Convincing NASA

SpaceX's Starship on the Moon and Mars

Musk is interviewed by Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine.  It's well worth reading the whole interview, but I'll reproduce just part of it here.

JK: It could not have been easy getting a home-brew space mission and rocket company off the ground. How did you begin?

EM: I went to Russia a couple of times because I couldn’t afford the American rockets. They were too expensive. Russia was decommissioning a whole bunch of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. So in 2001 and early 2002 I went to Russia to try to buy some decommissioned ICBMs, which sounds crazy, but you know, they’re gonna throw them away anyway. But they kept raising the price on me.

I also came to realize that even if we doubled NASA’s budget, unless NASA had good options for rocket contractors, they would still not make progress ’cause it would just be more expendable rockets and we’d be at risk of a flags-and-footprints outcome for Mars, which is still better than not going there at all, but not as good as having a base on Mars, a base on the Moon, and ultimately a self sustaining city on Mars. And so I was like ‘okay I gotta try building a rocket company here.’

I thought this was almost certain to fail. In fact, I would not let anyone invest in the company in the beginning. Not because I thought it would turn out well, but because I thought it would fail.

JK: If the Elon Musk of 2019 could talk to Wernher Von Braun, Chris Craft, Gene Kranz and all of the heroes of the 1960s—if you had one piece of advice to give them whether it was technological, spiritual, salesmanship, long-term vision, what would it be?

EM: Well, Wernher Von Braun really knew what he was doing. His plans were for reusability. But those plans were stymied. It doesn’t matter how you skin the cat, you just have to get reusability done. It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.

In order for us to be a multi-planet species we must solve full reusability of rockets. In the absence of that…. It would as though if in the old days if ships were not reusable. The cost of an ocean voyage would be tremendous. And you’d need to have a second ship towed behind you for the return journey. Or you can imagine if airplanes were not reusable, nobody would fly, you know, because airliner costs a couple hundred million dollars.

So this is why full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it—without which we cannot become a multi planet species. We cannot have a base on the moon or a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability. This is why we’ve been working so hard towards reusability at SpaceX.

JK: If you had to bet your house on it, when would you say the next boot prints show up on the moon?

Well, this is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I think we could land on the moon in less than two years. Certainly with an uncrewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside.

JK: And when you say, “We,” do you mean the U.S. or you mean SpaceX?

I’m not sure. If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then we might just do it. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.

Obviously this is a decision that’s out of my hands. But the sheer amount of effort required to convince a large number of skeptical engineers at NASA that we can do it is very high. And not unreasonably so, ’cause they’re like, “Uh, come on. How could this possibly work?” The skepticism…you know, they’d have good reasons for it. But the for sure way to end the skepticism is just do it.

Instead of going with the Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft you’ve got and saying, “Let’s get ourselves to the moon in three years,” you’re going an even more ambitious step further with, the Super Heavy and Starship. Why do that? Why not say, “We can go now”?

Well, I think we could do a repeat of Apollo 11 and a few small missions—you know, send people back to the moon. But the remake’s never as good as the original.

We really wanna have a vehicle capable of sending enough payload to the moon or Mars, such that we could have a full lunar base. A permanently occupied lunar base would be incredible. Like we’ve got a permanently occupied base in Antarctica. And it’d be absolutely way cooler to have a science base on the moon.

So that’s why we’re trying to build it as fast as possible. You know, I think it’s generally a good idea for a company that is building technology to try to make its own products redundant as quickly as possible. It’s slightly discomforting because we’ve put so much work into Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and Dragon. But actually the thing we should aspire to do is to render them redundant as quickly as possible. And we’ll put them in the museum.

[Read more here]

I don't doubt that when SpaceX gets Starship to work, i.e., to get to orbit and return from it without disintegrating, then it will start buying berths on the Moon and Mars expeditions.  It would be silly not to.  Musk has already pointed to how much cheaper the steel Starship will be compared to the one which was to be made of carbon fibre composites, and suggested that it will cost less to build than the Falcon 9.  And if it is re-usable as well, the cost of launching 1 kilo into LEO will drop 500 fold.  Probably the first crew and passengers going to Mars will all be engineers, doctors, scientists and technicians, and most of them will be from NASA. 

But until then, NASA will prolly not give SpaceX much dosh, because politics.  As Teslarati puts it:

Although minor progress has been made in the last six or so months, NASA headquarters – for the most part – still effectively operates as if SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle plans do not exist, all while the agency is seriously considering other similarly unproven rockets with years of development remaining. In light of this frustrating inconsistency, Musk has taken to publicly acknowledging that developing, building, and launching Starship completely internally may be an easier (and faster) fight to win than attempting to convince NASA to assist in Starship development or even just be willing to use it as a launch option.

NASA assistance or support could come in any number of forms, ranging from a cost-sharing development contract, a developmental launch contract like the US Air Force’s STP-2 Falcon Heavy mission, or something as basic as publicly expressing support for the SpaceX program and a willingness to launch NASA payloads on it down the road. For now, the closest SpaceX has gotten to public NASA interest in and acknowledgment of Starship is an official Starship render posted by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

In a sign of just how unengaged NASA is, the closest SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy vehicle has gotten to an acknowledgment from NASA headquarters is quite literally having an outdated BFR render subtly included in a few slideshows and documents published less than two months ago (late May 2019).