Official Video: SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System
Elon Musk Outlines his Plan for Colonizing Mars and Why We Should Do It, SpaceRef [Includes the full video of Elon Musk’s talk and the presentation slides.]
“In a presentation today at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk outlined his ambitious plan to colonize Mars. His personal motivation is to make humanity a multi-planetary species. The reason is to avoid an extinct level event on Earth that would wipe out humanity.
To achieve a self-sustaining society you’ll need to send 1 million people to Mars which could take 40-100 years. To get those people there Musk introduced the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System. The rocket, the largest ever built, could carry 100 plus people per flight and would need 10,000 flights to carry those million people. Musk hopes to be able to eventually carry 200 people per flight which would reduce the number of flights needed.”
Forty-two engines?
Because Nicolay Kuznetsov was too conservative in Elon’s book!
42 engines not much larger than Merlin 1D, using many of the same manufacturing methods, but 3x the thrust. Like Merlin, likely to have a sky-high TW ratio. Most will be fixed, with the inner rings gimballing.
Remember when SpaceX first came on the scene and said that Falcon 1 was better because it only had one engine?
No.
Finally, a real rocket! With turnaround as fast as an airliner.
Well, in cartoon world at least.
At least SpaceX is trying. NASA is planning on throwing every piece of SLS away after a single flight. If you were to bet on who is going to make transportation to Mars “affordable”, who would you bet on, SpaceX or NASA?
Does any one have the dimensions of both the spaceship and the booster…..also….trip time to Mars?
I’d also lve to know ship stay time on Mars …which I assume will be based on off loading and more so on time to refuel…as well as planetary alignment
Personal note: looks like a true spaceship…where we should be in the 2020s.
Trip time to Mars is 80 days according to these slides:
https://imgur.com/a/20nku
There are also comparisons to Saturn-V there. ITS looks like it’s pushing 200% the volume.
I can’t even believe 80 days. How so fast. Everyone has always said 6 months with chemical rockets
Chemical rockets could manage an 80 day transfer, but it would require a huge amount of fuel relative to the payload placed on the transfer orbit. Even with the BFR, I’m curious how they plan to get such large spacecraft to Mars that quickly.
I’d also like to know how it will stop when it gets there. Such a trajectory would approach Mars at a very high speed. That means a big approach maneuver (and more fuel) or an atmospheric entry at painfully high speed (and more mass for heat shields.)
With those gigantic solar arrays (200kW, IIRC), I’m wondering if there will be SEP sustainer engines and the vehicle will accelerate all the way up to half-way and then decelerate all the way down to MOI.
I still can’t see it. Electric propulsion wouldn’t do very much in 80 days. Probably not more than 1 km/s total. Having a bigger system doesn’t increase acceleration very much. Unlike a chemical rocket engine (whose mass is trivial compared to the fuel), as electric propulsion thruster and its power supply are a good fraction of the vehicle’s mass. Double the size of the thruster and you greatly increase the mass the thruster has to push; you don’t end up anywhere close to doubling the acceleration.
Isn’t it the case that with on orbit re-fueling delta V is much less of an issue? They could retain sufficient fuel for in-flight retro before approaching the landing.
I suppose that will be especially necessary for the return trip to Earth’s atmosphere. The number 25,000 MPH is often seen as the speed of a free return from lunar space. I wonder what the upper limit would be for this marvel of a hybrid ship.
And it’s not as if everyone didn’t know already the benefits of on-orbit refueling.
Those slides show average over several conjunctions of 115 days not 80.
BFS: 49.5×17 meters
BFR: 12×77.5 meters
About 30 days.
The vehicle has a mix of 3 sea level and 6 vacuum engines, allowing landing almost anywhere solid. Single Stage to Earth given props, and he mentioned propositioned depots – likely a BFS Tanker..
30 days trip time? My friend. How? VASiMIR takes 39 they say.
this strikes me as something that won’t get done by the mid 2020s
Motivational, inspirational and yet completely unfeasible. The ongoing problems in the world will prevent this idea from reaching its proposed full potential. He should have focused on the very short term, the next 10 years, the short-term attainable goal. There are so many other unaddressed aspects to just sending a few people to Mars much less hundreds. And talking only about rockets and propulsion is just a small component of going. What about proving that we can actually land there in mass safely and find sustainable, ex-tractable water and other resources? The focus is on the huge and should be on the small and practical.
This may be a turning point for Elon’s credibility. There is no question that SpaceX could get people to Mars sooner and more cheaply than NASA. But does anyone really believe his reasons to make money are to fund Mars Colonization?
Yes.
Of course, and thinking the opposite would be completely absurd imo. We are talking about Elon Musk here. The guy that sold paypal to start an electric car company and a rocket company (perhaps the two most risky, unprofitable and ridiculous types of business starters in the universe).
And he takes every dime he makes at those companies and plows it right back into the company (instead of rewarding himself with yachts, private jets, and vacation homes). The Gigafactory and the ever growing network of Supercharger Stations is evidence of this.
I for one totally believe Elon Musk’s reasons for doing what he does, he is the sort of person rarely seen before (at least in recent history) he is a dreamer (not of yachts and mansions but of space travel) who has the money, business acumen and engineering understanding to potentially make his dreams a reality. I’m not saying that his motives are entirely altruistic, indeed I’m sure he would happily admit himself that he wants to go down in history as the man who made Earth a space faring planet but I will happily let him have that if he achieves what is not only his dreams but the dreams of many others as well.
Elon is actually doing the thing that so many people bitch to NASA about NOT doing, namely putting forth a big plan and big dreams and a logical way to achieve the goal based on incremental and proven steps. He’s not pissing away money on a big expendable; plus he actually shows plans for a true spaceship.
Lots of practical problems, sure. But he is generating excitement in the HSF community not seen in many decades.
Naysayers should empty closets of headwear.
I hate to differ with you but this is just another in a long list of previous attempts both by NASA and others: 1990 Mars Direct/Semi-Direct, 1993 DRM, 1997 DRM2 & 3, 1998 DRM 3, 2009 DRM5 and a few others. I am very glad that SpaceX is re-championing the path, but excitement grows and wanes as it has many times before. I just do not see a rigorously vetted pragmatic or near-term plan that shows an understanding of how to get on, grow and then sustain humans on Mars. New rockets that are partially reusable are not enough to start settling Mars. This is a great long term plan, but there are too many assumptions that things here on Earth will remain on an unaltered and happy path especially given Musk’s financial longevity and growing social and economic pressures. Nobody seems to look at the big picture. He should be hoping for the best and planning for the worst (From psychology: short term attainable goals; From history: “the best laid plans of mice and men”).
That’s the thing: NASA talked about it, but never really tried. Whereas SpaceX may crash and burn, but is sure hell bent on making it happen! I won’t even argue that it’s possible to do all of this, let alone in the 2020s, but if your standard are NASA’s DRMs, you’re in for a pretty big surprise. As for me – I’m storing up on popcorn.
SLS is often criticized because it appears to be appearing in a vacuum, so to speak: a huge expendable with few uses.
Now comes Mr. Musk: he wants to build the BFR. And he has a mission, the requirements of which will shape both the ICT and the booster.
Isn’t that what those criticizing SLS have been clamoring to see? An actual, you know, plan? Nebulous, perhaps. On the edge of what we can do, certainly. But a plan. A big picture.
It’s ambitious but there are some huge leaps and assumptions here. Landing on the launch mount? A 42-engine core that doesn’t shake itself apart? This plan is going to be going through a lot of revisions before we see practical hardware, methinks.
Accuracy: Most of their landings have been within 2 meters of the X, and the radius has been decreasing. Are you saying it can’t improve using artificial vision, terrain mapping, LIDAR etc. as NASA’s G-FOLD landing software does? Are you aware it’s co-developer is now at SpaceX?
Vibration: People said the same thing about F9’s 9 engine cluster in 2009. How’d that work out?
Worked out great, but there’s quite a big difference between going between 1 and 9 and 9 and 42. It’s at least a big enough difference to not mock those who doubt.
Does the Falcon 9 use GPS data for those precision landings? No such navigation satellites exist on Mars. So adding a Mars GPS network might be another critical element.
Many other ways to pinpoint a landing aside from GPS, of course, including at the least some sort of beacon.
With the amount of mass they are talking about sending to Mars, including a dozen satellites for a GPS network would be trivial.
It isn’t accuracy that worries me; it’s an engine failure in that has the thing crashing into the pad structure at terminal velocity.
Nine engines are a lot easier to harmonise than forty-two.
With 42 engines to “play with”, losing a single engine shouldn’t be a problem.
Landing on a fixed “launch mount” is in some ways easier than landing Falcon 9’s first stage on a barge. Also, you don’t have to land in the exact center of the “launch mount” when you have that huge crane next to the pad which can be used to re-center the stage after it lands.
As for a “42-engine core that doesn’t shake itself apart”, what in the world are you talking about?
That number of engines all desperately trying to reach a resonant frequency together; that’s what I’m talking about.
Resonance is a well understood phenomenon now, and not difficult to avoid.
I would not turn down a seat on the maiden voyage. But having said that…. the mammoth booster reminds me in a positive way of Werner von Braun’s ” Mars Projekt” magnum opus from the 1950’s as presented by Walt Disney , Chesley Bonestell’s artwork, and Collier’s Magazine. A formative highlight of my youth , pre-Sputnik. In a negative way it is t-o-o-o-o-o similar to the Soviet Union’s N-1 moon rocket. You recall, the 32 -engine leviathan that ignited three times, flew up twice and blew up all three times.
My math says there are at least 40 and more like 56 Raptor engines clustered at the bottom of this stack. I cannot get my head around that . Who’s the poor SpaceX schmuck with the job title ” Chief of Harmonic Vibration Abatement ” ?
The carrot on Elon Musk’s stick is solid brass. I’ll give him that much . Oh—he just put NASA’s big old White Elephant SLS and Orion out to pasture.
As a long-time space enthusiast since the ’60s the N-1 comparison came to my mind as well, upon reading about the proposed booster. Musk has however, brought a long overdue fresh approach to spaceflight which I appreciate and respect.
Having no engineering background, I would appreciate any commentary regarding this topic; especially taking into account the decades of advances that have been made since the N-1s were designed.
Not the N1 again.
N1 as a program was well under way and in a very deliberate way until Mr. Kruschev ordered it sped up as he watched development of America’s moon rockets. Engineers and designers were fully aware of the problems with that rocket and, if I were to speculate, would have been successful had they not been forced to a politically-accelerated timetable.
Even then the engineers knew the problems with the rocket.
The problems the N-1 had that caused it to fail have long since been solved.
Also the N-1 was launched 4 times, the final flight nearly made it to 1st stage separation.
What I like about this is that it’s bold and you certainly can’t accuse Elon Musk of wanting to do things by halves, the challenges in this plan are immense but the rewards great. Will Space-X make a 2025 landing? there is much that will need be done in a very short time, perfecting multiple launches not weeks apart but potentially just hours at most, on orbit fueling, large scale in situ fuel production on mars are just a few of the obvious hurdles too be overcome. In the end much will come down to how far advanced these plans and designs are, how quickly could Space-X gear up to producing 12m diameter cores and 17m diameter human rated pressure vessels? My guess is more rapidly than we might think, while Elon Musk likes to set his goals seemingly impossibly high they are always rooted in reality at some point and clearly he believes this is doable by 2025 so I for one will be rooting for him and Space-X to achieve the seemingly impossible.
What exactly is this extinction event that wipes out both the Earth and the Moon? I ask because for the effort to put a million people on Mars you could put 100 million on the Moon.
Mars is a lot easier to live on than the Moon.
What makes Mars easier to live on than the moon?
Moon: Day / Night cycle of 28 days. +200 C in sunlight, -200 C in shadow, with similar temperature swings from day to night. No atmosphere, so a. thermal control must be done by radiating away the heat and b. there is no protection from cosmic radiation. Much less water in surface regolith (excepting polar locations with permanently shadowed craters). Surface dust is very sharp, clings to everything, gets into seals, and could be a health hazard if inhaled. 0.16 g gravity. ~3-4 days transit time from Earth, very frequent launch windows. ~1 second radio delay for communications with Earth.
Mars: Day / Night cycle of 24 1/2 hours, less temperature extremes (~90 C from day to night), very thin atmosphere, but sufficient for some radiation protection and allows for thermal regulation by convection. There is much more water available in the surface soil, and there’s evidence of buried glaciers on Mars down to the middle latitudes. Surface dust is very fine, but is weathered. 0.376 g gravity. ~6 months transit time from Earth with launch windows every 18 months or so. 15-40 minutes delay in radio communications with Earth.
The primary benefit of the Moon is that it’s closer and there are more launch opportunities, virtually everything else is more difficult. Mars has a greater quantity of and more easily extractable resources that can be exploited for ISRU, particularly water.
In a larger sense it’s a good question. But more specific to your question: readily available CO2; the ubiquity of water (albeit with poorly understood extraction requirements); an atmosphere to assist in aerobraking; a good deal more gravity; a rotation period (which matches earth’s, more or less).
That said the moon is probably a better stepping stone for us in space because it could allow us to work out the technologies that overlap, particularly life support.
Just my ill-informed opinion.
It’s a wonderful dream, and I hope it starts to come to life during my kids’ lifetimes. But (and a big one) I would like to see comparable resources dedicated to detecting all likely threats of extinction events and eradicating them, whether asteroids or global warming. We have a perfectly good planet here, which has sustained life for something like 3.7 billion years, through a variety of extreme conditions. While it’s good to have backup plans, it’s even better to maintain the viability of the one planet in al the universe we currently know has the ability to maintain diverse and successful species.
You can always achieve this goal the way Musk plans to achieve his. Get enough rich to pay for it on your own. I’m sure he’d be willing to sell you the launch services and perhaps some planetary spacecraft.
I don’t mean to he flippant about that: If he makes this work, then there are lots of other space ventures (like asteroid threats) which would suddenly be addressable at a reasonable price (by the standards of governments or very rich individuals.)
You don’t need a 3.5X Saturn V to deal with incoming asteroids, or even a Shuttle main engine plus SRBs. Something like an Atlas V is more than capable of getting payloads out of LEO that can carry enough propulsion to get to, and attach themselves to, an asteroid. Using something this size would be like swatting gnats with an elephant gun.
Perhaps you could do that with an Atlas V. But, at the cost of an Atlas launch, no one is willing to pay for it. At the cost of a Falcon Heavy launch, someone might be willing to pay for the launch, but the spacecraft and operations would be expensive. If you have the sort of mass Musk is talking about for his Mars colony vehicle, then you can make the payload very cheap. There would be no need for custom, highly optimized designs, to squeeze as much functionality out of every gram, or to keep reliability high (just add a repair technician and some spare parts; you’ve got plenty of mass for that.)
That’s a really good point. I wonder how much is added to the cost of payloads simply to add redundancy.
The increased reliability is a huge cost driver. I’ve been looking into planetary CubeSat concepts in the past year or so, and one thing people commonly misunderstand is their low cost. It’s typically attributed to their being, well, small. It isn’t. A good part of the relatively low cost is not going for very high reliability. It would be interesting to see a cost-comparison. Someone should do a formal cost estimate on otherwise identical spacecraft, one a Class-A nanosatellite and a Class-D CubeSat. I suspect you’re talking about a factor of three, possibly more. The reliability difference is perhaps 75% versus 90%.
It’s private funds my friend..so far at least..his ball..his game
Um, did I say it should be his money? I said comparable resources. Could be private, should be public — if you believe that one of the primary functions of government is to, y’know, “provide for the common defense.”
Think of how large a space telescope a vehicle this big could launch. Now think of how many such telescopes it could launch since it’s a reusable launch vehicle. Now, couldn’t you use such telescopes to “detect all likely threats of extinction events”? And once they’re detected, couldn’t you use such a vehicle to actually get to the object which needs its orbit to be “adjusted”?
A fully reusable, and refuelable, launch vehicle like this can be used for *many things* other than Mars missions.
The telescopes needed to see asteroid threats do not to be very large. The main rationale for putting them in space is to make them work in the infrared, and to get them away from the Earth, since there are some orbital families that are sort of hidden from earthbound telescopes. But it wouldn’t take much, most things planned like this are about a meter. It’s already the case that earthbound telescopes can see space rocks down to very small sizes. The Zwicky Transient Facility is a meter class telescope that will scan the whole (northern) sky every night, and several other telescopes will do the same, culminating in LSST with an 8m aperture.
Tough luck to the 7.025 billion people stuck on Earth to die, I suppose.
It must be nice to be part of the 0.0005%.
I’m sure they’re worth the resources. I guess there’s no way those resources could be used to… I dunno… AVOID a global extinction event.
Sure, launch a bunch of *very large* space telescopes using a cargo version of Musk’s MCT. Then when you find an asteroid which needs its orbit corrected, send an MCT to do the job.
In other words, this is not an either/or proposition. You can use MCT do do both missions.
Global extinction events happen when an entire ecosystem collapses or is grievously damaged. In such an event, having some people in test tubes is not going to prevent it, it will simply delay it.
I can’t stop having my mind boggled by the fact that people can’t see the obvious – that we have the most perfect ecosystem for sustaining human and other life… in a place perfectly suited for it to exist… that that ecosystem contains untold hundreds of millions of species maintaining its balance along with non-life factors in a self regulating equilibrium that we can’t understand well enough to keep from wrecking it, let alone SAVE it from an external threat…
…but somehow we have the understanding to go someplace FAR LESS hospitable and create a workable and sustainable ecosystem – a simpler, less robust, bottled one… from SCRATCH…. and that will work.
As always, this libertarian wet-dream involves a hyper-privileged tiny fraction of a percent of humanity “escaping” using several billion times each their fair share of resources and leaving the undeserving *virtually all of humanity* behind to deal with not only the impending threat, but now the fewer resources AND the mess of various effluvium those hyper-privileged leave in their wake.
It is the ultimate expression of libertarian “use it up, throw it away and move on to the next conquest” sociopathy and self-regard.
It’s also transparently unworkable except to those blinded by fantasy.
Musk’s proposal is like most – long on fantastic projection, devoid of the important details, and utterly dismissive of virtually the entirety of humanity except his select cohort.
His vision of the ultimate narcissist fantasy differs only in that he imagines it taking place even MORE implausibly sooner.
(Oh and it’s also not the one with zombies… you know… where he and his pals happen to be the only humans smart enough and deserving enough to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.)
It’s extraordinarily unlikely that Musk’s dream will be achieved, but even if, in the very long shot that he gets a million people there and keeps them alive, the residents of Galt’s Gulch On Mars will not survive an extinction-level event that wipes out all human life on earth. They’ll merely be the last to die, at best.
Not sure why you keep saying “libertarian” here. I’m not a libertarian at all and still think that colonies off planet are inevitable.
It’s not about you. It’s about Musk.
Tougher luck for those who go, who will be confined to a hermetically sealed, socially engineered dystopia for the rest of their stultified existence.
Leaving aside the various impossibilities in the transportation system for now (e.g. no way does that vehicle have provision for the radiation shielding necessary to keep 100 people alive during the voyage, etc.), why Mars? It is a dead planet and of no value beyond scientific curiosity. Even if the manifest problems of somehow terraforming it can be resolved, it still has no magnetic field to protect the newly terraformed environment and it is sized just big enough and just small enough to make transportation to and from the surface extremely problematic.
There is only one means by which mass populations of humans will ever inhabit any locale in this solar system other than Earth – on artificial colonies free of any planetary surface as envisioned by O’Neill, L5, etc. Mars has nothing to offer in the way of developing such colonies and any attention paid to Mars beyond exploration for the sake of pure scientific curiosity is nothing more than waste and distraction from real progress in economic development beyond Earth. Mars obsession has become the worst enemy of progress.
This has come up before, but… I think a real colony needs to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Specifically self-sufficient for high-mass imports. Low-mass items like computer chips are not such a big economic burden, but high-mass things like oxygen, water, a buffer gas like nitrogen, those would be a high economic burden if they had to be imported. Life support systems are not and can not be 100% closed loop. So a self-sufficient colony would need to produce those things locally. Despite the disadvantage you mention, a Mars colony would have a much easier time doing so than an orbital habitat.
“Mars has nothing to offer in the way of developing such colonies”
While the very-long future is in space, Mars certainly has much to offer, including an atmosphere, water, and gravity.
Okay. Go ahead. You’re awesome. Do it. Oh, no US taxpayer money though.
Why not? The amount would be similar to governmental support for forays to the poles, for instance, or to support the ‘wild west’ a few centuries ago.
In Elon-World a few $$$ billion is serious money with serious effect and used wisely. In NASA world $$$ billion is just piss away money.
Sorry if I don’t bow down to the alter of St. Musk, but this is just a rebranding of Von Braun’s proposal of 70 years ago.
Absolutely nothing new here. I had hoped for better.
I had hoped for better than a fully expendable SLS out of NASA, but I didn’t get my wish either.
😛
Kill SLS and use the money to fund “commercial HLV” in the same way commercial cargo and commercial crew have been funded. Between SpaceX, Blue Origin, and ULA, we could have a *real* competition between multiple companies.
This is an extremely ambitious project. It is also terrifyingly exciting, at least for me.
I really didn’t expect SpaceX to have any work done on a composite tank at this point in time (or even accomplishing something more than a short engine test fire..burp to simply show transients).
Regarding the presentation, the Q&A section made me punch my monitor, multiple times. I really wanted to know the weight goal for Raptor, as well as what would SpaceX do about insulation in the carbon fiber tanks. In any case though, this event reminded me of Mr Brown back in 1955 explaining how we move to Space, the Moon and Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
The presentation was really audacious, but if you think about it for a second the whole architecture rests on first principles. Musk identified what we need to do to start a colony on Mars, from the transportation infrastructure standpoint. And that is bring the cost down enough so as to enable it to happen, by attacking four avenues at the same time. Total re-usability, the right propellant, orbit re-fueling and ISRU. It makes sense.
Really looking forward to what the future can bring. Between the ambitions of Bezos and Musk, I really feel that we are moving towards a sci-fi future..fast. <3
As I think has been pointed out, Earth on it’s worst day (like, an asteroid impact) is still friendlier to life than Mars. If human survival were really the driver, you’d be better off working on some sort of Ark super-bunker on this planet.
But mass extinctions have happened many times on earth. Human beings really do not want to be one of the species to go extinct. Putting a million or so human beings on Mars isn’t such a silly idea, in the big scheme of things.
Previous mass extinctions were on an Earth inhabited by non-intelligent species. Humans can do things like plan ahead, build a bunker, make a seed ark, store our libraries. All of which is easier and cheaper than establishing a Martian colony on a planet with no air, no biosphere, no anything. The post-apocalyptic Earth is easier to survive on. If you want to fly to Mars and build a colony because you think that’s cool, just admit it and go with it. But if your level-1 requirement is human survival, then this is the wrong approach to achieving it.
Or a planet-encircling train.
The rocket can have the weight in the same league as the Titanic. Mind boggling!
Looking at his presentation slides, he quotes 550 tons expendable payload to LEO. Putting aside the Mars (and beyond) ambitions, which are fantastic, such a launch capability will dwarf SLS (130MT to LEO for SLS Block 2) or Saturn V (135 MT tons to LEO). Assuming the Mars plans do happen, what else could we do with the BFR? A 550MT to LEO booster is comparable to some of the later Nova concepts (see http://www.astronautix.com/…. To me the BFR really opens up Near Earth and Cislunar Space to large scale human activities – in addition to opening up Mars. Large space stations, Lagrange point platforms, solar power satellites…what are the possibilities for exploiting this vehicle for the Earth to Moon and NEA region?
Depending on the design, it’s right on the edge of being able to put into orbit a carbon nanotube ribbon for a space elevator.
That would be sweet
A big plus of having such a launch capacity is making weight issues for scientific payloads almost non existent, large scale space telescopes become viable without the expensive complexity of Webb, imagine Hubble with a near 17m primary mirror.