Speaker 1: Okay, sure, So it's quick up on Tesla. You have
to unute program for people hold on oneside.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. So I'm sure people have been reading
about the order alone, bailouts and all that sort of stuff.
So it's it's kind of a travesty at what's going on,
although I hope I don't think it's gonna last too long.
Into the Obama administration, there was a twenty five billion
dollar loan program that Congress approved to find energy development
of energy efficient vehicle, essentially the wean ourselves of oil.
And ironically, the Big Three then came to Washington and said,
now give us that money for our day to day
operations building gas guzzlers, which is is obviously a sort
of a version of the intent. And unfortunately, with the
job situation being being the way it is, Congress has
acceded to that demand and it is understanding currently giving
fifteen of the twenty five billion to the Big Three
to fund their data operations, which I.
Speaker 1: Believe gets them to about February. I love kidding. There's
not even an exaggeration.
Speaker 2: Although the Speaker a Speaker Pelosi has also said that
as soon as the new administration comes in they're going
to replenish that fund, so I think it'll be I
think it'll be okay.
Speaker 1: But certainly, if you have the opportunity to express to.
Speaker 2: Anyone in DC or in the press the importance of
developing clean energy vehicles, please take the opportunity to do so.
Speaker 1: In the case of Tesla, if.
Speaker 2: Tesla actually is not applying for any bailout funds, although
some of the press have mistaken that, what Tesla's done
is applied for funding to develop lower cost mass market vehicles,
and essentially the exact intent of the legislation, and.
Speaker 1: So hopefully this will some money left over to actually
do that after the Big three have taken what the
what what they will take?
Speaker 2: Uh so uh And and the Tesla Roadster, I think
a lot of people are familiar with that.
Speaker 1: That's the two seater sports car.
Speaker 2: In fact, my my car, which is production unit one,
is parked outside if anyone's curious.
Speaker 1: To see it. There's uh there's also Tesla.
Speaker 2: Sales and service center on Santa Monica Boulevard, so if
you want to pop in and take a look at
the card at that time, we also welcome do so.
And we're about to deliver our hundredth production Tesla next week.
And that's interestingly enough, our hundredth customer is Sam Perry.
Speaker 1: If if if anybody.
Speaker 2: Watched the the when Obama won and an Oprah was
crying on some guy's shoulder, that same guy's hundred customers.
Speaker 1: So it's good.
Speaker 2: Like Zelig, I mean, he's sort of everywhere. So anyway,
he's a really great guy and lives in the area.
It's going to take a little bit of his car
on Tuesday, so I'm going to hand him the keys
personally and think of being a customer. So and you know,
there's an important point about Tesla, which is, whenever somebody
buys the Tesla Roadster, even though it's a one hundred
thousand dollars one hundred nine thousand dollars sports car and
it's kind of a fancy sports car, every pointy that
Tesla makes goes into development of lower cost mass mark vehicles.
Speaker 1: So the company doesn't.
Speaker 2: Issue any dividends, nor will it ever know my stalary's
minimum wage, you know.
Speaker 1: So I'm a volunteer.
Speaker 2: Basically, So and then you know, it's it's like it's
just an important point because sometimes people think, well, gee,
what's the point of making these these expensive cars, which
are sort of toys for rich people, hows that really
helping the environment.
Speaker 1: The important point to bear in mind is that when.
Speaker 2: You have new technology, it takes time to optimize that technology.
If you think back to the early days of cell
phones or laptops or pretty much anything new, it's expensive
in the early days because the first job with a
new technology is you've got to make it work, and
you make it small volume you sell those cars. But
if you the critical point is that you can't get
to the low cost cars unless you start with the
expensive cars. And and that's that's the point that sometimes lies. Anyway,
that's enough on Tesla. I'll jump into the space stuff
and I'll kick it off with our last flight video.
Speaker 3: Fuel turned out actually are set.
Speaker 1: To trigger system. So this is actually on a remote
trop of the island. We launched a small rocket, the
Falcon one from an island in the quadronin anshole. So
so it feels a bit of nefarious to be launching
rockets for a moretrochoical islands. Yeah, I feel a bit
like a brine villain in this case. It's basically just
a dummy satellite. So if this is basically.
Speaker 2: A test flight to get to orbits. So this is
actually our fourth flights. The flights two or three made
it to space, but they didn't make rule a way
to orbit. And it's actually a lot harder to get
to orbit than it is to get to space. You
can get to space just by getting going up to
mark three, but to get to orbit you get to
get you have to have a minimum of mark twenty five,
and that doesn't actually explain the full difficulty because the
energy scales with the square of the last seas, So
getting space nine inntes of energy, getting to orbit six
hundred and twenty five minutes of energy. It's about seventy
times harder to get to orbit than to get to space,
and that's why there's only been about half a dozen
countries in the world that have actually reached aubit. So
this is actually the first completely privately developed rocket uh
to to reach orbit and also the first amen privately
about liquid fuel rocky disorders. This is it's named This
is the Falcon one. It's named Falcon after the Millennium Falcons.
Speaker 1: From Star Wars. Looks nothing like it, but.
Speaker 2: So the music in the background is a high roller
from the crystal method.
Speaker 1: Actually with with with rockets. Uh. The only semi reuseful
rocket in.
Speaker 2: The world right now is the Space Shuttle, and they
say sam reusul because the main tank is actually.
Speaker 1: Thrown away every time, so it's typically we're really almost
in all cases rockets are not recovered.
Speaker 2: They basically re enter and kind of either burn up
or crash into the ocean and think to the bottom.
Speaker 1: Typically now a.
Speaker 2: Falcon one, our intent is to recover the first stage,
which unfortunately we weren't able to do it this flight.
The clametry coming down showed that that the it didn't
have enough normal protection, so it actually ended.
Speaker 1: Up burning up. We need to increase the thermal protection.
Got Uh. The field is is a high purity kerosene,
so it's.
Speaker 2: Like sort of a very clean form of jet fuel
basically with no sult of content dry. It's not the
greatest thing in the world, but we do buy lots
of carbon ox sets, so.
Speaker 1: It's a nine degresional that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, we're making use of thest rotation to help
with the insert simplacity.
Speaker 3: Could you actually go out wouldn't it be easier to
go into space?
Speaker 2: And well, the only way to go up and stay
up is to reach orb it. The the gravity is
actually almost the same force at say two hundred.
Speaker 1: Miles above the surface as it is on the on
the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 2: The only reason people seem to be sort of floating around,
but actually what's happening is they're zooming around the Earth
super fast. And the said the outward acceleration is equal
to the inward acceleration of gravity, and so when that's neutralized,
you have what appears to be zero gravity, but you're
actally just sort.
Speaker 1: Of falling around the Earth.
Speaker 2: Do you want We've not encountered any any space junk
issue that it's although there's been a lot of launchers
up there and been issues like the where the Chinese
blood for satellite and scattered bits all over the place.
Speaker 1: It's so big up there that the statistical chance of
being hit is tiny.
Speaker 2: But but for things which are which carry people, like
the space station and our Dragon spacecraft.
Speaker 1: Uh, they actually have my Cromeinia rights shields so they
can take a high impact which essentially a.
Speaker 2: High speed bullet coming at its picture.
Speaker 1: Ah, the bigger picture. Very good question.
Speaker 2: So the reason I started SpaceX was because the cost
and reliability of getting to getting to orbits and beyond.
Speaker 1: Has not really improved since the sixties. In fact, it's
Scottland worse so.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the trajectory over time, it's
not an improving trajectory if you would extrapolate that the
cast trajectory, and Steve could tell could affirm that if
if you would extrapolate to the future, you would basically
be able to afford no launchers at some point.
Speaker 1: Because it's just it's actually was getting more and more expensive.
Speaker 2: So I started SpaceX to really reverse that trend and
make it affordable to get to orbit and beyond. The
huge breakthrough that space aspires to achieve, and this is
a very difficult thing, is to make a fully reusable.
Speaker 1: Orbital launch vehicle. So with Falcon one, the first stage
is intended to be re usable. With Falcon nine, both
stages are intended to be reusable.
Speaker 2: Now it's going to take us many launches to figure
that out and get the stages back safely and optimize
the refurbishment for flight and make sure they're reliable and what.
But that's that's the that's sort of the big tech
technical breakthrough wereing for and you can imagine in any
mode of transport, if you had a reusable vehicle or
expendable vehicle, it would be a night and day difference.
I mean, how many people would have driven here if
the car was single use or or even And that
applies to any mode of transport, bicycles, horses, planes, you know,
really pretty much anything.
Speaker 1: So we've got this weird.
Speaker 2: Situation in space where vehicles can only be used once.
In fact, you want to return journey, you've got like
tow one behind you. So that's what we're aspiring to it.
It's a tough goal. We're not saying we can achieve it,
but we're aspiring to achieve.
Speaker 1: That, and I think we will. But to explain why
that's so difficult.
Speaker 2: When an orbital rocket is after they've really optimized the
weight of the rocket and use the most advanced materials
and the engines are incredibly efficient, and you've pushed everything
to the maximum, you typically get about three percent of
the lift off weight to orbit. So if you make
even a small mistake in the design, you know, if
you get three percent off your you know you got nothing.
So and that's for expandable single use rockets, where they're
not trying to make the rocket robust enough to have
multiple flight. They're not trying to make it robust enough
to re enter safely. It doesn't have to have heat
shields and all that lot of stuff. So when you
add in all those things, if that exceeds three percent,
well you're getting nothing toward it.
Speaker 1: So uh So to make it.
Speaker 2: Reusable and still deliver it a useful payload is extraordinarily difficult,
and and no one has ever succeeded in doing that, right,
So I'm getting I'll get So the why Essentially.
Speaker 1: I should? I should? I Actually, you're right, I should
perceive this with the Y and then and then the how.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, technics, for granted, being in a space business.
But so I'm a huge believer in the extension of
life beyond Earth.
Speaker 2: So making life multiplanetary, I think, is one of the
most important things we could do.
Speaker 1: So then why why is that important? Well?
Speaker 2: How do you how do you say that anything is important?
How do you judge importance? Well, if you look at
things on an historical time scale, and the further you
zoom out more, the important stuff stays behind, and the
unimportant stuff you can't see it anymore.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the the span of life's
evolution on Earth, you know, the multi billion.
Speaker 2: Year history of Earth itself, of life on Earth itself,
you can really point to about half a dozen major
steps on the evolution of life. There's obviously single cell life,
multicellular life, differentiation to plants and animals, life moving from
the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness.
Speaker 1: You know, those are sort of like the big ones,
and that's why we're here talking.
Speaker 2: And on that scale also would fit I think the
extension of life to multiple planets. So life becoming multiplanetary,
it would be at least is important, if not more
important than life going from the oceans to lands, oceans
to land.
Speaker 1: You could jump back to the ocean if forgot uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: But going to another planet you've got to go over,
you know, billions of miles of hostile space and then
land and try to create an ecology on a planet
that is nothing like the planet that we live on today,
or if my current planet may become more like that
planet if not careful, But you know that's so if
you have something which arguably I could fit on the
important scale of the evolution of life, itself, then it's reason.
We'll say it's important and should get some of our resources.
And I think, say, well, what is some of our resources? Well, probably,
like you know, less than what we spend on medicare
and more than what we spend on lifstick. You know,
you can sort of bracket it. So we spent a
lot of lipstick quo, which I.
Speaker 1: Think is great.
Speaker 2: But if you said, well, maybe we should spend a
quarter of a percent of our of our economic product
on the extension of life to another planet, making my
fault planetary, and that would be like a reasonable number,
and you know that's uh, you know, several tanza billions.
So I don't think it could be done for that.
And but a critical element is making having that reusable
orbital craft. So that's the that's the fundamental breakthrough is necessary.
First bill to afford to do it at a price
that is going to be palatable to the general public.
Speaker 1: Planetary and think about the kind of fuels used. Probably
it looks so ideas about well my wild's idea about feels.
Speaker 2: I think long term, you know, once we well, if
we I suppose figure out fusion, you're having a fusion.
Speaker 1: If you can have a compact fusion reactor and that
that would be the best energy source.
Speaker 2: And then you need to sort of shoot something out
of the back end, uh, you know, which could just
basically a high energy ion engine powered by a fusion reactor.
That's like, that's pretty much about as good as're gonna get.
I mean, theoretically from a physics standpoint, sorry a gravity saying,
maybe a solar sale. Yeah, solar sale is an option.
But now the sun doesn't have a lot of force
because if you stand outside, you don't feel yourself getting
knocked down by the Sun.
Speaker 1: But but so you need a big sale in space
and it can and it can work, and it's an option.
Speaker 2: And particularly, you know, if you had, like to say,
a cargo ship going from Earth to Mars, where the
time of the journey wasn't that big of a deal,
then that could be actually a good option.