MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (9)
Transcript
0:08HostGood afternoon. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to this capstone of what has been a truly outstanding celebration of 100 years of aerospace at MIT. I'll be brief, as I'm certain that you didn't come here to listen to me.
0:26HostBut before I start, I want to reflect briefly on the significance of this week's symposium. Over the last few days, we have welcomed to our campus a who's who of aerospace scholars, innovators and legends.
0:40HostMore than 500 alumni and guests from all over the world have joined us to honor the past century of aerospace achievement and MIT's central role in the development of Earth transportation.
0:54HostThis celebration has also provided an opportunity to look ahead, to imagine, for instance, what the rise of autonomous systems will mean for air travel, commerce and space exploration. And it's breathtaking, truly, to recognize and realize the magnitude of the impact that the faculty, students, staff and alumni of this department have had on air travel.
1:19HostAs I look around at the aerospace pioneers who have taken the time to join us to these events this week, the thought that keeps coming back to mind is the realization that COR16 has been involved in every major achievement in the history of aerospace.
1:39HostAnd that is truly remarkable.
1:49HostAnd that reflects the leadership, the vision and brilliance of the faculty, administrators, and more than 6,000 aeronautical engineers who have earned an MIT degree over the last century. As we have seen over the last few days, the department remains committed to excellence and to pushing the boundaries of what is and what might be.
2:11HostAnd there is no question in my mind that MIT's Aeroastro department will continue to be a leading force in aerospace for the next 100 years at least. I want to take a moment to recognize Professor Jaime Perari.
2:34HostJaime and his team of faculty, staff and students have done a truly remarkable job of planning and executing this week's activities. They've created a program for which all of us at MIT are very proud of.
2:47HostAnd my deepest thanks go to him and to the department and his team. Before we begin the Q and A, I'd like to direct your attention to a short video produced by a tremendously innovative company, SpaceX.
3:01HostIt shows some of the company's recent successes in advancing private space exploration.
3:09Elon MuskDC confirms. My computer's in startup. Second stage. Pressing tanks are at flight pressure F9. Switching to internal power. T minus 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Lift off. Falcon 9.
3:37Elon MuskFalcon 9 is 30. Tower. First stage propulsion is download.
4:08Audience MemberHere is a look at the Dragon capsule making its way towards the International Space Station.
4:15Jaime Peraire (moderator)The station on 2.
4:17Elon MuskWe see Dragon at 20 meters.
4:24Elon MuskAnd capture is confirmed.
4:43Audience MemberIt.
5:18HostAs they say in Venezuela, that's a cool video. It is my pleasure to welcome the stars of today's show. Professor Jaime Perari is the H.N. slater professor and the head of department of Aeronaut at MIT and will serve as the interviewer of for the afternoon.
5:36HostAnd he'll be guiding a conversation with someone we're absolutely thrilled to welcome to our campus. One of the most creative minds of his generation, Elon Musk. Elon is an engineer and entrepreneur who builds and operates companies to solve environmental, social and economic challenges.
5:56HostHe co founded PayPal and currently drives strategy, development and design at two companies he created the space exploration technologies of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He's also chairman of SolarCity, America's largest solar power provider.
6:15HostAnd he led SpaceX efforts to be the first private company to successfully launch and dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station. And for his brilliance as an entrepreneur and his impressive creativity as an engineer, he's a fault hero to all of us here at MIT.
6:33HostPlease welcome Professor Jaime Perari and Mr. Elon Musk.
7:01Jaime Peraire (moderator)Good afternoon. For the last three days we have been celebrating a century of MIT aerospace innovation. We have looked at the lessons learned from the past, the excitement of the present, and speculated about the future.
7:14Jaime Peraire (moderator)The common thing underlying this incredible hundred years has been the passion of the visionaries. People like Hansucker, Doolittle, Garner, Draper and Siemens. Who better than Elon Musk to add to this roster of visionaries and culminate this symposium and join us as we launch our second century of aerospace at mit.
7:34Jaime Peraire (moderator)Elon is an innovator and an inspiration to a new generation of engineers and entrepreneurs. First of all, Elon, thank you very much for coming. It's a pleasure to have you here and welcome you to mit.
7:45Elon MuskThanks for having me.
7:53Jaime Peraire (moderator)So perhaps I'd like to start and ask you if you could elaborate a little bit on what you've seen on the video.
7:58Elon MuskOkay. That was quite a lot. Well, I mean what we're seeing there is. And I just like, like our communications team put it together so I just like saw it for the first time in the back there, like probably a bit too much slow mo.
8:15Elon MuskSo the, you know, what we're seeing there is our Falcon 9 rocket and our Dragon spacecraft. And then we're seeing some of the initial tests of the reusable version of Falcon 9 that is capable of taking open landing, which is reusability is really, I think, the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the Next level.
8:40Jaime Peraire (moderator)When do you think you might be able to fly an operational reusable force the stage?
8:47Elon MuskWell, we've been able to soft land boost the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far, unfortunately. You know, sort of sat there for several seconds then tipped over and exploded.
9:08Elon MuskYeah, just quite difficult to reuse,
9:15Elon MuskUnfortunately. It's as tall as a 14 story building. So when a 14 story building falls over, it's quite a belly blob. And so what we need to do is to be able to either land on a floating platform or ideally boost back to the launch site and land back at the launch site.
9:38Elon MuskBut before we boost back to the launch site and try to land there, we need to show that we can land with precision over and over again, otherwise something bad could happen.
9:50Elon MuskBut if it doesn't boost back to where we intended. So for the upcoming launch, I think we've got a chance of landing on a floating landing platform. We actually have a huge platform that's being constructed at a shipyard in Louisiana right now.
10:09Elon MuskWhich is what's huge. Huge.
10:11HostIsh.
10:11Elon MuskI mean it's about 300ft long by 170ft wide. That looks very tiny from space. And the leg span of the rocket is 60ft. So you know, you've got, and this is going to be positioning itself up in the ocean with, you know, with engines that'll keep it or try to keep it in a particular position.
10:37Elon MuskBut it's tricky, you've got these big rollers and GPS errors. So, you know, so it's kind, it's not anchored because it's like out in the bloody Atlantic. So that's.
10:51Elon MuskBut we're going to try to land on that on the next flight and if we land on that then I think we'll be able to re fly that booster.
10:57Elon MuskBut it's probably maybe not more than a 50% chance or less of landing it on the platform for the first time. But there's a lot of launches that will occur over the next year.
11:11Elon MuskSo there's at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months. And I think it's quite likely, probably 80, 90% likely that one of those flights we'll be able to land and re fly.
11:27Elon MuskSo I think we're quite close.
11:30Jaime Peraire (moderator)I'm curious to know why you chose to go with a retro thrust rocket for landing as opposed to just wings and wheels and run on a runaway like the shuttle scene.
11:43Elon MuskYeah, there's a couple reasons. The, the long term ambition of SpaceX is to develop technologies necessary to establish A self sustaining city on Mars or civil station on Mars.
12:00Elon MuskAnd wings and a Runway don't really work if you're going somewhere other than Earth. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere. So wings and wheels are. There's no runways and there's no atmosphere.
12:15Elon MuskNot a good choice for the moon. And then on Mars there are also no runways and the atmosphere is very thin. And so unless you, you know, like, you know, try to land something at supersonic velocity, it's unlike, it's just not a good choice for Mars either.
12:32Elon MuskSo you really have to get good at propulsive landing if you want to go someplace other than Earth, which is why we have rockets, because obviously aircraft work quite well on Earth, so and then.
12:45Elon MuskBut even for Earth recovery, you know, when you really look at it, even if other planets had atmospheres, the actually the penalty for propulsive landing is quite low. Like you can just do, you can just do easy calculation of what's the terminal velocity and then how long you have to fire the engine at what g level to get to zero velocity.
13:13Elon MuskAnd then if you do some interesting things, like if you look at our landing gear, they're essentially like giant body flaps. So the drag, when we deploy the landing gear, the drag massively increases.
13:24Elon MuskAnd so we have dual use of landing gear as giant body flaps and as landing gear. And it actually cuts the terminal velocity in half and therefore the fuel propellant that we need to stop the vehicle in half.
13:39Elon MuskAnd actually it's quite an efficient method of landing. Precisely. You can use less mass if you want to do parachutes or water landing. But then reusability is negatively affected.
13:53Jaime Peraire (moderator)Any near term plans for a reusable second stage?
14:01Elon MuskThe, the next generation vehicles after the Falcon architecture will be designed for full reusability. I don't expect the Falcon line to have a reusable upper stage just, just because the, you know, with a kerosene based system, the specific impulse isn't really high enough to do that.
14:27Elon MuskAnd a lot of the missions we do for commercial satellite deployment are just geostationary missions. So the, we're really going very far out. These are high delta velocity missions.
14:37Elon MuskSo to try to get something back from that is really difficult. But with the next generation of vehicles, which is.
14:51Elon MuskSubcooled methane oxygen system where the propellants are cooled to close to their freezing temperature to increase the density, we can definitely do full reusability. And that system is intended to be a fully reusable Mars transportation system.
15:09Elon MuskSo not merely to low Earth orbit, but all the way to Mars and bang. For reusability, three years. I'm an optimistic person, but always, I mean, I think we could start to see some test flights in the five or six year time frame.
15:29Elon MuskBut we were talking about a much bigger vehicle, much bigger vehicle together. Yeah. And we're also going to be upgrading to sort of a new generation, a harder engine cycle which is a full flow staged combustion.
15:47Elon MuskSo what we have right now is an open cycle engine. So I mean right now I'd say like engines are our weakest point, that's SpaceX. But they will become as strong as the structures and avionics in the next generation.
16:02Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay, thank you. So let me change a little bit. SpaceX is only 12 years old and you have shown that in some aspects you can compete head to head with much more established launch service providers like Lockheed and Boeing and the Europeans.
16:18Jaime Peraire (moderator)To what do you ascribe this ability of a young and conventional company to take on the establishment?
16:23Elon MuskSure. And actually just clarify the point. Like right now our weakest point is engines with respect to specific impulse, but not with respect to thrust to weight. We actually have the highest thrust to weight of any engine I think maybe ever.
16:36Elon MuskBut, but our specific impulse, the efficiency of the engine is about 10% worse than a staged combustion engine using the same propellant. In terms of our competitiveness,
16:56Elon MuskI think it most comes down to our pace of innovation. Our pace of innovation is much, much faster than the big aerospace companies or the sort of country driven systems.
17:09Elon MuskAnd this is generally true if you look at innovation from large companies or from smaller companies, smaller companies generally better at innovating than larger companies. And it has to be that way from a Darwinian standpoint because smaller companies would just die if they didn't try innovating because otherwise people just keep buying the product from the big company.
17:33Elon MuskSo, but I mean, and so then why is SpaceX more innovative? I think it's probably because we've got a super engineering driven culture. I mean it's really, it's, we're running kind of the Silicon Valley operating system.
17:48Elon MuskIt's kind of hard to describe. Like it's like, how do you describe Linux? Like, you know, like Linux is more efficient than some other operating systems to remain nameless.
18:01Elon MuskLike exactly why you really have to get into the weeds. But you have a fairly flat hierarchy. You promote rapid communication, our best ideas wins culture as opposed to having the seniority of the person decide the solution, which I mean that should never be the case in engineering.
18:26Elon MuskIt should always be a rational basis. And I also Believe that the, in terms of, at the leadership level, I'd much rather provide someone who has strong engineering ability than so called management ability.
18:47Elon MuskAnd know like we do hire some MBAs, you know, but.
18:58Elon MuskIt's usually in spite of the mba, not because of it.
19:04Jaime Peraire (moderator)I think that deserves an applause.
19:15Jaime Peraire (moderator)You're really pushing the concept of reusability as a way to affordability. But would you agree that the only way you justify making a more expensive reusable vehicle is if you can guarantee a minimum frequency of flights?
19:29Jaime Peraire (moderator)And is the market there in the say five years, 10 year period, who is going to provide that demand? Where is it going to come from?
19:42Elon MuskWell, I mean it is a chicken and egg sort of situation. I mean the reason that there's low demand for space flight is because it's ridiculously expensive. And you know, so somebody at some point, somebody has to say okay, we're going to make something that's much more affordable and then see what applications develop.
19:59Elon MuskThat's what has to happen. I mean the situation in rocketry is, it's like if an aircraft, imagine if aircraft were single use, then how many people would fly? I mean look, the flight rate would be really low.
20:14Elon MuskBuy a 747, it's like $250 million, maybe $300 million and you need two of them for a round trip. So nobody's paying like half a billion dollars to fly it from Boston to London.
20:27Elon MuskAnd if that were the case, there'd be like a very small number of flights for like scientific and military purposes. And people like who say wow, the market for aircraft is so tiny.
20:39Elon MuskPeople really love going by boat. It's nonsense. So if we have rockets that are reusable, we could reduce the fully reusable and can get to a decent flight rate.
20:55Elon MuskThe potential is there to get a two order of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transportation which is vital for establishing, establishing a self sustaining civilization on another planet or even on, you know, on the moon or some sort of L5 colony or whatever.
21:09Elon MuskBut you really need to get the cost, we need a tour of magnitude improvement at least in the cost transport in fact, I mean relative to the estimates of what it costs to do a Mars mission, manned Mars mission, were you know, I think like the, some of the lower estimates are at the 100 to 200 billion dollar level.
21:28Elon MuskYou know, for a four person mission we need, we do more like a 10,000 fold reduction to make it viable. Yeah, well, I mean so people can afford to go.
21:41Jaime Peraire (moderator)Do you see space tourism as a As a customer, people wanting to just pay to be in orbit.
21:48Elon MuskYeah, I mean there's some sort of private space. Private space flight is going to be some, some amount of market. Yeah, I, I don't really know. I mean really just we're trying to advance rocket technology and I mean on the one hand, if we are, even if we get even slightly towards the overarching goal of Mars colonization level technology, like if we just get slightly there, we certainly have a viable business in launching satellites and servicing the space station, that kind of thing.
22:25Elon MuskBecause like. Yeah, I mean for like 5%, you know, so it's not like this. There's still a very viable business doing Earth orbit. And even if like for 5, 10 towards that goal, we're like fast and more competitive than the other rocket companies.
22:45Elon MuskWe do have a lot of people gang up against us these days.
22:51Jaime Peraire (moderator)Let's talk about Mars. That's what really excites a lot of the people in the audience, excites many of us. How are we going to get there? First of all, what are in your mind, say two, three top technologies that we need to develop, that we need to improve to, to get us closer to where we want to be.
23:12Jaime Peraire (moderator)Sure. And second, I also like some comments as to what would be useful intermediate missions. Are we going to use the moon? Is the Moon, yeah. A necessary step on our way to Mars?
23:23Elon MuskI don't think the moon is a necessary step, but I think if you've got a rocket and spacecraft capable of going to Mars, you might as well go to the moon along the way.
23:34Elon MuskI mean it's like, I mean it's like crossing the English Channel relative to going to Mars. So it's like if you have these ships that can cross the Atlantic, would you cross the English Channel?
23:43Elon MuskProbably.
23:43Jaime Peraire (moderator)But you don't feel necessary from a logistics perspective?
23:47Elon MuskNo, definitely not. It's definitely not necessary. But you probably end up having a moon base just because. Why not? But in terms of the key. Yeah, key technologies, I mean obviously it'd be great to have some sort of fundamental new thing that has never existed before and like pushes the boundaries of physics, that would be great.
24:16Elon MuskBut as far as, you know, the physics that we know today, I think, I actually think we've got. The basic ingredients are there. I give. I mean if we, if you do densified, a densified methalox rocket with on orbit refueling, Earth orbit refueling, so you like load the spacecraft, space spacecraft into orbit and you send a bunch of refueling missions to fill up the tanks and you have the Mars colonial fleet essentially that gets built up during the time between the Earth Mars synchronizations, which occur every 26 months.
25:02Elon MuskAnd then the fleet sort of all departs at the optimal transfer point. I think, I think we have, we don't need anything like. So we don't need any sort of thing that people don't already know about, I believe.
25:18Elon MuskI think we've got the building blocks, but the mass efficiency is extremely important. So having better heat shields that, you know, are reusable.
25:33Jaime Peraire (moderator)Is radiation on humans.
25:35Elon MuskPardon me?
25:35Jaime Peraire (moderator)Radiation on humans a concern?
25:38Elon MuskYeah, I mean, things that can mitigate the radiation effects, certainly. I mean, I think the radiation effects are generally way overblown because if we went to the moon, went like two weeks in deep space space.
25:50Elon MuskBuzz Aldrin's still around.
25:55Jaime Peraire (moderator)Many other folks that went are also in the audience.
25:58Elon MuskYeah, great. I mean, so like obviously didn't. Cause like they're still alive and they, you know, they're. Yeah, they seem okay. So people have been up in the space station for like a year or more.
26:13Elon MuskThey're okay. Okay. So it's. I don't, I don't. I mean, if there are things we can do to mitigate the radiation on route, you know, by effective placement of the water.
26:25Elon MuskSo let's say the water, you're bringing there protection. Yeah, put that in the direction of the sun and. Yeah, but I mean, I really think we've got the sort of essential agreements.
26:36Elon MuskI mean, we do need an efficient propellant depot on Mars. So that's. But I mean, really, I think this is like, there's a lot of, I mean, obviously a lot of hard work and ensuring that needs to be done.
26:48Elon MuskBut, but it's there. Like the pieces are there.
26:51Jaime Peraire (moderator)You foresee robotic missions ahead of human missions going to Mars and to, to prepare the ground for, for people.
27:01Audience MemberYeah.
27:02Elon MuskYes. I think that the. Yeah, I mean, we have like, you know, the, we have rovers on the, on Mars or not already. So I think we see more robots on Mars and we probably want to make sure the propellant depot works have been automated.
27:17Elon MuskPropellant depot. And there's some questions as to how. What do you do for power generation on Mars? Do you have a nuclear reactor? You know, then you got to carry the nuclear fuel there.
27:29Elon MuskReactors are fairly heavy. Do you do some lightweight solar power system? You know, sort of maybe big inflatable solar arrays or something like that. So just power generation on Mars I think is an interesting problem.
27:46Elon MuskAnd then just figuring out like, how to get all of the bits of efficiency. Right. For creating say methane and oxygen on Mars. Mars has got a CO2 atmosphere and there's, there's a lot of water sort of buried in the soil that you can get, you can get.
28:06Jaime Peraire (moderator)Question that has been discussed over the past couple of days. Should we be considering one trips, one way only trips to Mars. What's the best approach to colonize the planet?
28:19Jaime Peraire (moderator)Is it, what's your view? Is that socially acceptable? You think people will sign up to do it?
28:25Elon MuskI think there's plenty of people that have signed up for a warning Church of Mars.
28:31Jaime Peraire (moderator)Maybe if I could have a show of hands, who would consider such an option? I see some, not many, but perhaps enough for a couple of missions.
28:42Elon MuskCertainly enough. I think it's sort of like is it a one way mission and then you die or is it one way mission and you get resupplied? That's a big difference.
28:53Elon MuskWe're for the second option. Yeah, exactly. But I mean I think it's, it ends up being a moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back. Like these spaceships are expensive, okay.
29:04Elon MuskThey're hard to build. You can't just leave them there. So whether or not people want to come back or not is kind of like they can jump on if they want, but they need the spaceship back.
29:18Elon MuskThank you. I mean, kind of weird. Like it was like huge collection of spaceships on Mars. Over time it's like maybe we should send them back. And of course we should send them back.
29:30Elon MuskSo I think that's for sure necessary. Particularly if you say we want to have a colony of some kind that's of significant size. Yeah.
29:40Jaime Peraire (moderator)Just one question. Looking at the Apollo experience, are you concerned that say we land humans in Mars in say 10, 15 years and then all of a sudden the excitement is done, We've done it and just go and rest for the next 50 years like we did with Apollo.
29:58Jaime Peraire (moderator)Is that something that concerns you?
30:00Elon MuskYeah, well, that's why I think we should really be setting the goal as the creation of a self sustaining civilization on Mars, not simply a mission to Mars. Because then we risk, you know, it'll be awesome and cool and it would be a new high altitude record and you know, great pictures and stuff.
30:18Elon MuskBut I mean it would be, it's, it's just, it's just not the thing that fundamentally changes the future of humanity. And, and this, I mean, I should sort of explain perhaps the rationale for, you know, why I think it's important to establish a self sustaining colony on Mars.
30:34Elon MuskBecause I think some people are aware of that, but probably most people aren't. And you know, you hear all these rebuttals like aren't there all these people problems on Earth that we need to deal with and should we focus on that?
30:46Elon MuskAnd the answer is yes. I mean our primary focus should be problems on Earth, but I think that there should be some small amount that's given over to the establishment of a colony on Mars and making life multi planetary.
30:58Elon MuskBy small amount I mean some number less than 1% of our resources. So you know, it's not as important as say healthcare, but it's more important than like say cosmetics.
31:10Elon MuskI mean like I'm pro, I mean I'm in favor of cosmetics, I like them, they're great. But you know, lipstick or colony on Mars,
31:24Elon MuskPeople may have different opinions, but so I think, I think we should, we should have that. And because the future of humanity will fundamentally bifurcate along the lines of either single planet species or multi planet species.
31:41Elon MuskAnd a multi planet version of humanity, of humanity's future is going to last a lot longer. We will propagate civilizations in the future, far longer if we are multi plant species than if we are a single plant species.
31:56Elon MuskAnd so it's like planetary redundancy backing up the biosphere. It's, you know, it's, we've got all of our eggs in one basket here. We should try to protect that basket and do everything we can.
32:09Elon MuskBut, but there are some risks that are just extremely difficult to mitigate and some which we will ultimately not be able to mitigate. So it just seems like the right thing to do.
32:22Elon MuskAnd then the question is, next question is should we do it now or should we just, should we wait for some point in the future? And I think the wise move is to do it now because the window of technology for this is open and it's the first time that window has been open in the four and a half billion year history of Earth.
32:41Elon MuskThat's a long time. And I certainly hope that the window will be open for forever, but it may also close. And if you look at the history of technology in various civilizations, you look at say ancient Egypt where they're able to build these incredible giant pyramids and then they forgot how to build pyramids and then they couldn't read hieroglyphics or you look at say Roman civilization and they were able to build these incredible aqueducts and roads and then they forgot how to do that indoor plumbing, they've got how to do inboard plumbing.
33:19Elon MuskYou know, it's like, you know, it's just there's clearly been a cycle with technology and, you know, hopefully that that's an upward sloping sine wave that, you know, continues on to be really great in the future, but maybe it doesn't, you know, maybe there's some bad thing that happens.
33:40Elon MuskAnd so for 1% of our resources, we could buy life insurance for life collectively, and I think that would be a good thing to do.
33:49Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you.
33:50Elon MuskThank you.
33:52Jaime Peraire (moderator)I'm sure the topic of March is going to come again because in a few minutes I'd like to open the floor for questions, but I have a couple more questions I really like to get your opinion on related to your association, well, your involvement with Tesla and SolarCity.
34:11Jaime Peraire (moderator)Could you tell us a little bit about your announced plans to construct battery gigafactory? And can you elaborate on this? What's the driver? Is it satisfy demands, reduce costs, improve
34:24Elon Muskefficiencies, or all of the above for the gigafactory?
34:28Jaime Peraire (moderator)Yes.
34:32Elon MuskSo the, you know, the gigafactory is like the least bad solution we could come up with. Honestly, I think it's actually pretty cool the way it's worked out, but we're just faced with a simple problem of if we want to make electric cars, we need enough batteries for the electric cars and say, well, last year all lithium ion Production combined was 30 gigawatt hours approximately.
35:01Elon MuskThat's nothing, or at least it's nothing when you consider like if you want to make half a million electric cars a year, that's how much you need. And there are 100 million new cars made every year.
35:15Elon MuskThere are 2 billion gasoline or diesel cars on the road worldwide. So just do the basic math. You don't just need one gigafactory, you need like 200 gigafactories just for new car production.
35:30Elon MuskAnd that assumes you're only going to replace the fleet at the existing rate, which has it refreshed every 20 years. So, yeah, so given that we want to try to get to full capacity at our Fremont plant in California of half million vehicles a year, we need half million vehicles a year of batteries.
35:52Elon MuskAnd obviously we can't use all of the other factories in the world combined because people want cell phones and laptops and other things. So therefore we have to build this factory.
36:06Elon MuskAnd then we found we have a great partner in Panasonic. Panasonic's taking care of the kind of the cell formation part of it. There are actually many aspects to this because you've got sort of anode cathode separator, electrolyte can, at the precursor level, you've got sort of raw materials coming in from the mines that sort of feed into to a variety of other companies like Sumito Metals and Mining and Hitachi and others that they do the precursor processing.
36:36Elon MuskAnd then Panasonic takes the anode and cathode material separate, whatnot, puts that into a cell, then it goes into a Tesla section which creates the module which is all the electronics and the packaging and the conductors, the safety mechanisms and the cooling loops and the modules go into the pack which then, you know, has a lot of crash structure associated with it.
36:59Elon MuskAnd the pack goes in the car and then, and then obviously Tesla is kind of the, the landlord of the whole thing as well. Anyway, that's short of doing that.
37:10Elon MuskThere was no, no way to scale. So that's why we did it.
37:14Jaime Peraire (moderator)The reason why I brought that up is because as much as we love Teslas, we are in an aerospace department where we are really interested in the potential for electric aircraft.
37:22Elon MuskSure. I love, I love the idea of electrical practice. Everything will go electric, everything will go fully electric, except for rockets with ironic.
37:33Jaime Peraire (moderator)We think that in terms of energy density, to make transport aircraft feasible, you would need improvements in, of the order of 10 to 100.
37:43Audience MemberWhat?
37:44Elon MuskNo, that's not good. Wait, when you say 10 to 100 of what baseline, what do you mean?
37:49Jaime Peraire (moderator)Ion lithium?
37:50Elon MuskOh, no, no, definitely not. So I, my opinion at least the where we are right now is at roughly, you know, for a cell that doesn't have like lots of other drawbacks which people always forget to mention when they talk about battery breakthroughs.
38:11Elon MuskThere's many parameters that are important for a battery and they'll, you know, hardly a week goes by where there's not some huge breakthrough allegedly in batteries, but like the bullshit factor is outrageous.
38:24Elon MuskSo, but for real cells that actually work and don't have like some huge drawback, they're currently at about 300 watt hours per kilogram. And if you to have a compelling aircraft, you only really need about 400 watt hours per kilogram.
38:41Elon MuskProvided your, the percentage of cell on the craft, on the aircraft is high, it doesn't need to be anywhere near as high as it is on a rocket. But if it's sort of at the 70% level at 400 watt hours per kilogram, you can do very decent range.
39:01Elon MuskAnd if you sort of move it up to the sort of mid, mid to high 70s, you can go transcontinental, but with, you know, not, not intercontinental, but sort of west coast to east coast.
39:14Elon MuskSo you need an efficient aircraft. But. But that's, that's approximately by my calculations. The, the numbers you need, 400 watt hours per kilogram, mid to high 70s cell mass fraction, which I think is an achievable number because, like, aircraft have all these, like, unnecessary things like tails and like rudders and elevators.
39:36Elon MuskLike, it's not needed. Just. Just that. Just gimbal, you know? Gimbal? Gimbal. The electric fan, like for some weird reason, like gimbaling motors is normal in rockets and not aircraft.
39:52Elon MuskWhy not?
39:55Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay, well, definite plans to get into this business because we love to see the. How things develop in that particular area. Certainly very interesting. I mean, do you have a specific plans?
40:08Elon MuskI mean, I've been sort of toying with the design for an electric supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric aircraft for a while. I'd love to do it, but I think my mind would explode.
40:20Elon MuskIt's like brains worn out, you know, it's like pretty saturated working on electric cars and rockets, so.
40:29Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay. Okay, good topic. So let me. The last question I will ask is about our students. You hired dozens of MIT graduates for your company. The first question is, how are they doing?
40:47Elon MuskWell, they're doing great. So, yeah. In fact, we want to hire a lot more people from mit.
40:56Jaime Peraire (moderator)That's good news. And I'm sure a lot of people in the audience.
41:04Elon MuskYeah. Definitely apply to SpaceX, applied it to Tesla, and like, yell at me on Twitter if there's something wrong with our admissions process or something that seems to be like, I mean, it's not the most efficient way to get to people.
41:20Elon MuskThat is one way, because I don't know if, like, our recruiting and our process of hiring people is good or I think it's good, but I'm not sure. But we want to hire lots of really smart engineers because that's how these problems get solved.
41:37Jaime Peraire (moderator)I read the quote, which I hope it's true from you. Tell me if that's not the case, that you said that the most common mistake, hiding mistake, was weighing too much on someone's talent and not on someone's personality.
41:48Jaime Peraire (moderator)And I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
41:51Elon MuskIt does. Yes, absolutely. So that's generally where. If I say where it's of the hiring mistakes that I've made in the past, it's been just as I said, it's looking too much at their intellectual capability alone and not on how they affect those around them.
42:18Elon MuskAnd what really matters is for someone's contribution to a company is how they are as individual and how they affect others around them. I mean, you could say it's also analogous to a sports team.
42:30Elon MuskYou know, if someone, the best person on the team is not necessarily the one who scores the most goals, it could be the person who assists in the most goals.
42:41Elon MuskAnd if somebody is, if there's one person on the team who's just, just wants the ball all the time and just wants to kick it at the goal, that can actually be detrimental.
42:52Elon MuskAnd so it is important to weigh personality and just, are they going to be a good person and what people like working with them and that kind of thing.
43:05Elon MuskIt does make a difference.
43:08Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you. I like to invite the audience to ask some questions. In particular, I like students to ask questions, but others are also invited. And one thing I will ask is that we keep the questions short so that we can have a few of those.
43:24Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay.
43:26Elon MuskI'm Phil Chapman. What I'd like to ask you, Elon, is it looks as if the next
43:31Hostdecade or two human spaceflight will be
43:33Elon Muskdominated by you and Bob Bigelow and other exopreneurs.
43:39HostThe question is, what do you think
43:42Elon Muskthe proper role of NASA human spaceflight should be in that context other than just giving you a contract? Well, NASA's been really helpful to SpaceX, you know, not just in terms of giving us contracts, but also technically in a number of areas.
44:02Elon MuskAnd a lot of things that we've done at SpaceX have been dependent on things that NASA's done in the past. So I think we're certainly incredibly grateful for, for everything that NASA's done in the past and for the ongoing support that we received from NASA.
44:20Elon MuskSo I'm a huge fan of NASA. I think NASA's actually doing the right thing given all of the constraints that they have, like within the context of being this large government entity that's getting pushed in all sorts of different directions and, and has a lot of limitations on what it can do.
44:45Elon MuskI've been pretty impressed with what NASA has done given all of those constraints. And yeah, so I think it's, you know, if NASA continues, continues to sort of expand upon the support of competitive commercial space, that's probably what will have the most positive effect on the future of space development.
45:11Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you.
45:12Elon MuskSo I'm Jordan and I had a quick question about manufacturing. So Obama has had a large push to really get high technology manufacturers in the United States. And I think above everything, SpaceX and Tesla are excellent examples of that.
45:27Elon MuskAnd I was wondering one, do you have a commitment going forward to have all your manufacturing or majority of it done in the US and then how can other companies really learn from this experience that SpaceX has had and Tesla has had to really do your own manufacturing in house as much as possible?
45:47Elon MuskSure. Well, I should say that for SpaceX and Tesla our goal was not initially to do huge amounts of internal manufacturing. So we actually tried to do as little manufacturing as possible at first, but we found that we had to insource more and more over time.
46:07Elon MuskAnd so I think. But it's not really, not from the standpoint of like we really believe in, in sourcing or outsourcing. It's just given, you know, if there's a great supplier that then we would love to use a great supplier and if there's not, then we need to, you know it ourselves.
46:27Elon MuskLike we either need to find a way or make a way to a good solution. And it's just over time we've had to make a way more often than not.
46:39Elon MuskAnd now for rocketry there's also, there's itar limitations which is that rockets are considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just outsource it to some other country. And yeah, so, but I think for manufacturing, very often people think of manufacturing as kind of just some rote process of making copies, which it is, which actually it isn't.
47:10Elon MuskManufacturing is building the machine that makes the machine. And if you think the machine is important, well, building the machine that makes the machine is also extremely important. And more often than not what I found is the manufacturing is harder than the original product.
47:33Elon MuskLike for example, a Tesla. We can make one of a car very easily, but to make thousands of a car with high reliability and quality and where the cost is affordable is extremely hard.
47:52Elon MuskI'd say maybe 10 times harder than designing than just making one prototype, but maybe more. And then at SpaceX also may be approaching an order of magnitude harder to manufacture rockets and launch, launch a lot of them then to design one in the first place place.
48:12Elon MuskSo I really think a lot more smart people should be getting into manufacturing and it's, it's kind of fun. So it's like, I don't know, it's sort of got a bad name for a while, but it's, it's really interesting.
48:26Elon MuskYeah, thank you.
48:27Jaime Peraire (moderator)I've got a question about the Tesla automobile. I understand the drive motors on the order of 250 horsepower and only weighs 70 pounds, which is multiple horsepower per pound.
48:41Jaime Peraire (moderator)I've never seen, I've worked in the transit industry, never seen. And Looked in other sources, never seen a motor other than one that weighs multiple pounds per horsepower the opposite way.
48:56Jaime Peraire (moderator)So you have an advantage of like an order of magnitude. Some of it can be explained by high speed. Can you explain how you achieve that?
49:06Elon MuskActually, if power to weight ratio is of interest to you, rocket turbo pumps really take the cake. The turbo pump on the Merlin engine generates 10,000 horsepower and weighs 150 pounds.
49:21Elon MuskNow, you know, fuel efficiency is a sort of separate question, but power to weight is, I mean, it's at the ragged edge of like pulling those molecules apart. You know, it's just kind of amazing that any, like you can get 10,000 horsepower in this thing, you can basically pick up.
49:41Elon MuskBut for electric motors, you know, if you have a properly designed, you know, electric motor, ac induction motor, getting a high power to weight ratio and like a, you know, a really great response, response rate, like low latency and all that, extremely low ripple current and whatnot.
50:01Elon MuskAnd it's just, it just kind of comes naturally to an ac induction motor. The bigger challenge is actually cooling it effectively and then particularly cooling the rotor, because you've got a rotor going at like 18,000 rpm.
50:16Elon MuskSo the model S, we coaxially cool the rotor in order to have high steady state. So also for electric motor, you can have. It's easy to get peak power for a short period of time.
50:32Elon MuskIt's hard to have sustained peak power. And because you overheat and then it's hard to get high efficiency over a complicated drive cycle. But those tend to be the, the problems we wrestle with more than, say, the peak power.
50:49Elon MuskLike, we can get peak power pretty easily, but sustained power and efficiency over the drive cycle are hard.
50:56Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you.
50:58Audience MemberHi, my name's Sherry. I'm a PhD student in Cor 16. And when you hear about the founding of SpaceX, a popular story is that you started it partly because you yourself want to go to space.
51:11Audience MemberIs this true? And what sort of time frame with the current program do you see for you yourself being able to have that opportunity?
51:20Elon MuskActually, that's not why I started SpaceX. But.
51:28Elon MuskI mean, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to buy a ride on the Soyuz. And, you know, I would have been able to go to the space station, as a number of other people have done.
51:39Elon MuskBut the thing that I was trying to figure out was how to get us back on, on the track of extending life beyond Earth. That, that's what the, that's the reason for starting SpaceX and, and I expected it to fail.
51:56Elon MuskAnd people sort of think like, well, why would you even start that in the first place? But the reason, if you go back, before I started SpaceX, I expected to, I wanted to do this philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars and try to get the public excited about sending life to Mars.
52:15Elon MuskBecause people respond to precedents and supporters and this will be the first life on another planet, the furthest the life's ever traveled. And I thought, well, that would get people excited and that would result in NASA's budget getting increased and then we could resume the dream of Apollo.
52:32Elon MuskSo, you know, that was my initial goal, was just to figure out how to get NASA's budget higher. But then I came to the conclusion that if we don't make, if we don't make rockets way better, then it won't matter.
52:47Elon MuskLike we can get a budget increase, but then we'd just send one mission to Mars and then maybe never go there again. So the goal of SpaceX really was to, to make as much progress as possible to advance rocket technology to the point where hopefully we can establish a colony on Mars or at least get as far along that way as we can.
53:13Elon MuskWe'll just try to go as far as we can. Hi, I'm Justin, I'm a freshman. Now that SpaceX has unveiled the Dragon V2, which is a man rated capsule, I was wondering if you were planning on forming and your own astronaut corps or you're relying on NASA astronauts from here.
53:34Elon MuskWell, yeah, you know, I mean we're probably, I mean it's, we're building a ship that NASA is going to use and that other people will use in terms of an astronaut core.
53:51Elon MuskI mean, I kind of think like, like this really, like what we should be transporting are scientists and engineers. You know, it's not, not pilots really. You know, it's like Dragon doesn't need pilots.
54:07Elon MuskLike it, you know, obviously goes there with just cargo. You know, we just sent up 40 mice, they were not piloting the craft. So it's really, it's a means of transporting people to like the sort of Earth moon orbit region in order to, you know, do science basically, you know, potentially to the moon to do some exploration there.
54:41Elon MuskBut I kind of think it should be easy to go on a spacecraft. You should just be able to get on with no training and go. It shouldn't be hard.
55:09Audience MemberHi, I'm Scarlet, I'm a junior in aerospace at mit, as you can tell. And I was just wondering now SpaceX and Boeing have both been awarded contracts to build a space taxi.
55:22Audience MemberAnd how do you think SpaceX's approach will differ from Boeing's? And which one do you think is likely to be most successful?
55:32Elon MuskWell, Boeing's a fine company, of course.
55:38Elon MuskSo yeah, I mean, what we're trying to do with Dragon 2 is, or the new crew Dragon design is be able to land propulsively with precision, which I think is kind of the next generation.
55:56Elon MuskLike if you consider the first generation wars, parachutes to a water landing, then you know, arguably sort of wings and gear, landing legs, landing gear. Then like the, the sort of third generation is propulsive landing with precision.
56:13Elon MuskI mean, if, if you saw a movie about the future with aliens landing, how do they land like that? Okay, obviously, like, I mean, it'd be kind of weird if the aliens landed in the ocean with parachutes and like, okay, nothing to fear.
56:38Elon MuskAnd like Boeing's like trying to like slightly improve because it's got airbags, but it's still an imprecise landing. You know, it's somewhere in a huge expanse of desert and it's basically landing on airbags and kind of crashing in the desert.
56:52Elon MuskYou know, like, okay, so that's one way to land.
57:00Elon MuskBut I think the future has to be precise propulsive landing, because that's what you need to go to the moon or to Mars or anywhere else in the solar system.
57:08Elon MuskAnd that's the thing we should be focusing on. And yeah, we're already going to the space station back, by the way. Like Boeing isn't doing that. Sorry.
57:17Audience MemberSo comic books are the future?
57:20Elon MuskWell, I think a lot of things that are envisioned in sci fi books returns, absolutely. Wide range, of course, but a lot of things that are envisioned do make sense.
57:34Elon MuskAnd yeah, I mean it's like, and like I said, there isn't some other way to land on the moon. You can't land on the moon with parachutes and airbags.
57:46Elon MuskLet's do the lack of atmosphere over there.
57:50Audience MemberThank you.
57:52Elon MuskHello there, my name is Johannes. I'm a junior in core 16 and I'm also international. And I was wondering from international perspective, how's this trip to Mars going to look like?
58:03Elon MuskIs it going to be an American colony on Mars and that's it, or is because of course Spacek is mainly based here in the US or is it just like.
58:13Elon MuskEverybody join in, please. I mean, I don't know. I think it's,
58:24Elon MuskI mean, I'm hopeful there will be multiple colonies on Mars. There's Certainly, from a SpaceX standpoint, there's nothing you Know, we don't aim to do anything sort of on an exclusionary basis.
58:35Elon MuskWe're just trying to get there. And then I think then, you know, we'd love to have that debate and be like, oh, is it too American? You know, like, okay, maybe, okay, but we've got the source and base on Mars, who cares?
58:54Elon MuskAnd, but I think if there was, you know, an American based on Mars, it would certainly prompt other countries to want to establish their, you know, base on Mars too.
59:02Elon MuskBut I do think it would be better to have competition than then cooperation. It's not. You encourage companies in other countries to start their own endeavor to go to Mars as well.
59:13Elon MuskAnd yes, I think we'd be better off with competition rather than insisting like the space station, got the International Space Station, but when governments are all sort of forced to go in lockstep, it tends to not make things go faster.
59:32Elon MuskAnd yeah, we want some sort of positive competitive element, I think. So. We don't like people going to war or anything, but just like some positive competitive element like the Olympics, you know, something if people compete hard and it's sort of good sportsmanship and everything, and the net result is better than if like there was no competition.
59:53Elon MuskLike Olympics with no competition wouldn't make any sense. And yeah, so I think some positive competitive thing would be, would be better. And we should definitely not insist that everyone, all countries go at the same pace or some collection of countries go the same pace.
1:00:07Elon MuskThat would slow things down dramatically and maybe not even happen. Just encourage ESA to invest in Mars. Yeah, absolutely. Esa, yeah, Chinese Space Agency everywhere. Yeah, thank you. Hi, my name is Vicente and my question is, are there any natural resources on Mars right now that a colony would be able to use use?
1:00:26Elon MuskAnd if so, how would SpaceX go about extracting those natural resources when the time comes? Well, I think any, any natural resource extraction on Mars would be that the, the output would be for Mars.
1:00:39Elon MuskLike it definitely wouldn't make Sense to transport 200 million miles back to Earth. You know, honestly, like, if you had like crack cocaine on Mars, like in prepackaged, you know, pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here.
1:00:56Elon MuskMaybe good times for the Martians, but not back here. These would be for the colony to use, obviously. Yeah, for the colony to use, exactly.
1:01:11Elon MuskHello, my name's Alexander Brucoleri, a recent Ph.D. in Course 16. And I recently started up an aerospace research and development company. And one thing that I'm working on is something called beamed energy propulsion, where we use external energy to power rockets, microwaves or lasers.
1:01:26Elon MuskThe idea being that you can get very high specific impulses with very high power. And I'm curious where SpaceX stands on this kind of technology. What your thoughts were, if you could comment a little bit.
1:01:36Elon MuskYeah, the beam to energy thing is interesting. I mean, I think it is a worthy area of research. So I think it's worth, it's worth trying to make, trying to make something work, try to get something to orbit or really high delta velocity with beam band energy and see how well does it work in practice.
1:02:02Elon MuskI mean, I do think this, I mean, I'll state some concerns, but these concerns are not meant to say that we shouldn't work on them. I preface it by saying we should work on it.
1:02:13Elon MuskThe, I think that there's, there are some scaling challenges with beamed energy. You have to say, what's the actual power output you need to send say a Falcon 9 class vehicle to orbit?
1:02:26Elon MuskAnd it's a very, very big number. Like you start needing like, whoa. We need like the power of like the eastern seaboard, you know, to sort of send something.
1:02:36Elon MuskFalcon, Falcon heavy class, you know, what do you need to send something like that to? Or it's really a huge amount of energy or a huge amount of power to be precise.
1:02:45Elon MuskLike it's actually the power level you need is no, you don't need like arguably that much on an energy basis. But you can't like tell everyone to turn their lights off in Florida.
1:02:57Elon MuskSo then you need like a huge power plant or a huge capacitor bank or a huge high power density battery array. So I'd like to see how this, you know, how well does it scale?
1:03:10Elon MuskAnd then, and then you say what's the cost of that? The huge power power plant and the huge laser array and that kind of thing. And how does that compare to the cost per unit mass if you just carry your own oxygen with you and have a lower ISP and don't do any of those things.
1:03:30Elon MuskThings. Hello, my name is Elliot Owen, I'm a freshman here. I'm very interested in the hyperloop. I made a small working model for my senior project and one of the major problems I ran into was tube tolerances.
1:03:42Elon MuskSo I'm wondering if you can comment on, you know, problems with tube tolerances and thermal expansion if you're building a 350 mile long steel tube. Well, what was the ratio of the, of the pod to tube diameter?
1:03:55Elon MuskYeah, two and a half inch internal diameter and about 20ft long. Right. But the pod pod diameter to tube diameter, the pod was only a few hundreds of an inch smaller than the inside.
1:04:06Elon MuskThat's the problem. So you actually want the pod to, you want a sort of a ratio of the called pod area to, you know, tube into tube cross section, tube to pod cross section of about two, you know, so the pod only is like half the cross sectional area of the tube because you're still going to want to have some flow of air over the pod to deal with the cantorid's limit.
1:04:39Elon MuskYeah, well, yeah, you partly deal with the cantorid's limit by having a compressor on the nose, but it only partly addresses it and then the rest is airflow around the pod.
1:04:54Elon MuskBut you definitely don't want to have something that's really a tight fit because you also get to start hitting tolerance limitations like that. Yeah. And you just need some play in that system.
1:05:15Elon MuskA tricky thing also for what if you're going really fast is just even small imperfections in the surface of the tube, which I think, I think can be dealt with by essentially having.
1:05:28Elon MuskOnce the tube's done, you actually need to run something that's going to smooth it out. Like you basically need to run a grinder through the tube that's going to polish the surface and make sure that there aren't undulations.
1:05:42Elon MuskBut in the proposal, in the high flavor we had, the air skis were sprung, so the. Yeah, but that's also important. And thermal expansion. If you heat it up 20 degrees, this 350 mile long pipe will get 450ft longer.
1:05:56Elon MuskHow do you maintain a vacuum seal with expansion joints? So you actually have, you have to allow expansion at the terminals. So wherever the terminals are, you've got to have that length of expansion.
1:06:16Elon MuskAnd then in the pylons that are supporting it, you actually need to allow each pylon to stretch in X so you can't hard constrain it at the pylons.
1:06:32Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you. We've gone past the hour now. Would you be able to take a couple more questions?
1:06:37Elon MuskYeah, like 10 or 15 more minutes.
1:06:39Jaime Peraire (moderator)Perfect.
1:06:42Elon MuskMy name is John and I was wondering, since there's always a growing need for more resources here on Earth, if like say sometime in the future SpaceX would look more towards obtaining resources from the moon or Mars or even out farther on asteroids.
1:06:56Elon MuskIs that like in a plan for SpaceX? Well, we're not really going to try to get resources on the moon because that's, you know, that would be useful if you're on the moon, but not for bringing it back to Earth.
1:07:12Elon MuskSo if there's a moon base, I suspect that they would extract resources. Yeah, but for themselves. I'll try to get through a bunch of questions I'm going to answer.
1:07:21Elon MuskMake my answer short. Hi, my name is Bob. In view of its potential to be possibly the biggest game changer ever, do you have any plans to enter the field of artificial intelligence?
1:07:36Elon MuskAnd in general, what are your thoughts on it? Do you think it's even close to being ready for prime time? I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.
1:07:46Elon MuskIf I were to guess at what our biggest extent, central threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful. With artificial intelligence, increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.
1:08:14Elon MuskI mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know, you know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like, yeah, you sure he can control the demon?
1:08:25Elon MuskDidn't work out.
1:08:26HostI take it there will be no
1:08:28Elon Muskhell 9000 going up to Mars. Hell 9000 would be easy. It's way more complex than. I mean, it would put hell 9,000 to shame. Yeah, that's like puppy dog.
1:08:43Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you.
1:08:45Audience MemberHi, my name is Rachel and Assetto and I'm a junior in the aeroastro department. My question aligns with how a lot of the work toward the mission to Mars is focused on rockets with SpaceX obviously, but where do you see the role of telecommunications and communication satellites since there's a lot of traction in this field and this will be very crucial to, I guess, the overall mission to colonizing Mar.
1:09:09Elon MuskSorry, can you repeat the question? I was just sort of thinking about the AI thing for a second.
1:09:17Audience MemberAbsolutely. So a lot of the focus with the mission to Mars aligns with rocket SpaceX. But a key aspect to eventually colonizing Mars allies with telecommunications and communications satellites.
1:09:29Audience MemberSo where do you see this as a viable aspect along with your goals?
1:09:34Elon MuskCommunications is certainly very important. We're going to need terabit level communication between Earth and Mars, which necessarily means that you want to have a tight beam, like a laser communication system or something like that, and relays, you know, sort of satellites that relate.
1:09:53Elon MuskBecause sometimes Mars is on the other side of the sun, so you've got to bounce the photons around the sun, not through them. And, you know, so I think communication is definitely going to be important also.
1:10:04Elon MuskSee, think that on Earth there's a lot of Potential for space based communications. I think that there's a huge amount of room to grow for having satellite communication systems that provide high bandwidth global coverage.
1:10:18Elon MuskAnd we'll need the same from Mars. Hi, I'm Eric Ward, I'm a graduate student in the system design and management program. And I was reading recently a Japanese construction company, I think it's Obayashi, just announced plans to make a space elevator by I think 2050.
1:10:35Elon MuskAnd I'm wondering if SpaceX has a response. I say bravo. That technology might affect your vision and goals as well. I mean, I think it would be awesome if there was a space elevator.
1:10:50Elon MuskI wouldn't hold my breath. I mean, I don't think it's realistic but you know, largely proven wrong. So I always think of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I hear the space elevator, you know, but because people sort of manage like an elevator, you press up and you just like now you're in space.
1:11:14Elon MuskThis is like a real, this is extremely complicated. Yeah, I'm not, I don't think it's really realistic to have a space elevator, you know, and I mean this way like at the point at which we have like a bridge from LA to Tokyo, which I think is much easier problem than we, or you know, how about across the Atlantic, you know, like some sort of 2,000 mile long bridge to a 3,000 mile long bridge, you know, something like that would be, you know, made of like carbon nanotubes.
1:11:52Elon MuskLike we haven't, I don't think we've got a carbon nanotube footbridge so far, let alone some enormous 60,000 mile long space elevator anyway. So I think, I think we're, it's, it's, it wouldn't be, it's not the thing that I think makes sense right now.
1:12:04Elon MuskBut hey, somebody can prove me wrong and that'd be great. Thank you. All right. Hi, my name is Koki ho, I'm a PhD student here. I wonder how you think about Mars One project which try to send crew to Mars one way every two years for reality TV show.
1:12:23HostI think they claim they want to
1:12:24Elon Muskuse the modified Dragon capsule for landing. And I wonder how you think about their philosophy and their technical feasibility. Thank you. Well, I think they're, I mean the illustrations that I've seen basically has them using a bunch of SpaceX rockets and Dragon spacecraft.
1:12:46Elon MuskI'm like, okay. I mean if they want to buy a bunch of dragons and Falcon 9 rockets, that's cool, we'll certainly sell them. I mean, I don't think they've got anywhere near the funding to buy even one.
1:13:01Elon MuskSo I think therefore it's unrealistic. And I think trying to go to Mars in Dragon is less than ideal because it's at least a. Well, it's kind of. If you go real fast, it's maybe a three month journey and normally it'd be more like a six to eight month journey.
1:13:18Elon MuskThat's a long time to spend in something with the interior volume of an suv. So I'd recommend waiting for the next generation technology. Thank you. Hi, my name is Benson, I'm a recent graduate.
1:13:32Elon MuskI had another space elevator question actually.
1:13:34HostWhat do you think would be the
1:13:35Elon Muskdifference in public perception if instead of building rockets you were building space elevators? How would the promo video have changed? Well, you know, I think it would not work.
1:13:50Elon MuskIt would just be an illustration on a page that doesn't actually have real hardware. That would be the difference. Yeah, I mean, I just don't, I just don't think space elevator is like a very sensible thing, you know.
1:14:04Elon MuskThank you. Hi, I'm Evan, I'm a sophomore. Just a question about the future of the supercharger network. Will renewable energy sources play a big role in the source for that for the network?
1:14:17Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. What we're planning to do over time is go to 100% renewable power generation for our solar supercharged stations. We've sort of temporarily, you know, not added solar power because in the interest of just having national and international coverage that you can drive anywhere in the US, Europe or Asia using superchargers, we haven't constrained that so that every supercharger has to have solar panels.
1:14:47Elon MuskThere are a few that have solar panels, most don't. But in the long term, all of them will either have solar panels or otherwise get their power from renewable sources.
1:14:57Elon MuskAnd in long term, I expect it to be solar panels to a stationary battery pack so that the solar panels can sort of charge the stationary battery pack over the course of the week.
1:15:08Elon MuskAnd then the stationary battery pack can be buffer the energy and release it during peak times. Because what we see with superchargers is huge differences in usage. And you can imagine like when people go away for the weekend, like Friday nights and Saturday nights, Friday and Sunday nights and Sunday nights, huge peak usage.
1:15:27Elon MuskPeople are going somewhere like on a family trip for the weekend, but say, you know, Wednesday at you know, 11:00am, low usage. So you want to have stationary battery pack solar panels.
1:15:43Elon MuskAnd then it could work even if the power grid goes down, you know, so that's like, I think like that would be cool to have something like, even post apocalypse, you know, you can still drive around.
1:15:53Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay, perhaps we can take a couple more if they are quick.
1:15:58Audience MemberHello, my name is Rita, I'm a sophomore in course two, so mechanical engineering. So I'm more of a car buff myself. So. So concerning Tesla, what is your approach to dealing with new companies trying to make it in the EV world like Ativa and others?
1:16:11Audience MemberIs it more of a collaborative approach in terms of sharing technology so we can see more electric vehicles on the roads in the near future or maintaining a competitive edge?
1:16:22Elon MuskWell, I think, you know, given that we open sourced our patents earlier this year, I think we're, you know.
1:16:36Elon MuskYeah, I think that suggests that we're trying to be helpful. So it's certainly, you know, if there's anything that Tesla can do that's helpful and doesn't distract us from making cars, then we're happy to do that.
1:16:54Elon MuskAnd you know, we've also done battery packs and powertrains for Mercedes and for Toyota. Right now the fundamental constraint is on battery production. So we have to solve that constraint in order for there to be any scaling up of electric cars.
1:17:11Elon MuskAnd that's why we've got the gigafactory and you know, and things have to be affordable. Basically people need a compelling and affordable electric vehicle. That is the holy grail.
1:17:23Elon MuskSo that's really what we're, we're trying to get there as fast as we can.
1:17:27Audience MemberFantastic, thank you.
1:17:30Elon MuskHi, so I'm Daniel and I'm a junior at mit. And so here's a decidedly non technical question. So I understand that you have consumed lots of science fiction, literature, films, et cetera.
1:17:43Elon MuskYeah, I mean, this is what you're doing. So I was just wondering what kind of works of art that you've, that you think have contributed to your zeal for a good future for humanity, whether by kind of influencing your fear, like cyberpunk stuff or like making you see something that's awesome like Star Trek or.
1:18:07Elon MuskYeah, sure. Well, I mean, I mean I love technology and so, yeah, I mean, particularly when I was a kid, I just consumed like all science fiction and fantasy, you know, movies, books, anything at all, even if it was like really schlocky.
1:18:26Elon MuskSo. But in terms of sort of key influences, I mean, I certainly like Star Trek because that actually shows like more of a utopian future. Like it's not like things like, aren't horrible in the future.
1:18:42Elon MuskThere's so many bloody post apocalyptic futures. Like, okay, can we have one? That's nice. Just a Few. So I like that about Star Trek and in terms of some sort of key books and movies, I mean, obviously Star wars, like Star wars was the first movie I ever saw, so I think that's going to be fairly influential.
1:19:04Elon MuskLike I never seen a movie in a theater before. It was sort of like. So it was like super great. And. Yeah. And then in terms of books, I mean, Lord of the Rings is probably my favorite book, but it's not really sci fi.
1:19:22Elon MuskIn fact, oddly enough, JRR Tolkien's kind of anti technology, sci fi and fantasy are often like bedfellows. Yeah, yeah, it is, but it's funny. Lord Rings is an awesome book, but it's kind of anti technology.
1:19:37Elon MuskIt's all great. And I think like the foundation series from Asimov is like a really like one of the best ever. And you know, the folks, you know, Arthur C.
1:19:52Elon MuskClark and Heinlein, you know, those are like sort of the probably the three best sci fi authors. And recently somebody was recommending to me that Iain Banks novels as being quick, you know, fairly good.
1:20:06Elon MuskYeah. What, what do you think's good? One of my favorite books is let's see, the Moon is a harsh M M. It's funny she mentioned that. Yeah, I think that's Heinlein's best book, honestly.
1:20:17Elon MuskIt's really fun. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you.
1:20:22Jaime Peraire (moderator)Perhaps we could take the last question.
1:20:31Jaime Peraire (moderator)Our last question.
1:20:33Audience MemberHi, my name is Ellie Simonson. I'm a sophomore here in Core 16. I was just wondering. So I know that NASA is working on the sls, which I believe after a couple iterations or several iterations, they're hoping we'll be able to land on Mars.
1:20:48Audience MemberAnd so I'm wondering if that happens before you guys develop a rocket that can do that. How will that change your focus at SpaceX?
1:21:03Elon MuskWell, I mean, I don't think that, I mean our behavior is going to. We're just going to keep trying to make rocket technology better and better. And I mean, I think the time frame for the sls, you know, sending people to Mars is pretty, pretty far out there.
1:21:25Jaime Peraire (moderator)So.
1:21:26Elon MuskAnd if it does, that's great, but it's really, it's, you know, what we need is a technology system that's capable of sending large numbers of people and cargo to Mars.
1:21:40Elon MuskIt's cool to send, you know, one mission, sure. But that's not the thing that changes humanity's future. The thing that really matters is being able to establish a safety, self sustaining civilization on Mars.
1:21:51Elon MuskAnd for that I don't see anything being done. Except SpaceX, honestly. And that's not to say SpaceX will be successful, but I don't see anyone even trying. So.
1:22:10Jaime Peraire (moderator)Okay, thank you very much.
1:22:39Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you very much for sharing your time and thoughts with us. We love to have you back anytime at mit. Thank you.
1:22:47Elon MuskThank you. Thanks. All right.
1:22:49Jaime Peraire (moderator)Thank you