite so that your photons don't have to go through the sun. And then ultimately we want, you know, terabit, maybe petabit level data transfer between Earth and Mars. So then you're going to, you're going to want probably some relay satellites along the way to be able to do that. It's just really, it's a bandwidth thing. You'd want to use lasers. And then the laser beam is going to widen with distance so that then you need to be able to receive the laser beam before it gets too wide. This means that you need a series of satellites in order to communicate with Mars at its furthest distance, especially with very high bandwidth. You can also do low bandwidth with longer wavelength length photons. But if there's a, you know, human city on Mars, you'd want to have very high bandwidth. So therefore a bunch of lasers and satellites, Starlink Already uses inter lasers for inter satellite communication.
Interviewer
So if, if I may, just a couple more questions. Throughout this week here at the ic, we've been inspired. There's thousands of young people here. I think 41% of our delegates are under the age of 35, which is incredible by, by any space conference metric, we get a lot of young people here. There's delegates from the Space Generation Advisory Council, from the Future Space Leaders foundation, from the YP program here at the iaf. Do you have a message for these young people, the young engineers and scientists that are here? Many of them have been inspired by you. Anything you can say to them about pursuing a career in space or what motivated you to do all the things that you're doing?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean I'm interested in that which further civilization and I think we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so as to better understand the nature of the universe and even to understand which questions to ask. Like, you know, one of the most inspiring books I've read was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where they're trying to understand the meaning of life in the, you know, Hitchhiker's Guide. And the, I mean the larger message of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that you actually need to know what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And we don't yet know what questions to ask. So I'm just curious, really. I'm just curious as to the nature of reality. Where does, where does it all go to? Where does it, where does it come from? Where are the aliens, for example? Are there aliens? Are we alone? People often ask me if I'm seeing any evidence of aliens. And I unfortunately have seen no evidence of aliens yet. We are the aliens, as far as I can tell. And I think if anyone would know, it would probably be me. And I've not seen any evidence of aliens. So what that perhaps suggests is that this tiny candle of consciousness, that is humanity is all that exists in a vast darkness. And we should do everything we can to ensure that the candle does not go out bound.
Interviewer
We've had a wonderful week here in Baku. Yes. So we've had a wonderful week here in Baku. Next year we're going to Milan in Italy for the 75th IAC. We would love to have you come back for sure. If you're in the neighborhood or you can hop over in a starship. We would love to have you.
Elon Musk
It would be quite the, quite the, quite the entry. Land on the roof.
Interviewer
I'll ask the Italian hosts to see if that's possible. So, just a fun question again. When do you think we can host an IAC in outer space?
Elon Musk
That's a good question. Probably less than 10 years.
Interviewer
Let's have it. Well, Elon, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Congratulations on the World Space Award. Well deserved, and our pleasure. We'd love to have you back. Good luck with your next launch.
Elon Musk
Thank you. Thanks. It was an honor to be interviewed. Thank you, everyone.