Speaker 1: It's always important to explain the why of things, and
the way of Starship is that we want to be
a multiplanet species, to extend consciousness beyond Earth.
Speaker 2: I think for two main reasons.
Speaker 1: One is to ensure the long term survival and prosperity
of life as we know it in consciousness, which if
we are a multiplanet species and ultimately a multi stellar
species out there among the stars, the probability of survival
is much much longer. That's kind of the defensive aspect
or life insurance for life collectively. But then there's also
there also need to be things that are inspiring and
exciting and that give you reason to live. Life cannot
just be about solving one tragic problem after another. There
must be also reasons to get up in the morning
and be excited about the future. And a future where
we are a space for civilization is infinitely more exciting
than one where we are not.
Speaker 2: And we're doing it all pretty unique location.
Speaker 3: I mean, the pads behind us, we got rocket on
the tower, we got another tower right that we're sitting
inside star Factory, and I mean it wasn't like this
for very long.
Speaker 2: This is all pretty brand now.
Speaker 4: I think we've moved Starship here in about the early
part of twenty nineteen, so we've been coming that entire
time and seeing the site of all from a double
wide trailer and a tent where we built Starhopper to
the first suborbital test flights, and now we have behind
us two towers for the first time as we built
towards the first operational flight from the second tower at
the end of this year, and this beautiful building, million
square feet where we're able to work towards a production
line of starships.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the SpaceX team, it's one an incredible job of
building out really the most advanced rocket manufacturing facility that
has ever existed. This is far beyond any rocket fabrication
facility that has ever been built.
Speaker 2: This is essentially.
Speaker 1: Alien level technology and it was well built here basically
down by the Rio Grande River and close to the beach.
It's an incredibly improbable location. And this used to be
a sand bar. I think we're about you know, three
feet or about a meter above sea level, so.
Speaker 2: It really was nothing.
Speaker 1: If you see the time lapse from a sand bar
to two launch towers and a gigantic rocket factory with
high bays and we're gonna be building something called the Gigabay,
which is like one of the largest enclosed volumes on Earth.
So it so it's sort of like a gigantic Bolg
cube that we're gonna be building here for yeah, building
and storing these gigantic rockets. It's really spectacular and anyone
can come and visit. So the because we're on a
public highway and we're literally by a public beach, you
can actually come and see the rocket. You can quite
close up. I mean you can drive past it, and
you can also look at the factory, and anyone could
do this from anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2: So if just you can come and visit and check
it out.
Speaker 3: I think it's pretty cool that it's just now, right now, just.
Speaker 2: Right, just know what we're launching, because there's some safety issues.
But but but.
Speaker 1: The rockets often just just sitting on the pad without
any palant in it.
Speaker 2: And then you can just you can just come here
and visit. It's very easy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's a really special place. Yesterday the
ship went down the road behind us and I saw
families outside going for there, or was on Sunday going
for their Sunday stroll. And they were greeted by Starship
going down. And I think that from the very beginning.
The thing about Starship different than Falcon and other rockets
that I'm aware of is we designed it to be
mass produced and mass produced at scale. And it's not
about building one starship and getting to orbit once. It's
about doing it in a sustained and rapid way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean for ultimately thousands of shifts to be built
per year, which is what's needed in order to construct
a city on Mars that is self sustaining. And the
major fork in the road of destiny will be when
the Mars city is capable of surviving even if the
re supply ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason,
and that reason could be something cataclysmic, or it could
be that that civilization simply subsided. There's always this debate
throughout history of will civilization and with a bang or whimper,
but either way, if the critical thing is to get
to the point where Mars is self sustaining and can
survive even if the resupply ships stuff coming for any reason,
which means that you need to build an entire base
of industry on Mars in order for Mars to survive.
For example, it's not simply enough to build a chip,
you know, like a computer, like a computer chip factory,
but you need the ability to build computer chip factories.
So this, this is going to really take a lot
of tonnage. My guess is at least a million tons
to the surface of Mars, and maybe it takes less
than that, but it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot.
But this is this is a very exciting future. It's
one which will ensure the long term survival and prosperity
of life and consciousness. And it's the critical stepping stone
to get from this solar system to other star systems
and perhaps go out there and explore and paths will
encounter alien civilizations that.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe they're alive now, but or maybe.
Speaker 1: They enjoyed a period of prosperity for millions of years.
And it also died out millions of years ago. So
it's humbling to think of the age of the universe,
according to the standard model of physics, being approximately thirteen
point eight billion years old, So an incremental million years
would ownly would be three digits past decimal point. And
if you look at say our civilization and measure civilization
by the first evidence of writing, which is about fifty
five hundred years ago. Civilization as measured from the first
writing is only one millionth of boths.
Speaker 2: Existence or blip, yeah, flashing the pan.
Speaker 3: So far, well, we're getting some cool shots rocking down
on the pattern right now. We tell people like, come
down see it. It's hard to get like a sense of
scale of just how massive this thing is. And we
were able to catch somebody working on it a little
while ago, and like part of the reason you said
we're sending millions of tons, that's kind of why this now.
Speaker 4: I think in this understand you can actually see the
person working at the bottom of the ship, and as
we zoom out you see the full ship that sort
of two tone silver and black, and then the booster
below it, right, and it really sets the scale which
doesn't come across I think other than in person. And
when I do tours, I like to say, starship is real,
Starship is big, and starship is really big, and I
think you can see there and with the factory shots
you saw earlier, again it's we've got flight ten on
the pad, but we got many more behind it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's I posted a video yesterday of just
a brief scan of part of the Starship factory and
you can get a sense of the scale of the factory.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I guess we could talk a bit about.
Speaker 1: Why Starship is the way it is, and like, for example, walk,
why is half of the ship black and half of
it is silver colored? And that's because the bottom half
of the ship, of the bottom as scene from obital entry,
has a heat shield on it. So the black there
is the is the heat shield. And then the core
structure of the rocket is a special alloy of stainless steel,
and that's where you see the sort of shiny silver
parts are stainless steel. The reason for steel over aluminum
is that the heat of of atmospheric entry and the
heat of the rocket engines is enough to melt easily
melt aluminum. But steel is much more resilient against both
scent heating but especially the re entry heating.
Speaker 2: And you don't have to paint.
Speaker 1: It, which is actually very difficult at to paint a
large object that is going through crygenic cycles and have
the paint stay on.
Speaker 3: It's quite challenging, and so we've talked about it.
Speaker 2: It's massive.
Speaker 3: It obviously takes a whole lot of energy to make
that thing move. And that's where Raptor really starts to
come in. Most advanced engine on the planet. Yes, now
that's the last saber and a half.
Speaker 1: You would get vaporized in an instant if you were
standing in front of Rafter So yeah, bunto Crispin in
a like less than a second.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker 1: In order for in order to create a fully reusable
orbital rocket, you have to advance the state of the
art in every part of the rocket. That means the
engines have to be better than any engine ever. The
structure has got to be better than any structure ever.
Speaker 2: You've got to you've got to have a.
Speaker 1: Means of bringing the rocket back to the launch pad.
You've got to have a fully reusable orbital heat shield,
and that no one has ever made.
Speaker 2: A fully reusable orbital heat shield.
Speaker 1: The Space Shuttle, for example, required nine months of refurbishment
between flights. So the Space Shuttle heathield come back essentially
partially broken and would require many months of refurbishment in
order to fly again. What we're trying to achieve here
with Starship is to have a heat shield that can
be flown immediately, so the ship, both both the ship
and the booster would be caught by the tower arms,
and the the booster will be placed immediately back on
the launch stand and the ship the ship's got it
orbit Earth at least once, and that then could be
back potentially in one orbit, but in most cases several orbits,
so the ship would come back several hours later, but
then be caught by the arms and placed on top
of the booster. You could also have multiple ships ready
so that a single booster could service five or more ships,
so that you could be flying the booster every in theory,
every hour. This is a kind of a profoundly fast speed,
obviously for the largest playing object by far ever made.
But it's the reason why we catch the tower. We
catch the booster with the tower arms, and the ship
also will be caught with the tower arms, because that's
the fastest way to get the booster and the ship
back to flight. If we had instead put landing legs,
which we have done before for the ship tests, we
actually had landing legs that flipped down and the ship
ship we've we've successfully demonstrated landing with legs. But if
you do that if we were to do that with
the booster and the ship here, we'd have to uh
land somewhere else with the legs, then lift the rocket,
stow the legs, transport the rocket back to the pad
with which is very unwieldy when you've got a gigantic thing.
Then it would be picked up by these tower arms
and placed in the launch mount. That would that would
delay the reusability dramatically and would add a lot of
masks with the landing legs. So that's why we catch
the rocket with the tower arms, because it's the same
tower arms that put the rocket in the launch mount
are used to catch the rocket, and that means that
we can put the booster back in the launch amount
in less than an hour after liftoff. In fact, the
boist is going to come back very fast, like five
or six minutes later. This boost is coming back one
way or another or not coming back. So then you
really have propellent full time, which can be brought down
to about thirty forty minutes, and that means it is
theoretically possible to fly at the booster again in less
than an hour.
Speaker 4: I think when when I think about it, it's the
jet drives up to the jetway, the people get off,
the new people get on, and it leaves. You don't
want to land the jet on a different airfield and
then tow it over to the jetway, so it's just
operationally simpler and faster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've had a lot of success with the Booster,
three for three on the catch attempts when we bring
it back. We've reflown one so awesome, and then that
again Starship Superpowers.
Speaker 2: The whole thing is reusable.
Speaker 3: So ship re usability is like what we're working on
right now. We've been able to get some really spectacular
re entries on a couple of flights, hoping to get
this one re entry on the V two ship. But yeah,
that that fully reasonable heat shield, that thing that has
just never been done before. That's that's one of the
things we're really looking for that data on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are thousands of engineering challenges that remain
for both the ship and the Booster, but the single, uh,
maybe the single biggest one is the reasonable optal heat shield.
Were all confident in making a fully reasonable opal heat shield,
but it will require many flights, many iterations to figure
out where the weak points are in the heat shield
where we need to change the design, either strengthening the
tile or change or changing the the thing, how big
the gap is between tiles, changing what's underneath the tile. Uh,
there's there's a there's a you know, one hundred different
variables that we could tweak with the with the ship,
the ship tiles, the heat of heat shield tiles. But
the only way to know is exactly what we should
be adjusting is to fly repeatedly and be able to
examine the ship upon landing. And we have successfully brought
the ship back through the atmosphere and achieved a soft
landing multiple times, so we know that this is possible.
But we have in the process shed many heat shield tiles.
So we need to be able to do this without
shedding heat shield tiles and.
Speaker 2: Do so repeatedly.
Speaker 4: And I think what you're seeing now is the starship.
This is cg of it coming in and landing on
the tower, much like the Booster, but there's some additional
challenges there where we need to make sure we don't
scrape the tiles off as we slide along the which we.
Speaker 2: Can't shuck the heat shield, don't crush the ship. Ability
we shocked if we.
Speaker 1: Shock the shuck the tiles, then that's obviously going to
fail to re useability test.
Speaker 4: So ships can use the tower to land and catch
like the booster here on Earth where towers are available,
and for our initial landings on Mars and other plant
and it's only landing legs that deploy, much like what
you're seeing here with Ship fifteen. When we did our
suborbital test to prove out the precision descent landing, which
was a successful test. We actually landed to one was
it We were able to actually recover it, and it's
you can see it here in the rocket garden if
you visit Starbase.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the rocket garden that that Bill mentioned, we
have actually a whole bunch of boosters and ships and
we'll be adding to them of a time, so you
can see an evolution of Starship just by driving down
the highway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So reusability is key.
Speaker 3: There's some other technologies we're still looking to prove out.
Really big one is going to be the on orbit refilling.
Looking to do that next year, and that's really what's
going to kind of unlock you know, Starship going everywhere else,
going everywhere everywhere beyond Earth and that's something that's again
never been done before, kind of like that reusable orbital
heat shield. But it's going to be something that that's
kind of some of the other secret sauces Starship. Where
were going to be able to send hundreds of tons
per ship to Mars.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I like to think of it as if we get
to orbit with a full cargo bay, but we're empty
on fuel and oxygen, so basically we're running on fumes.
Then we send other ships to dock transfer propellant, and
now we made our two stage rocket look like many
many multi stage rocket, and we get all that performance
and we can take that full cargo bay now wherever
we want to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a crucial technology that we hope to demonstrate extra
is this orbital refilling.
Speaker 2: Much like aerial refueling.
Speaker 1: It's essential for being able to send significant payload to Mars.
So you essentially send you send a ship to orbit
with a few hundred tons of payload. It's sort of
a fulled payload bay, but the once it gets to orbit,
the tanks we mostly empty, and then you send up
additional tanker ships to refill the mass ships tanks so
that when it can thrust from Earth orbit to Mars
and have enough propellant left for landing, So this is
orbital refilling. Is also not something that's ever been demonstrated before,
so that would be a brand new technology. We have
we abously have at SpaceX figured out how to dock
repeatedly with the space station. So in a lot of ways,
this is like docking, and in some ways it's easier
in that we're the ship where SpaceX is docking with
its with its own craft. But no one has ever
demonstrated propellant transfer in orbit to the best amount knowledge,
and and so this would be propellent transfer at a
very large scale, and but with full reusability and propellant transfer.
We those are the key technologies needed for building a
city on Mars. And I'm confident that the SpaceX team,
which is incredibly talented, will achieve this these goals, and
we will be landing ships on Mars in the future
and building life on Mars, building greenhouses and life on Mars,
and ensuring the long terms fival of life as we
know it. It's important note here that obviously you know
we are effectively stewards of life here on Earth, that
the other creatures cannot build space spacecraft and get to
get to other planets. So if there were to be
a cataclysmic event like a giant media or that destroyed
the dinosaurs, or ultimately the Sun will expand to envelop
Earth and destroy all life. We know this is this
is an undisputed fact, then if we don't take life
to another planet, well, life will be destroyed. So it's
incumbent upon us to ensure that we do bring life
to other planets and ensure long term survival of life as.
Speaker 2: We know it on planet Earth.
Speaker 3: And I mean, aside from that, there's so much that
Starship on locks. By being able to do these things
like we'll be able to go to Mars, but there
are other just transformational things by being able to take
that many people, that much stuff to space for that
much less money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think it's like understanding our planet better,
being able to move people around the planet, make the
make it feel smaller and more accessible. You could go
anywhere on the Earth, you know, in less than forty
minutes basically in terms of flight time. So I really
do see Starship as being this thing that can connect us,
just like Starlink connects our information this can connect us
more physically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's there's really nothing faster than our rocket. Really,
in overal rocket is the fastest thing that we know of.
That that of the fastest means of transport. So like
you could go from LA to Sydney in less than
half an hour, you could go LA to Tokyo less
than half Now you go from New York to Singapore
in half an hour. Everything's probably half an hour basically.
Some things might be ten minutes.
Speaker 3: Yes, sure, I mean yeah, sign me up for that,
please a right quest?
Speaker 2: Atlantic in ten minutes? No wrong? Please, yes, sign up.
You're going twenty.
Speaker 1: Five times a speed of sounds, so that's thirty times
faster than of commercial aircraft.
Speaker 2: And it's a whole hell of a lot better view. Yeah,
it's a hell of a view. Yeah,