So the key takeaway for me today compared to 1 year ago, is that Elon has put a lot of thought on how to make this plan economically viable compared to just the vision last year.
Multiple potential streams of revenue:<p>- Government/intragovernment contracts to cleanup space debris.<p>- Government/Private satellite launches.<p>- Earth to earth transportation which Elon announced on Instagram that the cost would be comparable to an economy fare. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/</a><p>- Transporting gear for ESA's moon base plan <a href="http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Village" rel="nofollow">http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Vi...</a>.<p>- Transporting Government/Private equipment to Mars.<p>This is very much a realistic business approach compared to last year's vision presentation.
Back of the envelope calculation for the price of an Earth-to-Earth ticket:<p>Musk's stated goal is $500k/ticket to Mars.<p>It's a shorter trip, so perhaps ~5x as many passengers in the same volume (i.e. 500 total; cf. a380 which seats 850).<p>It takes five (?) orbital refuel trips for the martian journey, but we'd need none of those. Depending on how much less than a full tank the passenger vehicle needs (payload could be smaller; the ship would also not reach fully orbital velocity), the fuel cost would be between 1/5 and 1/10 the Mars fuel cost.<p>So that would bring the cost down to between $10 and $20k/ticket, within reach of business travelers.<p>If maximum the number of flight cycles per vehicle is greater for Earth-to-Earth trips than for Mars, then that could further reduce the ticket cost. It's unclear to me which direction that number would go-- Earth's atmosphere is much thicker on re-entry, though the velocities will be much lower than an interplanetary re-entry. Since aerodynamic drag goes as the cube of velocity but only linearly with density, I'm guessing the speed would matter far more. That would imply much better lifetime on Earth.<p>So if the E2E fuselage gets (conservatively) only 2x as many flight cycles as a Mars trip, that could bring down the per-seat cost to $5k-- now getting close to the cost of an ordinary international ticket. Of course this is all assuming that Musk's baseline of $500k to Mars is reasonable.<p>Would be curious to hear from some rocket engineers about these guesses at the numbers/efficiency.<p>Not accounted for is amortized development cost for E2E-only vehicles, as well as all the infrastructure and ground support at the destinations.<p>Edit: If you wanted to be less conservative, you could pack in 1000 people instead of 500 (0.5x ticket price multiplier), or use a different source for the Mars ticket price (0.4x), which would bring it to $1k.
Highlights for me:
Started ordering stuff for the mars ship now, started facilities construction, possibly hitting a first launch in 2022 and a second launch window in 2024.<p>An extremely aggressive and impressive timeline.
He finally made it clear what this is about: feeling good about the future.<p>The other reasons to go to Mars that he has mentioned before are (arguably) valid.<p>This man might be the most inspirational voice in our lifetime.
This plan sounds much more sensible than most of what I've heard from Musk before.<p>Especially the intercontinental transport part. That is a real business use-case, potentially very lucrative. I also suspect that could get quite a few more billionaires excited (after all they spend a lot of time in private jets and I'm sure they'd like to cut that time off) which could help raising more investment.<p>I don't believe there is much to do on mars or the moon, not much that would make economical sense anyway. But intercontinental transport? That could work.
An update from Elon on the pricing[1]:<p>> Fly to most places on Earth in under 30 mins and anywhere in under 60. Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/</a>
Wow, can they really make BFR reliable enough to replace long distance airline routes? And how would propellant cost compare with jet fuel? Anywhere on Earth in an hour does sound extremely appealing; better than Concorde, with bonus zero gravity (going to need a lot of barf bags though).
SpaceX is building the BFR and launch facilities, but who is going to build all the equipment and gear required to live there - who is building the cargo?
Great presentation, only thing I'm worried about is human flight in these things. I mean what happens if this thing is 1% off on the landing? Does the whole thing topple over and blow up into a million pieces?<p>Additionally with the entire flight being automated, what happens if the software gets taken over in space and they just drop it like a rock onto a city? The damage would be catastrophic. We need Elon to invest in city wide force field technology too it would seem.
The earth-to-earth idea is nice, and whilst it would be an improvement, I expect the travelling time to be the biggest obstacle.<p>You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wait for clearance to take off.<p>Now is the short flight.<p>And afterwards we can do the entire thing in reverse.<p>Some things might be a bit more optimized, like perform customs, safety instructions etc during the boat trip. But the entire trip from arriving at the sea/space-port until leaving it at the destination would probably be making this a diminishing returns and only really interesting for the extremely long flights.
One big limitation that was glossed over in the presentation is radiation exposure. The only time it came up was the mention of a 'solar storm shelter'. The radiation exposure during the Martian transit would be much greater than the same time spent on the ISS, somewhere on the order of 200mSv [0] (the composition of this radiation also contains significantly greater proportions of heavy-ion radiation, which appears to be more damaging, so this may need to be adjusted upwards). According to the wonderful xkcd chart [1], this would be in the 'probably no radiation sickness, but certainly not good for you' territory.<p>I would love to know what their plans are, since shielding is heavy. [2] seems to suggest electromagnetic deflection as viable (which would be insanely cool, and could probably reuse SpaceX's cryogenics work for superconductors).<p>Also, a quick search didn't turn up much on the anisotropy of interplanetary radiation, but I wonder how much a reduction would be achieved by angling the crewless area of the ship towards the solar wind (which I think Musk had touched on in an earlier talk).<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/DATA/bibliography/ICRC2005/usa-mewaldt-RA-abs1-sh35-oral.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/DATA/bibliography/ICRC200...</a>
[1]: <a href="https://xkcd.com/radiation/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/radiation/</a>
[2]: <a href="https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/shielding/docs/spillantini_00.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/shieldin...</a><p>EDIT: Of course these sorts of talks are really exciting! This is just one more in a laundry list of crazy-cool engineering problems that have to be/are being solved.
Umm was I the only one too assume that BFR meant Big Feckin' Rocket? Oh, no, I see waitbutwhy has a piece on it [0]<p>I disappointingly see F is for Falcon, but still I really like the lack of marketing in the name.<p>Plus I like the parallel with Roald Dahl's BFG.<p>[0]: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-...</a>
Making life multiplanetary seems like one of the least important issues of our times to me: either we figure out how to make life on earth sustainable in the medium term (next 50-100 years) or we do not have enough time to become multiplanetary anyway (since that will take centuries, and we will likely never leave the solar system anyway).<p>So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions before we are even sure if we can maintain our own planet (which is, and will remain for an extremely long time, the only place for autonomous life in space that humanity has).<p>Then again, maybe I'm nitpicking since it's not like Musk demands the whole world to commit its resources to his ideas. If he wants to play around with adventurous Mars trips that's fine.<p>Edit: Of course I'm also aware that Musk is still using his money better than many other wealthy people, so more power to him. This comment was mostly about space exploration vs. sustainable life on earth, all other things being equal.
Deeply regretting not going to IAC since it's in Australia this year. A colleague went under his own money and he's had a great time, as well as several of my uni mates who are there due to working in the industry.<p>I'm enjoying this, it's basically laying out goals that he's essentially saying 'hold us to this'.
Loving this..Big visions, some may work, some not. Inspiring..Going against odds, this is what humanity should stand for. These are the real 'moonshots'.<p>Would love to see these kinds of big picture roadmaps in other areas/industries. It's a shame so much of our possible progress is politicised.
If I am flying a rocket plane and my normal landing site has bad weather what does the rocket do? Maybe they can have robot boats all around the world to catch them!
I wonder what the greenhouse gas emissions will be like for the Earth-to-Earth trips. Ironic that the display showed a snow-capped mountain after the E2E animation.
Honestly, Elon's presentations are some of the most impressive, inspiring I've ever seen. And the way he just stumbles out words and sentences that are completely revolutionary... casually dropping these absurd, incredible statements. I find it incredible.<p>If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. But I fully believe the SpaceX team can do this.<p>This has made me feel inspired for the future almost more than anything else has in recent memory.<p>(For context, and to the doubters, I've been following SpaceX for a long time, through their many failures, and they've <i>already</i> revolutionized the space industry. They have a drive and a vision and they're just going for it. This isn't about profits for them, it's about pushing humanity forwards -- and if that sounds grand, it's because it is.)
Musk's speaking is always a little awkward (in an endearing way), but did he seem significantly more nervous/emotionally affected than usual in the first part of this speech? It seemed that way to me, curious if anyone else interpreted it like that.<p>He calms down when he starts talking about risk and it being the anniversary of a launch.<p>edit: Good and fun presentation regardless!<p>edit2: Thoughts:<p>- Maybe he feels in over his head. The timing when he relaxed seemed to coincide with talking about a previous experience that might have felt overwhelming at the time but paid off.<p>- Maybe he typically takes beta blockers or something for speeches and take them until late this time (the talk did start late)<p>- Maybe it's just random.<p>Any spacex watchers have thoughts on cause?<p>edit3: Definitely not a diss. Love Elon/SpaceX/the vision.
I think humanity is not ready to be multi-planetary. Time or distances or conditions are not on humanity's side. Even humanity is not on humanity's side.<p>I think the dreams of being multi-planetary are similar to buying doomsday bunkers in New Zealand. I see it as a desire to escape the problems of earth.<p>I would ask a question to Anjum Choudhary, "If there is a colony on Mars, and your ideology got hold of major countries on Earth, would you try to convert those on Mars?". I think the answer, undoubtedly would be yes.<p>Humanity has much to resolve on earth, if we go multi-planetary before we reconcile then all we would end up doing is make our problems multi-planetary.<p>Unless few people escape earth and destroy earth so that there won't be anyone following them. Equivalent to you first going into a safe bunker and then nuking the world, wait out the nuclear fallout to emerge. But then you would be pure evil.<p>I don't know if they have thought this through. On the scale of centuries, not quarter ends, all they are doing is working for those with higher rate of reproduction.
I wish the government gave them tens of billions of dollars instead of the military. Even NASA's progress is laughable compared to SpaceX, and NASA gets $18 billion a year.
The plan is good and modestly aggressive time-wise. But he has to be careful. Even a single high-profile disaster with human loss or precious cargo will put the whole endeavor at risk.
Just like everybody else I'm really blown away by what SpaceX does, but at the same time I think the question begs to be asked: Has humanity already given up on earth as a home? Is the future really about planets as disposable habitats?
So what's the carbon footprint of one of these launches? Did I understand correctly that we can make the fuel by taking CO2 from the atmosphere? That would make the footprint negative, would it? That seems to good to be true.