Post by btx on Feb 7, 2018 12:45:01 GMT -6
And here we go...
https://gist.github.com/theinternetftw/a2ca9540e099621aef851c2ecbbd82fb
Tom Costello, NBC News: Well, congratulations again. I wanted to follow up on Chris's question, because Chris asked you what's your timeline potentially to go to the moon or Mars, and did you say as soon as next year? Can you quantify that? Then I had my real question, I'm just doing Chris's work here. [laughter].
Elon Musk: Well, by hopper tests, I mean kind of like, where we had the Grasshopper program for Falcon 9, where we just had the rocket take off and land in Texas, at our Texas test site. So that would be, we'll either do that at our South Texas launch site, near Brownsville, or do ship to ship. We're not sure yet whether ship to ship or Brownsville, but most likely it's going to happen at our Brownsville location, because we've got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it's cool. By hopper test, I mean it'll go up, you know, several miles, then come down. The ship is capable of single stage to orbit, if we fully load the tanks. So we'll do flights of increasing complexity. We really want to test the heat shield material. So we'll like fly out, turn around, accelerate back real hard, and come in hot, to test the heat shield. Because we want to have a highly reusable heat shield that's capable of absorbing the heat from interplanetary entry velocities. So it's really tricky.
Elon Musk: Well, by hopper tests, I mean kind of like, where we had the Grasshopper program for Falcon 9, where we just had the rocket take off and land in Texas, at our Texas test site. So that would be, we'll either do that at our South Texas launch site, near Brownsville, or do ship to ship. We're not sure yet whether ship to ship or Brownsville, but most likely it's going to happen at our Brownsville location, because we've got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it's cool. By hopper test, I mean it'll go up, you know, several miles, then come down. The ship is capable of single stage to orbit, if we fully load the tanks. So we'll do flights of increasing complexity. We really want to test the heat shield material. So we'll like fly out, turn around, accelerate back real hard, and come in hot, to test the heat shield. Because we want to have a highly reusable heat shield that's capable of absorbing the heat from interplanetary entry velocities. So it's really tricky.
https://gist.github.com/theinternetftw/a2ca9540e099621aef851c2ecbbd82fb