I am in Starbase Texas, inside the Starship rocket factory, and joining me now is SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell. It's great to be here.
Thank you, Morgan. I'm so glad you could make time to come down to Starbase. It's an incredible place.
It really is incredible, and I want to get into Starship specifically in just a moment, but first, huge moment right now with SpaceX poised to go public. Not just for the company, not just for the space industry, but for markets, for the world overall. Why go public? Why now?
So, it's interesting. I wasn't sure we would go public. Having a private company was important to us early on because we really weren't focused on quarterly financials. We were so focused on the long-term outlook for the company. But we've gotten so many of the building blocks completed for so many of these different business areas, it actually feels like the right time. Now, there's still development left to do. We still have work to do on Starship. We've got work to do on Starlink. But we've got the building blocks there and now it's time to scale.
What does being public enable that being private at this point does not?
$75 billion give or take.
Minus $20 billion to pay around that.
Yeah, scaling is very expensive actually, and the things that we're doing cost a lot to do. I don't even want to just focus on the financials. We've been feeling over the last few years a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for these folks to get in. Unfortunately, probably some got scammed, but there was no way to buy SpaceX stock. And it feels like a company that, you know, great people should be able to own a piece of.
It's interesting to hear you say that because obviously SpaceX has rewritten the space and defense playbook. Are you rewriting this retail investor playbook too with this IPO?
You know, I think we'll see what happens, right? But certainly letting everyday Americans and everyday people purchase the stock was a big focus for Elon and the team.
Yeah, I want to get into the businesses themselves, but first just one more question on all of this. And that is you just mentioned the long lead times. I mean, SpaceX has famously done things that everybody else has said was impossible, whether it's broadband LEO or whether it's reusable rockets. I could go down the list, but all of this takes time. To be a publicly traded company, now you're dealing with investors that are thinking on a quarterly basis, and any headline can move the stock. So, how are you adjusting to that?
So, I hope the folks that do decide to invest in SpaceX take a look at our history and see how we do operate and become comfortable with the way we operate, right? Our horizons are very long-term. I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings. I'm not saying we're not going to do right by our investors, but what folks that invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we're doing is very futuristic and we should be thinking about the future as well as the current quarter.
Yeah, and a 300-page prospectus that is very focused on the future. But out of the gate, what should investors be focused on judging the company on right now?
Well, I think for sure you need to look at our track record. It's funny, Elon jokes that we make the impossible, we just make it late. And people say, 'Oh, you're moving so quickly.' And we feel like we're actually behind. We always feel very behind. I do want people to basically look at our track record, look at our history. We do really difficult things. We do bring them to product level. In fact, xAI is definitely starting to be product focused. It was very much a lab, very much a research organization. And now, after the acquisition and obviously they were focused on product more than just when we purchased them, but they're definitely focused on product now.
I just want to go back to something you said about that tend to be a little late, but you always get it done. How do you think about that in terms of forecasting and managing investor expectations around timelines? Because it's a little different than what you usually hear.
We are very candid. I mean, some people look at us as a very quietly, you know, not very public company, and I don't mean it in the financial way. I think we put a lot out there actually. I think we're quite candid about what we're trying to do, the risks involved. And when we're late, we're late. Like, it's pretty obvious when you set a launch date and you don't hit it. So, I think we're pretty candid about kind of the hurdles in front of us. And if we're late or if we have a misstep, we'll be very clear about that and why. And by the way, I think it's actually really important to have failure. Do you know what a failure like, if a launch goes perfectly, all you've learned is that that launch vehicle on that day worked. You didn't get any more data than that, right? So, when you have failure, you actually get this treasure trove of data. So, failure, whether it's in the development phase, obviously you don't want failure on the mission phase, or failure in missing milestones from a time perspective, you learn from that and you can get better.
Yeah, part of the innovation process you get at SpaceX. Let's talk a little bit about Starlink because it is the profit driver of the broader company right now. What does full completion or I guess where do we top out here in terms of build out of Starlink?
It's interesting. I never really think about topping out. It's just not in the mind frame. The early satellites, we still have some very early satellites up in orbit. They're not as good as the latest ones and they certainly don't have as much capacity as the V3s that will be flying later on this year on Starship. And so, I feel like we will continually refresh the old satellites that we have and we'll add a lot more capability. We are actually constrained by capacity in many markets, really important markets. So, scaling is actually really quite important to the revenue story for us.
Meaning there is more demand than you can actually supply right now.
Than we can fulfill right now. Yes.
Okay. Starlink mobile, how big is that opportunity?
I think that opportunity is huge. If you were to look at numbers of subscribers, I think Starlink mobile will far exceed Starlink broadband in the home. I think more than half the population, the global population, has a cell phone, which is shocking, but it's crazy numbers of people have cell phones. Not everybody is going to need Starlink broadband in their home. There's lots of other options as well. But, I think the numbers of users of Starlink mobile will far exceed our Starlink broadband.
Yeah, you just mentioned it. What you're talking about the V3 Starlink satellites or some of the other capabilities that you're looking to put to orbit here, it's going to hinge on Starship. So, in terms of forecasts, what it's going to take to get Starship to full operation and service?
So, we had a great most recent flight, flight 12, flight 13. We're going to largely do what we did on flight 12. We obviously had some things that weren't perfect on that flight, for sure. So, we'll improve that, we'll fix that, learn that lesson, address it, get back to flight 13. I hope on flight 14 we'll follow basically the same flight with the exception if we feel like we can actually go to orbit, then we would actually have that gate and have the FAA let us go to orbit on flight 14. And then maybe flight 15 actually flies from the Cape.
Wow. Okay. Yeah. How are you thinking about launch in-house versus out of house for government customers, commercial customers over long term?
What I think is really important with launch, or really with almost any tough engineering development, is you want to do that thing a lot. Like production cars tend to be more reliable than the hand-built one-off cars, right? The more you can fly a vehicle, the more reliable it will be, the safer it will be. Starlink provided that market for Falcon 9. We flew, you know, 100 Starlink missions in a year, right? The AI satellites will be that same market, but for Starship. And so, we find the AI satellites to be incredibly important to the development of Starship.
Do you think you can get them going by 2028? Because I saw in the prospectus that target getting as soon as 2028 to begin deploying some of these AI compute satellites. There's also severe lack of atmospheric cooling in terms of challenges, hardware degradation from cosmic radiation, and a number of other things. What does it take to actually crack the codes on some of these challenges?
You know, the AI satellites are to some extent simpler than the Starlink satellites. I think the technology on the Starlink satellites that's far more—it was harder to achieve. AI satellites are simpler. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk by any stretch, but I'm not worried about the development of the AI satellites. We do have some supply chain challenges in front of us. We've got to get solar cells, right? And we have to build a lot of chips. Not because we necessarily want to build chips, but I don't think the chip manufacturers are thinking about scaling in the same ways that we're thinking about scaling, or they don't believe us.
All right, I want to get into that in just a moment, but first just one more question on these data centers in space. And that is up to potentially a million. Where do they go? How do you manage that many satellites in space?
You know, it's interesting. People talk about the size of the Starlink constellation, 10,000 satellites. It doesn't seem like a lot to us. I'm not saying that that team doesn't work hard, but so much of it is automated. If you needed 10 people to monitor and babysit a satellite, this would be a total loser, right? But we don't. We have maybe 10 people at a time monitoring the entire 10,000 satellite speed of first Starlink. So these are largely very highly automated satellites and the constellation itself works together in a highly automated way.
