Episode Transcript
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The SpaceX Starship is currently humanity's besthope for setting foot on the planet Mars
in your lifetime. The feature thatmakes the starship so well suited for this
job is, of course, it'sincredible power. There's no doubt that a
future starship will have more than enoughmuscle to send both crews and massive amounts
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of supplies on their path towards Mars. Going up is one thing, but
what about coming back down on theMartian surface. We are talking about the
most complicated maneuver of the entire journey, the make or break moment, and
there's a lot more involved in figuringit out than you might think. This
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is how the SpaceX Starship will landon Mars. Let's establish right now that
we are not all rocket scientists orphysicists. I'm definitely neither of those things.
But luckily we do not need tobe geniuses to understand the basic principles
behind interplanetary travel. So we're goingto keep this all at a very accessible
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level. Before we can talk aboutlanding on Mars, we need to know
how the starship got there in thefirst place. The thing that we always
have to remember about space travel isthat everything is always in motion, and
within the context of a solar system, everything is moving in an orbit around
the Sun. We are currently heldin the gravity well of the Sun,
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and the only thing that prevents usfrom falling down any deeper is the orbital
velocity of the Earth, which isapproximately thirty kilometers per second. That's how
fast we are traveling right now ina big circle around a star that takes
three hundred and sixty five days tocomplete. Mars is further away from the
Sun than the Earth, meaning thatit isn't as far down into the gravity
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well as we are, and thereforeMars can travel at a slower orbital velocity
without falling in so Mars orbits theSun at around twenty four kilometers per second.
Now, if we want to leavethe Earth in a spaceship and explore
the planets, we will become yetanother object spinning around in the gravity well
of the Sun. And just likethe planet Earth, if we were to
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slow down our orbital velocity, wewould start to fall into that gravity well.
This will change our orbit in thedirection of an inner planet like Venus,
and by the same mechanics, ifour spaceship starts moving faster than the
planet Earth, we will rise upthe gravity well, bringing our orbit towards
an outer planet like Mars. Sotraveling through the Solar System is all about
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changing your velocity relative to your startingpoint. The technical term that we use
to describe this is delta V,where delta means change and V means velocity.
We typically measure delta V in kilometersper second. So if the Earth
is moving at thirty kilometers per secondand you accelerate your spaceship to thirty one
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kilometers per second, you have adelta V of one. By the same
measure, if you decelerate your spaceshiprelative to the Earth and travel at twenty
nine kilometers per second, you alsohave a delta V of one. And
yet, if you blast off fromthe surface of the Earth at one kilometer
per second, you are not goingto begin rising up through the Solar System.
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You aren't going to rise up abovethe Earth's surface because gravity and atmospheric
drag are holding you down. Thesenatural forces will affect the amount of delta
V required to maneuver the spaceship.This is why it's so hard to get
from the surface of the Earth toouter space. The delta V required to
reach a typical low Earth orbit isgoing to be around nine point four kilometers
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per second. That's a lot ofacceleration, and that's why our starship requires
the massive power of the super heavybooster at launch. This is also why
the starship needs to stop for arefilling session in Earth orbit before it can
continue on to Mars, because we'regoing to need a lot more delta V
to complete this journey. In orderto change velocity, we need propulsion,
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and propulsion needs fuel. The advantageof filling up in orbit is that it
resets our starting point. From here, we only need another nine point five
kilometers per second of delta V toreach the surface of Mars, so basically
equal to the change required just toescape the Earth's atmosphere. But there is
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going to be a big difference inthe approach we take for the next leg
of the journey, because while escapingthe Earth was all about speeding up,
landing on Mars is going to requirea lot of slowing down and this can
be just as difficult to achieve.A fully fueled starship in low Earth orbit
is imagined to have enough thrust forsomewhere between six and seven kilometers per second
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of delta V. This obviously isa bit short of our nine point five
kilometers per second necessary to reach Mars. But that's okay, because the same
forces that made it so difficult toescape Earth's atmosphere, gravity and aerodynamic drag,
are going to work to our advantagewhen we come in for a landing,
effectively increasing the delta V potential ofour starship. So here's how it's
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going to go down. Okay,we are in orbit around the Earth,
but even a few hundred kilometers abovethe surface, we are still firmly caught
in the Earth's gravity. Well,the only thing keeping us up right now
is velocity. If the starship wereto slow down at all, it would
start falling back towards the Earth.By that same reasoning, if we do
the opposite and speed up, thenwe will continue to rise up into space.
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Because we are still so close tothe Earth, we need a lot
of delta V to fight against gravity. The ship will have to accelerate by
two point four to four kilometers persecond just to reach a height of geostationary
orbit. Another zero point sixty eightgets us through the height of the Moon.
Up Here, we are finally onthe edge of the Earth's gravity.
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Well, the force of gravity isinfinite, but the power of attraction dissipates
relatively quickly as you move further away. Now, all we need is another
zero point nine kilometers per second ofvelocity to escape the Earth's influence completely.
From this point, floating in thevacuum of space far beyond the Moon,
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we only require zero point three ninemeters per second of delta V to achieve
our Earth to Mars transfer velocity.This second leg of the journey has used
up three point six kilometers per secondof delta V, which is at least
half of the potential energy in ourstarship, if not more, and that
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means that we do not have enoughfuel left to successfully land on Mars with
engines alone. And here comes theproblem that we need to solve. All
of the velocity that we acquired toescape Earth's atmosphere and gravity well has got
us traveling around the Sun at asignificantly higher speed than the planet Earth,
which was already traveling at thirty kilometersper second to begin with. The planet
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Mars, on the other hand,is orbiting at a speed of just twenty
four kilometers per second, so weare moving significantly faster than our target planet,
which means that we are going toovershoot the planet Mars and end up
stuck somewhere in the asteroid belt unlesswe start slowing down. After several months
of coasting through the vacuum of space, we need to execute our first deceleration
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burn After flipping the starship around andgetting the Raptor engines back up to speed,
we have to shave off zero pointsix to seven kilometers per second of
velocity in order to become captured inthe gravity well of Mars. This is
the first step in what's about tobecome a very rough ride. If we
burn off another zero point three tofour kilometers per second of velocity, then
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we reach the height of the outermoon demos. Zero point four kilometers per
second of further delta V gets usdown to the inner moons. Here's where
things get really tricky. By slowingdown this much, we've already expended over
five kilometers per second of the potentialdelta V in our fuel tanks, and
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that leaves us with somewhere between oneand two remaining. But we need at
least another four and a half kilometersper second of delta V to safely reach
the surface. In theory, thisis still possible as long as we are
very strategic about how we use ourlast bit of fuel, and it's important
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to remember that everything from here onout is purely speculative. This is our
interpretation of the most logistically feasible Marslanding. If we want to conserve as
much fuel as possible for our landingburn, then we need to take advantage
of some external forces to slow ourship down to a reasonable velocity. Getting
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down into a circular lo Mars orbitwould use up most of our remaining fuel,
so we probably shouldn't do that.In this case, we might be
better served by inserting the ship intoan elliptical orbit, so instead of flying
in a circle, we're moving inan oval pattern with a low spot or
peragy close to the planet and ahigh spot or apogey deeper out into space.
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By using this maneuver, we canstart to take advantage of both aerodynamic
drag and Mars gravity to help usslow down. The Mars atmosphere is still
very thin, but we'll take anyhelp that we can get. We can
lower the peragy of our orbit downto the point where the ship actually dips
into the upper atmosphere of the planet. By doing this very carefully, we
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can actually catch some atmospheric drag andlose a small amount of velocity before getting
flung back out to our apogee,where if we've done this properly, the
gravity of Mars will pull us backin to repeat the process over again.
Every time that we dip into theapp hemisphere, we gain a little more
of that precious delta V, bringingus closer to the velocity we need for
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a soft touchdown on the planet's surface. But we can't keep this maneuver up
indefinitely. Eventually we need to transitionfrom a shallow dip to a full on
dive through the Martian atmosphere. It'sactually pretty difficult to achieve a landing trajectory
from Mars because the planet is onlyaround half the size of the Earth.
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That means the angle of attack necessaryto get down below the sky is pretty
steep. This means you need alot of energy pushing the vehicle down in
order to prevent it from skipping offand shooting back up into space again.
We want to save our engines untilthe last possible moment, so that forced
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to push the ship down deeper intothe atmosphere needs to come from somewhere else.
This is why the original SpaceX,designed for an interplanetary transport system in
twenty sixteen, had an aerodynamic liftingbody in the upper stage. Starship is
much smaller than its so it doesn'tneed as much aerodynamic force, but the
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methodology is still pretty much the same. On its final approach, starship is
actually going to flip over and comeinto the atmosphere upside down, so that's
what the belly and tail pointed upand the nose pointed down. This way,
the lift generated by the body isgoing to push the vehicle towards the
surface on a steeper angle to achieveentry. We're also going to start losing
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a lot of velocity thanks to aerodynamicdrag. Once the angle of attack is
set, the starship is going toflip around into the more traditional belly flop
maneuver that we've seen on Earth.This is all about creating the maximum amount
of drag that is physically possible andgetting the velocity down. But this force
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can only accomplish so much. Themaximum speed of a free fall is something
that we call terminal velocity. Imagineyou jump into a bottomless hole. Your
body will accelerate as you fall upuntil a certain point when the drag and
bullyancy of your body equalizes with theforce of gravity and your speed becomes constant.
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One way that we cheat terminal velocityis by using a parachute. This
greatly increases drag and slows down ourterminal velocity. Starship isn't going to use
parachutes, so there's going to comea point where the aerodynamic drag of the
vehicle has done all that it's goingto do, and we reach terminal velocity.
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Due to the thinner atmosphere, terminalvelocity on Mars is around five times
faster than on Earth. In otherwords, that means you only get one
fifth the delta v accomplished by bellyflopping through the air on Mars compared to
what we've already seen Starship do onEarth, which means that it's going to
require more engine power to land onMars than it does on Earth. This
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is why fuel is such a madeyour concern here. Assuming that everything up
until this point has gone correctly,the Starship's engines will fire up one last
time and flip the tail towards thesurface at which point the fuel in the
rocket's header tanks will provide just enoughdelta V to bring our ship perfectly in
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sync with the surface of Mars andwe touch down softly. Now that's a
lot of stuff that has to goright, and there is zero margin for
error. You either score one hundredpercent on the exam or you die.
So by knowing all of that,we can appreciate that landing on Mars is
going to be incredibly difficult in amassive vehicle like the Starship. It's much
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easier for NASA to land smaller andlighter vehicles on Mars because the potential delta
V of your fuel is determined bythe mass of the vehicle and the efficiency
of the engine. So one poundof fuel accomplishes more change in velocity for
a lighter ship than it does fora heavier ship, and there is a
limit on the amount of fuel thatwe can bring to Mars. Starship would
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be much easier to land on Marsif it were lighter, but SpaceX needs
it to be so gigantic to accomplishthe goal that Elon Musk has set out,
which is building a self sustaining cityof one million people on Mars.
SpaceX is working hard on increasing thedelta V of the starship. They want
to make starship be too longer withbigger fuel tanks, while also making it
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lighter at the same time and addingthree more Raptor vacuum engines. The third
version of the Raptor is currently indesign and will probably offer higher efficiency and
therefore more delta V potential. Nowthere are other more long term solutions as
well. Remember Mars's outer moon Demos. The delta VI required to move from
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low Earth orbit to the orbit ofDemos is only around five point three kilometers
per second. That's a lot moremanageable. And imagine if you could build
an outpost or a Mars gateway atthe orbit of Damos. Now we have
the potential to refuel the ships sothat it can make the hardest part of
the journey with more than enough deltavie to spare. This buys you a
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margin of error that would increase thesafety of a Mars landing by orders of
magnitude. So yes, landing afully loaded starship on Mars is going to
be logistically insane. This is oneof those situations where SpaceX won't know anything
for certain until they try. We'veseen this twice now with just launching the
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starship, and both times it explodedin mid air. Learning to land on
Mars is more than likely going tobe a similar affair. They are much
more likely to fail before they succeed. They could fail multiple times. It's
going to require a spectacular amount ofwillpower to make this work, to not
give up, and probably more thana lot of people are genuinely prepared for.
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And then eventually we try to dothis with people on board, and
calling this ambitious seems like an incredibleunderstatement, But over the history of humanity,
we've accomplished the impossible many times over, So what's one more