I 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 sort of incredible, and one day we will indeed occupy
Mars. So let's go through everything that FACEX has achieved, that you have
done, and it's actually going to take a while. By the way,
this is going to take a minute. 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 sixty launches in a year, and we did ninety six. Yeah,
so no other family of orbital class rockets has launched more than sixty three times
a year. That was Soyuz, and we did thirty percent more. Falcon
Heavy also surpassed in terms of heavy lift vehicles the record for Saturn five,
which I think that with five launches last year week seeded the Saturn five records.
So that was like pretty incredible on Falcon Heavy. So this gives you
a sense in pictures of how incredible that was. 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 they
were like three launches that happened in the space of a few days. But
this is all the launches on one page. And yes, it's really incredible.
All made it to orbit, all landed, just a huge hand for
the Falcon team. That was incredible. And two those of the missions were
Starlink, but the third were for other customers for a NASA for other communications
satellites. It was a combination of our of Starlink plus a lot of other
missions. So even if you just take the non Starling portion of the flights,
that was more than any other vehicle. Last year by a long shot.
We launched NASA's Psyche, Issa's Euclid, the X thirty seven B spaceplane,
multiple transport emissions, we launched, did missions for one web Viasat,
and we're actually on contract to launch Amazon's hyper Constellation and we treat everyone fairly.
So just one and just and we managed to do nineteen flights on a
single Falconine booster, which is really incredible in three and a half years.
So and that vehicle did that. Brewster did eight hundred and sixty satellites and
deliver two undred sixty metric tons to orbit. Because it's like wow. So
there's a lot of wows and it's worth you know, like, how long
ago was it that we landed a booster? Was actually eight years ago in
December, roughly eight years ago, and since that time we've landed two hundred
and sixty times. The two hundred and sixty landings, it's just like wow.
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 a dumb idea that it wouldn't it wouldn't pay off,
that it wouldn't you know, it wouldn't make sense. But we've shown that
in fact, it is absolutely the right. Idea of reusability is the key
to a great future in space. It's essential. We need reusability for truck.
It's 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 multiplanet species is a full and rapidly basically
rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. I mean, it's incredible how much has happened
in eight years. I wonder what will things be like eight years from now.
Hopefully we have I think we will have landed on Mars, and I
think we will have sent people to the Moon, and maybe if we get
like we will have sent people to Mars within eight years. The key question
is, sort of I think about for civilization is the key test perhaps for
civilization is do we make it through the Spermi Great filter of being going from
a one planet civilization to a multiplanet civilization? And if we are, if
we do become multiplanet 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,
as 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 history, you see that civilizations are anything but permanent.
Many civilizations have risen and fallen over the years, over the centuries and millennia,
and eventually the Sun will expand well the oceans and destroy all life on
Earth now bitterly. That's you know, several hundred million years in the future,
but it's only about maybe ten or twenty percent of the existence of Earth
itself. If Earth is four and a half billion years old, then another
ten, ten twenty percent longer and life wouldn't or intelligent life would not have
evolved because it's taken us a long time to get to this point. That's
really that's really the key test. Do we become a self sustaining multiplanet civilization
while civilization still exists, or don't we that? You know, I think
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 essence. I think
we want to make Mars self sustaining as quickly as possible. It's not just
a question of getting people tomorrows, 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 really the fundamental threshold to
pass the Fermi paradox, great filter. The Fermi paradox is where are the
aliens? You know, 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, okay, 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 have not seen any, and I'd be on it and you
can pretty much guarantee that I would post about it instantly. Okay. I
was like, yep, let's we go one. This is a spaceship for
sure, But I have not seen anything. So that leaves 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 small candle in a vast darkness, and we just must do
everything possible to ensure 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 like Stephen Hawking actually I believe
said that he thought there was like roughly a one percent 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 Falconine, back to reality. 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 launch and it just gets like crazy fast as you get to twenty twenty
three. Yeah, so we've done a nineteen three flight. We're now qualifying
Falconine to be able to do forty flights, and we're aiming for maybe as
much as one hundred and fifty flights this year. So and then let's not
forget far and 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
cas an immense amount of effort. We now quite regularly recover the fairing and
we've reflown fairings three hundred 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 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. May
help people. Also, sometimes I don't know the site, Like you can
see the size of the ship by the person walking around on it. It's
not small, so it looks cool like that's sort of 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 get under twenty four hours pad turn around by
the end of this year. So in terms of yeah, launch rate.
Yeah, So it's been fifteen years since flight one of Falcon one, I'm
sorry, Flight four Falcone the first one to reach orbit. So fifteen years
since we've got anything at all or to orbit. Yeah, and now we're
aiming to have one hundred and fifty flights of thereabouts this year, so big
rockets at this point, Falcon one is little rocket. In fact, when
I see Falcon one right now, I was like, man, I think
I've probably tucked that under my arm and just take it home with me.
You know, it was like launched in the backyard or something. It looks
so cute. 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 it's like, you look
adorable thing. Yeah. So the most I think the most profound metric,
or the metric that really describes the magnitude of what SpaceX achieved in twenty twenty
three is the mass to orbit number. So and you can see the incredible
change just year of a year. So twenty twenty one we were slightly below
the rest of world. Twenty two we I think roughly doubled what the rest
of the world did. And last year we were eighty percent 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 not a lot of industries where a company is doing like
eighty percent of everything. And then what's really mind boggling is that that number
should increase by fifty percent this year. So I guess on the order of
like ninety percent of all master to orbit, not counting starships. So if
we start as we start launching Starship, Starship is like in roughly one hundred
tons to orbit with every flight. There's a path to getting Starship to do
over two hundred tons with full reusability, So two hundred tons to useful orbit
with full reusability. And yeah, it's really an incredible amount. Twelve hundred
tons of useful load to orbit last year. Yeah, that's just astounding.
So I think that that really deserves around the floors. I got like wow,
I mean, 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 need to be kind of in
the million ton to orbit range, so maybe a little higher, ideally a
little higher, but sort of if you just try to get things to the
right order of magnitude, like not trying to get to an exact number,
but try to get the order of magnitude right. I think it's on the
order it's roughly a million tons to Earth orbit. That'll get you roughly two
hundred thousand tons to the surface of Mars. So roughly, you know,
approximately twenty percent of what if you get to Earth orbit you can get to
the surface of Mars, and figure like, maybe we need at least million
tons of useful load to the surface of Mars for this for it to become
self sustaining. That self sustaining threshold 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 break down and then you will have no chips, and then you're
that's it. 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, you'll teeth will fall out and you'll die. That was a
real problem in the old days. Anyway, it's quite a high threshold,
is and like Mars, Mars is a fixer upper of a planet. You
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 really quite a lot
of work that's required to make that work. So Dragon an amazing amount of
progress with Dragon and a 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 accumulative thirteen over thirteen hundred days of time on orbit last year as
of last year. So 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 had now Dragon has visited the Space station more times than
the Space Shuttle as well. This is an incredible achievement by the Dragon team.
So once again, as I'm saying, this really has been an incredible
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. And I'm not one who gives out false praise, so
it's really mind boggling what you've achieved. All of the missions. Last year,
I used a flight proven Dragon, so these were all these are all
these Dragons are all flown before, and this year we're looking to fly maybe
seven or eight Dragon missions. So it's really been fantastic success by the Dragon
team. This doesn't have audio, there's no sound in space. Yeah,
it's a great that's a great look in spacesuit and in Dragon interior. So
yeah, so we've now sent forty two humans to orbit. To be precise,
space is relatively easy, but orbit is very difficult. So if we've
now taken forty two 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 peeple like say, well,
what is the one thing you wish for? I said, I wish
we'd bring this asminalts back safely. That's one thing if I had one wish,
that's what it would be. So and we also have now completed a
second crew arm in Florida. So we've got two towers that are capable of
two launch pads that are capable of sending astronauts to orbit, and this is
going to be great for being able to shift missions between Pad forty and Pad
thirty nine night we've got so this here our first space walk, and so
we've got to redesign the suit so that you can actually move around in it,
and you don't just like, you know, 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 the joints move and stuff. And then 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 at
work and we don't have like a little hole in the suit or something go
up and around. So but I think, you know, obviously we're gonna
put a lot of testing into this, and there's gonna be another significant milestone,
which is to have a suit where you can be in like the vacuum
of space with just 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 this small number of particles per cubic meter, but it's pretty damn
close to nothing. If you lose too much, 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, it's the pressurization
pumps and get more atmosphere from. Because in the atmosphere dragon springs an oxygen
leak, and that auction leak is too significant. There is no place to
get oxygen. You're just gonna die. So the requirements for getting everything perfect
are saying it's everything's going to be absolutely perfect to work. We did not,
you know, evolve to live in space. Obviously a tough one,
but 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 you want to be able to walk around the Moon, walk
around a Mars. So having a high mobility space suit that actually isn't crazy
expensive ideally and that you can walk around in comfortably 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, well a million marsuits that you need, So we'll
have to make a lot of these things and we're atill more Starlink on that
flight. So then coming to Starlink, this is a this is only a
whole separate company, but we're basically building rebuilding Internet in space, which is
pretty wild and now it is I want to have size supplemental to the terrestrial
Internet. Sometimes people think, well, Starlink just going to take over and
destroy all the terrestrial Internet, like 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 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've got some books or something. But 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 might 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. See and we're now introducing the V two
minis. This is the next generation satellites that we've introducing the constellation. And
yeah, these are twice the capacity of last year or so, from eighty
eight terribuits per second to one hundred and sixty five. And our goal,
the biggest, single goal for Starling from a technical standpoint, is to get
the mean latency below twenty mints, so that would that actually makes it's 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 hard problem. But because we're low with orbit constellation, the
speed of light is what do you think the speed of light is three hundred
kilometers per milesecond, So if we're at five fifty kilometers, figure it like
roughly two milliseconds up, two milliseconds down. So if you go up,
down, up, down to eight milliseconds speed a light limitation and then almost
everything else we can actually address, like we can't go fast those of light
yet, you know, but noah, probably ever, but we can get
the rest of the time I think below blow ten milliseconds and so then basically
it'll be a 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 Argone hole thrusters, which are very low cost and
use Argone, which is plentiful. So we've gone from using Krypton, which
is not that rare. I mean if Superman did come here and be like,
you can get some krypton, you know, and squirt gun or something
like that. Okay, now what 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 two satellites. And
so we moved to argon and ar gone Is is actually extremely plentiful. In
fact, right now you are breathing approximately one percent argon, So ar gone
Is there's a lot of argne. But this is really the I think,
the first significant argne whole thruster and certainly by far the most cost efficient and
most power efficient, and a really great job by the Starling team to create
this thruster and many other upgrades to the in space laser stuff. I mean,
so this is by far. I think we're now sent at least one
thousand times more data, maybe ten thousand times more data over laser links in
space than any other system before. I think it will soon be like a
million times more data transferred, maybe more than that through the starlink laser interconnects
between the satellites. So we now have nine thousand 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 light. Art has like a laser for you
know, document the space station. So like dragons with lasers, I mean
like it'd be better than shocks with lasers. And each link, each laser
link is capable of one hundred gigabus per second and we're looking to increase that.
So let's see. This is an animation of all the places where starlink
is active. So obviously a lot of the Stallink 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 most countries we think we should be able to get to,
and our goal this year is to activate service in more than half of
the world's population, so that would be every fantastic but I do want to
emphasize because we are going to put this presentation online, is supplemental to terrestrial
internet, does not replace it. So it does really well for low population
density areas, but it is really not going to be competitive in high density
cities or it's really low density situations, which is really where the need is.
So anyway, it works well with other Internet providers, is what I'm
saying. Then we've got community gateways. I'm told this is a town called
Analaska's a real place. So we're a lot more gateways down as we increase
the number of gateways. That improves latency. We've now shipped our next gen
hardware that's version four of User Terminal, so that allows us to lower the
cost of Starling. And we'll be introducing the stalling many later this year which
can fit in a backpack, so that'll be pretty cool for anyone who wants
very portable Starling. And then we just opened our stalling factory in Bashrup,
Texas. So that's just a little you know, about twenty minutes away from
Houston. And this is this is gonna be. Yeah, I guess some
of you guys are part of that. Yeah, in general, we're gonna
We're gonna have like a massive round of applause for Starling, that is for
sure, because it's like the achievement level there is amazing. Actually, let
let's just have a mass around a flow. It's like, goddamn, it's
hard to clap with this thing. Yeah, this is the stalling achievements are
really mind blowing. So it's like the stalling system is an anomaly in the
matrix. And then we also just recently launched our first director 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 bespell these things, by
the way, So although actually when I first saw it, I was like,
is this real? Be terms that is in fact real? This is
yeah some doze cooin jokes basically, so yeah, And anyway, so 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 satellite can hear
the tiny signal that your phone is outputting, which is like such a faint
whisper it's ridiculous, but it can actually somehow hear that faint, whisper and
be able to communicate with a phone. Is I think it's one of those
things like I would say, is that actually physically possible? But it is
now I do want to size this is also a not a competitor to phone
companies. This is something that will be supplemental. So 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 Stonik will be able to communicate with phones. But it's
I think it's something on the order of seven megabus per second within a cell,
and the cells are hundreds of square miles or kilometers in size, so
it's really it's good for 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 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 it could I think it will actually save a lot of lives, which
is cool. And then we have seven announced partnerships. So we've got T
Mobile in the US, Rogers in Canada, Optists in Australia, one New
Zealand, Assaulting 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 what I'm saying, you know, we want to be support to telcos.
And then of course this is slow down a little. But that launch
did take a while to get off the pad that took off, I was
like, wow, I can't believe it took off as my reaction. So
it gets incredible that we took off twice last year. 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 primary residence for
three years. This used to be a sandbar basically what we're looking at here,
and now it's got an advanced rocket factory and a gigantic launch pad,
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
five. It is by far the biggest flying object ever made, and for
you know, with with some upgrades down the road, it'll actually be I
think probably over twenty million pounds of thrust and Saturn five is seven and a
half, so it'll end up being three times to thrust a Saturn and it's
gonna fly a lot. It has to fly a lot, so it's gonna
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 one and two, we made a number
of massive upgrades. So the it was obviously a massive upgrade to the launch
pad. So we've got like in many Niagara falls, here, 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 actually it went looked at. One of the first
things I went looked at after the second launch was to check out the launch
pad 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 launch pad overnight.
People always like want to use the Statue of Liberty for stuff. Statual
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 is a big rocket and we'll get
bigger over time. Yeah, so that's I don't know, if you guys
watched the cong versus Godzilla, it's like 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 a launch tower is bigger than Mecaso and it's
gonna do basically like the same thing, but with the arms, you know,
catch the rocket and tell people like, yeah, we're gonna 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 drump around. That'd be pretty cool. And then
we're also gonna build the second tower. Uh yeah, this is We're gonna
really be launching a lot and up and we're gonna be upgrading one tower while
we launched from another tower. So two towers is important, and there was
there are actually so many upgrades between flight one and two that it would actually
take it like hours to go through the mall. But one of the biggest
upgrades was going from a hydraulic to electric of the engines, so that actually
saved a lot of mass and complexity. So yeah, the electric TVC,
I mean, it was just that this is one of the biggest upgrades we're
also massively upgraded the heat field. The engines themselves were massally upgradedally, literally
everything on the rocket was like there might have been thousands of upgrades between flight
one and two, so really gigantic improved between flight one and two, and
also obviously many improvements between flight two and three. And then we've got a
whole development plan to, like I said, ultimately get to a fully reusable
rocket that does over two hundred tons to orbit on a regular basis, full
reusability. Yeah. Hot staging, I mean, hot staging was a change
that was basically, I don't know, I just really within the space of
like three or four months maybe less, going from or roughly that, going
from previously just separating the rocket without anything 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 an