So what I was, what I'm gonna go through to tonight is the overall,
overall sort of path to making life multiplanetary. So we're doing a lot
of good things at SpaceX. I mean, Starlink is incredible providing connectivity throughout
the world and also you know, paying for a lot of what we're doing
here. And Falcon nine is the primary left launch vehicle for Earth, just
doing more non SpaceX launches than anything else. And but Starship is what is
well Starship. Starship is the first design of a rocket that is actually capable
of making life multiplanetary, where success is one of the possible outcomes. Uh,
no rocket before this has had the potential to extend life to another planet.
And and I'll sort of wax esoteric here for a minute because this may
sound sort of unusual, but when you think about the question of where are
the aliens, which I get asked a lot, this is like the Fermi
paradox, where are the aliens? And I've not seen any evidence that there
are aliens on Earth. A lot of people think there are aliens on Earth,
and I'm like, great, I'd like to meet one, you know.
For a while there, when I was getting my green card and never
gets an alien registration card. I'm like, okay, but this question of
where the aliens, I think a very profound one because I'm aware of no
evidence of aliens whatsoever, which means that I think we're probably alone. And
if you look at the history of Earth, like how long has Earth been
around? Assuming that physics is correct, the universe is about thirteen point eight
billion years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old.
When you think about how old is civilization, I think the right measuring point
for civilization in my view, or a good measuring point, would be the
advent of writing. So the first writing is generally considered to be the ancient
Sumerians. Where are they now? They died out, but about fifty five
hundred years ago was archaic pre cuneiform. In fact, I suggest it's like
an interesting rabbit hole to read about the history of writing. So if you
consider, say, like, okay, civilization, I think if you don't
have writing, you kind of need writing for civilization. So it's only been
around for like a little of a five thousand years out of four and a
half billion years that Earth has been around. And the thirteen point eight billion
years of the universe, so we're all of human civilization is basically the blink
of an eye. It's like it's a fraction, it's almost it's nothing.
And I think that that probably means that that consciousness is incredibly rare and perhaps
fleeting. It may not last for very long, because otherwise we would I
think we would have seen aliens, some kind of sign of aliens. I
think the most likely explanation is that consciousness is so rare that and does that
consciousness actually extend to another planet? Does that consciousness extend to another star system?
I mean, ultimately, if we're able to become a space bearing civilization,
a multiplanet species, and ultimately a multi stellars species, and go out
there and explore all these star systems, I think we may find that there
are many long dead one planet civilizations. And as you've heard me say before,
we don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations. I
mean, we want to be a multiplanet civilization, ultimately, be a multi
stellar civilization, be out there among the stars, like you know, make
science fiction not fiction forever, kind of make star star trek real. That's
uh. So, that's why I think that there's actually there's this high urgency
to making life multiplanetary because this is the first time in four and a half
billion year history that it's been possible to extend life or consciousness beyond Earth,
and we've got to do that while civilization is still strong. So that's the
overarching goal of the company is extend life sustainably to another planet. Mars is
the only option, really, and to do so ideally before World War three
or some kind of bad thing. The key thing is that we need enough
people and enough tonnage on Mars such that Mars can survive and continue consciousness even
if something would happen to Earth. Now I still think obviously we wouldn't.
I'm not talking about abandoning Earth or anything like that, and we want Earth
to be as good as possible for as long as possible, but there are
certain things that may be outside of our control. So we want to just
get Mars to be a self sustaining civilization as quickly as possible, and I
think this can be done in around twenty years. So and this this giant
starship factory that we're building is obviously key to that, and the launch sites
that we're building here and at the cape and elsewhere in the future will be
key to that. Oh, it's wild that that this uh, this strange
spot. This we're basically on a sand spit by the Rio Grande near the
beach, and that is actually the gateway to Mars. Has to be like
if this was a movie, you'd be like, no way, come on,
too implosible. But it's it's real and it's due to you guys.
Congratulations. This is the side by side of the three flights. You can
see our thrust a weight improved significantly. So we've made tremendous progress from flight
one to flight two to flight three, and we got flight four coming up
in about a month or so. And with flight four we should if we
get you know, if fate smiles upon us, we will get through the
high heating regime and smash into the ocean at a controlled spot and the hopefully
be able to also do this with with the booster uh land on essentially a
virtual tower. If the landing on the virtual tower with the booster works,
then we will actually try with flight five to come back and land on the
tower. No, that's very much a success oriented schedule, but it is
in the realm of possibility. But I would say, like the odds of
us actually being able to catch the booster with the me Gozilla arms this year,
I think, I don't know, I don't want to tempt a fate
knock on wood, but I think the odds of actually catching the booster with
the tower probably like eighty ninety percent this year, which is insane. Like
actually, when we first talked about it, it sounded so bat shit crazy.
We're going to have a giant it's like literally bigger than me Gozilla from
the movie that you would catch like the like the biggest flying object ever made
with mechanical arms out of the air. But we're going to do it,
so let's get Yeah, it may not work, you know, necessarily the
foot time, but you know it will work. So really, Starship is
really the key to making life multiplanetary and preserving the light of light of consciousness.
That's what it's all about, and it may end up being the most
important thing that that we have a do. I think that like the light
of consciousness is like this this tiny candle in a in a vast darkness,
and that candle has only been lit for a very short time, and it
could easily go out, So we obviously want to preserve that that the tiny
light of consciousness on Earth but extended to Mars and then ultimately to the rest
of the Solar System and then start going to other star systems. And I
mean, I won't be allowed to see that, but unless I'm like frozen
or something other. But but you know, I think at some point we'll
discover many civilizations that maybe lasted a million years or two million years or ten
million years, but a civilization that lasted a million years, which would be
you know, vastly longer than our civilization has lasted. I mean, that's
only the third decimal point, so like thirteen point eight billion something something years.
If you're if your civilization lasts a million years, it's only goes that
third digit past the decimal point goes up one and that's a million years.
So I mean, i'd say, like we should think of, like how
do we make civilization last a million years? You know, we often get
caught up in like the day to day things, but we want them to
have at least a million year civilization, if not one hundred million year civilization
or a billion year civilization. So absolutely crucial to that goal is becoming a
multiplanet species. People and people often people often ask why why Mars. Well,
there's not a lot of options. Frankly, so uh, Venus is
a superheated, high pressure acid bath, so not not what you don't don't
want to go to Venus. And then the Moon is close, but it
doesn't have an atmosphere, the gravity is only one sixth out of Earth,
and it's missing a lot of key resources. So also the the the the
insulating value of the Moon relative relative to Mars is much less. So if
there's something that takes out of like let's say there's a World War three global
therm and nuclear warfare, they're probably throw a few nukes at the Moon,
so whereas it's way harder to shoot Mars with with nuclear and Mars would see
it coming and probably have some time to stop the inbound missiles. So that
the value of Mars, the difficulty or the distance and time required to get
to Mars, actually has an insulating benefit to the for the continuation of consciousness,
even if there's something terrible happens on Earth. And and then once we
go beyond Mars, there's there's some asteroids like Cerus, some of the moons
of Jupiter. Starship would ultimately be capable of uh of reaching anywhere in the
Solar System, and then we'll need something so a new level of technology to
go to other star systems. But if we can at least get to Mars,
then other star systems are hopeless. I mean, it's a fixer upper
of a planet. Okay, need some work, but it is. It's
really the only option for becoming multiplanetary and long term, we can warm up
Mars and we can there would be we can densify the atmosphere and there'd be
a liquid ocean on about forty percent of the surface, so we could make
it an earthlike planet long term. So let's see, we've learned a tremendous
amount from when we started the company and at first could we're unable to get
even a small rocket or of it to now where we've done three hundred and
twenty seven successful launchers, almost three hundred landings. In fact, you know,
give it a few weeks and we'll have done three hundred landings two hundred
and sixty one reflights. So I many times I was told that reusability was
it was impossible, and even if you did it, there would there will
be no point because nobody would want to fly rockets that much. But now
we routinely fly and land the booster and we recover the fairing. So we've
learned a tremendous amount from the Falcon program that is then feeding into the Starship
program, and Falcon and Starlink all what obviously keep the company going. So
I just like to give a hand to the Falcon team for the incredible work
that they're doing. And then Dragon, well forty five launches a Dragon.
It's amazing, and we've flown fifty crew members to orbit forty six to the
space station and everyone has come home safely, which is the most important thing.
So you know, incredible work by the Dragon team. So Skim the
hand that was couldn't ask for a better outcome. And Starlink actually, if
you look at the sort of the plot of the all the satellites going around
Earth, this look kind of scary actually, but there's six thousand satellites in
operation, over six thousand and ten thousand lasers, almost three million customers.
So Starlink is doing a lot of good people for people on Earth who don't
either don't have Internet access or it's very expensive, and so it's doing doing
a lot of good, you know, on Earth, because when I say
we want to be a multiplanet species, i'm you know, we obviously want
to Earth to be as good as possible and Mars to be great. So
Stallink is doing a tremendous amount of that, and we're learning a lot by
having this big fleet. Stalling will also be very important for high bound width
communication to and on Mars. So from it from a tiny rocket to Falcon
nine, which is a much bigger rocket, many iterations of Falcon nine and
then Falcon Heavy and then Starship as Starship will get bigger obviously, you know
this this year, if things go according to plan, SpaceX will do probably
ninety percent of all Earth Master orbit, and then China will do about six
percent, and the rest of the world will do about four percent, which
is pretty wild. And then once Starship is flying, we'll be doing over
nineteen nine percent of all Earth master orbit. What you kind of have to
do in order to build a city on Mars, and I should say we'll
also build a lunar base as well, so it might as well along the
way so you can see the actually Falcon one was really yeah, half a
ton to orbit ling grief slight error on the slide there, so Falcon was
about half a ton to orbit. Falcon nine, depending on inexpendable mode I
would do probably twenty five tons to orbit, and yeah, Falcon Heavy probably
seventy. Anyway, these these are just obviously rapidly increasing numbers, and Starship
in its final configuration or its final form, we'll probably do well over two
hundred tons to orbit with full reusability and be able to fly multiple times a
day. So and then there's recovering and reusing the ship. The ship will
take longer, so the ship. I think we will want to have at
least two consecutive successes of a given design that's land at a specific point in
the ocean or smash into a specific point of the ocean before we try to
bring it back to the launch site, because we do we do not want
to rain debris over Mexico or the US. So my guess is probably next
year is when we will be able to reuse Starship, but I think it's
I think it's highly likely that this year we will bring Starship to or the
ship the ship side of it to a controlled point in the ocean and have
it basically land on a virtual virtual tower in somewhere in the in the Pacific
or the Indian Ocean. And we've already proven that we can do the final
phase of landing, so coming from sort of a belly first position to rotating
the ship and landing vertically, we proved that right here. So what we
just really we just need to be confident that we can get through the high
heating portion of the app of re entry reliably, and then we will bring
the ship back and we'll land on the tower as well. And we're going
to build more mechazillas, so there's going to be two launch towers here and
I think and then two launch towers at the Cape as well, so well
have four launch towers for uh for Starship, probably you know, by sometime
next year. So we're aiming to have the first Cape launch tower and launch
system operational around the middle of next year, and that'll be important for launch
azimuths that are sort of fly overland. So I think what we should probably
expect is that we do the kind of the development launches here, test anything
new here, build the build the rockets, and then probably most of the
operational launches would be from the Cape. So this year we're planning to build
another roughly six UH boosters and shifts, and that production rate will increase a
lot next year. That's why we're building the Giant factory. Ultimately we'll need
to build a lot more shifts than boosters, especially for Mars, because it's
the you'll actually want to use the ship, take apart the ship and use
it for raw materials on Mars because the ship materials will be so valuable.
Most of the shifts you wouldn't want to bring back. You do want to
just use them for raw materials. Eventually, we will want to bring shifts
back, and I think we want to give people the option of coming back
because they're more likely to want to go if there's some option of coming back.
But I think most of most of the people that go to Mars will
probably never come back to Earth. So and we'll need to ramp production to
pretty high numbers, like I think ultimately probably a ship every like multiple ships
per day basically, and then next year we're aiming to demonstrate ship to ship
propellant transfer. It's hard to make this not look a little bit norty uh
because it's two ships connecting and doing a fluid transfer. Just what it is,
but it is this is actually a very important uh. This is a
very important step on going to Mars because you need to put to get the
ship to orbit and then do orbital refilling kind of like aerial refueling, and
and that's that's really you need about about five or six uh refilling missions for
every one mission that goes to Mars, so roughly five to one. So
and this will also be very important for the Otomis program for the Nest to
get back to the Moon. So we want to have a ship that is
well, it's going to be a specialized ship for the Moon like this.
So the Moon obviously there's no mechazola, so we need landing legs and you
don't need a heat shield, and you don't need flaps because there's no atmosphere.
So the moonship would be specialized. And ultimately I think we want to
build a moon base moon based ALFA and have a permanently occupied base on the
Moon like that would be super exciting. And so you'd have a bunch of
ships that are specialized for going to and from the Moon. But they never
come back to They never land back on Earth. They just would would dock
with propellant propellant tankers to get orbital refell So in terms of performance, we've
made traumatic progress on every level for Starship. It's remarkable that we can see
the raptor engines and how it has evolved from, you know, optimistically one
hundred and eighty five tons to two hundred and eighty and I think ultimately we'll
probably the booster engines will aim to get the booster rangines over three hundred and
thirty tons of thrust, which would mean ten thousand tons of total thrust at
leftoff. So and then the Raptor of three also will not need a heat
shield. So Rafter three looks looks very simple, and it is actually simplified
in a lot of ways, but a lot of the complexity is hidden because
we have integral cooling channels in many plots of the engine that don't exist in
Raptor two. So in order to not have a heat shield, it has
to be very resilient. But that is actually what rafter three would look like.
It looks like Rafter three looks like it's missing a bunch of parts but
actually those parts have either been deleted or they've been integrated into the system.
And like I said, with integral cooling channels and where you need secondary plumbing,
the secondary plumbing has also been integrated into the pump and into the the
chamber jacket. And yeah, so it's much simpler. Well, it's it's
it's yeah, it's actually extremely difficult to build rafter three, but that it
will be easy to integrate and will have higher performance and lower total mass and
be more reliable. So h well, then can go for a while.
So I find it interesting to look at the if you look at the the
flame tail on Starship and how long it is, it's a it's a very
long flame tail, which is due to the fact that the chamber pressure,
well, it's it's just outputting a lot more yeah, a lot more gas
at a higher velocity. But I think the flame tail is like maybe a
thousand feet long. It's like more than twice the length of the rocket.
And that will actually get as as we increase the thrust, that will get
longer. So yeah, and inevtably, the rocket grows in height. So
Starship two raiming for like I currently Flight three would be around forty or fifty
tons to orbit. So the current design, Starship two will be over one
hundred tons, and then Starship three will be over two hundred tons. And
yeah, it's gone from around seven thousand tons thrust to over eight thousand.
Nine. I think we'll end up ultimately with more than three more than ten
thousand tons of thrust, probably seven or eight thousand tons of leftoff mass,
and at least ten meters taller. We'll see tends to grow, yeah,
exactly, so it probably grows a bit more than that even Really, so
if you look at Falcon nine, it's it's very We're not going to do
the length to diameter of falconine. That would be crazy, but uh,
Falcon nine is a very long rocket, and so I suspect it will probably
get a bit longer than this. But at two hundred tons per flight fully
reusable, that is that is pretty incredible. And yeah, it will be
on the order of five hundred feet toll and then we're at this this hundred
there's thousands of design improvements here, so I mean, I think maybe the
most one of the most profound things is Starship three will cost less per flight
than Falcon one. So that's the difference between if you've got a fully reusable
rocket or an expandable rocket. The fully reusable rocket with low cost propellant and
or touching this pressurization actually costs less than a tiny expandable rocket. So and
it'll do. Like I said, Falcon one is about half a ton to
orbit. The Starship three will be four hundred times more payload for less than
the cost of a Falcon one. Ultimately, I think we might be able
to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around two million dollars or
three million dollars. So these are sort of unthinkable numbers from the you know,
nobody ever thought that this was possible. But we're not breaking any physics
to achieve this, so this is within the bound without breaking physics, we
can do this. So the Mars missions are two years apart or twenty six
more. And if you look closely at the Starlink router, you see the
home and transfer from Earth over to Mars overit and that's basically to stay to
people, the Starlink system that you're buying is helping get humanity to Mars.
I think it's pretty cool. So roughly every two years thousands of ships would
depart from Earth to Mars. It would look like Battlestar Galactica, but in
a good way, you know, hopefully without being chased by the cylons.
But it would be an incredible thing to see these thousands of ships departing every
twenty six months from Mars. What this diagram is basically saying is that for
getting to Mars, we would essentially create a kind of a propellant depot ship.
The propellant depot would look more like a hot dog than like a spear.
Surely, just mix a long ship with a lot of insulation and we'd
fill that chip up. And then shortly before or as they're going to Mars,
the ships would take off with a couple hundred tons of payload from Earth,
reach or of it with very almost no propellant, and then get refilled
by the tanker and then go to Mars and land, go all the way
to Mars with over two hundred tons of useful payload. Then on Mars,
in the beginning, we would, I think we would simply reuse the ship
materials, so most of the ships wouldn't come back. But then over time
you'd want to bring the ships back so you could reuse them. And for
that we would need to create methane H four and oxygen O two on Mars,
which you can do with a T and CO two. So the atmosphere
is CO two and there's plenty of water ice H two and so it's kind
of like tailor made for well. Actually, the reason we have a methane
oxygen system is because you can make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily,
like not that's not a total walk in the park, but the ingredients are
readily available to create methane and oxygen on Mars. So so you build a
propellant depot and bring the ships back and build out as quickly as possible a
self sustaining civilization on Mars. And we want to get that. We want
to get the cost of going to Mars such that almost anyone could afford it,
so like if somebody were to just work hard on Earth, save up
and that they'd be able to go to Mars. So it's like anyone.
Ideally, almost anyone could go to Mars. And I think you'll see a
lot of governments also sponsor people. And ultimately we want to get so there's
a kind of an optimal landing zone on Mars where you have resources, so
you've got access to water or frozen water that you're not too close to the
poles, so you can use solar power. It would it would be nice
to use nuclear. I don't know if we'll get the approval, but nuclear
would be very handy on Mars because you can use the heat and you can
generate electricity. So and then you kind of want to be about two kilometers
below sea level, so if Mars did have an ocean, you'd actually be
quite deep in the ocean, at least at first. And yeah, so
let's see that's Mars. Kind of you kind of want to land about halfway
between the pole and the equator in a kind of a deep area of Mars.
If the deeper it is, the more you can use the atmosphere to
break and the atmosphere density is higher. So these are all the things that
would have to be developed soon. As people ask me are we developing these
things, I'm like, not yet, because this is the cart, and
we need the horse first. So the rocket is the horse, and then
this is the cart. But ultimately we'll need all these things. Less of
power generation mining in general, ice mining, propellant production, long duration life
support, construct, a lot of construction, and the global communication. So
I think this would open up a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs that want to
create any to create things on Mars. Whether that is a propellant well,
I think we'll have to do the propellant depot. But whether it's like iron
ore refining or a pizza joint or a bar, you know, there'll be
an opportunity to do all the things that we like on Earth on Mars,
like a Mars bar would be yeah, great, So I think I think
probably a rough order of magnitude guess for what you need, how many people
do you need for a self sustaining city is about a million and several million
tons of cargo. So yeah, which we can do, and we can
do this in twenty years. But like I said, in order for it
to be self sustaining, you actually need the entire base of industry. You
can't be missing any element. So that's that's really what's going to take take
a while, is do you have everything you need to survive on Mars.
At that point, the future of consciousness is asshired. So if you do
ten launches a day at two hundred tons per launch, uh, a million
and a half tons to Leo per opportunity. You net that out to a
quarter million tons to Mars per opportunity, So that means you can get to
a million tons in about eight years, since the opportunities are two years apart.
So I think it's pretty doable, and I'm like, we're actually going
to do this. We get well, you know, we are actually going
to do it, which is insane to think. So millions of tons to
Mars. Yeah, wow, we're going to build a lot of vehicles.
So yeah, several thousand vehicles per year that's what we'll need, which really
quite quite doable. Actually it sounds like a lot, but it's very doable.
Yeah, if you're compared it to sort of car production, there's a
small number. Of course, this is much bigger than a car, but
even if you look at the total tonnage the it's still very it's very doable
to build several thousand vehicles a year. So that's what we need to do,
and we're gonna do it, and then long term will probably have some
offshore launch lights. You can just imagine all of these starships waiting a otverit
for the planets to align, and then this gigantic starfleet taking home from Mars.
All right, so we're actually gonna do this. And when you think
about where this started out, this was literally just like a sandbar where we're
standing right now. And now look at what we've done here, and that
we've gotten three flights off of starship and we've got a fourth, fourth one
coming up, and we're building a gigantic factory that we'll be able to output
a massive number of ships. So it's surreal, but but it's real.
So we're actually gonna do this. We're gonna take humanity to Mars, and
I have confident you can do it, so