All right, well, thank you very much for the award, and yeah, it's great to be before so many people who believe strongly in the in the establishment of life on Mars.
I mean, I think my reasons for.
Being interested in Mars and doing space X really that they come down to basically just two two things of one which the prior speaker was articulating, which is, there's the defensive reason in that if we are on more than one planet, the probable lifespan of human civilization and the line of consciousness as we know it is going to be far greater than if we are on one planet. So there's that that defensive reason, that life insurance reason.
And I think that that's obviously a very important thing. And Earth's been around for four billion years, and civilization about ten thousand years, and it's only now that we have this the window has just cracked open where it's possible for life to extend beyond Earth. And and so I think it sort of seems sensible to to take advantage of that window while it's open. Hopefully it will be open for a long time, but it could be
open for a short time. And so that's so we should take action and that's that's sort of the defensive reason. It's not actually the reason that I'm that gets me most.
Fired up about about Mars.
The thing that that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it's the It's the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It's the most exciting thing. I couldn't think of anything more exciting and more fun and more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars.
And it will be incredibly difficult, and they'll probably lets of people, will I.
And you know, terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States. But it will be It'll be one of those things that is incredibly inspiring.
And we must have inspiring things in the world.
Life cannot just be about solving, you know, this problem or that problem. There must be things that when you wake up in the morning, you're glad to be alive.
And that I think is for me the.
Most important reason why we should pursue the establishment of life on Mars. Now, of course I'm preaching to the advertt here.
You know, I.
Expect to hear a few objections from this audience. So I think, really what matters is finding a way to do it. In fact, i'll give you a little bit of background of my genesis of how I got into into space.
Sort of started when I was in college.
There were there were there were three areas that I thought would most affect the future of humanity and space exploration. The extension of life beyond Earth was one of those things, and I didn't ever expect to be involved in it because I thought it was the province of governments.
And besides which, it sort of seemed, at least, you.
Know, twenty one two years ago, that it was likely to occur because we went to the Moon, and then of course that people would go to Mars and we would establishing a base on the Moon, and they've been eventually based on Mars, and that sort of seemed like the natural progression of things.
And then amazingly it didn't happen.
I kept thinking, well, well, it's it's about to happen.
And again it just didn't. Didn't happen.
There's mighty python skit about this. Suddenly nothing happened. Before you know it, nothing happened. So, in fact, in approximately two thousand and one, I saw a good friend of mine in college, my college housemate.
Actually in New York, and he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal, and I said.
Well, you know, I've always been interested in space, but of course there's nothing that as an individual could do do about that. But the question got me curious is to sort of to find out, okay, well when are we sending people to Mars. So after I got back to my hotel room, I went to the NASA website to sort of look look, look up the schedule, because of course it had to be a schedule, and I couldn't find it.
Thought I thought the.
Problem was me, because you know, it's simply it must be here somewhere on this website, but it's just well hidden. And it turned out not it was another way side at all, so which was shogging.
So then I thought, well, perhaps.
The reason is that the American people have have led to have lost the will to explore or with you know, if if we just had more, if we've got people more interested in the subject, then then they would be inclined to want to do it. This turned out to be a false premise, by the way, but that was
my initial My initial thought it was a mistake. So at first I thought, well, perhaps if we can do it a small philanthropic mission to Mars, something that would get the public excited, then then that would result in a bigger budget pronouncer and and then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again. And and that's about the time that I started talking to Robert
Zuberin and a few other people. And so it's initially that the thought was to send a small greenhouse to the service of Mars with seasoned dehydrated new cent jail. They are hydrate upon landing, and then you'd have this little greenhouse on the surface of Mars. And the public tends to be, as they should, interested in things that are precedents and superlatives, so this would be the furthest that LIFs ever.
Traveled the first life on Mars.
And then you'd have this great money shot of green plants and a red background, so that that that would be that I thought, Okay, get people pretty exciting. They get pretty excited, and so I started investigating what that would take, and I was able to get the cost of the spacecraft down to sort of low single ADGIT millions and the cost of communications down and all, and and I was able to get everything compressed except for the cost of the rocket, and.
And so the US rockets were way too expensive.
Something like a Delta too would have cost sixty million dollars.
And I figured I needed to do.
To parallel, so two identical missions in case there was an equipment failure, because then it could be counterproductive. You know, It's like, look that fool you did that Mars mission. It didn't work, and now we definitely shouldn't do Mars. So so I figured we had to have redundant missions. And I just didn't actually have enough money from the sale of Payfal to from ice take in the sale of pay Fell to actually do that.
So it didn't have enough money. So I went to.
Russia in late two thousand and one, early two thousand and two to try to buy.
ICBMs. Right, And that's as crazy as it sounds, you know, you so I guess about.
Thirty thirty years old Internet guy arrives in Moscow.
I wants to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian rocket fleet.
I said, I don't need the nuke, just need the rocket, and they thought I was crazy. But then they also thought I've always got money, so that's uh. So I was able to actually negotiate a deal to buy a couple of of dneppers.
And now at the end of all that, I decided not to conclude the deal.
So negotiated a price, but decided not to conclude the deal because after my third trip to Russia, that's about the time that I realized that my original premise was wrong. That it is, in fact, we do not lack full will, particularly in the United States, perhaps the world as a whole, but particularly not the United States. It does not lack the will to explore, not in the least. In fact, the United States is a distillation of the human sport
of exploration. Almost everyone came here from I mean, they came here from somewhere else. So you couldn't ask for a group of people that are more interested in exploring the frontier. And so, but if people do not think that there is any way to do it, if they don't think there's there's a means, then it's it's somewhat irrelevant. You know, you're not you're going to bash your head against a brick wall if you're confident that your head will break before.
The wall will break. It's just not gonna happen.
So so so that's when I started to start the Rocket Company because it was clear that that we've not made advancements in rocket technology. And that was the reason that that we hadn't made progress, that rocket technology was actually going worse. It was costing more and more to send things to space, uh than than in the past. So we had a negative technology curve, which is countertitive.
Because we're so used to thinking in a consumer.
Electronics realm and in everyday life improving, we sort of take it for granted like it's it's those things as those things automatically improve. They do not automatically improve. They only with lots of effort and resources. You saw the graph of the or the picture of the perramits there. Egyptian civilization got to the point where to create things like the great perimitive chips, but then lost that ability and never got back there, and or Roman civilization went
went through a deep dop here. And it's not it's not a given that things improve. There has to be there has to be a forcing function. People have to do it. So anyway, so I started started, I started SpaceX and many people try to convince me not to start the company. That really tried their best, and many of my closest friends. I mean, if there was anything they could have done to stop me from starting the
rock company, they would have done it. Want one, one good friend of mine compiled footage of rocket fail years and forced me to watch it. I said, I'd seen them all, so so it was certainly, but I think that perhaps missions to the premise, because when I started SpaceX, it was not with the expectation of success.
I thought that the most likely outcome was failure.
But given that the thing I was going to do previously, which was the the grim Mars Greenhouse mission, I expected that would have one hundred percent chance of a one hundred percent likelihood of losing all the money associated with it. So anything if a rocket company had less than one hundred percent chance of losing all the money associated with it, and therefore was actually quite a bit less risky than
the thing I've been doing before. And anyway, so fortunately, I think things weren't resentally well with with with SpaceX, not in the beginning, because the first three launches of the Falcon one rocket that we did failed and and as what we were saying.
It's not it's not a good day when the rocket fails.
The first rockets failed only I mean it impacted sixty sixty seconds after.
Liftoff, not not far from the launch site.
So me and the rest of the team spent all of that day picking up pieces of the rocket, which is a very sad thing, but we picked them up to sort of see if we could, if would help figure out what went wrong. Fortunately, the fourth launch we were able to reach orbit. That's a good thing. It's a good thing we were able to do that because I had no more money left. So it's to Lula, my wife father. She's witness to the third and then
the fourth launch. So yeah, so stressed out of the fourth launch, I didn't even actually feel elation.
I just felt relief. But so it was a very very close call.
But fortunately the fourth launch worked, and then since then all of the launches have worked.
I hoped they continue to work.
And SpaceX has gotten a lot stronger, and we've actually been slightly profitable for the last four years approximately and
should be again this year. And the rockets now are much bigger, and we've we've got a Falcon nine which is about a million pound thrust rocket, and we've got an upgraded version of Falconine it's gonna launch next year, which will be almost one and a half million pounds at thrust, and then the Falcon Heavy, which will be over four million pounds at thrust, which is about sixty
percent out of Saturn five impact. With two Falcon Heavy launchers, you could actually send people back to the surface of the Moon. And most people probably aren't quite aware of the scale of the rocket that we're building in Falcon Heavy.
Should launch probably around the end of next.
Year or certainly by early twenty fourteen at the latest, and and that I think will represent.
A significant im provement in rocket technology.
And then and then very importantly, we're also working on reusability because if you really boil it down to the various the crux of why don't we have a base on Mars, As I mentioned, there's rocket technology, but what really needs to be developed. The key invention that's necessary is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket. And this is a very difficult thing to do on Earth because because grath gravity is quite quite high, it's right on cusp of impossibility for such a thing.
For a chemical rocket. So if you take an expandable rocket.
Even after people a lot of smart people, using advanced materials and uh and and really approaching the limits of engine efficiency and everything, you'll typically get two to three percent of your lift off mass to orbit.
That's where expandable rocket.
Now, if you say, well, we want to make it reusable, we want to bring it back to the launch site, it's going to survive the rigors of a re entry, it's going to all the systems have to be capable of surviving multiple firings and film or fatigue, and it's just it's really you add a lot of mass when when it happens. And previously when people have tried to make a reusable system, they found that that they would get some portion of the way and then conclude that
success was not one of the possible outcomes. In government programs, of course, that the program which will continue for quite time.
It's funny but true. And so the real trick then.
Is to say, can you create a rocket that is efficient enough that in an expandable form you can push that what would normally be two to three percent of master orbit up to maybe four percent of master orbit and then if you can get really good about the reusable elements, maybe that can only be cost you two of those four points, so on net you would still get two percent roughly of.
Your lift off master orbit. That's the thing that needs to happen.
In order for that to happen, you have to really get kind of strade a pluses across the board in all elements of the rocket design, every little tiny thing, the engine efficiency, thrust a weight, the engine, the tank mass, the pressure mass.
At the secondary structure of the wiring.
Even that, the weight of the computers, and every everything matters immensely, and and and but if you do all those things right, then then this.
It is possible to make this work.
And this is what it has given me hope recently in the last few years, because I wasn't sure whether it was possible, But in the last few years I've.
Become convinced that it is. It is possible. Of course, just because something is possible does not mean it will occur.
But but I think I think it can occur, which is like I said, you know, success being one of the possible outcomes is very important. So that that's that's that's that's the breakthrough that space sex is really trying to achieve because the stuff we've done last far, I think is is good. I think it's it's but it's evolutionary, it's not revolutionary, and we really need the revolutionary thing to work.
So so I think over the next few years.
We'll see if if we're going to be able to do that to rapid a complete reusability thing.
But but I'm actually if.
A place it makes I probably should sound more optimistic than I. I am actually quite optimistic that this word code, so I.
Don't want to leave any doubt. It feels my are quite optistic at OCO.
And and and then going beyond that that that's for Earth orbit, but not to establish life on Mars. I think you really ultimately need to care be able to carry millions of people there and millions of tons of cargo.
So you really need a fully.
Reusable Mars transportation system, which is yet a more difficult step than creating a fully reusable Earth system. And then I I was was really worried that would not be possible, But year I became convinced that it actually is possible, which was maybe be very happy. Actually, in fact, I think it was there when I was pacing around the bedroom late at night trying to.
See if this would work, and yeah, so yeah, so that's that's good news.
Now I could be deluded, but I'm pretty Unless I'm deluded, I think, I think, I think, I think we've we've got uh something in mind, which which would be a good Which would it be a solution that would work? And then it comes to sort of the threshold of what it really comes down to a cost?
What what's the what cost does it?
Does a trip to Mars have to be in order for it to be a self sustaining reaction?
And I think it's got You've got to roughly get to the to the I think around half a million dollars.
If if if if you have pay half a million dollars to move to Mars, sell all this stuff on Earth because you don't need it obviously, uh, then then you could remove Mars.
Then I think that that would work, because.
You know, that's basically the net worth of of sort of a roughly middle income earning person after about twenty five years in the United States is roughly half a million dollars. So in fact, it's kind of hard to buy a house in southern California for you know, half million dollars and in a lot of neighborhoods. So so, but I think at a roughly that level is where it would be, is where it works.
That's what we're going to get to.
And my calculations show that it should be possible that that in fact, it is possible according to me. H and and then so so that but there's a great deal of work that has to occur and then and then to.
Make to make it a reality. So that that I think is.
You know, maybe, yeah, I think I think that's that should be really good reason to feel good about the the possibility of of life on Mars.
And yeah, so I think that's that's what probably what I'd like to leave you with. And uh and then then in the ensuing years, we will.
I fail more and more about what we're going to do, and there'll probably be some ups and downs along the way, but uhh, but but I can finally see a path to to that objective. Like I said, as long as I'm not delusional, I haven't made some significant error, then I think that.
That will hopefully come as good news to people in this room. Thank you,