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Elon Musk Talks About Next Version of SpaceX Starship to Mars · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  So I I find it interesting to look at the if you look at the,
• 0:05
  the flame tail on Starship and how long it is, it's a it's a
• 0:09
  very long flame tail, which is due to the fact that the the the
• 0:14
  chamber pressure, well it's it's just outputting a lot more.
• 0:19
  Yeah a lot more gas at a higher velocity.
• 0:23
  But I think the flame tail is like maybe 1000 feet long.
• 0:25
  It's like more than twice the length of the rocket and that
• 0:29
  will actually get as as we increase the thrust that will
• 0:31
  get longer. So yeah, and inevitably the
• 0:38
  rocket grows in height. So Starship 2 we're aiming for
• 0:43
  like I currently flight 3 would be around 40 or 50 tons to
• 0:48
  orbit. So the current design Starship 2
• 0:51
  will be over 100 tons and then Starship 3 will be over 200
• 0:55
  tons. And yeah, it's going from around
• 1:04
  7000 tons thrust to over 8000. But I I think we'll we'll we'll
• 1:08
  end up ultimately with more than three more than 10,000 tons of
• 1:11
  thrust, probably 7 or 8000 tons of lift off mass and at least 10
• 1:20
  meters taller. We'll see.
• 1:23
  Tends to grow, Yeah, exactly. So it probably grows a bit more
• 1:36
  than that, even really. So if you if you look at Falcon
• 1:41
  Nine, it's we're not going to do the length to diameter of Falcon
• 1:44
  Nine. That would be crazy.
• 1:45
  But Falcon 9 is a very long rocket, and so I suspect it'll
• 1:54
  probably get a bit longer than this.
• 1:56
  But at 200 tons per flight, fully reusable, that is, that is
• 2:02
  pretty incredible. And yeah, it'll be on the order
• 2:10
  of 500 feet tall. And then we're at this, this
• 2:18
  hundred. There's thousands of design
• 2:19
  improvements here, so I mean, I think maybe the most, One of the
• 2:28
  most profound things is Starship 3 will cost less per flight than
• 2:33
  Falcon one. So that's the difference between
• 2:37
  if you've got a fully reusable rocket or an expendable rocket.
• 2:42
  The fully reusable rocket with low cost propellant and
• 2:46
  autogenous pressurization actually cost less than a a tiny
• 2:51
  expendable rocket. So and it'll do like I said,
• 2:56
  Falcon one is about half a ton to orbit.
• 2:58
  The Starship 3 will be 400 times more payload for less than the
• 3:02
  cost of a Falcon one. Ultimately, I think we might be
• 3:07
  able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around
• 3:11
  $2,000,000 or $3,000,000. So these are sort of unthinkable
• 3:18
  numbers from the, you know, nobody ever thought this was
• 3:23
  possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this.
• 3:27
  So this is within the without breaking physics, we can do
• 3:30
  this. So the Mars missions are two
• 3:36
  years apart or 26 months. And if you look closely at the
• 3:44
  Starlink router, you see the the home and transfer from Earth
• 3:50
  over to Mars over. And that's basically to say to
• 3:57
  people, the Starlink system that you're buying is helping get
• 4:01
  humanity to Mars. I think it's pretty cool.
• 4:06
  So roughly every two years, thousands of ships would depart
• 4:10
  from Earth to Mars. It would look like Battlestar
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  Galactica, but in a good way, you know, hopefully without
• 4:16
  being chased by the Cylons. But it would be an incredible
• 4:21
  thing to see these thousands of ships departing every every 26
• 4:24
  months. For Mars.
• 4:28
  What this diagram is basically saying is that for getting to
• 4:32
  Mars, we would essentially create a kind of a propellant
• 4:39
  depot ship. The propellant depot would look
• 4:43
  more like a hot dog than like a spear, surely just makes a long
• 4:47
  ship with a lot of insulation, and we'd pull that ship up and
• 4:55
  then shortly before or as as they're going to Mars, the ships
• 5:01
  would take off with a couple 100 tons of payload from Earth reach
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  orbit with very almost no propellant.
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  And then get refilled by the tanker and then go to Mars and
• 5:14
  and land go all the way to Mars with over 200 tons of useful
• 5:17
  payload. Then on Mars at the beginning we
• 5:21
  would, I think we would simply reuse the ship materials so most
• 5:25
  of the ships wouldn't come back. But then over time you'd want to
• 5:27
  bring the ships back so you could reuse them and and for
• 5:31
  that we would need to create a methane Chapter 4 and oxygen O2
• 5:35
  on Mars which you can do with H2O and CO2.
• 5:39
  So the atmosphere is CO2 and there's plenty of water ice H2O
• 5:43
  and so it's it's kind of like tailor made for well we actually
• 5:48
  the reason we have methane oxygen system is because you can
• 5:51
  make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily like not just not
• 5:57
  a total walk in the park but the ingredients are readily
• 6:00
  available to create methane and oxygen on Mars.
• 6:04
  So so you build a propellant depot and and bring the ships
• 6:10
  back and build out as quickly as possible a self-sustaining
• 6:16
  civilization on Mars. And we want to get the we want
• 6:19
  to get the cost of going to Mars such that almost anyone could
• 6:22
  afford it So like if somebody were to just work hard on Earth
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  save off and that they'd be able to go to Mars.
• 6:29
  So it's like anyone ideally almost anyone could go to Mars
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  and I think you'll see a lot of governments also sponsor people
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  and ultimately we'll we'll want to get.
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  So there's kind of an optimal landing zone on Mars where you
• 6:46
  have resources so you've got access to water or frozen water
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  that you're not too close to the poles so you can use solar
• 6:54
  power. It would it would be nice to use
• 6:57
  nuclear. I don't know if we'll get get
• 6:59
  the approval, but nuclear would be very handy on Mars because
• 7:02
  you can use the heat and you can generate electricity.
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  So and then you kind of want to be about two kilometers below
• 7:09
  sea level. So if Mars did have an ocean,
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  you'd actually be quite deep in the ocean at least at 1st.
• 7:18
  And yeah, so let's see, that's Mars kind of, kind of want to
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  land about halfway between the the pole and the equator in a
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  kind of a deep area of Mars. If you the deeper it is, the
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  more you can use the atmosphere to break and the atmospheric
• 7:43
  density is higher. So these are all the things that
• 7:49
  would have to be developed. So as people ask me, are we
• 7:52
  developing these things? I'm like not yet, because this
• 7:56
  is the cart and we need the horse first.
• 7:59
  So the rocket is the horse and then this is the cart.
• 8:03
  But ultimately we'll need all these things lesser power
• 8:05
  generation, mining in general ice mining, propellant
• 8:09
  production, long duration life support construct a lot of
• 8:13
  construction and and the global communication.
• 8:18
  So I think this would open up a lot of opportunities for
• 8:21
  entrepreneurs that want to create any create things on Mars
• 8:25
  whether that is a propellant. Well, well I think we'll have to
• 8:28
  do the propellant depot. But whether it's like iron ore
• 8:32
  refining or a pizza joint or a bar, you know there'll be an
• 8:36
  opportunity to do all the things that we like on Earth, on Mars
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  like a Mars bar would be great. So I think, I think probably the
• 8:50
  a rough order of magnitude guess for what you need, how many
• 8:54
  people do you need for a self-sustaining city is about
• 8:57
  1,000,000 and several million tons of of cargo.
• 9:03
  So yeah, which we can do and we can do this in 20 years.
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  But like I said, in order for it to be self-sustaining you
• 9:15
  actually need the entire base of industry.
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  You can't be missing any element.
• 9:19
  So that's that's really what's going to take take a while is do
• 9:22
  you have everything you need to survive on Mars At that point
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  the future of consciousness is assured.
• 9:32
  So if you do 10 launches a day at 200 tons per launch, million
• 9:39
  and a half tons to Leo per opportunity, you you net that
• 9:42
  out to a quarter million tons to Mars per opportunity.
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  So that means you can get to 1,000,000 tons in about 8 years
• 9:53
  since the opportunities of two years apart.
• 10:00
  So I think it's pretty doable. And I'm like, we're actually
• 10:02
  going to do this. Are we going to, you know, we
• 10:06
  are actually going to do it, which is insane to think so.
• 10:10
  Millions of tons to Mars. Yeah, Wild.
• 10:18
  And we're going to build a lot of vehicles.
• 10:23
  So, yeah, several thousand vehicles per year.
• 10:30
  That's what we'll need, which really quite, quite doable
• 10:37
  actually. It sounds like a lot, but it's
• 10:40
  very doable. Yeah.
• 10:44
  If you compare it to sort of car production, there's a small
• 10:48
  number. Of course this is much bigger
• 10:49
  than a car, but even if you look at the total tonnage, the it's,
• 10:55
  it's still very, it's very doable to both several thousand
• 10:57
  vehicles a year. So that's what we need to do and
• 11:03
  we're going to do it.