Accelerating the SpaceX Long Term Goal

[sanman]

Thorium is available in the surface Martian regolith. So you could in principle scoop it up from the topsoil, and refine/smelt it.

[docmordrid]

First, invest into advanced energy (fusion, advanced fission) and propulsion concepts as well as material science.
Energy (or lack thereof) is the biggest problem here in earth, in space and on future colonies.

I believe the best energy source, both here on earth and in space is the LFTR. Simple, natural load following (no control rods), cheap and plentiful thorium power, inherently safe (requires artificial gravity in space, so spinning version), no long term radio-active disposal problems. http://energyfromthorium.com/

Thorium trolls start to be really annoying.

You do realize that not all claims from thorium crowd are true? That they aren't immune for pushing agenda?

For example, it is not really cheap. It may end up marginally cheaper than uranium reactors - AFTER many years and billions spent on R&D. Not today.

China's pilot LFTR starts ops in 2015, based on a recent acceleration of their program, and if it goes well they plan to produce them like sausages within 10 years. Are you saying a small one  for base use couldn't be done sooner?

As for Mars colony application, just imagine how much effort it would be for Mars colony to mine its own thorium!!! There *are* energy sources which can be made self-sustaining much easier than that.

A small LFTR needs 2 things; a few tons of thorium fuel (tops) and a small amount of U233 to seed the reaction. Plus the salt.

Are you saying <10 tonnes of startup consumables couldn't be shipped from Earth on a BFR? That a small load of re-fueling  thorium couldn't be packed in to cover the periodic recharge until extraction techs and machinery were built? Remembering that thorium is a common waste product from the mining of other materials.

[gospacex]

Thorium is available in the surface Martian regolith. So you could in principle scoop it up from the topsoil, and refine/smelt it.

How many tons do you need to process to get 1 gram of thorium? How many reagents and steps this process requires?

[gospacex]

Are you saying <10 tonnes of startup consumables couldn't be shipped from Earth on a BFR?

I'd rather ship 10 tons of solar panels. Or better yet, a ten-ton small scale solar cell fab!

[docmordrid]

Are you saying <10 tonnes of startup consumables couldn't be shipped from Earth on a BFR?

I'd rather ship 10 tons of solar panels. Or better yet, a ten-ton small scale solar cell fab!

Output is lower with solar,  you cover a huge area which makes a meteorite hit more likely, and do we know the heavy metals and rare earths needed for local production are in Mars? And what about solar during  those long dust storms? We know thorium and uranium are there, and nuclear doesn't give a rip about dust storms..

[zodiacchris]

An intense sense of déjà vu as this thread goes off-topic and back to the power source discussion, which is another thread. So please, reign in your horses...

30bn:
Fly Dragon V2 manned in 2015
Build Brownsville ASAP
A SpaceX  Bigelow habitat to test Life support and related technology
Accelerate Raptor and BFR

[inventodoc]

Think about this - if that $900B 'stimulus' from 2009 had gone into human spaceflight - where would we be now, or in 5 years?

[AncientU]

Think about this - if that $900B 'stimulus' from 2009 had gone into human spaceflight - where would we be now, or in 5 years?

In court, trying to get Boeing/LockMart to compete?

[GregA]

I didn't think the OP meant $30B. I assumed using "Giga" he meant "huge unlimited money", maybe that's a US english thing. So for $30B?

As a first brainstorm… I would simply have SpaceX setup a sponsorship division. Groups can apply to have their cargo subsidised - so SpaceX can guarantee several full MCTs for initial missions. Anybody setting up long term Mars solutions of any type gets the leg up.

I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX already hopes to charge the cheaper "ongoing/frequent launch cost" from the beginning to build interest, but whether they're in a financial position to do that will depend on investment and vision of others.

[ChrisWilson68]

Make "The Case for Mars" required reading for every high school student.  And it wouldn't even cost that much to implement.

Making something required reading is something money can't buy.  The question is what SpaceX would do with $30 billion.

[ChrisWilson68]

The best thing SpaceX could do with $30 billion to further their long-term goals is drastically cut launch prices today.  Change the price of F9 to $2 million and the price of Falcon Heavy to $4 million.  Use the $30 billion to cover the losses.  That would trigger a huge increase in demand in a few years, and give them time to get reusability worked out and cheap, first for the first stage then for the upper stage.  Eventually, their costs would go down below the low prices and the business would become sustainable.

That would push us over the energy barrier to low-cost, high volume access to space.  Get over that and everything else follows naturally.

[ey]

The best thing SpaceX could do with $30 billion to further their long-term goals is drastically cut launch prices today.  Change the price of F9 to $2 million and the price of Falcon Heavy to $4 million.  Use the $30 billion to cover the losses.  That would trigger a huge increase in demand in a few years, and give them time to get reusability worked out and cheap, first for the first stage then for the upper stage.  Eventually, their costs would go down below the low prices and the business would become sustainable.

That would push us over the energy barrier to low-cost, high volume access to space.  Get over that and everything else follows naturally.

Subsidizing every flight would be leaving money on the table, and I don't think it would help further SpaceX's goals.

They already have a long list of customers at the current ~$60M price. Instead, they could do what they've already been doing; giving a discount for more "experimental" hardware, like the 80% discount to CASSIOPE for the first Falcon 9 v1.1. Or they could launch smaller, cheaper payload (like cubesats) on a full F9 and use the extra performance for first and second stage RTLS testing.

They could also use the money to expand their factory by 50 to 100% so they have spare cores for FH testing. For $1B of this hypothetical $30B, they could then launch a few FHs with a highly discounted payload. It'd be like a really expensive version of the Falcon 1 ... with enough money, they could afford a few failures on the test run.

Or they could throw $30B into R&D. Build a dozen F9R-devs. If one breaks because they pushed it too hard, too fast -- go build another one. Build a prototype BFR. Launch a rocket to the moon for fame, glory, and data.

[ChrisWilson68]

Subsidizing every flight would be leaving money on the table, and I don't think it would help further SpaceX's goals.

They already have a long list of customers at the current ~$60M price.

Not long enough to really justify reusable rockets.

What they really need is to get to thousands of launches a year.  Seriously.  But it's a chicken-and-egg problem.  Nobody wants to lower prices enough to attract that much volume until there is that much volume, and nobody will form the businesses that will use so many launches until prices are very low.

Lowering the prices vastly today will let the new businesses form.  It's not enough to say that maybe eventually low prices are coming.  SpaceX needs to say, "These are the low prices today and they will stay low, so go ahead and build a business based on these prices."  It will then take several years for the businesses that can use those prices to get going.  By the time the demand actually reaches thousands of launches a year, maybe SpaceX can be ready to serve it.

[WindyCity]

SpaceX is advancing rapidly in rocket R&D aimed at one day launching settlers to Mars. Rockets alone, however, won’t secure that future. Space flight to destinations beyond the moon will also require other advanced technologies, including critical Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS). Such hardware will have to be far more robust and reliable than what is required for relatively short trips to the moon or for the ISS. While the life support systems on the ISS work well,  should they fail catastrophically, astronauts can board a spacecraft and return quickly to Earth. For people stuck in a small vehicle on a six-month transfer orbit immediate rescue wouldn’t be an option.

To develop and flight-test advanced ECLSS, including the means to maintain or repair them, will take many years and large sums of capital. Is SpaceX devoting a sufficient effort to this task? Also, what about artificial gravity or an advanced nuclear power source? Before the BFRs roar into space bound for Mars, which Elon Musk has projected will take take place in 12-15 years, R&D for these ancillary but indispensable technologies must keep pace with rocketry.

[sanman]

Spend $30B on lobbyists - works for everybody else 

Or, just spend that $30B on hiring extra staff to get the certifications and validations and man-ratings out of the way ASAP, so that the launch vehicles and crew capsules can start transporting people ASAP. Right now the main constraint on SpaceX timelines seems to be their available manpower.

[macpacheco]

First, invest into advanced energy (fusion, advanced fission) and propulsion concepts as well as material science.
Energy (or lack thereof) is the biggest problem here in earth, in space and on future colonies.

I believe the best energy source, both here on earth and in space is the LFTR. Simple, natural load following (no control rods), cheap and plentiful thorium power, inherently safe (requires artificial gravity in space, so spinning version), no long term radio-active disposal problems. http://energyfromthorium.com/

The main North American proponents of Thorium / Molten Salt / Integral Reprocessing (aka LFTR) reactors claim it would take a billion to get the first built and certified plus another billion to start up a mass production line capable of replacing all coal/natural gas and existing nuclear reactors in the world in 50 years. I'm more of a fan of LFTR than I am of SpaceX. If it's just 2 billion to solve the Mars colony energy problem and provide an extremely effective solution both to gets us off coal and reduce existing nuclear spent fuel problems, it would be a very cheap solution. Actually US$ 2 billion would be too good to be true...

[Vultur]

I think they need to get a working Raptor engine before throwing massive money at it will really speed things up, assuming they can develop Raptor "on their own".

Now, once they get to seriously developing/building MCT and BFR, then that will be expensive. I'm not sure what they really plan for how to fund MCT/BFR development and test flights.

ECLSS, yes, definitely.

I'm not sure if MCT will necessarily use artificial gravity.... do we have a quote from Musk on that?

It strikes me as a needless complication. Exercise is good enough for 8 months... people have done much longer on Mir with exercise equipment that isn't as good as what we have on ISS now... especially since we're talking about colonizing Mars, which is only 38% gravity. (Those who do return to Earth may need a lot of time to re-build their strength, but return to Earth isn't necessarily part of this at least for most people.)  And Musk is talking about getting the trip down to more like 3 months.

So... I really don't think artificial gravity makes sense for Mars colonization, at least unless it gets to "mass market" levels where they're taking regular members of the public, and maybe not then.

[Mongo62]

Recent mammal experiments indicate that induced hibernation in non-hibernating mammals appears not to result in muscle degradation, even after months in hibernation. Testing has not reached the human stage yet, but it's quite possible that passengers on a MCT might end up staying in hibernation for almost the entire trip, without suffering degradation in muscle tone (plus a lot lower strain on ECLSS and consumables, a lot lower living volume needed, and no boredom during the trip).

[TomH]

I didn't think the OP meant $30B. I assumed using "Giga" he meant "huge unlimited money", maybe that's a US english thing.

The prefix giga means billion when applied to metric measurements and to bits of computer code. Technically however, there is no such thing as gigadollars. If one assumes a literal construct, it would indicate one billion dollars, but if used as metaphorical hyperbole, it could imply an unlimited amount. Only the OP himself can clarify the meaning.

Regardless of the amount, the sensible thing would be to accelerate the existing plan, not go off onto esoteric tangents. Raptor does have the potential to take Musk to Mars. Spending an octillion dollars on wormhole research holds no known promise at all. Simply accelerate what you already know will work.

[TomH]

The best thing SpaceX could do with $30 billion to further their long-term goals is drastically cut launch prices today.

Likely illegal. It's like Chinese dumping products at below production costs. Predatory pricing. Everyone else would be in court filing lawsuits by the end of the day.