Elon Musk at the 2020 Mars Society Convention
Transcript
0:10Elon MuskOkay, I think we're here.
0:14Robert ZubrinAre we live, Jim?
0:20Audience MemberYes, Robert, we are live.
0:23Robert ZubrinOkay, well then we're live. So
0:28Audience MemberI would just wait for a moment. Robert.
0:32Robert ZubrinIt's okay, he's here.
0:34Elon MuskHere, right here.
0:35Audience MemberOkay, perfect.
0:37Robert ZubrinOkay, so. Well, Elon, you need no introduction, but for those who don't know, you are the founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX and the Mars Society and we're delighted to have you back.
0:55Robert ZubrinWe've got 9,000 people registered to hear you today.
0:58Elon MuskAll right, cool, Sounds good. Okay, so we should like change this perspective. Let's see if I can change the perspective. Is that better or is that worse?
1:07Robert ZubrinI think you were better before.
1:08Elon MuskOkay,
1:11Robert Zubrinokay, so listen, why don't we just start out with the basics. You started SpaceX to make humanity multi planetary.
1:21Elon MuskYeah.
1:22Robert ZubrinWhy? Do you see that as a critical goal?
1:25Elon MuskYes. I think we want to be on track to become a multi planet species and a space branch civilization in order to find out what the universe is all about, like what you know, and ensure the continuance of consciousness as we know it.
1:41Elon MuskAs far as we know, we're the only life. I mean, people think there's aliens, but honestly I haven't seen any sign of aliens. So as far as we know, we're the only life, whether we could be the only life.
1:53Elon MuskSo let's put it that way. And we need to take the set of actions that are most likely to make the future good and result in the continuance of consciousness as we know it.
2:03Robert ZubrinOkay, so, okay, well obviously your means to that end is to open the space frontier with reusable launch vehicles and you've gone through some partially useful ones and now it's starship.
2:18Robert ZubrinCan you explain basically the line of thinking that led you to the starship design?
2:26Elon MuskI forgot what I need to look at. Just look like I'm looking at the camera. So let's see. Well, on the starship front, we've gone through many iterations, starting from not really knowing how to build rockets at all with Falcon 1 and having four failures actually in reaching orbit.
2:47Elon MuskYeah, sorry, three failures and then the fourth one got to orbit. So fourth one's a charm. So we only barely survived. I was at zero cache basically when we got that fourth one to orbit.
3:00Elon MuskAnd if that fourth one hadn't worked, we would have been curtains. So it's definitely not been smooth sailing. It's been a very difficult ride with just a lot that has been discovered along the way.
3:14Elon MuskI mean, just, just trying to figure out what questions to ask about the Design was, was quite difficult. I think it's helpful to have as the objective the creation of a self sustaining city on Mars.
3:30Elon MuskI think this is, this has to be the objective. Not simply a few people or a base, but a self sustaining city. The acid test really is if these, if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason.
3:48Elon MuskDoes Mars die out for any reason? It could be from any banal, or it could be nuclear Armageddon. Doesn't matter if the ship stopped coming for any reason. Does the city on Mars die out?
4:02Elon MuskIf it does, we have not. We're not in a secure place. So I mean I think this really might come down to, you know, on the great filter front is this, are we going to create a self sustaining city on Mars before or after World War three?
4:22Elon MuskAnd I think the probability of it being created after World War 3, hopefully there's never a World War 3, but after is low. So we should try to create this, make the city self sustaining before any possible World War 3.
4:38Elon MuskThis is just a risk. This is not. You know, I think sometimes people have difficulty dealing with probabilities. It's either this way or that way. But it's really, we just face a series of probabilities and there's some chance that we will have a giant war or a super volcano or you know, a comet might hit the Earth or we might just self extinguish in some.
5:02Elon MuskIt might be more of a, more of a whimper than a bang. And frankly right now civilization's not looking super strong, you know, it's just looking a little rickety right now, to be frank.
5:15Robert ZubrinWould you say that it's more than a lifeboat? That it would actually make civilization more robust, clearly more able to divert asteroids from hitting the Earth and otherwise help?
5:34Elon MuskYeah, it's not, it's not an escape vehicle. It's simply something that it's like you can, I mean unless Mars, Mars is made self sustaining, which will probably not happen in my lifetime, it is certainly not.
5:52Elon MuskIt's meaningless to have an escape,
5:57Audience Memberyou
5:57Elon Muskknow, lifeboat or escape hatch or something if you will, you're simply moving to another place where you will soon die out. That doesn't count so much of a lifeboat really.
6:10Elon MuskSo this is really about minimizing existential risk for civilization as a whole and then having an exciting future that you can look forward to. And a future where we are a spacefaring civilization and multi planet species is far more exciting than one where we are not.
6:33Elon MuskI mean that's an exciting future. And being forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event is depressing and knock on. And we need things that make you want to get out of bed in the morning and be excited about the future.
6:47Elon MuskAnd I think being a spacefaring civilization is one of those things that everyone can get excited about.
6:54Robert ZubrinBut can you maybe just kind of lead people on the path that led you from the design from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, but now Starship is rather different than Falcon Heavy.
7:07Robert ZubrinYes, the engineering,
7:11Elon Muskabsolutely. I didn't quite answer your original question. You first have to say what is the goal? And once you have what is the goal? You can then measure various designs against that goal.
7:24Elon MuskOtherwise you're saying how are you evaluating? Why is one design better than another? What's your goal? It's got to be a goal. So the goal is get enough tonnage to Mars and enough people to make Mars self sustaining as quickly as possible.
7:39Elon MuskSo then you say, okay, let's back, back out the math on this. We're going to need a lot, need a lot of tonnage. Maybe, I don't know, 100,000 tons, maybe a million tons.
7:51Elon MuskSo you can't be faffing around with these expandable rockets. They're a joke, they're absurd. Even Saturn V is tiny potatoes we need. Because if you want to get like let's say first order approximation, a million tons, this surface of Mars inclusive of people, you know that that means probably something around 4 or 5 million useful tons of payload in the, into low Earth orbit.
8:22Elon MuskYou know, for every time you get to low Earth orbit, you're going to get four or five tons, hopefully closer to five. It's, it's, you know, this math is you really start squeezing like tiny percentages.
8:33Elon MuskBut let's say confidently, if you got five tons to low Earth orbit, you can get one ton to Mars, that's, that's confident. Maybe you can get, maybe you only need four.
8:45Elon MuskAnyway, the point is you need 5 million tons into Earth orbit to get 1 million tons to Mars. Now let's put this into perspective. Total global capacity to orbit of all expendable rockets is around 5 or 600 tons, I think.
9:05Elon MuskAnd if you said okay, the world's going to end if you do not increase your capacity, perhaps they could do a thousand tons. Okay, so that's.
9:19Elon Musk1 5000th of what's needed. This is ridiculous. You know, it's, it's not Even, you know, 0.1% would be, you know, 1,000. So way less than 0.1%. We have way less than 0.1% of the capability needed to create a.
9:44Elon MuskIf everyone went full tilt with expendable rockets, experimental rockets are the absolute, are just utterly stupid, in my opinion. Utterly stupid. They're a complete waste of time. People should stop wasting their time.
9:57Elon MuskIf you try to sell an expendable plane, people would laugh you out of the room. If you try to sell an expendable car, they would laugh you out of the room.
10:03Elon MuskIf you try to sell an expendable horse, they would laugh you out of the room and think there's something wrong with you mentally. So all these things are reusable.
10:14Elon MuskIt's essential to be reusable. Now, creating a reusable rocket, orbital rocket is very difficult. Doing a suborbital reusable rocket is easy. Doing a reusable orbital rocket is hard. Even when a lot of smart people have put quite a bit of effort into it.
10:30Elon MuskThey might get 2 or 3% of the liftoff mass to low Earth orbit and a really epic rocket would get four. I'm not sure. I don't think anyone's ever gotten four.
10:43Audience MemberSo.
10:43Elon MuskBut you basically need to have something that in expendable form would probably get about 4% of its payload orbit, such that you can spend about half of that 4% on reusability and still net out to around 2% of payload to orbit.
11:03Elon MuskSo you have to make both the booster and the upper stage and the fairing everything reusable. So with Falcon 1, we did actually attempt to do this. So we had a parachute from the first stage, but really did not appreciate that that first stage was going to hit the atmosphere like a concrete wall.
11:19Elon MuskSo at first I got pretty mad at the parachute supplier until I realized it's not their fault, we were just being fools. That thing was exploding as soon as it hit the atmosphere.
11:31Elon MuskAnd, you know, so you really got to do something to ease the transition into the atmosphere. At high Mach number, it's very hot and there's a lot of force and a lot of heat.
11:45Elon MuskSo then with Falcon 9, we made a bigger rocket. And our scale matters here because you do get basically economies of scale. You can't have a tiny rocket as a tiny rocket, you basically just end up carrying your electronics to orbit.
12:01Elon MuskSo your avionics, you know, so in a little rocket, if you're small enough, just your avionics alone ends up being a significant percentage of your payload. And then, you know, if you had a rocket that was, I don't know, trying to get a 10,000 pound rocket, for example, or even a 10,000 kilogram rocket to orbit, I think you would basically get zero payload.
12:28Elon MuskNow as you get bigger, the rocket gets bigger, but the brain doesn't get bigger. The brain can stay the same size. So your avionics, for example, become Almost, not almost 0% of the weight for a big rocket.
12:44Elon MuskThen for big rockets you also get gauge advantages. So this is, we're really in the nuances of rocket design and manufacturing here. If things are very small, it's difficult to get your gauge accurate.
12:56Elon MuskSo basically how thick is the material? Like you want to do castings, for example, there's a minimum gauge or thickness for a casting. There's a minimum kind of error bar on the, you know, on the material skins.
13:13Elon MuskEven for a composite rocket, you've got, you know, you start getting granularity issues as you get bigger, you know, you're no longer gauge limited and you can get your percentage accuracy on the thickness of walls and castings can be, can be very good.
13:32Elon MuskThese are nuances that I think no one appreciates. But suffice to say that there are advantages to size. And you can certainly see this in many walks of life where if you've got a truck that's carrying cargo, it's more efficient to have a big semi truck, not a bunch of little trucks for ships.
13:52Elon MuskIt would be pretty silly to see container ships or containers going across the ocean one at a time with little outboard motors. That would be silly. You put them on a container ship, you have big ships, not little tiny ships.
14:04Elon MuskSo anyway, so size matters. It really does. And full reusability matters. So with Falcon 9, after immense effort, we were able to achieve reusability of the booster and we're mostly achieving reusability at this point with the fairing as well.
14:26Elon MuskBut this is a, this is a monumental effort. And I think within its architecture, Falcon 9 is close to a local maximum. If you say, you know, gas, generator, cycle, kerosene, oxygen vehicle of this particular size with a 12 foot or 3.6 meter diameter, which is, which is that size for, because of road transport limitations.
15:03Elon MuskSo if you go bigger than that, you can't transport it over the road and your logistics costs become extreme. So having a long thin rocket is not very mass efficient.
15:16Elon MuskYou end up having to have thicker skins to take out the bending moment. So, and having like kerosene is not the right fuel. Methane is a much better fuel.
15:29Elon MuskYou can get higher isp, a specific impulse, basically efficiency. I mean. But for those who, I think probably a lot of us who are listening know what the rocket equation is but in simple terms, it's actually very simple.
15:40Elon MuskIt's like a rocket is going to go further if the gas, if it shoots the gas out of the end faster and if a bigger percentage of its mass is propellant, it's obvious.
15:53Elon MuskSo that's what, that's what the rocket equation says. So should gas out faster in the right direction and increase the propellant, the percentage of propellant that's going to allow you to go further.
16:10Elon MuskWith methane, you can shoot out faster
16:13Robert Zubrinand you can make it on Mars.
16:15Elon MuskYou can make it on Mars for sure. Exactly. So being able to do institute profound development production is very important. So you don't have to carry your return fuel with you or return fuel.
16:30Elon MuskAnd oxygen rockets are mostly oxygen or oxidizer. So. And there's some other subtle advantages with a oxygen methane system in that you can go to a higher percentage, a higher mass ratio of oxygen.
16:49Elon MuskSo with kerosene you'd be at about roughly two and a half to one oxygen to fuel mass ratio. With methane you're more like three and a half to one.
17:00Elon MuskAnd you actually want that higher mass ratio because oxygen is very dense and inexpensive, especially on Earth. So you're gonna, you know, you have all these plants just making oxygen all day long and plankton just making oxygen never do anything.
17:15Elon MuskSo the cost of oxygen is basically the cost of electricity anyway. So going from Falcon, going from, you know, kerosene, which is basically the same as jet fuel, it's like RP1 rocket propellant grade.
17:32Elon MuskKerosene is just a tighter grade of jet fuel. You want to go from that to something which has, where the gas shoots out faster and that's methane and where institute production of propellant is easier.
17:46Elon MuskSo that's why the change from kerosene to methane. Methane is just CH4, it's one carbon, four hydrogens, and then the oxygen pairs together so you have, it's called O2 because oxygen pair bonds and obviously you knew all this stuff.
18:03Elon MuskI'm just basically helping together.
18:08Robert ZubrinLarge size, twice the takeoff thrust of a Saturn V, but about the same payload. But that gives you reusability. Much cheaper in situ propellant. It all is coherent. And so let me ask you the thing that I think everybody wants to know, which is when, when are we going to see starship do a high fly to stratosphere, when to orbit, when first payload to Mars, when first humans to Mars?
18:39Elon MuskAll right, well, it's not like we're obviously venturing into unknown territory. So it's not as though I, I have all these secret dates and I'm just keeping them from people.
18:52Elon MuskSo these are just guesses. Obviously. I'd say I'm 80 to 90% confident that we will reach orbit with Starship next year. I think probably 50 or 60, 50% confident that we'll be able to bring the ship and booster back.
19:11Elon MuskThat's like, that's more of a dicey situation. We'll probably lose a few ships before we really get the atmospheric return and landing right. We might lose. Hopefully we don't lose it.
19:26Elon MuskHopefully we don't lose any boosters because that's a lot of engines. Our initial booster flights will just have maybe two to four engines, not 28, 28 engines. So yeah, and then I think we'll probably be in doing high volume flights, I think probably in 2022.
19:49Elon MuskSo a couple years from now I'm trying to make sure that our rate of innovation increases, it does not decrease. This is really essential. In fact, if we do not see something close to an exponential improvement in our rate of innovation, we will not reach Mars.
20:12Elon MuskLike a pure linear doesn't get there, not well, I'll be dead anyway before it gets there. Because it's purely linear, it's exponential. I think we could get to Mars.
20:24Elon MuskWe could probably send an uncrewed mission there in maybe four years. You know, there's a Mars conjunction every 26 months. There's one this year. So that means in a couple years from now is another one and then four years from now is another one.
20:42Elon MuskI think we've got a fighting chance of making the second MOZ transfer window.
20:50Robert ZubrinSo one thing that is really amazing about SpaceX to those of us who have experience in the aerospace industry, is the rate of innovation. You know, okay, last time you spoke to the Mars society convention was 2012.
21:11Robert ZubrinSince then you've made the Falcon 9 reusable, introduced Falcon Heavy, crew Dragon, a satellite constellation, and you're in the middle of developing starship. So what is your, you know, what would you say is your methodology that allows you to innovate so swiftly?
21:35Elon MuskI don't really know. We're focused on, like I said, it is important to have that, have the objective view. Right. That's why I was talking so much about the importance of making Mars a self sustaining, building a self sustaining city on Mars.
21:53Elon MuskIf that's the objective, then obviously, you know, just putting some satellites in orbit or there's not that that's not important. You have to achieve full and rapid reusability. Emphasize full and rapid reusability is Only relevant to the degree is rapid and complete.
22:11Elon MuskAnd, and then you also have to do orbital refilling. This is essential as well. And, and then propellant production on Mars also essential. So you know, and with that as the goal then you know that that means that that creates I think a good forcing function for radical innovation.
22:37Elon MuskBecause in the absence of radical innovation we have no chance of meeting that goal. Whereas if I go simply, you know, defeat Lockheed and Boeing or something like that, we would probably achieve.
22:52Robert ZubrinYou've already done it.
22:56Elon MuskThat really wasn't even a thing. You know, I wish it was like they're not really trying to do, not even trying to do reusability which is bizarre because they make planes that are reusable.
23:08Elon MuskSo I mean if they, if they talk to, you know, if they talk to one of their customers buys their a Lockheed fighter jet or Boeing aircraft like hey, we're going to sell you a 737.
23:19Elon MuskIt can be used once and it's not 737 Max. But that was, turns out that was a single user plane at times. But you really. It would be an absurd thing for them to sell a single use aircraft but they feel quite comfortable selling a single use rocket anyway.
23:42Elon MuskBut if our goal was simply we're going to have be the leaders in launching the conventional satellites that exist, we would probably approach that on a sort of a logarithmic basis where you get there and you sort of slowly make progress towards doing 10 launches a year, 12 launches a year while they do six or something like that, I don't know.
24:06Elon MuskBut since the goal is hey, we need to make life multi planetary before it's too late and time really matters. So we're our state's. It's like we're shooting for Mars, not just the moon.
24:19Elon MuskIt's not much to shoot for the moon, shoot for Mars and then the, you know, these competitive things are kind of small, they're things along the way. Unless somebody else is shooting from Mars, they will not be competitive with something as pedestrian as launching a few satellites into Earth orbit.
24:37Robert ZubrinSo how can the Mars society help you?
24:41Elon MuskWell, I do think there's. In order to. For there to be a self sustained city on Mars we're going to need an intersection of sets here. One set is the set of people that want to go and can either find sponsorship either or it themselves or find government sponsorship or take out a loan or whatever the case may be.
25:09Elon MuskBut somehow you've got to have the set of people who want to go to Mars and can Come up with a fund somehow to do that. And then I should say there's two sets of desire to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars.
25:23Elon MuskWhen desire to go to the people who want to go to Mars and the people who could afford to go to Mars. When that intersection of sets reaches a million roughly then I think we will have this city on Mars.
25:37Elon MuskSo we need both the motivation and the, you know, we need both the means and the way. It's like.
25:53Elon MuskWe need people to want the will and the way. The will and the way. Yes, exactly, the will and the way where there's a will and the way. But in this case we need will and away.
26:00Elon MuskSo when the will and the way intersect then we will have be a multi planet species. The will and the way must intersect. So I think the Mars society can really help with the will.
26:12Robert ZubrinOkay, you provide the way, we'll provide the will.
26:15Elon MuskYes, exactly.
26:18Robert ZubrinNow your assistant Jen told me earlier that you have a hard cutoff at the half hour. Is that true or do you want to stay and take some questions from the audience?
26:29Elon MuskYeah, we could do maybe five, 10 minutes of questions.
26:32Robert ZubrinAll right, great. So we've got 100 quests. So with the. Jim, do you want to read a question or two?
26:44Audience MemberYeah, sure thing. Hi Elon, my name is James Burke, I'm from Seattle, Washington. Where's the best place to land on Mars, do you think?
26:53Elon MuskYeah, actually I'm not super sure. I can tell you what the criteria are that you'd want, you'd want to be. I think the short answer is mid latitudes, probably on the north.
27:07Elon MuskSo you want to be close to ice. You don't be too, you don't be too far away from the sun so you can get solar power and you want to land at a low altitude so that you can take maximum effect of atmospheric breaking.
27:25Elon MuskWhat do you think?
27:27Audience MemberI like Millis Chasma. It's a nice little area at the bottom of Valles Marineris. The air pressure is high.
27:34Elon MuskOkay, is there a lot of ice there?
27:37Audience MemberThere's ice around there. We'd have to look for it though. Okay, that kind of brings me to my next question and then I'm going to turn it over to Kerry to ask you 1, how would you prioritize like missions like 2 through 10, are you going to focus on exploration or building up the infrastructure or science?
27:57Elon MuskWe're going to, I think the first order of business is build a propellant plant. I mean we can for sure lob out a bunch of droids you know, that's no problem.
28:08Elon MuskI think. Why not? You know, we're going, you know, and probably if anyone wants to put their droid on, we could just take it and you know, it's like, hey, it's basically a remote control car, solar powered remote control car.
28:22Elon MuskAnd we could provide the communication relay. So you know, you could just basically connect to your car from your computer at home and you know, cruise your electric. It could have legs too matter, your robo device car.
28:43Elon MuskThat would be pretty cool. And there's a lot of people worried about like, you know, life contamination. It's like, listen, anything that can survive on Mars is very so freaking tough.
28:55Elon MuskIt's insane that it is cold and there's like a lot of UV radiation and it's not going to be too worried about anything we sent from Earth. Let me put it that way.
29:08Elon MuskIt's tougher than anything on Earth. So. But I think the first order of business is we've got to build a propellant plant to make propellant. And we said we've got a lot of energy, we've got a mine, some ice and we've got, you got CO2 from the atmosphere, from the ice, you got the H2O.
29:33Elon MuskCombine the H2O with the CO2, you get CH4 and O2. But that's a lot of energy and quite hard I think, to make that repellent plant reliable. So, but that's the primary order of business.
29:51Elon MuskAnd then we could also look around and see if we can learn anything from a scientific standpoint.
29:55Audience MemberKerry, do you want to go next? Thank you James. I'm Carrie Fade, I live in Denver, Colorado. Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Musk. We do have a lot of questions from 13, 14 year olds.
30:11Audience MemberI'm just going to pick one and ask you. It's from teenager and her name is Dara and she wants to be an engineer and build starships and robots and her dream is working for SpaceX.
30:23Audience MemberWhat should she focus on to be an engineer?
30:29Elon MuskWell, I think there's all kinds of engineering that's needed. So you don't have to be an aerospace engineer. You could be in electronics, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, it could be software engineer.
30:46Elon MuskI mean there's a lot of engineering, basically almost any kind of engineering. We'll need chemical engineering, I think also for figuring out how to make a good propellant depot or super sleep repellent production plant.
31:00Elon MuskAnd yeah, I think physics in general is a good background for thinking. I just generally recommend people take physics courses because physics has the best tools for critical thinking.
31:15Audience MemberThank you, Milan. James. Yeah, thanks. Kerry, Another question. The Boring company. Now is that just kind of an outfit to build tunneling machines that can work on Mars?
31:29Elon MuskNo, the Boring company actually started as kind of a joke. And a lot of times people would ask me what do I think the opportunities are out there. And for, I don't know, five years or more, I kept saying, can someone please start a tunneling company?
31:46Elon MuskBecause I think tunnels have a lot of opportunity for alleviating traffic in cities and just improving quality of life overall. I mean there's a lot of streets you could turn into parks.
31:57Elon MuskYou certainly wouldn't need parking. You could just park cars on the ground. So. And I just, everyone thought I was joking and I was. And I was like, well, I guess we'll see what it takes to drill a ton, dig a tunnel.
32:09Elon MuskAnd all these like so called traffic experts and like haven't really made much progress. You know, cities like LA and DC are slow. Traffic nightmare. I'm like, okay guys, well if you got such great ideas when, why is this little traffic nightmare?
32:26Elon MuskSo if you build tunnels, you got to go 3D somehow, either underground or above ground, like either air or ground. And the problem with air is like, you know, anything that can carry a person is going to generate a lot of noise and a lot of wind force and could fall in your head and also kind of not be good for privacy and like, you know, sit in your backyard and someone like flying over you is like not that cool.
32:49Elon MuskSo the tunnels are working, all those things. They're also weatherproof, privacy issues and safe anyway, they would make a big difference to traffic. And we have the first production tunnel or useful tunnel in Vegas that's going to open in a month or two.
33:11Elon MuskSo a few months I guess, and hopefully we'll be ready for prime time around the Consumer Electronics Show. So now for Mars. I think tunnels and digging in general is good, but you need to build a very light system compared to what would matter on Earth.
33:31Elon MuskYou don't really care all that much about mass on Earth. You care a lot about mass going to Mars.
33:36Audience MemberIs it fair to say that you're learning some techniques that might apply to Mars with the boring company?
33:43Elon MuskYeah, yeah, probably.
33:46Audience MemberWhen do you think Starship will be able to be demonstrating refueling in low Earth orbit?
33:53Elon MuskI think we got a shot at doing that in 22, about two years.
33:59Audience MemberAnd then when do you guys think you'll have a moonship prototype?
34:10Elon MuskProbably two or three years. As soon as you've Got orbital refilling. You can send significant payload to the moon. Like significant meaning 100 tons of useful payload at a shot.
34:24Audience MemberSo then from there, I think you mentioned Mars is a couple years after that.
34:30Elon MuskIt's only a couple years after that because the Mars transit window is every 26 months. Like I think we maybe have a shot of sending or trying to send something to Mars in three years, but the window is four years away because of the being in different parts of the solar system.
34:50Audience MemberKerry asked a question from a young person I'd like to also ask. Do you have any tips for young people who love Mars but don't know how to help with the settlement of Mars?
35:00Elon MuskWell, I think definitely I, you know, anyone who is a strong advocate for Mars, I think this really makes a difference. You know, a lot of times it's not even.
35:11Elon MuskPeople aren't even thinking about it. And you know, you can talk to people at a party and they, or talk to friends and like it's just not even a topic of conversation.
35:20Elon MuskSo I think it could really help if everyone out there who thinks this is important for the future of humanity and consciousness as a whole, to make it part of what people are thinking about, bring it up at parties and talking to friends and online.
35:34Elon MuskIt's like it should be a thing that we do. And I think it's worth, you know, maybe 1% of our resources at least. And that's not going to fundamentally change, change things, you know, quality of life if we have one.
35:47Elon MuskIf we spend 1% of our resources, you know, much less than healthcare, obviously, maybe probably even less than we spend on cosmetics, frankly, then that would be enough to make lifelong planetary.
36:02Elon MuskBut we really need to make this a thing people talk about at least 1% of the time and that would really matter. As we were talking about earlier, we need the will, which is we need a critical mass of people wanting to make it happen.
36:18Elon MuskAnd then we need the way. And SpaceX is going to try hard to provide the way. And then we, once we show that there's a way, probably there'll be other companies that also try to do it as well.
36:28Elon MuskSo we need the will in the way they can provide either. The will is extremely important, makes a huge difference.
36:38Audience MemberWhat's the coolest part of starship development?
36:43Elon MuskWell, I guess the coolest part of starship development is working with just a great team of engineers and coming up with interesting solutions. I think it's just fundamentally enjoyable if you're working with a lot of good, smart people creatively towards Solutions that have never existed before.
37:05Elon MuskThat's very rewarding. So I guess probably I like that the most.
37:10Audience MemberCan you talk a little bit about how starship could be used for other destinations in the solar system, like Venus and the outer planets?
37:20Elon MuskStarship is definitely a generalized ship. It solves for transport anywhere in the solar system where there is a solid surface to land. So if you can land there, we're going to take there.
37:41Elon MuskWe'll also actually go into the atmosphere of Venus, for example, just like going to orbit and perhaps to the upper atmosphere. Venus's atmosphere is extremely dense, also quite hot.
37:57Elon MuskSo but because that dense atmosphere you could, you could have something, you could have a kind of like a, some sort of turrigible, you know, some kind of like, like things that could float on Venus that could not float on Earth in the atmosphere because of the dense atmosphere.
38:16Elon MuskSo you could go to Venus. I mean, it's not a super friendly place. And then like Mercury is super hot. I think that we could go to Ceres or any of the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter, although quite high radiation around there, and then out to Saturn, you know, eventually getting out to you know, the sort of Kaber belt, Earth cloud and that kind of thing, the outer solar system.
38:46Elon MuskSo starship, once you have propellant depots, you can kind of like plan a pop or moon hop around the solar system. It's not, it's not a vehicle that would enable us to go interstellar, but
38:58Robert Zubrinit's,
39:02Elon Muskthat's a tough one. But we need to make the leap of going to another planet first. Once we are multi planet species, we will create a forcing function for the rapid improvement of spaceflight.
39:16Elon MuskAnd we'll figure out new technologies that will ultimately allow us to go to other star systems.
39:21Robert ZubrinWhat do you look for in the people you hire, especially the engineers, really
39:27Elon Muskjust look for evidence of exceptional ability. So it's not. Or at least aspirationally, like sometimes these things get messed up in recruiting or the recruiting fault of things ends up being wrong.
39:39Elon MuskLike I sometimes wonder with Tesla if Nikola Tesla applied to Tesla, would we even give him an interview? It's not clear. You know, this guy came from like some weird college somewhere in Eastern Europe.
39:52Elon MuskHe's got some odd mannerisms now. We don't know if we should give him an interview. Like, I worry that that's actually what we do. Instead of like, it should be like, man, Nikola Tesla, this kid's super smart.
40:04Elon MuskWhat does he want? We'll pay him anything. That should be the reaction if Nikola Tesla applies, you know, to Tesla, ironically. But so, but I can tell you the intent is we're looking for evidence of exceptional ability.
40:18Elon MuskAnd it really doesn't matter if you went to graduated high school or college or anything. We're just looking for evidence of exceptional ability such that it would be a good predictor for doing exceptional things.
40:28Elon MuskSpaceX.
40:34Robert ZubrinAll right, do you have some more questions from the audience there, Jim?
40:37Audience MemberI've got one. So have you thought about communication networks between Earth and Mars and kind of you're working on Starlink? What about like an Internet around Mars? Have you thought about that?
40:49Elon MuskYeah, I mean, you could certainly do some variants of Starlink. This probably have to be the last question because I've got a bunch of things to pile up. But yeah, you could just do a version of Starlink around Mars and then you just need a big laser coming from Earth, probably want it to be in orbit so it doesn't get atmospheric diffraction or attenuation.
41:11Elon MuskYou want to go from a big laser from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. And then you're going to need some relay stations for when Mars is on the other side of the sun.
41:23Elon MuskSo you can't just shoot a laser through the sun. All right, thank you. Thank you so much, Elon.
41:29Audience MemberWe're all pulling for you.
41:30Elon MuskGood luck. I'd just like thank you to all the people out there that are fighting hard for the course of Mars. There's not that many and we need more.
41:39Elon MuskThank you.
41:40Robert ZubrinThank you.