HAWTHORNE, CA—At an evening event in the SpaceX Headquarters on Thursday night, CEO and founder Elon Musk revealed the Dragon V2 space capsule, a next-generation version of SpaceX's current Dragon capsule that will be able to ferry up to seven crew members and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) and eventually to other destinations. The capsule is reusable, and will be able to make a controlled landing "with the precision of a helicopter" upon re-entry.

The capsule, which has been in development for several years with help from NASA, will be a part of a new generation of commercial space vehicles since the US shuttered its own shuttle program in 2011. Currently, NASA pays Russia around $71 million a head to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS on Soyuz vehicles.

Tonight, Musk told the press that his company foresees being able to send astronauts to the ISS and back for around $20 million per seat.

Musk added that depending on how many flights SpaceX is able to launch, that cost-per-head number could come down significantly to where it could "potentially get into the single-digit-million figure.”

NASA has publicly stated that it wants a commercial space vehicle to be ready for prime time by 2017; Musk told Ars tonight that NASA is being characteristically cautious: “from a SpaceX standpoint we expect to be ready to transport crew by 2016,” he said. “We feel fairly confident that we’ll be ready in two years.” When the Dragon V2 does launch, it’ll launch from the historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, which SpaceX recently signed a 20-year lease for.

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Tricked out space ride

The Dragon V2 borrows heavily from the design of the original Dragon, and because of this, Musk told the press that getting from version one to version two cost about $400 to 500 million. Still, "it’ll probably be that amount more to get to first flight, so you’re looking at somewhere around a billion dollars,” Musk admitted. He noted that NASA is helping fund much of the research and development, and taken with the Falcon launch rocket, which SpaceX designed without help from NASA, Musk said that NASA has contributed about 50 percent of the funding for the project.

“Really we would not be where we are today without the help of NASA,” Musk said.

Key to making the Dragon V2 cost-effective will be getting a lot of reuse out of it. According to Musk, the V2 is built to withstand 10 flights without any significant refurbishment. After that tenth flight or so, the heat shield would likely have to be replaced. On the V2, that shield is a variant of NASA’s Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, which SpaceX calls PICA-X 3 (it retains an X because it’s SpaceX’s variant, and a three because it’s the third version of such a shield.) But Musk said he expects that the next versions of PICA-X will last longer than the most current version. “It’s kind of like a brake pad, it does need to be replaced, but eventually we’d like to get up to 100 flights” out of the heat shield before replacement becomes necessary, he said, adding that SpaceX has improved the micrometeorite shielding on the Dragon V2, as well.

The Dragon V2 will be able to hold seven passengers as well as a ton of pressurized cargo, along with two to three tons of unpressurized cargo.

All that mass will be propelled by the SuperDraco engines that SpaceX has been working on for some time. The company announced this week that the SuperDraco engines, which are 200 times more powerful than the current Draco engines on the Dragon spacecraft, have passed qualification testing and will be used on the Dragon V2 to run the Launch Abort System and to facilitate precision landing.

In building the V2, Musk said that the “biggest technology challenge was the SuperDraco engine..because that’s an engine that has to produce a tremendous amount of thrust and also be very light; it also has to throttle over a very wide range.”

Inside of the Dragon V2, two sets of two 17-inch touch screens make up the main control space. Musk was not hesitant to say that those screens were taken from the design of the Tesla Model S.

“The touch screens are sort of a ruggedized version of what was used in the Tesla Model S so there’s a bit of technology sharing there…and the great thing about a 17-inch touch screen…[is that] you can configure the interface to have a wide range of controls and a wide range of feedback, and you can really have almost an infinite amount of information,” Musk said. "In the unlikely event of all the screens being destroyed, the critical functions can all be controlled with manual buttons in terms of manual chute deploy and reserve oxygen going to the backup systems for life support.”

Musk told Ars that, like the Tesla S’ touch screen, Nvidia SoCs will power the graphics on the Dragon V2 (although those chips won’t power the rest of the systems on the spaceship, Musk clarified, laughing).

A grand vision

It’s hard to come away from an event like this without feeling a little starry-eyed. Although SpaceX is just one commercial space company building a capsule among others (Boeing and the Sierra Nevada Corporation are two big players that are also building crewed spacecraft for the near future), the company’s founder is openly ambitious about humanity becoming an interplanetary species, and even comes off a little anxious for that future to arrive.

“We want to get to the point where we have thousands of space flights per year, and ultimately where we have a base on the moon and we have [bases] for other civilizations, that’s where things need to go in the long term,” Musk told the audience early on in his address. “Eventually we will be able to go beyond our solar system.”

Even if this sounds dreamy now, the founder confidently estimated that it would be a mere 20 years before “thousands” of flights would occur every year.

And after years of watching NASA flounder due to funding problems, SpaceX is in many ways becoming the heir to the hope that Americans felt about NASA during the Space Race. At tonight's event, Musk was happy to spread the love around: “America is the only place where a private company could get this far," he said, "and we’ve been able to attract a very talented team… having critical amounts of talent is what has enabled us to get this far.” That distance is both literal and figurative, we assume.