Reddit AMA — r/space (2017)

• Format: an r/space “Ask Me Anything” — Reddit users post questions, Elon Musk answers in writing. Announced via tweet and run in the two weeks after his IAC 2017 keynote (“Making Life Multiplanetary,” the BFR reveal), so the questions are almost entirely technical follow-ups on BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) and Mars.
• Date: October 14, 2017.
• Trust tier: verified. The raw is a curated set of direct Q&A excerpts from the AMA, with Musk’s answers carried verbatim. The questions are from Reddit users; only the answers are Musk — and only his answers are quoted here.
• Quote citation: the raw’s own public source is the TechCrunch write-up of the AMA, which reproduces Musk’s answers. Each block quote below is byte-accurate to the raw and anchored to that article with a #:~:text= fragment whose decoded snippet is an apostrophe-free verbatim substring of the quote; presence + Musk attribution were checked on the live page (focused single-phrase fetch). Engineering/spec answers (Raptor thrust, multiple Mars orbiters, the flight-engine internals, orbital-refueling visuals) are kept in prose, not block-quoted.

Summary

This is a thin, late-2017 datapoint sitting two weeks after the September 2017 IAC keynote — and it adds no new content to the Mars/multiplanetary case, which the IAC keynotes and the wider Mars colonization arc already cover in depth. Almost every answer is BFR/rocket engineering (why Raptor thrust was reduced, whether SpaceX would launch multiple Mars orbiters, the flight engine’s reliability target, single-stage-to-orbit feasibility, what orbital refueling will look like) — spec, not mind, and kept in prose below.

What the AMA does contribute is a clean look at a narrow but real thing: how Musk talks when he engages the engineering community directly and unscripted. The register is the opposite of the flagship IAC keynote — terse, self-deprecating, dry. He answers a thrust-reduction question with a one-line confession (“We chickened out.”), waves off a textbook rocketry constraint with a shrug (“No problemo on Mars.”), and turns the Earth–Mars communications lag into a Snapchat joke. That register — candor and humor in place of polish when the audience is technical — is the only durable signal here, and it is logged on Elon Musk and SpaceX. The one answer that is more than register is the reliability standard he sets for crewed flight, recorded on SpaceX.

Key quotes (verbatim, Reddit AMA — Elon Musk’s answers only)

“We chickened out” — self-deprecation about a design call

Asked why SpaceX had reduced the thrust of the Raptor engine (a BFR design change announced at IAC 2017), he does not give an engineering rationale — he answers with a one-line, self-deprecating confession:

“We chickened out.” ↗

The substance — that a lower-thrust, lighter, more conservative engine is the safer, more reliable choice — is left implicit; what is mind-relevant is the register. Where the IAC keynote two weeks earlier is polished and aspirational, here, to a technical audience, he reaches for unguarded candor and treats a major design decision as a thing he can joke about being scared into.

“No problemo on Mars” — a constraint waved off

Asked whether single-stage-to-orbit (a long-standing holy grail / sore point in rocketry) is possible, he reframes it as a planet problem rather than a physics problem, and answers in the same casual register:

“Earth is the wrong planet for single stage to orbit. No problemo on Mars.” ↗

The underlying point is sound first-principles physics — Mars’s lower gravity and thinner atmosphere make single-stage-to-orbit far easier than on Earth — but the delivery is what is characteristic: a hard aerospace question dismissed in two short, almost flippant sentences, the answer already obvious to him.

The communications lag, turned into a joke

Asked about internet latency between Earth and Mars, he gives the figure and immediately reaches for humor about everyday life on another planet:

“3 light-minutes at closest distance. So you could Snapchat, I suppose. If that’s a thing in the future.” ↗

It is a small instance of how he domesticates the Mars project — folding a stark interplanetary constraint (a multi-minute speed-of-light delay) into a mundane, slightly absurd image of teenagers messaging across the solar system. The same instinct that makes the mission feel inhabitable rather than only heroic.

The reliability bar — “passenger airline levels of safety”

The one answer that is more than register is a standard. Asked how reliable the BFR flight engine is, he states the safety target for crewed spaceflight by analogy to the safest mass-transport humans already trust:

“The objective is to meet or exceed passenger airline levels of safety.” ↗

This is the durable mind-material in the AMA: he benchmarks a Mars transport not against historic rocketry (which is orders of magnitude less safe) but against commercial aviation — the implicit claim that interplanetary travel must become as routine and trustworthy as boarding a plane. It is the space-travel-should-be-like-air-travel thesis stated as a safety standard rather than a reusability one — the same aircraft analogy he uses for cost and reuse, here applied to reliability. (The surrounding engine internals — that the flight design is “much lighter and tighter” and “extremely focused on reliability” — are engineering detail and are kept in prose.)

Engineering and spec — kept in prose

The bulk of the AMA is BFR/rocket detail rather than mind-material and is summarized rather than block-quoted: the Raptor thrust reduction (“We chickened out.” above is the whole of his stated reason — the engineering substance is that a lighter, lower-thrust engine is more reliable); a one-word “Yes” that SpaceX would launch multiple orbiters around Mars; the flight-engine design being “much lighter and tighter” and “extremely focused on reliability” than the test versions; and the orbital-refueling maneuver, which he says “will look kinda weird.” These are mission/engineering spec and carry no distinct mind-signal beyond the register and the safety standard recorded above.

Connections (pages touched)

• Elon Musk — extended with a “What the Reddit AMA (2017) reveals” section: the unscripted, self-deprecating, dry-humor register he uses with a technical audience (“We chickened out.”; “No problemo on Mars.”; the Snapchat-latency joke), dated two weeks after IAC 2017 as the unpolished counterpart to the flagship keynote.
• SpaceX — extended with the reliability standard for crewed BFR flight (“meet or exceed passenger airline levels of safety”), the air-travel analogy applied to safety rather than reuse, plus a note on the candid engineering-community register.
• Mars colonization — not extended. The AMA adds no distinct why/survival/governance/affordability statement; the Mars/BFR substance is already covered by IAC 2017 (two weeks earlier) and the broader arc on the page. The technical answers here are spec, kept in prose.
• Humanity’s bright future — not extended. No distinct inspiration/“why” line; the 2017 bright-future register is already carried by IAC 2017 and TED2017.