Okay, sure, So it's quick up on Tesla. You have to unute program for people hold on oneside.
Oh yeah, yeah. So I'm sure people have been reading about the order alone, bailouts and all that sort of stuff. So it's it's kind of a travesty at what's going on, although I hope I don't think it's gonna last too long. Into the Obama administration, there was a twenty five billion dollar loan program that Congress approved to find energy development of energy efficient vehicle, essentially the wean ourselves of oil.
And ironically, the Big Three then came to Washington and said, now give us that money for our day to day operations building gas guzzlers, which is is obviously a sort of a version of the intent. And unfortunately, with the job situation being being the way it is, Congress has acceded to that demand and it is understanding currently giving fifteen of the twenty five billion to the Big Three to fund their data operations, which I.
Believe gets them to about February. I love kidding. There's not even an exaggeration.
Although the Speaker a Speaker Pelosi has also said that as soon as the new administration comes in they're going to replenish that fund, so I think it'll be I think it'll be okay.
But certainly, if you have the opportunity to express to.
Anyone in DC or in the press the importance of developing clean energy vehicles, please take the opportunity to do so.
In the case of Tesla, if.
Tesla actually is not applying for any bailout funds, although some of the press have mistaken that, what Tesla's done is applied for funding to develop lower cost mass market vehicles, and essentially the exact intent of the legislation, and.
So hopefully this will some money left over to actually do that after the Big three have taken what the what what they will take?
Uh so uh And and the Tesla Roadster, I think a lot of people are familiar with that.
That's the two seater sports car.
In fact, my my car, which is production unit one, is parked outside if anyone's curious.
To see it. There's uh there's also Tesla.
Sales and service center on Santa Monica Boulevard, so if you want to pop in and take a look at the card at that time, we also welcome do so. And we're about to deliver our hundredth production Tesla next week. And that's interestingly enough, our hundredth customer is Sam Perry.
If if if anybody.
Watched the the when Obama won and an Oprah was crying on some guy's shoulder, that same guy's hundred customers.
So it's good.
Like Zelig, I mean, he's sort of everywhere. So anyway, he's a really great guy and lives in the area. It's going to take a little bit of his car on Tuesday, so I'm going to hand him the keys
personally and think of being a customer. So and you know, there's an important point about Tesla, which is, whenever somebody buys the Tesla Roadster, even though it's a one hundred thousand dollars one hundred nine thousand dollars sports car and it's kind of a fancy sports car, every pointy that Tesla makes goes into development of lower cost mass mark vehicles.
So the company doesn't.
Issue any dividends, nor will it ever know my stalary's minimum wage, you know.
So I'm a volunteer.
Basically, So and then you know, it's it's like it's just an important point because sometimes people think, well, gee, what's the point of making these these expensive cars, which are sort of toys for rich people, hows that really helping the environment.
The important point to bear in mind is that when.
You have new technology, it takes time to optimize that technology. If you think back to the early days of cell phones or laptops or pretty much anything new, it's expensive in the early days because the first job with a new technology is you've got to make it work, and you make it small volume you sell those cars. But if you the critical point is that you can't get to the low cost cars unless you start with the expensive cars. And and that's that's the point that sometimes lies. Anyway,
that's enough on Tesla. I'll jump into the space stuff and I'll kick it off with our last flight video.
Fuel turned out actually are set.
To trigger system. So this is actually on a remote trop of the island. We launched a small rocket, the Falcon one from an island in the quadronin anshole. So so it feels a bit of nefarious to be launching rockets for a moretrochoical islands. Yeah, I feel a bit like a brine villain in this case. It's basically just a dummy satellite. So if this is basically.
A test flight to get to orbits. So this is actually our fourth flights. The flights two or three made it to space, but they didn't make rule a way to orbit. And it's actually a lot harder to get
to orbit than it is to get to space. You can get to space just by getting going up to mark three, but to get to orbit you get to get you have to have a minimum of mark twenty five, and that doesn't actually explain the full difficulty because the energy scales with the square of the last seas, So getting space nine inntes of energy, getting to orbit six
hundred and twenty five minutes of energy. It's about seventy times harder to get to orbit than to get to space, and that's why there's only been about half a dozen countries in the world that have actually reached aubit. So this is actually the first completely privately developed rocket uh to to reach orbit and also the first amen privately about liquid fuel rocky disorders. This is it's named This is the Falcon one. It's named Falcon after the Millennium Falcons.
From Star Wars. Looks nothing like it, but.
So the music in the background is a high roller from the crystal method.
Actually with with with rockets. Uh. The only semi reuseful rocket in.
The world right now is the Space Shuttle, and they say sam reusul because the main tank is actually.
Thrown away every time, so it's typically we're really almost in all cases rockets are not recovered.
They basically re enter and kind of either burn up or crash into the ocean and think to the bottom.
Typically now a.
Falcon one, our intent is to recover the first stage, which unfortunately we weren't able to do it this flight. The clametry coming down showed that that the it didn't have enough normal protection, so it actually ended.
Up burning up. We need to increase the thermal protection. Got Uh. The field is is a high purity kerosene, so it's.
Like sort of a very clean form of jet fuel basically with no sult of content dry. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but we do buy lots of carbon ox sets, so.
It's a nine degresional that too.
Yeah, exactly, we're making use of thest rotation to help with the insert simplacity.
Could you actually go out wouldn't it be easier to go into space?
And well, the only way to go up and stay up is to reach orb it. The the gravity is actually almost the same force at say two hundred.
Miles above the surface as it is on the on the surface of the Earth.
The only reason people seem to be sort of floating around, but actually what's happening is they're zooming around the Earth super fast. And the said the outward acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity, and so when that's neutralized, you have what appears to be zero gravity, but you're actally just sort.
Of falling around the Earth.
Do you want We've not encountered any any space junk issue that it's although there's been a lot of launchers up there and been issues like the where the Chinese blood for satellite and scattered bits all over the place.
It's so big up there that the statistical chance of being hit is tiny.
But but for things which are which carry people, like the space station and our Dragon spacecraft.
Uh, they actually have my Cromeinia rights shields so they can take a high impact which essentially a.
High speed bullet coming at its picture.
Ah, the bigger picture. Very good question.
So the reason I started SpaceX was because the cost and reliability of getting to getting to orbits and beyond.
Has not really improved since the sixties. In fact, it's Scottland worse so.
And if you look at the trajectory over time, it's not an improving trajectory if you would extrapolate that the cast trajectory, and Steve could tell could affirm that if if you would extrapolate to the future, you would basically be able to afford no launchers at some point.
Because it's just it's actually was getting more and more expensive.
So I started SpaceX to really reverse that trend and make it affordable to get to orbit and beyond. The huge breakthrough that space aspires to achieve, and this is a very difficult thing, is to make a fully reusable.
Orbital launch vehicle. So with Falcon one, the first stage is intended to be re usable. With Falcon nine, both stages are intended to be reusable.
Now it's going to take us many launches to figure that out and get the stages back safely and optimize the refurbishment for flight and make sure they're reliable and what. But that's that's the that's sort of the big tech technical breakthrough wereing for and you can imagine in any mode of transport, if you had a reusable vehicle or expendable vehicle, it would be a night and day difference.
I mean, how many people would have driven here if the car was single use or or even And that applies to any mode of transport, bicycles, horses, planes, you know, really pretty much anything.
So we've got this weird.
Situation in space where vehicles can only be used once. In fact, you want to return journey, you've got like tow one behind you. So that's what we're aspiring to it. It's a tough goal. We're not saying we can achieve it, but we're aspiring to achieve.
That, and I think we will. But to explain why that's so difficult.
When an orbital rocket is after they've really optimized the weight of the rocket and use the most advanced materials and the engines are incredibly efficient, and you've pushed everything to the maximum, you typically get about three percent of the lift off weight to orbit. So if you make even a small mistake in the design, you know, if you get three percent off your you know you got nothing.
So and that's for expandable single use rockets, where they're not trying to make the rocket robust enough to have multiple flight. They're not trying to make it robust enough to re enter safely. It doesn't have to have heat shields and all that lot of stuff. So when you add in all those things, if that exceeds three percent, well you're getting nothing toward it.
So uh So to make it.
Reusable and still deliver it a useful payload is extraordinarily difficult, and and no one has ever succeeded in doing that, right, So I'm getting I'll get So the why Essentially.
I should? I should? I Actually, you're right, I should perceive this with the Y and then and then the how.
No.
So, yeah, technics, for granted, being in a space business. But so I'm a huge believer in the extension of life beyond Earth.
So making life multiplanetary, I think, is one of the most important things we could do.
So then why why is that important? Well?
How do you how do you say that anything is important? How do you judge importance? Well, if you look at things on an historical time scale, and the further you zoom out more, the important stuff stays behind, and the unimportant stuff you can't see it anymore.
And if you look at the the span of life's evolution on Earth, you know, the multi billion.
Year history of Earth itself, of life on Earth itself, you can really point to about half a dozen major steps on the evolution of life. There's obviously single cell life, multicellular life, differentiation to plants and animals, life moving from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness.
You know, those are sort of like the big ones, and that's why we're here talking.
And on that scale also would fit I think the extension of life to multiple planets. So life becoming multiplanetary, it would be at least is important, if not more important than life going from the oceans to lands, oceans to land.
You could jump back to the ocean if forgot uncomfortable.
But going to another planet you've got to go over, you know, billions of miles of hostile space and then land and try to create an ecology on a planet that is nothing like the planet that we live on today, or if my current planet may become more like that planet if not careful, But you know that's so if you have something which arguably I could fit on the important scale of the evolution of life, itself, then it's reason. We'll say it's important and should get some of our resources.
And I think, say, well, what is some of our resources? Well, probably, like you know, less than what we spend on medicare and more than what we spend on lifstick. You know, you can sort of bracket it. So we spent a lot of lipstick quo, which I.
Think is great.
But if you said, well, maybe we should spend a quarter of a percent of our of our economic product on the extension of life to another planet, making my fault planetary, and that would be like a reasonable number, and you know that's uh, you know, several tanza billions. So I don't think it could be done for that. And but a critical element is making having that reusable orbital craft. So that's the that's the fundamental breakthrough is necessary.
First bill to afford to do it at a price that is going to be palatable to the general public.
Planetary and think about the kind of fuels used. Probably it looks so ideas about well my wild's idea about feels.
I think long term, you know, once we well, if we I suppose figure out fusion, you're having a fusion.
If you can have a compact fusion reactor and that that would be the best energy source.
And then you need to sort of shoot something out of the back end, uh, you know, which could just basically a high energy ion engine powered by a fusion reactor. That's like, that's pretty much about as good as're gonna get. I mean, theoretically from a physics standpoint, sorry a gravity saying, maybe a solar sale. Yeah, solar sale is an option. But now the sun doesn't have a lot of force because if you stand outside, you don't feel yourself getting knocked down by the Sun.
But but so you need a big sale in space and it can and it can work, and it's an option.
And particularly, you know, if you had, like to say, a cargo ship going from Earth to Mars, where the time of the journey wasn't that big of a deal, then that could be actually a good option.