Elon Musk Speech At SpaceX Starship Launch #10

Elon Musk Speech At SpaceX Starship Launch #10

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
Will and I just going to enter this live cast?

(00:24):
All right. I had a little flavor.
Yeah, right. Right now we're counting down,
but we're we're about to launch the largest flying object ever
made, but this isn't on the radar for everybody and we know
that so we want to kind of take a beat pull back to a little bit
of Starship one O 1 to do that. I've got some special guests

(00:45):
crash in the webcast today joining me now in Star factory
Elon Musk, chief engineer at SpaceX, Bill Riley, our VP of
Starship engineering. Thanks for being here guys.
I know we got a rocket about to get off the bat, but you know,
let's start people off like highlevel, like why are we here?
What the hell are we doing here?Well, I don't know about
everybody, but I'm here to try to build into the future that I

(01:06):
imagined and dreamed of as a child, where starships with
people are out among the stars exploring the universe.
Yeah, so the the, the why. It's always important to explain
the why of things and the the why of Starship is that we want
to be a multi planet species to extend consciousness beyond

(01:27):
Earth. I think for two main reasons.
One is to ensure the long term survival and prosperity of life
as we know it in consciousness, which if we are a multi planet
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, you know, defensive aspect or life

(01:51):
insurance for life collectively.But then there's also they also
need to be things that are inspiring and exciting and that
give you reason to live. Life cannot just be about
solving 1 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
frank civilization is infinitelymore exciting than one where we

(02:13):
are not. And we're doing it all pretty
unique location. I mean, the pads behind us, we
got rocket on the tower, we got another tower with that.
We're sitting inside Star Factory.
And I mean, it wasn't like this for very long.
This is all pretty brand new. Yeah.
I think we've moved Starship here in about the early part of
2019. So we've been coming that entire
time and seeing the sight of allfrom a double wide trailer and a

(02:36):
tent where we built Star Hopper to the first suborbital test
flights. And now we have behind us 2
towers for the first time as as we built towards the first
operational flight from the second tower at the end of this
year and this beautiful building, 1,000,000 square feet,
where we're able to work towardsthe production line of
Starships. Yeah, this the, the SpaceX team

(02:59):
has done an incredible job of building out really the the most
advanced rocket manufacturing facility that has ever existed.
This this is far beyond any rocket fabrication facility that
has ever been built. This is essentially alien level
technology and it was all built here basically down by the Rio

(03:20):
Grande River and close to the beach.
It's an incredibly improbable location.
And this used to be a sandbar. I think we're about, you know, 3
feet or about a meter above sea level.
So it's really was was nothing. If you see the time lapse from
sandbar to two, two launch towers and a gigantic rocket

(03:45):
factory with with high bays. And we're we're going to be
building something called the Giga Bay, which is like a one of
the, the largest enclosed volumes on Earth.
So it's sort of like a gigantic Borg cube that we're going to be
building here for. Yeah, for, for building and
storing these gigantic rockets. It's really spectacular and

(04:09):
anyone can come and visit. So the because we're on a public
highway and we're literally by public beach, you can actually
come and see the rocket. You can quite close up.
I mean, you can drive fast it and and you can also look at the
factory and anyone could do thisfrom anywhere in the world.
So if you just you can come and visit and and check it out.

(04:30):
Just I think it's pretty cool that it's.
Just not right now. Just not right, just not right
now. It's not where we're launching
because there's some safety issues, but but the, but the
Rockets often just just sitting on the pad without any
propellant in it. And then you can just, you can
just come here and visit. It's for very easy, yeah, I
think. It's a really special place.
Yesterday this the ship went down the road behind us and I

(04:50):
saw families outside going for their 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 awareof is we designed it to be mass
produced and mass produced at scale.
And it's not about building 1 Starship and getting to orbit

(05:11):
once, it's about doing it in a sustained and rapid way.
Yeah, we're aiming for ultimately thousands of shifts
to be built per year, which is what's needed in order to
construct a city on Mars that isself-sustaining.
And the the major fork in the road of destiny will be when the
Mars city is capable of surviving, even if the resupply

(05:32):
shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason.
And that reason could be something cataclysmic, or it
could be that it it, that civilization simply subsided.
There's always this debate throughout history of wolf
civilization and with a a bang or a whimper.
But either way, if the the the critical thing is to get to the
point where Mars is self-sustaining and can survive

(05:54):
even if the resupply ships stuffcoming 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 computerchip factory, but you need the
ability to build computer chip factories.

(06:15):
So this is, this is going to really take a lot of tonnage.
I mean, my guess is at least 1,000,000 tons to the surface of
Mars. And maybe it takes less than
that, but it's going to be, it'sgoing to 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, of life and consciousness.

(06:37):
And, 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, and perhaps we'll encounter alien
civilizations that maybe the maybe they're alive now, but, or
maybe they enjoyed a period of prosperity for millions of years
and but also died out millions of years ago.

(06:58):
So it's humbling to think of theage of the universe according to
the standard model of physics, being approximately 13.8 billion
years old. So an incremental million years
would only would be 3 digits past decimal point.
And if you look at, say, our civilization and measure our
civilization by the 1st evidenceof writing, which is about 5500

(07:22):
years ago, civilization as measured from the first writing
is only one millionth of Earth'sexistence.
Or blip. Yeah, yeah.
Flash in the pan so far, yeah. Well, we're getting some cool
shots rocking out on the pad right now.
We we tell people like come down, see it.
It's hard to get like a sense ofscale of just how massive this

(07:45):
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 we're sending
millions of tons when? I think in this image, Dan, 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 2 tone silver and black and then the

(08:07):
booster below it, right? And it really sets the scale,
which doesn't come across, I think other than in person.
And I when I do tours, I like tosay 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 got Flight 10 on the pad, but we got
many more behind it. Yeah, so there's, I posted a

(08:29):
video yesterday of just a, a brief scan of part of the
Starship factory and you can geta sense of this, the scale of
the factory. And yeah, I guess we could talk
a bit about why Starship is the way it is in like, for example,
what why is half of the ship black and half of it is silver
colored? And that's because of the bottom

(08:50):
half of the ship of the bottom, as seen from orbital entry is
has a heat shield on it. So the the black there is the is
the heat shield and the, and then the the core structure of
the rocket is a special alloy ofstainless steel.
And, and that's where you see the, the sort of shiny silver
parts are stainless steel. The reason for steel over

(09:13):
aluminum is that the heat of, ofatmospheric entry and the heat
of the the rocket engines is enough to melt easily, easily
melt aluminum. But steel is much more resilient
against both ascent heating, butespecially the reentry heating.
And you don't have to paint it, which is actually very difficult

(09:36):
at to paint a large object that is going through cryogenic
cycles and have the paint stay on.
It's quite challenging. And so we've talked about it.
It's massive. 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 Light Saber.

(10:01):
Now that's a light Saber and 1/2you would get vaporized in an
instant if you were standing in front of rafter.
So yeah, a bunch of crisp in a in a like a less than a second.
So, yeah. So in order for in order to
create a fully reusable orbital rocket, you have to advance the

(10:24):
state-of-the-art in every part of the rocket.
That means the engines have to be better than any engine ever.
The structures got to be better than any structure ever.
You've got a, you've got to havea means of bringing the rocket
back to the launchpad. You've got to have a fully

(10:44):
reusable orbital heat shield. And that no one's ever made a
fully reusable orbital heat shield.
The space Shuttle, for example, required nine months of
refurbishment between flights. So the the space shuttle heat
shield come back essentially partially broken and would
require many months of of refurbishment in order to fly

(11:05):
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
the booster would be placed immediately back on the launch
stand and the ship, the ship's got it orbit Earth at least once

(11:28):
and but but 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 can also have multiple ships
ready so that a single booster could service 5 or more ships so
that you you could be flying thebooster every, in theory every

(11:51):
hour. This is 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 the booster with the tower arms and the ship also
will be caught with the tower arms because that's the fastest

(12:12):
way to get the the booster and the ship back to flight.
If we had instead put put landing legs, which we've done
before for the the the ship tests, we actually had landing
legs that flip down and the the ship would ship.
We've successfully demonstrated landing with legs.
But if you do that, if we were to do that with the booster and

(12:35):
the ship here, we'd have to landsomewhere 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.

(12:57):
That would that would delay the reusability dramatically and
would add a lot of mass with thelanding legs.
So that's why we catch the rocket with the tower arms
because it's the same tower armsthat 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

(13:18):
mount in less than an hour afterliftoff.
In fact, the boost is going to come back very fast, like you
know, 5 or 6 minutes later this boost is coming back one way or
another or not coming back. So, so then you really have
propellant full time which can be brought down to about 30-40
minutes. And that means you it is
theoretically possible to fly the booster again in less than

(13:41):
an hour. I think when the when I think
about it, it's the jet drives upto the jet way.
The people get off, 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 jet way. So it's just operationally
simpler and faster. Yeah, we've had a lot of success
with the booster 3 for three on the catch attempts.
When we bring it back, we've reflown 1 so awesome.

(14:02):
And then the again, Starship Superpowers, the whole thing is
reusable. So ship reusability is like what
we're working on right now. We've been able to get some
really spectacular re entries ona couple of flights hoping to
get this one for re entry on theV2 ship.
But yeah, that that fully reusable heat shield, that thing
that has just never been done before.

(14:23):
That's that's one of the things we're really looking for that
date on. Yeah.
I mean, there are thousands of entering challenges that remain
for both the ship and the booster, but the single, maybe
the single biggest one is, is the reasonable Opal heat shield.
We are confident in, in making afully reasonable Opal heat

(14:43):
shield, but it will require manyflights, many iterations to
figure out where the weak pointsare in the heat shield, where we
need to change the design, either strengthening the tile or
change or changing the, the, thethick, the how big the gap is
between tiles, changing what's underneath the tile.
There's, there's a, there's a, you know, 100 different

(15:07):
variables that we could tweak with the, with the ship, the
ship tiles, the sheet shield tiles.
But the only way to know exactlywhat we should be adjusting is
to fly repeatedly and be able toexamine the ship upon landing.
And we we have successfully brought the ship back through

(15:29):
the atmosphere and achieved a soft landing multiple times.
So we know that this is possible, but we have in the
process shared many heat shield tiles.
So we need to be able to do thiswithout shedding heat shield
tiles and and do so repeatedly. And I and I think what you're
seeing now is the Starship, thisis CG of it coming in and

(15:50):
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 weslide along the.
We can't Shuck the heat shield. Don't crush the ship.
Rapid usability. We Shuck the If we Shuck the
Shuck the tiles, then that's obviously going to fail the
reusability test. So ships can use the tower to
land and catch like like the booster here on Earth where

(16:12):
towers are available. And for our initial landings on
Mars and other planets, we'll need landing legs that deploy
much like what you're seeing here with Ship 15.
When we did our suborbital test to prove out the precision
descent landing, which was a successful test, we actually
landed to 1 was it? We were able to actually recover
it. And it's you can see it here in
the Rocket Garden if you visit Star Base.

(16:35):
Yeah. So the rocket garden that that
bill mentioned that we have a actually a whole bunch of
boosters and ships and we'll be adding to them over time.
So you can see an evolution of Starship just by driving down
the highway. Yeah.
So reusability is key. There's some other technologies
we're still looking to prove outreally big 1 is going to be the
on orbit refilling looking to todo that next year.

(16:57):
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 sauce to Starship,
where we're going to be able to send hundreds of tons per ship

(17:19):
to Mars. Yeah.
I like to think of it as if we get to orbit with a full cargo
Bay, but we're empty on fuel andoxygen.
So basically we we're running onfumes, then we send other ships
to dock, transfer propellant andnow we made our two stage rocket
look like a many, many multi stage rocket and we get all of
that performance and we can takethat full cargo Bay now wherever
we want to go. Yeah.

(17:42):
So a crucial technology that we hope to demonstrate next year is
this orbital refilling, much like aerial refueling, it's
essential for being able to sendsignificant payload to Mars.
So you essentially send, you send a ship to orbit with a few
100 tons of payload if it's sortof a full payload Bay, But the,

(18:04):
the once it gets to orbit, the, the tanks will be mostly empty.
And then you send up additional tanker ships to refill the, the
Moss ships tanks so that when it's so 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

(18:25):
technology. We, we have, we also have a
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 demonstratedpropellant transfer in orbit to

(18:47):
the best of our knowledge. And, and so this would be
propellant transfer at a very large scale.
And, but with full reusability and propellant transfer, we,
those are the, the key technologies needed for building
a city on Mars. And I'm confident that the
SpaceX team, which is incrediblytalented, will achieve this,

(19:10):
this, these goals. And we will be landing ships on
Mars in the future and building life on Mars, building
greenhouses and, and life on Mars and ensuring the long term
survival of life as we know it. And it's important to note here
that obviously, you know, we areeffectively stewards of life
here on Earth, that the other creatures cannot build space

(19:34):
spacecraft and get to get to other planets.
So if there were to be a cataclysmic event like a giant
meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs or ultimately the sun
will expand to envelope Earth and destroy all life, We know
this, this is this is an undisputed fact.
Then if we don't take life to another planet, the light will,

(19:54):
life will be destroyed. So it's incumbent upon us to
ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure the
long term survival of life as weknow it on planet Earth.
And I mean, aside from that, there's so much that Starship
unlocks 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

(20:15):
stuff to space for that much less money.
I mean, I think 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 40minutes basically in terms of
flight time. So I, I really do see Starship
as being this thing that can connect us, just like Starling

(20:36):
connects our information. This can connect us more
physically. Yeah.
So there's there's really nothing faster than a rocket.
Really, an overall rocket is thefastest 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

(20:58):
hour. You could go LA to Tokyo in less
than half an hour. You go from New York to
Singapore in half an hour. Everything's probably half an
hour. Basically.
There's some things, might be 10minutes, yeah.
That's true. That means, Yeah, sign me up for
that, please. All right.
Cross Atlantic in 10 minutes, noproblem.
Please yes, sign me up. You're going 25 times the speed

(21:19):
of sound, so that's 30 times faster than than of commercial
aircraft. And it's a whole hell of a lot
better view. Yeah, it's a hell of a view,
yeah. All right, cool.
Anything else, guys? Anything else?
I mean, we could say a lot more,yeah.
I just maybe we should go check in on the rocket and get on.
We're going to go back on a console to hopefully the weather

(21:40):
supports the launch tonight. And yeah, thanks for tuning in
and yeah, thanks for your support.
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(22:02):
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(22:24):
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