SpaceX Starship Update at Starbase (March 18, 2024)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:12Elon MuskAll right. It's been an incredible year. The SpaceX team I think is the best space team that has ever been assembled on the face of the earth by far.
0:24Elon MuskAnd the achievements of the past year demonstrate that I think to a degree that is mind blowing. Like what you have achieved over the past year is nothing short of incredible.
0:36Elon MuskAnd one day we will indeed occupy Mars. So let's go through everything that SpaceX has achieved that you've done and it's actually going to take a while by the way.
0:57Elon MuskThis is going to take a minute. So first of all, with Belkin we have achieved the most launches of any rocket in a single year ever. So the next best was the Soviet Soyuz, which I think did a little over 60 launches in a year and we did 96.
1:20Elon MuskSo.
1:25Elon MuskThis, this, yeah. So no other family of orbital class rockets has launched more than 63 times a year. That was Soyuz and we did 50% more. Falcon Heavy also surpassed in terms of heavy lift vehicles the record for Saturn V, which I think that yeah, we, with five launches last year we exceeded the Saturn V record.
1:45Elon MuskSo that was like pretty incredible. And Falcon Heavy. So this gives you a sense in pictures of how incredible that was. You know, for a while there I was like, when I was like, I'd be posting something, is this like the launch that just happened or the one that is happening or like because there were like three launches that happened in the space of a few days.
2:07Elon MuskSo but this is all the launches on one page and yeah, so it's really, really incredible. All made it to orbit, all landed. So just a huge hand for the Falcon team.
2:21Elon MuskThat was incredible. So,
2:30Elon MuskAnd two thirds of the missions were Starlink, but a third were for other customers, for NASA, for other communication satellites. So it was a combination of our of Starlink plus a lot of other missions.
2:50Elon MuskSo even if you just take the non Starlink portion of the flights, that was more than any other vehicle. Last year by a long shot. We launched NASA's Psyche, ESA's Euclid, the X37B space plane, multiple transporter missions, we launched missions for OneWeb, ViaSat, and we're actually on contract to launch Amazon's Kuiper Constellation.
3:16Elon MuskAnd we treat everyone fairly. So you know, just one. And we managed to do 19 flights on a single Falcon 9 booster, which is really incredible in three and a half years.
3:31Elon MuskSo and that vehicle did that booster, did 860 satellites and delivered 260 metric tons to orbit. So it's like wow. So there's a lot of wows. And it's worth, you know, like how long ago was it that we landed a booster?
3:54Elon MuskIt was actually eight years ago in December, roughly eight years ago. And since that time we've landed 260 times. So 260 landings, just like wow. I mean there were a lot of people that said that it couldn't be done.
4:12Elon MuskAnd then there were a lot of people that said even if it could be done, it's gonna, it's a dumb idea that, no, that it wouldn't, it wouldn't pay off, that it wouldn't, you know, wouldn't make sense.
4:22Elon MuskBut we've shown that in fact it is absolutely the right idea. Reusability is the key to a great future in space. It's essential. We need reusability for truck, it's just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses.
4:39Elon MuskObviously reusability is essential. And the fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi planet species is, is a full and rapidly, basically rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
4:54Elon MuskSo like space pirate.
8:28Elon MuskSo it's, I mean it's incredible how much has happened in eight years. So you know, I wonder what will things be like eight years from now? Now hopefully we have, I think we will have landed on Mars and I think we will have sent people to the moon and maybe if we get lucky, we will have sent people to Mars within eight years.
8:54Elon MuskYou know the, you know the key question sort of, I think about for civilization is the key test perhaps for civilization is do we make it through the spermy great filter of going from a one planet civilization to a multi planet civilization?
9:18Elon MuskAnd if we do become a multi planet civilization, we may go out there to other star systems and discover many long dead one planet civilizations. And we don't want to be one of them.
9:29Elon MuskThat's lame. We don't want to blame one planet civilizations, but I think we should always regard civilization as fragile, as not something that, not a situation where there is an inevitable upward trajectory.
9:46Elon MuskI mean I read a lot about history and if you look at, if you read history, you see that civilizations are anything but permanent. That many civilizations have risen and fallen over the years, over the centuries and millennia, and.
10:04Elon MuskEventually the sun will expand, boil the oceans and destroy all life on earth. Now admittedly that's you know, several hundred million years in the future, but it's only about maybe 10 or 20% of the existence of Earth itself.
10:23Elon MuskIf Earth is four and a half billion years old, then another 10, 10, 20% longer and life wouldn't, or intelligent life would not have evolved because it's taken us a long time to get to this point.
10:38Elon MuskSo that's really the key test. Do we become a self sustaining, multi planet civilization.
10:51Elon MuskWhile civilization still exists, or don't we? I think that's really the key question.
11:02Elon MuskI think we've got a good chance, but it's not a sure thing.
11:09Elon MuskThat's why time is of the essence. I think we want to make Mars self sustaining as quickly as possible. It's not just a question of getting people to Mars, but it's getting enough tonnage and equipment to Mars to make, enable Mars to be self sustaining.
11:27Elon MuskThe key test being that if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, do we, does Mars die out or does it continue? That's the, that's the really the fundamental threshold to pass the, the Fermi paradox.
11:44Elon MuskGreat Filter. The Fermi paradox is where are the aliens? You know, if life is common, if intelligent life is common, shouldn't we see a lot of evidence of it?
11:52Elon MuskNow I get asked a lot about, you know, aliens actually, and I usually say I am one. Well, actually I used to be, according to, you know, Homeland Security, it said alien registration card.
12:07Elon MuskLiterally. I was like, okay, so. But the truth is I actually have not seen any evidence of aliens, which I think is maybe a bit more troubling than if I had.
12:24Elon MuskI have not seen any and I'd be on it and I can pretty much guarantee that I would post about it instantly. Okay. I was like, yep, we got one.
12:38Elon MuskThis is a spaceship for sure. But I have not seen anything. So that leads me to think that we're more likely to be a tiny candle of consciousness in a vast emptiness, a vast darkness.
12:53Elon MuskYou know, that the civilization that we have is really just this very, very small candle in a vast darkness. And we just must do everything possible to ensure that that candle does not go out.
13:04Elon MuskYeah, anyway, I think we can do it. So, you know, but we need to move fast because you just never know. I mean there could be, you know, at any given point there's a, like Stephen Hawking actually, I believe, said that he thought there was like roughly a 1% chance in any given century of civilization ending.
13:26Elon MuskThat was his rough estimate. I think it actually might be higher than that. So we just want to go there fast. So this is the getting Back to Falcon 9 back to reality.
13:38Elon MuskThis is, these are all the launches we've done. And you can see how the cadence of launches has rapidly increased over time.
13:53Elon MuskI think people online have actually assembled videos showing every launch and it just gets like crazy fast as you get to 2023. So yeah, so we've, and we've done a 19, 3 flight.
14:08Elon MuskWe're now qualifying Falcon 9 to be able to do 40 flights and we're aiming for maybe as much as 150 flights this year. So. And then let's not forget fairing recovery, because actually a lot of people don't realize we recover the fairing as well.
14:25Elon MuskThis was actually very difficult to recover the fairing, so that's an immense amount of effort. But we now quite regularly recover the fairing and we've reflown fairings 300 times.
14:38Elon MuskSo congrats to the fairing recovery team. That was actually pretty damn hard.
14:51Elon MuskOh, and then of course we do operate basically a small navy. I think people don't always know that, but we have, you know, drone ships and support ships of various kinds.
15:04Elon MuskSo we've got a small fleet of ships and we operate them very efficiently. People also sometimes don't know the size. Like you can see the size of the ship by the person walking around on it.
15:20Elon MuskIt's not small, so it looks cool. I like this sort of kind of a Darth Vader aesthetic, but it's. I like it.
15:32Elon MuskSo. And, and we're also getting much better with the pad turnaround. We achieved a three day pad turnaround and I think we're aiming to hopefully, I think, get under 24 hours pad turnaround by the end of this year.
15:47Elon MuskSo in terms of. Yeah. Launch rate. Yeah. So it's been 15 years since Flight 1 of Falcon 1. I'm sorry, Flight 4 of Falcon 1, the first one to reach orbit.
16:00Elon MuskSo 15 years since we've got anything at all to orbit. Yeah. And now we're aiming to have 150 flights or thereabouts this year. So. And these are big rockets at this point.
16:18Elon MuskFalcon 1 is a little rocket. In fact, when I see Falcon 1 right now, I was like, man, I think I'd probably tuck that under my arm, just take it home with me, you know, it was like launch it in the backyard or something.
16:27Elon MuskIt looks so cute. But at the time, Falcon 1 did seem like extremely, it was extremely difficult. It took us four flights to reach orbit and it did seem kind of big at the time, but now it's like adorable thing.
16:43Elon MuskSo. Yeah. So I think the most profound metric or the metric that really describes the magnitude of what SpaceX achieved in 2023 is the master orbit number. So. And you can See that, the incredible change just year over year.
17:05Elon MuskSo 2021, we're slightly below rest of world 22 we I think roughly doubled what the rest of the world did. And last year we were 80% of all master orbit.
17:18Elon MuskSo when rest of the world we mean like the rest of US industry, you know, Europe, India, China, Japan, everyone. So there's not a lot of industries where a company is doing like 80% of everything.
17:36Elon MuskAnd then what's really mind boggling is that number should increase by 50% this year. So I guess on the order of like 90% of all mass to orbit, not counting starship.
17:51Elon MuskSo if we start, as we start launching starship, Starship is like roughly 100 tons to orbit. With every flight there's a path to getting starship to do over 200 tons with full reusability to 200 tons to useful orbit with full reusability.
18:08Elon MuskAnd yeah, it's really an incredible amount. 1200 tons of useful load to orbit last year. Yeah, that's just astounding. So I think that really deserves a round of applause.
18:24Elon MuskWow. I mean that's the most mind blowing.
18:33Elon MuskAnd the rate of increase is just astonishing. Now these numbers will actually look very small in the future. In order to build a city on Mars, we'll need to be kind of in the million ton to orbit range.
18:51Elon MuskSo maybe a little higher, ideally a little higher. But sort of if you just try to get things to the right order of magnitude, like not trying to get to the exact number, but try to get the order of magnitude right, I think it's roughly a million tons to Earth orbit.
19:10Elon MuskThat'll get you roughly 200,000 tons to the surface of Mars. So roughly approximately 20% of whatever you get to Earth orbit, you can get to the surface of Mars.
19:22Elon MuskSo and figure like maybe we need at least a million tons of useful load to the surface of Mars for this, for it to become self sustaining. That self sustaining threshold is actually a very tough threshold to meet because even if you're missing a tiny thing, then eventually that Mars will die out.
19:44Elon MuskSo you've got to be able to not just build for example, computer chips, but you need to be able to build computer chip factories. Because you can't build computer chip factories.
19:56Elon MuskThe factory that you do build will eventually break down and then you will have no chips and then you're. That's it. So it's kind of like a long sea voyage where if you're just missing vitamin C.
20:08Elon MuskYeah. You'll cruise on for a while. But then you know Your teeth will fall out and you'll die. So that was a real problem in old days. So anyway it's quite a high threshold and like Mars is, Mars is a fixer upper of a planet, you know, needs some work but so it's not like you can just run around outdoors and like you know, fish or live off the land, you know you can't live off the land on Mars.
20:43Elon MuskSo it's really quite a lot of work that's required to make that work. So Dragon an amazing amount of progress with Dragon and an incredible track record of success.
20:58Elon MuskSo by as of last year the Dragon's fleet time on orbit exceeded the space shuttle fleet. So we had a cumulative 1300 over 1300 days of time on orbit as of last year.
21:14Elon MuskSo that's pretty mind boggling that Dragon has now had more days in orbit than the entire space shuttle fleet. It's like wow. So yeah and we've had now Dragon has visited the space station more times than the space shuttle as well.
21:33Elon MuskThis is an incredible, incredible achievement by the Dragon team. So once again.
21:43Elon MuskAs I was saying this really has been an incredible 2023 was like maybe the best year in the company's history. I mean it was the best year in the company's history actually.
21:52Elon MuskSo there's a lot of great things to go through. So and I'm not one who gives out false praise so it's really mind boggling what, what you've achieved. So all of the missions last year used a flight proven Dragon.
22:12Elon MuskSo these were all, these are all these Dragons had all flown before and this year we're looking to fly maybe seven or eight Dragon missions. So it's really been yeah fantastic success by the Dragon team.
22:32Elon MuskThis doesn't have audio, there's no sound in space.
22:50Elon MuskYeah, it's a great, that's a great looking spacesuit and in Dragon interior.
23:02Elon MuskSo yeah so We've now sent 42 humans to orbit to be precise. Space is relatively easy but orbit is very difficult. So We've now taken 42 humans to orbit and back.
23:17Elon MuskAnd I have to say like.
23:22Elon MuskYeah, if there's one thing I wish for it is that we bring them all back safely. That's like some of us feel like say what is the one thing you wish for?
23:31Elon MuskI said I wish we bring this astronauts back safely. That is one thing. If I had one wish that's what it would be.
23:42Elon MuskSo we also have now completed a second crew arm in in Florida. So we've got two towers that are capable of two launch Pads that are capable of sending astronauts to, to orbit.
23:56Elon MuskAnd this is going to be great for being able to shift missions between Pad 40 and Pad 39A. We've got this year our first spacewalk. And so we've got to redesign the suit so that you can actually move around in it and you don't just like, you know, pop out like, because if you just inflate the suit, you know, you just basically, you know, you're kind of like one of those like balloons at a party or something, you know.
24:29Elon MuskSo it's quite hard to make the, to still be mobile in an inflated suit and have the joints move and stuff. And, and then we will actually evacuate the whole spacecraft.
24:42Elon MuskSo everyone, even those that don't go on the spacewalk will still be in vacuum. So obviously very important that it work. You know, we don't have like a little hole in the suit or something go flipping around.
25:00Elon MuskSo. But I think, you know, obviously we're going to put a lot of testing into this and, but this is going to be another significant milestone, which is to have a suit where you can be in like the vacuum of space with just nothing, nothing at all, and just be out there.
25:17Elon MuskIt's hard to, it's actually hard to conceive the concept of nothingness. And it's not technically nothing like the small number of particles per cubic meter, but it's pretty damn close to nothing.
25:32Elon MuskYou know, if you lose too much, too much air, too much oxygen, that's it. There's no place to get oxygen from. So like an airplane, even at high altitude, can increase the pressurization pumps and get more atmosphere from.
25:51Elon MuskBecause it's in the atmosphere, Dragon springs an oxygen leak and that oxygen leak is too significant. There is no place to get oxygen. You're just going to die. So the requirements for getting everything perfect are insane.
26:08Elon MuskIt's, everything's got to be absolutely perfect to work. I mean, we did not, you know, evolve to live in space, obviously, so it's a tough one. But this is, this is really going to be another great milestone is to actually have, be able to have someone floating out there, you know, in the vacuum of space and come back.
26:40Elon MuskAnd we do want to actually have, we want to have a spacesuit that you can walk around in, because if you're on the moon, you're on, you want to be able to walk around on the moon, walk around on Mars.
26:49Elon MuskSo having a high mobility spacesuit that actually isn't crazy expensive ideally, and that you can walk around in comfortably is A big deal. It's actually an important thing that needs to be developed and ultimately made in large numbers because if we send say a million people to Mars, then that's a million spacesuits or a million Mars suits that you need.
27:12Elon MuskSo we'll have to make a lot of these things. And we're also going to launch Starlink on that flight. So then coming to Starlink, this is, this is only a whole separate company, but we're basically building, rebuilding the Internet in space, which is pretty wild.
27:33Elon MuskAnd now it is, I want to emphasize supplemental to the terrestrial Internet. Sometimes people think, well, is Starlink just going to take over and destroy all the terrestrial Internet?
27:42Elon MuskIt definitely will not. But what it will do is Starlink will give access to the Internet to people that either don't have access or where their access is extremely expensive or very, very bad access.
27:56Elon MuskSo this is a massive enabler for improving and enabling people in remote locations to learn anything. Like you can basically learn almost anything for free on the Internet right now.
28:09Elon MuskLike for example, MIT has all of its lessons on YouTube. You can, you can learn almost anything if you've got an Internet connection. But if you don't have an Internet connection, you're limited to I guess, book, you know what, maybe you got some books or something.
28:22Elon MuskBut not, it's, it's a, basically Starlink is a game changer for improving people's quality of life around the world. Like it's, this might be the single, well certainly one of the, I think it might be the number one over time technology that improves people's standard of living around the world.
28:40Elon MuskIt's certainly a candidate for potentially being the most profound thing that actually improves quality of life for people around the world. Which would be really something to be proud of obviously.
28:54Elon MuskSo let's see. And we're now introducing the V2 minis. So this next generation satellites that we've introducing the Constellation. And yeah, these are twice, twice the capacity of last year.
29:10Elon MuskSo from 88 terabits per second to 165. And our goal, the biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds.
29:27Elon MuskSo that would, that actually makes for immediacy of, for actually the quality of Internet experience. This is actually a really big deal. Also if you play video games like I sometimes do, this is also important, otherwise you lose.
29:43Elon MuskSo, so this is anyway, so that's actually a very, very hard problem. But because we're a low Earth orbit constellation, the speed of light, it Is what do you think the speed of light is?
29:58Elon Musk300 kilometers per millisecond. So if we're at 550 kilometers, they go like roughly 2 milliseconds up, 2 milliseconds down. So if you go up down, up down, it's 8 milliseconds.
30:08Elon MuskSpeed of light limitation. And then almost everything else we can actually address. Like we can't go faster than the speed of light yet, you know, but probably ever. But we can get the rest of the time I think below 10 milliseconds.
30:32Elon MuskAnd so then basically it'll be more responsive than ground Internet in most cases, which is really what we're after here. So, yeah, this is really amazing work. We also have now launched the argon hole thrusters, which are very low cost, and use argon, which is plentiful.
30:55Elon MuskSo we've gone from using krypton, which is not that rare. I mean, if Superman did come here, it'd be like, get some krypton, you know, squirt gun or something like that.
31:06Elon MuskOkay, now what? So Krypton is a noble gas. That is, it's moderately rare, but we would actually be using a huge percentage of the world's Krypton if we were launching that with the Gen 2 satellites.
31:22Elon MuskAnd so we moved to argonne. And argon is actually extremely plentiful. In fact, right now you are breathing approximately 1% Argon. So Argon is, there's a lot of argon and.
31:37Elon MuskBut this is really the, I think the first significant argon whole thruster and certainly by far the most cost efficient and most power efficient. And it was a really great job by the Starlink team to create this thruster and many other upgrades to the.
31:55Elon MuskThen there's the in space laser stuff. I mean, so this is by far, I think we've now sent at least 1,000 times more data, maybe 10,000 times more data over laser links in space than any other system before.
32:13Elon MuskI think we'll soon be like a million times more data transferred, maybe more than that, through the Starlink laser interconnects between the satellites. So we now have 9,000 active space lasers.
32:30Elon MuskSo sort of vaguely reminds me of Dr. Evil, you know, lasers from space, actually. Well, I guess I made that joke a long time ago. It's like Dragon does have lidar.
32:42Elon MuskIt has like a laser for, you know, docking with the space station. So it's like dragons with lasers. I mean, like, it'd be better than shocks with lasers. And each link, each laser link is capable of 100 gigabits per second and we're looking to increase that.
33:05Elon MuskSo let's see, this is an animation of all the places where Starlink is active.
33:16Elon MuskSo obviously a lot of the Starlink activations depend on country approvals. So as we are able to get a country approval then you see rapid adoption within a country and hopefully we'll get most countries, most, the rest of the countries will get the approval hopefully this year and we'll be able to go almost worldwide.
33:39Elon MuskSome countries are probably unlikely to approve our system, but most, most countries we think we should be able to get to. So and our goal this year is to activate service in more than half of the world's population.
33:55Elon MuskSo that would be fantastic. But I do want to emphasize, because we are going to put this presentation online, that Starlink is supplemental to terrestrial Internet. It does not replace it.
34:12Elon MuskStarlink, it does really well for like low population density areas, but it is really not going to be competitive in high density cities or it's really low density situations, which is really where the need is.
34:31Elon MuskSo anyway, works well with other Internet providers is what I'm saying.
34:42Elon MuskThen we've got community gateways. I'm told this is a town called Unalaska in Alaska, so that's a real place. So we're putting a lot more gateways down. As we increase the number of gateways, that improves latency.
34:59Elon MuskSo we've now shipped our next gen hardware That's a version 4 of the user terminal. So that allows us to lower the cost of Starlink. And we'll be introducing the Starlink mini later this year which can fit in a backpack.
35:17Elon MuskSo that'll be pretty cool for anyone who wants a very affordable Starlink. And then we just opened our Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas. So that's just a little, you know, about 20 minutes away from Austin.
35:33Elon MuskAnd this is, this is going to be. Yeah, I guess some of you guys are part of that. Yeah. In general we're going to have like a massive round of applause for Starlink.
35:46Elon MuskThat is for sure because it's like the achievement level there is amazing actually. Let's just have a massive round of applause like God damn. Yeah, sorry, it's hard to clap on this thing.
36:02Elon MuskYeah, the Starling achievements are really mind blowing. So it's like the Starlink system is an anomaly in the matrix. And then we also just recently launched our first direct to cell satellites and we were able to send text messages directly from a phone to the satellite and then back down again.
36:29Elon MuskSo we did intentionally misspell these things, by the way. So although actually when I first saw it, I was like, is this real? It turns out it is in fact real.
36:42Elon MuskThis is. Yeah, some dogecoin jokes, basically. So, yeah, anyway, so it's kind of amazing that you can actually close the link between a phone in your hand and a satellite that's hundreds of miles away.
37:01Elon MuskAnd the satellite can hear the tiny signal that your phone is outputting, which is like such a faint whisper. It's ridiculous, but it can actually somehow hear that faint whisper and be able to communicate with a phone is.
37:17Elon MuskI think it's one of those things like I was that actually physically possible, but it is now. I do want to emphasize this is also not a competitor to phone companies.
37:33Elon MuskThis is something that will be supplemental. So it's going to be very helpful for remote areas where there's no cell connectivity or once in a while within a city.
37:43Elon MuskIf there is a place that has no connectivity within a city, then Starlink will be able to communicate with phones. But it's. I think it's something on the order of 7 Mbps within a cell.
37:59Elon MuskAnd the cells are sort of hundreds of square miles or kilometers in size. So it's really, it's good for, you know, text messages. You could technically do video if you're the only one, or if there's only a few people in that cell.
38:15Elon MuskLike if you're in the middle of Pacific or something like that, then. But it is something that is going to be very helpful and will, I think, save lives of people.
38:24Elon MuskYou know, if somebody sort of hiking in a remote region and they get lost, well, now their phone could actually work. And I think it will actually save a lot of lives, which is cool.
38:35Elon MuskSo.
38:41Elon MuskAnd then we have seven announced partnerships. So we've got T Mobile in the us, Rogers in Canada, Optus in Australia, one New Zealand, SALT in Switzerland, KDI in Japan, and intel in Chile and Peru.
38:57Elon MuskSo. And we expect to announce a number of other telco partnerships this year. So this is definitely something where we're again in partnership with telcos. I just basically don't want telcos to get really mad at us.
39:09Elon MuskWhat I'm saying, you know, we want to support the telcos and then of course.
39:27Elon MuskThis is slowed down a little, so. But that first launch did take a. Take a while to get off the pad. A bit worried there for a second. It.
40:01Elon MuskI mean, when that took off, I was like, wow, I can't believe it took off. That was my reaction.
40:45Elon MuskSo I think it's Incredible that we took off twice last year.
40:56Elon MuskI mean, even though I've been very, you know, closely, you know, involved with the Stasher program from the beginning. And actually I lived out here, this is my primary residence for three years.
41:10Elon MuskThis used to be a sandbar, basically what we're looking at here. And now it's got an advanced rocket factory and a gigantic launch pad. And we got a whole bunch of rockets out there.
41:25Elon MuskBut I still amazed that it actually got put together and took off. I'm like, wow. I mean, the starship is more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V.
41:39Elon MuskIt is by far the biggest flying object ever made. And, you know, with some upgrades down the road, it'll actually be, I think, probably over 20 million pounds of thrust.
41:53Elon MuskAnd Saturn V is seven and a half. So it'll end up being three times the thrust of Saturn V.
42:03Elon MuskAnd it's going to fly a lot. It has to fly a lot. So it's going to end up flying several times a day from many different locations in the world.
42:15Elon MuskAnd I think there's a pretty good chance that it does Earth to Earth transport as well, because the fastest way to get from one place to another on Earth is, you know, to get from here to the other side of Earth is an intercontinental ballistic missile.
42:28Elon MuskBut just make sure you delete the nuke and add the landing part. Basically, it's the fastest way to get somewhere.
42:40Elon MuskYeah. Wow. And then between flight one and two, we made a number of massive upgrades. So the. It was obviously a massive upgrade to the launch pad. So we've got like many Niagara Falls here.
43:00Elon MuskI mean, the water pressure is so much that if it went straight up, it would actually destroy the rocket. That's how much water pressure it is. So it's like, wow.
43:10Elon MuskAnd it worked, like actually went and looked at. One of the first things I went and looked at after the second launch was to check out the launch pad because obviously after the first launch we dug a pretty big hole.
43:23Elon MuskAnd honestly it looked like you could just. It looked like there was no damage at all. Like you could just launch again, basically at full the pad itself. So it's great work by the team to radically improve the launch pad overnight.
43:39Elon MuskYeah,
43:49Elon MuskPeople always like want to use the Statue of Liberty for stuff. Statue of Liberty is not that big. I was like, I was like, been there. I actually climbed up the Statue of Liberty in the tiny staircase long time ago.
44:00Elon MuskBut anyway, this is a big rocket and it will get bigger over time. So, yeah,
44:15Elon MuskSo that's. I don't know if you guys watched Kong vs Godzilla, it's like one of the most insane movies I've ever seen. But it's, like, kind of entertaining in its sheer madness.
44:27Elon MuskAnd the crazy thing is that our launch tower is bigger than Mechazilla, and it's going to do basically, like, the same thing, but with the arms, you know, like, catch the rocket.
44:38Elon MuskAnd when I tell people, like, yeah, we're going to catch the largest flying object ever with giant mechanical arms, they're like, there's no way that's real. I mean, we could give it legs, too.
44:53Elon MuskJust give it legs and have it tromp around. That'd be pretty cool. So, and then we're also going to build a second tower.
45:12Elon MuskSo we're going to really be launching a lot, and we're going to be upgrading one tower while we launch from another tower. So two towers is important. There are actually so many upgrades between flight one and two that it would actually take, like, hours to go through them all.
45:30Elon MuskBut one of the biggest upgrades was going from hydraulic to electric actuation of the engines. So that actually saved a lot of mass and complexity. So, yeah, the electric tvc, I mean, it.
45:46Elon MuskIt was just. This is one of the biggest upgrades. We also massively upgraded the heat shield. The engines themselves were massively upgraded. Literally everything on the rocket was like.
45:56Elon MuskThere might have been thousands of upgrades between flight one and two. So really gigantic improvement between flight one and two. And also obviously many improvements between flight two and three.
46:07Elon MuskAnd then we've got a whole development plan to, like I said, ultimately get to a fully reusable rocket that does over 200 tons orbit on a regular basis. Full reusability.
46:22Elon MuskYeah, hot staging.
46:31Elon MuskI mean, hot staging was a change that was basically, I don't know, just really within a space of like three or four months, maybe less, going from. Or roughly that.
46:43Elon MuskGoing from previously just kind of like separating the rocket without anything and to. To actually lighting the upper stage engines while the first stage engines are still thrusting and not blowing up the ship, which is.
47:03Elon MuskThat is an amazing achievement. So I was like, wow, that's. And it worked. So I was like, wow. So then let's look at light two.
49:07Elon MuskSo, yeah, big round of applause, guys. Wow.
49:18Elon MuskSo Flight 2 actually almost made it to orbit. So in fact, ironically, if it had a payload, it would have made it to orbit because the reason that it actually didn't quite make to orbit was we vented the liquid oxygen, and the liquid oxygen ultimately led to fire and an explosion because we wanted to vent the liquid oxygen, because we normally wouldn't have that liquid oxygen if we had a payload.
49:44Elon MuskSo ironically if it had a payload it would have reached orbit. And so I think we've got a really good shot of reaching orbit with Flight three. And then a rapid cadence to achieve full and rapid reusability.
49:59Elon MuskAnd I mean kind of the mind blowing thing is like there is an actual path that we are on to make life multi planetary. Can you friggin believe that?
50:10Elon MuskLike what?
50:19Elon MuskYeah, we just got to get it done before civilization ends. But I think it's going to happen. Yeah, right here. So anyway, so in terms of getting there, we obviously want to accelerate the production and testing, get to a high cadence, you know, for any given technology development.
50:43Elon MuskThere it is, you know, how many iterations do you have and what is the amount of time between each iteration? So every time we launch we learn, every time we launch or do a test we learn something more.
50:56Elon MuskSo increasing that cadence of launching and testing. And it's always better to sacrifice hardware rather than sacrifice time. Like time is the true, the one true currency. So it's sort of the fastest path to, as I was saying earlier, rapidly, rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.
51:22Elon MuskYeah, so and we've got, yeah a block, sort of a version 2 ship that will be more reliable, better performance endurance. We've got a version 3 ship design that will stretch that be even taller.
51:39Elon MuskProbably end up being, I don't know, 140 meters before it's all said and done. Maybe 150 in the end in length. So yeah, so it'll be even taller than it currently is.
52:01Elon MuskYeah. And so with Flight 1 the goal was not to blow the pad up and ideally get some distance, which we did with Flight two. It was to get past staging.
52:13Elon MuskSo we achieved the goal of getting past staging and almost to orbit. And then Flight 3 we've got, well we want to get to orbit and we want to do an in space engine burn from the header tank and prove the that we can reliably deorbit.
52:32Elon MuskWe want to do a tipping point header domain propellant transfer. This is important for the NASA Artemis program. And we want to also demonstrate the payload door for the sort of PEZ dispenser for delivering The Starlink, the V2 non mini actually probably, I guess V3 technically, but really the really giant satellites to orbit.
53:03Elon MuskYeah, so like I said, the mass orbit ultimately of starship will be, you know, over time, I think millions of tons of payload to orbit. So it's, I mean compared to present day Master orbit.
53:25Elon MuskIt'll be more than, more than a thousand times, I mean, you know, more than a thousand times greater than master orbit currently. That's what it will be eventually or needs to be.
53:44Elon MuskSo we also want to demonstrate on orbit refilling. This is very important for the NASA Artemis program. So we're very proud to be part of the NASA Artemis program.
53:54Elon MuskI'm always incredibly grateful to NASA for their support and for trusting us to do. To take astronauts to orbit, to take cargo to the space station, and to be an integral part of getting astronauts back to the moon.
54:12Elon MuskOne of the other questions I get a lot is, did we really go to the moon? I've gotten that from a lot of people and I'm like, yes, we went to the moon more than once, in fact.
54:22Elon MuskBut the crazy thing is that it's been over half a century since we last went to the moon. So,
54:33Elon MuskYou know, I think maybe that's what caused people to be skeptical. Like, how come we can't go to the moon now? It was 66 years from the first controlled powered flight of the wright brothers in 1903 to landing on the moon in 69.
54:53Elon MuskOnly 66 years. But you know, like 50 years have passed since we last went to the moon. But now we're going to go back there and we're going to go back there soon.
55:05Elon MuskAnd we're not going to go just I think, like we want. The next step, I think, is to build a moon base like Moon Base Alpha. Make Sci fi real, remove the fire part of sci fi.
55:19Elon MuskSo, but now, but in order to go and land on the moon, one of the technical challenges we have to solve is orbital refilling, where we dock the starships, dock on orbit and transfer propellant.
55:35Elon MuskNow, we've gotten very good at docking because we dock with Dragon to the space station, which is actually more complicated than docking with our own spacecraft. So we have a lot of expertise in docking.
55:46Elon MuskSo I'm confident we will solve this. And we just ideally want to solve it hopefully by the end of this year, but certainly by, by next year. And that's a big deal.
55:58Elon MuskThis is one of the fundamental technologies that's necessary to build a city on Mars and to have a Mars, a moon base. And then, yeah, we'll also be launching some very big satellites.
56:18Elon MuskWorld's biggest peasants venture.
56:25Elon MuskAnd we do hope to do this by the end of this year. And then, yeah, more about the NASA human landing system. So, as I said, we're extremely grateful to NASA for entrusting us With a fundamental part of the Artemis program, we want to make sure we do a great job for NASA and really the like.
56:48Elon MuskWe are a very fundamental part of the Artemis program. So if we do not succeed, which we will, but in order for the Artemis program to succeed, we must succeed with Starship.
57:03Elon MuskAnd like I said, we actually want to far exceed what NASA has asked us to do. So we want to go far beyond the NASA requirements and actually be able to put enough payload on the moon with enough frequency that you could actually have a permanently occupied moon base.
57:24Elon MuskThat's the next really big threshold from Apollo is have an actual moon base. I remember seeing this like, I guess kind of cheesy sci fi show a long time ago called Moon Base Alpha.
57:37Elon MuskI don't know if anybody's seen that, but like the moon actually drifts away from Earth. Now this is not going to happen, but it was a cool show, Moon Base Alpha.
57:49Elon MuskBut we need a real Moon Base Alpha and we're going to do it. So then, yeah, as I was saying, the, this is the long term goal. This is what we want Mars to look like is starships coming and going.
58:05Elon MuskAn incredible beautiful Mars city and a flourishing civilization on Mars. And ultimately we can transform Mars into an Earth like planet with terraforming. Just needs to be warmed up really.
58:25Elon MuskAnd then you could, it could be ultimately an Earth like planet and we could bring the life from Earth. We could extend life from Earth to Mars. And really it has to be, you know, has to be humans actually.
58:40Elon MuskYeah, because not going to be the dolphins. So. But we can bring, we can bring all the creatures with us and we can ensure that life on Earth continues on Mars even after Earth becomes unlivable in the distant future.