← BackSeptember 29, 2017IACWithElon Musk0:00 / 0:00CC1×YouTubeIACSeptember 29, 2017Full IAC keynote unveiling the BFR and the plan to make life multiplanetary.Full IAC keynote unveiling the BFR and the plan to make life multiplanetary.TranscriptAnnouncerIt's a pleasure for me as president of the International Astronautical Federation to welcome all you today to the concluding session of the global networking Forum for this ISC 2017 which has been a huge success. In particular, I want to thank Premier Wazarel, Minister Amiltad Smind and Lord Mayor Hayes for their support and presence.Now let me please introduce our distinguished speaker for today. 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 multi planetary species. Today he will provide an update on those plans and first chair at ISC 2016 in Guadalajara last year.SpaceX has had a number of firsts, including the first private company to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station, the first entity to land an orbital class booster back on land and on drone ships out of sea. And the first to refly an orbital class booster. In addition to SpaceX is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and chairman of SolarCity.Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk.Elon MuskAll right, so welcome everyone and I'm going to talk more about what it takes to become a multi planet species.And just a brief refresher on why this is important. I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a space faring civilization and a multi planet species than if we're not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great.And that's what being a space faring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future would be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. That's why. So let me go into more detail on becoming multiclamp species.This is the updated design for the.Well, we're sort of searching for the right name, but the code name at least is bfr.And.Probably the most important thing that I want to convey in this presentation is that I think we have figured out how to pay for it. This is very important.In last year's presentation, you know, we're really searching for what the right way. You know, how do we pay for this thing? We went through various ideas, Kickstarter, you know, collecting underpants.These didn't pan out, but now we think, we think we've got a way to do it, which is to have to have a smaller vehicle, still pretty big, but one that can Serve one that can do everything that's needed in the greater Earth orbit activity. So essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant. We want to have one system, one booster and ship that replaces Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon.So if we can do that, then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9, Heavy and Dragon can be applied to this system.So that's really fundamental.So let's see what progress have we made in this direction. So last time you saw the giant tank, that's actually a 12 meter tank and you can see the relative scale of it. It's 1,000 cubic meters of volume inside. That's actually more pressurized volume than an A380. Just to put that into perspective, we developed a new carbon fiber matrix that's much stronger and more capable at cryo than anything before.And it holds 1200 tons of liquid oxygen. So we tested it. So we successfully tested it up to its design pressure and then went a little further.So we wanted to see where it would break. And we found out where it would break. It shot about 300ft into the air and landed in the ocean. We fished it out.But we now get a pretty good sense of what it takes to create a huge carbon fiber tank that can hold cryogenic liquid.That's actually extremely important for making a light spaceship.The next key element is on the engine side. We have to have an extremely efficient engine. So the Raptor engine will be the highest thrust weight engine, we believe of any engine of any kind ever made. We already have now 1200 seconds of firing across 42 main engine tests. We fired it for 100 seconds. It could fire for much longer than 100 seconds.That's just the size of the test tanks. And then the duration of the firing you're seeing right now is about 40 seconds, which is the length of the firing for landing on Mars.The test engine currently operates at 200 atmospheres or 200 bar. The flight engine will be at 250 bar. And then we believe over time we could probably get that to a little over 300 bars.The next key element is propulsive landing.So in order to land on places like the moon, where there is no atmosphere and certainly no runways, or to land on Mars where the atmosphere is too thin to land, even if there were runways to land with the wing, you really have to get propulsive landing. Perfect. So that's what we've been practicing with Falcon 9. So this is just a series of landing, but these quite mesmerizing.But we now have 16 successful landings in A row and that's with.So the, it's 60 in a row and that's with, with really without any redundancy. So Falcon 9 lands on a single engine. The final landing is always done with a single engine, whereas the BFR will always have multi engine out capability. So if you can get to a very high reliability with even a single engine and then you can land, and then you can land with either of two engines, I think we can get to a landing reliability that is on par with the safest commercial airliners.So you can essentially count on the landing. It's not like the, you want minimum pocket factor on landing.And it can land with also very high precision. In fact, we believe the precision at this point is good enough for propulsive landing that we do not need legs for the next version. It will literally land with so much precision it will land back on its launch mounts.So the, the launch rate has also been, has been, is increasing exponentially. The particularly when you take tanking or refilling on orbit into account and taking the idea of establishing a self sustaining base on Mars or the moon or elsewhere seriously, you need thousands, ultimately thousands of ships and tens of thousands of retanking or refilling operations, which means you need many launches per day.The you really need to be looking in terms of how many landings are occurring. You need to be looking at your watch, not your calendar. So while this is quite a high launch rate that we're talking about here, by conventional standards, it's still a very small launch rate compared to what will ultimately be needed.But just for those who are unfamiliar with how many orbital launches occur every year, it's approximately 60 orbital launches occur per year. Which means if SpaceX does do something like 30 launches next year, it'll be approximately half of all orbital launches that occur on Earth.The next thing is a key technology is automated rendezvous and docking. So in order to retank or refill the spaceship in orbit, you have to be able to rendezvous and dock with the spaceship with very high precision and transfer propellant. So that's one of the things that we've perfected with Dragon. Dragon 1 will do an automated rendezvous and docking without any pilot control to the space station.Dragon 1 currently uses the canadarm for the final placement onto the space station. Dragon 2, which launches next year, will not need to use the Canada arm. So Dragon 2 will directly dock with the space station and it can do so with zero human intervention. You just press go and it will dock.Dragon has also allowed us to perfect heat Shield technology. So when you enter at high velocity, you'll melt almost anything. The reason meteors don't reach Earth is they melt or disintegrate before they reach the ground, unless they're very big. So you have to have a sophisticated heat shield technology that can withstand unbelievably high temperatures.And that's what we've been perfecting with Dragon and also a key part of the, of any planet colonizing system.Next slide.So Falcon 1, this is where we started out.A lot of people really only heard of SpaceX relatively recently. So they may think say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was, but it wasn't. We started off with just a few people who really didn't know how to make rockets.And the reason I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer was not because I wanted to, it's because I couldn't hire anyone, nobody good would join.So ended up being that by default. And I messed up the first three launches. First three launches failed. Unfortunately the fourth launch, which was the, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. The fourth launch worked, or it would have been, that would have been it for SpaceX.But fate liked us that day. So the fourth launch worked.And interesting. Today is the, is the ninth anniversary of that launch. So.I didn't realize that until I was told that just, just earlier today. But this is a very emotional day actually.But Falcon 1 is, was quite a small rocket. When we're doing Falcon 1, we're really trying to figure out what is the smallest useful payload that we get to orbit. I thought okay, something around half a ton to orbit would be able to launch, you know, that launch a decent sized small satellite to low Earth orbit. And that's why we sized Falcon 1.But it's really quite small compared to Falcon 9. So Falcon 9, particularly when you factor in payload, Falcon 9 is many times more sort of on the order of 30 times more payload than Falcon 1. And Falcon 9 has reuse of the primary booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket and hopefully soon reefs of the, of the fairing the big nose cone at the front.So we think we can probably get to something like somewhere between 70 and 80% reusability with the Falcon 9 system. And then, and hopefully towards the end of this year we'll be launching Falcon Heavy, which is Falcon Heavy ended up being a much more complex program than we thought. It sounds easy, Electro. Falcon Heavy actually it sounds like it should be, should be easy because it's two first stages of Falcon 9 strapped on as boosters.It's actually not.We have to redesign almost everything except the upper stage in order to take the increased loads. So Falcon Heavy ended up being much more a new vehicle than we realized. So it took us a lot longer to get it done. But the boosters have all now been tested and they're on their way to Cape Canaveral.And we are now beginning serious development of bfr. So you can see that the payload difference is quite dramatic.BFR in fully reusable configuration without any orbital refueling. We expect to have a payload capability of 150 tons solar orbit.And that compares to about 30 for Falcon Heavy, which is partially reusable. Where this really makes a tremendous difference is in the cost, which I'll come to in some of the later slides.So let's go to the next slide.And just by the way, if.Yeah. So with VFR you can get a sense of scale by looking at the tiny person there.It's really quite a big vehicle. Main body diameter is about 9 meters or 30ft. And it consists of the booster is lifted by 31 raptor engines that produce a thrust about 5,400 tons lifting a 4,400 ton vehicle straight up.So then just the basics about the ship. 48 meter length dry master expecting to be about 85 tons. Technically our design says 75 tons. But inevitably this mass growth and that ship will contain 1100 tons of propellant with a design of 150 tons and a return mass of 50.So you can think of this as essentially combining the upper stage of of the rocket with Dragon. It's like if Falcon 9 upper stage and Dragon were combined.So as we I'll go into each of these items in detail, but you've got the engine section in the rear, the propellant tanks in the middle and then a large payload bay in the front. And that payload bay is actually eight stories tall. In fact you can foot. You can fit a whole stack of Falcon 1 rockets in the payload bay.Compared to the design I showed last time. You'll see that there is a small delta wing at the back of the rocket. The reason for that is in order to expand the mission envelope of the BFR spaceship.Depending on whether you're landing or you're entering a planet or a moon that has no atmosphere, a thin atmosphere or a dense atmosphere. And depending on whether you have you're re entering with no, no payload in the front, a small payload or a heavy payload. You have to balance the Rocket out as it's coming in. And so the Delta wing at the back, which will also, which also includes a split flap for pitch and roll control, allows us to control the pitch angle despite having a wide range of payloads in the nose and a wide range of atmospheric densities.So we try to avoid having the Delta wing, But it was necessary in order to generalize the capability of the spaceship such that it could land anywhere in the solar system.So let's look at a couple of things in detail.So the cogger area has a pressurized volume of 825 cubic meters.This also is greater than the pressurized area of an A380. So really is capable of carrying a tremendous amount of payload in a Mars transit configuration. Since you'd be taking three months in a really good scenario, but maybe as much as six months, some number of months, a single, single digit ones, you probably want a cabin, not just a seat.So the Mars transit configuration consists of 40 cabins. And it sort of depends on. You could conceivably have five or six people per cabin if you really want to craft people in. But I think mostly we would expect to see two to three people per cabin. And so normally about 100 people per flight to Mars. And then there's a central storage area and galley and a solar storm shelter entertainment area.And I think probably, you know, a good situation for at least VFR version 1. Then going to the main body of the vehicle, the center body area, This is where the propellant is located.And this is subcooled methane and oxygen. So as you trill the methane and oxygen below its liquid point, you get a fairly meaningful density increase. You get on the order of 10 to 12% density increase, which makes quite a big difference for the propellant load. So we're expecting to carry 240 tons of CH4 and 860 tons of oxygen.In the fuel tank are header tanks. So when you come in for a landing, your orientation may change quite significantly. But you can't have the propellant just sloshing around all over in main tanks. You have to have the header tanks that can feed the main engines with precision. So that's what you see most in the fuel tank, then the engine section.So the ship engine section consists of of four vacuum raptor engines and two sea level engines. So all six engines are capable of gimbaling. The engines with the high expansion ratio have a relatively smaller gimbal area or gimbal range and a slower gimbal rate. The two center engines Have a very high gimbal range and can gimbal very quickly.And you can land the ship with either one of the two center engines. So when you come in for a landing, it will light both engines. But if one of the center engines fails at any point, it will be able to land successfully with the other engine. And then within each engine there's a great deal of redundancy.So we want the landing risk to be as close to zero as possible.And there's some basic stats about the engines.The sea level engines are about a 330 ISPs at sea level. The Alpha stage engine is 375. Now this is version one. So I think over time there's potential to increase that specific impulse by 5 to 10 seconds. And as I was mentioning, also increase the chamber pressure by 50 bar or so. And then for refilling what you just saw, the two shifts would actually mate.At the rear section. They would use the same mating interface that they used to connect to the booster on liftoff. So we'd reuse that mating interface and then, and reuse the propellant fill lines that are used when the booster is, when the ship is on the booster. And then to transfer propellant, it becomes very simple.Use control thrusters to accelerate in the direction that you want to empty. So if, sorry, in this direction, propellant goes that way and you transfer the propellant very easily into the, from the, from the tanker to the ship. So going to rocket capability, this gives you sort of a rough sense of, of rocket capability.Starting off at the low end with the Falcon one at a half ton and then going up to BFR at 150. So I think it's important to note that VFR has more capability than Saturn V even with full reusability.But here's the really, really important fundamental point. Let's look at the launch cost.The order revers.Now, at first glance, this may seem ridiculous, but it's not. The same is true of aircraft.If you bought, say a small single engine turboprop aircraft, that would be one and a half to two million dollars.To charter a 747 from California to Australia is half a million dollars there and back. The single engine tower can't even get to Australia.So a fully reusable system like fully reusable giant aircraft like 747 costs a third as much as an expendable tiny aircraft.In one case you have to build an entire aircraft. In other case you just have to refuel something. So it's really crazy that we build These sophisticated rockets and then crash them every time we fly. This is mad.So, yeah, I can't emphasize how profound this is and how important reusability is.And often I'll be told, but you could get more payload if you made it expendable. I said, yes, you could also get more payload from an aircraft if you got rid of the landing gear and the flaps and just parachute it out when you got to your destination. But that would be crazy and you would sell zero aircraft.So reusability is absolutely fundamental.Now I want to talk about the value of orbital refilling. This is also extremely important.So if you just fly BFR to orbit and don't do any refilling, it's pretty good. You'll get 150 tons to loath orbit and have no fuel to go anywhere else.However, if you send up tankers and refill in orbit, you can refill the tanks all the way to the top and get 150 tons all the way to Mars.And if the tanker has high reuse capability, then you're just paying for the cost of propellant. And the cost of oxygen is extremely low and the cost of punishment of methane is extremely low. So if that's all you're dealing with, the cost of refilling your spaceship on orbit is tiny and you can get 150 tons all the way to Mars.So automated rendezvous and docking and refilling, absolutely fundamental.So then, getting back to the question of how do we pay for this system?This is really quite a profound, I won't call it breakthrough, but realization that if we can build a system that cannibalizes our own products, makes our own products redundant, then all of the resources which are quite enormous that are used for Falcon 9 Heavy and Dragon can be applied to one system.Some of our customers are conservative and they want to see the, they want to see BFR fly several times before they are comfortable launching it. So what we plan to do is to build ahead and have a stock of Falcon 9 and Dragon vehicles so that customers can be comfortable if they want to use the old rocket, the old spacecraft, they can do that because we'll have a bunch in stock.But all of our resources will then turn towards building vfr.And we believe that we can do this with the revenue we receive for launching satellites and for servicing the space station.So going to the satellites portion, the size of this being a 9 meter diameter vehicle is a huge enabler for new satellites. We can actually send something that is almost 9 meters in diameter to orbit.So for example, if you want to do a new Hubble, you could send a mirror that has 10 times the surface area of the current Hubble as a single unit. It doesn't have to unfold or anything.Or you can send a large number of small satellites. You can do whatever you'd like. You can actually also go around and if you wanted to collect old satellites or clean up space debris, you can just use the sort of chomper over there and go around and collect satellites or collect space debris if you want.So that may be something we have to do in the future.But that fairing would open up and retract and come back down. So it enables launching of Earth satellites that are significantly larger than anything we've done before, or significantly more satellites at a time than anything that's been done before. It's also intended to be able to service the space station.I know it looks a little big relative to the space station, but the shuttle also looked big, so it'll work. Looks a little outsized, but it'll work. So it'll be capable of doing what Dragon does today in terms of transporting cargo and what Dragon 2 will do in terms of transporting crew and cargo. So space station servicing, it can also go obviously much further than that.Like for example, the moon.Based on the calculations we've done, we can actually do lunar surface missions with no propellant production on the surface of the moon. So if we do a high elliptic parking orbit for the ship and retank in a high elliptic orbit, we can go all the way to the moon and back with no local propellant production on the moon.So I think that would enable the creation of Moon Base Alpha or some sort of lunar base.Yeah, quite captivating.So the you can also see, for example, how do you transfer cargo from the cargo bay down to the ground is a crane. It's not very complicated.And yeah, but this will enable the creation of a lunar base. It's 2017. I mean, we should have a lunar base by now. What the hell's going on?And then of course, Mars becoming a multi planet species beats the hell out of being a single planet species. So yeah, so we'd start off by sending a mission to, to Mars, where it would be obviously just landing on rocky ground or dusty ground.And it's the same approach that I mentioned before, which is you send the spaceship up to orbit, you retank it or refill it until it has full tanks and it travels to Mars, lands on Mars. For Mars, you will need local propellant production But Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and plenty of water ice that gives you CO2 and H2O.So you've got, you can make therefore CH4NO2 using the Sabatier process and, or you know, Poly Sabatiya process. And I should mention that long term this can also be done on Earth. So sometimes I get some sort of criticism for why, why are you using combustion in rockets and you have electric cars like. Well, there isn't some way to make an electric rocket.I wish there was. But in the long term you can use solar power to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket. So the same thing that we would do on Mars, we could do on Earth in the long term.But that's essentially what happens. Similar to the moon, you land on Mars. The tricky thing with Mars is we do need to build a propellant depot to refill the tanks and return to Earth. But because Mars has lower gravity than Earth, you do not need a booster. So you can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth just using the ship, albeit you need to go to a max payload number of about 20 to 20 to 50 tons for the return journey to work.But it's a single state, single stage all the way back to Earth. I'll show you the. So this is the true physics simulation.This will last about a minute. So, so you come in, you're entering very quickly, going 7.5km a second for Mars there will be some ablation of the heat shield. So it's just like a sort of brake pad wearing away. It is a multi use heat shield, but unlike for Earth operations, it's coming in hot enough that you really do.You will see some wear of the heat shield. But because Mars has an atmosphere, albeit not a particularly dense one, you can remove almost all the energy aerodynamically. And we've proven out supersonic retro propulsion many times with, with Falcon 9, so we feel very comfortable about that.This is a. Because it's sort of, you can see a sort of a mesh system. It's not, it's not meant to be sort of particularly pretty because it's just tries to simulate the physics of it. But the size of the cone gives you a rough approximation for how much thrust the engines are producing.That's not a typo, Although it is aspirational.So we've already started building the system.The tooling for the main tanks has been ordered, the facility is being built. We will start construction of the first ship around the second quarter of next year. So in about six to nine months we should start building the first ship. I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years.Five years seems like a long time to me.And the area under the curve of resources over that period of time should enable this time frame to be met. But if not this time frame, I think pretty soon thereafter. But that's our goal is to try to make the 2022 Mars rendezvous the Earth. Mars synchronization happens roughly every two years. So every two years there's an opportunity for just to fly to Mars.So then in 2024 we want to try to fly four ships, two of which would be crewed and two of which two cargo and two crew. The goal of these initial missions is to find the best source of water. That's for the first mission. And then the second mission, the goal is to build the propellant plant. So we should with particularly with six ships, there have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant depot which will consist of a large array of solar panels, very large array.And then everything necessary to mine and refine water and then draw the CO2 out of the atmosphere and then create and store Deep Cryo CH4 and O2, then build up the base, starting mostly with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, even bigger.And yeah, over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.Thanks. Give me a.I think that's quite a beautiful picture.And on the prior slide, it's interesting to note that on Mars dawn and dusk are blue. And so the sky is blue. And dawn, dusk and red during the day. It's the opposite of Earth.But there's something else.If you build a ship that's capable of going to Mars, what if you take that same ship and go from one place to another on Earth?So we looked at that and the results are quite interesting.Let's take a look at that.We're traveling at 27,000 kilometers an hour. Hour or roughly 18,000 miles an hour.This is where the propulsive landing becomes very important to me gets to put it right.So most of what people consider to be long distance trips would be completed in less than half an hour, which is.So the great thing about going to space is there's no friction. So once you're out of the atmosphere, you will go. It would be smooth as silk, no turbulence, nothing. There's no weather, there's no atmosphere. And you can get to most long distance places, like I said, in less than half an hour.And if we're building this thing to go to the Moon and Mars, then why not go to other places on Earth as well? All right. Thank you.