News Elon Musk wants to put millions of people on Mars.

[RGClark]

In his presentation at about the 54 minute mark Musk discusses that the second stage in its tanker form or in its spaceship form will be able to reach orbit when used as a single stage. He states though the tanker will not be able to land, presumably because of insufficient reserve fuel. Then it could be an expendable SSTO.

However, he states it could be used as cargo ship for fast intercontinental deliveries. In this case it would need to land so presumably he means this would be at speeds just below orbital.

Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species - YouTube

A simulation of the ITS upper stage tanker as an SSTO:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzyzwr-5XXY"]ITS Tanker SSTO - YouTube[/ame]

It suggests it can get a total mass of 190 metric tons to LEO as an expendable. Since the dry mass is 90 metric tons, this means a 100 metric ton payload to orbit.


Bob Clark

 

[boogabooga]

SSTO makes more sense as the scale of a launch vehicle increases. The fuel weight is roughly proportional to volume, while the dry weight is roughly proportional to surface area. So as volume:area ratio increases with scale, you get a naturally more favorable mass fraction. And this is a huge scale.

 

[Urwumpe]

Another edition of the original presentation, an update of the Mars plans regarding the economics is announced.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu

 

[Nicholas Kang]

This week at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, SpaceX CEO and Lead Designer Elon Musk will provide an update to his 2016 presentation regarding the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars.

You can watch the talk live on this page on Thursday, September 28th at 9:30 pm PDT,
or Friday, September 29 at 2:00 p.m. ACST in Adelaide, Australia.

Live stream:

Source

 

[Urwumpe]

Thats 6:00 in the morning for us central Europeans... :hmm:

Spam, ham, eggs & Musk?

 

[Pipcard]

New images released

Moon Base Alpha

Mars City

---------- Post added at 11:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:59 PM ----------

Presentation starts in 10 minutes

 

[Andy44]

Holy Robert Heinlein, Batman!

It's hard for me to believe I'll see anything that cool in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal...

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Wow. That's a significant difference from the earlier artwork for ITS. I'm kinda meh about the changes, though.

 

[Pipcard]

Wow. That's a significant difference from the earlier artwork for ITS. I'm kinda meh about the changes, though.

It's meant to be something big enough to send colonists to Mars and something that's small enough to reasonably replace F9 and FH within the next decade. There's a reason why I haven't been working on my fictional M-III Heavy, ever since Blue Origin's New Glenn and the ITS/BFR were unveiled.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Well, it seems it's also meant to be used as point-to-point VTOL suborbital transport, too:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0"]BFR | Earth to Earth - YouTube[/ame]

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Check this out:

BFR | Earth to Earth - YouTube

Ops, posted by MaverickSawyer first. Sorry.

FINALLY! I managed to :ninja: someone! :lol:

 

[Notebook]

BBC article on the presentation.

People will soon be able to fly from city to city within minutes, rocket and car entrepreneur Elon Musk says.
Mr Musk made the promise at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41441877

 

[Artlav]

He is delusional - "fly from city to city within minutes" won't ever happen because it takes 3-4 hours to go through the security and customs.

 

[Urwumpe]

He is delusional - "fly from city to city within minutes" won't ever happen because it takes 3-4 hours to go through the security and customs.

Next year, he will talk on twitter about a company named "AST Customs".

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Literalist.

At least they're scaling down to a more manageable scale.

 

[Pipcard]

According to the World of 2001 add-on,

"airlines wanted an airplane that could reject a takeoff or return to base at any point, not a flame-belching vertical-takeoff behemoth that needed to get supersonic before it was possible to abort and return to land."
(I'm guessing that was talking about vertical takeoff, horizontal landing, not vtvl, though?)

 

[MaverickSawyer]

No, if memory serves, the Orion of "2001" was a catapult launched, two stage spaceplane design.

 

[Pipcard]

No, if memory serves, the Orion of "2001" was a catapult launched, two stage spaceplane design.

The quoted statement was the justification for that design in-universe.

 

[Urwumpe]

The quoted statement was the justification for that design in-universe.

Yes - pretty constructed, but yes.

A VTVL has some big issues in that field, because it depends on its propulsion system, which is at the same time likely its most failure prone component. And isolating a failure to a single engine is much more difficult than it already is for aircraft.

But: That does not mean a horizontal take-off is automatically better. The flight US Airways Flight 1549 could have gone bad by just some variables changing. A different aircraft could already have been a problem.

 

[Andy44]

We shall see. The idea of a two-stage, suborbital passenger transport is not new; it's been around since the days of Eugen Sanger at the very least, although most early concepts were winged hypersonic skip-gliders that landed on runways. The margin for error gets ever more slim as performance increases, and thus the probability of error must be reduced as close to zero as possible, and that drives costs up. Then there are other considerations, like sonic booms, etc.

I give them credit for reviving old dreams, I just don't want to be let down again. This is part of the optimistic "Jetsons future" we all believed in as kids, and we need it to counter all the dystopian fatigue that modern sci fi offers.