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 source 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.
Quotes: from the TechCrunch write-up of the AMA, which reproduces Musk’s answers. The engineering and spec answers (Raptor thrust, multiple Mars orbiters, the flight-engine internals, what orbital refueling looks like) are summarized in prose rather than block-quoted.

Summary

There isn’t much new here. The AMA lands two weeks after the September 2017 IAC keynote, and on Mars itself it adds nothing the keynotes and the wider Mars colonization arc don’t already cover. Almost every answer is BFR engineering: why Raptor’s thrust was cut, whether SpaceX would launch multiple Mars orbiters, how reliable the flight engine has to be, whether single-stage-to-orbit is feasible, what orbital refueling will look like. That’s hardware spec, not mind, and it stays in prose below.

What the thread does catch is something narrow but real: how Musk talks when he drops the script and answers a technical audience directly. It is the opposite of the IAC keynote. Where the keynote is polished and aspirational, here he is terse, self-deprecating, dry. Asked why the thrust came down, he confesses in three words (“We chickened out.”). Asked about a textbook rocketry limit, he shrugs it off (“No problemo on Mars.”). Asked about the Earth–Mars lag, he turns it into a Snapchat joke. Candor and humor in place of polish, with a technical audience: that is the durable thing, and it sits on Elon Musk and SpaceX. The one answer that goes further is a reliability standard for crewed flight, recorded on SpaceX.

Key quotes

“We chickened out” — a design call, confessed

SpaceX had cut the thrust of the Raptor engine, a BFR change announced at IAC 2017. Asked why, Musk skips the engineering rationale entirely and gives a three-word confession:

“We chickened out.” ↗

He doesn’t give the engineering reason; the likely one, a lighter, lower-thrust engine being the safer and more reliable choice, is an inference. What stands out is how he says it. Two weeks earlier, at the IAC keynote, he was polished and aspirational. Here, talking to a technical audience, he treats a major design decision as something he can joke about getting scared out of.

“No problemo on Mars” — a constraint waved off

Single-stage-to-orbit is a long-standing holy grail and sore point in rocketry. Asked whether it’s possible, Musk doesn’t treat it as a physics problem at all. He makes it a question of which planet you’re standing on:

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

The physics underneath is sound: Mars has lower gravity and a thinner atmosphere, so single-stage-to-orbit is far easier there than here. The delivery is the tell. A hard aerospace question gets two short, almost flippant sentences, because the answer is already obvious to him.

The communications lag, turned into a joke

Asked about internet latency between Earth and Mars, he gives the number and immediately jumps to what everyday life out there might feel like:

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

This is Musk domesticating the Mars project in miniature. A stark interplanetary constraint, the multi-minute speed-of-light delay, becomes a mundane and faintly absurd picture of teenagers messaging across the solar system. It’s the same instinct that makes the mission feel livable rather than only heroic.

The reliability bar — “passenger airline levels of safety”

The one answer that goes past manner and into substance is a standard. Asked how reliable the BFR flight engine is, he sets the safety target for crewed spaceflight against the safest mass transport people already trust:

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

This is the one piece of 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 implied claim is that interplanetary travel has to become as routine and trustworthy as boarding a plane. It’s his usual space travel should be like air travel thesis, except stated as a safety target rather than a cost-and-reuse one. The aircraft analogy he reaches for to explain cheap, reusable rockets, he reaches for here to explain reliability. (The surrounding engine detail, that the flight design is “much lighter and tighter” and “extremely focused on reliability”, is hardware spec and stays in prose.)

Engineering and spec — kept in prose

Most of the AMA is BFR hardware detail, not mind-material, so it’s summarized here rather than block-quoted. The Raptor thrust reduction: “We chickened out.” above is the whole of his stated reason, with the engineering point being 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, “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.” All of it is mission and engineering spec, and none of it carries a mind-signal beyond the candor and the safety standard above.

Connections (pages touched)

Elon Musk — extended with a “Reddit AMA (2017): the unscripted Musk” section: how he talks with a technical audience, unscripted, self-deprecating, dry (“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 how candidly he talks to the engineering community.
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 or “why” line here; the 2017 bright-future note is already carried by IAC 2017 and TED2017.