Elon Musk latest starship updates 2025

Elon Musk latest starship updates 2025

#ElonMusk

Source: SpaceX

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, there you go, all right, the gateway to Mars.
So here we are. Here, we are at the newly
incorporated star based Texas. This is the first new city

(00:26):
made in America in I think quite a few decades
that at least, that's what I'm told. And a very
cool name. And it's named that because it is the
It is where we're going to develop the technology necessary
to take humanity and civilization and life as we know
it to another planet for the first time in the

(00:47):
four and a half billion year history of Earth. Go
with this little video here. This is how it started
off with basically nothing. So start Starve started off as
basically a sandbar with nothing. Even those little things we

(01:16):
built obviously that's the original sort of Mad Max rocket.

(01:44):
That's where you discovered light lighting is very important for
that Mad Max rocket. So yeah, not that long ago,

(02:05):
there was basically nothing here and in the space of
about five or six years, thanks to the incredible work
of the SpaceX team, we've built a small city and
we've built two gigantic launch pads and a gigantic rocket
factory for a gigantic rocket. And the cool thing is,

(02:28):
for anyone out there who's watching this you can actually
come and visit because our entire production facility and launch
site are on a public highway, so anyone who comes
to South Texas can come and see the rocket pretty
close up and see the factory. And so if anyone

(02:50):
is interested in seeing the largest flying object on earth
can come here anytime they want and just drive down
the public highway and see it, which is pretty cool.
So then we progress to where we are now, start
based twenty twenty five, so we're now at the point

(03:14):
where we can produce a ship roughly every two or
three weeks. Now, we don't always produce a ship every
two or three weeks because we are making design upgrades,
but ultimately we're aiming for the ability to produce one
thousand ships a year, so three ships a day. So

(03:39):
that's where things are now. I'm standing in that building
that's our hovercraft. We're driving a booster down the road

(04:11):
to the launch site. You can see the megabase, and
I said, what's the cool The cool thing for those
out there watching this video is that you can actually
just literally come here, drive down the road and see it,

(04:34):
which is the first time in history that that's been possible.
So all this cool stuff. You that that road on
the left there, that highway is public and you can
just come here and see it, which I recommend doing.
I think it's very inspiring to see. So that's our gigabay.

(04:56):
So where we're expanding integration to produce one thousand star
shows per year. Well, yeah, that hasn't been built yet,
but we're building it. That is a truly enormous structure.
Is that this will be one that'll be one of
the biggest structures, I think, by some measures, the biggest
structure in the world, and it's designed for a thousand

(05:20):
starships a year. We're also building a gigabay in Florida,
bringing so we'll have two facilities, one in Texas and
one in Florida. It's it's actually difficult to gauge the
size of these buildings because you need a kind of
human for scale where you see how tiny a human

(05:42):
is next to that building, you realize just how enormous
it is. So when we look at our built comparison
vehicles per year, and so you look at Boeing an
airbus making airplanes, starship make it. We'll be making at

(06:02):
some point probably as many starships from Mars as Boeing
and Airbus make commercial airplanes, So this is really at
a scale enormal scale, and each starship will have a capability.
Each starship is bigger than a seven forty seven or
an A three eighty, like, it's truly enormous. And then

(06:28):
in terms of starship star stalling satellites, the Version three
satellites making on the order of five thousand a year,
maybe at some point closer to ten thousand a year,
and those stalling B three satellites are each the size
of roughly a seven thirty seven. They're pretty big. That

(06:50):
compares to the B twenty four bomber in World War Two.
Now it's still small compared to Tesla, so and Tesla
will probably be doing you know, double or trouble that
volume in the future. So it just puts things into
perspective that is, it is actually possible to build a

(07:14):
vast number of interplanetary star shifts. And even when you
can compare things on the tonnage standpoint, Tesla is still
and other co company is still building far more complex
manufactured tonnage than this basics, which is really is a
way of saying that it's very achievable. Like these numbers.

(07:34):
While they are insanely high by traditional space standards, are
are are achievable by humans because they have been achieved
in other industries. Progress is measured by the timeline to
establishing a self sustaining civilization on Mars. That's how we're
gauging out progress here at star Base. So with each launch,

(07:55):
especially in the early days of Starship, each launch is
about learning more and more about what's needed to make
life multiplanetary and to improve Starship to the point where
it can be taking ultimately hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of people to Mars. Ideally we can take anyone who
wants to go to Mars. We can take to Mars

(08:17):
and bring with it, bring all of the equipment necessary
to make more self sustaining so Mars can grow by
itself in a worst case scenario. Getting to the point
where the fundamental folk in the road for human destiny
is where where Mars can continue to grow even if

(08:39):
the supply shifts from Earth stopped coming for any reason.
At that point, we've achieved civilizational resilience where Mars can
potentially come to the rescue of Earth if something goes wrong,
or maybe Earth could come to the rescue of Mars.
But having two planets that are that can that that

(09:02):
are both self sustaining and strong, I think it's going
to be incredibly important for the long term survival of civilization. So,
like just I think any given civilization is likely to
last maybe I don't know, ten times longer, maybe much
longer if it is a multiplanet civilization, then if it

(09:26):
is a single planet civilization, because there's always there's always
some chance that you know, us humans could do something
crazy like World Wars three, hopefully not, but it's possible,
or that there could be some natural event like meteors
or super volcanoes or something that we don't expect, and

(09:46):
and and then if you only have one planet, the neck,
that could be curtains. But if we've got two planets,
we keep going and and then we go beyond Mars,
ultimately to the mood maybe the asteroid belt, the moons
are Jupiter and beyond, and ultimately to other star systems,
and we can be out there among the stars, making

(10:08):
science fiction no longer fiction. So in order to achieve
this goal, we have to be we have to make
rapidly reusable rockets so that the uh the cost per flight,
the cost per ton to Mars is as low as possible.
That's essential. So for that rapidly reusable rockets, I said,

(10:29):
it's actually four urs. Right, it's like a pirate are.
It's like rapidly reusable, reliable rockets is the key are are.
Now we've uh aggrass to the SpaceX team on making
incredible progress on catching a giant rocket. So it's really

(10:58):
mind blowing that the SpaceX team has been able to
catch the largest flying object ever made multiple times using
a very novel method of catching it out of the
air with giant chopsticks. I mean, I've ever seen that before. Yeah,

(12:21):
congrarets agating. That was an incredible achievement. So the reason
we are catching it in this way, which is never
been done before, is in order to achieve the rapidly
reasonable portion of the in order to make the rocket

(12:45):
rapidly reasonable. So if it is if the super heavy booster,
which is gigantic, it's like thirty feet in diameter, if
it were to land with landing legs on landing pad,
we would then have to pick it up, stow the legs,
and put it back in the launch pad. And that's

(13:10):
it's quite difficult to transport such a lot of thing.
But if we catch it with the same tower that
it's used to put it in the launch amount to
begin with, that is the best case outcome for rapid reuse.
So it literally gets caught by the same arms that
placed it in the launch in launchering and then it

(13:33):
is placed back in the launchering immediately. So in principle,
the super heavy booster can be reflown within an hour
of landing, so it comes back in about five or
six minutes one way or another, and then it gets
caught by the tower arms placed back in the launch mount,

(13:55):
and then you can re propellant in about thirty to
forty minutes and place a ship on top of it,
and in principle refly the entire booster every hour, maybe
every two hours to give a little bit of extra time.
But let's just say it's it's very it's in the
limit of rapid reuse. And then the next thing we

(14:23):
need to do is catch the ship too. So we
haven't done this yet, but we will. So that's what

(14:44):
we hope to demonstrate later this year, maybe as soon
as two or three months from now, and then the
ship would be placed on top of the booster and
then again refold with propellant and flown again with the ship.
It takes a bit longer because it's got orbit Earth

(15:06):
a few times until the groundtrack comes back over the
launch pad. But the ship is also intended to be
reflown multiple times per day. So is the new Raptor three,
which is an awesome engine began to the Raftor team
for this. This is very exciting. So a Raft three

(15:34):
is designed to require no basic heat shield, saving a
lot of mass on the bottom and actually improving reliability
so that if there is, for example, a small fuel
leak from the Raftor engine, it will simply leak into
the existing flaming plasma and not really matter, whereas a

(15:55):
fuel leak when the engines are contained in a box
is a very scary thing. Indeed, So this is a
Raptor three. Uh, it'll take it, probably a few kicks
if the can, but it will be. It is a
massive increase in payler capability, in engine efficiency, and in reliability.
So this is really a revolutionary engine. The Raft three

(16:18):
is really i'd say, kind of alien technology rocket engine.
I mean even industry experts when we showed a picture
of the RAPT three said that engine is not complete.
So then we said, well, here's the engine not complete,
firing at a level of efficiency that has never been

(16:42):
achieved before. So I mean that is one clean engine.
So in order to the engine like that, we had
to simplify so many parts of the design incorporate secondary

(17:06):
fluid circuits and electronics in the structure of the engine itself,
so everything is contained and protected. It is a marvel
of engineering. Frankly. Then one of the other technologies that's
key for MARS is doing orbital propellant transfer. So you

(17:31):
can think of this like similar to aerial refueling for airplanes,
but in this case it's orbital refilling of rockets, which
has never been done before. But it is, you know,
technically feasible. I always feel like these things are a

(17:52):
little NSFW sort of Listen, you've got to trans for
food somehow, there's no this has got to be done.
So the two starships would get together and one starship

(18:15):
would transfer fuel an oxygen, and actually most of the
masses oxygen. It's almost eighty percent oxygen that gets transferred
a little over twenty percent fuel and and so on.
You so you'd send a starship to orbit with that's
full of payload, and then you send up a bunch
of other starships up and you would refill the propellant

(18:36):
on that starship, and once the propellant tanks are mostly full,
then you can depart for the Mars, for Mars or
the Moon or Yeah. So this is an important technology
which we should hopefully demonstrate next year. Yeah, with the

(19:02):
one of the toughest problems to solve is the reusable
heat shield. So no, no one has ever developed a
truly reusable orbital heat shield, so that it's extremely difficult
to do so. Even the Shuttle Shuttle's heat shield required
several months of refurbishment basically fixing broken tiles, testing each

(19:26):
tile and because it's an extremely hard problem to be
able to withstand the extreme heat and pressure of re entry,
and the only things that can really withstand this level
of heat are advanced sort of ceramics kind of you know,

(19:49):
basically glass, aluminum, sometimes of carbon carbon, but very very
little actually can survive the and with reusability, without getting
without eroding or falling off or cracking, can survive the
stresses of re entry. So this will be the first

(20:11):
time that it's done. That that that a reusable orbital
heat shield is developed and it needs to be obviously
extremely reliable. So this will this will be something that
will be working on for a few years. I think
to keep honing the heat shield. It's it's a very
it's it's it is an achievable thing. So we're not

(20:32):
trying to do something that isn't achievable. It is within
the realm of physics to get this done. Just an
extraordinarily difficult thing to get done. And Marsh the Mars
atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which at first may seem better,
but actually it ends up being worse because it when
the CO two turns into a plasma and you've got

(20:56):
you actually end up with more free oxygen entering on
a Mars atmosphere then on earth atmosphere. So Earth's atmosphere
is only around twenty percent oxygen and Mars ends up
being basically more than double that. Maybe trouble that when
you consider when the CO two becomes a plasma and

(21:17):
and you get carbon and O two, so that wants
to oxidize the heat shield, basically burn the heat shield.
So that's why we we test it very regular orgorously
in a CO two atmosphere, because it's got to work
not just for Earth but also for Mars, and we

(21:40):
want to we want to use the same heat shield
for Earth that we use for Mars, because there are
many other factors with the heat shield, such as making
sure the tiles don't crack or fall off or anything
like that. So we want to have the same heat
shield structure, same material on Earth as on Mars, so
we can test it hundreds of times on Earth before

(22:01):
going to Mars and be confident that when it goes
to Mars it will work. So we're developing some next

(22:24):
generation starships which are have a number of improvements versus
our carrent Gent, so it's toller, for example, and has
a better it are kind of a the interstage between
the ship and the booster. You can see that sort
of the sort of struts there that makes it easier

(22:49):
for the flame like they're right there when doing hot staging,
which is when we light the ship's engines while the
booster's engines are still firing the floor I aim from
the from the ship engines can more easily exit through
the the open struts of the of the new interstage,

(23:09):
and this case will bring the struts interstage back with
us instead of throwing it away. So a little more
height here seventy two meters from around sixty nine repellent capacity.
I think we'll probably push that up a little, maybe

(23:31):
thirty seven hundred tons. Long term, my guesses were maybe
around four thousand tons, and but just sort of just
over eight you know, sort of eight thousand, probably like
eight thousand three. This will keep getting up. My guess
is ultimately we're four thousand tons here, close to ten

(23:53):
thousand tons of thrust. But this is kind of the
next the next level or the next version of the
super Heavy. So the booster will look a little naked
on the bottom because the rafter of three engines don't
require heat shield, so it looked like it looks like
there's kind of parts missing, but that's just because the

(24:15):
rafter heat shield does not the rafter three does not
need a heat shield, so it's just it's just standing there.
They're in a bathed in flaming plasma. But it's a
lot lighter, yep, integrated hot stage. I think it looks amazing.

(24:49):
Then the shifts a little a little more, a little longer,
and more capable moving to fifteen and fifty tons of
propelling capacity. My guess is this probably ends up twenty
more than this long term. And yeah, you can see

(25:09):
the heat shield is sleeker, so much smoother boundaries as
as the boundary of the heat shield going to the
leeward side is very smooth, no more jagged tiles. I

(25:29):
think it looks very sleek. So and this version we
still have six engines, but a future version will have nine,
but with the raft of three again we have improved
reduced mass, higher specific impulse. It's this is the Starship

(25:55):
Version three is really the the vote that is I
think achieves all of the key elements. I mean generally
with any new technology, it takes three major, three major
iterations of any major of any new technology to have
it really, really really work well. And this with Raptor
three and Starship and Booster version three, it should be

(26:20):
able to achieve all of the things that I just mentioned,
which is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket with orbital refilling,
basically all of the ingredients necessary to make life multiplanetary
will be achieved with version three of Starship, which we're
aiming to launch for the first time at the end
of this year. Yeah, so you can see this is

(26:52):
kind of where things are on the left, where things
will be end of this year in the middle and
as I was saying, kind of with will be probably
long term, yeah, one hundred and forty two meters so,
but the one in the middle is will be fully
capable of doing Mars and thereafter will It'll be a

(27:17):
lot of performance improvements and as as has been the
case with the Falcon nine, we always end up making
the rocket longer and increasing payload. So that's that's that's
the game plan, pretty straightforward, but it's important to empa size.

(27:37):
Even with the rocket that will be launching just at
the end of this year, it will be capable of
making life multiplanetary, and thereafter it's it's just about continuing
to hone the efficiency and capability of the rocket and
reduce the cost per ton, and reduce the cost per
posting to Mars, and like I said, ultimately make its
that anyone who wants to move to Mars and help

(27:58):
build a new civilization can do so. So anyone out there, like,
how cool will that would that be? And even if
you don't want to do it, maybe that you have
a son or daughter who wants to do that, or
a friend who wants to do it, and I think
it would be the adventure that the best adventure that

(28:19):
it on it could possibly do is to go and
help build a new civilization on a new planet. So yeah,
ultimately we'll have forty two engines, which it was inevitable

(28:42):
as the prophecy foretold by the great prophet Douglas Adams
and his you know, book of the Hitchock's Guide to
the Galaxy, the answer to the Meaning of life is
forty two and so inevitably the starship stack will have

(29:02):
forty two engines. And in terms of payload to orbit,
what's remarkable is that it's two hundred tons of you know,
Starship will have two hundred tons paler to orbit with
full reusability. So this is twice the capability of the

(29:24):
Saturn five Moon rocket. Saturn five Moon rocket was fully expendable. Uh,
Starship is fully reusable. But we'll have twice the payload
to orbit of the next biggest rocket that made it
to orbit, which is a Saturn five. In fact, if
without reusability, Starship would have about four hundred tons of

(29:46):
palo to orbit. So this is a this is a
very big rocket, is what I'm saying. So, but you
need a big rocket, you know, the you know, make
life multiplanetary. And then along the way we could do
very cool things like have a moon base, like moon
based Alpha. Long ago there was a TV show about

(30:10):
moon based Alpha. You can't couldn't think about the physics
of that too much because apparently, like the moon base
was like drifting away from Earth. But anyway, we should
have a moon based alpha, which is the next step
after the Apollo program, would be to have a base
on the Moon, so you could like you could have
a like a gigantic you know, science station doing research

(30:35):
about the nature of the universe on the Moon. Would
be very cool. So in terms of like when can
you go to Mars, So you can go to Mars
every two years or every twenty six months. So the
next Mars opportunity is at the end of next year,
in about eighteen months, So November December is the next
Mars opportunity. So we'll try to make that opportunity. If

(30:57):
we get lucky. I think we'll probably have a fifty
to fifty chance right now, because we've got to we've
got to figure out orbital refilling in order to have
enough capability to go to Mars. But if we achieve
orbital refilling in time, then we will launch the first
uncrewed starship to Mars at the end of next year.

(31:17):
So this gives you an illustration of how does how
does the spaceship go from Earth to Mars. So you've
got blue Earth there and red Mars. And I mean

(31:44):
the the actual distance traveled on the arc is close
to it, like a thousand times further than the Moon.
So you can't just go straight to Mars. You have
to create this elliptical orbit with Earth at one point
and Mars at the other side at the far end
of the ellipse, and then time the time where you

(32:07):
are in that and that ellipse to intersect with Mars
and this so this is a the orbital transfer or
how you do orbital transfer from Earth to Mars. And
if you look on your starlink Wi Fi router, you'll
see this image because the starlink Wi Fi is what
is starling. Internet is what's being used to pay for

(32:30):
humanity getting to Mars. So I'd just like to thank
everyone out there who's bought Starlink because you're helping helping
secure the future of civilization and helping make life multiple
multiplanetary and helping make humanity a space baring civilization. Thank you.

(32:54):
So this is a tentative game plan here where we're
hoping to the hoping to achieve where we increase the
cadence of flights to Mars dramatically with every launch window.
So every every roughly two years, we are dramatically increasing

(33:15):
the number of of ships that go to Mars and
ultimately try to get to a thousand or two thousand ships.
Uh you know per Mars rendezvous. The the I mean
as a rough order manning two. There's just guesses obviously,

(33:36):
but we need to get about a thou about about
a million tons is my guess to the soaps of
Mars to make a civilization or Mars self sustaining against
that critical point where if the if the re supply
ship's most stopped coming for any reason, Mars still succeeds,
Mars can still grow. And so you can't be missing anything.

(33:56):
You can't be missing even like the equivalent of vitamin
C or anything. You've got to have everything you need
for Mars to grow. That's that's essential. So my guess
is that's about a million tons, but it might be
ten million tons. I hope it's not one hundred million tons.
That'd be a lot. But we want to try to
get to that point and secure the future of civilization

(34:16):
as quickly as possible, so we're looking at different locations.
The lead candidate right now is the Arcadia region. So
Mars has a lot of real estate. But when you
combine all of the factors and say, okay, we need
we can't be too close to the poles, we need

(34:38):
to be near ice for for to get to get water,
and can't be too mountainous for the rockets, then you
it narrows down to a smaller region. So Arcadia is uh,
it's one of my my daughter's the name is Arcadia
actually is one of the options. So we got the

(35:02):
first starships on Mars gather critical data. So the first
the first flights there we'll send with the Optimist robot
so we can go out there and explore and kind
of prepare the way for humans and that'll be a
very cool image if we're able to achieve it by
launching and the next year would actually technically arrive in
twenty twenty seven, but that would be an epic fixture

(35:27):
to see Optimists walking around on the surface of Mars.
And then with the launching two years later, we would
be sending humans. Seeing the first missions are successful and
they land successfully, would send humans on the next mission,
and we'll really start building the infrastructure for Mars. So anyway,

(35:53):
might maybe just to be safe and we might just
do two landing episodes with the Optimists and do the
third one with humans. We'll see that classic picture of
the workers on the Empire state. And then for communications

(36:15):
on Mars, we'll be using a motion of Starling to
provide Internet on Mars. Yeah, so the speed of light,

(36:35):
even moving up the speed of light, your best case
scenario is I guess Rik around three and a half
minutes to Mars and then worst cases twenty two minutes
or more. Because Mars is on the other side of
the Sun from Earth. So anyway, it's quite challenging to
do high bandwidth communications with Mars, but Starling will achieve that. Yeah,

(37:03):
and then we'll have the first humans laid the groundwork
for permanent presence on the surface. And yeah, the goal,
like I said, will be to make Mars self sustaining
as quickly as possible. It's just a sort of rough
idea of what things will be like for the first

(37:25):
city on Mars. My guess is we'll probably put the
launch pads a little further away or the landing pads
just in case. But ian four Mars, we're going to
need a lot of solar power, will be you know,
since you you can't really walk around on the surface

(37:45):
of Mars, at least as yet, until Mars is terror
formed to be like Earth, you need to walk around
worth a Marris suit and be you know, initially in
kind of like glass domes. But it would work and
eventually we can make Mars into an earth like planet.

(38:08):
We want to get to the point where we're transferring
over a million tons at every Mars transfer window, and
then that's like a serious civilization, a mega ton for
transfer window. So yeah, I have a lot of space ports,

(38:31):
I mean, because of the fact that you can't fly
there continuously and you have to transfer in these windows.
You'd have a gathering of a thousand ships or two
thousand ships or more than that. So we look to
have this kind of like Battlestar Glactica Fiel where all
these ships are in orbit, went need to depart and uh,
and then they all depart. I look at I think

(38:54):
an amazing image of all these ships departing at once.
And then you're gonna need obviously a lot of launch pads,
a lot of landing pads on Mars are you'll need
to move the ships off the landing pad pretty fast.
So if you get it, you've got to I don't know,
a few thousand ships inbound, probably need at least a

(39:15):
few hundred pads and landing pads. And anyway, we'll solve
that problem later. So yeah, anyway, this is this is
like an incredible thing to have, like this amazing city
on Mars, the first city on another planet and a

(39:44):
new world. And it's also an opportunity to, I think,
for the Martians to rethink how they want civilization to be,
so you can maybe rethink, like what kind of form
of government do you want, what new rules do you
want to have. There's a lot of freedom and opportunity

(40:06):
in Mars to do a recompile on civilization, which will
be up to the Martians. So all right, let's get
it done. Thank you everyone,