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Elon Musk Latest Interview Talked About Starships 4th Flight. · Elon Musk Thinking

• 0:00
  Great. I think the social per performed very well and the space six teams
• 0:06
  done an incredible job. Talk about the views from starlink, I want to
• 0:10
  give a shout out to starlink hat powered my live stream and obviously the three
• 0:14
  plus million people who watched on X. Yeah, we actually had I think
• 0:19
  sixteen video feeds or thereabouts from starlink, some of which were external, most
• 0:24
  of which were internal. Just looking at the internal systems for cadevagging issues and
• 0:30
  yeah, we had almost continuous starlink coverage. For the next flight, we
• 0:37
  make some adjustments to starlink so we'll actually have completely continuous the entire way.
• 0:41
  I'm sure everyone at home would love that. Would you say that fourth time
• 0:45
  is the charm? Maybe for SpaceX As we look at Falcon one's history,
• 0:50
  the fourth launch is certainly great. I mean third launch was we solid too.
• 0:54
  I mean we did make it to orbit. By normal standards, that
• 0:58
  would be a successful launch. For this launch, we we hit two key
• 1:04
  reusability milestones, which was having the booster boost back to a precise location and
• 1:11
  execute a landing burne and land softly in the water, which it did,
• 1:15
  and getting the ship to go all the way through the super high heating of
• 1:19
  re entry where it's coming in like a meteor and uh, and then maintain
• 1:23
  control subsonically and land in a pretty precise precise location. Well it was technically
• 1:32
  six kilometers off geographically, but it was able to was able to maintain control
• 1:36
  and then relight the three wraftar engines for for a for landing. So that's
• 1:44
  uh a super successful days. Yeah, as you were watching, people are
• 1:51
  saying on X the little flat that could, what was going through your mind?
• 1:56
  I was surprised that the flat lasted so long. So it's uh,
• 2:00
  you know, because it's once the heat shield tiles are gone, you really
• 2:04
  just have bare steel is mostly the sort of SX three hundred steel alloy,
• 2:12
  and it was actually quite surprising how well the steel held up despite the extreme
• 2:19
  heating. So I thought the flat would fail because it's not supposed to be
• 2:23
  able to survive, but it did. I think a lot of us were
• 2:25
  surprised. Does that validate your choice to use stainless steel? Yeah? Absolutely.
• 2:30
  If we'd use colbon fiber or aluminum, they both would have failed due
• 2:36
  to high heating. Now, we saw you post on X that maybe flight
• 2:39
  five you'll attempt to catch how what do you think is the likelihood of that.
• 2:44
  Well, I need to regroup with a team and confirm that there aren't
• 2:46
  any other known issues. But I think given that the booster came back,
• 2:53
  came to a precise location, came to potentially zero lasty landing on the ocean,
• 3:00
  think we I think we should probably try to catch it with the tower
• 3:04
  arms on the next flight. Absolutely, I was lucky enough to take a
• 3:08
  tour of Starbase, and it's amazing that you guys are able to manage construction
• 3:13
  and production at the same time. Tell me about the team down here at
• 3:16
  SpaceX. Yeah, well we've foased on. We've been doing continuous construction of
• 3:22
  the factory and the launch site while belt doing development of the rocket. That's
• 3:25
  been the case, you know, ever since we came out here. For
• 3:30
  three years, this was my primary locate, primary residence. I lived here,
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  kind of building up this Starbase factory and launch site from basically nothing,
• 3:42
  from just being a sandbar. And and we're just trying to figure out how
• 3:47
  to do how to work with standless steel as opposed to aluminum, mi lithium
• 3:52
  and carbon, and how to deal with the methane as a quadrantic fuel instead
• 3:58
  of kerosen or fine jet fuel. So yeah, so it's really always been
• 4:04
  a case of build the factory, build the more site, and keep developing
• 4:11
  the rocket. And if people have never been down to starbas this is much
• 4:15
  more than a factory. You're trying to maybe build out a city. Can
• 4:17
  you tell me more about your vision? A city would be a strong word,
• 4:21
  but maybe a small town. Does having a young workforce benefit SpaceX by
• 4:26
  not having preconceived notions? Well, we have people that range from you know,
• 4:33
  sort of seventy to eighteen, so it's really a wide range. I
• 4:39
  don't know about age. I mean, really it's a question of mindset.
• 4:45
  Is somebody gung ho about the future and wanting to drive advanced technology as fast
• 4:50
  as possible. That can be true at any age. What kinds of missions
• 4:54
  do you think SpaceX could accept that will act as development stepping stones towards Mars.
• 5:00
  We're seeing the development stepping sense towards here. Which is the fundamental breakthrough
• 5:03
  that is needed for life to become multiplanetary is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.
• 5:11
  So that means that the boost stage and the upper stage or ship must
• 5:15
  both come back to the launch site and be immediately able to fly again with
• 5:20
  no refurbishment. This has never been accomplished. The closest that anyone's ever gone
• 5:25
  is Falcon nine, where the booster comes back and is quickly available for flight
• 5:30
  in really less than a week, and the Pheromone nose cone is also a
• 5:35
  refurbished full flight. The only thing that's lost is the upper stage. So
• 5:41
  in terms of so Falcon is the first rocket ever to demonstrate commercially feasible reusability.
• 5:47
  In fact, or another way of saying it is reusability that actually mattered
• 5:51
  and was useful. Now Falcon nine is still we lose the upper stage.
• 6:00
  So Falcon I is about eighty percent reusable, but it's also not rapidly reusable
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  in terms of enabling immediate reflight. So with Starship, the whole thing will
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  be reusable and it's designed for immediate reflight' that's a very profound thing. That
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  is the fundamental thing that is necessary to make life multiplanetary. There is I
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  put everything else in the category of being really a different order of magnitude or
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  difficulty. You know, I don't think it will be very difficult to survive
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  on Mars frankly, I think it'll from technology challenge standpoint, that is,
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  that is small compared to full and rapid reusability. We live in a planet
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  with a deep gravity, well in a thick atmosphere. This makes full reusability
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  extremely difficult. If gravity was even ten percent lower, it would be easy,
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  and if it was ten percent higher, it would be impossible. So,
• 7:00
  uh, you know, we it. It's not as though uh,
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  prior rocket designers, you know it. It's not like people before me thought
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  y D didn't realize that re reusability was a thing. Bonovon Brown was actually
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  big on reusability. He really wanted to push a reusability design and he was
• 7:18
  a brilliant guy, and and he had many sort of design ideas for that,
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  as did others. Uh. But uh, thus far, for whatever
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  reason, uh, no rocket organization has been able to execute on reusability until
• 7:35
  SpaceX and Starship is the first rocket design where uh, full and rapid reusability
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  is in fact possible cause w W. What this does is drop the cost
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  of space transport by at least a hundredfold, maybe a thousandfold. So it's
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  a gigantic difference, uh, as would before any motor transport. If it
• 7:59
  was cars, horses, bicycles, airplanes, imagine if you needed to get
• 8:03
  in your airplane with every flight, airflight would be impossible for almost anyone.
• 8:11
  One thing that never ceases to amaze me is there's not enough people that really
• 8:15
  know what's going on with Starship and why is it important to generate public interest?
• 8:20
  It's not. I mean, I do think we want the public on
• 8:24
  our side and supportive, but we're not trying to maximize public awareness. I
• 8:28
  think the large portion of public is aware of it, and I think when
• 8:33
  we start taking Ashwaltz to the Moon and especially Mars, it will be everyone
• 8:39
  on Earth will know about it. At what point do you think it would
• 8:41
  be safe for people to bring or have children on Mars? Well, I
• 8:46
  think you can have children on Mars as soon as you're able to. I
• 8:52
  wouldn't bring children initially because it's dangerous. The first flights may not succeed.
• 8:56
  It's a hazardous environment. But I think within I don't know, less than
• 9:03
  ten years of the initial landings, I would expect that it's safe to bring
• 9:07
  kids. Do you think that you'll go to Mars in your lifetime? Whipends
• 9:11
  I If I live long enough, then yes,