JUST RECORDED: Elon Musk Announces SPACEX Plans — Transcript

All right. Well, hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out, I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starling team. Figured we'd check in. It's been, you know, a typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle, acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terrorized chip building project. And so, yeah, never a dull moment. Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year.

terrorized chip building project. And so, yeah, never a dull moment. Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year.

And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multilanetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stat stuff.

Kind of start galaxy sized and bring people in with the Carterv scale. What's the big picture?

Kind of start galaxy sized and bring people in with the Kardashev scale. What's the big picture?

Um that's the most objective metric uh that any alien species say visiting us uh would calibrate how how much progress we've made um as a civilization. And one of the most subjective ways to do that is the amount of power that is any given

What's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale? Like how do you decide what progress the civilization has made?

you can have you can you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's uh type one. And then type two would be uh how much of the stars power are you harnessing? And then type three would be

Um, that's the most objective metric that any alien species, say visiting us, would calibrate how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most subjective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. Um, and there was a Russian physicist actually, I think by the name of Kardashev, who thought about this and it's, and I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's type one. And then type two would be how much of the star's power are you harnessing? And then type three would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing. These are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale.

Like if you say like what proportion of uh our planet's power uh are we harnessing? It's a very very tiny number. Um and uh and and basically we we're harnessing almost nothing of our stars power. So the the sun uh is truly

Like if you say, like, what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing? It's a very, very tiny number. And basically, we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. So the sun is truly an immense thing. It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is. But this gives you sort of a sense of scale.

Yeah. It's um it's it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.

Yeah. It's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.

Yeah. Exactly. AI will figure it out. I told one way to appreciate this the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system.

Very big difficulty jump.

Yes. Uh the entire mass of earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. We're we're like a earth is a tiny dust moat compared to the sun. But but how much energy are we talking like coming from the sun especially compared to what

Yes. And level three, and we don't even know how to do level three really. We'll get—

Um and and the vast majority of that we we cannot use because uh you know 70% of earth is water.

Yeah.

We're the we're the greenlands not green of the of the galley of the solar system.

Yeah. Exactly. AI will figure it out. I told one way to appreciate the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system.

people typically want to live and you're not going to get a lot of uh solar power in the at the poles.

So the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. It's everything. And then of the remaining one, you know, 0.14%, most of that is Jupiter, one planet. So we're still lightweight.

space. If you wanted to get to say a millionth of the power output of the sun, um you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million.

Yes. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. We're like a tiny dust mote compared to the sun. But how much energy are we talking, like coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth? It feels like—

Uh so so basically there's we're we're basically practically nowhere um on on the sort of the Kadeshv 2 scale.

Yeah, the incident solar energy on the cross-section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's power output.

Not even a micro soul. Yeah. We're No. And so to actually one micros would be an epic epic achievement relative to where we are right now.

And the vast majority of that we cannot use because, you know, 70% of Earth is water.

power harness being 1 millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a micros to actually start getting there though, we're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need.

Yeah. We should technically call our planet Water because it is 70% water. And I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they calling it Earth when it is mostly water?

notch a percentage point or two? I mean, getting to a percent of the sun's energy, maybe not a percent. Let's go. Like, we we'll move the decimal point back.

We're the Greenland, not green, of the galaxy of the solar system.

start to make some progress uh on the cottage scale, we need to uh launch satellites to to to orbit Earth uh and capture uh solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and uh deal with cooling cuz uh

Yeah. A bunch of it, exactly. Even though we're 70% water and of the 30% that's land, a bunch of it is Antarctica or Siberia type of thing. Very northern Canada type of thing. Very difficult, not places people typically want to live. And you're not going to get a lot of solar power at the poles.

cartes scale to I don't know be kind of like a respectable civilization. Um so when the aliens hopefully there are aliens out there and they uh maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have we have some respectable

So the actual usable area of land where you can get solar power is quite small anyway. In order to ascend the Kardashev scale, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to, say, a millionth of the power output of the sun, you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million.

And so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible.

So we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. And a trillion is a million times a million.

you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put a 100 gawatt or ultimately a terowatt into space from earth uh you need uh you you will at

So basically, we're practically nowhere on the Kardashev 2 scale.

lot of chips. All right. Well, let's start ticking down the list. So, NASA orbit, that's where Starship comes in. We just had first flight to V3 was awesome.

Practically nowhere. So on the Kardashev scale, we're all still, we're like not—we're not even—

Yeah, so Starship is going to it's going to revolutionize space really. It's um it's the first rocket design uh that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multilanetary uh

Yeah. We're so we're not registering.

solar system without a reusable rocket. Um the cost is simply prohibitive. You you can't you can't make enough rockets.

Not even a microscale.

expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes. You're doing a whole lot more driving.

Yeah. We're no. And so to actually reach one microscale would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.

Um, with rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. Um, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. Um, and there have been,

Something to aspire to.

perfect. The the engines, the structure, the avionics, um the choice of propellant uh you've got to you've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing

Yeah. Yeah. That's our goal. Like this is, I think, both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve power harness being one millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a microscale, to actually start getting there though, we're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need. Like you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that maybe now is the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two?

And then you you've got to achieve full reusability. Then you've also you got to go a step beyond that, which is um make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand, and can be

I mean, getting to a percent of the sun's energy, maybe not a percent. Let's go. Like, we'll move the decimal point back.

also happens to be the the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship B3 is more than double the thrust of it, the Saturn 5 moon rocket. Uh by version four, we'll be

You're an extremely kick-ass civilization if you get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilization is going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least.

One of the fun facts from flight 12 that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do. So yes, I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly. I mean we already fly

Yeah. So in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashev scale, we need to launch satellites to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth.

It's it's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So even with Falcon uh 9, Falcon Heavy, uh SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. Um I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. Um and

You can just radiate to the vacuum.

Um now with with Starship we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit. Um and to do so in a pretty short period of time. So we think

And so what we're proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the Kardashev scale to, I don't know, be kind of like a respectable civilization.

Starship Starship is going to take care of the master orbit limiting factor. Yes. And then power generation. So first and Ian maybe you can help.

So when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there, and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used.

of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.

Yeah. That's not like totally pathetic, which is the current situation.

Yeah. And it's some like mythical place where the the internet's in the cloud or something.

And so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so this is almost impossible.

it. Uh the more challenging part is figuring out how to get how do you get the power for it. Uh and and that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starwing technology, the solar arrays um

Yeah. What does it take to scale?

what is what is the actual engineering problem here? and and it's it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space as you mentioned.

Yeah. So things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us. That large mass. So you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put a 100 gigawatt or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, you need, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar. And then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips. So the three things you need are mass orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators, of course, and a lot of chips.

it's much more complicated than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is essentially a lot of uh solar cells, um a radiator, and uh you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the the super complex uh antennas that

All right. Well, let's start ticking down the list. So, NASA orbit, that's where Starship comes in. We just had the first flight to V3, was awesome.

Yeah, it's just a little bit bigger. Just bigger. Just make stuff bigger. Yeah. I was like, so we've got this is our AI1. If you guys want to walk us through.

I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch.

level. Um, but as we look at the workloads with with our experience with XAI, uh, we get to actually see the that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute. There's a difference.

Yeah. And like long time coming. What's kind of Starship's kind of purpose of being? What is it going to be doing?

is 150 kW peak power, 120 kW sustained power. And um and to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiators, size of the solar panels, um the assumptions

Yeah, so Starship is going to, it's going to revolutionize space really. It's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multilanetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot extend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft and you—

They're uh oriented knife edge to the sun and uh and and it's 1400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal.

Over time, we think we could probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1400 watts per square meter for the uh solar panels and radiators respectively. Um but this gives you like a a is pretty much what the satellite's

going to look like. It's uh a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small by comparison.

And these are like evolutions of of things that we have actually already launched in in in our Starling constellation to date.

Uh that's that's really I think the the cool part to me is that we're we're looking at solar technology that we already are are going to use on on the V3 uh Starlink vehicle. So, uh I I'm like really excited to then just take

those and make it bigger. Yeah. Part of what we want to convey here is that this there's not some um magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the AI satellites. Uh as Ian said, this is a lot of this is u

technology we've already made for the stalling B3 satellites. Uh so it's it's we we basically we don't think this is a a super hard problem compared to things we already do. Mhm.

Um there would also be probably something on the order of a terabit of connectivity of laser link connectivity from the uh from the satellite.

Um the 150 kW peak uh power level is roughly matches what say an Nvidia GB300 uh rack would do. So you've got a GV300 with 72 GPUs. Uh it peak power I think is around 140 kW. Um but it's rarely

it's it's almost impossible to get it to to be at that peak power. Um a more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120 20 kow average power. Um but but it can peak up to 150. So that's it's basically think of it as a a rack

of compute in space and then you can connect the these these racks of compute to uh either each other by the laser links um or directly to the stalling constellations. So you can close the link uh with the Starink constellation

and then Starlink can then um uh send that data to the ground uh using the existing KA and KU uh antennas on the on the vehicle. Um it also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So

uh and this this would not be at a particularly high latency you know we're talking about you know maybe being around 6 to 800 km above the earth uh and light travels 300 km per millisecond.

So that's uh it's about you know 3 milliseconds away basically. It's not not very far.

Won't worry about that too much though. It's sometimes people think there's going to be some like high latency. I'm like yeah it's no speed of light moves pretty fast.

Light moves pretty fast. A tall one. Yeah. Yeah. I think the cool thing also is the uh the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing uh solar race for the V3 vehicle. Um kind of kind of

in that that realm where we're flying today. Yeah. So, I mean they got they got about a 70 m wingspan. So these are fairly large. We're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there.

But you like to say like space is in the name like there's there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even, you know, up to a million satellites. Yeah.

You got plenty of room to move around up there. Yeah. Space is really big. So it's not like it's not like space is going to get crowded. Uh space is is enormous. Like if you zoom in close to the satellite,

it looks big. But if you actually look at it relative relative to the Earth, these satellites are so tiny you can you can't even see them. So they're they're very very tiny compared to Earth.

And I mean, we have 10 about 10,000 Starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now. Right.

We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. Uh it's it's a great thing that you know we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and and and fly them safely. That's that's a

a number one goal when when we look at the constellation. We're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop. Right. So we've we've got this which Yeah.

So we're in that building kind of in the middle which Yeah. We're sitting in that building right now. This is my first time here.

The building is massive. Like you you come around the corner, you see it through the trees and you're like, "Oh, wow." But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we?

Uh yes, we're going to in fact, we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already. And uh and then we will be building out the AIAT production building soon. Um and uh yeah so we expect to have the this theat

as production the solar production um and uh all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.

So if anybody wants to work on a AI satellites this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also so I mean like right behind us the machines are humming. We're still making all of our user terminals for Starlink here.

That's not going anywhere. In fact, we're turning on new production lines for new units, right?

Uh yes. Um in fact, these are the new Starlink terminals, uh which we made in much higher volume than than the current uh terminals. Um you know, ultimately we think there's probably going to be a few hundred million Starink terminals out

there. And then our the Starlink direct to cell constellation will um connect directly to people's cell phones and enable uh high bandwidth communication directly from your phone to space.

All right. We're we're two limiting factors down. We've got mass to orbit, got putting solar in the third one's chips.

Yes. Um so at least in the in the beginning, we can obviously launch the the chips that are already being made.

Um, so our current reference design is for Nvidia uh Reuben chips or could be either GB300 or or Reuben CHFS. Um, and uh we'll also have a reference design for TPUs and and essentially you can put up put any any

existing chips into into orbit. Um, but the the current industry uh seems to be uh it seems like it's going to I don't know get to maybe around 100 gawatt a year of of AI compute, but it that doesn't answer the question of

well, how do you get to a terowatt? That's why you need uh the terra app.

Always looking a step bigger. Yeah. Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, uh you need a gigantic ship factory. And to give you a sense of scale here, uh we expect that the terafab is going to be around 100

million square ft uh which is 10 times the size of the uh the Tesla Gigafactory Texas.

And what aside from just, you know, I'm going to need Starship point to point to get from one end to the other. Aside from just the size, what's going to make this unique, different from any other chip building operation on the planet?

Well, I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the Terra Fab, but fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there were no uh fundamental technology breakthroughs and and you simply you you could simply

scale uh the existing chipm technology u with a lot of difficulty uh to a terowatt of chip output per year. Um that's if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint that's uh that's equivalent that's like having a billion

chips per year with a a kilowatt per reticle. So it's a billion full radical equivalent chips uh each doing a kilowatt and then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that.

A lot of people today even think orbital data centers were like a decade away.

Yeah. I think we want to try to give people a sense of of the time frame uh we at least the time frame we're aiming for. I mean you know people should take this with a grain of salt to some degree

because this is this is just our best guess. So this is not a this is not a promise of what we'll do. This is what we what what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do um which is

to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space uh AI compute um and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in 2 and

1/2 years hitting an annualized rate of 10 gawatt a year to space in 3 and 1/2 years maybe 100 gawatt and then depending upon what progress uh there is in trip making in the rest of the world and with the terap fab uh going beyond

that to scale to a terowatt per year which is 1,000 gawatt which is that that's twice the the current electricity consumption of the United States.

I think there will be an appetite for that but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. So, I don't know what it's going to think about, but uh we need to do a lot of simulations or something.

Yeah. So, after we've, you know, broken through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to again try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming

Carter Chev level two? Why stop there? Stop. Why think small cuz a terowatt actually is very small.

Think small. Let's not think small. Um so there is in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1000x from a terowatt per year the the only way that we can really say see that you can achieve that is on

the moon with uh a mass driver essentially where you do local production of uh photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the moon. Um maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably uh make the chips on on the moon. Um and

but you you need most of the mass uh to be made on the moon. So you don't have to transport it to the moon from Earth.

And and then because the moon has no atmosphere and only 16th Earth's gravity, you can you can get you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So you can basically shoot them into space using um

an electromagnetic gun like a like a rail gun type. I mean just it's basically linear electric motor is a way to think about it.

I think we can show people Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. I mean, if that doesn't get you excited for the future, I don't really know what will.

I'm fired up to see to see a mass driver on the moon. That would be very cool.

Yeah. Sci-fi future. Yeah. Yeah. Um it would also mean that if we're if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the moon uh we'll be able to go to the moon and I think that would

be pretty cool. Yeah. I'm I'm going to be jumping first in line to get up there.

Yeah. I mean, you know, everyone should go to the moon at least once, I think.

I know. Just once. Yeah. You can move there if you want. You can go live on the moon.

We'll see. Thanks guys for chatting with me for a little bit. Like excited to see a whole new type, whole new kind of satellite, whole bunch more Starship launches, more chips, more solar, more more everything.

It's it's a big future, but I'm excited to see everybody at this company go out and build.

All right, sounds good. It's exciting. Great. Aces.