So what I was what I'm going to go through to tonight is the overall overall sort of path to making life multiplanetary.
So we're doing a lot of good things at space XI mean Starlink is incredible providing connectivity throughout the world and also you know paying for a lot of what we're doing here and Falcon 9 is the the primary lift launch vehicle for for earth just doing more non SpaceX launches than anything else And but Starship is what is well well Starship is Starship is the first design of a rocket that is actually capable of making life multi planetary where success is one of the
possible outcomes no rocket before this has had the potential to extend life to another planet and and I'll I'll sort of wax esoteric here for a minute because this this may sound sort of unusual but when you think about the question of where are the aliens which I get asked a lot this is like the Fermi paradox where are the aliens And I've not seen any evidence that there are aliens on earth A lot of people think there are aliens on earth and I'm like great I'd like to meet
one you know for a while there when I was getting my green card and everything it said alien registration card. I'm like, OK, but this this question of where the aliens, I think a very profound one, because I'm aware of no evidence of aliens whatsoever, which means that I think we're probably alone. And if you look at the history of Earth, like how long has Earth been around? If, assuming that physics is correct, the universe is about
13.8 billion years old. Earth is about four and a half billion years old. When you think about the how how old is civilization? I think the the right measuring point for civilization in my view or or a a good measuring point would be the advent of writing. So the first writing is generally considered to be the ancient Sumerians. Where are they now? They died out but the about 5500 years ago was archaic pre pre
cuneiform. In fact I suggest it's like an interesting rabbit hole to read about the history of writing. So if you consider say like OK, civilization, I think if you don't have writing you kind of need writing for civilization. So so there's only been around for like a little over 5000 years out of four and a half billion years that Earth has been around and the 13.8 billion years of the universe. So we're all of human. Civilization is basically the
blink of an eye. It's like a just a fraction. It's almost it's nothing. And I think that that probably means that that consciousness is incredibly rare and perhaps fleeting. It may not last for very long because otherwise we would have, I think we would have seen aliens, some kind of sign of aliens. I think the most likely explanation is that consciousness is is so rare that that you and and does that consciousness actually extend to another planet.
Does that consciousness extend to another star system? I mean ultimately if we're able to become a a space bearing civilization, a multi planet species and ultimately a a multi stellar species and go out there and explore all these star systems. I think we may find that there are many long dead one planet civilizations. We and as you've heard me say before we don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations.
I mean we want to be a multi planet civilization, ultimately be a multi stellar civil civilization, be out there among the stars, like you know make science fiction, not fiction forever can make Star Star Trek real. That's so that's why I think that there's there's there's a high urgency to making life multi planetary because this is the first time in Earth's 4 1/2 billion year history that it's been possible to extend life or consciousness beyond Earth.
And we've got to do that while civilization is still strong. So that's that's that's the overarching goal of the company is extend life sustainably to another planet. Mars is the only option really and to do so ideally before World War Three or some kind of bad thing. The the key thing is that we we need enough people and enough tonnage on Mars such that Mars can survive and continue
consciousness. Even if something would happen to Earth now I still think well obviously I'm not talking about abandoning Earth or anything like that and we want Earth to be as good as possible for as long as possible but there are certain things that may be outside of our control so. So we want to just get get to Mars to be a self-sustaining civilization as quickly as possible. And I I think this can be done in around 20 years.
So. And this, this, you know, giant Starship factory that we're building is obviously key to that. And the launch sites that we're building here and at and at the Cape and elsewhere in the future will be key to that. I mean, it looks like CGI. I mean it's hard to believe that that is unfiltered video. That's just the actual what the camera saw, no filters, no nothing. That's actually what the camera
saw, which is insane. So, you know, you're doing incredible work that I think almost no one thought would actually happen. So it's well that that this, this strange spot, this we're basically on a sand spit by the Rio Grande near the beach and that is actually the gateway to Mars has to be like if if this was a movie, you'd be like, no way, come on too, too implausible. But it's it's real and that's due to you guys. Congratulations, this is a side by side of the three flights.
You can see how thrust away it improved significantly. So we've we've made tremendous progress from Flight 1 to Flight 2 to Flight 3, and we got Flight 4 coming up in about a month or so. And with Flight 4 we should if we get you know if fate smiles upon us, we'll get through the high heating regime and smash into the ocean at a controlled spot and then to hopefully be able to also do this with the with the booster land on a essentially a virtual tower.
If if the landing on the virtual tower with the booster works then we will actually try with flight 5 to come back and land on the tower. No, that's very much a success oriented schedule but but it is in the realm of possibility. But I would say like the the odds of us actually being able to catch the the booster with the Mechazilla arms this year. I think I don't. I don't want to tempt fate,
knock on wood. But I think the odds of actually catching the booster with the tower probably like 80 or 90% this year, which is insane. Like, actually, when we first talked about it, it sounded so batshit crazy. We're going to have a giant. It's like literally bigger than Megazilla from this movie that you'd catch like the, like the the biggest flying object ever made with mechanical arms out of the air, then we're going to do it.
So yeah it may not work you know necessarily the first time but
it you know it will work. So really Starship is is really the key to making life multi planetary and preserving the lighter light of consciousness that's what it's all about and it it may end up being the most important thing that that we ever do. I think that you're you're like the light of consciousness is like this this tiny candle in a in a vast darkness and that candle has only been lit for a very short time and it could easily go out.
So we obviously want to preserve that that the tiny light of consciousness on Earth but extend it to Mars and then ultimately to the rest of the solar system and then start going to others other star systems.
And I mean I won't be allowed to see that but unless I'm like frozen or something like that But but I, you know I think at some point we will discover many civilizations that maybe lasted a million years or 2 million years or 10 million years but a civilization that lasted a million years which would be you know vastly longer than our civilization has lasted.
I mean that that's only the the 3rd decimal point so like 13.8 billion something something years if your if your civilization lasts a million years it's only goes that third digit pass the decimal point goes up one and that's a million years. So I mean I'd say like we should think like how do we make civilization last a million
years. You know, we often get caught up in like the day-to-day things, but we want them to have at least a million year civilization, if not 100 million year civilization or a billion year civilization. So absolutely crucial to that goal is becoming a multi planet species. People often people often ask why, Why Mars? Well there's not a lot of options frankly. So Venus is a super heated high
pressure acid bath. So not, not what you don't don't want to go to Venus, but and then the moon is close, but it it it doesn't have an atmosphere, the gravity is only one sixth out of Earth and it's missing a lot of key resources. So also the the the the insulating value of the moon relative to Mars is much less. So if there's something that takes out of like let's say there's a World War three global thermonuclear warfare, they'll probably throw a few nukes at at
the moon. So whereas it's way harder to to to shoot Mars with with in which Mars would see it coming and probably have some time to stop the inbound missiles. So that the the the the value of Mars the the the difficult or the distance and time required to get to Mars actually has an insulating benefit to the for the continuation of
consciousness. Even if there's something terrible happens on Earth. And and then once we go beyond Mars there's there's some asteroids like Cerus, some of the moons of Jupiter Starship would ultimately be capable of of reaching anywhere in the solar system and then we'll need something a new level of technology to go to other star systems. But if we can't at least get to Mars then other star systems are hopeless.
I mean it's a fixer upper of a planet, OK, needs some work, but it is it's it's really the only option for becoming multiplanetary and long term. We can warm up Mars and we can there. There would be, we can densify the atmosphere and there'd be a liquid ocean on about 40% of the surface, so we could make it an Earth like planet long term.
So let's see we've we've we've learned a tremendous amount from when we started the company and and at first could we're unable to get even a small rocket to orbit to now where we've done three 327 successful launches almost 300 landings in fact you know give it a few weeks and we'll have done 3300 landings, 2 161 reflights. So many times I was told that that reusability was was impossible and even if you did it there would there would be no point because nobody would want
to fly rockets that much. But now we routinely fly and land the booster and we recover the fairing. So we've learnt A tremendous amount from the Falcon program that is then feeding into the Starship program and Falcon and Starlink are what obviously keep keep the company going. So I just like to give a hand to the the Falcon team for the incredible work that they're doing.
And then Dragon Wow 45 launches of Dragon it's amazing and we've flown flown 50 crew members to orbit 46 to the space station and everyone has come home safely which is the most important thing. So you know incredible work by the Dragon team. So skim a hand that was couldn't ask for a better outcome. And Starlink actually if you look at the sort of the the plot of the all the satellites going around Earth, this look kind of scary actually.
But there's there's 6000 satellites in operation, over 6010 thousand lasers, almost 3 million customers. So Starlink is doing a lot of good for people, for people on Earth who don't either don't have Internet access or it's very expensive. And so it's doing doing a lot of good you know on Earth. Because when I say we want to be a multi planet species I'm you know we obviously want Earth to be as good as possible and Mars to be to be great.
So Starlink is is doing a tremendous amount of of that and we're learning a lot by having this big fleet. Starlink will also be very important for high bandwidth communication to and on Mars. So from a from a tiny rocket to Falcon 9 which is a much bigger rocket, many iterations of Falcon Nine and then Falcon Heavy and then Starship and
Starship will get bigger. Obviously, you know this, this year if if things go according to plan, SpaceX will do probably 90% of all Earth mass to orbit, and then China will do about 6% and the rest of the world will do about 4%, which is pretty wild. And then once Starship is flying, we'll be doing over 99% of all Earth mass to orbit, which you kind of have to do in order to build a city on Mars. And I should say we'll also build a a a lunar base as well.
So it might as well along the way. So you can see that actually Falcon One was really, yeah, half a ton to orbit welling grief, slight error on the slide there. So Falcon One was about half a ton to orbit. Falcon 9, depending on in expendable mode, I would do probably 25 tons to orbit. And yeah, Falcon Heavy probably 70.
Anyway, these these are just obviously rapidly increasing numbers and Starship in its final configuration or its final form will probably do well over 200 tons to orbit with full reusability and be able to fly, you know, multiple times a day. So. So I'm pretty confident we will achieve that this year like I said probably 8090% this year and and then there's recovering and reusing the ship, the ship
will take longer. So the ship I think we will want to have at least two consecutive successes of a given design that's land at a specific point in the ocean or smashed into a specific point in the ocean before we try to bring it back to the launch site because we do, we do not want to rain debris over Mexico or the US. So my guess is probably next year is when we will be able to reuse Starship.
But I think it's it's I think it's highly likely that this year we will bring Starship to or the ship, the ship side of it to a controlled point in the ocean and have it basically land on a virtual virtual tower in somewhere in the in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. And we've already proven that we can do the final phase of landing. So coming from sort of a belly first position to rotating the ship and landing vertically we proved that right here.
So what we just really we just need to be confident that we can get through the high heating portion of the of of RE entry. Reliably and then we'll bring the ship back and it will land on the tower as well. And we're going to build more mekazillas. So there's going to be two launch towers here and and I think and then two launch towers at the Cape as well. So we'll have four launch towers for 4 Starship probably you know by sometime next year.
So we're aiming to have the first Cape launch tower and launch system operational around the middle of next year and that'll be important for launch Azimuths that are sort of fly
over land. So I think what what we should probably expect is that we, we do the kind of the development launches here, test anything new here, build the, build the Rockets and then play most of the operational launches would be from the Cape. So this year, we're planning to build another roughly 6 boosters and ships and and that production rate will increase a lot next year. That's why we're building the the giant factory.
Ultimately, we'll need to build a lot more ships than boosters, especially for Mars, because it's the you'll actually want to use the ship. Take apart the ship and use it for raw materials on Mars, because the ship materials will be so valuable you most of the ships you wouldn't want to bring back, you'd want to just use them for raw materials.
Eventually we will want to bring ships back and I think we want to give people the option of coming back because they're more likely to want to go if there's some option of coming back. But I think most of most of the people that go to Mars will probably never come back to Earth. So and we'll need to ramp production to pretty high numbers like I think ultimately probably a ship every like multiple ships per day basically. And then next year we're aiming to demonstrate ship to ship
propellant transfer. It's it's hard to make this not look a little bit naughty because it's two ships connecting and doing a fluid transfer just what it is.
But it is this is actually a very important this is a very important step on going to Mars because you need to put to get the ship to orbit and then do orbital refilling kind of like aerial refuelling and and that's that's really you'll need about about 5 or 6 refilling missions for everyone mission that goes to Mars. So roughly 5 to 1. So and and this will also be very important for the Artemis program for the to to get back to the moon.
So we want to have a ship that is, well, it's going to be a specialized ship for the moon like this. So the moon obviously there's no Mechazola, so we need landing legs and you don't need a heat shield and you don't need flaps because there's no atmosphere. So the moon ship would be specialized and now ultimately I think we we want to build a moon base, moon base alpha and have a permanently occupied base on the moon like that would be super exciting.
And so you'd have a bunch of ships that are specialised for going to and from the moon, but they never come back to, they never land back on Earth. They just would would dock with propellant, propellant tankers to get overload refilling. So in terms of performance, we've made dramatic progress on on every level for Starship. It's remarkable that we can see the Raptor engines and how how it, how it has evolved from you know optimistically 185 tons to 280.
And I think ultimately we'll probably the booster engines will will aim to get the booster engines over 330 tonnes of thrust which would mean 10,000 tonnes of total thrust at lift off. So and then the Raptor 3 also
will not need a heat shield. So Raptor 3 looks looks very simple and it is actually simplified in a lot of ways, but a lot of the complexity is hidden because we have integral cooling channels in in many parts of the engine that that don't exist in Raptor 2. So in order to not have a heat shield it has to be very resilient, but that it is actually what Raptor 3 would look like.
Looks like Raptor 3 looks like it's missing a bunch of parts, but actually those parts have either been deleted or they've been integrated into the system and like I said with integral cooling channels and where where you need secondary plumbing, the secondary plumbing has also been integrated into the pump and into the the chamber jacket. And yeah, so it's much simpler.
Well it's it's it's yeah it's actually extremely difficult to build Raptor 3 but but it will be easy to integrate and will have higher performance and lower total mass and be more reliable. So
well that can go on for a while. So I I find it interesting to look at the if you look at the the flame tail on Starship and how long it is, it's a it's a very long flame tail which is due to the fact that the the the chamber pressure well it's it's just outputting a lot more yeah a lot more gas at a higher velocity. But I think the flame tail is
like maybe 1000 feet long. It's like more than twice the length of the rocket and that will actually get as as we increase the thrust that will get longer. So yeah and inevitably the rocket grows in height. So Starship 2 we're aiming for like I currently flight 3 would be around 40 or 50 tons to orbit. So the current design, Starship 2 will be over 100 tons and then Starship 3 will be over 200 tons. And yeah, it's going from around 7000 tons thrust to over 8000.
But I I think we'll we'll we'll end up ultimately with more than three, more than 10,000 tons of thrust, probably 7 or 8000 tons of lift off mass and at least 10 meters taller. We'll see. Tends to grow, Yeah, exactly. So it probably grows a bit more than that, even really. So if you look at Falcon Nine, it's we're not going to do the length to diameter of Falcon Nine. That would be crazy. But Falcon 9 is a very long rocket, and so I suspect it'll probably get a bit longer than
this. But at 200 tons per flight, fully reusable, that is, that is pretty incredible. And yeah, this will be on the order of 500 feet tall. And then we're this, this, there's thousands of design improvements here. So I mean, I think maybe the most, one of the most profound things is Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon one. So that's the difference between if you've got a fully reusable rocket or an expendable rocket.
The fully reusable rocket with low cost propellant and autogenous pressurization actually costs less than a a tiny expendable rocket. So and it'll do like I said, Falcon one is about half a ton to orbit. The Starship 3 will be 400 times more payload for less than the cost of a Falcon one. Ultimately, I think we might be able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around
$2,000,000 or $3,000,000. So these are sort of unthinkable numbers from the, you know, nobody ever thought this was possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this. So this is within the without breaking physics, we can do this. So the Mars missions are two years apart or 26 months. And if you look closely at the Starlink router, you see the the home and transfer from Earth
orbit to Mars orbit. And that's basically to say to people, the Starlink system that you're buying is helping get humanity to Mars. I think it's pretty cool. So roughly every two years, thousands of ships would depart from Earth to Mars. It would look like Battlestar Galactica, but in a good way, you know, hopefully without being chased by the Cylons. But it would be an incredible thing to see these thousands of ships departing every every 26
months. For Mars. What this diagram is basically saying is that for getting to Mars, we would essentially create a kind of a propellant depot ship. The propellant depot would look more like a hot dog than like a spear, surely just makes a long ship with a lot of insulation, and we'd pull that ship up and then shortly before or as as they're going to Mars, the ships would take off with, I don't know, a couple 100 tons of payload from Earth reach orbit with very almost no propellant.
And then get refilled by the tanker and then go to Mars and and land go all the way to Mars with over 200 tonnes of useful payload. Then on Mars at in the beginning we would I think we would simply reuse the ship materials so most of the ships wouldn't come back but then over time you'd want to bring the ships back so you could reuse them and and for that we would need to create methane chapter 4 and oxygen O2 on Mars which you can do with H2O and CO2.
So the atmosphere is CO2 and there's plenty of water ice H2O and so it's it's kind of like tailor made for well actually the reason we have methane oxygen system is because you can make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily. Like not just not a total walk in the park but the ingredients are readily available to create methane and oxygen on Mars.
So so you build a propellant depot and and bring the ships back and build out as quickly as possible a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. And we want to get the we want to get the cost of going to Mars such that almost anyone could afford it. So like if somebody were to just work hard on Earth save up and that they'd be able to go to Mars. So it's like anyone ideally almost anyone could go to Mars and I think you'll see a lot of
governments also sponsor people and ultimately we'll we'll want to get. So there's kind of an optimal landing zone on Mars where you have resources so you've got access to water or frozen water that you're not too close to the poles so you can use solar power. It would it would be nice to use nuclear. I don't know if we'll get get the approval, but nuclear would be very handy on Mars because you can use the heat and you can
generate electricity. So and then you kind of want to be about two kilometers below sea level. So if Mars did have an ocean, you'd actually be quite deep in the ocean at least at 1st. And yeah, so let's see, that's Mars kind of kind of want to land about halfway between the the pole and the equator in a kind of a deep area of Mars. If if you the deeper it is, the more you can use the atmosphere to break and the atmospheric density is higher.
So these are all the things that would have to be developed. So as people ask me, are we developing these things? I'm like not yet because this is the cart and we need the horse first, so the rocket is the horse and then this is the cart. But ultimately we'll need all these things, lesser power generation, mining in general, ice mining, propellant production, long duration life support construct, a lot of construction and and the global communication.
So I think this would open up a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs that want to create any create things on Mars, whether that is a propellant. Well, I think we'll have to do the propellant depot. But whether it's like iron ore refining or a pizza joint or a bar, you know, there'll be an opportunity to do all the things that we like on Earth, on Mars, like a Mars bar would be, yeah,
great. So I think I think probably the a rough order of magnitude guess for what you need, how many people do you need for a self-sustaining city is about a million and several million tonnes of of cargo. So yeah, which we can do and we can do this in 20 years. But like I said, in order for it to be self-sustaining, you actually need the entire base of industry. You can't be missing any element.
So that's that's really what's going to take take a while is do you have everything you need to survive on Mars At that point the future of consciousness is assured. So if you do 10 launches a day at 200 tons per launch, million and a half tons to Leo per opportunity, you you net that out to a quarter million tons to Mars per opportunity. So that means you can get to 1,000,000 tons in about 8 years since the opportunities of two years apart.
So I think it's pretty doable. And I'm like, we're actually going to do this, Are we? You know, we are actually going to do it, which is insane to think so. Millions of tons to Mars. Yeah, Wild. And we're going to build a lot of vehicles. So yeah, several thousand vehicles per year is what we'll need, which really quite, quite doable actually. It sounds like a lot, but it's very doable. Yeah. If you compare it to sort of car production, it's a small number. Of course this is much bigger
than a car. But even if you look at the total tonnage, the it's still very, it's very doable to both several thousand vehicles a year. So that's what we need to do and we're going to do it. And then long term, we'll probably have some offshore launch sites. They can just imagine all of these starships waiting in orbit for the planets to align and then this gigantic Starfleet taking off from Mars. All right, So we're actually going to do this.
And when you think about where this started out, this was literally just a like a, a sandbar where we're standing right now. And now look at what we've done here and that we've gotten three flights off of Starship and we've got a 4th, 4th 1 coming up and we're building a gigantic factory that will be able to output a massive number of ships. So. It's surreal, but it but it's real. So we're actually going to do this. We're going to take humanity to Mars and I'm confident you can do it.