All 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.
And 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.
And 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, this is going to
take a minute. So first of all, with Falcon we
have achieved the most launches of any rocket in a single year
ever. So the next best is was the
Soviet Soyuz, which I think did a little over 60 launches in a
year and we did 96. So this this, yeah, so no other
family of orbital class rockets has launched more than 63 * a
year. That was Soyuz and we did 50%
more. The Falcon Heavy also surpassed
in terms of heavy lift vehicles, the record for Saturn 5, which I
think that, yeah, with five launches last year, we exceeded
the Saturn 5 record. So that was like pretty
incredible on 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 3
launches that happened in the space of a few days.
So, 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.
That was incredible. So and 2/3 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.
So even if you just take the non Starlink portion of the flights,
that was more than any other vehicle.
Last year by a longshot, we launched NASA's Psyche, ESA's
Euclid, the X37B space plane, multiple transport emissions.
We launched did emissions for one web via SAT and we're
actually on contract to launch Amazon's Kuiper constellation
and we treat everyone fairly. So, you know just one so and
just and and and we we managed to do 19 flights on a single
Falcon 9 booster, which is really incredible in 3 1/2
years. So and and that 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 it's worth, you know, like
like how long ago was that we landed a a booster.
It was actually eight years ago and in December, roughly roughly
8 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. And then there were a lot of
people that said even if it could be done, it's going to.
It's a dumb idea. That note that it wouldn't, it
wouldn't pay off that it wouldn't, you know, wouldn't
make sense. But 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 rockets, just like we have reusability
for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses.
Obviously reusability is essential and the fundamental
invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi
planet species is a full and rapidly basically rapidly
reusable reliable rockets. So like space pirate?
Rob, confirm you're ready for engine chill. 30 seconds.
Rob is ready for engine chill. Stace left R and internal power.
Stage wide locks. Stage wide fuel.
Stage 2 fuel rates. All them.
All stations verify. Ready for launch.
All stations acknowledge FTS. Rob, Rob, Carol, maybe.
I maybe I scope. G and CG.
And C go OSM go recovery landings, go LCLD go for lunch B
- 5 four 3/2 digital propulsion is dull
like a stage ignition. Stage one is entered into split
NH1. Newspad is starting
Spacecraft 1/2. I've been deployed final Orcom.
They were deployed. Why?
Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's incredible
how much has happened in eight years.
So, you know, I wonder what, what, what will things be like 8
years from now? Now hopefully we have, I think
we will have landed on Moss and I think we will have sent people
to the moon and and maybe if we get lucky we will have sent
people to Mars within eight years.
You know the and you know the. The key question sort of I think
about for civilization is the key test perhaps for
civilization is do we make it through this Bermie grade filter
of being a going from a one planet civilization to a multi
planet civilization? And if we do become 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. That's lame.
We don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations.
But I think we should always regard civilization as fragile.
That's not something that not a situation where there is an
inevitable upward trajectory. I mean, I read a lot about
history, and if you look at, if you read read history, you you
see that civilizations are anything but permanent, that
many civilizations have risen and fallen over the years, over
the centuries in millennia, and eventually the sun will expand,
boil the oceans and destroy all life on Earth.
Now admittedly that's, you know, several 100 million years in the
future, but it's only about maybe 10 or 20% of the existence
of Earth itself. If Earth is 4 1/2 billion years
old then another ten 1020% longer and life would or
intelligent life would not have evolved because it's taken us a
long time to get to this point. So you know that's that's really
that's that's really the key test do we become a
self-sustaining multi planet civilization while while
civilization still exists or or or don't we that that you know I
think that's that's really the key question.
I think we've got a good chance but it's not a sure thing.
That's why time is of 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.
The 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 grade
filter. You know Fermi Paradox is where
are the aliens you know if if if life is common, if intelligent
life is common, shouldn't we see a lot of evidence of it Now 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's an alien
registration card. Literally.
I was like, OK, so but but 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 I I have not seen any and I'd be on
it. And I can pretty much guarantee
that I'll post about it instantly.
OK, I was like, Yep, this is we. We got one.
This 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.
You 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. Yeah.
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. That 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.
This is these are all the launches we've done and you can
see how the cadence of launches has rapidly increased over time.
I think people online have actually assembled videos
showing every, every launch and it just gets like crazy fast as
you get to 2023. So yeah, so we've and we've
we've done a 19 three flight. We're now qualifying Falcon 9:00
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
Ferring recovery because actually a lot of people don't
realize we recover the fairing as well.
This was actually very difficult to recover the fairing.
So, Kessler, an immense amount of effort, but we now quite
regularly recover the fairing and we've reflown fairings 300
times. So Congrats to the ferry
recovery team. That was actually pretty damn
hard. Oh, and then of course, we do
operate basically a small Navy. I think people don't, don't
always know that, but we have, you know, drone ships and
support ships of various kinds. So we've got a small fleet of
ships and we operate them very efficiently.
I think a lot of people also sometimes don't know the size,
Like you can see the size of the ship by the person walking
around on it. It's not small though.
It looks cool. I like this sort of, it's kind
of a Darth Vader aesthetic, but it's like it so.
And we're also getting much better with the pad.
Turn around, we achieved a three day pad turn around and I think
we're aiming to hopefully I think get under 24 hours pad
turn around by the end of this year.
So in terms of. Yeah, launch rate, yeah.
So it's been 15 years since Flight 1 of Falcon One.
I'm sorry, should Flight 4 of Falcon One the first one to
reach orbit? So 15 years since we got
anything at all to to orbit. Yeah.
And now we're aiming to have 150 flights with airbass this year.
So. And these are big rockets at
this point. Falcon One is a little rocket.
In fact, when I see Falcon One right now, I was like, man, I
think I'd probably tuck that under my arm and just take it
home with me, you know, it was like launch it in the backyard
or something. It looks so cute.
But at the time, Falcon One 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, now it's like you look adorable thing.
So yeah, so the the most, I think the most profound metric
or the 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. So 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
mass to orbit. So the rest of the world, we
mean like the rest of US industry, you know, Europe,
India, China, Japan, everyone. So there's there's not a lot of
industries where a company is doing like 80% of everything.
And and then the what's really mind boggling is that that that
number should increase by 50% this year.
So I guess on order of like 90% of all mass to orbit, not count,
not counting Starship. So if we start, as we start
launching Starship, Starship is like, you know, 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.
And yeah, it's really an incredible amount, 1200 tons of
useful load to orbit last year. Yeah, that's that's just
astounding. So I I think that that really
deserves a round of applause. Like wow, I mean that's just
that's the most mind blowing and 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
will will need to be kind of in the million ton to orbit range.
So maybe a little higher, ideally a little higher, but
it's sort of if you just try to get things to the right order of
magnitude, like not trying to get to exact number, but try to
get the order of magnitude right, I think it's on the
order. It's roughly 1,000,000 tons to
Earth orbit that'll that'll get you roughly 200,000 tons to the
surface of Mars. So roughly you know
approximately 20% of whatever you get to Earth orbit you can
get to the surface of Mars. So and figure like maybe we need
at least 1,000,000 tons of useful load to the surface of
Mars for this for it to become self-sustaining.
That self-sustaining threshold is is actually a very tough
threshold to meet because even if you're missing a tiny thing
then eventually that Mars will die out.
So 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, the factory that you do build will eventually
breakdown and then you'll 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, yeah, 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
the old days. So anyway, it's quite a high
threshold and like Mars is is Mars is a fixer upper of a
planet. You know, need 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. So it's 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.
So by as of last year, the Dragon's fleet time on orbit
exceeded the space shuttle fleet.
So we had a cumulative of 1300 / 1300 days of time on orbit last
as of last year. So it's 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 we've had now Dragon
has visited the space station more times than the space
shuttle as well. So it's an incredible incredible
achievement by the Dragon team. So once again like as I was
saying this really has been an incredible 2023 was like maybe
the best year in company's history.
I mean it was the best year in the company's history actually.
So there's a lot of great things to go through.
So and I'm, 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 a flight proven dragon.
So these were all these are all these Dragons are all flown
before and and this year we're looking to fly maybe 7 or 8
dragon missions. So it's really been, yeah, a
fantastic success by the Dragon team.
This doesn't have audio, There's no sound in space.
Yeah, that's a great, that's a great looking space suit and in
Dragon interior. So yeah, so we've now sent 42
humans to orbit to be precise. Space is space is relatively
easy, but orbit is very difficult.
So we've now taken 42 humans to orbit and back.
And I have to say, like, yeah, if there's one thing I wish for
it is that we bring them all back safely.
That's like some of us people like say look what is the one
thing you wish for? I said I wish we'd bring this
astronauts back safely. That's one thing.
If I had one wish, that's what it would be.
So we also have now completed a second crew arm in in Florida.
So we've got two towers that are capable of two launchpads that
are capable of sending astronauts to to orbit.
And 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 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. So it's it's quite hard to make
the to still be mobile in an inflated suit and have have the
joints move and stuff and and then we we will actually
evacuate the whole spacecraft. So everyone even those that
don't go on the space walk 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. So but I 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 the vacuum of space
with just nothing, nothing at all and just be out there.
It's hard to It's actually hard to conceive the concept of
nothingness, and it's not technically nothing like there's
a small number of particles per cubic meter, but it's pretty
damn close to nothing. You know, if you lose 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 the the pressurization pumps and get
more more atmosphere from because 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. It'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. And we do want to actually have,
we want to have a space suit that you can walk around in
because if you're on the moon, you're on, you want to be able
to walk around the moon, walk around on Mars.
So having a high mobility space suit that actually isn't crazy
expensive ideally and that you can walk around in comfortably
is 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 space suits, 1,000,000 Mars suits that you need.
So 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 we're basically building, rebuilding the
Internet in space, which is pretty wild and 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?
It 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 bad
access. So 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.
Like 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.
But not it's a 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.
It'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. So let's see and we're we're now
introducing the the V2 money's. So this is the next generation
satellites that we've introduced with the constellation and yeah
these are twice, twice the capacity of last year or so from
88 terabits per second to 165. And our goal the the the, the
biggest single goal for stalling from a technical standpoint is
to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds.
So that would, but it 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. So this is anyway.
So that's actually a very, very hard problem, but because we are
low Earth orbit constellation, the speed of light, what do you
think the speed of light is 300 kilometers per millisecond.
So if we're at 550 kilometers, figure it like roughly two
milliseconds up, two milliseconds down.
So if you go up, down, up, down, it's 8 milliseconds speed of
light limitation and then almost everything else we can actually
address like we can't go faster than the speed of light.
Yeah, you know but yeah probably ever but we can, we can we can
get the rest of the the time I think below below 10
milliseconds and so then it basically it'll be 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. So we've gone from using
Krypton, which is not that rare. I mean, if Superman did come
here, it'd be like you can get it some Krypton, you know,
squirt gun or something like that.
And OK, 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. And so we moved to argon 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 but this is really the I think the first significant
argon hole thruster and certainly by far the most cost
efficient and the most power efficient and it was a really
great job by the Starlink team to create this thruster and many
other upgrades to the then there's the in space laser
stuff. I mean so this is by far, I
think we've now sent at least 1000 times more data, maybe
10,000 times more data over laser links in space than any
other system before. And I think we'll we'll soon be
like a million times more data transferred, maybe more than
that through this, this, this the Starlink laser interconnects
between the satellites. So we now have 99000 active
space lasers. So sort of vaguely reminds me of
Doctor 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.
It has like a laser for, you know, docking with the space
station. So it's like it's like Dragons
with lasers. I mean like 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.
So let's see. This is animation of all the
places where Starlink is active. So obviously a lot of the
stalling 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 to most
countries, most of the rest of the countries will get the
approval hopefully this year and we'll be able to go almost
worldwide. Some countries are probably
unlikely to approve our system, but yeah 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.
So that would be definitely fantastic.
But I do want to emphasize because we're all going to put
this this presentation on online that Starlink is supplemental to
terrestrial Internet. It is not does not replace it.
It is stalling does it does really well for like low
population density areas, but it is it is really not going to be
competitive in high density cities or it's it's really low
low, low density situations, which is really where the need
is. So anyway, works well with,
works well with other Internet providers is what I'm saying.
Then we go to 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. So we've now shipped our next
Gen. hardware that's a version four of the user terminal.
So that's allows us to lower the cost of Starlink and we'll be
introducing the Starlink many later this year, which can fit
in a backpack. So that'll be pretty cool for
anyone who wants very portable Starlink.
And then we just opened our Starlink factory in Bachelor of
Texas. So that's just a little, you
know, about 20 minutes away from Austin and this is this is going
to be. Yeah, I guess.
I guess some of you guys are part of that.
Yeah. In general we're going to we're
going to have like a massive round of applause for Starlink.
That is for sure because there's like the achievement level there
is is amazing. Actually.
Let's just have a massive round of applause.
It's like, God damn. Yeah, right.
It's hard to clap on this thing. Yeah, this the Starling
achievements are really mind blowing.
So it's a like the Starling system is an anomaly in the
Matrix. And then we also just recently
launched our first direct to sell satellites and we were able
to send text messages directly from a phone to the satellite
and then back down again. So we did intentionally spell
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.
This is, yeah, some Dogecoin jokes, basically.
So yeah. And anyway, so it's it's 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. And the the satellite can hear
the tiny signal that your phone is outputting, which is like
such a faint whisper, it's ridiculous.
But I can actually somehow hear that faint whisper and be able
to communicate with a phone Is is.
I think it's one of those things like I was sure is that actually
physically possible? But it is.
Now I do want to emphasize this is also a not a competitor to to
phone companies. This is something that will be
supplemental. So it's it's going to be very
helpful for remote areas where there's no cell connectivity or
once in a while within a city. If there is a place that has no
connectivity within a city, then Stonic will be able to
communicate with with phones. But it's I think it's something
on the order of seven megabits per second within within a cell
and the cells are sort of hundreds of square miles of
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 like if you're in the middle of the Pacific or
something like that, then but it but it is something that is
going to be very helpful and well I think save lives of
people. You know, if somebody's sort of
hiking in a remote region and they get lost, well now their
phone could actually work and I could.
I think it will actually save a lot of lives, which is cool.
And then we, we have 7 announced partnerships.
So we've got T-Mobile in the US, Rogers in Canada, Optus in
Australia, 1 New Zealand, Assault in in Switzerland, KDDI
in Japan and Intel in Chile and Peru.
So 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.
That's what I'm saying, you know, we want to, we want to
support the telcos and then of course this is slowed down a
little. But that first launch did did
take a take a while to get off the pad.
Don't worry there for a second. I mean, when that took off, I
was like, wow, I can't believe it took off.
That was my reaction. So I think it's incredible that
it we, we took off twice last year.
I mean, even though I've been very, you know, closely, you
know, involved with the Starship program from the beginning and
actually like I lived out here, this is my, my primary residence
for three years. This used to be a sandbar,
basically what we're looking at here.
And now it's got a, an advanced rocket factory and and a
gigantic launchpad and we've got a whole bunch of rockets out
there. But I still amazed that it
actually got put together and it took off.
I'm like, wow, I mean, the Starship is more than twice the
thrust of a Saturn 5. It is by far the biggest flying
object ever made. And for, you know, with with
some upgrades down the road, it'll it'll actually be, I think
probably over 20,000,000 lbs of thrust.
And Saturn five is 7 1/2, so it'll it'll end up being three
times the thrust of Saturn 5. And it's going to fly a lot.
It has to fly a lot, so it's it's going to end up flying
several times a day from many different locations in the
world. And 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. But just make sure you delete
the nuke and add the landing part.
Basically, it's the fastest way to get somewhere.
Yeah, wow. And then between Flight 1 and
two, we made a number of massive upgrades.
So the IT was obviously a massive upgrade to the
Launchpad. So we've got like our mini
Niagara Falls here. I mean the 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 and it worked
like oh actually it went looked at.
One of the first things I went and looked at after the second
launch was to check out the launchpad.
Because obviously after the first launch we dug a pretty big
hole and and honestly it looked like you could just it looked
like there was no damage at all, like you could just launch a
game basically for the pad itself.
So it's great work by the team to radically improve the
launchpad overnight. Yeah, the people 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
a long time ago. But anyway, this this is a big
rocket and it will get bigger over time.
So yeah, so that's, I don't know if you guys watched Kong versus
Godzilla. It's like the one of the most
insane movies I've ever seen. But it's like kind of
entertaining and it's sheer madness.
And the crazy thing is that 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.
And 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.
Just 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. Yeah, so we're going to this is
this is we're going to really be launching a lot and up and we're
going to be upgrading 1 tower while we launch from another
tower. So two towers is important and
there there are actually so many upgrades between Flight 1 and
two that it would actually take it like hours to go through them
all. But 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 TVCI mean
it it it was just that this is one of the biggest upgrades.
We also massively upgraded the heat field.
The engines themselves were massively upgraded.
Literally everything on the rocket was like, there might
have been thousands of upgrades between flight 1:00 and 2:00.
So really gigantic improvement between flight 1:00 and 2:00.
And also made obviously many improvements between flight 2:00
and 3:00. And then we've got, we've got a
whole development plan to, like I said, ultimately get to a
fully reusable rocket that does over 200 tons to orbit on a
regular basis. Full reusability.
Yeah, hot staging, I mean hot staging was was a change that
was basically, I don't know just really within the space of like
three or four months maybe less going from or roughly that going
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 that was an
amazing achievement. So I was like, wow, that's and
it worked. So I was like, wow, so, so then
let's look at flight 2. Potential operators on Countdown
One. It's the final go go for Flight
2 of Starship and their two zeros at 7:00 AM.
Central Raptor One go Raptor 2GO Stage 1.
Go stage two. Copy go for plate.
Clock is rolling 10987654321. We have liftoff.
Boost stretcher cut on. Stage separation.
So yeah, big round of applause guys.
Wow. So flight flight 2 actually
almost made it to orbit. So in fact, ironically if 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 only wouldn't have that liquid oxygen
if we had a payload. So 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 3 and then a rapid cadence to achieve full
and rapid reusability. And I mean, what kind of the
mind blowing thing is like there is an actual path that we are on
to make life multiplanetary. Can you freaking believe that?
Like what hype? Yeah, we just got to get it done
before civilization ends. But but like, I think we, I
think it's going to happen. Yeah, right here.
So anyway so in terms of getting there, we're going to obviously
want to accelerate the production and testing get to a
high cadence. You know for for any given
technology development there 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 we do a test, we we learn something
more. So 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. Yeah.
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 the the
be even taller, probably end up being, I don't know, 140 meters
before it's all said and done. Maybe 150 in the end in in
length. So yeah, so be even taller than
it currently is. Yeah and so with with flight.
With flight 1 the goal was not to blow the the pad up and
ideally get get some distance which we did.
With flight 2 it was to get past staging.
So we achieved the goal of getting past staging and almost
to orbit and then flight 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 and prove the that we can reliably deorbit.
We want to do a tipping point header domain propellant
transfer. This is important for the NASA
Artemis program and we wanted to also demonstrate the the payload
door for the sort of PES dispenser for delivering the
Stallings, the the the V2 non money, the actually probably VI
guess V3 technically but really the really giant satellites to
orbit. Yeah so like I said the the the
the master orbit ultimately of Starship will be you know over
time I think millions of tons of of payload to orbit.
So it's I mean compared to present day master orbit it'll
be more than more than 1000 times.
I mean, you know, more than 1000 times greater than master orbit
currently. That's what it will be
eventually or needs to be. So 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. I'm always incredibly grateful
to NASA for their support and for trusting us to do to take
take astronauts to orbit to take cargo to the space station and
to be an integral part of of getting astronauts back to the
moon. One 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. But the crazy thing is that it's
been over half a century since we last went to the moon.
So, you know, that's I think what maybe that's what what
causes people to be skeptical, like how come we, we can't go to
the moon Now it was 66 years from the first controlled
powered flight of the Wright brothers in 19 O3 to landing on
the moon in 69. So only 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 and we're not going to go just I think like we
want. The next step I think is to
build up a a moon base like Moon base Alpha, make sci-fi real,
not to add remove the fire part of sci-fi so but now one 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.
Now we've gotten very good at docking because we've 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.
So 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. This is one of the fundamental
technologies that's necessary to 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, world's biggest
peasant, Spencer. And 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 and really the we like we are a very
fundamental part of the the Artemis program.
So if we if we do not succeed wish we will but but we in order
for the Artemis program to succeed we must succeed with
with with Starship and like I said we actually want to far far
far exceed what NASA has asked us to do.
So so the 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. That's that's the next really
big threshold from Apollo is have a have an actual moon base.
I remember seeing this like I guess kind of cheesy sci-fi show
long time ago called moon base alpha.
I don't know if you know we've seen that but like the moon
actually drifts away from Earth. Now this is not going to happen
but but it was a cool show moon base alpha but we need a real
moon 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, an incredible beautiful Mars city and a
flourishing civilization on Mars.
And you know ultimately we can transform Mars into an Earth
like planet with the terraforming just needs to be
warmed up really. And 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, it has to be humans
actually, yeah, 'cause it could 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 in the distant future.
So anyway, I'll go into questions.