SpaceX President talks BFR and Mars exploration in laid-back Madrid Q&A session

Speaking at a Q&A session hosted for a Madrid university’s Master’s of Business Administration students, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talked for more nearly an hour about the launch company’s next-generation BFR rocket, the reality of long-term life on Mars, and more, revealing a number of interesting tidbits in the process.

Almost entirely led by questions from the abnormally reasonable, gracious, and well-informed audience, the graduate students and professors predominately kept the famous SpaceX exec more or less focused on the company’s future, delving into the reasoning behind BFR. Shotwell had an impressive amount of praise to level on the next-generation launch vehicle, targeting initial hop tests in late 2019 and its first full launches as early as 2021, a delay of several months from previous schedule estimates targeting hops in early 2019 and orbit by 2020.

Aside from rough schedule updates and unfortunate but wholly unsurprising delays, Shotwell had more still to say about the rocket:

• “The flexibility that [BFR] offers will change how we do everything in space.”
• “BFR has the capability to open its payload bay, bring [a] satellite back in, close it, pressurize it, work on it (repair, upgrade, etc), and redeploy it”
• “BFR will basically allow people to work and live in space”

Although she offered some self-deprecating humor on SpaceX’s often-optimistic schedules for future projects, she was for the most part extraordinarily positive about the company’s ultimate aspirations of completing and perfecting BFR, stating without hesitation that “something terrible [would] have to happen at SpaceX for us to not be on our way to Mars and back in 10 years.”

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