ggccccc'''''' sarah ferguson: there's something remarkable going on in a remote corner of southeast texas. something vast and visionary. just above the sand dunes of boca chica beach, one of the world's richest men is building starships to take humans back to the moon and on to mars. elon musk: for the first orbital launch our goal is to make it to orbit without blowing up. to be totally frank, if it takes off without blowing up the stand, or stage zero, that would be a victory.

please do not blow up on the stand. eric berger: i think what you're seeing is organized chaos and what you're seeing, really, is the personality of musk writ large. and he doesn't really care if it's messy, he doesn't really care if it appears to be chaotic, he's trying to go forward into the future as fast as possible. sarah: elon musk is building his massive starships through trial and error. elon: oh, god, no, no. oh! elon: starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up. that's really helpful. we actually want to push the envelope. and if you don't push e envelope, you cannot achieve the goal of a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. sarah: this year musk won a multibillionollar nasa contract for his starship to be their moon lander. one former nasa boss is not convinced. charlie bolden: the difficulty me for me as a huge

fan of spacex, but a huge skeptic about starship, is the fact that it's so big, it's so massive. if neil armstrong were alive today to talk to them, he would probably say, "that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard." sarah: but the self-titled chief engineer of spacex keeps proving his doubters wrong. it's called "new space" because entrepreneurs are taking the lead, and elon musk is its defining genius. tim dodd: i feel like he's a howard hughes meets edison meets steve jobs. a whole bunch of figureheads mashed together. but i think in the grand scheme of things, especially if he gets us to mars, like, that's probably gonna be near the top of the list of historical figures. all: three, two, one. sarah: two weeks ago spacex made history again by sending

four civilians into orbit and bringing them back safely. now his acolytes areonvinced k will take us all the way to mars. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪

ryan chylinski: this is the little spot right over here. maryliz bender: leave 'em there. ryan: yeah. sarah: ryan and maryliz are rocket chasers. ryan: so if we're lucky this morning we might see a 70-meter tall first stage of the world's largest rocket just driving down the road. so, a pretty exciting morning and we're gonna set up some cameras here, hopefully to capture the beginning of rollout. nice view. maryliz: there's really nothing like seeing this massive hardware roll down the street. i don't think people understand, this is the largest most powerful rocket that's ever existed in human history. much larger even than the saturn 5, more powerful. and so, what we always try to do is gift the awe, and the actual feeling, the actual experience, what it's like to be on the side of the road right next to the rocket as it's rolling by.

ryan: alright, recording. sarah: inspired by elon musk's starship program, the couple moved from florida's space coast to boca chica to document each step of its evolution. maryliz: the booster's gonna come out of the high bay very slowly, roll out onto this highway, highway 4. we call it the road to mars. and then it's going to slowly track all the way down 2 kilometers, all the way to the launch site where the orbital launch tower is. that's waiting for the booster for its test campaign to begin. ryan: ready to go? maryliz: yeah. ryan: 'kay. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪

gene gore: i can see the other two starships from here. i usually get up on top, you can see a little better. sarah: local surfer, gene gore, showed me the view of starbase from the ocean, the warm waters of the gulf of mexico. gene: good morning, starship. sarah: since testing began here in 2019, gene has filmed and photographed every launch. gene: i just love all the different angles you can get out here, and go back and look. you're like, "oh, that one's good." sarah: so you weren't a big space nerd before? gene: oh, heck no. sarah: no, nothing? you weren't into it? gene: surfer. sarah: yeah. what is it that got into your imagination? gene: you just said the word: "imagination." the possibilities, going setting up a base on mars. sarah: mm-hm, what do you think about elon musk? gene: he's cool and he's a big dork. sarah: he's a big what? gene: ha, ha, ha, no, i like him, man. he's so, like, just, i dunno, outgoing and friendly and normal.

sarah: nothing normal about what's happening here, though. gene: no man, i love it. he dreams big, and goes for it. sarah: would you go, if you could? gene: to where, mars? no, there's no surf there. sarah: [laughing] gene: no. maryliz: in position. sarah: maryliz and ryan post their material on their youtube channel, cosmic perspective, to a new generation of space enthusiasts. maryliz: and we can zoom in a lot. i'm gonna take some panoramas and then do some zooms. sarah: and what did you say that one was, the--? maryliz: starhopper. sarah: the one that looks like an old nasa piece of-- maryliz: yeah. or a c-3p0. sara this stars wars throwback was the prototype of the starship. but right now, maryliz is focused on a close friend who really is about to go into space.

maryliz: just two to three weeks ago,y friend sian came here to visit for the first time. it was her last real vacation she could take before quarantine, before getting ready for her flight on the crew dragon. female: one, two, three. there, got it. maryliz: isn't it gorgeous? sian proctor: it's unbelievable. sarah: sian proctor was one of the inspiration4 civilian astronauts chosen for a trip into orbit on another spacex rocket. sian: this is the beginning of us becoming a multi-planetary species. like, this is ground zero for that. sian: and then here i am going up. maryliz: that's what we were talking about when she and i were on the dunes. we just kept saying, man, as science communicators we've been talking about this new era of private space travel that's coming and that access is going to open up to private citizens around the world. but even as we're saying it, it's kind of like, "god, i hope

that's really true," right? and then she gets selected to go and it's all so true. sarah: as the texas temperatures rise at the base, ryan's remote cameras capture the giant booster called "super heavy" rolling out of the production site, and then trundling down the road. ♪♪♪ sarah: it is absolutely breathtaking, seeing it this close. it does change your perspective on this. i'm beginning to see what it is that draws all these people here. ♪♪♪ jenny: it's coming down the aisle. this one has all the right stuff. this is the right love potion that the cosmos knows itself to be true. this is faith in determination, this is faith in determination for our country, for our planet, for our cosmos at an apex.

this is like an apex predator right here, because it's been founded based on a wave of love. sarah: musk is preparing starship for its first orbital launch. this is where you understand how different spacex is to nasa. not only is this an open road, but there's virtually no security: just a flimsy yellow tape, a couple of security guards here, and just a few hundred meters away starship 20 itself that's gonna go into orbit pushed there by this giant booster number 4. ryan: it looks like they're moving into position to lift it onto the orbital launch mot, so that's a really special treat to see. we'll see it lift, and we'll actually see the 29 raptor engines from below. tim: oh, my gosh. people are so tuned in to every bolt of every piece of anything that moves around at starbase that it's like almost--it's almost become its own level of obsession, you know? and obviously like, i have to say, i've fed that monster myself.

sarah: new space has spawned a new breed of online science communicators. as the everyday astronaut, tim dodd has a huge following. it helps that he caught elon musk's attention. tim: in 2019, i remember we were at a starship event. you know, i was with the press and said, "hey, it's--i'm tim dodd." tim: hey, elon. tim dodd, the everyday astronaut, how are you? elon: how's it going? good, good, you have great questions online. tim: thanks. you have great answers. elon: you're welcome. sarah: musk was so taken with tim dodd, he agreed to give him an unconventional tour of starbase. elon: i'll get my camera out so i can take a video of this, of you guys taking a video. tim: make sure this is going through there. just shoot the screen the whole time. i don't want anything else. elon: all right. so this--this is--okay, so this is--i'm being videoed here. and then the video of the video. sarah: musk calls himself the chief engineer of spacex and it's obvious that's no honorary title.

elon: if you look at, like, the various reasons, like why--where we blew up starships, and you looked at the risk list, none of the reasons it blew up were on the risk list. tim: really? elon: yeah, it was like, no. maybe you could argue, like, one of them, maybe, was on somebody's risk list, but it wasn't brought up beforehand, put it that way. i mean, there's a crazy amount of new technology happening here, and it's all evolving simultaneously. so we would need to iron out, like, the unknown unknowns, so to speak. sarah: part of that constant evolution are their own powerful raptor engines that will lift the starship into deep space. tim: this is insane. elon: i won't tell you all secrets, but since the engines are--it's hard to have people not see them. this sort of maze of plumbing and wiring doesn't exist on raptor 2. tim: well, it's already slimmed down a ton from, like, you know, the-- elon: it used to look like a frigging christmas tree.

like, you couldn't even see the engine for all the stuff that was around it. tim: no, you really couldn't. tim: seeing a whole, like, set of raptor engines, dozens of raptor engines, in front of me is unbelievable, because two years ago, this engine barely existed. and now they have dozens of these things and they're ramping them up like crazy. sarah: musk talked frankly about the trial and error process he's using to fast track the development of the starship. elon: for starships we're iterating rapidly in order to create the first ever fully reusable rocket, orbital rocket. reusable in a way that is like an aircraft. that's the fundameal holy grail for making life multi-planetary. sarah: only elon musk seems to have the resources to blow up prototype starships one after the other in the pursuit of perfection. tim: starship is such a blank slate.

no one's really ever had that freedom when designing a rocket to just push the envelope on it and try crazy things and not care whether or not the whole thing works perfectly from front to back. and so if it fails, as long as they're learning something and realize what went wrong and can figure out why that went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen on the next one. eric berger: there's still lots of resistance in the industry, though, and there's constant lobbying about spacex. like, you can't trust musk. he's not a reliable partner. you know, look at their rockets that have blown up. that kind of thing. it becomes more difficult to make that argument wn spacex launches more rockets than any company in the world. you can add up all the rockets launched by other rocket companies in the united states, and it doesn't come close to what spacex is doing. ♪♪♪ sarah: since the days of the apollo mission in the 1960s, great big rockets like the saturn 5, whose massive engines powered the lunar module into space, have been built for nasa

by the aerospace establishment, old companies long used to winning the lion's share of government space contracts. eric: so, in the united states, the largest and most powerful companies are the biggest contractors to the us government andhat's e aerospace industry. and so that's the lockheed martins, that's the boeings, that's the northrop grummans. sarah: the audacious rise of elon musk's spacex has totally disrupted the industry. eric: you had to have a little bit of a manic quality to think you could take on the boeings and the lockheeds and, sort of, you know, eat their lunch. one of the early engineers, a guy named zach dunn described it to me as that, you know, the existing rocket industry was kind of bucolic classical music. you know, everyone was kind of polite manners and in comes spacex, which is headbanging band, you know, riffing on guitars, making as much noise and, you know, smashing their

guitars at the end of their sets. charlie: if we lost rockets at the rate that elon musk loses his big starship, nasa would have been out of business. congress would have shut us down. if we lo one starship, let alone six or however many it's been, we can't do that. sarah: to beat the aerospace establishment, musk had first to win over nasa, including nasa administrator, charlie bolden, who'd been an astronaut on the space shuttle. male: three, two, one. charlie: in the case of shuttle, you're in a 200,000-pound spacecraft that's being pushed along by a million and a half pounds of force. that's a lot. what i wasn't ready for was the... the vibration where the rockets are just causing everything to vibrate. sarah: the former marine pilot was an astronaut for 14 years. in 2009, bolden was president obama's pick

to run the space agency. after a career working for government, he wasn't ready for commercial space. charlie: i was an extreme skeptic, which was-- sarah: extreme skeptic? charlie: extreme skeptic. i went from being the president's selection to be the nasa administrator to being probably one of the most despised people in the president's orbit because i was not--i did not fall in line. i did not fall in love with the concept of commercial space. i was not an ideolog like many around me who felt that all we need to do is take nasa's budget, take everything for human spaceflight, and give it to elon musk and spacex. charlie: the us will remain the world's leader in space exploration. sarah: there was a sharp philosophical divide at the top of nasa between bolden and his deputy lori garver. lori garver: in my view, the government doesn't need to, and therefore shouldn't, be using the public's money to develop launch vehicles when the private sector has this capability.

sarah: garver wanted to commercialize the building of rockets, but in the us congress, powerful political figures were opposed to the idea. eric: congress threw a fit because the space shuttle was retiring in 2011 and all of those big contractors stood to lose. and so congress people were accustomed to having thousands of jobs in their districts. and especially around these field centers in florida and texas and alabama, they were stood to lose hundreds or thousands of jobs. and so congress said, "well, let's come up with a plan that both allows nasa to build a big rocket, but keeps all of those sarah: the big rocket congress ordered up is called the space launch system. on top of it is the orion capsule, desned to take astronauts into lunar orbit. the whole thing will cost the us tax payer more than 40 billion us dollars.

but it won't go all the way to the moon. the plan is for it to meet up with elon musk's starship to take the astronauts down to the lunar surface. it's kathy lueders's job to coordinate the mission. kathy lueders: we awarded a contract last spring to, you know, obviously, spacex to do a demonstration lander, and they'll be doing the first human demonstration landing on the mn. what they'll be doing is they'll be taking their human landing system up, where we'll be transferring crews out of the orion into the spacex human landing system and landing on the moon. so i think actually this will be a perfect example of new space and old space meeting together into a great new mission. sarah: except that after a decade of development, nasa's rocket still hasn't flown and is billions over budget. eric: finally, after ten years, the first rocket is

almost ready, but this is an expendable rocket. it costs $2 billion per launch. it has a flight rate of, at most, one per year. so it reallyonstrains your space program if you've got a big rocket that can only fly once a year at most. elon: is that better or is that worse? robert zubrin: i think you were better before. sarah: speaking to the mars society during lockdown last year, elon musk was typically blunt. elon: expendable rockets are the absolute--are just uttly stupid in myopinion, . ey're a complete waste of time. people should stop wasting their time. it would be an absurd thing for them to sell a single-use aircraft, but they feel quite comfortable with selling a single-use rocket. male: falcon starlink lds go for launch. female: ten, nine, eight-- sarah: musk says he'll fund his ambitions to go to mars th his controversial plans to put 40,000 communications satellites

into low earth orbit, accessing a global intert market worth more than 1 trillion us dollars. charlie: right n, mars is the on destination for humans if we wanna do, like, elon musk uses the term "multi-planet species." if we wanna be a multi-planet species in the near term, the only place that's earth-like where we can go and live for long periods of time is mars. ♪♪♪ sarah: in boca chica the giant booster is being lifted onto its launch platform for engine testing. sarah: environmental concerns and regulatory issues have delayed plans to put starship into orbit, knocking musk off his st track. elon: i think if we operate with extreme urgency, then we have a chance of making life multi-planetary.

just a chance. not for sure. if we don't act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably zero. i mean, i'll be long dead before, you know, mars is self-sustaining, but hopefully the momentum is strong in that direction by the time i die, which hopefully isn't soon. eric: spacex looks at the rules of play and sees where it can bend them. it's really about how can i go as fast as possible. and he really runs into regulators because they're there to, sort of, make sure all the rules are followed and that slows things down. sarah: nasa has invested 2.8 billion us dollars in musk's 50-meter high starship as its moon lander, but its technology is far from proven. elon: this is the tentative design right now, but with the

agreement of nasa, we--i think we may see that design evolve and it may be better, actually. sarah: starship towers over the tiny apollo lunar lander that nasa built for the first moon mission. neil armstrong: tranquility base here. the eagle has landed. sarah: musk is alarmingly frank about how hard it is to land such a large ship on the suace of the moon. elon: a big question here is, like, can you land on the moon with the main engines or do you need a separate thrusterystem that's way up ther like, basically, if you land with the main engine, are you gonna dig a big ditch in the moon and then fall over 'cause you landed in a ditch that you dug, like, literally dig your own grave. that would be obviously bad, you know? charlie: the difficulty me for me as a huge fan of spacex, but a huge skeptic about starsh, is the fact that it's so big, it'so massive. the lunar surface is pockmarked beyond belief. the astronauts in the lunar rovers found that, you know,

boy, it's treacherous getting around the lunar surface because they're--we're going to places that we don't have any imagery. they'll learn when they go to the moon. landing on the--if neil armstrong were alive today to talk to them, he would probably say, "that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard." sarah: hi, victor. good to talk to you. is it true that your call sign is ike? victor glover: yes, ha, ha, that is my call sign. it stands for "i know everything." sarah: if elon musk's starship does go to the moon there's a good chance victor glover will be on it. he's one of nasa's 18 artemis astronauts now training for the mission. sarah: what would it mean to you, personally, to go to the moon? victor: wow, that's a big questio that's--wow. personally, it would be the realization of a dream. but to be able to work on the surface of the moon, whoever

we've sent, they're gonna have a great story to tell. they're gonna have a great way to connect to people all over the world, because they've unified humanity behind this one reallyowerful idea, our generation's moon shot. female: and there they are, first-- sarah: in november 2020, victor glover piloted a spacex capsule to the international space station. sarah: you piloted the first operational flight of spacex's crew dragon. what do you think about the speed that they're moving at now? victor: i think that really fast evolution is a part of a much larger move to this new idea of space and what space can be, but also relying on the heritage of what space has been and the teamwork and the partnership that has grown out of that. it really can serve as a model for how we're gonna tackle the lunar missions and how we're gonna tackle moving humans onto mars. ♪♪♪

sarah: sunrise on florida's space coast. the rocket chasers are here to watch spacex launch four civilians into orbit. maryliz has written a piece for her friend sian who won a place on the inspiration4 flight. maryliz: i composed it last night, i think it was about 1:30, 2 a.m., when i was sitting at my computer, just trying to put into sound the way that i was feeling. getting into the flow of listening to the song as i'm playing it, and i started to see sian take off. and then there was a contrail in the sky and i was like, "oh, my god, that's gonna be her soon, achieving her dreams." sarah: the inspiration4 crew, led by billionaire jared isaacman, who was paying for the flight,

gave a final press conference. sian: and as we move, yo know, to the moon and mars and beyond, we're writing the narrative of human space flight right now. so when we do that we need to think about a jedi space: a just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive space for all of humanity, because, you know, we're on starship earth and we wanna bring everybody along with us. tim: just ev knowing someone that's riding on a rocket to space is just--it's just insane, you know? it's just--it's just crazy. sarah: tim dodd, the everyday astronaut, was here in florida to live stream the launch. tim: i think it'll be pretty profound. i think it might be another level of emotion for me personally. ♪♪♪ gene: she's very brave and she's an awesome woman. and she's gonna have the time of her life. i don't think i'm gonna be able to sleep for the next three days watching her, you know?

sarah: rocket chaser and surfer gene chartered a boat for a closer look at the spacex rocket on its pad in cape canaveral. gene: wow, there it is. the capsule looks so small, you know, from here, like a little marshmallow. ♪♪♪ female: there they are, our first all-civilian crew walking ouof hangar x. they look so excited. male: this is minus 36--i guess 26 seconds. everything continues to look good. charlie: i'm so excited to be here this evening for this launch. it's the complete cycle of a tale to get us from where it was nothing but government to where now we can actually have an all-civilian, all-commercial flight. male: from the same launch pad when he launched--

tim: hello and good afternoon, evening. i'm tim dodd, the everyday astronaut. yeah, you can see me sitting in the car. welcome to my coverage of a really, really, exciting mission today. ♪♪♪ maryliz: i can just see sian's smile and i feel light inside of it. she and i have talked about it. she knows the risks and she's ready to do this. ♪♪♪ female: dragon spacex confirm crew displays are configured for launch. male: spacex dragon, our displays are configured for launch. tim: my heart is racing right now. this is getting very real. female: t minus 15 seconds. crowd: eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

[cheering] male: holy crap, guys. male: vehicle's pitching down range. [cheering] male: no way! tim: oh, my god. i'm shaking. ♪♪♪ sarah: my heart is still pounding at the thought of those three ordinary people hurtling into space. they say it's the dawn of a new era in space travel for ordinary people like you and me, that's assuming you can find a friendly billionaire to pay for your ride. but for today, these people have allowed all of us to dream.