NASA isn’t going to pay for the BFR, so Musk charts a new course

On a Monday night filled with emotion as much as engineering, one of the most poignant moments came toward the end of the program at SpaceX's rocket factory in California. The company's founder, Elon Musk, choked up as he described the financial contribution from a Japanese businessman, Yusaku Maezawa, to his Big Falcon Rocket project.

"I’ll tell you, it’s done a lot to restore my faith in humanity," Musk said, seated in front of the end of a Falcon 9 rocket and its nine engines. "That somebody is willing to do this, take their money and help fund this new project that’s risky, might not succeed, it’s dangerous. He’s like donating seats. These are great things."

The headline news out of Monday's event was that Maezawa has bought all of the seats on the first human flight of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) and upper stage spaceship (BFS)—a sortie around the Moon as early as 2023. Although neither Musk nor Maezawa would specify how much it had cost, Musk said, "This is a non-trivial amount that will have a material impact on the BFR program."

Moreover, Maezawa announced that he would invite artists—painters, musicians, film directors, novelists, and more—for this first flight that he is calling #dearMoon. The project has a website. "I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself," Maezawa said Monday evening. "I would be a little lonely." Perhaps 8 to 12 people will accompany Maezawa, who said he has invited Musk to join him.

How to pay

So what to make of all of this? There were some telling clues Monday about the status of the BFR project and the lengths that Musk is willing to go to see the large rocket and spaceship built, send waves of people to Mars, and ultimately make humanity a "multiplanetary species." And despite the novelty of seeing Maezawa speak about his love for the Moon on Monday, these clues are perhaps the most intriguing elements from the discussion.

Musk introduced the BFR concept in 2016 and refined it in 2017. He refined it further on Monday, noting that he had taken the decision to couple the spaceship's landing legs along with actuating wing flaps in part because he liked the aesthetics better. It looked more like the ship from the Adventures of Tintin comics. "I think it looks beautiful, and I love the Tintin rocket design, so I wanted to bias it toward that," he said.

What Musk has never really addressed previously in depth is how, specifically, he will pay for the BFR. "We need to seek every possible means of funding," he said. But now he has begun to do this, and the answers aren't entirely convincing. Here are the ways he enumerated on Monday for how SpaceX will afford the development of the BFR and BFS, which he said will cost between $2 and $10 billion, and likely around $5 billion. (Which is what Ars predicted last week):

• Launching of satellites
• Servicing the International Space Station with cargo and, next year, astronauts
• Starlink global broadband system
• Private customers, or "any" customers

There are problems with each of these bins, however. Launching satellites is a profitable business, but by several estimates we've seen, flying 20 commercial missions a year essentially covers the payroll costs of SpaceX's 7,000 employees. Servicing the space station has resulted in multi-billion-dollar contracts, but a lot of that money was spent on actual development costs. Moreover, SpaceX is now in the uncomfortable position of saying that it will use NASA's money for a program (BFR lunar flyby) to potentially upstage NASA's own deep space program that aspires to complete a lunar flyby mission in the early 2020s as well. Finally, the Starlink service is at least a few years from profitability.

That left "customers" as a funding source, and Maezawa's announcement is significant in that he is the first one. We surmise that if SpaceX could sell 10 lunar flyby missions like this one, they could go a long way toward developing the BFR. That is the challenge before them now.

Novelty of approach

What seems most striking about Musk's approach is that he has come to peace with the fact that neither NASA nor the US military, at this stage, is likely to provide substantial funding—i.e. in the billions of dollars—for the BFR. Undeterred, he has gone a different route.

SpaceX has always been a different company, innovating in the development and marketing of its rockets. This seems like another advancement along those lines. If the government won't pay for a rocket, perhaps rich international billionaires will?

This "billionaire crowdfunding" is a novel approach, and it speaks both to the determination of Musk and his willingness to take chances. This is not so much a desperate move but a brave and bold one. We give him credit for exploring all of his options. This is his dream, and he is going for it for all he is worth. He may succeed. He may well fail. It is refreshing to see someone lay it all on the line like this.

Some concerns

However, we did finish Monday evening's event with some concerns about the overall viability of the BFR project. Although the BFR and BFS would be the largest, most complex, and certainly most ambitious rocket and spacecraft humans have ever built, the company at present is only devoting about 5 percent of its resources to their development, Musk said. The company's primary work remains commercial contracts for NASA, launching satellites, and national security missions.

Moreover, while SpaceX continues to produce first-rate renderings, there remained relatively little hardware in evidence Monday. Musk showed a photo of the "main cylinder section" of the BFS prototype, which is 9 meters in diameter. He said work on the pressure domes and engine section would begin "soon." The spaceship seems even less far along. Asked about the interior of the BFS, which could house up to 100 people for a journey to Mars and have more pressurized volume than the International Space Station—1,000 cubic meters, he estimated—Musk replied that, "We just have some concepts." The company hopes to leverage its work developing life support systems for the Dragon spacecraft for life support inside the BFS.

Musk shared a timeline Monday evening: "Hop" tests of the BFS at the company's spaceport in South Texas should still begin in late 2019; then the company could move on to "high altitude high velocity flights" of the BFS in 2020 as well as initial rocket tests that year. "If things go well, we could be doing the first orbital flights in two to three years," he said. However, he acknowledged that this timeline, as well as the 2023 target date for the first flight of the BFR, was aspirational.

"You have to set a kind of a date that is the 'things go right date,'" Musk said. "Things often don’t go right in reality. This is a ridiculously big rocket. It’s got so much advanced technology. It’s not 100 percent certain that we succeed in getting this to flight. I think it’s pretty likely, but it’s not certain."

This all remains an audacious process. On Monday night, SpaceX took a critical step toward developing the BFR by signing its first commercial customer. It will need many more for the BFR to become a reality, but often times the first step is the hardest one.