Main Engine Cut Off - T+23: SpaceX Mars Architecture Initial Reactions

Episode Date: September 28, 2016

Elon Musk took the stage at the IAC this week and unveiled SpaceX’s architecture for their planetary exploration and colonization plans. Jake from WeMartians and I discuss our initial reactions to and takeaways from the event. WeMartians | Follow humanity's journey to Mars Mars | SpaceX Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species - YouTube Full Presentation Slides (PDF) IAC - International Astronautical Congress | September 26th - 30th 2016 Guadalajara, Mexico Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we have a ton to talk about today. I'm here with Jake from the Wee Martians podcast. Hey, how's it going? How's it going? We just got done watching the SpaceX announcement at IAC of the Mars architecture. We are, what, like 20 to 30 minutes past the nightmare of a Q&A session after Elon Musk's announcement there. Yeah, it's less of a watching the Q&A session more of an experiencing the Q&A session. It was cringing our way through some of that. I think most of the people left their yurts in Burning Man and flew straight to the conference just to ask a few of the questions about a dusty, waterless shitstorm that is Mars.

Yeah, I didn't know they had direct flights from Black Rock City to Guadalajara, so that's good. I think they flew with Elon is my guess. That's my best guess is that they all piled in his little plane there. So anyway, so we're gonna do our little bit of an initial reaction kind of show here. We are, like I said, just fresh out of the announcement. So we'll probably get some stats wrong. We'll probably hear some clarifications over the next week or so. I'm sure, you know, people will be talking about this all week. So this is going to be very, very raw right after the announcement. So this is just kind of our time to nerd out. And then this will be posted. And next week, I will be on Jake's show

over at WeMartians.com. And we'll probably be a little bit more informed when we get to that point. We'll do our best. So I figure we'll start with things that were announced, go through some of the stuff that Elon Musk talked about, some of the things that we saw. We saw a lot of visualizations, a video of the Raptor test firing that happened this week. So we'll start there and then we'll get into what we didn't see, what we still want to see, what we know is coming, but we haven't seen yet. So let's get started with the initial mission architecture, kind of following the launch profile of the spacecraft all the way up to trans-Mars injection. That was the kind of lead off of their video that they posted a little bit before Elon

Musk took the stage. They showed the actual booster, the actual spacecraft, taking off from Pad 39A, going up to a parking orbit, getting refueled by the same booster plus a tanker variant of the spacecraft and kind of getting all prepared there until it heads out towards Mars. So that's the overall architecture. I don't think that's too surprising. That seems to be what a lot of the rumors were pointing to beforehand. It seemed like they would take between two and five refueling trips before they were ready to head out towards Mars. So, you know, and then at the end, Elon Musk talked about the fact that depending on how long refueling took, they might bring the humans up on the first launch or they might bring them up

at a later time. So it still seems like they're working out the exact specifications of how they would get people up to orbit. But do you have any thoughts on that general architecture, things that you like about that, things that you don't like about that? Yeah, well, I mean, I think you nailed it. I mean, it was pretty much exactly what we were expecting, right? All the rumors were kind of right along those lines. I really appreciate how it's sort of, in a sense, it's actually kind of a simple design, right?

The concept of a Mars colonial transporter is a pretty far out there, almost sci-fi esque picture, but, but this is really, it's a stage and a ship. Like it's, it's, it's not nothing crazy from, from that, uh, perspective. So I do like how, um, you know, he kind of gets down to the simple way to get that done. Uh, the refueling in orbit, it's, uh, we were all kind of debating whether that was actually going to happen or not, whether we could launch it with or without. It makes sense that you want to refuel because you can really maximize your payload. It was a pretty fun little docking dance they did there.

I liked kind of how they sort of touch bellies, if you will, if that's if that's the way we can. Yeah, I don't understand what was going on with that. I mean, like I understand that, you know, they wanted to keep the front of the ship and the back of the ship pretty simple, but they didn't really show any details, obviously, about the docking interface or the transfer interface. Is there a way to get between ships if it was going to dock? You know, like, so he said they might bring people up on the first flight. They might bring them up later. If they were to bring them up later in the same kind of ship, do they dock in that kind of spooning orientation? And then there's some way to transfer. I can't imagine everyone have to eva to get between the ship so there has to be

some sort of transfer mechanism there yeah i don't think they'll be doing evas um but if you look really closely though you'll notice the tanker is actually a slightly different ship right there were no windows at all on the tanker so the the initial um vessel with all the crew had tons of windows you could see all around in the different decks. Tanker was windowless. So I'm not sure if that means if the whole thing is fuel or if it means that there's room for cargo in there. But presumably, if you are going to take five trips to refuel this thing and it takes weeks

and maybe months even to get the ship ready, you're not going to have people up there. So I assume they're going to have a second crew version that comes up. And then yeah, there's got to be some sort of docking interface, because that's that's the only way it could ever happen, right? Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of, I guess, you know, a couple questions about, did anyone see a launch abort system on the ship? And I didn't, I didn't see anything that would indicate there was a launch abort. I mean, you have plenty of engines there. So maybe you can do something tricky with, you know, some sort of launch abort mechanism. But really what the plan seems to be is build a reliable system and accept the risk.

That's something that was repeated a lot. He didn't stray away from saying that the risk of death is very high on these missions. So they definitely seem to be heading the way of saying we're going to accept risk because we have to. We have to accept risk if we're going to do this kind of mission. Yeah. And, you know, the abort system, it's a great point. Cause I didn't see one either. Um, and that's going to be a criticism that will, I'm sure come out of the woodwork pretty quickly here. Um, but if you compare that to the shuttle, I mean, this is the big difference. So the shuttle had two, two really, you know, catastrophic failures and, um,

both of them were, were, you could, you could almost say that both of them were were you could you could almost say that both of them were a result of of the side mounted crew compartment right because uh if if the the ship had been mounted on the top which the the spacex version is uh you know the the columbia one definitely wouldn't have happened because that was a result of the foam falling off backwards and hitting the orbiter and then the uh Challenger, well, you could argue that one, I guess. But still, I think there is actually lower risk with a top-mounted booster, even if there isn't much of an abort system. But I would also not be surprised if we find out that there is something. He just didn't have time to talk about it, right?

Well, yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to lead off making humans a multi-planetary society by telling them about your abort system. So there's certainly a little bit of that where it's, you know, which parts of the plan do you want to announce today? Because clearly there's, I mean, he blew over his time limit. So there was way too much to talk about, even if he wanted to get into the details of that. I know he said he was going to get into technical details during Q&A, but we saw how well that went. Yeah, yeah, there's certainly a lot to chew on, that's for sure.

So the other thing, when he was talking about the initial structure of the mission, he was talking about the way that these pieces could be reused and how often they could be used. And he mentioned that the ship portion is really only going to be used for heading out to Mars and back. Obviously, there might be some missions that people heading out to Mars and back. Obviously, there might be some missions that people would do to the moon or wherever else. But in reality, the crew ship portion of the ship or that variant is going to be used to head out to Mars every 26 months. So we said that's as frequently as that thing would be used. But the booster and the tanker, they could be reused as frequently as you would like to use them, as frequently as they can actually use them in reality. You know,

we don't know what the refurbishment is going to be like for these things. Presumably, based on their video, they're really going to optimize this for reusability without refurbishment. But they definitely left the options open there to use the booster and the tanker for other missions, whether it just be to take a massive amount of propellant up to orbit to be used by someone else to sell when you're in low Earth orbit, or even to use the booster as a launch system for other payloads, be it a satellite, you know, a space telescope, whatever it is. They definitely left the door open for that, but we didn't see any hard plans plans uh for that just yet yeah i mean and that's

certainly a possibility as far as using the booster goes like i i love the idea of thinking that we have this incredibly powerful booster available for other missions um but like i i don't know what kind of market exists for that because i mean you're looking at uh i think the the slide says the the ship's um dry mass is about 150 tons and uh you know add your cargo to that you're over 300 tons to orbit uh i think you can get up to 550 with an expendable mode like what can you even launch with that besides this like i don't think i think if you put a bunch of you know nasa scientists in a room and said hey we're gonna give you a a mission to you know pl NASA scientists in a room and said, hey, we're going to give you a mission to, you know, Pluto, do whatever you want. You have 550 tons of expendable space. I don't I don't know what they could come up with 550 tons worth of stuff in one monolithic launch. So I'll be

really interested to see what SpaceX can offer from that perspective. It's it's a it's a big question mark, I think, for sure. Yeah. And the other aspect of the reuse that I found interesting, I'll post in the show notes a link to somebody extracted all the good technical slides out of the presentation so that you can just kind of scroll through to see the different diagrams, the different stats, all the different things that you would really care about for this architecture. And one of the slides had on it the amount that each component could be reused. So the kind of lifespan for the booster, the lifespan for the tanker, and for the actual crew variants. And the booster portion, it said a thousand uses per booster, a hundred per tanker,

and twelve per ship. That was kind of the stats that they laid out. And the interesting thing there, you might wonder why is this a magnitude less for each portion? And the booster, obviously, that seems like a value that's limited by how many times it could be fired, re-entered, et cetera, et cetera. Same for the tanker. Now, the ship is where it gets interesting to me. This is something that I had thought about as they were going through their presentation. 12 uses of the ship, if you consider it going out to Mars whenever it can, every transfer window, one time there, one time back, if you were to send it every 26 months, which regardless of, you know, it might not be that often because of how it will stay on the surface for a while and then come back.

If you were just to send one every transfer window, that would be about 26 years of use. So it might not be that the ship would wear out physically within 12 uses, but the fact that you would use this 12 times and be 30 years down the road, that could be a completely outdated version of the ship by that point. They might have a next gen one ready. And that's why the use of the ship is only at 12 instead of 100 or 1000. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that if you think about if you were using it full, full fledged like that, it would spend a lot of time in space, which is just really hard on it, right? So you get onto that kind of timescale 2030 years,

and basically, you're looking at a shuttle, right? This is, I think we're going to see is that these these colonial transporters end up being treated more like shuttle orbiters, which were, you know, they had names, they had character, rather than a disposable capsule, like closer to what an Apollo mission would be, where they kind of had this one shot and then you put it in a museum, right? So I think you've got it nailed right there. That's a perfect lifespan for a ship before they come out with uh you know mct2 or whatever it's right yeah it's just cool that we're getting into the era of being limited on your lifespan because of a lifespan not because of technical aspects reusability refurbishment all of the things that caused ships to be you know retired in the past have been because of physical components like that whereas you, you get into these missions and you're looking at generations of people heading out to Mars or wherever else

these things are going. It's just a really interesting consideration that no one else has had to make at this point. You don't really consider the lifespan of, you know, think about the ACES upper stage that ULA is working on. That thing's reusable with air quotes. I'm making air quotes right now because it's, you know, it's one launch and then it's going to be reused up there. So that sort of has the same thinking where you've got to understand the uses of this are really limited to the duration of your mission and the kind of missions that you're carrying out, not so much the actual wear and tear of the materials used in these structures. not so much the actual wear and tear of the materials used in these structures.

Yeah, yeah. I think it speaks to how Musk really wants to usher in this sort of new era of spaceflight and trying to think of it more like a commercial transportation system rather than an out-of-touch launch system. We might start thinking of these ships as, as the same way we had the, um, and, uh, you'll have to forgive me cause I'm Canadian. So I don't know the, uh, the American history very well here, but the, the ships that Columbus came on, everyone likes to quote the ships, right? They have, and the names, the Santa Maria, I think it is, and the other one. I'm letting you go on this just cause I like, I like this. Yeah. So, so if you think of those ships, those ships went into history, right?

I mean, you can look up the Wikipedia article on that specific ship, and there's a ton of information there. So I think that ultimately Musk wants to see these MCTs as that sort of vessel. And the other interesting thing I'm wondering is, you know, at the end of a lifespan of a ship, it doesn't necessarily have to come back to Earth at that point. You could leave it at Mars,

you could harvest the metals out of it, you could harvest the components, the composites, whatever you want to harvest out of that, you could use it as a hab. You could even do something like a wet workshop with it once you're at Mars. If you need a ton of pressurized space, you could turn it into a wet workshop at that point, you know, once it's seen its time, because it's still a useful structure. It's still, you know, if everything was built right, it would still be structurally sound after that 20 years of use or whatever it may be. And even if it's not the ship that you want to be flying between Earth and Mars, we need all the infrastructure we can get on the surface of Mars. So, you know, at that point, why not retire it there? You've already got

it there. There's no reason to bring it back and retire it here. You're not really going to fit it in the Air and Space Museum here in DC. Can't really get that through the front door. So leave it on Mars. Let it be useful there, whether it be for resource harvesting or even if you want to just use it as a place to store the propellants that you're creating with your propellant plant, there's a lot of stuff we could do with that once it's on the surface. Yeah. You know, what I would love to see is actually, uh, you retire them into Mars orbit and then lease them to NASA for, for a rover control, right? I mean, I think that would be a perfect thing for, for NASA to be like, I want to send a science crew

to Mars and they'll teleoperate different rovers from the uh from orbit and they can do tons of science from up there right it's like a it's like a pre-built uh space station it's like a like a mobile mobile home space station you're selling real estate that's already you know in orbit or something like that so yeah it's it's just a different way to think this is again getting back to this is a different type of mission than we've done before that and we've even really thought about before because these again are considerations that you don't think about when you're thinking about a NASA type plan or an ESA type plan to the moon.

These are not considerations that you have to make when you're just thinking of a typical mission architecture. Yeah. And I think Musk is really trying to capture that, right? I mean, he spoke about how it's really important to not just, you know, try and solve problems every day. It's important to wake up and be excited about what the future holds.

And he does a great job of getting everyone to think in a way that pushes boundaries, right? Like this whole idea is, and he called it, it's gonna sound a little crazy, but it's definitely gonna be entertaining. And I think that, well, I mean, as you could tell from the enthusiasm in the room, it was just, it really inspired a lot of people, I think. So just on the topic of the actual materials that are used on this ship, everything that

was pointing to this was correct in that it is going to be carbon fiber. There was that report a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago at this point, of that big deal that got made between SpaceX and the largest carbon fiber supplier in the world. It was reported and then taken back and everyone denied it. But either way, I think this obviously confirms those rumors that it's going to be carbon fiber based. And it's something that they spent a lot of time on talking about, the fact that the carbon fiber is going to be used for the tanks, which is the structure of the ship, and there's a lot of concerns that they have about keeping the methane and oxygen cold enough in space.

There's a lot of work going into those structures, and right now they only use the carbon fiber structures for the interstage and a few other components on Falcon 9, so they don't have a ton of experience. The fairings are the other one, obviously. the carbon fiber structures for the inner stage and a few other components on Falcon 9. So they don't have a ton of experience, the fairings or the other one, obviously. They don't have a ton of experience with carbon fiber only because they haven't used it too much. I guess at this point, they're using plenty of it for their fairings and stuff at this point. So they're even thinking about reusability for their fairings. So they're inching their way to being experts with carbon fiber and on that front they showed

a picture of a fully built uh development tank of the i guess that was that the oxygen tank of the ship i forget which one they said it was yeah it was it was almost spherical so i'm i'm looking at the the diagrams here i'm sure that was definitely it wasn't in the booster right it was in the mct um my guess it's it's the top one what do you put in the top is usually the oxygen in the top isn't it yeah well i guess it changes on which kind of configurations a lot of like the hydrolog stages use the hydrogen tank in the in the top and oxygen at the bottom so it changes depending on what you're using but yeah either way the point is uh you know they had only built fairings and interstages of carbon fiber before.

They've got this giant tank built, which was something that I think this is probably the most surprising part of the presentation for me, is that they've built out an entire dev tank. You see, you know, not to throw shade here, but there's a lot of hubbub being made about the fact that SLS tanks are being built right now. A lot of times they're showing not even the flight tanks, they're showing the actual structural tanks and things like that. And SpaceX somehow was hiding this gigantic composite tank somewhere in, I assume, Hawthorne. I don't know where this is at, but the fact that they kept this under wraps and just unveiled the fact that they've built this entire tank as a test article. I don't know that they got into what they were using this

tank for yet. I don't know if this is a Pathfinder or an actual test article. I don't know that they got into what they were using this tank for yet. I don't know if this is a Pathfinder or an actual test article. I don't think they made that clear. Did I miss that? It sounded like it was a structural test article, but I mean, yeah, the details were, it was a pretty brief part of the presentation.

Yeah. And there's a staircase inside of the tank. So it's definitely not a flight tank. I don't think you're flying with a giant staircase in there. And that just speaks to the size. I mean, the picture had some people standing in front of it and it was unbelievable and i think you know i think that we talk about all these advancements in in uh yeah you know

the methalox system we have all these these we're gonna see some cool solar panels that are gonna pop out with tons of power all this isru stuff i think we might look back at this point, you know, in 10, 20 years and go, this carbon fiber stuff is, is really the, the engineering marvel that SpaceX is going to be remembered for because, you know, until we got to reusability, we never, we never bothered with, with carbon fiber. It just was, it was too expensive to throw away into the ocean. And if they can make this work, it's going to, it's going to revolutionize a lot of different space travel applications. I mean, structures is a huge part of of space uh aerospace engineering right so i mean look at uh the perfect example is the uh the boeing 787 dreamliner right this is the newest plane it's a work of art like

if you've ever been on they're just gorgeous planes and they're they're incredibly efficient with their fuel they they glide around just like they're like birds man they're just so they're so nice and they're they're carbon fiber fuselages and that helps them with their their fuel economy so um taking that sort of mentality and applying it to space is is exactly what musk is trying to do so i'm really excited for that and on the topic of seeing actual hardware hardware built i'm trying to just keep us moving along so we don't drone on too long about this but i'm sure we'll be diving in depth on this on uh jake's episode of we martians next week which i'll be i'll be on i think i mentioned that up front of the show uh but i'll be on his show next week to talk more in depth about this so this is really just you know what are our initial

thoughts so we're going to try to move through a lot of this and just talk about things that we found important um but we're going to be talking about this for years obviously to come from here but on the topic of actual hardware um we saw earlier this week a test firing of the raptor the first raptor that was shipped to mcgregor we heard about that uh maybe what was that a month ago two months ago gwen shotwell said that they shipped the first raptor to mcgregor hadn't heard anything else about that since and monday night or what was it i guess it was sunday night that the firing actually happened sounds like it was around like 9 p.m local time in mcgregor they test fired the raptor for the first time and we actually got to see a video of that today as well as tons of other stats on the raptor so it probably warrants talking about the engine a little bit first. And we'll post in the show notes, the video of the test firing, definitely check that out

because it's good to see the duration of that firing. Obviously it wasn't full duration or anything like that, but kind of showed the whole startup phase. I don't know the exact launch, you know, timeline of this giant spaceship that they're building here. But sort of looked like it was a startup through liftoff firing. It didn't it cut off maybe five, six seconds after startup. Yeah. And I think that it's a gorgeous engine. I mean, if if you're at all into into to rocket engines, it's just it's a work of art. I mean, the I love seeing the that rich purple in the plume it's a really kind of a nice color that's the coolest looking color of any plume yeah is it yeah i mean i i

think of some other weird fuel combinations that create some fun stuff if you ever um this is a complete starry five bar but if you ever look up the uh pictures of uh there's an old british rocket called a black arrow and they uh they burned i think it was um like hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer so the the plume was transparent. So it's a really bizarre looking rocket. But this reminds me kind of that it gives you that sort of joy to look at something new. Yeah, we haven't seen a lot of methane engines really in the world. I mean, we've definitely seen a few test firings of methane engines.

The only one I know that has actually lifted off the ground is the engine from Project Morpheus, which is a NASA project that they were working on for a handful of years. They had a pretty big incident in like 2012 or 13, I think it was. And that was a testbed for planetary landers. And that was a methane engine. So a lot smaller scale, obviously. But we haven't seen a lot of methane engines yet. But we are entering the era of methane in every way. We've got the Raptor here. The BE-4 is all methane. So we are very much entering the phase of giant methane engines.

So cool to see our first video of a firing of that kind of engine. Yeah, it's very exciting. And, you know, it's not just the fuel, I think, that's exciting about it. The fact that this one's a full flow stage combustion um is it's going to be pretty impressive and you'll see that in the efficiency of the engine for sure and like that chamber pressure so 300 bars of chamber pressure which is something like three times what the merlin can put out from the falcon 9 um that's why you're going to get that much more thrust out of the same size engine like it's it's impressive i don't think i can't think of one

engine that has that much chamber pressure. I went through the list. No, it's the highest by far, yeah. Yeah, I went through the list. I think the closest that I could find was RD-180 gets up to about 260 bars, I think. And that's even got a good margin above anything else in that list

that you've had going. He's got a sweet little table going of all these different engine stats. So we were sending this back and forth earlier in the week just to kind of compare where this thing is going to sit in the lineup and uh i don't know if you're looking at the list right now but what's do you know what's under the rd 180 yeah so i mean the next one down is is what everyone refers to as the ferrari of rocket engines right it's the space shuttle main engine it's the rs25 which you'll see on the space launch system but that's already down to 200 bars so um only beats it yeah raptor

beats it by 50 percent uh right away so it's really impressive i'm i'm actually i'm really excited to find out what the b4 can put out because it's uh it's a pretty similar engine when you get down to it so um bezos and blue origin they haven't released the uh those kind of stats on it yet but uh i'll be curious to see where uh where the winner between those two comes up but this is uh really exciting for sure and this is quite a bit higher than uh just you know all the stats of this are quite a bit higher than the ones that elon musk was talking about in his reddit ama from it was like a year ago at this point, it was a while ago, they were talking about 230 metric tons of thrust at that point in time, and this is well above that. The stats here are between three and three and a half from sea level vacuum, so three and three and a half, I'm talking 3,000 to three and a half thousand kilonewtons, so this is bigger than the engine

that was leaked back then by a good amount. So you can imagine the BE-4 would do something similar where the early stats we heard about it might be outdated by the time we actually see it fire. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, I don't remember what the BE-4 thrust is, but what a time to be alive. Probably the most important stat about this engine in terms of the way spacex is going to use it uh they mentioned the throttle capability on this engine and it's between 20 to 100 obviously it wouldn't be this is not a spatial engine where we keep upgrading it

and then say that it's 110 thrust so it goes down all the way to 20 which is it's very deep throttling um and i certainly certainly, there are a lot of things that they learned from Merlin days into Raptor that they can apply to get that deep throttling. But that's really going to help for their landing profiles, both at Mars and at Earth. The thing about Merlin is that its thrust-to-weight is so high that it can't hover. It's too powerful to actually hover here on Earth. So they have to time their landing burns to hit zero velocity right at the point where they're going to land and touch down. So with a deeper throttling engine, that becomes a lot, not easier to land, but you get a lot more control. You certainly see that with the New Shepard landings.

That's a very deep throttling engine in the BE-3. So they can actually hover and kind of maneuver where they're going to land. Each landing profile of New Shepard has been a little different because they're kind of showing off. It sort of looks like they're showing off the way that they're coming back in. But, you know, when we're talking about landing back on a launch mount, you need all the help you can get to do that. So the deep throttling is going to be huge for them. Yeah, exactly. And you know, some people maybe don't think about throttling when it comes to rocket engines, because we think every other engine in our life can throttle however we need to. But it's not that easy for rockets. I mean, most of them don't throttle that much. Some of the best ones like the space shuttle, they could throttle down to I think

something like 80 85% when they think it was a little lower than that but maybe a little over 60 nowhere close to 20 nowhere close to 20 i think that you know the best historical example i can think of is is the lunar descent engine so when apollo was landing on the moon uh the uh the descent engine on the on the part that stayed on the moon uh could throttle down to between 10 and 60 percent which gave the astronauts control over selecting their landing sites right so that's that's exactly why they developed it then, and it's exactly why they're developing it now. They want to be able to land these things with lots of control, lots of precision. I'm trying to look up what the BE-3 is. Let's see. Sorry for our off-the-cuff. I told you this was going to be rough. We're in the heat of the moment here. So it looks like here,

off we're in the the heat of the moment here so uh it looks like here i'm doing some math on the fly it looks like they got 18 throttle in some of their tests now obviously the b3 is a much smaller engine uh not that that makes rocket engines any easier but just you know different cycles it's a hydrogen engine versus the methane so there's some different variables there but you know the b3 has that 18 throttle rating or you know whatever it actually is i'm trusting some internet stats so don't don't uh write any research papers based on my comments here but you know uh deep throttling is something that spacex has gone so far without and the fact that they're going to get an engine that can throttle as deeply as this is uh is pretty huge and then consider consider they're putting 42 of these things

on the booster stage. So, you know, the way that Falcon 9 sort of throttles itself right now is by selectively firing engines. So they fire, you know, one engine on the landing burn, sometimes three. They sort of play with what they're firing to adjust their throttle values.

If you combine that with deep throttling, you do have a lot of control over even something as big as the boost stage yeah i mean i don't know i just keep saying this it's so exciting that we're getting into this because uh you know b3 if you say if that's right 18 that's right in the same ballpark and that means that b4 is probably not too far out of the way because they're going to land that stage as well so we've got two you know like work of art i keep saying that they're work of art uh engines they're uh they're they're cutting edge and they're going to be able to do a lot of crazy things that just were not possible in the the old days of space is there anything else on the the raptor specifically that that you found uh important or surprising or you were expecting to see and didn't well i mean i think that the biggest question left over is is to to find out

more about the the different versions right because we saw in the video the the actual spaceship had six kind of in an outer ring and then three in an inner ring so the six were the what they used for the trans mars injection if you will and then three in the middle were the landing engines for on the surface so i'm really curious to see what the difference is between those two um are they just two different kinds of raptors and you know what is you know what is the thrust difference between them and and uh you know just kind of that kind of stuff i think we found out we did read that the the outer ones do not gimbal and the inner ones do so that was on the boost stage but did they say the same about the ship they did yeah so okay is that what he was talking about the thrust differentiating uh to

steer um there was like something where he was talking about kind of like you know pulling the throttle down on some of the engines to reorient uh it sounded similar to the way that dragon 2 is going to steer on descent where it's got eight engines, so it throttles some differently to orient itself. I don't know if that was what he was talking about there. It was a little bit, obviously, as you know, Elon Musk talks, he gets off into the weeds a lot. So I don't know if that was something that I just missed out on or what. Yeah, I might have missed that as well, but that's something we'll have to answer. You know, what's really strange too is that, and this is me, I'm just kind of thinking this right now, the three landing engines is kind of a weird arrangement for a rocket kind of,

because you can't suffer a failure on that one, right? If you lose one engine, the other two will be off your thrust vector and it's going to throw everything into... So that's kind of strange. That's why most will go to a five or a seven or a seven or um or three kind of in a line which would make more sense but this sort of triangular formation is really peculiar so i'm i'm kind of curious to see him address that the the only thing i could think is that they are pretty tight together uh in consideration with how wide that that spaceship portion is it was a was it, 17 meter diameter on the ship portion there. And if you look in the video, now again, there's a lot of stuff left out of the video that we don't see yet, but there was a lot of thrusters on the side of the spaceship. Obviously, that's stuff

that's used for in-orbit maneuvering or in deep space maneuvering based on where this thing's flying. But I don't know how much of that is to kind of control itself, sort of like the cold gas thrusters do on Falcon 9. We certainly saw on the Falcon 9 landing, what was that, CRS-6, when the touchdown on the ship and then that one thruster was trying to keep it upright as it fell over and crashed. So, you know, even looking at that, you can see that they've already been working with, you know, other systems on the craft trying to keep itself oriented as it loses orientation. So I don't know if that might be

part of the consideration, the fact that they're clustered so tightly to the center of a wide ship, and they have thrusters elsewhere that might be able to help. I don't know how much of that plays into it. But, you know, we see asymmetrical rockets, we've got the the atlas 5 4 11 that that flies all crazy so gimbling might might be able to be their friend in that case you're right there i think you can probably angle them just a little bit you'll probably only need a couple degrees of uh of gimbling before you're you're back in the right spot so yeah but again this is something that i didn't expect them to talk about in their uh reason just like launch abort systems i don't really think this was probably worth the time to cover considering that you know most of the audience probably didn't care about it anyway so yeah um again this is you know another fact that i hope we get some more technical

sessions out of this um one other point i want to bring up before we move on to some of the uh larger takeaways from what elon musk was saying and some of the stuff that we didn't see. Something that is of note right now, considering where SpaceX is at and what they're dealing with, it's going to be autogenously pressurized, the boost phase and I guess, you know, the spaceship portion as well, which means there's no more helium. So helium has been the bane of their existence. It's caused, you know, in different ways, it's caused both of their, their issues with Falcon nine or all three. There was, there was a little bit of a, an issue that was happening out of McGregor a year, two years ago.

That wasn't really talked about too much, but they've had a ton of issues with helium. Um, so the fact that they're making progress to get rid of it, uh, that says a lot. Yeah, exactly. they're making progress to get rid of it uh that says a lot yeah exactly and that's that was kind of their subtle way of of acknowledging the uh the uh fast fire we had earlier this month um without actually acknowledging it right so they're saying this is uh no helium so you don't have the exact same problems um and uh i think that definitely leaves the door open for and this again this is rumored but um leaves the door open for putting a raptor into a second stage making a new second stage for falcon and for falcon heavy that's that's

methane fueled um and then you eliminate this whole you know copv this composite over pressure vessel problem they keep having at least in the upper stage you know we don't know the the air force contract is for an upper stage engine so presumably there could be plans for that, but you still would have that issue in that first stage. There's always that, but we haven't seen that issue arise in the first stage, even though it's the same structures and engineering on both stages. Presumably the helium tank in the first stage is much larger, right? I don't know if there's just maybe some scale benefits they get out of that that could be making the smaller one harder. Yeah, I've heard some theories that because the helium is suspended in more liquid oxygen on the first stage that it's got more pressure from the outside, so it might not,

you know, be as stressed. But again, if either of us really understood that, we probably wouldn't be doing a podcast. So yeah, exactly. You mentioned something that I think we could move into. And, you know, you said that the, you know, talking about autogenous pressurization was their way to kind of hat tip towards the helium issues that they're having right now. And I thought that in general, Elon Musk did a good job of, you know, referencing things that people have been saying from the outside. The helium issue was one of them. The other was that he made a very big point to thank NASA for all their support over the years.

There's a lot of hubbub lately about, you know, NASA is SpaceX's main client. They're the people that kept them in business all these years. They've supported them so much. And SpaceX keeps focusing on other projects. They're not focusing on Crew Dragon. They're not focusing on getting Falcon 9 back to flight. There's been a lot of feelings towards SpaceX that they're not, you know, thankful enough for NASA. So the fact that Elon took so much time out to really thank NASA and say how much he appreciated their support, let them get a big applause during this session.

I think that said a lot. And the other one was that he's kind of poking fun at himself for being terrible at timelines. So, you know, those three instances, granted, two of them were a little bit, you sort of had to know what was going on with SpaceX to really understand

what he was getting at there. But the fact that there were these elements of the presentation where he was kind of owning up to some of the stuff that SpaceX has been getting flack for, I thought that said a lot for their mindset around all this. Yeah, I think it maybe shows how they're growing, right? They're becoming aware of their limitations, but not letting them compromise their ambitions, right? You're bang on with the NASA stuff. And you know, this is something that I hope we can talk more about on

my show next week. But NASA is their biggest customer, but it's not just the amount of money that they, they made. It's the timing. I mean, the, the NASA contract came in literally down to the wire. It was days before he was going to default on payroll. So, I mean, that's, it's such a critical component to the SpaceX story is the NASA cargo contract. So I, yeah, I'm really glad to see him, uh, speak to that. Uh, and the that. And the timeline thing, it was really funny. It was kind of a mea culpa and he just flat out said, listen, I'm not good at this. And you saw that later when he put the timeline chart up and he kind of prefaced it with like, listen, we're going to do our best, but things happen. And that's how it goes. That's how space goes, right? So I'm kind of glad that he, at the same time of, you know,

he presented a timeline, but at the same time, he lowered the expectations. I think maybe people will be a little bit less fussy when, you know, inevitably one part of it will be delayed. So it's good to see. And it certainly shows that they're more self-aware than they have been in the past. I think, you know, they've never been willfully ignorant of this stuff, but,

uh, the fact that they're more self-aware of the perception from the outside, when they talk about timelines, when they talk about technical issues, you know, they've, they've always, if you're someone who follows SpaceX closely, uh, you've known to read their timelines as a statement of, if everything goes according to plan, this is when we will fly. They didn't do a great job prefacing that in other times. You know, they never really made that clear to the public, to someone who might be reading, you know, about SpaceX in the newspaper or something. They will always see that Falcon Heavy is six months away or whatever. But that's kind of been SpaceX's MO, that we're going to give you a timeline based on, if everything went according to plan, exactly, this is when we will fly. But now they do a good job of saying,

they say that upfront, that this is a timeline that's dependent on everything going according to plan. It probably won't, but this is when we would get there if so. So regardless, I just think it shows that they're becoming more self-aware, more aware of the way this is going to be communicated out to the general public, to the people at NASA, or the people that support them or don't support them. It just shows a little bit of maturity in their communications. Yeah. And probably a little bit of how to deal with being a celebrity company, right? Totally. Yeah. That's definitely a big part of it. I'll just move on a little bit to some things that, if you have any other takeaways,

I think we should get into that things that might not be technical in nature, but you took out of the presentation in general, their architecture, their, uh, you know, things like we were just talking about with the way that they're handling this. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I was just really my, my overall feeling if I'm, if I'm watching this and just taking a step back and thinking about it as I was really, I don't want to say surprised, but I'm pleased to see that there was so much in this presentation that met the expectations that were laid out leading up to this. I mean, the rumors that we've heard from Elon, just like you said, he's not good at timelines. He's also very good at boasting about stuff. timelines he's he's also very good at boasting about stuff so you know for the years leading up to this when he starts talking about things like 100 people to mars or 100 tons to mars and

and he's just kind of throwing these these these vague round numbers around but he delivered exactly that in this presentation now of course none of this is is you know besides this test article fuel tank none of this is actually real hardware yet so he can still fall back on it but i was just really pleased to see how everything that we've heard in the past led up to this and they stayed none of this is actually real hardware yet so he can still fall back on it but i was just really pleased to see how everything that we've heard in the past led up to this and they stayed on the mark like they they they met their um they met their obligations they met their commitments and i think that i was really impressed by that you kind of touched on one of my other two takeaways and that's the this isn't as much of a paper rocket as we might have assumed you know this

is something that we've seen a test firing of the raptor engine granted it's a dev version it's at least a full scale version from what it sounds like it's about the size of a merlin so it seems full scale uh and we saw that test article tank so you know you can't really say that this is a paper rocket this is as much a real rocket in a lot of ways as SLS, to be honest. We've seen, you know, SLS, granted, is closer to launching and probably further along because they've got more components. But if you write it down in paper in the simplest form, they've got engines, they've got test article tanks. So it's not a paper rocket. It is somewhat along in the plan. At least they're, you know, they're bending carbon fiber at this point. And that's way farther

along than I was expecting. And I think, you know that that seemed to be the most shocking part of the presentation that they had that tank built so it's good to see that they are at least you know into the development program of this rocket yeah that's that's a great point i mean and it's a it's good for them to be able to sort of quell some of the naysayers, right? I mean, like you said, that's the biggest criticism they're going to be levying right away. So the fact that they have some real hardware to lean on is important. Yeah. The other main takeaway I had, and this is really in terms of strategy, the way they're going to go about this, SpaceX is focusing on the transportation side of things. Elon even said this directly in the Q&A session.

If you can work your way through that thing, get past the Burning Man people. He openly said they're focusing on transportation. He talked about early in the session, he talked about the fact that they're going to leave some infrastructure on the surface of Mars, but bring the ships back to be reused. But he didn't really show any infrastructure that would be left on Mars. So it leaves the question open. They're obviously open to partnerships. They seem to be pleading for people to work with them, be it NASA, governments, even other private entities. So are they kind of going about this in a way that would say, we'll build the transportation, we'll be the railroad, you bring the stuff, you bring the habitats, you bring the hardware,

we'll get you there, but you got to bring the stuff, you bring the habitats, you bring the hardware, we'll get you there, but you got to bring the stuff to us. Well, and I think they have to, right? I mean, that's been their plan all along is to reduce the cost of space travel. So that's probably a good point as to why it's important to have this presentation today, right? I mean, if this thing doesn't fly until 2022 or 2024, if it slips the launch window, I guess by then it goes into 2025 because of the 26 month difference. But, you know, if it slips to there, that's still, you know, seven, 10 years away. It's important to start thinking about it. Right. So you're going to start seeing these universities, these these private companies, government space agencies are going to have to start putting putting some ideas down on paper and thinking of what they can they can use like leverages for.

And that's going to help SpaceX achieve their goals. And it's going to help, you know, those organizations achieve their goals. Yeah. And I think, you know, if you're thinking about it in that aspect, this is another example of where Red Dragon strategically comes in handy for them, because they're going to start to build partnerships with people who don't have a way to get to Mars, but have stuff to put there. They can start working with NASA payloads, with other private industries, with their own hardware, you know, if they're going to build some ISRU hardware. They have this structure built up with Red Dragon that says, we're going to put payload on the surface of Mars. We're going to partner with people for that payload. So if they start building

partnerships and relationships from that kind of interaction, that kind of shows that maybe they do have a, you know, part of their head towards the strategy side of how do we make these partnerships? How do we get in touch with people that are going to be able to put hardware on Mars? Are they going to talk to Bigelow to put a BA3 whatever or BA6 million? However, I don't know what they're working on in terms of planetary bases. But Bigelow has interest in putting these stuff that they have into orbit, right? They're working with ULA to get BA330s into orbit in the 2020s or whatever. Maybe they have a version that will be able to be put on the surface of Mars, but they

need someone to take it there. So that's kind of the thing that I think we'll look out for going forward. Yeah. And to that point, I mean, Red Dragon was announced, and I think it was days later. NASA already came out and said, yeah, we got payload. We got $30 million of stuff we want to put on this. So the appetite's there, and they're thinking about it. There's no way the NASA commitment to that came out on a whim.

They'd been talking about it for a while. So we can clearly see that there's interest in this i mean this infrastructure right and they i think you know one of the things that i was a little bit disappointed that we didn't see is any sort of cargo variant of the uh spaceship i don't really know that they have a good name for the spaceship yet they just call the whole thing the interplanetary transport system which is terrible um i hate the name, but I preferred MCT. I thought that sounded cool. It rolled off the tongue. But they didn't show a cargo variant of that. So that's one of the things that I really hope to see soon, whether it be, you know, seeing that they,

I linked to something on the blog earlier this week that showed the way to leave like hardware canisters on the surface of a planet from an old presentation from 2004. I just want to know, are they going to do something like that where they leave a whole chunk of stuff on the surface? Are they going to have big bay doors in one of these models? I just want to know what their plan is. If Bigelow were to come to them and say that we've got, you know, we've got a piece of hardware that's X by Y and we want to get it to Mars, how are they going to support that? That's my my biggest question mark uh i mean granted you know we don't really know anything yet so kind of stupid to say i have a biggest question mark because there's so many um but that's something that i i thought we would see today i'm a little disappointed that we didn't yeah it's definitely something to look out

for because you're right there's a lot of ways to go about it right do you do you modify this tanker version with bay doors like you say because like you say? Because it's a big ship. They say it's 17 meters, but it might be 12 inside the diameter or so, which is still huge, right? I mean, what's the SLS fairing size? It's something like 7 or 8 meters or something like that. Yeah, they're going to work their way up over time, but it's still way smaller than what they've got.

So if they can fit the inside, that's certainly an option. Or maybe they ditch the uh the spaceship altogether and they just mount a a one-use payload that can land on mars um on the top of it and you can send a huge you can send a you know basically a base camp in a box on on top of that thing so um there's lots of options there and i think i you know i'm a little disappointed that we didn't hear about it but at the same time i also think that that's something they have to leave open to the the partners right i mean that's something that nasa needs to have a say in is something that bigelow needs to have a say in if they want that's a good point so yeah i i there's some questions that were were better

left unanswered because uh this can't be a one organization operation this has to be a team effort and and moving ahead too quickly without their consultation is is probably a recipe for disaster right yeah and and you're right in that you know there could be um people could come to them and say that you know we would like to get payload to the surface of mars but we have our own landing system that we want to test we want to be able to fly something that makes its own entry to mars so there's like considerations about the way they would get something to mars if if they don't want to be the service that lands your big cargo to Mars, but they just want to throw you towards Mars, you know, that's something that they could consider if they have some sort of transfer stage that just throws it towards Mars and they don't worry so much about landing all these

different payloads. That's just like, you know, that's what they get to decide now, now that their plans are out in the open and people know that they're going to do something like this. They know the payload range they're talking about. You know, I think that might have been even why they said 450 tons towards Mars. They're giving you an idea of what they can do. And then they want to hear from people about what they should do with it. Yep, you got it. Just before we close up and all, and maybe we can give a little preview about what we'll talk about on we martians this week coming up um we did get a few tweets from people about things that they didn't see

uh in the presentation that they thought and it's just some things that uh we didn't bring up here so you know maybe just a nice little list here of stuff that we can have on our list to to look out for over the next couple of months we got one from paul levitt who said uh the missing components that he was hoping to see or or hear about or is concerned that was missing. Radiation hardening. Elon kind of shrugged off radiation problems, but there definitely are some concerns there for bigger solar flares or things like that. He didn't see any crew accommodations, so we saw a fly-through of the spaceship, but it was totally empty. we saw a fly through of the spaceship, but it was totally empty. Um, so we, we don't know how much, how tiny of a box you're sleeping in, if you're sleeping in an ISS kind of pod, or if you have a state room, like a ship or something. Yeah. Um, the, you know, the radiation thing,

this, I wish I knew more about radiation, to be honest, this is kind of one of the things where I wish I was a little bit of a physicist because I've heard it both ways. I've heard it, you know, it's a, it's a disaster out there. And if we don't do something about it, we're all toast. And then I've heard, ah, no big deal. We just, you know, we just position the ship with the, with the fuel tanks facing the sun and hide behind the water tank during a solar flare. You're fine. So even like, you know, Zubrin has kind of written about how the, the levels that are you're receiving in transit are not that harmful. And yes, a flare would be harmful. But, you know, if we don't have a launch abort system, do we worry about flares that much if they're pretty,

you know, it's still rare occurrence? It's one of those things where is that a risk that you accept just like a launch issue? It's a tough call, but, you know, they could decide to go that way. Yeah. And, you know, maybe that's an opportunity for them to put a, you know, they could decide to go that way. Yeah. And, you know, maybe that's an opportunity for them to, to put a, uh, you know, a, a radiation instrument on red dragon and just take a look, see what, see what the dosage is on rouge, right. And get some of that data. Um, some other things that Paul did not see the, any mention of life support in the craft. Uh, I don't know, you know, what they wanted to get into on that it's i don't know how much that would have really benefited spacex to talk about today obviously they're not going to send you in an unpressurized tube to mars so i'm not sure i would be too worried about that

yet we'll obviously hear about that uh when uh it gets you know when it comes time micro g deconditioning so you know uh i've talked about how I was hoping to see some sort of artificial gravity in this system, because when you have 100 people heading out to Mars, you don't want them to all be, you know, out of commission. Once you get there, you want them to be operating at all times of the day to keep their bone mass up, their muscle mass up, uh, enough so that when they get to Mars, they can actually do something useful. Or when they get back to earth that they don't, um, you know, they're not comatose for a couple of days or weeks when they get back into one G. Yeah, that's a great point. And actually the way you bring that up is that, is there enough exercise equipment on there for everyone? Because, uh, you know, I spoke with the crew of high seas just, just in the last episode,

and they had six people in a habitat and they had traffic problems with their, with their exercise equipment. So, um, you know, trying to get a hundred people on there, you'd need, you'd need dozens and dozens of these machines. So, um, that's a, that's a great point at the same time. We don't really know much about that yet. I'm comfortable leaving that question unanswered because it's not like returning to Earth where you're right back into 1G. So going from zero to 0.38G, maybe that's an easier transition. I mean, some of the astronauts come back from the space station after six to eight months

and they can walk. So what can you do on Mars with that? Right. So we'll have to just kind of wait and see on that one. Yeah. And it's always something that, you know, it's not mission critical for the first mission out there. So it's something that, you know, if you're thinking about it from a way of how do we do this the quickest and safest and with as little complications as possible, you don't have to solve

that one right off the bat if you're just trying to figure out what do we need to be able to do this. And it's something that you could, you know, like we were saying, these things are going to get retired soon enough. These ships, they're not going to have a giant lifespan. So maybe Gen 2, which is the one that's built for 100 people, 200 people out to Mars. Maybe that's when you start thinking about artificial gravity. Once you start actually getting up into that range and, you know, is it worth solving when you're going to do a crew of 10 or whatever it's going to be on those initial missions? Something that, you know, they definitely can look at and probably will look at once they get in, you know, upwards of 100 people going out to Mars on each on each ship.

the very first commercial airliners they were far less comfortable than the ones we get to fly on today so uh it's got to be incremental and eventually it'll get to a point where um you know it's it's fun to go to mars rather than uh you know imagine the first passengers on the on the mayflower who laid in the bottom of a ship uh getting scurvy on the way over so uh things get better over time and as long as you can, you can make it safe and you can make it, uh, you know, possible, then we're on the right track. Yeah. The only, uh, other comment that was a thing that we haven't discussed yet. Um, you know, there's been some comments of stuff that we have covered. Will Arnold, uh, said that they didn't address the scientific potential of Mars at all. So they didn't, you know, uh, at the beginning of the presentation, Elon went on a bit of a rant about why Mars was the pick. Um, but you know, he's right in So they didn't, you know, at the beginning of the presentation, Elon went on a bit of a rant

about why Mars was the pick. But, you know, he's right in that they didn't really talk too much about how much science there is to be done there. And partially, you know, I think that might be because that's a little bit self-evident that obviously, if they were to get this up and going, that there wouldn't be people, you know, jumping to get to be a part of the mission to actually do their scientific work on the surface of Mars. Yeah, I don't think there's a real long answer that needs to be said on that. I mean, NASA does a great job of touting the scientific, you know, benefits of Mars exploration. We all know we need to go this. We just need a way, right? Yeah. So, you know, I don't know if we want to go too much on here before we get a chance to

do a lot of reading this week over everything that was announced some things i know that we had on our list that we didn't get to um we were going to talk about transit times which i guess we probably should have touched on when we're just talking about artificial gravity they they want to have some short transit times so maybe that's something we can get into as part of we martians same goes for the aerobraking that they're going to do on the surface of Mars. The ship is sort of biconic-ish in sort of lifting body-ish. It's not a capsule design, so it's a different sort of entry than we've seen. You know, there have been tests here at Earth of those kind of entry models, but none at Mars. So a little bit different of a way to get to Mars. So you know,

those are some things that we'll probably talk about on We Martians. And I'm sure we'll dive in a lot deeper on a lot of these topics. So you know, on that topic, can you tell us a little bit about We Martians for anyone that listens to this show that hasn't checked it out? I recommend it. But what can they expect to find over there? Yeah, well, I mean, it's just kind of a it's a it's not as frequent as yours. So I put out every three weeks or so um you can see our website www.wemartians.com and i just try to delve into really anything to do with mars so um the the shows typically end up being either about science about engineering or about human spaceflight um and so uh you know lots of great guests there as well i'm very excited for next week's episode and we'll uh yeah you and i will talk again we'll go into some more detail hopefully i can cover some more of the

historical context and and you know what the what the collaboration has to look like with uh with the rest of the community uh for spacex and uh we can uh we can get deeper and and you know what there's there's still more information rolling out so who knows what happens now there's there's as we're speaking there's an impromptu press conference happening. So we're already missing details. We're already out of date at this point. So no big deal, though. We'll cover it next week. And I hope everyone who listens to your show pops by take a take a chance on me, too. Yeah, I definitely recommend going to check that out. A ton of great interviews over there. Like you like Jake was saying, you know,

from the science to engineering, if you are into this show, you will love that show. So go check it out. You've had Joe Cassidy from Aerojet Rocket dying on talking about solar electric propulsion and a lot of other things like that. Jake just mentioned that he had the high seas crew on, which is probably my favorite episode that you've done because it gives a lot of good insight on the human side of the mission. You know, you were talking about their insights on the exercise equipment, just things like that, that you don't really talk about every day when you're talking about Mars with somebody. So a lot of cool stuff to be learned there. So please go check it out. Thanks. All right. Well, that'll be it for us today. Thank you very much, Jake, for coming on the show. And I look forward to talking to you next week. All right. We'll see

you then.