Hi it’s me Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut.
Elon Musk revealed the update to SpaceX’s highly anticipated and ambitious rocket, the
BFR or the Big (FALCON) Rocket.
It sports a slimmer and more practical design than what they revealed just last year.
SpaceX is planning on the BFR becoming their new workhorse, capable of deploying huge satellites,
servicing the ISS and even sending humans to the moon and back in order to continue
funding their Mars ambitions.
Believe it or not, the tooling has begun, and SpaceX says they’ll be ready for Mars
by 2022… let’s take a deeper look at SpaceX’s plans and compare this years version of the
BFR to last year’s version… let’s get started!
Almost exactly one year prior, on September 27th, 2016, Elon Musk took the stage at the
International Astronautical Congress (IAC), in Guadalajara Mexico to show the world just
how serious SpaceX’s Mars ambitions are.
The rocket was gargantuan.
Standing at 122 meters (or 400 feet tall), the BFR was to be the tallest and most powerful
rocket ever produced, standing a full 12 meters or 37 feet taller than the famous Saturn V
moon rocket.
Although the plan was well thought out and fairly technical, there was one giant question
mark in the presentation.
How do you fund this endeavor?
Having given up on Stealing underpants and kickstarter, SpaceX came to this year’s
IAC in Adelaide Australia with the answer.
Make a smaller, but still huge rocket that’s capable of servicing greater Earth activity
with a new work horse that makes their current Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon Capsule
obsolete.
Basically they took a rocket that was very good at sending a ton of people to Mars and
they made it smaller so it could be used for various applications.
SpaceX currently makes the majority of their money by launching satellites for customers
and by resupplying the International Space Station with cargo and soon crew.
In a surprise twist, we learned the BFR spaceship will be capable of docking with the ISS.
This kind of reminds me of how Space Shuttle used to dock to the ISS.
But the real key to making the BFR cheaper than a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy is, of course,
reusability.
Full reusability.
We might get sick of hearing how SpaceX is trying to make using rockets similar to airliners,
but that really is the key.
Elon drilled in this concept when he mentioned it’d be like buying a small single engine
turboprop plane for 1.5 million dollars just to get to Australia and throw it away, vs
chartering a 747 for half a million dollars.
Why would you throw away a small vehicle when reusing a big one makes more sense?
The cost of fuel, even for a huge jet, is still much less than building a small plane.
That’s exactly the concept at play here.
Refueling a huge rocket that’s fully reusable is much more economical over the long run
than throwing away, or even partially reusing, smaller rockets.
While we’re talking about planes, perhaps the biggest surprise was the serious consideration
of using the BFR for point to point transportation on Earth.
That’s right, SpaceX envisions being able to go to any destination on Earth in under
an hour with most long distance trips taking less than 30 minutes all for the cost a full-price
economy plane ticket.
Woah.
Let’s not forget to mention that they still plan to have no landing legs on the first
stage booster…
Elon specified that the BFR plans to land back on its launch mounts at the launch pad.
Double WOAH
So now we need to talk size, let’s do a side by side comparison of old vs new and
throw in a few other rockets for comparison.
The new BFR stands 106m (347 feet) tall vs the old BFR which stood 122m (400 feet) tall
and again, let’s compare that to the Saturn V for reference which stood 110m (363 feet)
tall and SpaceX’s soon to fly heavy lift rocket, the Falcon Heavy which is 70m or 229
feet tall.
The next thing we need to notice is that the new BFR appears to have gone on a diet as
it now comes in at just 9m (or 29.5 feet) wide which is down from the previous BFR which
was 12m (39 feet) wide.
The Saturn V’s first and second stages were 10m (33 feet) wide and the Falcon Heavy will
have 3 - 3.7m (12 foot) wide cores.
Next let’s talk about the number of engines on the vehicle.
The new BFR has 31 raptor engines vs the old BFR’s 42, the Saturn V’s 5 F1 engines,
and the Falcon Heavy’s 27 Merlin engines.
How about thrust you say?
The new BFR has an impressive 48 mega newtons of thrust at liftoff which is way down compared
to the old BFR which claimed 128 mega newtons of thrust.
Both are more powerful than the Saturn V which had 35 MNs and the Falcon Heavy which will
have 22 MN’s.
Notice it appears the Raptor engine got downgraded, producing about half as much thrust as it
was claimed to have had last year.
But the good news is, they’ve test fired the raptor engine 42 times for a total of
1200 seconds with the longest test lasting a full 100 seconds.
They’re getting very close to reaching the flight capability of the raptor, and I’m
really glad to see they’re moving along aggressively with its development.
I suspect they’ll continue to push the raptor engine, just like they keep pushing the merlin
engine, and they’ll continue to wow us with its performance.
Lastly, payload capacity to Low Earth Orbit.
The new BFR can put 150 tons into Orbit while fully reusable, compared with the old BFR
which could do 300 tons fully reusable.
The Saturn V, which was fully expandable, could loft 135 tons and the Falcon Heavy,
which is partially reusable will be capable of 54 tons.
Now onto the upper stage or spaceship portion of BFR.
Interestingly the new ship is almost the same height as the old one, standing 48m (157 feet)
tall vs 49.5m (162 feet) tall.
The new BFR spaceship is 9 meters wide compared to the old one which was 12m but flared all
the way out to 17m (55 feet).
The new BFR spaceship will have 4 vacuum optimized raptor engines and 2 sea level engines vs
the old BFR spaceship which was to have 6 vacuum engines and 3 sea level engines.
One fun change is that all engines on the new BFR spaceship are capable of gimballing
or steering, something that only the sea level engines on the old one were capable of.
Another interesting note is how they plan to refuel the spaceship.
Elon showed off an impressive in-space butt to butt fueling procedure.
They can easily transfer fuel between ships by thrusting in one direction to move the
fuel from one ship to the other.
The cool take away from this is that the ships will connect to the same fuel line that connects
the upper stage to the BFR booster on the pad.
So it sounds like all the fuel umbilicals will run up the length of the booster and
not require a separate umbilical from the tower for the upper stage.
Very cool.
Now the elephant in the room, we need to address the delta wings.
Ugh those delta wings are so 80's.
See those stubby little wings on the aft end of the vehicle?
Well, they’re actually extremely important for balancing the spaceship throughout reentries
for different atmospheres, aka landing on Earth and Mars.
They also help provide more surface area to increase the drag and control in the atmosphere.
Elon’s always been critical of wings on spaceships since, well, wings in space are
useless because there is no air in space… that being said, the laws of physics must
ultimately be obeyed, and it looks like the best plan moving forward is Delta wings.
SpaceX even calculated that this new design allows them to remove 99% of their Mars intercept
energy using the thin Martian atmosphere to slow the vehicle down.
Before you all cry that the BFR is smaller and less capable than what we were expecting,
let’s get to the good news.
It’s happening.
Soon.
SpaceX plans to try and send their first BFR’s to Mars in 2022.
That’s right… just 5 years from now and then just two years later, they hope to send
people to Mars.
Now do take into account so-called Elon time or his extreme optimism… but even so you
can tell they are super serious about pushing this as quickly as possible.
This is exactly why they stopped planning to send their Dragon capsule to Mars.
Something we talked about in my last video.
So in summary, what did we learn from Elon’s 2017 IAC talk?
Well we can tell SpaceX has put even more thought and development into the BFR rocket,
and that this new iteration is even more refined, focused and practical than before.
Now some of you may think this new plan is a cop out from their previous plans, but let’s
not forget, this will be the biggest and most powerful rocket to fly.
Ever.
SpaceX is doubling down on reusability in a big way.
Having proven they know how to reliably recover the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket,
they now have the confidence to move forward with a new generation of rocket that is massive,
jack of all trades and most importantly fully reusable.
Now, a bit of speculation here…but, with NASA starting to talk about a space station
around the moon and with a potential new moon economy booming in the near future, I think
Elon will drive SpaceX to follow the money ensuring his vision of Mars is achieved, even
if it means “moon first" for now.
And lastly, what about feasibility?
Do I really think SpaceX is capable of doing this?
Yeah, I do.
SpaceX has proven over and over their ability to do the once thought impossible.
From being the first private company to get a liquid fueled rocket into orbit, and later
being the first private company to dock with the International Space Station and now they
land first stage boosters like it's nothing… they’ve hit home run after home run.
But, do I think we’ll see humans exiting a SpaceX spaceship in 2024… unlikely…
there’s always unforeseen delays in development and 2024 just leaves no room for error.
However, I do think it’ll happen by 2030… and if so, let’s throw a huge party!!!
So what do you think?
Do you think this new version is more realistic or do you think they’re taking the easy
way out?
Well, let me tell you now, there’s nothing easy about developing the world’s biggest
and most powerful rocket with 31 all new methane powered engines and an entirely carbon fiber
structure capable of sending 100 humans to the surface of Mars and back all within a
decade… but I’m sure you have plenty of thoughts on how, when and if this will happen.
Leave them in the comments below.
That being said, remember I host SpaceX launches starting about 30 minutes before lift off
here on YouTube!
So come ask questions and join in the conversation live!
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Thanks everybody, that does it for me.
I’m Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut.
Bringing space down to earth for everyday people.