In these 3 videos (video 1, video 2, video 3) which are the most incredible videos I’ve ever seen Elon Musk tours Starbase in Boca Chica Texas where he is assembling and testing Spaceship his incredible new revolutionary vehicle.

The person with Elon is “everyday astronaut.” He seems quite smart and asked a lot of smart questions of Musk. I highly recommend this guy.

These videos are real life not science fiction and show the actual operation of SpaceX as it moves at incredible pace to bring Spaceship to life and we see Elon Musk, his management style, his relationship with co-workers and his authenticity something we never see usually of other people.

Some of the most impressive moments are seeing Musk think about a question and sometimes admit he doesn’t know.

Elon Talks about how we have very little time to become interplanetary and he feels a tremendous urgency to do this. One of his chief engineers in Texas talks about how he tells the other workers that imagine that an asteroid is going to strike the Earth in 8 days and we need to get this thing flying.

That is definitely motivating but how urgent is the need to become interplanetary? You may disagree about the urgency. Elon points out that the US has been on a trend from Apollo to the end of Shuttle and now the termination of ISS that is towards 0 participation in space.

We were failing and had no path

One might say we are already a space faring world. We have built craft that have gone to every planet in our star system and visited it. We have sent 30 probes to mars to measure and rove on it. We have landed people on the moon.

What Elon says is that in the 1960s the US had numerous human capable spacecraft, by the 1990s we had none. If Elon hadn’t had an infantile interest in space the US would be stuck with the SLS which is such an expensive abortion it seems like we would never fly again or it would be so expensive we would do it once in a generation for all purposes.

Elon says the trend was going to zero. What we need to make humans space faring and potentially multiplanetary is a huge impulse factor the other direction. Elon has supplied this. The starship makes the falcon look positively infantile.

The starship is the first spaceship ever built that can do it all.

What that means is Starship can lift off from Earth a huge amount of mass at incredibly lower cost / lb. Elon is aiming for literally 1,000th the cost of the SLS or the Shuttle and even 1/100 the cost of the falcon which was already 10 times cheaper than many other rockets.

The way Starship achieves 1/1000th the cost is by reuse. Starship is designed to be re-used. The shuttle was designed for re-use but it cost $2 billion to launch and took 6 months to a year to reuse. The starship is designed to be ready to refuel immediately after landing and potentially lift off again within an hour turning it into the plane-like economics that we have dreamed of one time and gave up.

This reusability and extreme cost savings means things that seemed incredibly expensive in the past now seem vastly cheaper. Today, the lift costs for any satellite or thing you do is at least 50% or more of the cost of anything. Elon will make the lift cost almost go away meaning we can build things in space within an order of magnitude of building them on Earth.

This change is revolutionary and life changing as much as something like genetics or discovering quantum mechanics. This is not just another rocket. I struggle to express how you have to think differently as a result of Starship.

Elon talks about this goal of multi-planetary as urgent. Starship enables this. Without him this dream was dead for 50 years at least. I think Elon believes if he doesn’t do this and if Starship wasn’t designed exactly as it was it wouldn’t help us be space-faring.

I believe him. NASA would never have come up with this vision. I call NASA an entertainment company. They basically do hugely impressive things that cost is no object and then do another with no seeming goal to it.

Elon like me is saying we need to have a goal or just stop. We don’t need to spend $50 billion or whatever to go to Mars and return just to say we did it. I am a big advocate of space but I don’t want us to spend a penny doing another demonstration project. Let’s do something folks. Elon has given us the possibility.

The US Space program is nearly dead

If we look objectively at what Musk is saying he is absolutely right. NASA has started on a journey to build a mission to the moon. The project called SLS is years behind schedule and is incredibly expensive. It is likely SLS launches will be $5 billion / launch. It is not clear how many missions we could do at that cost.

NASA has planned 8 missions for Artemis (SLS). For the same cost we might be able to do 800 missions with Starship.

NASA is planning to decommission the ISS which was a colossal waste of money anyway.

There may seem to be a lot of activity with Bezos and Branson building their own version of rockets but so far it is a lot of talk and little action.

Without Elon’s efforts none of the other private space operations has produced a real rocket that is viable as anything but a tourism device. These do not help America to have a multi-planetary future. We would have no future in space after the ISS was decommissioned. They say the moon but even I have no enthusiasm for that unless it is tied to a bigger initiative with a definite plan. If I am not interested who else is? Why do it? To keep the employees in Florida busy?

One of our principal rocket companies ULA is still using Russian rocket engines in its lift vehicles. I consider the SLS an abortion like the ISS. A lot of money that will be launched once or twice a year to do lame things that will take a hundred years to do anything and at incredible cost. I really wish they would cancel it and end the nightmare of this huge disaster was over.

NASA’s vision is so lame that I don’t think most people even know it is planning to return to the moon or any other missions.

Without Elon and SpaceX the US space program would be a joke. We would still be using a Russian space complex to launch Americans to the ISS at a cost of $2 billion / year while we sit here trying to threaten Russia with sanctions over Ukraine and call the Russian leader an evil dictator.

The latest mission to Mars with the 1,000 lb perseverance rover is interesting but hardly more than a high school chemistry lab compared to what the US used to do in space.

Elon is saying we need to do a lot more to get to space faring or just to get on a “positive upward” path towards that goal.

We have to get the cost to lift down to do anything. If we do that then all the current plans look stupid.

If America doesn’t step up I think Elon should market it to Europe and China and maybe even Russia. I don’t think he wants to do that but if NASA won’t step up if I were him I would go and market to other countries who have more vision.

Elon Musk’s vision is heroic – What are the requirements of “space-faring”

Here again are the revolutionary things Starship can do that no other rocket has imagined.

• Reuse means that the rocket can go to space, land on the moon and the same rocket can launch from the moon or mars and come back to Earth or go any other place without destroying itself.
• Refueling. Starship can refuel. It can refuel from indigenous made rocket fuel on another planet or with other Starships placed like oil tankers in space allowing Starship to literally go from destination to destination because it can be reused you don’t need a whole ‘nother rocket.
• It is 1000 times cheaper than other forms of lifting mass into space making lifting mass to space almost irrelevant and therefore sending large amounts of mass or stuff to other planets or to do things is possible too like building a space station.
• It is 50% bigger than Apollo so it has sufficient lift to move some serious mass into space.

These characteristics are revolutionary and no other rocket has even attempted to do them. It’s fun to talk about it but what if he can’t build Starship? Will he be able to do it?

If you see the videos above I think you’ll see that Elon is no joke. I absolutely believe he is going to do it. There is nothing here that is not outside the physics. He has already demonstrated reusable landing with Falcon. He has demonstrated with Raptor (the starship engine) that he can build and design the rocket. The rest is iterative improvement.

I don’t know if he needs to crash 10 or 20 Starships to perfect it. I don’t know if it is $1 billion or $10 billion to make Starship work but it is absolutely doable.

Here are the requirements to become space faring as I believe Elon meant it

• We must reduce the cost to lift mass into space dramatically. DONE
• We must have a reusable craft that is reliable and does not destroy itself on every flight so that it can go from place to place without having to carry another vehicle with you to get back or leave behind. DONE
• We must be able to refuel and have places we can go to get supplies to go father so you don’t have to carry everything you need when you leave. DONE
• You need to be able to carry a significant amount of mass with you. DONE
• You need to be able to build, assemble and repair in space and to rescue. TO BE DONE
• We must have capability to use resources in space like manufacturing fuel or get supplies like water and other things from places we go. TO BE DONE
• We have to find a way to protect astronauts from physical problems from space travel like radiation, lack of gravity, failure of systems. Limited energy. TO BE DONE
• We must have enough energy in a rocket to do the delta V to get from A to B anywhere in the solar system. TO BE DONE

Of course there are many other requirements but I am trying to outline what I think are the critical big things.

If you look at these requirements it seems like a larger probably rotating space station would be very important.

We need a way to protect people on the starship. I think we should use superconducting magnetic field using a special superconducting magnetic cable as I have documented previously developed in Europe.

This cable is lightweight and when cooled in space it should be able to provide for almost zero energy a magnetic field sufficient to protect the crew from radiation for the entire voyage even if it were years. It could even be used on Mars when we get there as protection during solar storms.

We need to carry a nuclear thermal reactor on the spaceship to generate power even when we are too far away to generate enough solar power.

We should eventually retrofit Starship with nuclear propulsion in addition to chemical propulsion. Nuclear propulsion would enable Starship to get to Mars in 2 months. We wouldn’t launch with nuclear propulsion but we could have it as a secondary propulsion system. The ideal way this might work is to have the nuclear propulsion system as cargo. When needed it would be deployed and attached to the ship.

Nuclear propulsion like Ion propulsion has the advantage that it can run for years continuously using very little mass. The constant acceleration over times produces more delta V than a chemical high specific impulse rocket.

We’d still need the chemical rockets to land on Mars and Earth or take off.

Other Versions of Starship

Elon has already talked about special versions of Starship:

• Planetary lander Starship – specifically designed to land on the moon or Mars and take off to take supplies
• Planetary lander with humans on board
• Fuel resupply Starship – just meant to stay someplace and disgorge fuel when needed.
• Manned Interplanetary Starship – for solar system travel going to asteroids or other planets and the space station and doing activities like construction (using robot craft like in 2001: a space odyssey (see my blog on space station))
• Warehouse Starship for long term storage of supplies in space safely for docking and resupply.
• Tug Starship (just used to go back and forth from Earth orbit to Mars or other places and back over and over)

Colonization using Starship

Another Goal Elon talked about is colonizing Mars as soon as possible and becoming independent.

I have written about this a lot. The keys to building a colony on Mars that is independent.

• A cheap transport that can carry 15 million lbs to Mars for less than $10 billion – At $5 million per liftoff Starship could deliver 15 million lbs to Mars for 10 billion dollars.
• A transport that can carry 7 people or more and sustain them, protect them for 9 months on a journey to Mars
• Extensive exploration of Mars to discover the ideal locations to build the colony that is close to required materials to become largely self-sustaining
• Understanding how to build habitats from indigenous materials that are safe and spacious
• How to reuse and recycle virtually everything especially life support
• How to grow food
• How to grow animals off the earth
• How to mine needed materials and process them to produce raw materials to manufacture needed materials to sustain the colony and grow it
• How to do all these things with very high duty cycle and largely in an automated way because colonists will find it hard to do things in a dangerous environment.
• To build the infrastructure in power and needed essentials to sustain the colony even in difficult periods or in case of extended multi-year times without having Earth supplies without the colony reduced to survival mode
• Having some technology or thing that could produce a profit that could support the colony

Starship can do this. It can do it economically. So economically Elon may be able to afford to do it himself just as he dreamed when he left South Africa as a kid.

Starship in more detail

You can skip this section if you aren’t interested in the details.

Here are some of the most amazing things Starship already has been designed to do that seem amazing technical achievements.

• the engine called raptor is the first full flow staged combustion cycle rocket engine ever successfully made and tested – it produces 98.5% efficient thrust from fuel and achieves 330 bar so far the most powerful rocket engine ever produced. The engine is like the idea of supercharging to car engines pushing exhaust gases back into be combusted and produce more thrust
• Starship will come in belly first distributing heat over the full surface of its stainless steel body. Doing this enables Starship not to have to use materials that wear with use allowing the same rocket to be launched and reused without maintenance.
• Starship is designed to use methane as the main reactant which is both more powerful and less polluting. The byproducts of combustion are basically water. Methane also can be manufactured easily in many environments with simple access to components such as water and co2 readily available on planets and asteroids.
• Starship is refuelable during its mission enabling it to go farther and carry more payload.
• Starship uses non-degrading heat tiles on the nose where peak heating occurs
• Starship will generate 12.7 million lb of thrust 100% larger than Apollo enabling it to take more mass than any other rocket and having a massive bay for transporting physically large objects or carrying large amounts of extra fuel or manned modules. And have enough fuel to use some to land whereever it needs to land on Mars or the moon.
• Starship is designed to perform an unbelievable feat of returning to the original launchpad it came from turning to vertical in a heart stopping maneuver that will make the falcon’s return look trivial by comparison. The rocket will slow and be captured by giant arms called Mechzilla that prevents the need for landing stand and having to move the starship prior to reflying.
• The landing pad / launch pad is what Elon is calling Stage 0 of the rocket as it will be capable of assembling the rocket lifting one stage onto another using mechzilla so that assembly can be done in situ and in minutes instead of days
• The entire launch system is designed for re-use including the durability of the engines, which can be used over and over, the fact that no heat tiles have to be replaced, the rocket doesn’t even have to be moved to launch again.

Stage 0

Elon has talked in the videos above about how the launch pad and landing pad is 100 times as complex as the starship itself

Some of the requirements of Stage 0 include

• Ability to assemble, lift and dissassemble Starships in hours
• Ability to sustain rocket launch over and over without having to be rebuilt
• The ability to reduce the environmental impact of launches
• Ability to supply Starships with supplies and onboard or disgorge fuel and supplies automatically ( a propellant farm and production center and the transport of those materials safely to the pad)
• Ability to catch the hooks on Starship with large MechZilla arms when it is returning to Earth
• Ability to protect people from accidents on the launch pad
• Ability to service Starships in place possibly

Elon emphasized how the cost of designing and building a rocket is trivial compared to the manufacturing and process cost to make something re-usable. He said that it is 1/100th the cost of the systems on the ground that produce the rocket engines in scale and cheaply, that manage multiple flights one after another with no rebuild.

Elon’s design process

In the videos above Elon mentions a very important management principle in design:

• 1. Smart requirements that are tagged to an individual because he says requirements are always dumb initially
• 2. Remove objects or steps from requirements
• 3. Optimize
• 4. Do it Faster
• 5. Automate

This may be the most important part of the videos above. Elon gives examples how he has learned to execute every design process in this order. He pointed out how he himself has done this in the reverse order many times and realized how important doing it this way was.

For instance he described how they were automating a placement of a barrier over the batteries in a Model 3. It was slowing the manufacturing of the entire Model 3 car incredibly. At first they tried to improve the robots that automated the placement of the pad. It was hard.

So they sped up the robots to make it faster improving the robots speeds and more robots. After this failed they went back and asked why this barrier was there in the first place. When he went to find the reason for this barrier he was told it was one group but they weren’t responsible for the sound. When he went to that group they had no idea if the barrier helped keep the sound down. So they ran experiments and discovered that it did not reduce sound at all.

He gave a few such examples.

One of the most incredible things is seeing that this person who is the richest person in the world today knew practically everything that was happening and was involved at the construction site and the people seemed to know him and have frequent conversations with him.

Frankly, this is how I imagine Donald Trump worked when building his hotels. Obviously those didn’t involve high tech stuff but it explains why Trump is so involved, why he has a connection to the average worker because he and his family spent all their time working with these everyday people doing the work and involved.

Elon is down in the details. He knows the physics, the science of aeronautics and astronomics. He knows chemistry and materials.

I don’t think Elon appreciated the difficulty of the software for self-driving but the software for flying a rocket is trivial in comparison. It doesn’t require AI.

Elon has staked an incredible position in history possibly forever

Someday if the world continues and we survive all the tribulations ahead we will eventually go to the stars. Elon Musk will be a legend as the single man who brought Space back to life. He will be remembered through history far more than Letsgo Brandon. Far more than any covid pandemic.

I wish America had made more of an effort to work with Elon to create a future vision. Maybe he should be put in charge of NASA but I wouldn’t take him out of control of SpaceX and I wouldn’t bring SpaceX into the government.

We need a new Space Direction Committee

The effort to do these larger things will require as I’ve pointed out above a lot of additional companies to build the other things that will be needed for Starship, for colonization. Maybe the way to do this is to combine Branson, Bezos and Musk and somebody like Zubrin on a committee who’s goal is to direct American Space Policy and push our objectives forward.

These people would effectively between them a fixed budget and would be allocated parts of the mission. They could use their companies or others to get the things done in the requirements they decide on.

We are lucky to have a bunch of billionaires who are interested in space enough to spend money. Let’s get them to work together and on a common mission and match what they do with federal monies.

If America and the world starts to move to doing more in space it will undoubtedly be based on Starship and it will enable us to do things that are unbelievable today. These are the kinds of things we will remember all through history even 1,000 years from now.

Not doing them is stupid. We are not talking trillions like the Democrats have talked about for any of their programs. Their plan for Medicare for some would cost trillions.

NASA’s budget including the military part is under $30 billion/year. With this money and more efficient usage we could do all the things I have talked about and Elon has talked about. I believe we don’t have to spend a $ more than we do today but just better spent.

We could also boost the budget by $20 billion and space would still be less than 1% of the federal budget. This includes all the current activities of NASA and the space military. There is incredible waste compared to how SpaceX and private companies run.

Nobody will remember Black Lives Matter. Nobody will remember Build Back Better and Brandon. This effort and the things it would do are inevitable and are high impact. We don’t know how having such a far reaching space program would affect the entire world and the US. What technologies and just motivation it would give people.

Given that Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world and has near a trillion dollars in wealth he could actually finance this adventure by himself.

Just think that Elon Musk came to America as a legal immigrant from South Africa 30 years ago and is now the richest man in the world. Yet we see him in these videos hearing about how the welding went last night on a portion of what Elon calls stage 0 of the rocket.

The vision Elon is giving America could save this country. It might take our minds off the small things that are making America go crazy. We need something bigger to occupy us or these wackos who think we need to perfect ourselves and calling each other names and fighting each other is important.

NASA is less than 1% of the US budget. In its heyday back in the 60s NASA was spending 3% of the federal budget. Nobody is asking for a return to that at least not until space looks really more important for some reason.

NASA isn’t the most evil part of government but it is wasteful. If we put some management and follow practices of private industry with a real goal not as demonstration projects to wow the people so they will hand them some more money to do another one let’s actually put the money to some tangible goal.

Maybe you don’t like the goal. A rotating space station would be another huge cog in the spacefaring idea. For practically nothing compared to the ISS we could build one that rotated and was 10 times the size.

We need to work on interplanetary issues instead of the pure exploratory projects. I means things like vastly expanded rovers to find life around the planets and of course Mars. Build new telescopes 10 or 100 times the size of the James Webb.

Figure out if there is a way to mine asteroids. Work on a much larger scale space defense system against incoming asteroids.

Figure out how man can survive in interplanetary space for longer, how to simulate gravity, build nuclear rockets that can make travel much faster between planets. Deposit long lived probes on all the planets and moons in the star system.

When you think about it here is a list of things NASA could be doing that it isn’t doing today and isn’t planning.

• Build a moon base and go to the moon (NASA is doing this)
• Build a rotating space station 20-100 times larger than the current space station
• Tow the existing space station to the new one to use as a backup or for history.
• Explore Mars fully using the GPS satellites and 9 super-rovers I describe in Missions 1-3 of my plan to find life on Mars and find where everything is, map it like Google Earth to the inch and produce incredible library of 3D VR high resolution 4K video that can put people on Mars even if we don’t. Explode C4 to discover what’s under the surface of Mars.
• Figure out how to protect astronauts in space for long duration
• Figure out how to build interstellar craft using nuclear rockets that rotate for gravity and go much faster
• Figure out how to have much larger energy systems and sustainable even when the sun is not visible or too weak to provide sufficient energy
• Make Mars into a resupply station for longer missions and discovery for eventual colonization
• build automated long term probes on all the major planets and moons as reasonable that could also be resupply stations.
• Build a telescope 100 times as big as James Webb
• Build an asteroid planetary defense capability to defend the planet
• Develop mining, processing and transportation of materials from planets or asteroids
• Mine asteroids
• Send manned missions to beyond Mars
• Send craft that can make the journey between stars
• Start terraforming Mars
• Send genetic payloads to other planets we find that might be viable that might take centuries to arrive to help the universe have children if it doesn’t have them already.
• Apply modified rovers on other moons of other planets to figure out if there is life there.

There is probably more. The point is Starship gives us the opportunity to dream. Elon has given us a gift that could chop NASA’s budget in half if we just used Starship to save money but the value of these things is unknown at this time.

Giving people a hope is one thing.

Spin-off technologies

Unknown unknowns