SpaceX
Elon Musk finally did it. Fourteen years after founding SpaceX, and nine months after promising to reveal details about his plans to colonize Mars, the tech mogul made good on that promise Tuesday afternoon in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the course of a 90-minute speech Musk, always a dreamer, shared his biggest and most ambitious dream with the world—how to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species.
And what mighty ambitions they are. The Interplanetary Transport System he unveiled could carry 100 people at a time to Mars. Contrast that to the Apollo program, which carried just two astronauts at a time to the surface of the nearby Moon, and only for brief sojourns. Moreover, Musk’s rocket that would lift all of those people and propellant into orbit would be nearly four times as powerful than the mighty Saturn V booster. Musk envisions a self-sustaining Mars colony with at least a million residents by the end of the century.
Beyond this, what really stood out about Musk’s speech on Tuesday was the naked baring of his soul. Considering his mannerisms, passion, and the utter seriousness of his convictions, it felt at times like the man’s entire life had led him to that particular stage. It took courage to make the speech, to propose the greatest space adventure of all time. His ideas, his architecture for getting it done—they’re all out there now for anyone to criticize, second guess, and doubt.
It is not everyday that one of the world’s notables, a true difference-maker, so completely eschews caution and reveals his deepest ambitions like Musk did with the Interplanetary Transport System. So let us look at those ambitions—the man laid bare, the space hardware he dreams of building—and then consider the feasibility of all this. Because what really matters is whether any of this fantastical stuff can actually happen.
The hardware
During his talk, Musk outlined an extremely large new rocket, with a primary structure made from carbon-fiber composites that are lighter and stronger than the aluminum and other metals used in traditional rockets. A staggering 42 Raptor engines, burning liquid oxygen and densified liquid methane, would power the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) booster to orbit. “It’s a lot of engines,†Musk acknowledged. Presumably the software to integrate all of that power has come a long way since the Soviets tried their 30-engine N1 rocket in the late 60s and early 70s. All four N1 launches were failures.
The expendable variant of the ITS rocket would have an unprecedented lift capacity of 550 metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), which is roughly equivalent to 50 full-size yellow school buses. The most powerful rocket flying today, the Delta IV heavy, has a payload-to-LEO capacity of only about 28 metric tons; the most powerful rocket ever to successfully fly, the Saturn V, could haul 140 metric tons to LEO. Musk’s plan relies on a reusable variant of the the ITS rocket (300 tons to orbit), sending it up and landing it back at the launch pad. After accelerating to a staging velocity of 8,650km/h, the booster would use 7 percent of its propellant for a return trip.
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SpaceX finally released its concept for the Interplanetary Transport System on Tuesday.
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Here the immense booster with a crew module, 122 meters tall, is shown launching. To the left is a another spacecreaft filled with propellant.
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Up it goes, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
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After reaching a staging velocity of 8,650km/h, it is time to drop off the crew module.
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After that point the first stage booster returns back to Earth, using 7 percent of its propellant.
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It then lands precisely from where it took off. Shortly thereafter, the spacecraft filled with propellant is lifted onto the first stage booster.
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The propellant module launches, and is used to refuel the crew module in orbit.
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And then it’s time to go to Mars!
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SpaceX hopes the journey to Mars will eventually take 80 days, or less, for crews of up to 100 colonists.
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Time to slow down in the thin atmosphere of Mars and begin to fire the SuperDraco thrusters.
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Safely down.
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Oh, hello Mars.
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But the Interplanetary Transport System can go well beyond Mars, so it is no longer called the Mars Colonial Transporter.
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Maybe even to Saturn?
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Europa is a possibility. Although, please, don’t venture outside the spacecraft. We hear the radiation there is basically hell.
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Maybe Enceladus is more to your liking?
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The ITS spaceship would stand 50 meters tall (the Apollo capsule was a mere 3 meters high) atop its rocket, with a maximum diameter of 17 meters. Instead of departing Earth orbit at 4.5km/s, its six Raptor engines optimized for the vacuum of space would accelerate it to 6 km/s, cutting the journey to Mars from six months to about three. After launching and being fueled on orbit, the ITS could deliver 450 tons to the surface of Mars. The largest payload NASA—or anyone—has ever safely landed on the Martian surface is the Curiosity rover, which weighs less than a single ton.
There are more details in the presentation SpaceX has posted on its Web site. Suffice it to say the company has proposed building breathtaking space machines orders of magnitude greater than NASA or anyone else has ever constructed. These are truly audacious space-faring vessels, designed to go where no one has gone before. They are almost unbelievable.
Really, Elon?
Understandably, one might dismiss Elon Musk as a crank, a once-promising visionary slowly degenerating into a Howard Hughes-like madness. A million people on cold, dead Mars? Humans haven’t even been to the Moon, which is right next door to Earth, in nearly half a century.
However, SpaceX has made some demonstrable technical progress. Engines represent the bedrock of any rocket, and SpaceX has already built a full-scale version of its Raptor engine, which it tested this month in Texas. The Raptor is approximately the same size as the company’s Merlin 1-D engine, but has three times the thrust due to its capability to withstand higher pressures.
Additionally, in one of the real “wow†moments of of Tuesday’s talk, Elon showed several photos of an ITS liquid oxygen tank, made of carbon fiber composites to withstand high pressures. This is real hardware, equivalent in scale to the tankage NASA is building for its SLS rocket, and offers some insight into the company’s plans.The “big” composite tank used to contain pressurized liquid oxygen that Musk revealed Tuesday.
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It seems clear that SpaceX will build as much Mars hardware as it can afford, in hopes of showing the aerospace community and space agencies around the world that it is serious about this venture, and has the technical chops to pull it off. “As we show this is possible, that this dream is real, I think the support will snowball over time,†Musk said during his presentation.
Costs and timelines
Musk also spent some time Tuesday discussing costs. Eventually, he said, SpaceX would like to bring down the per-person cost to Mars to $200,000, about the same price as a middle-class home in America (at least, the parts of America with sane real estate markets). At this cost, he believes, enough people will be able to afford a trip to Mars to find permanent new homes there. The ride, he said, would be enjoyable enough. Passengers would have access to a restaurant, zero-g games, movies, cabins, and more. “It will be really fun to go,†he quipped. “You’ll have a great time.â€
But Musk cannot simply will such a transport system into existence. He estimated it would take about $10 billion in development costs to produce the first rocket, spacecraft, and other components of the ITS needed to safely bring the first astronauts to the surface of Mars. (This seems shockingly low, and based upon several interviews with industry officials the real costs are probably at least two to three times greater than this).
For now, SpaceX is investing only a “few tens of millions of dollars†annually into the ITS, Musk said, or about five percent of the company’s capacity. After SpaceX finalizes its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon 2 spacecraft in the next couple of years, Musk said the company would devote more resources to the ITS. He said that by the end of the decade SpaceX might be able to spend about $300 million annually on the Mars launcher and spacecraft.
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Technically, Musk believes it is feasible to launch the initial ITS mission to Mars in 2024, just eight years from now, and reach the Martian surface by 2025. “That’s optimistic,†he admitted during a teleconference with reporters after his speech. “I would describe that as an aspiration. But if it did go later, I don’t think it would go a lot later than that.†That will necessitate significant capital.
The budget shortfall
Elon Musk cannot afford the plan by himself. During his presentation he showed a slide that jokingly suggested the company had some strategies to raise funds for the ITS, including “steal underpants†and “Kickstarter.†The reality is that SpaceX will need to raise billions, and probably tens of billions of dollars, to bring about this venture. The company’s own revenues, now or in the foreseeable future, will not come close to supporting Mars colonization.
Indeed, Musk suggested the plan would probably need to come about through a public-private partnership, which essentially means that he would conceive of the plans, and his company would build the space hardware, but a government would pay. This is because there is no near-term profit in developing a Mars colony. It would only be be brought about through public financing, or less likely, philanthropic means.
The backing government need not be the United States. It could be a European country. Or an Asian nation. Or perhaps even Middle Eastern states rich with oil money and willing to bankroll an extension of their culture to a new planet. Musk said he deliberately chose the International Astronautical Congress as his forum because this was a worldwide endeavor. “I wanted to come and describe this to the world,” Musk said. “To encourage companies and organizations around the world to do something perhaps like this. That’s why I wanted to do it at IAC. To get the community in general to think about going to Mars.â€
But first, undoubtedly, Musk will look to NASA as a potential partner. For most of the last decade NASA has been his steady financial backer, providing the majority of his company’s revenues. It is thanks to multibillion dollar contracts from the space agency to deliver cargo (and eventually astronauts) to the International Space Station that Musk has been able to spend funds on the Raptor engine, and invest in Mars-related technology like supersonic retropropulsion. “In the future there may be a NASA contract,†he said of the ITS. “There may not. If there is a NASA contract it would be a good thing. If not, that’s not a good thing.â€
Whither NASA?
Let’s be painfully honest: Musk’s announcement is a potential embarrassment to the space agency. By the time NASA launches a handful of astronauts in the early 2020s on its own new vehicles, the space agency will have spent about $30 billion on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. And for what? A crewed flight around the Moon and back. According to Musk’s timeline and stated budget, for about $10 billion, he could send humans all the way to the surface of Mars in the same time frame. So why would NASA spend so much cash for an hors d’oeuvre when it could get a seven-course meal for one-third the price?
Musk walked into a dangerous minefield on Tuesday, and he knows it. NASA has been his meal ticket with its launch contracts, and will remain so for some time. But now having expressed ambitions beyond low-Earth orbit, SpaceX is competing with NASA, with the agency’s own hardware and its much promoted “Journey to Mars.†These government programs stand in the way of spending federal dollars on ITS.
So while the founder of SpaceX praised NASA for its support of his company, Musk also subtly undermined the agency’s Space Launch System rocket. NASA has said its SLS rocket will slash several years off the transit time for scientific spacecraft to Europa and other moons of interest in the outer solar system. Showing a picture of the ITS on Europa, Musk said Tuesday, “It would be really great to do a mission to Europa, particularly.â€
And asked where he would construct his massive rocket and spacecraft, Musk said he could see building and testing the systems at locations in Louisiana and Mississippi, the same places where NASA is currently working on its Space Launch System. The unsaid implication from Musk for NASA seemed clear: Why bother spending your billions to build the expensive SLS rocket, when I can build you a launcher many times more powerful, for less money, and keep people employed at some of your facilities?
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This gallery takes a look at some key players in Washington DC space policy who might help decide the fate of the Interplanetary Transport System. Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, has said he isn’t a “big fan” of private investment in heavy lift rockets.
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No one is sure what Donald Trump’s space policy might be. He has never spoken about SpaceX.
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While she hasn’t commented on SpaceX publicly, Hillary Clinton has endorsed NASA’s “Journey to Mars,” and its Space Launch System rocket.
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Senator Richard Shelby, chair of the Senate subcommittee overseeing NASA’s budget. is no friend to SpaceX. In 2011 he said the company wasn’t capable of returning trash from the space station.
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John Culberson, seated in white shirt at right, chairs the House subcommittee over NASA’s budget. He has wrote it into US law that two Europa spacecraft use Space Launch System boosters instead of private rockets, such SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
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Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has tangled with Elon Musk on Twitter and in the court room over space achievements and sea-based landings. His company will likely become a direct competitor to SpaceX for government launch contracts.
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Tory Bruno, chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance, urged the Department of Defense to reconsider SpaceX’s safety record after the recent Falcon 9 accident. His company has been under intense pressure because its rockets have much higher launch costs than the Falcon 9.
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Lori Garver, a deputy administrator of NASA earlier this decade, was a staunch supporter of SpaceX. She has since left NASA, but might return as an influential space policy leader in a Hillary Clinton administration.
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SpaceX is also up against the old guard of the aerospace industry, whom are all involved in the Space Launch System. Here, from left, are NASA’s Bill Gerstenmaier, Charlie Precourt, Vice President and General Manager, ATK Space Launch Division; John Elbon, Vice President and General Manager, Boeing Space Exploration; Julie Van Kleek, Vice President, space programs, Aerojet Rocketdyne; and Jim Crocker, Vice President and General Manager, civil space, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
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So far, at least, the current NASA leadership isn’t interested. Earlier this month, in a clear reference to SpaceX, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said he wasn’t a “big fan” of private companies building heavy lift launch vehicles that could take humans into deep space. That was for NASA to do.
Congress staunchly supports NASA in this view. Key members in the House and Senate have gone out of their way to stress the importance of the Space Launch System and Orion vehicles, plussing up budgets each year and demonstrating this is where they want the government’s space dollars to go. There seems to be very little appetite in Washington D.C. to divert money away from the blessed plan, and its lucrative cost-plus contracts for traditional aerospace contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Congress also seems dubious about promises from Musk. And why not? They have those big contractors, and their lobbyists, constantly in their ears telling them how Musk will fail.
Credibility
During his speech Musk did not once mention the recent loss of his Falcon 9 rocket, which lies at the core of everything SpaceX wants to do right now. This booster delivers commercial satellites and cargo to orbit. It will fly astronauts into orbit in a couple of years. It is the basis of proving the reusability of orbital launch systems. So if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business. And there have been two Falcon 9 failures in 15 months, including a catastrophic ground test accident at the beginning of September that led to the total loss of the rocket and its Israeli satellite payload.
Musk was asked about the investigation into this second accident when he met with reporters later on Tuesday. The inquiry into the root cause of the recent failure was a “most vexing and difficult thing,†Musk said. “We have eliminated all of the obvious possibilities for what occurred there. What remains are the less probable answers.â€
But despite the uncertainty about the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket during fuel loading operations, Musk said it represented just a “small thing†on a long road. Moreover he blamed the press for its focus on the failure. “If something happens to SpaceX it gets 100 times the press than if another rocket fails,†he said. “Maybe 1,000 times.â€
It is probably more accurate to say that SpaceX garners an outsized amount of attention because it does the fantastic and the unprecedented—like fly large rockets into space, and then have them make spectacular, fiery landings on small barges in the middle of the ocean. It has a flamboyant chief executive who dares mighty things. When the company fails at what is perceived as a relatively straightforward task, like delivering a payload into orbit, the failure raises questions about the credibility of enacting a vision to deliver humongous payloads to the surface of Mars.
This is not the mere speculation of a reporter at Ars Technica. It is a message that comes through in discussions with very senior engineers at NASA, astronauts, and private industry officials who closely follow happenings at SpaceX and have watched the company successfully disrupt the global launch business.
But Elon Musk is a charismatic leader who, for better or worse, is driven by his own vision. He cannot help himself by grabbing for what is unimaginable to most of us. This single-minded drive to continue innovating, and continue pushing boundaries, may ultimately blow up his company. Or, one day, it may lead to the founding of Musk City on Mars.
The vision
Perhaps the biggest contribution from Tuesday’s speech will come from Musk’s clarion call to make humanity a multiplanetary species. In a particularly poetic moment, Musk expressed the need for “ensuring that the lamp of consciousness is not extinguished.” What would happen if we fail to act upon his vision, or something like it, to have humans settle other worlds? “We’re confined to one planet until an extinction event,†he said.
Here, Musk differs markedly from NASA and the US government. For the agency, spaceflight can be measured a series of discrete goals. In the 1960s that meant a sequenced build-up of flights each building on the last, from Mercury to prove humans could survive in space, to Gemini to prove out rendezvous and long-duration flight, and culminating in a half-dozen Apollo missions to the surface of the Moon. Now NASA would like to begin with a few brave astronauts on the surface of Mars beginning in the late 2030s. It is about going, doing, proving, and then coming back. For Musk, though, it is about releasing the masses into space, and letting them create a new life in space.
That is the ethos espoused by Musk and the “new space†movement. They seek not to explore space to plant flags, but rather to open up new frontiers and provide humanity a backup plan. “This is different from Apollo. This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure,†Musk said.
Although Musk has certainly become by far the most visible proponent of the “settlement†of space, others have come before him, such as the physicist Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s. Another scientist, Princeton astrobiologist Christopher Chyba, more recently said, “Humanity should become a space-faring civilization, and if that is not the point of human spaceflight, what the hell are we doing?â€
Yet on Tuesday Elon Musk brought the “settlement†conversation out of the halls of space conferences and among the space Twitterati, and into the broader public consciousness. His plans for Mars became international news. The question now becomes whether the public shrugs this off, or if his message gains traction in the months and years ahead. Was it a moment, or a movement?
Tuesday’s speech marked only the opening salvo in Musk’s evangelism about the colonization of Mars. His search for a deep-pocketed backer now begins in earnest. For him, personally, and his company, this represents a huge gamble. By putting his entire vision out for the world to see, Musk has emboldened his doubters. Opponents will use details to undermine him. Certainly, they will mock his concept of using a booster with 42 engines. And Musk may just be OK with that. SpaceX has always been a longshot, Musk confided, sharing a delightfully awkward photo from 2002, when the company began. He had only given SpaceX about a 10 percent chance of “doing anything.†Today they’ve upended the global launch business.
Musk’s greatest attribute in an era of space timidity and a stagnated launch industry is probably this: he was never afraid to fail. In what may be his most revealing comment of all on Tuesday, he said, “I just kind of felt that if there wasn’t some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn’t seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a spacefaring nation, and be out among the stars.â€
Musk decided fourteen years ago to see if he could do something about that. On Tuesday, he finally let it all hang out. This audacious plan might be madness, or brilliance—or both.
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