Welcome, Elon. Let's talk rockets.
All right. Let's talk really big rockets,
Okay. Let me take you guys back in
time a little bit. 15 years ago, I think it was a week past,
SpaceX successfully, on its fourth attempt, launched the
Falcon One to space to orbit. And I think it carried, if I'm
correct, 165 kilogram payload today you're up.
Go ahead. It was just a test payload on
the 4th floor, so no actual satellite because the 1st 3
launches unfortunately have failed, though we didn't want to
risk that was launched with with natural satellite, but we're
very happy to have launched A Malaysian satellite on the 5th
launch of Falcon One. Yeah, fantastic.
So let me make the contrast today.
You're preparing for the second launch of Starship, which has
the ability to ability to launch up to up to 150 metric tons in a
reusable configuration. If I'm doing the math and you're
better than this and me 900 times the capability, roughly a
Falcon one and I get. A Falcon One looks like a
child's toy by comparison. It's a it's a staggering
achievement, what you've done in 15 years and all the team at
SpaceX, I think we're all just in awe of how fast that progress
has been made and to pioneer reusability for orbital launch
systems is, I think, something to be tremendously proud of,
both for you and the team. There it stands, this vehicle
now, I think something like almost 400 feet tall, roughly
over 120 meters. It's a massive Starship
spacecraft and super heavy rocket, itself collectively
known as Starship, and it produces more thrust than the
SLS system, the Saturn 5 and Rush's old N1 rocket.
Is that correct? Yes the the current version of
this of the Starship produces just over twice the thrust of
Saturn 5 and with the upgrades that have we have in the works
it'll do about three times the the thrust.
SO75 in in the sort of auditorial system would have
been seven and a half million pounds of thrust.
We're we're at about 16 right now and we with with future
engine upgrades we'll take that to about £20 million of thrust.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
So I know you guys have said you learned a lot from the April
17th from this first launch attempt.
There's been some upgrades to the vehicle.
I think it's it's a Booster 9 now that you're launching with
Ship 25, is that correct, geeking out the numbers?
Yeah, the kids that follow online.
These numbers are are maybe a little.
It's not quite the 21st, 1st booster, because what would
happen is we would redesign the we would make a new design.
And then we'd actually scrap units that were in progress.
So it's, it's 25. It sounds like we're both 25
years, but we haven't actually built 25 units.
We're both probably about 12. So a lot and yeah, so so but the
way you think we really is that this is, this is a flight 2 and
has a number of upgrades on both the ship side and the booster
side. We've done a lot more for with
with engine isolation. Which is incredibly important.
We've tried to draw as many lessons as possible from the
Soviet Anwan rockets, which was probably the closest in design
to Starship. I believe it had 29 N K33
engines are called correctly and there was a very quite high
thrust rockets and there unfortunately I think actually
the rocket on on all things considered was was a great
design. But I did not receive sufficient
ground testing, so I never never made it to always.
But that would have been the sort of the closest probably
parallel to to Starship. The the the really the biggest
difference, the most fundamental difference of Starship is that
it is designed to be fully reusable with both the booster
and the ship or the both the first and second stage be are
designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
So that so. Well, a truly profound
revolution in Master Olbridge. You have to have.
I call it the Four. The Four R's reusable, reliable
rockets. RRRRI.
Love it. You're pirated RR everybody give
me an RR all. Right, So what does what does
success look like for this flight?
Number 2, what does success look like for you?
What are you trying to achieve? Well I I do want to set
expectations well not too high so there's there's there's a
transmount new technology in this rocket we are we we have
actually changed the entire stage separation system from
something that was I don't know how to describe this but but
but. Kind of a a a just just a
rotation and flip we're we're trying we're trying to move to a
passive stage step system where you don't have pushers
essentially in in the to try to eliminate parts.
There's no pushes, no interest stage like Falcon Nine has and
with, with with with Splite too. We're actually trying to do hot
stage, so. So, so hot staging would would
mean that we light the the ship or other stage engines while the
boost engines are still partially thrusting.
So we throttle down and shut down most of the booster
engines. Then we light the the ship
engines and there's there's a bent area which looks comically
small actually, which hopefully is not because you're you're
you're essentially blasting the top of the booster with the
ship. Now this is actually from a
physics standpoint the most efficient way to do stage
separation and the Soviets I believe the Russians made
extensive use of of hot staging and but but of course this is
the first time we're doing it So I would say that's that's the
riskiest part of the flight full flight 2 and if if, if the if
the engines likes and the ship. Doesn't blow itself up during
stage though then I think we've got a decent chance to reach the
orbit. Now technically it's it's a it's
a scooch below orbit because it's it's going to do almost a
complete Circuit of the Earth, but then bash down somewhere,
somewhere in the Pacific, just off the coast of Hawaii, because
the the ship is designed to reenter and has a has a heat
shield. So we we we want to make Now we
we don't know if this we think it will work, but we aren't sure
if it will work. So if it doesn't work, we want
it to not work over the Pacific, which is a very large body of
water with almost no people on it.
Excellent target, Excellent target.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I always think it's
funny if you people call Earth Earth, because Earth is water.
Earth is 70% water. And if you take a, a, a, you
know the, the an actual round version of the Earth, not not a
mercantile projection, but at the globe and you center it on
the Pacific, it just looks like water.
It's it's it's like, where's the land?
So anyway, this this is quite helpful when you're doing
experimental rocket flights. So how many more test flights
are coming up, and when do you think you're going to try to
catch Starship on a tower? With the With that giant
Mercazilla. Listen, I saw Congress's
Gogzilla and dust got gave gave me the idea.
In fact if we gave out to our legs it could just tromp around
like like Mercazilla. But but we have we have a giant
custom designed tower with massive mechanical arms that
will literally try to catch the booster and catch the ship.
Which it sounds insane. I mean, I'm going to see a scifi
movie that does this, you know? But the theory actually work.
Is it work? Let's just say success is in a
set of possible outcomes. I'm not sure what the
probability is, but success is somewhere in that.
Is success possible? Yes, I think it's possible.
In terms of catching it, I think.
Well, well for the for the ship side we we also want to make
sure that it actually comes in at fully intact and and lands at
a precise location in the Pacific before we try to catch
it at at the lower side because we we we're taking every
proportion we can for that. We do not risk any any human
lives or or destruction of property.
So it'll be a few flights so so for the ship it'll be when we
see the ship landing at a precise position.
In the in the water, that's when we will try to catch the ship
with our Mecazilla on the tower. The booster obviously the
booster fights we've we've done many times on Falcon 9, so we're
much more familiar and have retired confidence with Rooster
recovery. We we've actually had the
booster boost back to land and and land at Cape Canaveral Air
Force Base many times, albeit with landing legs, not with the
Mecazilla arms. The booster I, I, I I think, I
think that there's a decent chance depending on when our
licenses are granted that we would catch the booster within
the next year or maybe less than a year and and then hopefully
get lucky. We might catch the ship towards
the end of next year. And where does the catch take
place? Is it Willie Mays in the middle
outfield over his shoulder, or is Florida somewhere?
No, the, the, the both the booster and the ship come back
to launch night. OK, fantastic.
Yeah, that's. What I mean by the, the, the,
this, this in fact. I mean the the thing that is
this says we need a giant tower with customized arms to lift the
the booster and the ship onto the launchpad.
We're gonna absolutely need it. We can technically do it with
with. With humongous cranes on a low
wind day, but that's it's quite unwieldy The the the the tower
with the arms is capable of lifting the booster and the ship
even on on on a on a very windy day.
Oh moderately windy day. So then it just seems to me
that, well if we can lift the the ship and the Brewster the
the ship onto the onto the lower stand or the the booster onto
the lower stand and the ship onto the booster.
With those same arms we should be able to catch the the booster
ship with those same arms we've done pretty good with with with
the thruster based land deal and in fact we can make this we can
make the the rocket harbor in midair.
In fact, we were able to do that many years ago.
If you look at the old Falcon 9 test videos which we've called
Grasshopper, where where we'd actually take Falcon 9 booster.
And we'd have it just go up and and hover at 100 meters and then
translate over another 100 meters, then translate back and
then come back and land. So we're able to do that really
over a decade ago. It's it's not obviously very
efficient. We're propellant to have a
rocket hover, but it can't be done.
So that was I was like OK, let's just have the rocket come back
and you know hover briefly and have the like then the arms come
together and catch it. So that's the best of German
ideas. Going back to what I'm saying,
which it's not, it's not just reusability, it's rapid
reusability and and it doesn't get more rapid then bring it
back to the Lord site. And so in principle the the, the
booster, it must come back very fast.
By the way, where we know that booster is coming back to land
or it's going to land fast because with the high thrust to
weight that we're aiming for, which is sort of on the order of
1.3 to 1 quad core. The, the and and a staging ratio
which is currently about 3:00 to 1:00 in favor of the booster.
So propellant to the propellant on booster to propellant.
Our ship has got three to one on on the current version but it's
trending closer to 2 to one on with future versions.
That means that we're we're shifting more and more of the
Delta V burden to the ship side that that means the.
The booster actually uses up its repellent quite quickly and will
will trend towards about a only about 100 seconds or so of a
booster flight and the booster will immediately flip around,
boost back to more site and land.
And so it it it really we're talking about Booster being back
at the lower site in about four or five minutes, which is
pretty, pretty wild I think like 5 if you know. 5 minute booster
basically it's back it's it's it's it's landed somehow.
Whether it's either crashed or it's landed on the it's from
court by the islands one or two and within 5 minutes and so so
so then you then lands back on more sand and you can then
refill propellant the the the booster, there's a sharp side.
Obviously it's going to take a minimum of an hour to map to get
around the planet. Still going pretty fast but.
You got a circle of globe and and obviously that depends on
what inclination and So what what your launch as with what
your inclination of the Brewster as to whether it has a flight
coming back over the launch site or not.
If it's it's technically possible to just say a little
bit depending upon your launch inclination, very good.
So, Chris? Come back in an hour and a half.
A ship? Ship.
Sorry, ship could come back in about an hour and a half.
Any prediction on when you're gonna start deploying satellites
with Starship? Yeah, I think we will start
deploying. I think there's a good chance we
start deploying stalling V3 satellites next year in roughly
roughly a year from now because we.
We before we are confident that the ship like I said the the the
the the hardest part about this or the part that will take the
longest is the is is solving for ship safe ship reentry and
landing and but but before we sold that we can launch the
satellites because in any case with Belkin mine it's the the
the upper stage is expandable so more.
You know it's it's actually fine to start watching satellites
even before we saw for for ship reusability that that that is
the hardest part of the equation.
So but with Falcon 9 we've we've gotten pretty far with
reusability the the the booster I think it's now highly unusual
for the booster to not come back and land it's it's it's gotten
quite normal for the booster to come back and land.
We now have a couple of boosters that are have done 17, I think
18 flights at this point. And and and and then the fairing
is also recovered. So the fairing reusability is
also solid. But, but the Falcon 9 design
does not allow for a reusability of the upper stage.
So and and the Falcon 9 does it while reasonably rapid.
If you especially you've got a a return to launch site landing
still takes at least a few days to refurbish before you can
fight again. And so with.
With with Starship, actually more profound than the size is
the fact that it is fully it is designed to be fully and rapidly
reusable. The the reason for the absurd
size is that we're trying to build something that is capable
of of creating a permanent face on the moon and a city on Mars.
That's that's why it is so large.
Otherwise we could make it much smaller.
So I think the the diameter of Starship in inside the envelope
is something like 9 meters and inside the the top envelope is
about 1717 1/2 meters of usable volume.
This is incredible amount of of space, right?
Unheard of volume. What is that?
What does that open up the possibilities?
What, what kind of things can we we fit in that space and what
does it mean for the industry as we look at, you know, maybe you
can give me a how many whales or how many starlings can you stuff
in there? I don't I don't know what the
right metric is, but give us a sense of size.
Well, I mean like when you when you step into the the, the
Starship bearing, payload volume, it looks like a
cathedral. It looks absurd, frankly, it's
like why this is ridiculously gigantic.
That's what that was my first impression when I when I first
went up there in a man lift and and and and climbed through the
little hole. For the Starship initial rough
prototype, I was like this. Like what?
What have we done? This thing is too thing is
ridiculously big. Listen, so now this actually can
be great for science though. So one of the exciting projects
that we're working with is with the sole full motor at Berkeley
on A. A telescope or Space Telescope
that is able to use the that that what you it's it's got an
enormous lens I think it's perhaps A7 or 8 meter diameter
lens and it it was actually a satellite that was meant for the
OR a a the lens is meant for for a ground based satellite.
But if you then take that same satellite and put it in in in
orbit. Its capabilities are greatly
enhanced because you don't have the obfuscation of the of the
atmosphere. So that that's why for example
the the the Hubble which is actually a fairly small
telescope can do better than I think any ground in any maybe
any historical ground satellite especially in the visual
spectrum. So.
So we're very excited about the what we can do for space
science. Because really at this point
especially for for any photons that where there's interference
with the atmosphere so any any sort of short wavelength photons
you really want your satellite to be in vacuum or your your
telescope to be back. So that's really the future.
So I think there's a lot of exciting potential there for
planetary for for space science and but but like I said the the,
the really fundamentally the reason that's so, so gigantic
is. Is that if if you're on a, you
know, long Jay de Mars, I think being cooped up in a something
the size of a minivan would would be unappealing to most
people. Just so comparison for the
audience here, I think the Hubble telescope was something
like 2.4 meter diameter, and so you're talking about I think
three times the size somewhere along that order for the mirror.
That's incredible. We've seen some changes down
there in Texas at Starbase. I don't know if that's where
you're you're you're streaming from here today, but there's a
new factory that you're working on to enable a faster
manufacturing rate. Can you talk to us a little bit
about that? What are you trying to what are
your goals? What are you what are you trying
to achieve with the with the new factory Yeah so we are building
a giant factory for a giant rocket and I mean honestly it's
I I recommend people visit Star base as it turns out it's it's
on a state highway. So for the I think it's one of
the rare situations where and I actually don't mind.
I think it's kind of cool that the that the public can actually
drive within a literal stones throw away from the battery and
the launch site and actually see the rocket first hand.
And in fact if you go on the Internet right now including on
the X platform, there are people who are live streaming at 24/7
the entire construction launchpad everything.
And so. So it's it's the people say like
well can I go see it. It's so easy to go see.
You can just literally fly to Brownsville and drive down drive
to the beach and you can see it literally a stone's throw away
the factory and the launch side. So anyone here wants to do that
I recommend it. It's very, very easy.
No permission required. So yeah we're building this
giant rocket factory we the engines are still manufactured
in California at SpaceX headquarters in in in Los
Angeles which is also that's it's also just an odd location
that's where we built the the the Falcon 9 rockets and the
Dragon spacecraft really about 5 minutes from LAX at the at sort
of what used to be a Northrop headquarters I believe it's
that's so you know that's but yeah we're willing the strand
factory. So The thing is so in order to
if you look at the in the grand scheme of things say OK what is
required to have a self-sustaining base on Mars or
city on Mars. You have to really think of it
in terms of very large tonnage the and and if we can even get
the tonnage estimate to correct within an order of magnitude I
think we're doing well. So the you know, I think I think
we we should probably aim for something like 1,000,000 tons of
useful load delivered to the surface of Mars which requires
roughly 5 million tons to Earth orbit.
So you know if you get about 20 for whatever mass you get to
Earth or would you get about 20% of that mass landed to the
surface of Mars, you know you will take maybe you can get 25%
optimistically. So that's why this thing is so
gigantic is we've got to get 5 million tons to the to to orbit,
which hopefully gets about 1,000,000 tons to the surfs to
Mars and hopefully 1,000,000 tons is enough to create a
self-sustaining city on Mars. I'm incredible.
So talking about Mars, any new predictions on when you I know
this is your ultimate goal, your destination?
Any predictions on when Starship might land on Mars without crew?
Maybe a crude flight? Any any prediction there?
Well, I think three or four years.
Four years. That would be something like,
right? I have to check with the Earth,
Mars, you know Earth, Mars. But you know get have overall
synchronization about every 26 months so you can't just go you
fly to Mars when it's on the other side of the sun from Earth
that's the I will be so that roughly every 26 months the
orbits are in the the right relative position and then you
then you have the Mars transport window.
So I I think, but I think it's sort of feasible within the next
four years to do an uncrewed test test landing that.
Didn't have enough on your plate?
You're doing a lunar Lander version, yes.
Yeah. Well really Starship should be a
generalized transport system to anywhere in the solar system.
That's that's the intent with when you when you have
propulsive landing you you you can land anywhere whether
there's an atmosphere, no atmosphere.
You know it's not really dependent on water.
You know see you know full crude capsules on on on Earth we've
generally gone with parachutes and water or you know and it
rushes on land but then they need retro rockets right at the
end to sort of slow things down. So a propulsive system should
generalize to be able to land anywhere on a solid surface
anywhere on the the the in the solar system.
So the the the moon while it's sort of dusty that that that the
moon is actually harder that it's it's not just a big dust
pile. So it's it's parter than you
think the the lunar regolith. So I'm I'm sort of optimistic
that we can take a Starship that's fairly you know
unmodified from what would land on earth or Mars obviously need
legs but apart from that I suspect you could land the
Starship with minor modifications on on the moon and
and the same would go for once you have a propellant plant on
Mars you could then go to the asteroid belt and and the moons
of Jupiter. If you could establish A
propellant plant there then then you could go to the winds of
Saturn and and ultimately all the way out into the caper belt
and the OR cloud. So what you're talking about
requires propellant transfer, obviously in orbit.
Can you explain to everyone watching why that's necessary
and how it works and and how you work to progress to to make that
propellant transfer happen? Yes, so really propellant
transfer is is a similar problem to just docking.
Now we've gotten pretty good at docking with the Dragon.
Going to the space station and docking with the space station
is really quite difficult because we didn't design the
space station and the space station has a lot of
complexities and has crew on board.
So what we have to be extremely careful and that the talk with
the space station take is is like I would say it's far more
difficult to talk with the space station that it would be stuck
with our own spaceship and and so propellant transfer just
really means that we we send a but a a Starship up there with
with no payload and and it just transfers its propellant to a
ship that is already there. So you have to dock dock with
the ship that is going to Mars or the moon and transfer the
propellant from a version of the ship that has no cargo.
Now there's there's there's there'll be a future sort of
tanker optimized version of of Starship where where we, you
know have we stretch the tanks and have little to no cargo
space because that's the optimal thing for a tanker.
But you don't have to do that. That will increase the
propellant load of the tanker or you have the propellant
transferability of the of the of the tanker.
But it's not. It's not absolutely necessary.
You just you could in theory use an unmodified Starship and
transfer propellant that way. So.
I would imagine that you're doing this and you may have
multiple launches in either rapid succession or maybe
multiple pads launching multiple versions of the vehicle.
Is that all taking place from Texas?
Then how quickly did those launches have to take place to
make this work? Yeah we'll we'll have a launch
site in in Texas as well as in Florida though we're actually
partially built a Starship launch pad at we had 39 A which
is where we launched Falcon Heavy and our crude the crude
Dragon. So we're partially built and
we'll we'll we'll fully build that out over time and and
probably have at some point a a Greenfield location for Starship
at at the Cape. Now in the in the sort of you
say like four or five year time frame where paths we're
launching several times a day then we may need to go to an
ocean based like platform just if if you're launching I don't
know 10 times a day that might be a bit much for even for even
for the Cape I don't know. But so we may end up doing
platform based launches from specially designed sort of ocean
going platform but we we we will need to do a lot of launches.
We're talking about thousands of launches per year, so at at and
and so you do get up to the sort of what I was talking about
million tons or 5 million tons to orbit that if you've got you
know 1000 launches a year each of which do over 100 tons,
that's 100,000 tons of like a Congo, you know per year to
orbit there's still not quite enough.
I think we'd want to get to roughly a million times over per
per year to Earth or per year which would mean that you get to
1,000,000 tons to Mars in five years.
These are very big numbers. Obviously they've just put
things into perspective. All of Earth launch capability
right now it apart from Falcon is about 400 tons to orbit per
year. Falcon nine this year we'll do I
think around 50 or 1600 tons. So Falcon 9, you know this
already doing about 80% of Earth mass to orbit and next year we
expect to increase that by about 40 or 50% on the Falcon side.
So, you know, maybe 2500 tons to over for Falcon next year, but
these are still small numbers compared to what's required for
essentially making life multiplanetary.
Well, making life multiplanetary, you've got to be
in this sort of hundreds of thousands to millions of tons of
goes over per year. Unbelievable numbers, really.
Somebody worked in the launch business for several years.
It's it's incredible for me to even try to think about that
much mass to orbit in one year. It's that's crazy.
Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. Ludicrous mode, I think.
Yeah, for launch very much. So yeah, it's either we do that
or we're a single plant species forever.
So we either achieved those kind of numbers or we will we will
never have a self-sustaining city on Mars.
Into building this amazing launch system.
You're also working on a Polaris mission for that's going to
allow, I think, Dragon to open and have people actually
floating in space doing an Eva. And you're building a space suit
for that. So you can talk a little bit
about that space suit. And then can you use that same
suit on the moon and Mars and for other missions, Yeah, so
SpaceX spacesuit, we, we do expect to evolve that to be
something that can be an Ava suit on the ground on the moon
and Mars. And it's sort of initially as as
really just a precious suit just in case there's an emergency
emergency depressurization of the spacecraft.
So it's it's was basically like a self-contained life support
system in in suit form and obviously we'll retain that
capability but but but now for an upcoming flight we we want to
do an Eva or extra. Yeah basically go float around
in space still on a tether. So it's not, it's not going to
be an independent little little space, little spacesuits that's
just flying around. We could do that, but and maybe
that'll happen on a future flight.
But it will be a tethered EBA, just you're just out there,
floating in the void, connected by a thin cord to the spaceship.
You put a Tesla in space. This was like an amazing thing
to see a Tesla actually flying into space.
So you've already put one of the vehicles in space.
Are you thinking about making a Tesla Rover?
Maybe Moon or Mars? Any any ideas for a cyber truck
on the moon? It would look cool, that's true.
And I think the nice thing about electric cars is that obviously
do not require oxygen to, they're not combustion cars, so
they don't require, they don't have to ingest oxygen from the
ambient atmosphere. So yeah, I think Tesla could
easily make a car that, you know, like a cyber truck, lunar
variant, we could just get the get the ruin off your package.
So yeah I mean the the reason that we launched the car the
reason we launched the car was heavy I should say is it's
settled but we want to have something was that exciting as a
initial payload but but where the last of the wood would not
be catastrophic. So you will wonder what why if
my what's my car orbiting Earth and Mars because it's it's in an
elliptical orbit and and actually it almost touches it
touches like the the asteroid belt and and goes past the orbit
of Mars. It's just that we we were we
weren't sure if the first flight of heavy would fail or not and
reward to just have a pic that was more exciting than.
I thought it was brilliant, really a masterstroke in terms
of getting attention of the world, really, to put that in
orbit, Thanks. Can Starship be used as a space
station? How long could it stay in orbit
and what would be the purpose of that?
How could that work? So how long could Starship be in
orbit? Yeah.
Could it be its own space station?
If you wanted to put a Starship with the capability of
laboratory, how long could that could it stay in orbit and still
come down? Oh, there's no real limits.
You could stay in orbit for a very long time.
The, the, the, the volume of the Sasha faring is roughly
comparable to the volume of the of the International Space
Station. So there's about about 1000
cubic meters of of volume in the in the ferry, I think.
I think space station's A comparable amount.
And would have the power to run a lot of laboratory experiments.
Sorry. Yeah.
Given that is given that is some of volume to the space station,
you you could do what what you're doing in the space
station on a saw ship if you want.
There's there's no limit to how long to stay up there.
It's really just you you you need.
Yeah, solar panels, battery, and some thrusters to maintain
orbit. How about point to point
transportation? I know when you were in
Guadalajara at the IC you got you kind of hinted at a little
bit of the point point to point. Capability of transportation.
I I can't remember the exact amount of time to get from one
side of the world to the next, but can you talk about that?
How do you see the the future point to point using using
Starship? Yeah so the the fastest way with
with known physics to get from one place to another on Earth is
with a incontinental ballistic missile.
This is This is why Icbs with nukes are kind of like the
ultimate weapon. Now in this case it's sort of
lead the new AD landing, but it's it's it's certainly very
feasible obviously if we can take off from trans and land on
Mars or the moon we can take over land on Earth too.
So, so it really comes down to a question of of is it
economically viable compared to long distance aircraft.
And I think our our back the outlet numbers suggest that it
actually has a shot at being economically viable for long
distance transport on Earth for for a few reasons.
The the propellant cost is actually quite low being liquid
methane, liquid oxygen. The cost of liquid oxygen is
primarily liquid productions, about 7778% liquid oxygen by by
mass and roughly 22 or 23% liquid methane.
So the propellant cost is it's the lowest cost propellant you
could possibly get on Earth and and then the the because the
Rockets moving so fast you you can use it about in theory about
10 times more than you've used aircraft.
So there's so, so Falcon 90, sorry, Starship can go from
let's say Los Angeles to Sydney or something like that in 20
minutes basically maybe half an hour at most.
So it whereas I think I think an airliner takes about 14 or 15
hours. So you've got something which is
really much faster than an aircraft.
And so for an airliner that you can do basically in order of
magnitude more trips with Starship than you can with an
airliner, which means that the and this and the no, no pilots
are needed. In fact, you can't.
This is not only a computer can pilot this because human
reaction time is not, that's not so then you don't have the pilot
costs, you don't have the food costs, you don't have the you,
you know, you don't really even need bathrooms if you can get
there in half an hour. So it actually would work out
that. It's it's actually we think
lower cost than long distance aircraft.
OK. You got a little chuckle here in
the crowd about the no bathroom line.
So I think people are looking forward to it.
Yeah, less than half an hour. You know, you say like go just
go before you hop on, you know, and it'll be there fast.
I mean you you could technically, you know, have, I
don't know, breakfast in LA, lunch in London and you know,
dinner in Singapore and then be back back in LA for bedtime.
So you're. Connecting now I think something
like 2 million people with * lake right with your with your
satellite communication system and growing rapidly, you're
mastering communications from space to earth from low earth
orbit. You're now doing inter satellite
links with this system. What do you see for Starlink
being used as a relay, let's say around the moon or for calm
relay all the way to Mars and back?
Well, for for Mars Mars you'd want basically like a laser
relay system. Essentially.
It sort of depends on what you what what, what bandwidth are
you looking for. Obviously in order to have
continuous coverage with Mars, you'd have to have some relay
system because you can't transmit through the Sun.
So in Mars you know when the Sun is between you and the and Mars
you have to do a bank chart through a relay satellite so
that your photons don't have to go through the Sun.
So and then then it's just I will ultimately want you know,
Terra bit, maybe petabit level data transfer between Earth and
Mars. So then you're going to you
don't want probably some some relay satellites along the way
to be able to do that. It says it's really, it's a
bandwidth thing. You'd want to use lasers and
then the the the laser beam is going to widen with distance so
that then you need to be able to receive the laser beam before it
gets too wide. This means that you need a
series of satellites in order to with Mars at its first distance,
especially with very high bandwidth.
Well you can obviously do low bandwidth with longer wavelength
photons but but but if if there's a you know here in city
on Mars you'd want to have very high bandwidth so therefore
bunch of lasers and and satellites stalling already used
this inter laser sport intrasatellite.
So if I if I made just a couple more questions.
Throughout this week here at the IC, we've been inspired.
There's thousands of young people here.
I think 41% of our delegates are under the age of 35, which is
incredible by by any space conference metric.
We get a lot of young people here.
There's delegates from the Space Generation Advisory Council,
from the Future Space Leaders Foundation, from the YP program.
Here at the I A F you have a message for these young people,
the young engineers and scientists that are here.
Many of them have been inspired by you.
Anything you can say to them about?
Pursuing a career in space or what motivated you to do all the
things that you're doing? Yeah, I mean I'm interested in
that which both the civilization and I think we want to expand
the scope and scale of consciousness so as to better
understand the nature of the universe and even to ask
understand which questions to ask.
Like, you know, one of the most disfiring books I've ever read
was the Hitchhikes guys of the Galaxy.
What we're in the they're they're trying to understand
meaning of life in the, you know, Hitchhiker's Guide and
the, I mean the larger message of the Hitchhiker's Guide of the
Galaxy is that you you actually need to know what questions to
ask about the answer that is the universe.
And we we don't yet know what questions to ask.
So I'm just curious really, I'm just curious as to the nature of
reality. Where does where, where does it
all go to? Where does it go?
Where does it come from? Where are the aliens, for
example? Are there aliens?
Is it? Are we alone?
People often ask me if I'm seeing any evidence of of
aliens, and I unfortunately have seen no evidence of aliens yet.
We are the aliens, so I can tell, and I think if anyone
would know, it'll probably be me.
And I've not seen any evidence of aliens.
So what? What that perhaps suggests is
that this tiny candle of consciousness that is humanity
is all that exists in a vast darkness, and we should do
everything we can to ensure that the candle does not go out.
Well, Ilan, I'd like to thank you for joining us today.
Good luck with your next launch. Thank you.
Thanks. It was honor to be.
Thank you everyone.