SATELLITE 2020 Keynote
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (7)
Transcript
0:00AnnouncerLadies and gentlemen, welcome to our satellite 2020 opening day keynote sponsored by Maxar. Please take your seats. The program is about to begin.
0:11Elon MuskLadies and gentlemen, a message from our session sponsor, maxar.
0:22AnnouncerFor two decades, government and commercial organizations have relied on Maxar satellite imagery to map, monitor and provide Earth intelligence at a global scale. Today, Maxar operates the world's most sophisticated commercial imaging constellation.
0:37AnnouncerBut to help customers keep pace with rapid change around the world, we are excited to introduce Worldview Legion, our next generation high resolution Earth imaging constellation. Designed and built in house, Worldview Legion will fly in both sun synchronous and mid inclination orbits to dramatically increase Maxar's revisit over the most rapidly changing regions on Earth.
1:00AnnouncerIt will triple our high resolution 30 centimeter coverage and overall imaging capacity, allowing Maxar to capture many areas up to 15 times in a single day. This enables Maxar to better support applications that require current and accurate Earth intelligence.
1:15AnnouncerWith frequent updates on changing ground conditions for enhanced monitoring foundational in national security and military operations, accurate mapping a key component on the road to autonomous vehicle technology and expedited access to post event coverage critical in the wake of natural disasters.
1:33AnnouncerWith Worldview Legion, Maxar is shaping the future of what's possible, changing the way we detect, understand and address change. The next era in Earth intelligence begins at launch.
1:48Elon MuskSa.
2:14Elon MuskSam.
3:03Elon MuskAll right.
3:03Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Hi everybody. Welcome to Satellite 2020.
3:13Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Sorry, we got off to a late start. DC traffic is a killer. But my name is Jeffrey Hill, I'm the conference chair and I'm here with Elon Musk, chief engineer and founder of SpaceX.
3:22Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Elon, thank you so much for being with us.
3:24Elon MuskThanks. Thanks for having me. I GUESS it was 11 years ago that we met.
3:28AnnouncerYeah.
3:29Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And when we met 11 years ago, we were talking about Falcon 1, Falcon 9 at the time. And when I asked you what's the point of all this? You said, to send human beings back into space on a US built rocket from a US built facility so that we could permanently resettle other planets.
3:46Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And here we are. We're right on the brink here of sending humans back into space. The crew Dragon is in Cape Canaveral. How do you feel that you're on the doorstep here?
3:58Elon MuskYeah, it's great that we're about to launch people to orbit. It's been a long time.
4:06Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Long road.
4:07Elon Musk18 years.
4:09Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Yeah.
4:10Elon MuskKid could be in college by now.
4:13Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Is it like sending your kid off to college?
4:16Elon MuskWell, we haven't done it yet, but it's a long time.
4:20Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)You're packing. You're packing the bags you're ready to go. Can you talk about the, talk about the road from the space shuttle to the crew Dragon? Talk about the.
4:34Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)What are some of the challenges that you faced in creating a human rated space spacecraft for human spaceflight? What were some of the challenges that you encountered along the way?
4:49Elon MuskWell, the thing that concerns me most right now is that unless we improve our rate of innovation dramatically, then there is no chance of a base on the moon or a city on Mars.
4:58Elon MuskNot I'll be. Yeah, this is my biggest concern.
5:07Elon MuskCrew Dragon was, we've already taken it to the space station and back. A lot of people aren't aware of that. We just had like a, basically a dummy, you know, so.
5:20Elon MuskAnd it's just what then We've done massive amount of testing, you know, pushing all the corner cases and just a truly ridiculous amount of testing. It's like definitely hat is off to the Dragon engineers and supporting team at NASA for going through a truly staggering number of tests.
5:47Elon MuskNow that said, Dragon really is just a low Earth orbit transport vehicle. It's really just, it's capable of taking a few people at what is still a very high cost to Earth orbit.
6:07Elon MuskTechnically we could send people around the moon on Dragon, but I'm not sure we'd want to. It's due to too small. So it's good to get this done. But it's, I think we need to be very careful of getting stuck in a local maximum.
6:29Elon MuskAnd you know, the space shuttle was something that was really stuck in a local maximum for a long time. And yeah, we don't want to be that situation. I mean, frankly, why is, why does Soyuz still fly?
6:47Elon MuskI mean Karlev is probably turning in his grave right now.
6:51Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Right, interesting.
6:52Elon MuskIt's an interesting question. It was designed in the 50s.
6:54Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Yeah, right, right.
6:57Elon MuskIf you told them, if you told Karlev and the other guys that they'd still be, we'd still be flying Soyuz in 2020, they'd be like, that's crazy. Yeah, we are.
7:07Elon MuskSo we don't want to be that situation. You know, it's a solid vehicle. It's just like it's time to move on.
7:12Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Right, right. And so we, you know, I know we started late. I sourced a lot of these questions from the public in the audience. We're also going to do a Q and A here.
7:22Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So I'm just going to jump right into the questions that we received. So I mean the most popular question we got was like, what are the greatest challenges or the biggest challenges we face expanding our presence in space?
7:33Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And exploring and eventually resettling new worlds.
7:39Elon MuskThere's really just one thing that matters, that is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. That's the one thing that matters. And it needs to be reasonably big or your payload to non payload ratio will be kind of whacked.
8:02Elon MuskYou know, won't be good. So just like you wouldn't want a super tanker growing like you when you, you know, container ships, you have a container ship with thousands of containers.
8:14Elon MuskYou don't, you know, have like a bunch of tiny ships with little outboards on them cruising across the Pacific. That would be silly. So you have big ships when you want to go long distances with cirrus cargo.
8:27Elon MuskSo we need a fairly big but definitely rapidly and completely reusable rocket. This is the fundamental thing. Without that we're going nowhere.
8:37Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And what level of reusability is SpaceX actively pursuing for Falcon 9, for Dragon, for Starship?
8:50Elon MuskI think Falcon 9 and Dragon have, they're asymptoting their technology architecture is asymptoting meaning like it really would not make sense to have a block six Falcon nine. You know, from where we are right now, it just doesn't make sense.
9:12Elon MuskThat's why we have a big focus in terms of new technology development on Starship for Falcon. And Falcon and Dragon are kind of like operational vehicles at this point.
9:24Elon MuskSo they're good products, they're operational, but there's not really. We need a whole new architecture and that's what Starship is about. And Starship needs to be fully and completely reusable and rapidly.
9:43Elon MuskSo I mean it's, it's being designed for about an hour to be relaunched an hour after landing with, with zero nominal work. Like you could have scheduled maintenance or you could have like something like a spork issue, just like commercial aircraft.
10:04Elon MuskBut you're expected, the only thing you expect to change on a regular basis is propellant and it's got to be fast. So now for the ship, you've got to wait unless you're launching duties from the equator.
10:24Elon MuskYou've got to have figure out some way to get the ship orbital ground track to pass over the landing site, otherwise you're too far away. So the ship, maybe it might take, you know, three orbits, four orbits maybe to get back over the, the launch site.
10:48Elon MuskBut I think we want to aim for a capability of three flights a day for the ship.
10:55Audience MemberWow.
10:56Elon MuskMost of which is taken up with getting the orbital ground track to come over the launch site and then an hour for everything else.
11:07Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And you know, everybody's Interested in the mission to Mars. Planetary resettlement. When talking about reusability for the launch vehicle, what are your thoughts on in space resource utilization? Utilization, for example, water, oxygen, soil from the moon, perhaps, maybe to go to Mars.
11:27Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Do you have any plans to utilize resources in space for the mission to Mars?
11:35Elon MuskNope. I mean, apart from orbital refilling, I think that's very important. So you've got to. So there's one example. Besides a fully and fully and rapidly reusable rocket, you need to also have orbital refilling or retanking.
11:55Elon MuskThat's got to be. That's fundamental because then you can essentially recoup all of your mass fraction Delta V in Earth orbit. You can leave with full tanks and it could be.
12:12Elon MuskCould be from low Earth orbit or something that's maybe elliptical or something like that. If you want to go higher energy. But that's crucial for getting to Mars. The moon is neither here nor there.
12:25Elon MuskI mean, using the moon would be like, okay, if you want to cross the Atlantic, maybe you want to go to Iceland. Probably not, but to visit, sure. But it's not like an mandatory setup, you know.
12:42Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And also for the mission to Mars, what advancements. We talk a lot about hardware and physics problems. And what about advancements in software? You know, the reason I bring this up recently.
12:57Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Are you familiar with the game designer Jonathan Blow? He referenced you in a keynote he was given and he said that you had talked about technology naturally decays because skills naturally fade.
13:12Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)And one of the things he identified was a decay in software. Degradation in software. Is this something we have to address in doing something like going to Mars, since all of this stuff runs on software?
13:27Elon MuskWell, software is an increasing part. Part of any piece of technology. I mean, Tesla, the car is extremely configurable. It's basically like a laptop on wheels. So software matters enormously there.
13:43Elon MuskAnd really, for example, for full autonomy, the only gating factor is software. The hardware is all there. That's required and has been for last couple years. Well, the final piece of hardware was upgrading the computer to have more compute power.
14:03Elon MuskSo software is extremely important. The point you're alluding to, which is that you know I was referring to is technology does not automatically improve, right? People are used to the phone being better every year and I'm an iPhone user.
14:23Elon MuskBut I think like some of the recent software updates have been like, not great. Certainly feeding it to that point, it like broke my email system. Like, what the.
14:31Elon MuskThis is like quite fundamental. So yeah, there sure is a lot of software out there. And some of it's like the people that wrote it or retired or maybe dead, you know.
14:48Elon MuskSo like now how do you fix it? It's gonna be an issue. We definitely need a lot more smart people working software and not just troubleshooting old problems, not just troubleshoot shooting old problems.
15:02Elon MuskIt's actually very important to retire old code bases and not just maintain them forever because the difficulty of maintaining them becomes extremely high at a certain point. You just gotta redo the code base.
15:17Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So we'll come back to the Mars mission because I know we've got some audience questions on that. You know, we're at a satellite conference. So I'm gonna ask you some questions about satellites.
15:26Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Starlink, what's the long term vision for Starlink? How do you see the role of Starlink as it relates to mobile broadband and 5G?
15:39Elon MuskSure. So I mean the whole purpose of SpaceX is really to help make life multi planetary and then, but the revenue potential of launching, launching satellites, servicing the space station, whatnot, that's, you know, taps out around $3 billion a year.
16:01Elon MuskBut I think providing broadband is more like an order of magnitude more than that. Probably 30 billion a year as a rough approximation. And we're still like probably below 5% at that point.
16:14Elon MuskSo it's not like I want to be clear like some, like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear. It is not, in fact it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with cell radio stations with cell towers.
16:41Elon Musk5G is great for high density situations like being here in D.C. or New York, San Francisco, that kind of thing. 5G is great for high density situations, but it's actually not great for the countryside.
16:55Elon MuskYou know, for rural areas. It's, it's not, it's not great. You need, you need range and so any, any kind of sparse environment, 5G is, is really not, not well suited, but it's great, great for, in it, for, for city density situations.
17:12Elon MuskSo Starlink will effectively serve the, I don't know, 3 or 4% hardest to reach customers for telcos or people who simply have no connectivity right now or the connectivity is really bad.
17:27Elon MuskSo I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos.
17:35Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Okay. And I was, I was going to ask you what customers, you know, were ideally suited for Starlink, but I guess since you mentioned that it would be, it would be these three to four at the very, at the very edge.
17:49Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)What is the customer experience like then for those people and what's the cost of acquiring the services?
17:58Elon MuskWell, it will be truly a good experience because it'll be very low latency and we're Targeting latency below 20 milliseconds so somebody could play a fast response video game at a competitive level.
18:14Elon MuskLike that's the threshold for the latency. So then. And bandwidth. Bandwidth is a very complex question, but let's just say somebody will be able to watch high def movies, play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed.
18:38Elon MuskRight. And then the challenge for anything that is space based is that the size of the cell is gigantic. So like I said, it's great for very low to maybe medium sort of sparsity situations, but it's not good for high density situations.
19:03Elon MuskWe'll have some small number of customers in la, but we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough.
19:14Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)What does the equipment on the ground look like for this?
19:19Elon MuskSo the ground equipment just looks like. Well like I said, it looks like a little. Looks like a UFO on a stick. So at least the version one of the user terminal will actually have actuators on it so that it can improve the pointing accuracy so you don't have to.
19:38Elon MuskIt's very important that you don't need a specialist to install. The goal is that the instructions on the box will. There's just two instructions and they can be done in either order.
19:53Elon MuskPoint at sky, plug in. We do it either order sequence doesn't matter and it will work. Plug and play literally. But also point at sky can't see the satellites.
20:10Elon MuskIf you can't see the satellites, it can't see you.
20:15Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Just wanted to talk about just some of the design concerns that were raised by astronomers. Can you talk about a little bit about how you working, maybe working with astronomers to alleviate these concerns?
20:26Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Or are you working on the design or altering it or are the concerns overblown? I mean how do you feel about what has been raised?
20:40Elon MuskI am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. So you're not launching them? We'll take corrective action if it's above zero.
20:56Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So you're not giving like Orion a hat or anything like that.
21:00Elon MuskEverything's no, I mean there's a lot of people get a little excited because when the satellites are first launched that they're tumbling a little bit. So they're like they're kind of like they're going to blink because they haven't stabilized.
21:16Elon MuskAnd then. And they're raising their orbit so they're lower than you'd expect. And they're kind of necessarily going to reflect in ways that is not the case when they're on orbit.
21:26Elon MuskBut now that the satellites are on orbit, I'd be impressed if somebody could actually tell me where all of them are. I've not met someone who can tell me where all of them are.
21:40Elon MuskNot even one person. Interesting. So, I mean, it can't be that big of a deal.
21:50Elon MuskWe are taking. We are actually working with senior members of the science community and senior astronomers to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites. So, you know, and we're running a bunch of experiments to, for example, just have a.
22:16Elon MuskPaint the phased array antenna black instead of white. And we're working on a sun shade because there are like certain angles where if the sun gets just right and there's not like a little sunshade, we're not talking about a lot here, then you can get a reflection.
22:43Elon MuskAnd so we're launching sunshade, changing the color of the satellites and otherwise minimizing the potential for any impact. Even like as the astronomy. Aesthetically, this should not be an impact.
23:00Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)I think recently Gwen Shotwell in Bloomberg was quoted as saying that you were exploring splitting Starlink from SpaceX. Could you talk a little bit about that, why that would happen and how you see both of these independent companies functioning and just talk a little bit about that.
23:22Elon MuskWe're thinking about that. Zero.
23:25Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)We're thinking about that.
23:25Audience MemberWhat?
23:25Elon MuskZero.
23:26Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Zero.
23:28Elon MuskZero.
23:29Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Not thinking about it at all.
23:30Elon MuskWe need to make the thing work. It's far from obvious that. I mean, it's real important to just set the stage here for LEO Communications constellations. Guess how many LEO constellations didn't go bankrupt?
23:50Elon MuskZero. Right? Zero. It. Iridium is doing okay now, but the Iridium one went bankrupt. Orbcom went bankrupt. Globalstar, Bankrupt. Teladisic, bankrupt. Am I leaving anyone out? There's a bunch of others that didn't get very far.
24:12Elon MuskThey also went bankrupt. Anyway. They all went bankrupt.
24:15Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So you're focusing on making it work first.
24:17Elon MuskNot bankrupt.
24:19Audience MemberRight.
24:19Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)I'm not gonna.
24:21Elon MuskThat would be a big step. Let's have like more than zero in the not bankrupt category.
24:28Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)How would you, I mean, with. How does it work then with the business of SpaceX, since you're like, I mean, you are launching other constellations. Is that an issue?
24:38Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Does that cause like a conflict or.
24:41Elon MuskWe're launching other Constellations.
24:42Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Oh, you're launching other satellites?
24:44Elon MuskOh, yeah, sure, whatever. Yeah, no problem. Of course.
24:49Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So there's no like, you know, we're
24:51Elon Muskeven giving them a good deal, by the way, like, no problem. You only launch constellation on SpaceX. Sounds good to me. So, I mean, I think, you know, I think there's.
25:02Elon MuskThe world seems to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth. So we're certainly happy to launch other satellites. And you know, we don't think Starlink is going to destroy all other satellites or something like that, or.
25:14Elon MuskDefinitely not. All right. Yeah, we always want to be in the not bankrupt category. That's our goal.
25:24Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Since you're, since you're now the company of SpaceX now, you know, you're building and launching satellites, are you, are you looking at expanding the business of SpaceX and other areas of commercial satellite connectivity?
25:36Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Maybe. Like we talked a little bit about the, you know, you're already building like technology on the ground. Are there other areas that you're looking to get into in terms of commercial space connectivity or satellite services?
25:50Elon MuskNo, we already, there's just, there's two major new technology programs at SpaceX. That's Starlink and Starship. Well, it kind of has Star in the name of it too much.
26:02Elon MuskMaybe we should call it like Link and Ship. If you divide the one by the other, the stars net out and then it's just Link and chimp. But that's it as far as I know, anyway.
26:15Elon MuskSome secret project that's so secret I don't know about it.
26:18Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)You have a business under the chair.
26:22Elon MuskI don't think there's anything major,
26:26Announcerso
26:27Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)I want to give time for people in the audience to ask some questions. But we talked about Starship, so development at Boca Chica is moving along pretty quickly.
26:38Elon MuskYeah, actually that was the real reason I was late, because I was at Boca Chica. My apologies. I was just working on Starship with the team there. So it's pretty cool out there, actually.
26:47Elon MuskI like it.
26:49Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Tell us a little bit about the work that's underway, what we can expect in the future for Starship.
26:55Elon MuskWell, we're building a production line. Production line is the hard part. You know, making one of something is. Well, at this point, you know, like, frankly, designing rockets is not that hard, especially if it's an expandable rocket.
27:11Elon MuskIt's not, not really a hard problem. You can literally read books that'll you tell you exactly how to do it. The hard part is now actually building that thing even once is hard.
27:24Elon MuskThen building a Production line is a thousand percent harder. Like at least a thousand percent harder, maybe more so just in general production and manufacturing is underappreciated I think especially in the U.S.
27:42Elon Muskfrankly. So we should really pay a lot more attention and care a lot more about manufacturing. This is, yeah, this is an honest day's work, let me tell you.
28:00Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Also what inspired some of the design aesthetics of the spacecraft. It's stainless steel. It's striking design for a spacecraft. What inspired your vision for the way it looks, the way it functions?
28:15Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Like why stainless steel? Why?
28:22Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Well,
28:24Elon Muskwe were going to make it out of advanced composites and the advanced composites that cost like $60 a pound or $60 a kilogram, like a little more than that, maybe $130 a pound.
28:39Elon MuskAnd there was 60 to 120 plies for the, the tank. It was taking forever. We weren't making good progress. Cost crazy money. And I was like okay, switching to aluminum.
28:54Elon MuskLithium is also a pain in the neck. We do that. That's we use for the Falcon 9 tanks because it's hard to weld because of the reactivity of the lithium.
29:02Elon MuskSo you know what's easy to weld? Steel. Steel is really easy to weld. And stainless steel doesn't even require paint. That sounds great because the paint drops a pain in the neck.
29:16Elon MuskAnd you want to try painting something that's got to go to drop to cryogenic temperatures and then bend a lot. It's like forget it. I mean that paint wants to come off like there's no tomorrow.
29:27Elon MuskIt does not like to stick. So then you could use special paint and then the special paint also can't get like when you're going vertically at like supersonic, you get basically static electricity buildup called triboelectrification.
29:45Elon MuskAlthough it reminds me of the trouble of troubles. But you can basically zap yourself if you have paint that the wrong paint. So anyway, no paint is great. We need a friggin big ass paint shop for starship.
30:05Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)One less problem to think about.
30:06Elon MuskOne less problem. And paint doesn't weigh zero. They used to paint the shuttle external tank white. But the like. Well we're adding a lot of weight to this thing and it's big pain in the neck so we'll just have it stay orange.
30:24Elon MuskSo just not painting it is great. So then you know, and we're not the first to use steel like they used 301 in the early Atlas program. Charlie Bossert, I think it was, I think it was his idea.
30:40Elon MuskObviously other people involved, but Charlie Bassett, by the way, that guy is underappreciated. He kicks ass. It's really great to read about his stuff. He's awesome. So here's 301.
30:53Elon MuskSo obviously it's not a new alloy. I think we're going to start switching to a different alloy pretty soon and then just tweak the alloy constituents because we should be able to do better in 2020 than they did in like the 50s, you know, so, I mean, come on.
31:12Elon MuskSo I think we'll probably start switching away from 301 maybe in the next month or two. Now the funny thing is that, like, I actually knew that steel, especially 301 full hard steel, couldn't be that heavy because original Atlas had a very good mass fraction, right?
31:34Elon MuskSo it can't be that wrong or bad. And if you look at the normal sort of standard material sheet for 301, it will usually not tell you what that it work hardens dramatically and improves the strength dramatically.
31:52Elon MuskWith work hardening and also at cryogenic temperature temperatures, it improves strength dramatically. So then if you combine the work hardening with the cryo strength improvement, you get an effective strength to weight that is about the same as advanced composite.
32:16Elon MuskNow, people will generally make a mistake with composites because they'll look at the material sheet and not realize that, okay, with comparison composites, you've got to have a big knockdown because you basically have.
32:26Elon MuskComposites are string and glue. And so you get. And you can't just like have like, let's say your problem caused for having four pliers of carbon. You can't just have four pliers, you need like five or six because in case you damage one or something like that and you say what's your worst case allowable for?
32:49Elon MuskOr a D bond or something like that. So the actual knockdown you end up taking for composites is more than you would for a metal structure. So people often.
32:57Elon MuskSo it's like a classic newbie mistake is to overrate carbon fiber because you just, you look at the material data sheet and it looks like an obvious move, but it's not.
33:12Elon MuskSo anyway. So at cryogenic temperatures, the steel has a de facto strength weight about the same as advanced composite. But that doesn't even counting the fact that you have to paint the composite, you don't have to paint the steel.
33:29Elon MuskThen there's another factor which is if you want to have a reusable vehicle, it's going to get hot. Composites don't like getting hot. So typically your composite maybe is comfortable up to around 150, 200 Celsius, something like that, you know, and things start getting pretty sketchy around 250C.
33:56Elon MuskI mean, like, you start having to use advanced resins and all that kind of thing. So whereas steel's pretty happy at 1000C, you know, and no problem at 5, 500, consider it 500C all day and brief periods of 1000C.
34:12Elon MuskNo problem. So then for a reusable vehicle, you now need zero heat shielding on the leeward side. Normally you need some heat shielding just due to radiative heating on the back, so you don't have a lot of convective heating at hypersonic, but you have radiative heating.
34:33Elon MuskAnd then you can thin out the windward side of the heat shield, because the thickness of the heat shield tile is driven by the temperature on the backside of the tile where it mounts the primary structure.
34:49Elon MuskSo if your primary structure can take a high heat, that means you can thin out the tile. So think of it like these, like oven mitts or something. You know, if you have like, how hot can your hand go and that's how thick your oven mitt is, Right?
35:07Elon MuskSo then you can have, like I said, no, no heat shield on the leeward side on it and a thin heat shield on the windward side. So now your actual total mass of a steel, of a reasonable steel spacecraft is less than that of the most advanced coast carbon fiber vehicle you could possibly imagine.
35:28Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Yeah.
35:29Elon MuskWow. This happened by accident, by the way. This may sound like some great insight, but it actually happened because we were moving too slowly on composite and I was like, we cannot move this slowly or we'll go bankrupt.
35:41Elon MuskSo just do this with steel.
35:45Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So, yeah, I mean, the design has to be focused on problem solving, otherwise you're going to spend too much time trying to.
35:51Elon MuskYou don't start with a. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, sort of taking to management by rhyming. If the schedule is long, your design is wrong. Right, Very true.
36:05Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Good point.
36:06Elon MuskYes.
36:07Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)With that, I want to go to some audience questions. We asked the audience through the app to submit us questions, so I believe we have a few that we've pulled here.
36:17Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)So we've got some over here. Can we. And can you come closer over here so we can see you? All right, our first question.
36:30Elon MuskHello, I'm Jayden Zundal. I'm a graduate student at Stanford. My question for you is, as you look back on your career in the space industry, what has been the most surprising or unexpected challenge that you faced?
36:41Elon MuskAnd along those lines if you were to go back in time and talk to your 20 year old self, would you do anything differently?
36:48Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Go back in time to your 20 year old self?
36:52Elon MuskI mean, I think I'd. If I get, I think it would make far fewer mistakes obviously if I could go like, here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do, please do not do them, wouldn't we all.
37:04Elon MuskThat'd be a very long list. And like here, let me write it down or something. You know, I mean hindsight's 20 20, so it's hard to say. I mean a number of.
37:17Elon MuskI've made so many foolish mistakes I lost count, honestly.
37:27Elon MuskI mean some of these things I just wish I like that's simple sort of mantra management by rhyming. I mean it works for Homer. Okay, management wire rhyming is that thing.
37:44Elon MuskI was saying if the schedule's long, the design is wrong. We've overcomplicated the design many times.
37:55Elon MuskAnd I think we should have just gone with a simpler design. With the as a test be being, how long will it take for this to fly? And if it's going to take a long time, don't do it, do something else.
38:13Elon MuskIf you look at say Falcon 9, it's got an aluminum lithium tank, but then the unpressurized structures are carbon fiber composite. And really one of the worst possible things you could do to a joint is take something with a high coefficient of thermal expansion, high cte, put it, take it from room temperature to cryo, and then connect it to something that has zero cte, you know, basically zero, like carbon fiber.
38:50Elon MuskSo now you've got a real pain in the ass joint basically, right? So in order for that to work, you've got to, the tank's got to shrink radially and you've got these super expensive heavy bolts that are like a beam and bending across that are then taking load into the interstage and they desperately want to shear off or snap off.
39:21Elon MuskThis is crazy. You know, really you should just have a continuous metal structure that, that's obvious that should be done. That'd be way better. You know, things expand to fully available resources.
39:38Elon MuskSo then like sometimes you should say no to things that you, that you don't, you know, like the original Falcon 1 team which did the fairing, tanks, engines, everything pretty much was maybe a little over 100 people.
39:55Elon MuskOkay. Now SpaceX is like 6,000 people, I think something like that. So really just simplify your product as much as possible,
40:17Elon MuskYou know. And then like if I think of some of the ways in which. How does a smart engineer make dumb mistakes? Including, you know, is optimize something that shouldn't exist.
40:30Elon MuskDon't optimize something that shouldn't exist. But people are trained to do this in college. You can't say no to the professional. You know, the professor's going to give you the exam and you've got to answer all the questions or they will get angry and give you a bad grade.
40:47Elon MuskSo then you always optimize the. You always answer the question. A lot of the times you say this is the wrong question, right? In fact, the question is definitely wrong to some degree.
41:00Elon MuskJust how wrong? And I think just generally taking the approach that your design is some degree wrong, probably a lot more than you think your goal is to make it less wrong over time.
41:16Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Do we have a. Let's go to another question.
41:26Audience MemberHi, My name is Julie Seven Sage and Mr. Musk, you have said in the past that you think that college degrees shouldn't be that important. And that has been shown in job listings in places such as Tesla.
41:40Audience MemberHowever, in places like this industry, including even at SpaceX in the satellite development area, many of the job listings say that you need at least a bachelor's degree and prefer at least a master's degree.
41:55Audience MemberSo my question to you is, with more jobs asking for higher levels of degrees, the scholarships are not changing amounts and that it's getting harder and harder every year to pay tuition even with using scholarships.
42:11Audience MemberHow can colleges and industries make it easier to afford college, but at the same time being able to pay grad students and employees. Employees well, and also to make sure that there is a large scale access to good colleges, especially to underprivileged communities, so that everyone can be a part of the future we're building.
42:33Audience MemberThank you.
42:35Elon MuskWell, first of all, you don't need college to learn stuff, okay? Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free. It is not a question of learning.
42:49Elon MuskThere is a value that colleges have, which is like seeing whether somebody's. Can somebody work hard at something, including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments and kind of soldier through and get it done.
43:09Elon MuskYou know, that's like the main value of college. And then also, you know, probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce.
43:23Elon MuskSo I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.
43:32Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)There it is. I know we started Late. And I know we don't have much time left, but to build on Julie's question here, how does somebody like you with a very long term mission going to Mars?
43:44Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)How are you cultivating the next generation of leadership to take you there? Because I mean this is, this is a long term project. We might not be around to see us finally resettle on Mars or maybe.
43:57Elon MuskNo, I mean, I hope I'm not dead by the time people go to Mars. That would be a great, a great outcome. I think I might be, you know, if we don't improve our pace of progress, I'm definitely, you know, going to be dead before we go to Mars.
44:12Elon MuskSo I'm just like, would like to not be dead when, by the time we go to Mars. That's my aspiration here. So if it's taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people to orbit, we better improve our rate of innovation or you know, based on past trends, I'm definitely going to be dead before Mars.
44:38Elon MuskSo we're going to improve our pace of innovation a lot. So yeah,
44:49Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)I guess what I would say is I can tell you can see. How do you communicate that vision you have to that to somebody who could maybe take over for what you're doing and to see things the way you're seeing them in terms of the mission?
45:03Elon MuskWell, we have a lot of good people at SpaceX that, a lot of really talented people. In fact, I wonder like sometimes how we can make use of their talents in the best way because I think we're often not using their talents in the best way.
45:29Elon MuskYeah, but you know, to the point of the question I was just asked, I want to make sure Tesla Recruiting does not have anything that says requires university because that's absurd.
45:40Elon MuskBut there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability. Like you just can't. If you try to do something exceptional, they must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.
45:53Elon MuskIn fact, ideally you dropped out and did something. I mean, obviously, you know, look at like, you know, Gates is a pretty smart guy. He dropped out. Dove is pretty smart.
46:06Elon MuskHe dropped out. You know, Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out. Like obviously not needed. Did Shakespeare even go to college? Probably not.
46:19Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Well, thank you so much. I wish we could take more audience questions. I know we have a hard stop, but thank you Elon for stopping by.
46:26Elon MuskThank you.
46:27Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Let's give him a round of applause for stopping by and speaking to us. Enjoy the rest of your evening and.
46:38Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)Thank you very much.