Elon Musk hinting at Mars plans - #MuskOnMars - 9.20

Coming up, a series of launches. Static fire tests. Planet 9. And Elon drops some hints on his Mars plan. Stay tuned. Tomorrow begins right now. And welcome to Tomorrow, season 9, episode 20, for Saturday, June 4, 2016. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. I'll be joined by the rest of the gang. And just a moment before that happens, I'd like to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of Tomorrow who helped to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who have contributed $10 or more to this specific episode. We are a crowdfunded show. Every single dollar helps. If you'd like to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of Tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. All right, let's go. This is going to be an action-packed episode. So let's go ahead and get started right into space news. Oh, I'm sorry. We've got Jared Head sitting directly to my left. We've got Space Mike in between. And we've got my beautiful, lovely, wonderful wife, Carrie Ann, sitting on the end. All right, starting with some space news. Russia deploys another GPS satellite. They either shot that with a GoPro, or they have this really cool bend to their lightning towers. I'm pretty sure that's shot with a GoPro. Well, lightning is never straight, Ben. That's true. That happened Sunday, May 29th, at 0844 Coordinated Universal Time. That's a Soyuz 2-1B. And that was a GLONASS-M satellite. The GLONASS-M is the second generation of their GLONASS satellites. And it's a navigation system, much like the Global Positioning System in the United States. They're really only believed to be about eight more of the M series of the GLONASS satellites. The next generation, the K2 GLONASS satellites, is kind of on deck. But sanctions are making it hard for those to get those up and operational. So at this point, they're only launching the M series. And they're only doing that when they need to replace something that's gone wrong up in orbit. And speaking of things that have gone wrong, Space Mike, you brought to my attention that while this was a successful insertion, there were actually issues bringing it up to space. That's right. The third stage for that, the Block I, actually shut down several seconds early. This is kind of similar to the Atlas launch anomaly, where it shut down early. But this is one of the upper stages. And there was one more upper stage, the Fregat space tug, that the cool thing about it is it has its own computers that are able to monitor its own live telemetry feed and make adjustments as necessary. So even though the Block I, the third stage, failed to perform as expected, the Fregat stage was able to compensate and plug in the numbers for that and be able to insert it into its correct orbit so that they could deliver to the satellite successfully. So good job for correcting automatically. That is a little bit weird that we've seen a couple of these shortened burns. I'm sure there's no relation. It's just interesting that they happen so close to each other. Yeah. Just neat. All right, moving along. How neat is that? Moving along, we've got a Long March 4B lofting some Earth-viewing satellites. Oh, yeah, that's right. We have about five seconds of footage on this one. This happened Monday, May 30, at 0317 coordinate. That's all you get. 0317 coordinate universal time. That's the Zeewan 3-2. It's a civilian Earth-imaging satellite. It's going to be looking over land. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Go ahead and roll it one more time. Roll it one more time. And I won't even get through all my notes in this second roll. Land resource surveys, natural disaster prevention, agriculture development, water resources management, and urban planning. It also had a, I'm sorry, it's the second satellite in a remote-sensing mapping system that China's building and trying to build out by 2030. See, I told you. Why do they look like they're going in for surgery while they're in mission control? Like, every one of those. Wait, roll it again. It's only going to take us five seconds to get there. Roll it one more time. So what are you talking about here? There's, OK, this. And then I assume it's mission control for them. This. They're all in like, why are they? Because it looks very formal. Is that what's going on? I don't know. I'm impressed. It's basically a gif at this point. That's hilarious. Like, maybe it's kind of like, it's like a tuxedo shirt, you know? It's like, I want to be formal, but I'm also here to party. They've also, they also have two micro satellites owned by SatLogic. It's a Buenos Aires company. The first two members of the constellation were just launched on that vehicle right there. Nice. And they hope to have up to 25. Four more of them are going to join them later this year. They're called NuSat-1 and NuSat-2. Each one of those satellites has three cameras on it to capture imagery in color, infrared, and the hyperspectrum. And it's going to give them analysis of Earth. So cool. That seems to be another kind of burgeoning. OK, you can stop rolling it. Lur says that they're military, so that they're in uniform. I guess I just, I didn't know. That's why I asked the question. It seems like they have different uniforms, too, at different launch centers. Because I've seen, like, that before, where they have the, like, the kind of chef's hats on. And then at other launch centers, they have the blue coats on. And they don't seem to be wearing hats. Coordination. Yeah, no, the blue coats, I remember. It depends on which launch center it is. I think it's like Star Trek, right? You have a different color uniform based on your position. So if it's a science mission, you're in yellow? Yeah. More security? So let's see, science missions would be blue. Yellow would be command, right? So if it's a command mission, I have no idea what white would be. But yeah, all right, cool. That's pretty cool. White would be, like, craft services. That's terrible. That's just me. That's terrible. All right, and the final launch this last week, a Russian Rokot launching GEO-1K2, IK-2. There's some yellow smoke for you. Yeah, that was a Saturday, June 4th at 1,400 coordinating universal time. Again, I'm pretty sure that's a GoPro. There was some environmental protesting to that launch. Can't imagine. Yeah, due to the hydrazine contamination from the spent second stage coming back. That, like I said, was the GEO-IK-2 number 12L. That just rolls right off the tongue. It's going to be investigating Earth's gravitational field. It's going to gain data on the global displacement of Earth's crust, along with the study of sea surface heights and tidal movements. Here's another view. Wait, did you just loop it, or is that another view? Yeah, that's another view. Yeah, that's right. I think there are, like, three or four views in this particular clip. It's going to be put into a sun synchronous orbit, and it's going to be joined by another spacecraft, and then hopefully not too distant future, which was kind of their plan all along. So there you go. That was the launch coverage that happened this last week. Speaking of things that are about to launch. Well, grumpy space, that makes me hold my breath from here. Yeah. Don't play with the fumes. Right? Hypergolic fuels are, you just don't want to. Yeah, those orange, when you see rockets in those orange clouds, you just kind of hope that it's the sun illuminating it from behind and not actually. You know, I've heard that hypergolic fuels smell like fish, but nobody's ever been able to live to tell us what it actually smells like. What's it smell like? Yeah, it's like a Monty Python sketch, isn't it? Yeah. It would be a terrible sketch, actually. No, anyway, go on. All right. Oh, well. All right, Space Mike, talk to me about some orbital ATKs. So yes, speaking of things that might be launching in the near future, orbital ATK has completed a very crucial step in returning their Antares rocket to flight. This was a static fire test that they completed at the designated Mars, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. And we have the footage of that successful static fire test. And. OK. Oh, there it goes. This is. By the way, all right, the video admin in me is going to make two analysis here. First, that is a CMOS sensor with a rolling shutter. I can tell you that. Second, this camera also is a CMOS sensor with a rolling shutter. And that first camera was almost certainly a pan-tailed zoom camera in an enclosure that couldn't deal with the vibe. All right, continue, Mike. Oh, my gosh, rocket. But in any case, this test took place on Tuesday, May 31 at Pad 0A. And this was completed ahead of its return to flight, like I said. And with this Antares, this is actually a stage designated the Antares 230, which replaces the AJ-26 engines, which are reworked NK-33s from the Soviet Moon Program, and replaced those with Russian-made RD-181 engines. And because of that upgrade over the Antares 100, they actually have quite a bit of a performance increase. And even though I believe that they're looking at around a 25% increase in the performance that this rocket will be able to do with these new engines, but the cool thing is they don't have to rework the tanking or a lot of the plumbing on it because it uses the same mixture ratio as the AJ-26s. So there was minimal changes that they needed to do on the core stage other than being able to integrate these new engines. And they're single-chamber engines, and they're using two of them on each Antares stage. And something that I found interesting is that this particular rocket that completed the static fire test is not the rocket that is going to be used on their next launch, hopefully next month, returning the Antares to flight and launching a Cygnus to the International Space Station. This one will be used on the following Cygnus mission, which is for their CRS-7 mission, I believe. And this one is their CRS-5, or OA-5 is how they designate it. And whatever the data they glean from this test, they're going to make modifications to the core stage for that rocket, which will be launching next month. And then this one that we saw do that static fire test will be launching, hopefully, later this year. So very good news, and hopefully everything goes well. And they don't have any more problems like they did back in October of 2014. GreenJim2 in the chat room is wondering, so what's happening to the remaining N1 engines? Well, I believe that Aerojet Rocketdyne still has a couple of them left. And I don't know what they're planning to do with them. They might try to sell them back or maybe just use them as museum pieces. But there are still several remaining NK-33s and the different variants of engines that were on the N1 rocket, the Russian Moon rocket. And they're using those NK-33s on a version of the Soyuz rocket. And once they're done with those, they're going to be replacing it with the RD-191 engine, which is a version of this 181 engine. It's a single nozzle engine. But it also has a little bit higher performance than the 181 does. And they're already using that one on the Angara-1 rocket. And once they use up the remaining NK-33s that they can use, some of them they can't, then they'll be replacing them with new engines that are based on the same design. I'll take one. If they don't want one, I'll take one. Make it a coffee sample. Yeah, I could. Or I could use it. Yeah? Yeah, I could use it too. You got a 50-50 shot of it working correctly. Yeah, that's fine. Good odds for me. I did want to say thank you, Space Mike, for using the term static fire. I actually wrote in the notes, I'm like, hot fire is a dumb term. For whatever reason, Orbital ATK calls their static fire as a hot fire. But obviously, it's a hot fire. Well, I was about to say all fire is hot, but that's mostly true. OK. It is, yeah. It's true-ish. The way I think of it is static fires are usually like what is referred to like the full up test, where they have a full rocket on the pad doing it. I think of hot fire test as just like a single engine test that they can do at any test hand. Yeah, but then that would have been a static fire based on that description. Yeah. But they refer to it as a hot fire. Anyhow, I think hot fire is a stupid term. They're basically interchangeable terms. They basically mean the same thing. We should get the International Rocket Union in here to get the nomenclature set correctly. We should. We totally should. Yes. That needs to be a thing that happens. Moving on, more rocket launch geekery, Jared. Yes, big time geekery too, because not only is this just a big rocket, this is a big payload that a big rocket is taking up. And Ariane Space's Ariane 5 is getting ready to launch on June 8th at 20.30 Greenwich Mean Time. Or excuse me, UTC. I'm sorry, Coordinated Universal Time. Oh, I blew it, which is 1.30 PM Pacific Daylight Time here for us on the best coast. There's going to be a 45 minute. I've never heard that before. Boom. Yeah, that's right. That's awesome. Turkey? Oh, turkey. All right, so there's going to be a 45 minute window available for this. Now, the thing about this launch is that this is going to be the heaviest unclassified payload ever put into geosynchronous transfer orbit. This is going to be 9,840 kilograms, which if you include the total mass of things like the adapters and the other computers and systems on board, the total amount of mass allocated for the payload is 10,731 kilograms. This is really, really heavy. And it'll be a dual satellite launch with ECOSTAR-18 weighing in at 6.3 metric tons, and BRESAT, which will weigh in at 3,540 kilograms. They'll be targeting an orbit of 250 kilometers by 35,766 kilometers, tilted six degrees to the Earth's equator. Canary? Yeah, well, you know, hey, got to do it. BRESAT will be supporting banking services in Indonesia, and ECOSTAR-18 will provide services for DISH network subscribers in North America. Wait, wait, wait, what's it doing for banking services? Like relay, like telecommunications relay for banking services. So like money goes up to the satellite and comes back down? Sort of. Actually, it's really, yeah, it's data relay for banks. But the most important part of the data relay for the banks is essentially time stamps. So that's why they want to do it. Scary accurate timing. Exactly. And encryption. Yes, and encryption as well. And also, you know, you may not necessarily want to send something over a landline. You can just send it up in that way. Especially with the whole controversy a couple of years ago about all the stock traders like tapping into the landline so that they could get that millisecond extra notice whenever stocks fluctuated. So they could buy or sell that fraction of a second faster than their competitors. And ever since that was outlawed, I feel like this might be a way of getting around that whole thing. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, and just to note, this is the 230th Ariane family rocket launch. And this will be the 86th Ariane 5 to launch as well. So continuing to roll on. All right, let's talk about some new spacecrafts, Space Mike. Yeah. So there is a new Soyuz spacecraft that is going to be launching very soon. This is the Soyuz MS spacecraft. And with this, it's the final planned upgrade of the Soyuz spacecraft before moving on to their new Federation capsule in the 2020s. And some of the upgrades on this particular vehicle include more efficient solar panels, a modified docking and attitude control engine positions, or in other words, changing where some of the thrusters are mounted so that they'll have extra redundancy during docking and deorbit burns. But they also have a new KERS approach and docking system, which weighs half as much and consumes a third of the power of the previous system. That's a huge increase. It also has a new computer, which is also about 1 eighth of the weight of the previous computer. Or the new one, rather, where it weighs 8.3 kilograms versus 70 kilograms at the previous computer weight. So that's also a huge increase. It also has a new unified digital command and telemetry system so that way they can tap into the telemetry via satellite and control the spacecraft even when it's out of sight of ground tracking stations. It also provides the crew with position data when it's out of the ground tracking range. If they need to do any corrections, if something weird happens, they have the information they need. It also has improved GLONASS or GPS systems for accurate location during the search and rescue operations after the Soyuz lands. So this is very cool. But the whole thing with this is it was originally supposed to launch on June 24. It may get pushed back to July 7 due to a problem with the control system. After reports about the problem were made on Wednesday of this past week, the next day on Thursday, Roscosmos made an official statement saying that a decision on when to launch the spacecraft won't be made until Monday, giving the manufacturer, Energia, a couple more days to correct the issue and hopefully not have to have a delay. Because if there is a delay, then they're going to have to reschedule a lot of other vehicles. There's a Progress that was supposed to be launching after this Soyuz, also a Cygnus vehicle next month, which I talked about earlier. And there's also a Dragon spacecraft that are supposed to launch next month for that as well. The next crew for that that's going to be launching, we have a picture of them. And from left to right, we have Anatoly Ivanishin from Roscosmos, Kate Rubins from NASA, and Takuya Onishi from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. So very cool. And hopefully, they don't have any more problems with that. And the first flight of this new version of the Soyuz goes well. And they're able to reap all the benefits especially all the systems that weigh a lot less. That might mean that they'll be able to carry some more supplies and maybe even move things around so that they have a little bit more elbow room. That would be great. Space Mike from the chat room Lur is asking, will they be reusing components with other new capsules? Well, they sometimes use some components from the landed Soyuz capsules. They might be reusing some of those. But I think that you might be referring to their future version, the Federation capsule. And as far as I know with that, they're going to be using the same docking systems. They're going to be using the same types of thrusters on it, although in different configurations. And a lot of the computer systems that they're testing now, kind of catching up to the digital age, are going to be on their next version. Although the way that it's shaped and the way that it's going to be built is going to be completely different. All right, thank you, Space Mike. Jared, I hear our sun is a thief. Yes, it may quite well be a thief. And actually, there is a proposal from a group of scientists from Lund University in Sweden that the hypothetical Planet 9. All right, we're going to pause. So you were giggling during Mike's last segment in case your microphone picked that up. The reason he was giggling is I went through every instance in his show notes where he said Planet 9 and wrote Planet 10 instead, indicating Pluto is still a planet. Yeah, because someone is still a Neanderthal over here and doesn't understand the concept of nomenclature. So he didn't notice that I had done this right until he scrolled in his show notes. He was getting ready for his thing, and he started noticing everything said Planet 10. And he just busted out laughing. If you heard him giggling while Mike was talking, that is why. I'm just going to say this right now, which is that this week, one of the dwarf planets that we know of, 2007 QR10. What a great name. This week, we had to revise just how big it was because we realized that it was actually reflecting less light than we expected, which means that it has to be even bigger in order for it to reflect that amount of light. So they ended up saying, this is a dwarf planet, and this is Mike Brown and his team, the same people who caused Pluto to lose their Pluto status. Boo! When it lost its planet status when Eris was discovered. And they are saying that they are not going to wait for the International Astronomical Union to start designating what is a dwarf planet and what may be just a Kuiper Belt object. They're just going to start using the nomenclature however they want to. So there's this big showdown now that's probably going to happen sometime later this year. Nerd fight. Especially in November when the International Astronomical Union meets, where they're going to have a showdown on nomenclature. And this may be the battle to end all battles in terms of what Pluto will be classified as. Which nerd will rule them all? By the way, if you call Pluto a planet, there are 94 additional objects that fit the criteria that Pluto does. So you will have to call those planets as well. I'm cool with that. If you're down with 105 planets in our solar system. It's like a bigger party. Or excuse me, 104, then that's how it works. Because our solar system is way more awesome now. And you know, I'm still of the opinion that even our current definition of a planet makes no sense. Because you literally have something, Jupiter and Mercury, in the same category. And that's just like, what the heck. So we really need to work on that. But for now, we will use the nomenclature. So planet nine. That's not what it says in your show notes. It clearly says planet 10, Jared. All right, so a vast majority of stars, they actually form in clusters. They don't really form all by themselves. They form as like groups. So every once in a while, these stars will actually get very close to each other, where stuff that may be around them, like planets, or asteroids, and comets, and Kuiper belt objects, and the Oort cloud of that star, may actually be influenced by the gravitational pull of another star. Now, the team of scientists at Lund University in Sweden actually ran computer models and discovered that if you had a star come close enough to the sun, it could pull a exoplanet that may be around that star and put it into the expected orbit that planet nine would be in. So there is sort of this hypothesis now being floated around out there that planet nine may actually be a exoplanet from another star system. So that would essentially mean that, well, first of all, we'd have to find planet nine. And that's what we're doing right now. And we're using the Keck and the Subaru telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to look for them. Basically, the best telescopes in the world. Exactly the type of telescope you want to have looking for them. So we're expecting sometime in the next 18 months to either confirm or disprove the existence of planet nine. Either way that goes, it will be an interesting result. So if we do find planet nine, what will that evidence point to as to whether, is it a body that formed in our own solar system and got ejected out there, like they think where Jupiter and Saturn kind of acted like bullies with this planet? That seems like something they would do. They are mean planets. Yeah, they're quite mean. Or was it an actual planet that formed around another star and we have a captured exoplanet in our solar system? So if it turns out, if we have a captured exoplanet in our solar system, we have an exoplanet that we can go study within our own lifetime. We don't have to fly an interstellar mission in order to do that. We can actually go to an exoplanet. Let's be clear, within our lifetime. How long is it going to take to get there? Well, if you want to use a pretty powerful ion drive with a nuclear reactor driving it, you could probably get to it within about 30 years. All right, so you get to it in 30 years. What's the speed of light delay at that point? Um, it would just be about, I want to say, something on the order of roughly 11 to 12 hours. OK, that's doable. So 30 years and 35, so about 40 years to do something like that. So that is barely within, well, at least barely within my lifetime. It's definitely within the operational lifetime of a spacecraft, I guess is the way to put it. OK, but I may not be on this planet anymore. You may not be on this planet. You'll probably be on another planet. Oh! Hey, that's a great segue. There you go. All right, we're going to, for whatever reason, it just got very awkward for some reason. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, it's like a Michael Cera movie. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about other planets. It's the term of the day, she's fine. Whoa. Go back to the other image. That's awesome. I don't know what happened there, but that's great. Welcome back to the show. I tarbordacted. Something. Before we get started with this segment, I did want to give a huge shout out to all the patrons of Tomorrow's who helped make this segment happen. Words go here. These are people who contributed at least $10 to this specific episode. We've also got people who have contributed $5 or more to this specific episode. These are the Tomorrow producers. Each one of those different levels gets different rewards. Head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O for all the different reward levels. And thanks, Donald. That's great. Hey, now before we get into our main topic, we're wearing these shirts. What's going on with that? Yeah, so I was up at a astronomy conference last weekend in Big Bear called the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference. And it is open to the public, and it happens every Memorial Day weekend. And it's awesome because during the day, there are incredible lectures. So if you've ever wanted to know what would be the perfect telescope for you, how do I get into astroimaging? And even paper proposals being presented up there as well. So it's basically an astronomy nerd's dream during the day. And then at night, it's dark skies. You could see the Milky Way with your naked eyes, and it's absolutely amazing. And we all take our telescopes out at night. We go do imaging. We do observation. We do incredible stuff. I have a question. Sure. If you have seminars all day long, and then night observation all night long, when do you sleep? We don't. You just don't. He did say that the conference part was an astronomer's dream. Yeah, there is that. So it was fun? You had fun? I will admit that a lot of the panels and stuff start at noon, so that way you can sleep at least three or four hours before you go, which is basically what I did all weekend long. So yeah, that was lots of fun. And I bought shirts for it, matching shirts, because there's always an official shirt for the conference every year. And it's from a company called Infinities. And they actually make scientific apparel, if you will. So basically, get your nerd fashion on with them. Do they do custom things? Can they do something for tomorrow? Maybe. I guess you could ask them. So that'd be pretty cool. And you can find them at I-N-F-I-N-I. Sorry, that was really hard. I-N-F-I-N-I-T-E-S.com. And you can get their really awesome, cool scientific shirts there. And I think it just got thrown into the chat room. So yeah, pretty cool stuff. If we're smart, we'll remember to put it in the show notes. But I may not remember yet. It's cool. We got it. All right. And actually, also, before we get into our main topic, where are you going next week? Oh, next week I will be at LDRS35, which LDRS stands for Large Dangerous Rocket Ships. And I am so excited. It is basically the global meetup of people who do high power rocketry, like myself. Basically, instead of those little small, like little Estes or Quest rockets that kids play with, I'm sorry, that people play with, we actually. No, I had that as a kid. I totally did that. Yeah, I have a couple too, but I'm above that now. The high power rocketry is basically H motors and above, so basically 40 pounds of thrust or more out of your rocket. Or like 3 and 1 half pounds or more in weight with your rocket. So we'll be flying everything up to M motors, which are putting out a couple thousand pounds of thrust. So basically, sometimes the only thing separating these people from NASA is that they don't work for NASA. It's a good way to do it. And we'll actually be doing next week's show. Or I will be. Yeah, you'll be live. I will be live next week out on the lake bed at Lucerne Dry Lake. This is either a brilliant idea or a terrible idea. We're going to find out next week. Yes. And it's going to be awesome. Just to let you know, LDRS 35, it's free to be a spectator. And it's also free to camp on the lake bed out there. So if you actually want to go to LDRS, you can. You just have to be ready for the fact that you are in the Mojave Desert in June. And you need to be able to run quickly, just in case. Yes, you do need to be up and able to move out of the way as I have had to do several times before out there, just in case something goes wrong with a rocket. All right, cool. I'm excited for that. I'm very excited, too. And I still need to build my rocket. So be ready to show up. All right, let's get into our main topic this week. Elon was at the Recode Conference. He was one of the guest speakers. And they spent not an insignificant amount of time talking about SpaceX. We're not going to cover all of that, because it was a good chunk of time where he talked about SpaceX. I actually would recommend heading over to just hit YouTube and search for Elon Recode. And you'll be able to find the whole, I think it was like, hour and a half, I don't remember, hour, hour and a half. Yeah, and it wasn't all SpaceX, but you get the whole thing. It was actually quite interesting. But he did drop some interesting tidbits about Mars. I mean, the basic game plan is we're going to send a mission to Mars with every Mars opportunity from 2018 onwards. And they occur approximately every 26 months. We're establishing cargo flights to Mars that people can count on for cargo. And it's like I said, the Earth-Mars orbital rendezvous is only every 26 months. So there's one in 2018. There'll be another one in 2020. And I think if things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024, with arrival in 2025. Is that a more certain schedule than United Airlines? Well, I don't know. Well, he hasn't been on United Airlines in a year. There's certainly some uncertainties associated with that. So let's, I'm going to show you. Anyway, that's the game plan. Like approximately 2024 to do the first, to launch the first of the Mars Colonial Transport System. I want to get back to what you said earlier about a multi- This will be a very big rocket. OK. Very big? Bigger than Saturn V? Yes. Twice as big or what? September. I'll tell you. Not going to say anything until September? Come on. Very big. Come on. Has to be very big. How big is very big? So big. So A, I'm excited for that conference because that's going to be really cool when he announces the Mars architecture. Yes. Yeah, I know, right? The space nerd community all went, ah, come on. And then they all kind of went, tell us now. Yeah, kind of, right? But the interesting takeaways from that are, it sounds like SpaceX is going to be doing dragon runs to Mars starting in 2018. So I'll ask you guys, how viable do you think that is? Starting 2018 and then, I guess, every time that orbital window opens up, right? So you've got every two years. And I believe that window stays open for about two months, if I remember right. Yeah, thereabouts, depending upon how much thrust or how much delta V you have available to yourselves. How much energy can you expend? I guess with my engineering background and how I understand everything with it, 2025 is very optimistic. That's how I would put it. And you, SpaceX? Yeah, I don't feel like 2025 would be doable. Well, we already kind of talked about part of this infrastructure in the episode where we talked about Red Dragon. And I do think that it is possible to at least send these unmanned dragons starting every launch window starting in 2018. But as for sending humans up in 2024, even though I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I like to be just as optimistic as Elon is, the fact is that at this current moment, they're about two years behind schedule on a lot of different programs where they would hope to be. They're still not quite where they need to be for Crew Dragon. They're still not where they want to be for Falcon Heavy. That was supposed to launch a couple of years ago. And if we can look at his predictions, we can definitely trust Elon's predictions a lot more than someone like Richard Branson. There are things that will happen that are unforeseen. And you have to factor in lots of wiggle room there. So I feel like the humans on Mars in 2025, plus or minus eight years, is a good estimate. You mean plus, not minus. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Minus eight years. Yeah. Somewhere in between there. I think that 2025, the worst case scenario, give eight years to that, and that would probably be the first time they do it. And in a good case scenario, they actually do it then or in the next launch window. But it could happen. I think that's a fairly, not to knock you both, I think it's a fairly easy answer, right? Just to be like, well, they've missed timelines before, so they may miss timelines in the future. That's fairly obviously true. But this may be a different situation, in that you look at something like Falcon Heavy, and you need to have customers for Falcon Heavy. You need to set it as a priority. You need to go, OK, this is what makes sense. And you look at SpaceX as a whole, and from the beginning, SpaceX has said, Mars. Yes. We're going to Mars. So because Mars has always been the thing that they've been pushing for, does that maybe make this a higher priority? Or something where they go, no, seriously, this is a thing we're going to do. And so other projects can slide in timeline, whereas this one is more like, no, this is happening. Well, you have to look at the commercial aspect of SpaceX, because that is what's kind of funding everything with it. And if you want to give up the commercial aspect, that's fine, but then you're going to kind of lose the ability to generate the money to actually make all of that happen. I mean, I know Elon Musk is a billionaire and everything, but even billionaires can run out of money. So it's just, which has already happened to him. You know the joke of, how do you become a millionaire in space? How? Start a billionaire. Excellent. Yeah, and I just feel like, especially with the technical challenges of landing on Mars, and specifically landing large payloads on Mars, which is what you're going to have to do for a human mission, even though SpaceX is working with NASA on that, I still feel like they're going to have a difficult time with that, simply because there are unknowns at the moment. Sure, you've designed everything with Mars in mind, but you haven't flown everything to Mars yet. But aren't they in a better position than Apollo? Consider this. Apollo, JFK makes his speech. At that point, we had never put a human in space. Yeah, they are definitely in a better position technologically, and in terms of the architecture that's set there, and the infrastructure. But in terms of SpaceX having the knowledge base to actually go to Mars, it's not what I would call completely set in stone yet. I guess the best way I'm trying to say it is that- But the timelines are about the same, is what I'm getting at, right? Yeah, nine years. So JFK does his speech, and then it's about nine years. So from having no idea what we're doing, to human walking on the moon, nine years. Why could we not do the same thing with Mars architecture? And here's the thing, we're not starting from that no idea point. We're starting further down the track. Yes. Budget, OK, that's fair. Budget, yeah, that's a good one. That was the voice of Dunna. Yeah. Go ahead, Mike. SpaceX does have several Space Act agreements, where they have been given pretty much full access to all of NASA's libraries. So all of the data that NASA has been able to acquire over all these years of being able to land things successfully on Mars, SpaceX has information to all of that. And NASA has said that they're going to be actively working with SpaceX to accomplish their goals, and they want to have payloads on that first Red Dragon mission. And so they're not exactly having to start from scratch here, because they have that huge wealth of information and the support of the agency. So what I guess I'm getting at, is is it fair to be cautiously optimistic and go, yeah, I mean, there is Elon time. Steve Jobs had the reality distortion field. Elon has Elon time, right? So yes, Elon has Elon time. He's kind of known for that. But maybe it doesn't apply this time, or is that just foolhardy of me to think? And kind of like what you were saying earlier, maybe the reason that some of these other programs have had delays is because of the work that they've been doing on this whole architecture of bringing mass amounts of people to Mars at once. This will all be announced in September. And right now, yes, it is safe to say to be cautiously optimistic. But once all this plan is announced, who knows? We might actually get to see stuff that's already been worked on this. There might already be a bunch of hardware already existing towards this that's been kept so secret that that might instill a lot of confidence. So we'll see you then. The other interesting thing in the speech that Elon gave was that he didn't say, we're sending a dragon to Mars in 2018. He said, we're starting in 2018, making it sound like we're going to go 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026. Those are your available windows, essentially. So this creates a kind of a new system for them, doesn't it? I mean, you're saying, well, maybe the infrastructure could already be there. They could start building that in 2018. Well, maybe not super big infrastructure, but they could start in 2018. Well, I feel like Red Dragon is kind of a test mission. It's a true test flight. It's like, we're going to see if this actually works or not. Because it hasn't flown to Mars yet. We don't know what's going to happen on the cruise to Mars. We don't know how the dragon is actually going to act when it enters the Mars atmosphere. We don't know if it could. We don't know how the retro propulsion is going to work with the specific type of retro propulsion that the dragon is using. So every unknown has to be answered during that mission. Or at least as many unknowns as you can think of has to be answered during that mission. Well, missions, right? Missions. So here's the other thing to remember. Although SpaceX has not said this, these windows are about to, again, like you said, it's the amount of available power that your rocket has, basically, to dumb that down. So it's how powerful your rocket is will dictate how long of a window you have. So that doesn't mean that they get to launch once in 2018. That's true. They could, I'm not saying they're going to do this, but in theory on paper, they could launch once per hour for 24 hours, right? I mean, that's an unreasonable thing, right? And just constantly send payload until that window closes again. Cariann, you had a point? No, that's fine. This is why I never say anything on the show is because you always say everything that I was thinking before I have a chance to say it. You just said the window should be about two months. Why only send one? If you have two months, SpaceX has said that they wanted to up the cadence of launches in general. I mean, I'm not a rocket scientist. But again, in theory, if you had enough rockets, if you had the time, if you had the money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to launch more than one, that just seems like a no-brainer to me. We should point out, we are not privy to any of this information, by the way. So we're speculating right around with you guys, right? We have no idea what the plans are. Right, but that's the probability of chance, right? If I have the chance to take three chances to get the hole in one, I'm going to take all three shots to do the hole in one and not just go, I'm sure I only need one chance, right? I mean, that's the law of probability, I guess is what I'm trying to say? Yeah, it's just like in test flights, they didn't fly the X-15 once. They flew it 199 times. Just hopefully you learn something every single time. Exactly, yeah. Mike, if you're trying to say something, sorry, we keep talking over you. Oh, no, no, no, no, keep going, keep going. I was going to say, and- You just pulled what we usually do and said what I was thinking. Yeah, and I was also- All right, give me a turkey. That was awkward. I also want to say, too, that just because the X-15 flew 199 times doesn't mean every mission in those 199 times was successful as well. Yes, but then it goes back to how you define success. Yes. If you lose the vehicle and get no data from it, that's not a success. If you lose the data but learn something extremely valuable, is that not successful? Especially if it's a test mission. Well, I was going to say, in test flights, pushing the envelope and getting that data back is what it's all about. Sure. So as long as you get the data back, that is a successful test flight. Right. There's this weird culture of like, and I don't know where this started, but if you lose the vehicle or something doesn't go exactly as planned, you've failed, but you haven't failed. These are test and experimental vehicles. Yeah, well, there's also the term- I don't know how we got on this track, but yeah. I was going to say, in test flights, failure is an option. Yes. But in actual missions with humans, failure, no. Not particularly a good option. But like the upcoming Blue Origin test flight, where they're going to purposefully not have one of the parachutes deployed correctly. These are things that you'd, anyhow. Yeah. I don't know how we got off on that. So the thing that I think is exciting, and I could be mistaken, but based on these timelines, it's very, it parks back to Apollo, I think, just timeline-wise, right? About the same amount of time, kind of about the same amount of, okay, that's a big freaking goal. That's a big deal. And that's why I'm really excited for, what was it, September? August, September? What did you say, September? September. That's why I'm really excited for September, because I'm wondering if that's going to be kind of that JFK moment, you know what I mean? Because JFK had that speech, we choose to go to the moon. I don't know what, you don't think, okay, okay, it will be different. It will obviously be different. Yeah, because JFK was a good speaker. Ouch! That man signs your checks. Be nice, be nice. It'll be different, but I think you just need that one line. Sure. Right, that thing that history takes out and applies to the whole thing. Minnie Stoge is saying September 26th through 30th. There you go. Cool. Because Minnie Stoge is going to be there. Oh, awesome. She's going to be speaking there. You should live tweet that for us. You're cool, Stoge. I think she's one of 12 people who are... Doing a presentation. Yeah, that are like international rising space leaders or something like that. Really, really cool. Yeah. I'm excited. I'm trying to get all my stuff together so that I can just go to the conference, and it'd be awesome to see her speak, and of course, the whole Elon announcement, so. Yeah. Trying. All right, what do you guys think? Are you excited about this? Do you think it's reasonable timelines? Or you are? I love being excited, especially if I get proven wrong. That's what I love, too. I love to be proven wrong on stuff like this. Well, yes, but yeah. I think everyone would be like, yay, made the timelines. Yeah, woo-hoo! What do you think? Do you think they'll make the timelines? Or is Elon time kicking in here and off by, you know? It's generally about two years, right? Elon time's about two years, so off by about two years. But even at two years, that still puts Mars well within our lifetime, well within our grasp. Finally. That's kind of exciting. We did it! Right? Have we? I mean, how close are we? Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot more later this year, but what do you think right now? Did this announcement make you excited? What do you think? Leave your comments, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, wherever you wanna leave them. Speaking of comments, we've got comments from last week's show. We're gonna talk about those. We've always looked to the stars. They guide us, give us comfort, help us find our way. We see ourselves out there. When we look up, it inspires us, on for something we don't yet know. We yearn to go there. So, we venture forth. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not cause they are hard. We'll serve to organize, and this mission of space will go ahead. We join in it or not. Many think we stopped exploring, but we know our journey didn't end. We've only just begun. Come with us and explore tomorrow. And welcome back to Tomorrow. Now, before we get started with comments from last week's show, I did wanna give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of Tomorrow, who've helped to make this specific segment to this episode happen. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific episode. These are Premiere members. We've also got our producers. They've contributed $5 or more to this specific episode, as well as our Patreon Plus subscribers. They've contributed $2.50 or more to this, there we go, specific episode. I thought I heard her mashing on the keyboard in the background. Now, at this level and above, so that our Plus, our producers, and our Premiere members, they're gonna also get access to After Dark as soon as we post it online, as well as the Google Hangouts. But wait, there's more. We've also got our patrons. These are people who've contributed anywhere between one penny and $2.49, so as little as one penny gets your name in the show. To find out how you can help crowd fund the shows of Tomorrow and keep us going week after week, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O, right around that time when we need to do another one of the Hangouts. And I think what's gonna happen, we're gonna be off for a chunk of July, most of July. So I think what we'll do is we'll schedule it somewhere in there, because we're gonna be moving places, so we'll figure it out. Maybe just use iPhones. It'll be totally ghetto, but it'll be neat. Ghetto? Yeah. Well, I mean, because we're moving to the ghetto. No, it's because he's on Android now and he thinks that iPhones are ghetto. Ha! Something. It'll be a questionable broadcast. How about that? Ben is prissy. What? You are. All right, let's go ahead and get started with our comments from last week's show. Up first. This one comes from Doug Space off of tmro.tv. Ooh, our website. It says, with proper planning, how many of the things that we'll miss could we provide? Consider a large inflatable habitat with plenty of greenery inside, or consider a refrigerator with a variety of meats. Consider hanging out for an hour overlooking Yosemite using a VR headset, et cetera. What was our hashtag last week? Mars Lifestyle. Mars Lifestyle, yeah, that was it. I'm like, hmm, this needs context. So, yeah. Yeah, actually, that's an interesting idea. We could use VR, but then at the same point, you could probably use VR in reverse, too, right? So you could send rovers and get, although I think we're starting to do that, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah, so you can actually, like, from Curiosity and whatnot, I think just grab it. Yeah, they do use VR to plan out drives and stuff for the rovers. They did that with the Mars Exploration rovers as well, so it's actually not a new thing, at least at JPL. Yeah, but I'm wondering how, but I believe that's actually available to the Muggles so that we can also experience Mars. That actually might be kind of a fun, cool, I've got a Gear VR headset over there, I should do that in After Dark. We should play with it in After Dark. All right, up next. This one comes from xAerodynamics off of Patreon. Ooh, a Patreon comment. Yeah. So there's always one small thing missing when working on a project or acquiring a trip to the hardware store. There are few Home Depots on Mars, so that little thing may be a major frustration. There are few, not a few, there are few. In other words, there's not a Home Depot or a Lowe's or whatever you might need. Yes. Yeah, but that's where the 3D printer comes into play, right? You just print whatever part you need. Unless you need a part you can't print. We need to figure out how to print everything. Like an extra liver or something. Well, although, no, aren't we printing body parts now? We are. Yeah, you can 3D print body parts. Yeah, I think that's a printable thing. We can 3D print meat. We can 3D print metal parts. We can 3D print plastic parts. What can't we 3D print? Pizza. No, they have. So I did see a report like a year ago that they 3D printed a pizza. Here's what I don't want. I don't want my pizza 3D printer, my meat 3D printer, my metal parts 3D printer. We need to find a way to kind of wrap some of these so you've got like your tissues 3D printer. Right, because I want accidentally my pizza to come out as a liver. Liver pizza. Yum. Think about that for just a half second. Liver and onions pizza. Absolutely not. Why can't I have titanium pizza? But you know, with the 3D printer, sure you can make all those things, but it's whether or not you have the raw materials to make those different things or not. That's true too. Although hopefully Mars has the raw materials necessary. We can mine whatever we need on Mars to build whatever we need to build whatever we need. Plenty of iron. There you go. All right, next up. Great for liver. So it comes from Tom Core off of YouTube. The name of a star system is named usually after the central star or the opposite. And since our system has its star soul known as sun, we named it the solar system. Jeez. I got the death stare from Jared on that one. So I think this was from last week when you were doing your astrology. Can you- Astronomy. Oh, I'm sorry. I got that confused again. For Pete's sake. I got that confused again. Oops. Completely innocent mess up. You should just table flip and walk off. Some day. By the way, did you tell me my Aquarius horoscope? I'm out. Jared, come back. I need my Aquarius horoscope. You know where you can get it, Space Mike? All right. So Tom Core, that is fair enough, yes. Although I always want, I feel like the astronomy community has terrible names for things that are boring and they could do better. And I personally blame you. Okay. All right. I'm fine with that. Next up. Wow. Also off of YouTube. This comes from Basile Collard, or Collard, I suppose. I'm wondering if it can be possible to build an inflatable propellant gas tank. It could be great to reduce the overall weight of spacecrafts. To go further, we could imagine an inflatable structure with two or three main layers. The first for people who live in, the others at the outside to store propellant, and to protect people from solar radiation and do only one micrometeorite shield for both functionalities. Huh. Interesting. And the answer is yes, you absolutely can. The old, old Atlas rockets used kind of inflatable balloons on the inside for the propellant tanks. Yeah, the Centaur upper stages for those. Yeah, you had to keep them pressurized or else, you know, they kind of collapsed. And there's actually a really cool video if you can find it online on YouTube of a test flight that they were, they were like getting an Atlas ready to go on a stand out at Vandenberg and they lost the pressurization in the Centaur while it was being fueled. And it like, the rocket like folds in half and then falls and like spills its kerosene everywhere. I have not seen that and that sounds amazing. Yeah. I wish I had known that we would roll that in the show. That sounds amazing. Let's roll it next week. Just randomly. Or let's just find it in After Dark and we can roll it there. No, that's terrible. Or something, I don't know. All right. And finally, actually last one. Last one actually comes off of our Slack channel from Grumpy Space. Which means also a patron. Yeah. I just now got around to watching last Saturday's show. I always crack up when Ben says something to their Alexa and mine tries to comply also. This week you added wood to my shopping list. Thanks Bencredible. Well, you're welcome. Wood. Anything I can do. Alexa, tell me a joke. I have no idea what you said. It didn't work. At least not on ours. Hopefully it worked on yours. Everyone else's Alexa right now is telling some really crappy joke. Alexa, buy everything in the shopping cart. Oh God, wait. What did you just do? Someone's really pissed at me right now. Yeah, you might be really pissed at you right now. I'm gonna have to go check my shopping cart. On that note, thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next week. There's 14 items saved in that cart. Ooh.