A (0:02)

All right, well, thank you very much for the award. And yeah, it's great. It's great to be before so many people who believe strongly in the establishment of life on Mars. I think my reasons for being interested in Mars and doing SpaceX are really that they come down to basically just two things. One, which the prior speaker was articulating, which is 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 defensive reason, that life insurance reason, and I think that's obviously very important thing. And Earth's been around for 4 billion years and civilization about 10,000 years. And it's only now that we have this little window has just cracked open where it's possible for life to extend beyond Earth. And so I think it sort of seems sensible 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 we should take action. And that's sort of the defensive reason. It's not actually the reason that I'm. That gets me most fired up about Mars. The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think 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 probably lots of people will die and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States. But it will be one of those things that is incredibly inspiring. And we must have inspiring things in the world. Life cannot just be about solving 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 converted here. 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 on my genesis of how I got into space. Sort of started when I was in college. There were three areas that I thought would most affect the future of humanity and space exploration. 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 21, 22 years ago that it was likely to occur because we went to the moon. And then, of course, people would go to Mars and would be establishing a base on the moon, and there'd been eventually a base on Mars. And that sort of seemed like the natural progression of things. And then, amazingly, it didn't happen. I kept thinking, well, it's about to happen. And again, it just didn't happen. There's a Monty Python skit about this. Suddenly, nothing happened. Before you know it, nothing happened. So, in fact, in approximately 2001, I was with a good friend of mine, college, my college housemate, actually, in New York, and he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal. And I said, well, I've always been interested in space, but of course, there's nothing that I, as an individual could do about that. But the question got me curious as 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 up the schedule, because, of course, there had to be a schedule, and I couldn't find it. I thought the problem was me, because it must be here somewhere on this website. It's just well hidden. And it turned out not. It wasn't on the website at all, which was shocking. So then I thought, well, perhaps the reason is that the American people have lost the will to explore. Or if we just had more, if we got people more interested in the subject, 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 thought. It was a mistake. So at first I thought, well, perhaps if we do a small philanthropic mission to Mars, something that would get the public excited, then that would result in a bigger budget for NASA, and then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again. That's about the time that I started talking to Robert Zubrin and a few other people. And so initially, the thought was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seasoned dehydrated nutrient gel. They would 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 life's ever traveled. The first life on Mars. And. And then you'd have this great Money shot of green plants in a red background. So that would be, I thought, okay, that could get people pretty exciting. They'd 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 low, single digit millions and the cost of communications down. And, and I was able to get everything compressed except for the cost of the rocket. And so the US rockets were way too expensive. Something like a Delta II would have cost $60 million. And I figured I needed to do two parallel missions, so two identical missions in case there was an equipment failure, because then it could be counterproductive. It's like, look at that fool, he did that Mars mission, it didn't work and now we definitely shouldn't do Mars. So I figured we had to have redundant missions. And I just didn't actually have enough money from the sale of PayPal to, for my stake in the sale of PayPal to actually do that. So just didn't have enough money. So I went to Russia in late 2001, early 2002, to try to buy ICBMs. And that's as crazy as it sounds. So I guess about 30, 30 years old, Internet guy arrives in Moscow, 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, well, he's got money. So that's. So I was able to actually negotiate a deal to buy a couple of DNFers. And now at the end of all that, I decided not to conclude the deal. So I 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 for will, particularly in the United States and 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 spirit of exploration. Almost everyone came here from, 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 a means, then it's somewhat irrelevant. You know, you're not 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 going to happen. So that's when I decided to start the rocket company because it was clear that we had not made advancements in rocket technology and that was the reason that we hadn't made progress. The rocket technology was actually going worse. It was costing more and more to send things to space than in the past. So we had a negative technology curve, which is counterintuitive because we're so used to things in the consumer electronics realm and in everyday life improving. We sort of take it for granted, like it's as though things automatically improve. They do not automatically improve. They only improve with lots of effort and resources. You saw the graph or the picture of the pyramids there. Egyptian civilization got to the point where it could create things like the Great Pyramid of Cheops, but then lost that ability and never got back there and. Or Roman civilization went through a deep dark period. It's not a given that things improve. There has to be a forcing function. People have to do it. So anyway, So I started SpaceX and I had many people try to convince me not to start the company that really tried their best. Many of my closest friends. I mean, if there was anything they could have done to stop me from starting the rocket company, they would have done it. One good friend of mine compiled footage of rocket failures and forced me to watch it. I said I'd seen them all, so. So it was certainly. But I think that perhaps misunderstood 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 Grimoires Greenhouse mission, I expected that would have 100% chance of 100% likelihood of losing all the money associated with it. So a rocket company had less than 100% chance of losing all the money associated with it, and therefore was actually quite a bit less risky than the thing I'd been doing before. And anyway, so fortunately, things went reasonably well with SpaceX. Not in the beginning, because the first three launches of the Falcon 1 rocket that we did failed. And as Bob Zuber was saying, it's not a good day when the rocket fails. The first rocket failed only. I mean, it impacted 60 seconds after liftoff, 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 him up to sort of see if we could, if it 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, yeah, to Lula, my wife there, she's witness to the third and then the fourth launch. So, yeah, so stressed out at the fourth launch. I didn't even actually feel elation, I just felt relief. So it was a very, very close call. But fortunately the fourth launch worked and then since then, all of the launches have worked. Hope 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 got Falcon 9, which is about a million pound thrust rocket. And we've got an upgraded version of Falcon 9 that's going to launch next year, which will be almost 1 1/2 million pounds of thrust. And then the Falcon Heavy, which will be over 4 million pounds of thrust, which is about 60% that of Saturn 5. In fact, with two Falcon Heavy launches, you could actually send people back to the surface of the moon. Most people probably aren't quite aware of the scale of the rocket that we're building. And Falcon Heavy should launch probably around the end of next year or certainly by early 2014 at the latest. And that I think will represent a significant improvement in rocket technology. 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 Earth's gravity is quite high. It's right on the cusp of impossibility for such a thing for a chemical rocket. So if you take an expendable rocket, even after a lot of smart people using advanced materials and really approaching the limits of engine efficiency and everything, you'll typically get 2 to 3% of your liftoff mass to orbit. That's for 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 got to survive the rigors of reentry. All the systems have to be capable of surviving multiple firings and thermal fatigue. And it's really, you add a lot of mass when that happens. And previously when people have tried to make a reusable system, they found 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, the program would still continue for quite some 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 2 to 3% of mass to orbit, up to maybe 4% of mass to 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 2% of roughly of your Luftwaffe master orbit. That's the thing that needs to happen. In order for that to happen, you have to really get kind of straight A pluses across the board in all elements of the rocket design, every little tiny thing. Because the engine efficiency, thrust weight, the engine, the tank mass, the pressure mass, the secondary structure, the wiring, even the weight of the computers and everything matters immensely. But if you do all those things right, then it is possible to make this work. And this is what has given me hope recently in 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 possible. Of course, just because something is possible does not mean it will occur, but I think it can occur, which is like I said, success being one of the possible outcomes is very important. So that's the breakthrough that SpaceX is, is really trying to achieve. Because the stuff we've done thus far I think is good. I think it's evolutionary, it's not revolutionary, and we really need the revolutionary thing to work. So I think over the next few years we'll see if we're going to be able to do that rapid and complete reusability thing. But I'm actually, I call. It should sound more optimistic than I am actually quite optimistic that this will occur. So I don't want to leave any doubt in people's minds. I'm quite optimistic it'll occur. And then going beyond that, that's for Earth orbit, but to establish life on Mars, I think you really ultimately need to 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 was really worried that that would not be possible. But last year I became convinced that it actually is possible, which made me very happy, actually, in Fact, I think Tallulah 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 good news. Now I could be deluded, but I'm pretty unless I'm deluded. I think we've got something in mind which would be a good, which would be a solution that would work and then comes to sort of the threshold of what it really comes down to a cost. What cost does a trip to Mars have to be in order for it to be a self sustaining reaction? And I think you've got to roughly get to the, I think around half a million dollars. If, if people could pay half a million dollars to move to Mars, sell all this stuff on Earth because you don't need it, obviously, then you could move to Mars. Then I think that would work because that's basically the net worth of a roughly middle income earning person after about 25 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 a million dollars in a lot of neighborhoods. But I think at 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. In fact it is possible according to me, but there's a great deal of work that has to occur and then to make it a reality. So that I think is, you know, I think that should be really good reason to feel good about the possibility of life on Mars. And yeah, so I think that's probably what I'd like to leave you with. And then in the ensuing years we will unveil more and more about what we're going to do and there'll probably be some ups and downs along the way, but I can finally see a path to that objective. Like I said, as long as I'm not delusional, I haven't made some significant error, then I think that will hopefully come as good news to people in this room. Thank you.