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"Once you have the transportation system to Mars, then there's a vast set of opportunities."
Elon Musk at a SpaceX press conference on September 17, 2018 in Hawthorne, California. Credit: Getty Images | Mario Tama
On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.
In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?
The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship's launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.
Ars Technica: So what does success look like with today's launch for you?
Elon Musk: These launches are all about data. The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it's basically data during the high heating, re-entry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration. So we've got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We're trying different coatings on tiles. We're trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We're varying the gap filler for the tiles. And also, we want to make sure that we've solved the issues that caused the explosions in the last two flights in the upper stage engine bay.
Ars: Do you feel like you've solved that?
Musk: I feel like we've got an 80 to—I don't want to tempt fate, I was going to say 90—but we've got about an 80 percent chance of having solved those issues. To really have a 100 percent chance, it requires the design iteration on the engine. And part of it was that we had to discover that we needed to tighten the bolts that attached the thrust chamber to the injector head after firing. So after the first firing, it turns out that's what caused some of the bolts to loosen a little bit; like some of them, some of the time, would loosen and that would allow basically fuel and gas to combine. Because the seal that normally blocks the passage of the fuel and oxidizer would gap a little bit, and it only takes a tiny amount of fuel and oxygen combining in a bad spot to explode the engine.
Ars: You mentioned the tiles. Is upper-stage reentry the biggest technical problem standing in the way of getting to a fully, rapidly reusable Starship?
Musk: Yeah. I mean, we've proven booster re-flight many times. Now this is a more efficient re-flight of booster, because the booster is literally coming back, getting caught by the tower, and being placed on the launch stand. That is much more efficient than landing on a droneship with legs, and then the ship's got to come back into port. That takes several days, and there are dozens of small things about Falcon 9 that need to be refurbished between flights. It's a pretty quick refurbishment, but it takes a few days, whereas Starship booster is designed for immediate re-flight. So it literally comes back, and in principle, less than 10 minutes later, you can be refilling propellant on the booster.
Ars: You mentioned upgraded engines solving the problem with Starship's upper stage. What's the timeline on flying Raptor 3 engines?
Musk: That's end of the year. The upgraded Raptors have a complete redesign of the aft end of the booster and the ship. So, because we don't need the heat shield around the upper portion of the engine, it greatly simplifies the base of the booster and the ship. It'll look a little, frankly, naked, especially on the booster side, because the engines will just be there, like, not with stuff around them. If you look at the current design, you can see the nozzles, but you can't see the thrust chamber and the turbopump, because each one of those are in basically an individually fire-walled cell. But Raptor 3 is designed to not require a heat shield around the thrust chamber and turbopump. And that's part of what makes it so clean. And this is a design change that I really had to push the team very hard to do, to get rid of any secondary structure, and any parts that could get burned off because there will be no heat shield. So it'll be very clear when we have a Raptor 3. Version 3 of the Ship and Booster has quite a radical redesign.
Ars: Ten years ago you kind of made big bets on Starship and Starlink, and most people probably expected one or both of them to fail.
Musk: Including me.
Ars: Yeah. These were huge bets.
Musk: I was interviewed in the early days of Starlink, and they were asking me what's the goal of Starlink? I said goal number one: don't go bankrupt, as every other [low-Earth orbit] communications constellation has gone bankrupt, and we don't want to join them in the cemetery. So any outcome that does not result in death would be a good outcome.
Ars: Starlink has become really successful. It helped me during a hurricane. And Starship is coming along. As you look out for the next 10 years, what are you betting on big now that will really bear fruit for SpaceX a decade from now?
Musk: Well, by far the biggest thing is Starship. If the Starship program is successful—and we see a path to success, it's just a question of when we will have created the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, which is the holy grail of rocketry, as you know. So no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital vehicle, and even the parts that have been reusable have been extremely arduous to reuse, such that the economics actually were worse than an expendable rocket in a lot of cases. The canonical example being the shuttle, where the shuttle's fully loaded, cost of the whole program, I believe, was about a billion dollars a flight.
Ars: I saw one research paper that estimated the fully loaded cost was about $1.5 billion.
Musk. Yeah. And that is roughly equivalent to a Saturn V cost. But the Saturn V as an expendable rocket had four times the payload capacity of the shuttle. So the shuttle was like the principle of reusability was good one, but the execution, unfortunately, was not. The shuttle got burdened by so many crazy requirements. You know, I've got this five-step first principles process thing for making things better. And step one of my five-step process is make the requirements less dumb. And for the government, it's the opposite. The government is making requirements more dumb.
Ars: So getting a rapid and reusable Starship is the main goal for SpaceX over the next 5 to 10 years?
Musk: Yeah, absolutely.
Ars: You've been in the space industry now for almost 25 years. And in that time, SpaceX has gone a long way toward solving launch. So if you were coming into the industry today as a 20-something, you know, with a couple $100 million. What would be the problem you would want to solve? What should new companies, philanthropists, and others be working on in space?
Musk: We're building the equivalent of the Union Pacific Railroad and the train. So once you have the transportation system to Mars, then there's a vast set of opportunities that open up to do anything on the surface of Mars, which includes, you know, doing everything from building a semiconductor fab to a pizza joint, basically building a civilization. So we want to solve the transport problem and that can enable philanthropists and entrepreneurs to do things on Mars, which is everything needed for civilization. Look at, say, California. There were very few people in California until the Union Pacific was completed, and then California became the most populous state in the nation. And look at Silicon Valley and Hollywood and everything. So that's our goal. We want to get people there, and if we can get people there, then there's a literal world of opportunity.
Ars: NASA is focused on Artemis and going back to the Moon. I think you have mixed feelings, perhaps, about that program.
Musk: Yeah, I think its ambitions are too low.
Ars: So does it matter to you if China gets back to the Moon before the United States? Do you care about that?
Musk: I think the United States should be aiming for Mars, because we've already actually been to the Moon several times. Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I'm like, okay, sure, but that's something that America did 56 years ago. If you look at the Apollo program, when JFK gave that famous speech, it was about setting a target that's far in excess of what had been done. It wasn't, like, let's do what the Russians already did.
Ars: Right. JFK wanted to accomplish something far beyond what the Soviets did.
Musk:We should be going 1,000 times further, and going to Mars. Mars is 1,000 times further than the Moon. And if we are gonna go to the Moon, I think we should do a Moon base, or something that's the next level beyond Apollo.
Ars: You've you spent the last year pretty heavily focused on politics. I'm wondering if you feel like that has slowed SpaceX down or harmed SpaceX?
Musk: I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics, it's less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media. It's not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I've reduced that significantly in recent weeks.
Elon Musk at a SpaceX press conference on September 17, 2018 in Hawthorne, California. Credit: Getty Images | Mario Tama
On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.
In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?
The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship's launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.
Ars Technica: So what does success look like with today's launch for you?
Elon Musk: These launches are all about data. The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it's basically data during the high heating, re-entry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration. So we've got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We're trying different coatings on tiles. We're trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We're varying the gap filler for the tiles. And also, we want to make sure that we've solved the issues that caused the explosions in the last two flights in the upper stage engine bay.
Ars: Do you feel like you've solved that?
Musk: I feel like we've got an 80 to—I don't want to tempt fate, I was going to say 90—but we've got about an 80 percent chance of having solved those issues. To really have a 100 percent chance, it requires the design iteration on the engine. And part of it was that we had to discover that we needed to tighten the bolts that attached the thrust chamber to the injector head after firing. So after the first firing, it turns out that's what caused some of the bolts to loosen a little bit; like some of them, some of the time, would loosen and that would allow basically fuel and gas to combine. Because the seal that normally blocks the passage of the fuel and oxidizer would gap a little bit, and it only takes a tiny amount of fuel and oxygen combining in a bad spot to explode the engine.
Ars: You mentioned the tiles. Is upper-stage reentry the biggest technical problem standing in the way of getting to a fully, rapidly reusable Starship?
Musk: Yeah. I mean, we've proven booster re-flight many times. Now this is a more efficient re-flight of booster, because the booster is literally coming back, getting caught by the tower, and being placed on the launch stand. That is much more efficient than landing on a droneship with legs, and then the ship's got to come back into port. That takes several days, and there are dozens of small things about Falcon 9 that need to be refurbished between flights. It's a pretty quick refurbishment, but it takes a few days, whereas Starship booster is designed for immediate re-flight. So it literally comes back, and in principle, less than 10 minutes later, you can be refilling propellant on the booster.
Ars: You mentioned upgraded engines solving the problem with Starship's upper stage. What's the timeline on flying Raptor 3 engines?
Musk: That's end of the year. The upgraded Raptors have a complete redesign of the aft end of the booster and the ship. So, because we don't need the heat shield around the upper portion of the engine, it greatly simplifies the base of the booster and the ship. It'll look a little, frankly, naked, especially on the booster side, because the engines will just be there, like, not with stuff around them. If you look at the current design, you can see the nozzles, but you can't see the thrust chamber and the turbopump, because each one of those are in basically an individually fire-walled cell. But Raptor 3 is designed to not require a heat shield around the thrust chamber and turbopump. And that's part of what makes it so clean. And this is a design change that I really had to push the team very hard to do, to get rid of any secondary structure, and any parts that could get burned off because there will be no heat shield. So it'll be very clear when we have a Raptor 3. Version 3 of the Ship and Booster has quite a radical redesign.
Ars: Ten years ago you kind of made big bets on Starship and Starlink, and most people probably expected one or both of them to fail.
Musk: Including me.
Ars: Yeah. These were huge bets.
Musk: I was interviewed in the early days of Starlink, and they were asking me what's the goal of Starlink? I said goal number one: don't go bankrupt, as every other [low-Earth orbit] communications constellation has gone bankrupt, and we don't want to join them in the cemetery. So any outcome that does not result in death would be a good outcome.
Ars: Starlink has become really successful. It helped me during a hurricane. And Starship is coming along. As you look out for the next 10 years, what are you betting on big now that will really bear fruit for SpaceX a decade from now?
Musk: Well, by far the biggest thing is Starship. If the Starship program is successful—and we see a path to success, it's just a question of when we will have created the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, which is the holy grail of rocketry, as you know. So no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital vehicle, and even the parts that have been reusable have been extremely arduous to reuse, such that the economics actually were worse than an expendable rocket in a lot of cases. The canonical example being the shuttle, where the shuttle's fully loaded, cost of the whole program, I believe, was about a billion dollars a flight.
Ars: I saw one research paper that estimated the fully loaded cost was about $1.5 billion.
Musk. Yeah. And that is roughly equivalent to a Saturn V cost. But the Saturn V as an expendable rocket had four times the payload capacity of the shuttle. So the shuttle was like the principle of reusability was good one, but the execution, unfortunately, was not. The shuttle got burdened by so many crazy requirements. You know, I've got this five-step first principles process thing for making things better. And step one of my five-step process is make the requirements less dumb. And for the government, it's the opposite. The government is making requirements more dumb.
Ars: So getting a rapid and reusable Starship is the main goal for SpaceX over the next 5 to 10 years?
Musk: Yeah, absolutely.
Ars: You've been in the space industry now for almost 25 years. And in that time, SpaceX has gone a long way toward solving launch. So if you were coming into the industry today as a 20-something, you know, with a couple $100 million. What would be the problem you would want to solve? What should new companies, philanthropists, and others be working on in space?
Musk: We're building the equivalent of the Union Pacific Railroad and the train. So once you have the transportation system to Mars, then there's a vast set of opportunities that open up to do anything on the surface of Mars, which includes, you know, doing everything from building a semiconductor fab to a pizza joint, basically building a civilization. So we want to solve the transport problem and that can enable philanthropists and entrepreneurs to do things on Mars, which is everything needed for civilization. Look at, say, California. There were very few people in California until the Union Pacific was completed, and then California became the most populous state in the nation. And look at Silicon Valley and Hollywood and everything. So that's our goal. We want to get people there, and if we can get people there, then there's a literal world of opportunity.
Ars: NASA is focused on Artemis and going back to the Moon. I think you have mixed feelings, perhaps, about that program.
Musk: Yeah, I think its ambitions are too low.
Ars: So does it matter to you if China gets back to the Moon before the United States? Do you care about that?
Musk: I think the United States should be aiming for Mars, because we've already actually been to the Moon several times. Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I'm like, okay, sure, but that's something that America did 56 years ago. If you look at the Apollo program, when JFK gave that famous speech, it was about setting a target that's far in excess of what had been done. It wasn't, like, let's do what the Russians already did.
Ars: Right. JFK wanted to accomplish something far beyond what the Soviets did.
Musk:We should be going 1,000 times further, and going to Mars. Mars is 1,000 times further than the Moon. And if we are gonna go to the Moon, I think we should do a Moon base, or something that's the next level beyond Apollo.
Ars: You've you spent the last year pretty heavily focused on politics. I'm wondering if you feel like that has slowed SpaceX down or harmed SpaceX?
Musk: I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics, it's less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media. It's not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I've reduced that significantly in recent weeks.
