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Elon Musk Speech At SpaceX Starship Launch #10 · Elon Musk Podcast

0:01
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
0:04
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
0:07
the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
0:11
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
0:20
Will and I just going to enter this live cast?
0:24
All right. I had a little flavor.
0:26
Yeah, right. Right now we're counting down,
0:29
but we're we're about to launch the largest flying object ever
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made, but this isn't on the radar for everybody and we know
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that so we want to kind of take a beat pull back to a little bit
0:41
of Starship one O 1 to do that. I've got some special guests
0:45
crash in the webcast today joining me now in Star factory
0:48
Elon Musk, chief engineer at SpaceX, Bill Riley, our VP of
0:52
Starship engineering. Thanks for being here guys.
0:54
I know we got a rocket about to get off the bat, but you know,
0:57
let's start people off like high level, like why are we here?
1:00
What the hell are we doing here? Well, I don't know about
1:03
everybody, but I'm here to try to build into the future that I
1:06
imagined and dreamed of as a child, where starships with
1:09
people are out among the stars exploring the universe.
1:14
Yeah, so the the, the why. It's always important to explain
1:17
the why of things and the the why of Starship is that we want
1:23
to be a multi planet species to extend consciousness beyond
1:27
Earth. I think for two main reasons.
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One is to ensure the long term survival and prosperity of life
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as we know it in consciousness, which if we are a multi planet
1:39
species and ultimately a multi stellar species out there among
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the stars, the probability of survival is much, much longer.
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That's kind of the, you know, defensive aspect or life
1:51
insurance for life collectively. But then there's also they also
1:54
need to be things that are inspiring and exciting and that
1:58
give you reason to live. Life cannot just be about
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solving 1 tragic problem after another.
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There must be also reasons to get up in the morning and be
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excited about the future and a future where we are a space
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frank civilization is infinitely more exciting than one where we
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are not. And we're doing it all pretty
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unique location. I mean, the pads behind us, we
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got rocket on the tower, we got another tower with that.
2:21
We're sitting inside Star Factory.
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And I mean, it wasn't like this for very long.
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This is all pretty brand new. Yeah.
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I think we've moved Starship here in about the early part of
2:30
2019. So we've been coming that entire
2:32
time and seeing the sight of all from a double wide trailer and a
2:36
tent where we built Star Hopper to the first suborbital test
2:39
flights. And now we have behind us 2
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towers for the first time as as we built towards the first
2:45
operational flight from the second tower at the end of this
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year and this beautiful building, 1,000,000 square feet,
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where we're able to work towards the production line of
2:55
Starships. Yeah, this the, the SpaceX team
2:59
has done an incredible job of building out really the the most
3:03
advanced rocket manufacturing facility that has ever existed.
3:07
This this is far beyond any rocket fabrication facility that
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has ever been built. This is essentially alien level
3:15
technology and it was all built here basically down by the Rio
3:20
Grande River and close to the beach.
3:23
It's an incredibly improbable location.
3:25
And this used to be a sandbar. I think we're about, you know, 3
3:28
feet or about a meter above sea level.
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So it's really was was nothing. If you see the time lapse from
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sandbar to two, two launch towers and a gigantic rocket
3:45
factory with with high bays. And we're we're going to be
3:49
building something called the Giga Bay, which is like a one of
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the, the largest enclosed volumes on Earth.
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So it's sort of like a gigantic Borg cube that we're going to be
3:59
building here for. Yeah, for, for building and
4:04
storing these gigantic rockets. It's really spectacular and
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anyone can come and visit. So the because we're on a public
4:13
highway and we're literally by public beach, you can actually
4:17
come and see the rocket. You can quite close up.
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I mean, you can drive fast it and and you can also look at the
4:24
factory and anyone could do this from anywhere in the world.
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So if you just you can come and visit and and check it out.
4:30
Just I think it's pretty cool that it's.
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Just not right now. Just not right, just not right
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now. It's not where we're launching
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because there's some safety issues, but but the, but the
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Rockets often just just sitting on the pad without any
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propellant in it. And then you can just, you can
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just come here and visit. It's for very easy, yeah, I
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think. It's a really special place.
4:47
Yesterday this the ship went down the road behind us and I
4:50
saw families outside going for their or was on Sunday going for
4:54
their Sunday stroll and they were greeted by Starship going
4:57
down. And I think that from the very
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beginning, the thing about Starship different than Falcon
5:02
and other rockets that I'm aware of is we designed it to be mass
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produced and mass produced at scale.
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And it's not about building 1 Starship and getting to orbit
5:11
once, it's about doing it in a sustained and rapid way.
5:15
Yeah, we're aiming for ultimately thousands of shifts
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to be built per year, which is what's needed in order to
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construct a city on Mars that is self-sustaining.
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And the the major fork in the road of destiny will be when the
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Mars city is capable of surviving, even if the resupply
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shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason.
5:35
And that reason could be something cataclysmic, or it
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could be that it it, that civilization simply subsided.
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There's always this debate throughout history of wolf
5:44
civilization and with a a bang or a whimper.
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But either way, if the the the critical thing is to get to the
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point where Mars is self-sustaining and can survive
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even if the resupply ships stuff coming for any reason.
5:57
Which means that you need to build an entire base of industry
5:59
on Mars in order for Mars to survive.
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For example, it's not simply enough to build a chip, you know
6:08
like a computer, like a computer chip factory, but you need the
6:10
ability to build computer chip factories.
6:15
So this is, this is going to really take a lot of tonnage.
6:19
I mean, my guess is at least 1,000,000 tons to the surface of
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Mars. And maybe it takes less than
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that, but it's going to be, it's going to be a lot.
6:29
But this is, this is a very exciting future.
6:32
It's one which will ensure the long term survival and
6:35
prosperity of, of life and consciousness.
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And, and it's the critical stepping stone to get from this
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solar system to other star systems and perhaps go out there
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and explore and, and perhaps we'll encounter alien
6:49
civilizations that maybe the maybe they're alive now, but, or
6:52
maybe they enjoyed a period of prosperity for millions of years
6:56
and but also died out millions of years ago.
6:58
So it's humbling to think of the age of the universe according to
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the standard model of physics, being approximately 13.8 billion
7:06
years old. So an incremental million years
7:09
would only would be 3 digits past decimal point.
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And if you look at, say, our civilization and measure our
7:16
civilization by the 1st evidence of writing, which is about 5500
7:22
years ago, civilization as measured from the first writing
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is only one millionth of Earth's existence.
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Or blip. Yeah, yeah.
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Flash in the pan so far, yeah. Well, we're getting some cool
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shots rocking out on the pad right now.
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We we tell people like come down, see it.
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It's hard to get like a sense of scale of just how massive this
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thing is. And we were able to catch
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somebody working on it a little while ago.
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And like part of the reason you said we're we're sending
7:55
millions of tons when? I think in this image, Dan, you
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can actually see the person working at the bottom of the
8:01
ship. And as we zoom out, you see the
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full ship, that sort of 2 tone silver and black and then the
8:07
booster below it, right? And it really sets the scale,
8:10
which doesn't come across, I think other than in person.
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And I when I do tours, I like to say Starship is real.
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Starship is big and Starship is really big.
8:19
And I think you can see there and with the factory shots you
8:22
saw earlier, again, it's we got Flight 10 on the pad, but we got
8:25
many more behind it. Yeah, so there's, I posted a
8:29
video yesterday of just a, a brief scan of part of the
8:33
Starship factory and you can get a sense of this, the scale of
8:35
the factory. And yeah, I guess we could talk
8:39
a bit about why Starship is the way it is in like, for example,
8:44
what why is half of the ship black and half of it is silver
8:48
colored? And that's because of the bottom
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half of the ship of the bottom, as seen from orbital entry is
8:54
has a heat shield on it. So the the black there is the is
8:58
the heat shield and the, and then the the core structure of
9:02
the rocket is a special alloy of stainless steel.
9:06
And, and that's where you see the, the sort of shiny silver
9:09
parts are stainless steel. The reason for steel over
9:13
aluminum is that the heat of, of atmospheric entry and the heat
9:18
of the the rocket engines is enough to melt easily, easily
9:23
melt aluminum. But steel is much more resilient
9:26
against both ascent heating, but especially the reentry heating.
9:31
And you don't have to paint it, which is actually very difficult
9:36
at to paint a large object that is going through cryogenic
9:39
cycles and have the paint stay on.
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It's quite challenging. And so we've talked about it.
9:47
It's massive. It obviously takes a whole lot
9:49
of energy to make that thing move.
9:52
And that's where Raptor really starts to come in.
9:55
Most advanced engine on the planet Light Saber.
10:01
Now that's a light Saber and 1/2 you would get vaporized in an
10:05
instant if you were standing in front of rafter.
10:07
So yeah, a bunch of crisp in a in a like a less than a second.
10:14
So, yeah. So in order for in order to
10:19
create a fully reusable orbital rocket, you have to advance the
10:24
state-of-the-art in every part of the rocket.
10:26
That means the engines have to be better than any engine ever.
10:30
The structures got to be better than any structure ever.
10:33
You've got a, you've got to have a means of bringing the rocket
10:41
back to the launchpad. You've got to have a fully
10:44
reusable orbital heat shield. And that no one's ever made a
10:47
fully reusable orbital heat shield.
10:49
The space Shuttle, for example, required nine months of
10:53
refurbishment between flights. So the the space shuttle heat
10:57
shield come back essentially partially broken and would
11:00
require many months of of refurbishment in order to fly
11:05
again. What we're trying to achieve
11:07
here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown
11:10
immediately. So the ship, both, both the ship
11:13
and the booster would be caught by the tower arms and the the
11:18
the booster would be placed immediately back on the launch
11:21
stand and the ship, the ship's got it orbit Earth at least once
11:28
and but but then could be back potentially in one orbit, but in
11:33
most cases several orbits. So the ship would come back
11:36
several hours later but then be caught by the arms and placed on
11:39
top of the booster. You can also have multiple ships
11:41
ready so that a single booster could service 5 or more ships so
11:47
that you you could be flying the booster every, in theory every
11:51
hour. This is kind of a profoundly
11:56
fast speed, obviously for the largest playing object by far
12:00
ever made, but it's the reason why we catch the tower.
12:04
We catch the the booster with the tower arms and the ship also
12:08
will be caught with the tower arms because that's the fastest
12:12
way to get the the booster and the ship back to flight.
12:17
If we had instead put put landing legs, which we've done
12:20
before for the the the ship tests, we actually had landing
12:24
legs that flip down and the the ship would ship.
12:28
We've successfully demonstrated landing with legs.
12:32
But if you do that, if we were to do that with the booster and
12:35
the ship here, we'd have to land somewhere else with the legs,
12:40
then lift the rocket, Stow the legs, transport the rocket back
12:44
to the pad with which is very unwieldy when you've got a
12:49
gigantic thing. Then it would be picked up by
12:51
these tower arms and placed in the launch mount.
12:57
That would that would delay the reusability dramatically and
13:01
would add a lot of mass with the landing legs.
13:03
So that's why we catch the rocket with the tower arms
13:07
because it's the same tower arms that put the rocket in the
13:10
launch mount are used to catch the rocket.
13:14
And that means that we can put the booster back in the launch
13:18
mount in less than an hour after liftoff.
13:20
In fact, the boost is going to come back very fast, like you
13:22
know, 5 or 6 minutes later this boost is coming back one way or
13:25
another or not coming back. So, so then you really have
13:30
propellant full time which can be brought down to about 30-40
13:34
minutes. And that means you it is
13:37
theoretically possible to fly the booster again in less than
13:41
an hour. I think when the when I think
13:43
about it, it's the jet drives up to the jet way.
13:46
The people get off, new people get on and it leaves.
13:48
You don't want to land the jet on a different airfield and then
13:51
tow it over to the jet way. So it's just operationally
13:54
simpler and faster. Yeah, we've had a lot of success
13:57
with the booster 3 for three on the catch attempts.
14:00
When we bring it back, we've reflown 1 so awesome.
14:02
And then the again, Starship Superpowers, the whole thing is
14:06
reusable. So ship reusability is like what
14:08
we're working on right now. We've been able to get some
14:12
really spectacular re entries on a couple of flights hoping to
14:15
get this one for re entry on the V2 ship.
14:19
But yeah, that that fully reusable heat shield, that thing
14:22
that has just never been done before.
14:23
That's that's one of the things we're really looking for that
14:25
date on. Yeah.
14:27
I mean, there are thousands of entering challenges that remain
14:30
for both the ship and the booster, but the single, maybe
14:36
the single biggest one is, is the reasonable Opal heat shield.
14:39
We are confident in, in making a fully reasonable Opal heat
14:43
shield, but it will require many flights, many iterations to
14:46
figure out where the weak points are in the heat shield, where we
14:50
need to change the design, either strengthening the tile or
14:53
change or changing the, the, the thick, the how big the gap is
14:58
between tiles, changing what's underneath the tile.
15:03
There's, there's a, there's a, you know, 100 different
15:07
variables that we could tweak with the, with the ship, the
15:11
ship tiles, the sheet shield tiles.
15:15
But the only way to know exactly what we should be adjusting is
15:19
to fly repeatedly and be able to examine the ship upon landing.
15:24
And we we have successfully brought the ship back through
15:29
the atmosphere and achieved a soft landing multiple times.
15:33
So we know that this is possible, but we have in the
15:35
process shared many heat shield tiles.
15:38
So we need to be able to do this without shedding heat shield
15:40
tiles and and do so repeatedly. And I and I think what you're
15:46
seeing now is the Starship, this is CG of it coming in and
15:50
landing on the tower much like the booster, but there's some
15:52
additional challenges there where we need to make sure we
15:54
don't scrape the tiles off as we slide along the.
15:57
We can't Shuck the heat shield. Don't crush the ship.
16:01
Rapid usability. We Shuck the If we Shuck the
16:04
Shuck the tiles, then that's obviously going to fail the
16:06
reusability test. So ships can use the tower to
16:09
land and catch like like the booster here on Earth where
16:12
towers are available. And for our initial landings on
16:15
Mars and other planets, we'll need landing legs that deploy
16:18
much like what you're seeing here with Ship 15.
16:20
When we did our suborbital test to prove out the precision
16:24
descent landing, which was a successful test, we actually
16:28
landed to 1 was it? We were able to actually recover
16:30
it. And it's you can see it here in
16:32
the Rocket Garden if you visit Star Base.
16:35
Yeah. So the rocket garden that that
16:36
bill mentioned that we have a actually a whole bunch of
16:39
boosters and ships and we'll be adding to them over time.
16:42
So you can see an evolution of Starship just by driving down
16:46
the highway. Yeah.
16:47
So reusability is key. There's some other technologies
16:51
we're still looking to prove out really big 1 is going to be the
16:54
on orbit refilling looking to to do that next year.
16:57
And that's really what's going to kind of unlock, you know,
17:00
Starship going everywhere else, going everywhere, everywhere
17:03
beyond Earth. And that's something that's,
17:06
again, never been done before, kind of like that reusable
17:09
orbital heat shield. But it's going to be something
17:12
that that's kind of some of the other secret sauce to Starship,
17:15
where we're going to be able to send hundreds of tons per ship
17:19
to Mars. Yeah.
17:21
I like to think of it as if we get to orbit with a full cargo
17:24
Bay, but we're empty on fuel and oxygen.
17:26
So basically we we're running on fumes, then we send other ships
17:30
to dock, transfer propellant and now we made our two stage rocket
17:33
look like a many, many multi stage rocket and we get all of
17:36
that performance and we can take that full cargo Bay now wherever
17:39
we want to go. Yeah.
17:42
So a crucial technology that we hope to demonstrate next year is
17:47
this orbital refilling, much like aerial refueling, it's
17:50
essential for being able to send significant payload to Mars.
17:54
So you essentially send, you send a ship to orbit with a few
18:00
100 tons of payload if it's sort of a full payload Bay, But the,
18:04
the once it gets to orbit, the, the tanks will be mostly empty.
18:07
And then you send up additional tanker ships to refill the, the
18:11
Moss ships tanks so that when it's so it can thrust from Earth
18:15
orbit to Mars and have enough propellant left for landing.
18:19
So this is orbital refilling is also not something that's ever
18:23
been demonstrated before. So that would be a brand new
18:25
technology. We, we have, we also have a
18:28
SpaceX figured out how to dock repeatedly with the space
18:31
station. So in a lot of ways this is like
18:33
docking and in some ways it's easier in that we're the ship
18:39
where SpaceX is docking with its, with its own craft.
18:43
But no one has ever demonstrated propellant transfer in orbit to
18:47
the best of our knowledge. And, and so this would be
18:49
propellant transfer at a very large scale.
18:52
And, but with full reusability and propellant transfer, we,
18:59
those are the, the key technologies needed for building
19:02
a city on Mars. And I'm confident that the
19:07
SpaceX team, which is incredibly talented, will achieve this,
19:10
this, these goals. And we will be landing ships on
19:14
Mars in the future and building life on Mars, building
19:19
greenhouses and, and life on Mars and ensuring the long term
19:23
survival of life as we know it. And it's important to note here
19:26
that obviously, you know, we are effectively stewards of life
19:30
here on Earth, that the other creatures cannot build space
19:34
spacecraft and get to get to other planets.
19:36
So if there were to be a cataclysmic event like a giant
19:38
meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs or ultimately the sun
19:42
will expand to envelope Earth and destroy all life, We know
19:45
this, this is this is an undisputed fact.
19:50
Then if we don't take life to another planet, the light will,
19:54
life will be destroyed. So it's incumbent upon us to
19:56
ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure the
19:59
long term survival of life as we know it on planet Earth.
20:03
And I mean, aside from that, there's so much that Starship
20:07
unlocks by being able to do these things, like we'll be able
20:10
to go to Mars, but there are other just transformational
20:13
things by being able to take that many people, that much
20:15
stuff to space for that much less money.
20:18
I mean, I think understanding our planet better, being able to
20:22
move people around the planet, make the, make it feel smaller
20:25
and more accessible. You could go anywhere on the
20:28
Earth, you know, in less than 40 minutes basically in terms of
20:30
flight time. So I, I really do see Starship
20:33
as being this thing that can connect us, just like Starling
20:36
connects our information. This can connect us more
20:38
physically. Yeah.
20:41
So there's there's really nothing faster than a rocket.
20:45
Really, an overall rocket is the fastest thing that we know of
20:50
that that of the fastest means of transport.
20:53
So like you could go from LA to Sydney in less than half an
20:58
hour. You could go LA to Tokyo in less
21:02
than half an hour. You go from New York to
21:04
Singapore in half an hour. Everything's probably half an
21:07
hour. Basically.
21:09
There's some things, might be 10 minutes, yeah.
21:11
That's true. That means, Yeah, sign me up for
21:13
that, please. All right.
21:14
Cross Atlantic in 10 minutes, no problem.
21:17
Please yes, sign me up. You're going 25 times the speed
21:19
of sound, so that's 30 times faster than than of commercial
21:22
aircraft. And it's a whole hell of a lot
21:24
better view. Yeah, it's a hell of a view,
21:26
yeah. All right, cool.
21:29
Anything else, guys? Anything else?
21:31
I mean, we could say a lot more, yeah.
21:34
I just maybe we should go check in on the rocket and get on.
21:37
We're going to go back on a console to hopefully the weather
21:40
supports the launch tonight. And yeah, thanks for tuning in
21:44
and yeah, thanks for your support.
21:49
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