Orbital Propellant Transfer for Mars Missions

Then one of the other technologies that's key for Mars is, is,

uh,

doing orbital propellant transfer.

So you can think of this like similar to aerial refueling for

airplanes. Uh, but in this case, it's orbital

refilling of rockets, which has never been done before.

Uh, but it is, you know,

technically feasible.

Um,

always feel like these things are a little NSFW.

Sort of.

Listen, you gotta transfer fluid somehow. There's no...

This has gotta be done.

So, uh,

the,

the, the two Starships would get together, and one Starship

would transfer fuel and oxygen,

and actually, most of the mass is oxygen.

It's almost eighty percent oxygen that gets transferred, um,

a little over twenty

percent fuel.

And, um,

and so once you, you, you-- So you'd send a Starship to orbit with,

uh, that's

full of payload, and then you send up a bunch of other

Starships up, and you

would refill the propellant on that Starship.

And once the, uh, the propellant tanks are mostly full, then you can depart

for the Mars, for Mars or the Moon or, yeah.

So

this is an important technology which, uh, we should hopefully, uh, demonstrate

next year