Welcome, Elon. Let's talk rockets. All right. Let's talk really big rockets, Okay. Let me take you guys back in time a little bit. 15 years ago, I think it was a week past, SpaceX successfully, on its fourth attempt, launched the Falcon One to space to orbit. And I think it carried, if I'm correct, 165 kilogram payload today you're up.
Go ahead. It was just a test payload on the 4th floor, so no actual satellite because the 1st 3 launches unfortunately have failed, though we didn't want to risk that was launched with with natural satellite, but we're very happy to have launched A Malaysian satellite on the 5th launch of Falcon One. Yeah, fantastic. So let me make the contrast today. You're preparing for the second launch of Starship, which has the ability to ability to launch up to up to 150 metric tons in a
reusable configuration. If I'm doing the math and you're better than this and me 900 times the capability, roughly a Falcon one and I get. A Falcon One looks like a child's toy by comparison. It's a it's a staggering achievement, what you've done in 15 years and all the team at SpaceX, I think we're all just in awe of how fast that progress has been made and to pioneer reusability for orbital launch systems is, I think, something to be tremendously proud of,
both for you and the team. There it stands, this vehicle now, I think something like almost 400 feet tall, roughly over 120 meters. It's a massive Starship spacecraft and super heavy rocket, itself collectively known as Starship, and it produces more thrust than the SLS system, the Saturn 5 and Rush's old N1 rocket.
Is that correct? Yes the the current version of this of the Starship produces just over twice the thrust of Saturn 5 and with the upgrades that have we have in the works it'll do about three times the the thrust. SO75 in in the sort of auditorial system would have been seven and a half million pounds of thrust. We're we're at about 16 right now and we with with future engine upgrades we'll take that to about £20 million of thrust. Amazing. Simply amazing.
So I know you guys have said you learned a lot from the April 17th from this first launch attempt. There's been some upgrades to the vehicle. I think it's it's a Booster 9 now that you're launching with Ship 25, is that correct, geeking out the numbers? Yeah, the kids that follow online. These numbers are are maybe a little. It's not quite the 21st, 1st booster, because what would happen is we would redesign the we would make a new design.
And then we'd actually scrap units that were in progress. So it's, it's 25. It sounds like we're both 25 years, but we haven't actually built 25 units. We're both probably about 12. So a lot and yeah, so so but the way you think we really is that this is, this is a flight 2 and has a number of upgrades on both the ship side and the booster side. We've done a lot more for with with engine isolation. Which is incredibly important.
We've tried to draw as many lessons as possible from the Soviet Anwan rockets, which was probably the closest in design to Starship. I believe it had 29 N K33 engines are called correctly and there was a very quite high thrust rockets and there unfortunately I think actually the rocket on on all things considered was was a great design. But I did not receive sufficient ground testing, so I never never made it to always.
But that would have been the sort of the closest probably parallel to to Starship. The the the really the biggest difference, the most fundamental difference of Starship is that it is designed to be fully reusable with both the booster and the ship or the both the first and second stage be are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. So that so. Well, a truly profound revolution in Master Olbridge. You have to have. I call it the Four. The Four R's reusable, reliable rockets. RRRRI.
Love it. You're pirated RR everybody give me an RR all. Right, So what does what does success look like for this flight? Number 2, what does success look like for you? What are you trying to achieve? Well I I do want to set expectations well not too high so there's there's there's a transmount new technology in this rocket we are we we have actually changed the entire stage separation system from something that was I don't know how to describe this but but
but. Kind of a a a just just a rotation and flip we're we're trying we're trying to move to a passive stage step system where you don't have pushers essentially in in the to try to eliminate parts. There's no pushes, no interest stage like Falcon Nine has and with, with with with Splite too. We're actually trying to do hot stage, so. So, so hot staging would would mean that we light the the ship or other stage engines while the boost engines are still partially thrusting.
So we throttle down and shut down most of the booster engines. Then we light the the ship engines and there's there's a bent area which looks comically small actually, which hopefully is not because you're you're you're essentially blasting the top of the booster with the
ship. Now this is actually from a physics standpoint the most efficient way to do stage separation and the Soviets I believe the Russians made extensive use of of hot staging and but but of course this is the first time we're doing it So I would say that's that's the riskiest part of the flight full flight 2 and if if, if the if the engines likes and the ship. Doesn't blow itself up during stage though then I think we've got a decent chance to reach the
orbit. Now technically it's it's a it's a scooch below orbit because it's it's going to do almost a complete Circuit of the Earth, but then bash down somewhere, somewhere in the Pacific, just off the coast of Hawaii, because the the ship is designed to reenter and has a has a heat shield. So we we we want to make Now we we don't know if this we think it will work, but we aren't sure
if it will work. So if it doesn't work, we want it to not work over the Pacific, which is a very large body of water with almost no people on it. Excellent target, Excellent target. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I always think it's funny if you people call Earth Earth, because Earth is water.
Earth is 70% water. And if you take a, a, a, you know the, the an actual round version of the Earth, not not a mercantile projection, but at the globe and you center it on the Pacific, it just looks like water. It's it's it's like, where's the land? So anyway, this this is quite helpful when you're doing experimental rocket flights. So how many more test flights are coming up, and when do you think you're going to try to
catch Starship on a tower? With the With that giant Mercazilla. Listen, I saw Congress's Gogzilla and dust got gave gave me the idea. In fact if we gave out to our legs it could just tromp around like like Mercazilla. But but we have we have a giant custom designed tower with massive mechanical arms that will literally try to catch the booster and catch the ship. Which it sounds insane. I mean, I'm going to see a scifi movie that does this, you know? But the theory actually work.
Is it work? Let's just say success is in a set of possible outcomes. I'm not sure what the probability is, but success is somewhere in that. Is success possible? Yes, I think it's possible. In terms of catching it, I think. Well, well for the for the ship side we we also want to make sure that it actually comes in at fully intact and and lands at a precise location in the Pacific before we try to catch it at at the lower side because we we we're taking every
proportion we can for that. We do not risk any any human lives or or destruction of property. So it'll be a few flights so so for the ship it'll be when we see the ship landing at a precise position. In the in the water, that's when we will try to catch the ship with our Mecazilla on the tower. The booster obviously the booster fights we've we've done many times on Falcon 9, so we're much more familiar and have retired confidence with Rooster
recovery. We we've actually had the booster boost back to land and and land at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base many times, albeit with landing legs, not with the Mecazilla arms. The booster I, I, I I think, I think that there's a decent chance depending on when our licenses are granted that we would catch the booster within the next year or maybe less than a year and and then hopefully get lucky. We might catch the ship towards the end of next year. And where does the catch take
place? Is it Willie Mays in the middle outfield over his shoulder, or is Florida somewhere? No, the, the, the both the booster and the ship come back to launch night. OK, fantastic. Yeah, that's. What I mean by the, the, the, this, this in fact. I mean the the thing that is this says we need a giant tower with customized arms to lift the the booster and the ship onto the launchpad. We're gonna absolutely need it. We can technically do it with
with. With humongous cranes on a low wind day, but that's it's quite unwieldy The the the the tower with the arms is capable of lifting the booster and the ship even on on on a on a very windy day. Oh moderately windy day. So then it just seems to me that, well if we can lift the the ship and the Brewster the the ship onto the onto the lower stand or the the booster onto the lower stand and the ship onto the booster.
With those same arms we should be able to catch the the booster ship with those same arms we've done pretty good with with with the thruster based land deal and in fact we can make this we can make the the rocket harbor in midair. In fact, we were able to do that many years ago. If you look at the old Falcon 9 test videos which we've called Grasshopper, where where we'd actually take Falcon 9 booster.
And we'd have it just go up and and hover at 100 meters and then translate over another 100 meters, then translate back and then come back and land. So we're able to do that really over a decade ago. It's it's not obviously very efficient. We're propellant to have a rocket hover, but it can't be done. So that was I was like OK, let's just have the rocket come back and you know hover briefly and have the like then the arms come together and catch it. So that's the best of German
ideas. Going back to what I'm saying, which it's not, it's not just reusability, it's rapid reusability and and it doesn't get more rapid then bring it back to the Lord site. And so in principle the the, the booster, it must come back very fast. By the way, where we know that booster is coming back to land or it's going to land fast because with the high thrust to weight that we're aiming for, which is sort of on the order of
1.3 to 1 quad core. The, the and and a staging ratio which is currently about 3:00 to 1:00 in favor of the booster. So propellant to the propellant on booster to propellant. Our ship has got three to one on on the current version but it's trending closer to 2 to one on with future versions. That means that we're we're shifting more and more of the Delta V burden to the ship side that that means the.
The booster actually uses up its repellent quite quickly and will will trend towards about a only about 100 seconds or so of a booster flight and the booster will immediately flip around, boost back to more site and land. And so it it it really we're talking about Booster being back at the lower site in about four or five minutes, which is pretty, pretty wild I think like 5 if you know. 5 minute booster basically it's back it's it's it's it's landed somehow.
Whether it's either crashed or it's landed on the it's from court by the islands one or two and within 5 minutes and so so so then you then lands back on more sand and you can then refill propellant the the the booster, there's a sharp side. Obviously it's going to take a minimum of an hour to map to get around the planet. Still going pretty fast but.
You got a circle of globe and and obviously that depends on what inclination and So what what your launch as with what your inclination of the Brewster as to whether it has a flight coming back over the launch site or not. If it's it's technically possible to just say a little bit depending upon your launch inclination, very good. So, Chris? Come back in an hour and a half. A ship? Ship. Sorry, ship could come back in about an hour and a half.
Any prediction on when you're gonna start deploying satellites with Starship? Yeah, I think we will start deploying. I think there's a good chance we start deploying stalling V3 satellites next year in roughly roughly a year from now because we.
We before we are confident that the ship like I said the the the the the hardest part about this or the part that will take the longest is the is is solving for ship safe ship reentry and landing and but but before we sold that we can launch the satellites because in any case with Belkin mine it's the the the upper stage is expandable so more.
You know it's it's actually fine to start watching satellites even before we saw for for ship reusability that that that is the hardest part of the equation. So but with Falcon 9 we've we've gotten pretty far with reusability the the the booster I think it's now highly unusual for the booster to not come back and land it's it's it's gotten quite normal for the booster to come back and land. We now have a couple of boosters that are have done 17, I think
18 flights at this point. And and and and then the fairing is also recovered. So the fairing reusability is also solid. But, but the Falcon 9 design does not allow for a reusability of the upper stage. So and and the Falcon 9 does it while reasonably rapid. If you especially you've got a a return to launch site landing still takes at least a few days to refurbish before you can fight again. And so with.
With with Starship, actually more profound than the size is the fact that it is fully it is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. The the reason for the absurd size is that we're trying to build something that is capable of of creating a permanent face on the moon and a city on Mars. That's that's why it is so large. Otherwise we could make it much smaller.
So I think the the diameter of Starship in inside the envelope is something like 9 meters and inside the the top envelope is about 1717 1/2 meters of usable volume. This is incredible amount of of space, right? Unheard of volume. What is that? What does that open up the possibilities? What, what kind of things can we we fit in that space and what does it mean for the industry as we look at, you know, maybe you can give me a how many whales or how many starlings can you stuff
in there? I don't I don't know what the right metric is, but give us a sense of size. Well, I mean like when you when you step into the the, the Starship bearing, payload volume, it looks like a cathedral. It looks absurd, frankly, it's like why this is ridiculously gigantic. That's what that was my first impression when I when I first went up there in a man lift and and and and climbed through the little hole. For the Starship initial rough prototype, I was like this. Like what?
What have we done? This thing is too thing is ridiculously big. Listen, so now this actually can
be great for science though. So one of the exciting projects that we're working with is with the sole full motor at Berkeley on A. A telescope or Space Telescope that is able to use the that that what you it's it's got an enormous lens I think it's perhaps A7 or 8 meter diameter lens and it it was actually a satellite that was meant for the OR a a the lens is meant for for a ground based satellite. But if you then take that same satellite and put it in in in
orbit. Its capabilities are greatly enhanced because you don't have the obfuscation of the of the atmosphere. So that that's why for example the the the Hubble which is actually a fairly small telescope can do better than I think any ground in any maybe any historical ground satellite especially in the visual spectrum. So. So we're very excited about the what we can do for space
science. Because really at this point especially for for any photons that where there's interference with the atmosphere so any any sort of short wavelength photons you really want your satellite to be in vacuum or your your telescope to be back. So that's really the future.
So I think there's a lot of exciting potential there for planetary for for space science and but but like I said the the, the really fundamentally the reason that's so, so gigantic is. Is that if if you're on a, you know, long Jay de Mars, I think being cooped up in a something the size of a minivan would would be unappealing to most
people. Just so comparison for the audience here, I think the Hubble telescope was something like 2.4 meter diameter, and so you're talking about I think three times the size somewhere along that order for the mirror. That's incredible. We've seen some changes down there in Texas at Starbase. I don't know if that's where you're you're you're streaming from here today, but there's a new factory that you're working on to enable a faster manufacturing rate. Can you talk to us a little bit
about that? What are you trying to what are your goals? What are you what are you trying to achieve with the with the new factory Yeah so we are building a giant factory for a giant rocket and I mean honestly it's I I recommend people visit Star base as it turns out it's it's on a state highway. So for the I think it's one of the rare situations where and I actually don't mind.
I think it's kind of cool that the that the public can actually drive within a literal stones throw away from the battery and the launch site and actually see the rocket first hand. And in fact if you go on the Internet right now including on the X platform, there are people who are live streaming at 24/7 the entire construction launchpad everything. And so. So it's it's the people say like well can I go see it. It's so easy to go see.
You can just literally fly to Brownsville and drive down drive to the beach and you can see it literally a stone's throw away the factory and the launch side. So anyone here wants to do that I recommend it. It's very, very easy.
No permission required. So yeah we're building this giant rocket factory we the engines are still manufactured in California at SpaceX headquarters in in in Los Angeles which is also that's it's also just an odd location that's where we built the the the Falcon 9 rockets and the Dragon spacecraft really about 5 minutes from LAX at the at sort of what used to be a Northrop headquarters I believe it's that's so you know that's but yeah we're willing the strand
factory. So The thing is so in order to if you look at the in the grand scheme of things say OK what is required to have a self-sustaining base on Mars or city on Mars. You have to really think of it in terms of very large tonnage the and and if we can even get the tonnage estimate to correct within an order of magnitude I
think we're doing well. So the you know, I think I think we we should probably aim for something like 1,000,000 tons of useful load delivered to the surface of Mars which requires roughly 5 million tons to Earth orbit. So you know if you get about 20 for whatever mass you get to Earth or would you get about 20% of that mass landed to the surface of Mars, you know you will take maybe you can get 25%
optimistically. So that's why this thing is so gigantic is we've got to get 5 million tons to the to to orbit, which hopefully gets about 1,000,000 tons to the surfs to Mars and hopefully 1,000,000 tons is enough to create a self-sustaining city on Mars. I'm incredible. So talking about Mars, any new predictions on when you I know this is your ultimate goal, your destination? Any predictions on when Starship might land on Mars without crew? Maybe a crude flight? Any any prediction there?
Well, I think three or four years. Four years. That would be something like, right? I have to check with the Earth, Mars, you know Earth, Mars. But you know get have overall synchronization about every 26 months so you can't just go you fly to Mars when it's on the other side of the sun from Earth that's the I will be so that roughly every 26 months the orbits are in the the right relative position and then you then you have the Mars transport window.
So I I think, but I think it's sort of feasible within the next four years to do an uncrewed test test landing that. Didn't have enough on your plate? You're doing a lunar Lander version, yes. Yeah. Well really Starship should be a generalized transport system to anywhere in the solar system. That's that's the intent with when you when you have propulsive landing you you you can land anywhere whether there's an atmosphere, no atmosphere. You know it's not really dependent on water.
You know see you know full crude capsules on on on Earth we've generally gone with parachutes and water or you know and it rushes on land but then they need retro rockets right at the end to sort of slow things down. So a propulsive system should generalize to be able to land anywhere on a solid surface anywhere on the the the in the solar system. So the the the moon while it's sort of dusty that that that the moon is actually harder that it's it's not just a big dust
pile. So it's it's parter than you think the the lunar regolith. So I'm I'm sort of optimistic that we can take a Starship that's fairly you know unmodified from what would land on earth or Mars obviously need legs but apart from that I suspect you could land the Starship with minor modifications on on the moon and and the same would go for once you have a propellant plant on Mars you could then go to the asteroid belt and and the moons of Jupiter. If you could establish A
propellant plant there then then you could go to the winds of Saturn and and ultimately all the way out into the caper belt and the OR cloud. So what you're talking about requires propellant transfer, obviously in orbit. Can you explain to everyone watching why that's necessary and how it works and and how you work to progress to to make that propellant transfer happen? Yes, so really propellant transfer is is a similar problem to just docking.
Now we've gotten pretty good at docking with the Dragon. Going to the space station and docking with the space station is really quite difficult because we didn't design the space station and the space station has a lot of complexities and has crew on board.
So what we have to be extremely careful and that the talk with the space station take is is like I would say it's far more difficult to talk with the space station that it would be stuck with our own spaceship and and so propellant transfer just really means that we we send a but a a Starship up there with with no payload and and it just transfers its propellant to a
ship that is already there. So you have to dock dock with the ship that is going to Mars or the moon and transfer the propellant from a version of the ship that has no cargo. Now there's there's there's there'll be a future sort of tanker optimized version of of Starship where where we, you know have we stretch the tanks and have little to no cargo space because that's the optimal thing for a tanker.
But you don't have to do that. That will increase the propellant load of the tanker or you have the propellant transferability of the of the of the tanker. But it's not. It's not absolutely necessary. You just you could in theory use an unmodified Starship and transfer propellant that way. So. I would imagine that you're doing this and you may have multiple launches in either rapid succession or maybe multiple pads launching multiple versions of the vehicle.
Is that all taking place from Texas? Then how quickly did those launches have to take place to
make this work? Yeah we'll we'll have a launch site in in Texas as well as in Florida though we're actually partially built a Starship launch pad at we had 39 A which is where we launched Falcon Heavy and our crude the crude Dragon. So we're partially built and we'll we'll we'll fully build that out over time and and probably have at some point a a Greenfield location for Starship at at the Cape. Now in the in the sort of you say like four or five year time frame where paths we're
launching several times a day then we may need to go to an ocean based like platform just if if you're launching I don't know 10 times a day that might be a bit much for even for even for the Cape I don't know. But so we may end up doing platform based launches from specially designed sort of ocean going platform but we we we will need to do a lot of launches.
We're talking about thousands of launches per year, so at at and and so you do get up to the sort of what I was talking about million tons or 5 million tons to orbit that if you've got you know 1000 launches a year each of which do over 100 tons, that's 100,000 tons of like a Congo, you know per year to orbit there's still not quite enough.
I think we'd want to get to roughly a million times over per per year to Earth or per year which would mean that you get to 1,000,000 tons to Mars in five years. These are very big numbers. Obviously they've just put things into perspective. All of Earth launch capability right now it apart from Falcon is about 400 tons to orbit per year. Falcon nine this year we'll do I
think around 50 or 1600 tons. So Falcon 9, you know this already doing about 80% of Earth mass to orbit and next year we expect to increase that by about 40 or 50% on the Falcon side. So, you know, maybe 2500 tons to over for Falcon next year, but these are still small numbers compared to what's required for essentially making life multiplanetary. Well, making life multiplanetary, you've got to be in this sort of hundreds of thousands to millions of tons of
goes over per year. Unbelievable numbers, really. Somebody worked in the launch business for several years. It's it's incredible for me to even try to think about that much mass to orbit in one year. It's that's crazy. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. Ludicrous mode, I think. Yeah, for launch very much. So yeah, it's either we do that or we're a single plant species forever. So we either achieved those kind of numbers or we will we will never have a self-sustaining city on Mars.
Into building this amazing launch system. You're also working on a Polaris mission for that's going to allow, I think, Dragon to open and have people actually floating in space doing an Eva. And you're building a space suit for that. So you can talk a little bit
about that space suit. And then can you use that same suit on the moon and Mars and for other missions, Yeah, so SpaceX spacesuit, we, we do expect to evolve that to be something that can be an Ava suit on the ground on the moon and Mars. And it's sort of initially as as really just a precious suit just in case there's an emergency emergency depressurization of the spacecraft.
So it's it's was basically like a self-contained life support system in in suit form and obviously we'll retain that capability but but but now for an upcoming flight we we want to do an Eva or extra. Yeah basically go float around in space still on a tether. So it's not, it's not going to be an independent little little space, little spacesuits that's just flying around. We could do that, but and maybe that'll happen on a future flight.
But it will be a tethered EBA, just you're just out there, floating in the void, connected by a thin cord to the spaceship. You put a Tesla in space. This was like an amazing thing to see a Tesla actually flying into space. So you've already put one of the vehicles in space. Are you thinking about making a Tesla Rover? Maybe Moon or Mars? Any any ideas for a cyber truck on the moon? It would look cool, that's true.
And I think the nice thing about electric cars is that obviously do not require oxygen to, they're not combustion cars, so they don't require, they don't have to ingest oxygen from the ambient atmosphere. So yeah, I think Tesla could easily make a car that, you know, like a cyber truck, lunar variant, we could just get the get the ruin off your package.
So yeah I mean the the reason that we launched the car the reason we launched the car was heavy I should say is it's settled but we want to have something was that exciting as a initial payload but but where the last of the wood would not
be catastrophic. So you will wonder what why if my what's my car orbiting Earth and Mars because it's it's in an elliptical orbit and and actually it almost touches it touches like the the asteroid belt and and goes past the orbit of Mars. It's just that we we were we weren't sure if the first flight of heavy would fail or not and reward to just have a pic that was more exciting than.
I thought it was brilliant, really a masterstroke in terms of getting attention of the world, really, to put that in orbit, Thanks. Can Starship be used as a space station? How long could it stay in orbit and what would be the purpose of that? How could that work? So how long could Starship be in orbit? Yeah. Could it be its own space station? If you wanted to put a Starship with the capability of laboratory, how long could that could it stay in orbit and still
come down? Oh, there's no real limits. You could stay in orbit for a very long time. The, the, the, the volume of the Sasha faring is roughly comparable to the volume of the of the International Space Station. So there's about about 1000 cubic meters of of volume in the in the ferry, I think. I think space station's A comparable amount. And would have the power to run a lot of laboratory experiments.
Sorry. Yeah. Given that is given that is some of volume to the space station, you you could do what what you're doing in the space station on a saw ship if you want. There's there's no limit to how long to stay up there. It's really just you you you need. Yeah, solar panels, battery, and some thrusters to maintain orbit. How about point to point transportation? I know when you were in Guadalajara at the IC you got you kind of hinted at a little
bit of the point point to point. Capability of transportation. I I can't remember the exact amount of time to get from one side of the world to the next, but can you talk about that? How do you see the the future point to point using using Starship? Yeah so the the fastest way with with known physics to get from one place to another on Earth is with a incontinental ballistic missile. This is This is why Icbs with nukes are kind of like the
ultimate weapon. Now in this case it's sort of lead the new AD landing, but it's it's it's certainly very feasible obviously if we can take off from trans and land on Mars or the moon we can take over land on Earth too. So, so it really comes down to a question of of is it economically viable compared to long distance aircraft.
And I think our our back the outlet numbers suggest that it actually has a shot at being economically viable for long distance transport on Earth for for a few reasons. The the propellant cost is actually quite low being liquid methane, liquid oxygen. The cost of liquid oxygen is primarily liquid productions, about 7778% liquid oxygen by by mass and roughly 22 or 23% liquid methane.
So the propellant cost is it's the lowest cost propellant you could possibly get on Earth and and then the the because the Rockets moving so fast you you can use it about in theory about 10 times more than you've used aircraft. So there's so, so Falcon 90, sorry, Starship can go from let's say Los Angeles to Sydney or something like that in 20 minutes basically maybe half an hour at most. So it whereas I think I think an airliner takes about 14 or 15
hours. So you've got something which is really much faster than an aircraft. And so for an airliner that you can do basically in order of magnitude more trips with Starship than you can with an airliner, which means that the and this and the no, no pilots are needed. In fact, you can't.
This is not only a computer can pilot this because human reaction time is not, that's not so then you don't have the pilot costs, you don't have the food costs, you don't have the you, you know, you don't really even need bathrooms if you can get there in half an hour. So it actually would work out that. It's it's actually we think lower cost than long distance aircraft. OK. You got a little chuckle here in the crowd about the no bathroom line.
So I think people are looking forward to it. Yeah, less than half an hour. You know, you say like go just go before you hop on, you know, and it'll be there fast. I mean you you could technically, you know, have, I don't know, breakfast in LA, lunch in London and you know, dinner in Singapore and then be back back in LA for bedtime.
So you're. Connecting now I think something like 2 million people with * lake right with your with your satellite communication system and growing rapidly, you're mastering communications from space to earth from low earth orbit. You're now doing inter satellite links with this system. What do you see for Starlink being used as a relay, let's say around the moon or for calm relay all the way to Mars and back? Well, for for Mars Mars you'd want basically like a laser
relay system. Essentially. It sort of depends on what you what what, what bandwidth are
you looking for. Obviously in order to have continuous coverage with Mars, you'd have to have some relay system because you can't transmit through the Sun. So in Mars you know when the Sun is between you and the and Mars you have to do a bank chart through a relay satellite so that your photons don't have to go through the Sun. So and then then it's just I will ultimately want you know, Terra bit, maybe petabit level data transfer between Earth and Mars. So then you're going to you
don't want probably some some relay satellites along the way to be able to do that. It says it's really, it's a bandwidth thing. You'd want to use lasers and then the the the laser beam is going to widen with distance so that then you need to be able to receive the laser beam before it gets too wide. This means that you need a series of satellites in order to with Mars at its first distance, especially with very high bandwidth.
Well you can obviously do low bandwidth with longer wavelength photons but but but if if there's a you know here in city on Mars you'd want to have very high bandwidth so therefore bunch of lasers and and satellites stalling already used this inter laser sport intrasatellite. So if I if I made just a couple more questions. Throughout this week here at the IC, we've been inspired. There's thousands of young people here.
I think 41% of our delegates are under the age of 35, which is incredible by by any space conference metric. We get a lot of young people here. There's delegates from the Space Generation Advisory Council, from the Future Space Leaders Foundation, from the YP program. Here at the I A F you have a message for these young people, the young engineers and scientists that are here. Many of them have been inspired by you. Anything you can say to them about?
Pursuing a career in space or what motivated you to do all the things that you're doing? Yeah, I mean I'm interested in that which both the civilization and I think we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so as to better understand the nature of the universe and even to ask understand which questions to ask. Like, you know, one of the most disfiring books I've ever read was the Hitchhikes guys of the Galaxy.
What we're in the they're they're trying to understand meaning of life in the, you know, Hitchhiker's Guide and the, I mean the larger message of the Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy is that you you actually need to know what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And we we don't yet know what questions to ask. So I'm just curious really, I'm just curious as to the nature of reality. Where does where, where does it all go to? Where does it go?
Where does it come from? Where are the aliens, for example? Are there aliens? Is it? Are we alone? People often ask me if I'm seeing any evidence of of aliens, and I unfortunately have seen no evidence of aliens yet. We are the aliens, so I can tell, and I think if anyone would know, it'll probably be me. And I've not seen any evidence of aliens.
So what? What that perhaps suggests is that this tiny candle of consciousness that is humanity is all that exists in a vast darkness, and we should do everything we can to ensure that the candle does not go out. Well, Ilan, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Good luck with your next launch. Thank you. Thanks. It was honor to be. Thank you everyone.