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with you. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
podcast. This is a show.
Where we discuss the critical crossroads, the shape SpaceX.
Tesla X, The Boring Company and Neuralink and I'm your host.
Will Walden In on today's episode, we're going to be
talking about some interesting things that SpaceX is up to as
far as space tourism goes. Just recently, SpaceX released
some new information on their website about the way that
people can book a flight to low Earth orbit in a Dragon capsule
and Jared Isaacman and his crew for the new Eva that's going to
be happening. It's going to be an interesting
few months when this all happens.
OK, so let's talk about what Jared's going to be doing.
They're going to be doing what is considered an Eva for the for
the next human spaceflight. It's basically like a booked
flight, like a like a plane flight, like a you book an
airliner flight, but you book it to space, right?
So Jared spent a bunch of money, millions of dollars prepping his
team and also prepping the the Dragon capsule.
And SpaceX and him are working very closely together.
And this is a bigger thing here with Jared.
OK, so Jared runs a very successful flight training
school. He trains fighter pilots,
basically like jet pilots. And I believe this is the next
step for his business is that he'll start training people to
go to space so he could own that part of spaceflight.
That's what you want to do as a business owner.
You want to own certain parts, be the first person or the first
entity, the first business to do this.
And the only way you can do that as a partner with somebody like
SpaceX who sends people to space in a rocket.
Now with Jared and his crew for the next flights, they're going
to be doing an Eva. They have an Eva suit that they
worked with SpaceX on for the last year or so.
Couple years on this suit. I don't know how long SpaceX has
been actually working on this, but I'm sure it's been a long
time internally. But Jared and SpaceX have been
working really closely together over the last year to bring this
thing to fruition and make it feasible for their next flight.
So they're gonna be doing an Eva, basically.
It's not the same as an old school Eva, You know, like say
like the shuttle or outside the ISS, they're gonna be tethered
inside of the the Dragon capsule.
Everyone's going to be exposed to the vacuum of space.
There's gonna be 4 participants in this, so everybody inside the
capsule will be exposed to the darkness and the vacuum of
space. So it's going to be absolutely
dangerous, absolutely terrifying.
But you're tethered and you're not going to float out of the
capsule. But you need a suit that can
withstand those harsh environments.
So the within the tether they have life support systems in
everything. They need to survive while this
is happening. Unlike when you're outside of
the International Space Station Space Station, you have this big
bulky backpack on. There's no room for that in a
Dragon capsule, right? There will be room for that in a
Starship. There will be room for that in a
Starship, but right now they're tethered and umbilicaled in so
they're umbilical. Can use all your life support.
If you need to go outside of the capsule, you could do that.
We don't know if they're going to be doing any sort of outside
capsule maneuvers. We were shown in the press
conference the other day that they were thinking about it and
they don't know exactly the duration of that, of that extra
vehicular activity. So that's what Eva stands for by
the way, is extra vehicular activity.
Now they said that the Eva could be a a long duration Eva for the
first flight and we don't really know if that's going to happen
because it's the first flight, it's a test flight.
These four people that are going up, it's a test flight and it
could stop in 10 minutes depending on what's going on.
You know, there could be some sort of problem where the Eva
starts and they find an issue and they all have to, they have
to stop it and they have to come back in the capsule.
They have to close the capsule up and go back to normal mission
directives, right. And that's OK.
Like that's that's going to happen sometimes.
And Space Flight and like new technologies.
And Spacex's space suit is basically all new technologies.
And it looks pretty similar to their old space suit.
It's a little bit, a little bit thicker.
It looks like a little bit thicker.
But you too can book a flight to low Earth orbit.
Your mission duration is usually three to six days.
You orbit around the Earth every 90 minutes, which is beautiful.
You're about 300 to 500 kilometers above the Earth
anywhere between 2:00 and 4:00 passengers.
So you can have you and three buddies go up.
You can have a cupola this. So you're not going to be doing
an Eva but there's going to be a cupola which is a giant window
on the on the spacecraft. So you could float upside down.
I there's no upside down. The space every everything's
upside down I guess. But you could be flying looking
at the earth in every 90 minutes you go around the earth.
You could orbit the Earth in 90 minutes.
That would be wonderful and beautiful.
It's going to cost a couple 1,000,000 bucks per person, you
know, 10,000,010 to 20 million per person, something like that.
And then, you know, hopefully it'll be a a wonderful
experience for you for, you know, three days you get trained
by everybody at SpaceX. And hopefully Jared in the
future and his crew and his company will start doing Space
Flight operations so they can train the people that do the
SpaceX flights, 'cause SpaceX doesn't currently have a lot of
Space Flight training personnel, 'cause they go to the
International Space Station. And those astronauts are NASA
astronauts mainly or Axiom Space astronauts, something like that.
But most of those people are trained via NASA or some
government body, Axiom Space, They do a kind of a combination
of both. So it looks like Jared is
getting into the business of Space Flight, which is
incredible because he's already in it.
Which is, Which is, you know, saying that, saying a lot for
this guy because he did Inspiration 4.
He's he was the captain of the Crew Dragon Resilience and it
launched from Kennedy Space Center for Inspiration Four.
They spent a bunch of time up there and they have the Polaris
Dawn program coming up. That's what I was talking about
before the Polaris Dawn program, where they're going to be doing
Eva, but we're not sure how far out they're going to be doing
the Eva. They're going to be launching
this from Florida and the Polaris Dawn crew will spend up
to five days in orbit, during which they will work towards the
following objectives, high altitude.
They're going to go higher than anybody else has ever flown.
They're going to be orbiting through portions of the Van
Ellen radiation belt. So checkmate against the people
that are flat Earthers or the people that say, oh, we've never
been through the Van Allen radiation belt, whatever.
Like this is going to prove them wrong, which is great, which is
great. We should probably prove all
those people wrong. And they're going to be doing
700 kilometers above the Earth. They're going to be doing an
Eva, the first ever commercial extra vehicular activity,
upgraded from the current IVA suit.
They have a new Eva suit, and this is all building to people
going to the moon and also going to Mars and then farther out in
the solar system eventually. Right now, we don't really have
the technology to get there fast enough.
It's gonna take a while to get to the outer solar system.
So when they do this low Earth orbit stuff, they're only up
there for a few days. If you have the outer solar
system, you're gonna be in space for a year to get to some of
these places or or more even when you go to when you go to
Mars. It's a long trip.
You know, you're not going to be there.
It's not going to take a week to get there.
It's going to take months to get there.
And can you survive, you know, the radiation, leaving the
Earth's atmosphere, all that and do Evas because the only way to
service Starship on the way to Mars or further is to do an Eva.
And this is the first Test of these Eva suits for Jared and
the crew. So they're going to be up there
700 kilometers doing an Eva and they're going to be using these
Eva suits probably on the way to the moon.
If it's a private Starship flight, they're probably going
to be using these suits and they're going to transfer from
the regular IVA suits to only these Eva suits.
So they'll have one suit that does everything.
So the best part is no part, right?
So you get rid, ditch the old technology, move forward and use
the new technology to better Space Flight.
But they needed all those years in the IVA to make it the best
suit possible. And then they added on top of
that. So now they have the Eva.
They'll be the first crew to do a Starlink based communication
in space. So they're going to get valuable
data for future space communications.
And while in orbit, the crew will conduct scientific
research. Let's see what they have here.
They have ultrasound to monitor, detect and quantify gas BGE
contributing to studies on human prevalence to decompression
segments, So basically the bends and also gathering data on the
radiation environment like we were saying before the Van Allen
radiation belt providing biological samples towards
multiomics analysis for a long term biobank and research
related to Space Flight association, Neuro Ocular
syndrome which is a key risk to human health and long duration
Space Flight. So your eyes get wonky in space
and they want to figure out why. And once they figure out the why
and how it happens, then they can figure out a way to prevent
it in the future. So that's important for long
duration Space Flight. When you want to go to, you
know, I don't know, sorry, Incitalis or something.
Incitalis. I said that wrong anyway.
You want to go to the moon? Another planet.
Why can't I think of how to say that right now anyway?
You want to go to the moons of Jupiter, right?
And that'll be great, but how? It's going to take you forever.
And by the time you get there, your eyes might be so messed up
you can't even see what you're, you know what you're looking at
because your eyes get so messed up.
So this neuro ocular syndrome or sands, it could be a thing that
they they start the process of figuring it out now and then in
like the years in the future, they could figure out how to
stop it before it starts and also how to fix it.
So the Eva suit, you know, it looks like a regular, looks kind
of like a regular IVA suit, but it's way more tech.
In the Polaris Dawn program, of course has Jared Isaacman, Scott
Petit, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menin who are going to be flying
on this thing and they were going to be influential for the
future of spaceflight altogether.
I mean, Inspiration Four was a huge deal, but Polaris Dawn,
that's taken it up to like 20 out of 10.
It's huge. And Eva commercial Eva, like no
one's ever done this before. Private Eva, no one's done it.
So what I want to talk about now is when do you get done with
these Evas, the Space Flight, tourism, Space Flight, thinking
SpaceX is going to put everybody out of business that's doing
this now because they have everything.
Of course, we know Spacex's Starship will be going to the
moon. We know SpaceX Starship
eventually will go to Mars. But in between the moon and
Mars, SpaceX has to figure out how to put people in the
Starship in low Earth orbit to send them to the moon and Mars.
How do you do that? You test things like Evas in a
Dragon capsule where it's already built.
Starship can't send people, yet it can barely get to orbit.
I mean, it did a great job with IFT E3 and upcoming IFT 4, but
nobody's going to get in that thing for a while.
And these Dragon capsule tests, I mean, I don't know how many
more Jared is going to try to do with players program, but right
now they have. You have three of them, three of
them planned. So we have the Polaris program,
which eventually they have, you know, Polaris Dawn mission,
mission two, and then mission three.
They don't have names for mission two and three yet.
This is mission 2 building upon Polaris Dawn.
This mission will continue to expand the boundaries of human
spaceflight missions in space, communications and scientific
research. So basically Polaris Dawn, which
is the first one, they're gonna take all that data that they get
from the first one they've got. Like, what?
Can we do this better than this? What can we do to add to this
and to make the next flight even more robust?
So every lesson they learned from the mission one, they're
gonna put towards mission two, and then for mission three, this
will be the first human spaceflight on a Starship, and
this will be something you could book in the future.
So the first human spaceflight on Starship mission 3, Polaris
Starship mission. I don't know what they're gonna
call it, but it seems like that's where everybody's headed.
So the first human space light on Starship, they're gonna human
rate Starship. NASA has the humans rate
Starship so they can send people to the moon in it.
And will the mission three of Polaris program be a lunar
Starship or will it be the crew Starship that sends people to
Mars? OK, so the crew Starship have a
big window, a bunch of windows have like places to hang out.
There will have an inside of the Starship where you could fly
around, I guess not fly. You could float around and there
will be, you know, there will be a a galley, a cafe, you know,
like everything. You need sleeping quarters.
You have your own little quarters to hang out in
communications. Things like kind of like if you
go on a cruise or if you go on a, how about this?
This is even better. So it's sort of like if you've
mashed up a cruise and a submarine or an airliner, I
guess would be a better way to put it.
But you're in the tube, you're basically in a 777 or something.
It's big. It's quite large, 9 meters
around, 30 feet around. It's huge.
And you get that all to yourself and like a few other people, but
you know, it's a cramped, cramped area.
You're in there with a bunch of people and it's not a open tube.
There's going to be life support systems, a bunch of things
around you. But it's going to be a a great
place to test things in low Earth orbit for Polaris program
and then move you off to the moon and Mars and beyond.
But the the first one is going to be the Polaris mission 3.
Now I know everybody's thinking like, OK, so so Polaris mission,
cool, great, what does that matter?
What matters? Because right now you can book a
mission with SpaceX to go to low Earth orbit.
And eventually, if you have enough money and this is human
rated for long duration Space Flight, and they finally figure
out how to fuel this up in low Earth orbit, you're going to be
able to go to Mars. You're going to be able to fly
you and a bunch of friends to Mars.
You might not want to land on Mars because it's it's
dangerous. It's horrible there.
It's horrible like Mars is like one.
It's one of the worst places to live and that's why we don't
live there, because it's the worst place.
It's like going to the top of Mount Everest and trying to live
like it's it's almost impossible.
People die all the time. Going to Everest, like climbing
up Everest and sometimes coming back down, they might make the
peak, but coming back down Everest, some people die.
And when you go to Mars, there's no oxygen, sort of like Everest.
It's super cold in places like Everest.
It's extremely dangerous to get there, which is also getting to
the top of Everest, you know, and I'm just making this
comparison because I know people.
It's an extremely difficult thing to do.
So people have done it. But it took a few brave people
with the resources to do it, to do it the first few times.
And once they did it, other people were like, oh, they can
do that. I can.
I can do that too. I have some money.
I got some resources. I think I could climb that
mountain. You hire the right people to
take you up there, which would be Jared's new program, which
trains astronauts and then sends them wherever they're going to
go. And also you work with SpaceX
for Starship integration and then you're good to go, which
would take you months to get there, 9/6 to nine months to get
this, get to Mars. Then you have to take 6 to 9
months to get back. So you're going to be in this
tube for about a year. That's why I was, I was kind of
combining the submarine and an airliner and sort of like a
cruise because they're all things that you do that have
life support systems. But also you're in a tube for a
year or more like or a year and a half or something if you just
go to Mars and come back. But you're probably going to
want to go to Mars, do a couple laughs, do a couple orbits, you
know, spend a month in orbit. I don't know.
That would be great. That'd be great.
I'm not going to be the person that does this.
Let me know in the comments if you're the person that does
this, because I'm not going to be that person.
So what I want to do is I want to, I want to figure out who
would do this. If you had unlimited resources,
unlimited money. Would you go to Mars on a
Starship? Would you be one of the first
people? Let's put it that way.
Let's put let's do that. Would you be one of the first
people to go to Mars? That would be incredible.
You'd be a pioneer and you would be in the history books.
You could become a hero for all of humanity.
So think about that. If you have the money to do it,
is your ego big enough? If it's just an adventure thing,
you're just like, man, I just want to go to Mars.
How sick would that be? That would be cool, right?
That'd be fun. But if it's an ego thing where
you're like, you know what, I get nothing else better going
on. This is my way to make a
contribution. That's cool too.
I I think that's great.
I couldn't do it myself personally, so I think you are
way more brave than me if you think you could do it, so let me
know in the comments. So we don't know how much it's
going to cost either. So a Starship could possibly go
for. Elon said it's going to take a
couple million, like 20 million to launch a Starship, which is
incredibly low, incredibly low, maybe up to 100 million to
launch a Starship. So if you got 25,000,000, Elon
has to make profit too. So say if you have 50 million,
you get 4 people to go with you. You're going to need a captain,
you know, somebody who's in charge.
Of course, you're going to have to have people.
Everybody has to know how to work all the systems, kind of.
You have to have people that are, you know, like a doctor.
You have to have somebody who's in charge of the food and like a
bunch of different people. It's sort of like going on a
Star Trek ship, you know, everybody has their duty like
you're in a submarine. Or you're in an air flight, like
in an airliner where there's a pilot, copilot, etcetera, and
sort of like the International Space Station.
Because basically what you're doing is flying a space station,
a mini space station to Mars. It's going to take a while to
get there. You need all the systems,
everything needs to work Florida State for six to nine months to
get there. How do you do that?
You get the right people to do the right jobs if anything
happens. Can you 3D print a part or do
you bring extra parts with you? How heavy are those parts?
If one part fails, what's the redundancy?
It's a it's a complicated mess, you know when you when you think
about it, because starships are big, they're giant things.
They're 150 feet tall, possibly bigger in the future according
to Elon. So who who does the work, You
know? So you're going to have to have,
I'm thinking, I'm guessing this is another thing we can talk
about in the comments too. I'm guessing minimum six people
going to Mars, minimum, possibly 10.
The thing is huge. Starship is huge.
So think about, because you're not gonna have a whole 150 feet
of of motion between the top of the Starship and where everybody
hangs out. There's there's numerous videos
about the interior of Starship and how it works.
SpaceX released something a long time ago about the interior of
Starship 2, so if you could dig that up, try to find that too.
That's pretty interesting. But people have also made their
own renderings. We have a video from a long time
ago, a couple years ago, focusing and showcasing the
interior of the Starship. Have a bunch of YouTube shorts
about it too. We had a a great graphic artist,
Pork Roll Porky, helping us out, and he said Pork Roll, no, Pork
Roll's the guy they play games with.
I forgot. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
So anyway, sorry to the artist. I think it's Pork Roll.
I don't know. I think Porky's the guy that we
play games with. Anyway, that's beside the point.
So there's a bunch of interior renderings and videos about
that. And SpaceX will make sure that
everything's taken care of before you fly to Mars.
So part of that is getting to the moon, flying people to the
moon, making sure all the systems work there and then
making it even better because you can have systems that go to
the moon and some of these things like we might not go to
Mars for the next 20 years. And I don't want to be one of
those people. I'm not a naysayer.
I just know how fast technology works and especially Space
Flight. How long did it take SpaceX to
get AISS rated? Star or Falcon?
And you know, the Crew Dragon took him a little while, right?
Took him years to do that. So Starship could be human rated
for the moon, but going all the way to Mars, there's massive
amounts of radiation in between here and Mars.
How do you shield for that? I'm sure they're working on that
in the background. How do you shield for that?
How do you make sure that everyone's OK?
Do you line the walls with water?
People were talking about that for a while.
Water's really heavy. Really, really heavy.
So I don't think that's going to be a possibility.
What kind of materials can you use?
Is there just going to be a radiation bunker somewhere in
the place where everybody kind of hunkers down while a big
radiation storm comes through or something?
That's a possibility. They did that.
They they did that in the ISS. They do that or not in the ISS.
They do that with some concepts for lunar landing and also for
long derision, Space Flight. NASA has done concept concepts
about that in the past. So there's a possibility that
they have a bunker in the Starship and that would, you
know, that would eradicate like a bunch of fears for people,
especially with radiation. And then the rest of the ship
could be rated for radiation, long duration, long duration
Space Flight, radiation. There we go, it's the long run.
So I don't know, would you take that flight?
It's going to be 10s, maybe $100 million.
If you had the money, would you do it?
I think there's a possibility. I think there's a possibility.
And I think Jared Isaacman is going to train the astronauts
that go to Mars or go to Mars himself.
Be the first person to go to Mars.
I don't know if it's going to be a nation.
I think it might be. It might be Jared.
I think he's going to be the first person to do that, to go
around Mars, to fly around Mars and come back.
He's an explorer, he's a, he's a thrill seeker.
He's very tempered, very well spoken, very calm, great
demeanor. So him being in charge of
everybody and being the commander of the first Starship
to go to Mars, I mean, if he's the, he's the commander of the
first Starship in orbit, first human rated Starship in orbit,
that's the first step. And maybe he'll go around the
moon for the first time. I don't know.
It would be great if he does all these things.
Maybe he's the explorer we need. Maybe we need Jared to do all
these things. So Jared could go lower Thurbin
in Starship. Go around the moon in Starship
before Dear Moon. Maybe, I don't know.
Maybe we'll see. And then maybe go around Mars.
But Dear Moon, I know not look at do good.
Dear Moon. I look at do good.
But I don't know if Jared is going to be competitive enough.
He'll pay whatever he he can pay.
But Dear Moon seems like, I mean there's gonna be 1234567891011
people that go to Dear Moon and Dear Moon's been postponed as
well. You know they started it in 2018
and they wanted you know they wanted to launch in 2023 for
start with Starship in 2023. Can you imagine that?
We all know, we all know that Starship is far away from
launching anybody to the moon. Years away from launching
anybody to the moon, even Artemis, the NASA program is
slated for like 20-30 ish now. So they wanted 2023, of course,
very ambitious flight timeline, but 20-30?
That's more realistic. But even then, you know, six
years from now, getting the Starship human rated, Jared's
gonna be one of those first, the first people to do that.
And then once they figure that out, send somebody around the
moon before they send NASA astronauts.
I don't know. I don't know.
I think, I don't know if NASA would be OK with that.
They probably would. But I mean, what is NASA?
Just a customer of SpaceX? I don't know if they'd be mad or
not, but who? I mean, if you're Elon, you
can't make like you can't. You can't make your one of your
best customers upset with you due to these politics.
I don't know. So would they send a private
astronaut crew before a NASA astronaut crew around the moon
Out of Starship? I don't know because it's just a
it's a it's a weird thing. So SpaceX and dear Moon project
of course postponed until they figure out how to do it.
You know they're upgrading everything as we speak.
Flight 4 of Starship coming up soon TM middle of the month,
maybe. We'll see.
But they're doing testing right now with the ship and they're
doing the booster and hopefully soon they'll get the FAA
approval to DUO Starship flight. Hey, thank you.
So. Much for listening today.
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