So I I find it interesting to look at the if you look at the,
the flame tail on Starship and how long it is, it's a it's a
very long flame tail, which is due to the fact that the the the
chamber pressure, well it's it's just outputting a lot more.
Yeah a lot more gas at a higher velocity.
But I think the flame tail is like maybe 1000 feet long.
It's like more than twice the length of the rocket and that
will actually get as as we increase the thrust that will
get longer. So yeah, and inevitably the
rocket grows in height. So Starship 2 we're aiming for
like I currently flight 3 would be around 40 or 50 tons to
orbit. So the current design Starship 2
will be over 100 tons and then Starship 3 will be over 200
tons. And yeah, it's going from around
7000 tons thrust to over 8000. But I I think we'll we'll we'll
end up ultimately with more than three more than 10,000 tons of
thrust, probably 7 or 8000 tons of lift off mass and at least 10
meters taller. We'll see.
Tends to grow, Yeah, exactly. So it probably grows a bit more
than that, even really. So if you if you look at Falcon
Nine, it's we're not going to do the length to diameter of Falcon
Nine. That would be crazy.
But Falcon 9 is a very long rocket, and so I suspect it'll
probably get a bit longer than this.
But at 200 tons per flight, fully reusable, that is, that is
pretty incredible. And yeah, it'll be on the order
of 500 feet tall. And then we're at this, this
hundred. There's thousands of design
improvements here, so I mean, I think maybe the most, One of the
most profound things is Starship 3 will cost less per flight than
Falcon one. So that's the difference between
if you've got a fully reusable rocket or an expendable rocket.
The fully reusable rocket with low cost propellant and
autogenous pressurization actually cost less than a a tiny
expendable rocket. So and it'll do like I said,
Falcon one is about half a ton to orbit.
The Starship 3 will be 400 times more payload for less than the
cost of a Falcon one. Ultimately, I think we might be
able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around
$2,000,000 or $3,000,000. So these are sort of unthinkable
numbers from the, you know, nobody ever thought this was
possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this.
So this is within the without breaking physics, we can do
this. So the Mars missions are two
years apart or 26 months. And if you look closely at the
Starlink router, you see the the home and transfer from Earth
over to Mars over. And that's basically to say to
people, the Starlink system that you're buying is helping get
humanity to Mars. I think it's pretty cool.
So roughly every two years, thousands of ships would depart
from Earth to Mars. It would look like Battlestar
Galactica, but in a good way, you know, hopefully without
being chased by the Cylons. But it would be an incredible
thing to see these thousands of ships departing every every 26
months. For Mars.
What this diagram is basically saying is that for getting to
Mars, we would essentially create a kind of a propellant
depot ship. The propellant depot would look
more like a hot dog than like a spear, surely just makes a long
ship with a lot of insulation, and we'd pull that ship up and
then shortly before or as as they're going to Mars, the ships
would take off with a couple 100 tons of payload from Earth reach
orbit with very almost no propellant.
And then get refilled by the tanker and then go to Mars and
and land go all the way to Mars with over 200 tons of useful
payload. Then on Mars at the beginning we
would, I think we would simply reuse the ship materials so most
of the ships wouldn't come back. But then over time you'd want to
bring the ships back so you could reuse them and and for
that we would need to create a methane Chapter 4 and oxygen O2
on Mars which you can do with H2O and CO2.
So the atmosphere is CO2 and there's plenty of water ice H2O
and so it's it's kind of like tailor made for well we actually
the reason we have methane oxygen system is because you can
make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily like not just not
a total walk in the park but the ingredients are readily
available to create methane and oxygen on Mars.
So so you build a propellant depot and and bring the ships
back and build out as quickly as possible a self-sustaining
civilization on Mars. And we want to get the we want
to get the cost of going to Mars such that almost anyone could
afford it So like if somebody were to just work hard on Earth
save off and that they'd be able to go to Mars.
So it's like anyone ideally almost anyone could go to Mars
and I think you'll see a lot of governments also sponsor people
and ultimately we'll we'll want to get.
So there's kind of an optimal landing zone on Mars where you
have resources so you've got access to water or frozen water
that you're not too close to the poles so you can use solar
power. It would it would be nice to use
nuclear. I don't know if we'll get get
the approval, but nuclear would be very handy on Mars because
you can use the heat and you can generate electricity.
So and then you kind of want to be about two kilometers below
sea level. So if Mars did have an ocean,
you'd actually be quite deep in the ocean at least at 1st.
And yeah, so let's see, that's Mars kind of, kind of want to
land about halfway between the the pole and the equator in a
kind of a deep area of Mars. If you the deeper it is, the
more you can use the atmosphere to break and the atmospheric
density is higher. So these are all the things that
would have to be developed. So as people ask me, are we
developing these things? I'm like not yet, because this
is the cart and we need the horse first.
So the rocket is the horse and then this is the cart.
But ultimately we'll need all these things lesser power
generation, mining in general ice mining, propellant
production, long duration life support construct a lot of
construction and and the global communication.
So I think this would open up a lot of opportunities for
entrepreneurs that want to create any create things on Mars
whether that is a propellant. Well, well I think we'll have to
do the propellant depot. But whether it's like iron ore
refining or a pizza joint or a bar, you know there'll be an
opportunity to do all the things that we like on Earth, on Mars
like a Mars bar would be great. So I think, I think probably the
a rough order of magnitude guess for what you need, how many
people do you need for a self-sustaining city is about
1,000,000 and several million tons of of cargo.
So yeah, which we can do and we can do this in 20 years.
But like I said, in order for it to be self-sustaining you
actually need the entire base of industry.
You can't be missing any element.
So that's that's really what's going to take take a while is do
you have everything you need to survive on Mars At that point
the future of consciousness is assured.
So if you do 10 launches a day at 200 tons per launch, million
and a half tons to Leo per opportunity, you you net that
out to a quarter million tons to Mars per opportunity.
So that means you can get to 1,000,000 tons in about 8 years
since the opportunities of two years apart.
So I think it's pretty doable. And I'm like, we're actually
going to do this. Are we going to, you know, we
are actually going to do it, which is insane to think so.
Millions of tons to Mars. Yeah, Wild.
And we're going to build a lot of vehicles.
So, yeah, several thousand vehicles per year.
That's what we'll need, which really quite, quite doable
actually. It sounds like a lot, but it's
very doable. Yeah.
If you compare it to sort of car production, there's a small
number. Of course this is much bigger
than a car, but even if you look at the total tonnage, the it's,
it's still very, it's very doable to both several thousand
vehicles a year. So that's what we need to do and
we're going to do it.