It's always important to explain the why of things, and the way of Starship is that we want to be a multiplanet species, to extend consciousness beyond Earth.
I think for two main reasons.
One is to ensure the long term survival and prosperity of life as we know it in consciousness, which if we are a multiplanet species and ultimately a multi stellar species out there among the stars, the probability of survival is much much longer. That's kind of the defensive aspect or life insurance for life collectively. But then there's also there also need to be things that are inspiring and exciting and that give you reason to live. Life cannot
just be about solving one tragic problem after another. There must be also reasons to get up in the morning and be excited about the future. And a future where we are a space for civilization is infinitely more exciting than one where we are not.
And we're doing it all pretty unique location.
I mean, the pads behind us, we got rocket on the tower, we got another tower right that we're sitting inside star Factory, and I mean it wasn't like this for very long.
This is all pretty brand now.
I think we've moved Starship here in about the early part of twenty nineteen, so we've been coming that entire time and seeing the site of all from a double wide trailer and a tent where we built Starhopper to the first suborbital test flights, and now we have behind us two towers for the first time as we built towards the first operational flight from the second tower at the end of this year, and this beautiful building, million square feet where we're able to work towards a production
line of starships.
Yeah, the SpaceX team, it's one an incredible job of building out really the most advanced rocket manufacturing facility that has ever existed. This is far beyond any rocket fabrication facility that has ever been built.
This is essentially.
Alien level technology and it was well built here basically down by the Rio Grande River and close to the beach. It's an incredibly improbable location. And this used to be a sand bar. I think we're about you know, three feet or about a meter above sea level, so.
It really was nothing.
If you see the time lapse from a sand bar to two launch towers and a gigantic rocket factory with high bays and we're gonna be building something called the Gigabay, which is like one of the largest enclosed volumes on Earth. So it so it's sort of like a gigantic Bolg cube that we're gonna be building here for yeah, building and storing these gigantic rockets. It's really spectacular and anyone
can come and visit. So the because we're on a public highway and we're literally by a public beach, you can actually come and see the rocket. You can quite close up. I mean you can drive past it, and you can also look at the factory, and anyone could do this from anywhere in the world.
So if just you can come and visit and check it out.
I think it's pretty cool that it's just now, right now, just.
Right, just know what we're launching, because there's some safety issues. But but but.
The rockets often just just sitting on the pad without any palant in it.
And then you can just you can just come here and visit. It's very easy.
Yeah, I think it's a really special place. Yesterday the ship went down the road behind us and I saw families outside going for there, or was on Sunday going for their Sunday stroll. And they were greeted by Starship going down. And I think that from the very beginning. The thing about Starship different than Falcon and other rockets that I'm aware of is we designed it to be mass produced and mass produced at scale. And it's not
about building one starship and getting to orbit once. It's about doing it in a sustained and rapid way.
Yeah.
I mean for ultimately thousands of shifts to be built per year, which is what's needed in order to construct a city on Mars that is self sustaining. And the major fork in the road of destiny will be when the Mars city is capable of surviving even if the re supply ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason, and that reason could be something cataclysmic, or it could
be that that civilization simply subsided. There's always this debate throughout history of will civilization and with a bang or whimper, but either way, if the critical thing is to get to the point where Mars is self sustaining and can survive even if the resupply ships stuff coming for any reason, which means that you need to build an entire base of industry on Mars in order for Mars to survive.
For example, it's not simply enough to build a chip, you know, like a computer, like a computer chip factory, but you need the ability to build computer chip factories. So this, this is going to really take a lot of tonnage. My guess is at least a million tons to the surface of Mars, and maybe it takes less than that, but it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot. But this is this is a very exciting future. It's one which will ensure the long term survival and prosperity
of life and consciousness. And it's the critical stepping stone to get from this solar system to other star systems and perhaps go out there and explore and paths will encounter alien civilizations that.
Maybe maybe they're alive now, but or maybe.
They enjoyed a period of prosperity for millions of years. And it also died out millions of years ago. So it's humbling to think of the age of the universe, according to the standard model of physics, being approximately thirteen point eight billion years old, So an incremental million years would ownly would be three digits past decimal point. And if you look at say our civilization and measure civilization by the first evidence of writing, which is about fifty
five hundred years ago. Civilization as measured from the first writing is only one millionth of boths.
Existence or blip, yeah, flashing the pan.
So far, well, we're getting some cool shots rocking down on the pattern right now. We tell people like, come down see it. It's hard to get like a sense of scale of just how massive this thing is. And we were able to catch somebody working on it a little while ago, and like part of the reason you said we're sending millions of tons, that's kind of why this now.
I think in this understand you can actually see the person working at the bottom of the ship, and as we zoom out you see the full ship that sort of two tone silver and black, and then the booster below it, right, and it really sets the scale which
doesn't come across I think other than in person. And when I do tours, I like to say, starship is real, Starship is big, and starship is really big, and I think you can see there and with the factory shots you saw earlier, again it's we've got flight ten on the pad, but we got many more behind it.
Yeah, So there's I posted a video yesterday of just a brief scan of part of the Starship factory and you can get a sense of the scale of the factory.
And yeah, I guess we could talk a bit about.
Why Starship is the way it is, and like, for example, walk, why is half of the ship black and half of it is silver colored? And that's because the bottom half of the ship, of the bottom as scene from obital entry, has a heat shield on it. So the black there is the is the heat shield. And then the core structure of the rocket is a special alloy of stainless steel, and that's where you see the sort of shiny silver
parts are stainless steel. The reason for steel over aluminum is that the heat of of atmospheric entry and the heat of the rocket engines is enough to melt easily melt aluminum. But steel is much more resilient against both scent heating but especially the re entry heating.
And you don't have to paint.
It, which is actually very difficult at to paint a large object that is going through crygenic cycles and have the paint stay on.
It's quite challenging, and so we've talked about it.
It's massive.
It obviously takes a whole lot of energy to make that thing move. And that's where Raptor really starts to come in. Most advanced engine on the planet. Yes, now that's the last saber and a half.
You would get vaporized in an instant if you were standing in front of Rafter So yeah, bunto Crispin in a like less than a second.
So yeah.
In order for in order to create a fully reusable orbital rocket, you have to advance the state of the art in every part of the rocket. That means the engines have to be better than any engine ever. The structure has got to be better than any structure ever.
You've got to you've got to have a.
Means of bringing the rocket back to the launch pad. You've got to have a fully reusable orbital heat shield, and that no one has ever made.
A fully reusable orbital heat shield.
The Space Shuttle, for example, required nine months of refurbishment between flights. So the Space Shuttle heathield come back essentially partially broken and would require many months of refurbishment in
order to fly again. What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately, so the ship, both both the ship and the booster would be caught by the tower arms, and the the booster will be placed immediately back on the launch stand and the ship the ship's got it orbit Earth at least once, and that then could be back potentially in one orbit, but in most cases several orbits, so the ship would come back several hours later, but
then be caught by the arms and placed on top of the booster. You could also have multiple ships ready so that a single booster could service five or more ships, so that you could be flying the booster every in theory, every hour. This is a kind of a profoundly fast speed, obviously for the largest playing object by far ever made.
But it's the reason why we catch the tower. We catch the booster with the tower arms, and the ship also will be caught with the tower arms, because that's the fastest way to get the booster and the ship back to flight. If we had instead put landing legs, which we have done before for the ship tests, we actually had landing legs that flipped down and the ship
ship we've we've successfully demonstrated landing with legs. But if you do that if we were to do that with the booster and the ship here, we'd have to uh land somewhere else with the legs, then lift the rocket, stow the legs, transport the rocket back to the pad with which is very unwieldy when you've got a gigantic thing. Then it would be picked up by these tower arms and placed in the launch mount. That would that would delay the reusability dramatically and would add a lot of
masks with the landing legs. So that's why we catch the rocket with the tower arms, because it's the same tower arms that put the rocket in the launch mount are used to catch the rocket, and that means that we can put the booster back in the launch amount in less than an hour after liftoff. In fact, the boist is going to come back very fast, like five or six minutes later. This boost is coming back one
way or another or not coming back. So then you really have propellent full time, which can be brought down to about thirty forty minutes, and that means it is theoretically possible to fly at the booster again in less than an hour.
I think when when I think about it, it's the jet drives up to the jetway, the people get off, the new people get on, and it leaves. You don't want to land the jet on a different airfield and then tow it over to the jetway, so it's just operationally simpler and faster.
Yeah, we've had a lot of success with the Booster, three for three on the catch attempts when we bring it back. We've reflown one so awesome, and then that again Starship Superpowers.
The whole thing is reusable.
So ship re usability is like what we're working on right now. We've been able to get some really spectacular re entries on a couple of flights, hoping to get this one re entry on the V two ship. But yeah, that that fully reasonable heat shield, that thing that has just never been done before. That's that's one of the things we're really looking for that data on.
Yeah.
I mean, there are thousands of engineering challenges that remain for both the ship and the Booster, but the single, uh, maybe the single biggest one is the reasonable optal heat shield. Were all confident in making a fully reasonable opal heat shield, but it will require many flights, many iterations to figure out where the weak points are in the heat shield where we need to change the design, either strengthening the tile or change or changing the the thing, how big
the gap is between tiles, changing what's underneath the tile. Uh, there's there's a there's a you know, one hundred different variables that we could tweak with the with the ship, the ship tiles, the heat of heat shield tiles. But the only way to know is exactly what we should be adjusting is to fly repeatedly and be able to
examine the ship upon landing. And we have successfully brought the ship back through the atmosphere and achieved a soft landing multiple times, so we know that this is possible. But we have in the process shed many heat shield tiles. So we need to be able to do this without shedding heat shield tiles and.
Do so repeatedly.
And I think what you're seeing now is the starship. This is cg of it coming in and landing on the tower, much like the Booster, but there's some additional challenges there where we need to make sure we don't scrape the tiles off as we slide along the which we.
Can't shuck the heat shield, don't crush the ship. Ability we shocked if we.
Shock the shuck the tiles, then that's obviously going to fail to re useability test.
So ships can use the tower to land and catch like the booster here on Earth where towers are available, and for our initial landings on Mars and other plant and it's only landing legs that deploy, much like what you're seeing here with Ship fifteen. When we did our suborbital test to prove out the precision descent landing, which was a successful test. We actually landed to one was it We were able to actually recover it, and it's you can see it here in the rocket garden if you visit Starbase.
Yeah, so the rocket garden that that Bill mentioned, we have actually a whole bunch of boosters and ships and we'll be adding to them of a time, so you can see an evolution of Starship just by driving down the highway.
Yeah, So reusability is key.
There's some other technologies we're still looking to prove out. Really big one is going to be the on orbit refilling. Looking to do that next year, and that's really what's going to kind of unlock you know, Starship going everywhere else, going everywhere everywhere beyond Earth and that's something that's again never been done before, kind of like that reusable orbital heat shield. But it's going to be something that that's
kind of some of the other secret sauces Starship. Where were going to be able to send hundreds of tons per ship to Mars.
Yeah.
I like to think of it as if we get to orbit with a full cargo bay, but we're empty on fuel and oxygen, so basically we're running on fumes. Then we send other ships to dock transfer propellant, and now we made our two stage rocket look like many many multi stage rocket, and we get all that performance and we can take that full cargo bay now wherever we want to go.
Yeah.
So a crucial technology that we hope to demonstrate extra is this orbital refilling.
Much like aerial refueling.
It's essential for being able to send significant payload to Mars. So you essentially send you send a ship to orbit with a few hundred tons of payload. It's sort of a fulled payload bay, but the once it gets to orbit, the tanks we mostly empty, and then you send up additional tanker ships to refill the mass ships tanks so that when it can thrust from Earth orbit to Mars and have enough propellant left for landing, So this is
orbital refilling. Is also not something that's ever been demonstrated before, so that would be a brand new technology. We have we abously have at SpaceX figured out how to dock repeatedly with the space station. So in a lot of ways, this is like docking, and in some ways it's easier in that we're the ship where SpaceX is docking with
its with its own craft. But no one has ever demonstrated propellant transfer in orbit to the best amount knowledge, and and so this would be propellent transfer at a very large scale, and but with full reusability and propellant transfer. We those are the key technologies needed for building a
city on Mars. And I'm confident that the SpaceX team, which is incredibly talented, will achieve this these goals, and we will be landing ships on Mars in the future and building life on Mars, building greenhouses and life on Mars, and ensuring the long terms fival of life as we know it. It's important note here that obviously you know we are effectively stewards of life here on Earth, that the other creatures cannot build space spacecraft and get to
get to other planets. So if there were to be a cataclysmic event like a giant media or that destroyed the dinosaurs, or ultimately the Sun will expand to envelop Earth and destroy all life. We know this is this is an undisputed fact, then if we don't take life to another planet, well, life will be destroyed. So it's incumbent upon us to ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure long term survival of life as.
We know it on planet Earth.
And I mean, aside from that, there's so much that Starship on locks. By being able to do these things like we'll be able to go to Mars, but there are other just transformational things by being able to take that many people, that much stuff to space for that much less money.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's like understanding our planet better, being able to move people around the planet, make the make it feel smaller and more accessible. You could go anywhere on the Earth, you know, in less than forty minutes basically in terms of flight time. So I really do see Starship as being this thing that can connect us, just like Starlink connects our information this can connect us more physically.
Yeah, so there's there's really nothing faster than our rocket. Really, in overal rocket is the fastest thing that we know of. That that of the fastest means of transport. So like you could go from LA to Sydney in less than half an hour, you could go LA to Tokyo less than half Now you go from New York to Singapore in half an hour. Everything's probably half an hour basically. Some things might be ten minutes.
Yes, sure, I mean yeah, sign me up for that, please a right quest?
Atlantic in ten minutes? No wrong? Please, yes, sign up. You're going twenty.
Five times a speed of sounds, so that's thirty times faster than of commercial aircraft.
And it's a whole hell of a lot better view. Yeah, it's a hell of a view. Yeah,