SpaceX Elon Musk Technical Talk on manufacturing, launch and AI satellites at scale (June 8th, 2026)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (6)
Transcript
0:00ModeratorAll right, well hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out. I got Elon and Ian Dahl with our Starlink team, figured we'd check in. It's been a typical Space X year.
0:09ModeratorLaunched a brand new vehicle, acquired xai, now Space X. I announced a terror sized chip building project.
0:18Elon MuskAnd so yeah, never a dull moment.
0:20ModeratorYeah, never a dull moment, typical year. And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multi planetary. Starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI SAT stuff.
0:34ModeratorIt's kind of start galaxy sized and bring people in with the Kardashev scale.
0:40Elon MuskWhat's the big picture?
0:41ModeratorWhat's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale?
0:45Elon MuskLike how do you decide what progress the civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species say visiting us would calibrate how, how much progress we've made as a civilization.
1:05Elon MuskAnd one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that is any given civilization has been able to harness. And there was a Russian physicist actually by the name of Kardashev who thought about this and it's good, I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is you can have, you can, you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet.
1:38Elon MuskThat's type one. And then type two would be how much of the stars power are you harnessing? And then type 3 would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing?
1:51Elon MuskThese are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now we're very low on the Kardashev 1 scale. Like if you say like what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing?
2:07Elon MuskIt's a very, very tiny number. And basically we're harnessing almost nothing of our, our star's power. So the sun is truly an immense thing. It is. It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is.
2:27Elon MuskBut this gives you sort of a sense of scale.
2:29ModeratorYeah, it's, it's, it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.
2:35Elon MuskVery big difficulty jump. Yes. And level three, and we don't even know how to do level three. Really, we'll get. Yeah, yeah, exactly. AI will figure it out. Yes.
2:43Elon MuskOne way to appreciate the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system.
2:51Elon MuskSo the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system, it's everything. And then of the remaining 1, you know, 0.14% most of that is Jupiter 1 planet.
3:07ModeratorSo we're still lightweight.
3:10Elon MuskYes. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category where we're like, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun.
3:20ModeratorBut how much energy are we talking like coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth?
3:28Elon MuskIt feels like, yeah, the incident solar energy on the cross section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's power output. And the vast majority of that we cannot use because 70% of Earth is water.
3:46Elon MuskTechnically our planet should be called water because there is 70% water. And I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they calling it Earth when it is mostly water?
3:56ModeratorWe're the Greenlands, not green of the gala of the solar system.
4:01Elon MuskYeah, a bunch of the even we're 70% water and 30% less land. A bunch of it is, you know, Antarctica or you know, Siberia type of thing. Very northern Canada type of thing.
4:17Elon MuskVery difficult to not, not places people typically want to live. And you're not going to get a lot of solar power in the, at the poles. So the actual usable area of land that where you can get solar power is quite small anyway.
4:32Elon MuskIn order to ascend the Kardashev scale, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to say a millionth of the power output of the sun, you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million.
4:58Elon MuskSo we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. And a trillion is a million times a million. So, so basically there's, we're basically practically nowhere on, on the sort of the Kardashev 2 scale.
5:15Elon MuskPractically nowhere.
5:16ModeratorSo on Kardashev scale we're all still non existent.
5:21Ian Dahl (Starlink)We're not registered.
5:22Elon MuskWe're like not a, you know, we're not even. Yeah, we're not registering not even a Microsoft. Yeah, we're no. And so to actually one Microsoft would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.
5:38ModeratorSomething to aspire to.
5:40Elon MuskYeah, yeah, that's our goal. And like this is I think both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve power harness being one millionth of what the sun outputs.
6:02Elon MuskAnd so to actually start a. Microsoft
6:04Moderatoractually start getting there though. We're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need, like you want to go up there and do something meaningful.
6:15ModeratorAnd obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that, like, maybe now's the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two?
6:28Elon MuskI mean, getting to a percent of
6:31Moderatorthe sun's energy, maybe not a percent. Let's go like we'll move the decimal point back.
6:36Elon MuskYou're an extremely thick ass civilization. If you get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilization is going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least.
6:49Elon MuskSo in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashian scale, we need to launch satellites to, to, to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling, because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth.
7:14Elon MuskYou can just radiate to the vacuum. And so what we're proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the Kardashev scale to be kind of like a respectable civilization.
7:29Elon MuskSo when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used, that's not like totally pathetic, which is the current situation.
7:48ModeratorAnd so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible.
8:00Elon MuskYeah. What does it take to scale? Yeah, so things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what starship will give us, that large mass.
8:12Elon MuskSo you know, you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put 100 gigawatts or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, you need, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar, and then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips.
8:33Elon MuskSo the three things you need are master orbit, a lot of solar power, and, and radiators, of course, and a lot of ships.
8:42ModeratorAll right, well, let's start ticking down the list. So master orbit, that's where starship comes in. Yeah, we just had first flight v3 was awesome. I know you were there.
8:55ModeratorIt was crazy to see that rocket launch.
8:57Elon MuskYeah.
8:57ModeratorAnd like long time coming. What's kind of what Starship's kind of purpose of being, what is it going to be doing?
9:05Elon MuskYeah, so Starship is going to, it's going to revolutionize space really. It's, it's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multi planetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale.
9:25Elon MuskYou simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft. And you cannot extend life to the moon, to Mars and rest the solar system without a reusable rocket.
9:38Elon MuskThe cost is simply prohibitive. You can't, you can't make enough rockets unless you fly, unless you can refly them just like any other mode of transport. You can imagine that if, if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
9:55ModeratorYou're doing a whole lot more driving.
9:56Ian Dahl (Starlink)Rapid reusability. Yes.
10:00Elon MuskEvery mode of transport is reusable without which is simply not viable as a transport system. So cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable with rockets. It's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere.
10:23Elon MuskAnd these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there have been, you know, many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket. And they, most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they, they didn't think they could succeed.
10:42Elon MuskIn order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got it. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket.
10:59Elon MuskInstead of putting on landing legs which are heavy, the rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship.
11:11Elon MuskAnd then you've got to achieve full reusability naval if you want to go step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection.
11:30Elon MuskLike an aircraft.
11:31ModeratorYeah.
11:32Elon MuskThis is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been A rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. It also happens to be the, the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made.
11:47Elon MuskThe most powerful moving object of any kind of B3 is more than double the thrust of it. The Saturn 5 moon rocket by version four will be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn 5 moon rocket.
12:02Elon MuskAnd we expect this, we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.
12:08ModeratorOne of the fun facts from Flight 12, that was actually the heaviest payload Space X has ever flown, and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do.
12:18ModeratorSo yes, I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly, I mean we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what mass orbit becomes?
12:37Moderator1 Starship is flying, it's, it's many
12:40Elon Muskorders magnitude greater than what is the case today. So Even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now.
12:57Elon MuskAnd then most of the remaining mass I think is, is launched by China. And then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US is, is the remaining, I don't know, 5 to 7%.
13:09Elon MuskNow with, with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit and to do so in a pretty short period of time.
13:23Elon MuskSo we think probably we can get to a million tons to orbit per year in about three years thereabouts.
13:35ModeratorStarship. Starship is going to take care of the master orbit limiting factor.
13:40Elon MuskYes.
13:41ModeratorAnd then power generation. So first and Ian, maybe you can help people probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say like data center in space. Like we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there.
13:55ModeratorLike these actually look like pretty different. And so kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.
14:06Ian Dahl (Starlink)Yeah, I think it's, it's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't actually know what, what the inside of a data center even looks like, right?
14:11Elon MuskYeah. And it's like mythical place where the Internet's in the cloud.
14:16Ian Dahl (Starlink)Yeah. Some people envision wire, some people envision boxes. But like effectively it comes down to a set number of chips. And the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it.
14:30Ian Dahl (Starlink)The more challenging part is figuring out how to get, how do you get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starlink technology, the solar arrays are what we want to utilize that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center in space.
14:50Elon MuskSpace itself.
14:53Ian Dahl (Starlink)We like to look at this and say like what is, what is the actual engineering problem here? And, and it's, it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space, as you mentioned.
15:07Elon MuskYeah. Now the, the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has, has gigantic phased array antennas. It's got, you know, parabolic antennas, it's got a lot of laser links.
15:29Elon MuskIt's a, it's, it's much more complicated than an AI satellite. And a satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite.
15:46Elon MuskSo I mean given the two, the easier one to design for is the, the AI satellite.
15:52ModeratorYeah, it's just a little bit bigger.
15:55Elon MuskIt's bigger.
15:56ModeratorJust makes stuff bigger. Yeah, I was like, so we've got, this is our AI one. You guys want to walk us through?
16:04Ian Dahl (Starlink)Yeah, so, so the first thing that we're, we're really looking at here is like first you've got to make something compelling, right. And we thought that the right place to start is around 150 kilowatt, like peak power level.
16:17Ian Dahl (Starlink)But as we look at the workloads with, with our experience with xai, we get to actually see that, that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute.
16:26Elon MuskThere's a difference. What we're showing here is kind of a draft version of the first one of the SpaceX AI satellite, an AI one I guess you could call it, and seems like a reasonable place to start is 150kW peak power, 120kW sustained power.
16:46Elon MuskAnd to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiator, size of the solar panels. The assumptions here are 250 watts per square meter for the solar array and about 1400 watts per square meter for the radiator.
17:02Elon MuskSo the radiators, these are double sided radiators are radiating both sides. They're oriented knife edge to the sun and, and and it's 1400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal over time.
17:17Elon MuskWe think we can probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1400 watts per square meter for the solar panels, radiators, respectively. But this gives you like pretty much what the satellite's going to look like.
17:32Elon MuskIt's a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small, like the virus.
17:37Ian Dahl (Starlink)And these are like evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date. Yeah, that's really, I think the cool part to me is that we're looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V3 Starlink vehicle.
17:55Ian Dahl (Starlink)So, so I'm really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.
18:00Elon MuskYeah. Part of what we want, what we want to convey here is that there's not some magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the satellites. As Ian said, this is a lot of, this is technology we've already made for the Starlink V3 satellites.
18:18Elon MuskSo it's, we basically, we don't think this is a, a super hard problem compared to things we already do. There would also be something on the order of a terabyte of connectivity of laser link connectivity from the, from the satellite.
18:34Elon MuskThe 150 kilowatt peak power level is roughly matches what say an Nvidia GV300 rack would do so. But a GV300 with 72 GPUs, its peak power I think is around 140 kilowatts.
18:50Elon MuskBut it's rarely, it's almost impossible to get it to be at that peak power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120kW average power, but it can peak up to 150.
19:03Elon MuskSo that's, it's basically think of it as a rack of compute in space. And then you can connect these racks of compute to either each other or the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellations.
19:20Elon MuskSo you can close the link with the Starlink constellation and then Starlink can then send that data to the ground using the existing KA and KU antennas on the, on the vehicle.
19:34Elon MuskIt also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So and this, this would not be at a particularly high latency. You know, we're talking about, you know, maybe being around 6 to 800 kilometers above the earth and light travels 300 kilometers per millisecond.
19:56Elon MuskSo that's, it's about, you know, three milliseconds away, basically. It's not, not very far.
20:02ModeratorWe'll worry about that too much then.
20:03Elon MuskIt's not. Sometimes people want to think there's going to be some like, high latency. I'm like, yeah, it's no. Speed of lightning was pretty fast.
20:10ModeratorLight moves pretty fast.
20:12Elon MuskYeah.
20:13Ian Dahl (Starlink)I think the cool thing also is the, the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar arrays for the V3 vehicle.
20:22Elon MuskKind of, kind of in that realm
20:24Ian Dahl (Starlink)where we're flying today.
20:25Elon MuskYeah.
20:26ModeratorSo, I mean, they got, they got about a 70 meter wingspan. So these are fairly large. We're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there.
20:34ModeratorBut you like to say like spaces in the name. Like there's, there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even, you know, up to a million satellites.
20:46ModeratorYeah, you got plenty of room to move around up there.
20:48Elon MuskYeah, space is really big. So it's not like, it's not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous. Like, if you zoom in close to the satellite, it looks big, but if you actually look at it relative, relative to the Earth, the satellites are so tiny you can, you can't even see them.
21:06Elon MuskSo they're very, very tiny compared to us.
21:11ModeratorAnd I mean, we have 10, about 10,000 starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now.
21:22ModeratorRight.
21:23Ian Dahl (Starlink)We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. It's, it's a great thing that, you know, we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and, and, and, and fly them safely.
21:34Ian Dahl (Starlink)That's, that's a number one goal. When, when we look at the constellation,
21:38Moderatorwe're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop. Right. So we've, we've got this, which. Yeah, so we're in that building kind of in the middle, which.
21:49Elon MuskYeah, we're sitting in that building right now.
21:51ModeratorThis is my first time here. The building is massive. Like, you come around the corner, you see it through the trees and you're like, oh, wow. But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we?
22:03Elon MuskYes, we're going to. In fact, we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already. And, and then we will be building out the air production building soon.
22:19Elon MuskAnd yeah, so we expect to have the air production, the solar Production and all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.
22:33ModeratorSo if anybody wants to work on AI satellites, this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also so I mean like right behind us the machines are humming.
22:42ModeratorWe're still making all of our user terminals for Starlink here. That's not going anywhere. In fact we're turning on new production lines for new units, right?
22:51Elon MuskYes. In fact these are the new Starlink terminals which we made in much higher volume than the current terminals. You know, ultimately we think there's probably going to be a few hundred million Starlink terminals out there.
23:06Elon MuskAnd then our Starlink direct to cell Constellation will connect directly to people's cell phones and enable high bandwidth communication directly from your phone of space.
23:17ModeratorAll right, we're, we're two limiting factors down. We've got master orbit got putting solar and Pew third one's chips.
23:26Elon MuskYes. So at least in the beginning we can obviously launch the, the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for Nvidia Ruben chips or could be either GV300 or, or even chips and we'll also have reference design for TPU's and essentially you can put up, put any, any existing chips into, into orbit.
23:57Elon MuskBut the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI computer. But it, that doesn't answer the question of well, how do you get to a Terrawatt?
24:16Elon MuskThat's why you need a tariff.
24:20Ian Dahl (Starlink)Always looking a step bigger.
24:21Elon MuskYeah, yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude you need a gigantic ship factory to give you a sense of scale here. We expect that the tariff AB is going to be around 100 million square feet which is 10 times the size of the Tesla Gigafactory Texas.
24:44ModeratorAnd what aside from just, you know, I'm going to need Starship point to point to get from one end to the other. Aside from just the size, what's going to make this unique different from any other chip building operation on the planet?
24:58Elon MuskWell I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the tariff app. But fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there were no fundamental technology breakthroughs and you simply, you could simply scale the existing chip making technology with a lot of difficulty to a terawatt of chip output per year.
25:23Elon MuskThat's if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that's, that's a, that's like having a billion chips per year with a kilowatt per radical. So a billion full radical equivalent chips, each doing a kilowatt.
25:40Elon MuskAnd then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that.
25:43ModeratorA lot of people today even think orbital data centers were like a decade away.
25:49Elon MuskYeah, I think we want to try to give people a sense of, of the time frame we, at least the time frame we're aiming for. I mean, you know, people should take this with a grain of salt to some degree, because this is, this is just our best guess.
26:03Elon MuskSo this is not a, this is not a promise of what we'll do. This is what we, what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space.
26:20Elon MuskAI compute and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in two and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, and three and a half years, maybe 100 gigawatts.
26:35Elon MuskAnd then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world, and with the tariff going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is a thousand gigawatts, which is, that's twice the current electricity consumption of the United States.
26:52Elon MuskI think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. I don't know what you think about, but we do a lot of simulations or something.
27:02Elon MuskYeah.
27:04ModeratorSo after we've, you know, worked through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to again try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev Level 2.
27:22Elon MuskWhy stop there? Why think small? Because the terawatt actually is very small.
27:27ModeratorThink small.
27:28Elon MuskThat's nothing small. So there is, in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1000x from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the Moon with a mass driver, essentially where you do local production of photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the Moon, maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably make the chips on the Moon and you need most of the mass to be made on the Moon so you don't have to transport it to the Moon from Earth.
28:07Elon MuskAnd, and then because the Moon has no atmosphere and only 16 Earth's gravity. You can, you can get, you can accelerate the satellites into deep space without a rocket.
28:19Elon MuskSo you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a, like a rail gun type. I mean just, it's basically a linear electric motor is the way to think about it.
28:31ModeratorI was like, I think we can show people.
29:49Elon MuskSa.
30:21ModeratorI mean, if that doesn't get you excited for the future, I don't really know what will.
30:26Elon MuskI'm fired up to sit to see a mass driver on the moon. That would be very cool. Yeah. Sci fi future. Yeah. Yeah. It would also mean that if we're, if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the moon will be able to go to the moon and I think that'll be pretty cool.
30:42Elon MuskYeah.
30:43ModeratorAnd I'm going to be jumping first in line to get up there.
30:46Elon MuskYeah, I mean, you know, everyone should go to the moon at least once. I think. Just once.
30:50Ian Dahl (Starlink)Yeah.
30:51Elon MuskYou can move there if you want. Go live on the moon.
30:53ModeratorWe'll see. Thanks guys for chatting with me for a little bit.
30:58Elon MuskAll right.
30:59ModeratorExcited to see a whole new, whole new kind of satellite. Whole bunch more starship launches, more chips, more solar, more everything. It's a big future, but I'm excited to see everybody at this company go out and build.
31:13Elon MuskAll right, sounds good.
31:14Ian Dahl (Starlink)It's exciting.
31:15Elon MuskThanks, guys.