All stations verify ready for launch. FTS, FTSS go, AI go, GNC go. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Good. Is going for orbital operations.
Nice to see you, Ron. How are you? I love you, love you.
Love you too. Hey everybody, I'm so glad it's not raining. So, welcome Gwen—this is your second time here. It must feel really cool working for someone who's so lowkey, never see him anymore. So here, by the way, this is a private company, SpaceX. You can't just buy stock in the stock market, and yet there's probably not a day that I don't read an article about SpaceX. It's unbelievable, so it's because of you. I was speaking with a CFO the other night of the launch businesses—two businesses, launch and Starlink satellites—and she said, 'Ron, when you started to invest in 2017, we had linear growth. We now have exponential growth. The growth is really accelerating right now, and the things that we're doing are just remarkable.' Everyone clamors to try to own stock. You never read about this—it's the front page of the New York Times saying that in order to own stock in SpaceX, you have to know someone. With us, you get to invest at the same price we invest in, without the high fees. At least we don't think they're high. So anyway, thank you very much. I sent Gwen topics I wanted to talk about, and there are a couple she didn't think were good to talk about, so I left them off.
Or my team said it wouldn't be useful for me to talk on the subject.
Yeah. And by the way, one more thing—you know I read that you called him 'Staran,' and so I started calling him Staran too. And he was supposed to come this afternoon, but he's doing other stuff, he's pretty tied up, so he couldn't. So what I was interested in is, first of all, Mechazilla—where did you get a name like that? Is that Godzilla or Mechazilla?
I think it's like a mechanical Godzilla. I'm pretty sure Elon came up with the name too. He is really quite brilliant in many things, but also in naming.
Do you want to talk about Godzilla just for a second?
Did you all see the capture of the Super Heavy booster? That was extraordinary. My team said it wasn't going to work, so they were sandbaggers, obviously. We've got a next launch coming up, hopefully on Tuesday—knock on wood—we're going to try to catch it again. We did have some issues; it's a very complex system and the things we're trying to do are very difficult. But let me tell you about Starship and how it's really going to change the world—not just Earth, but the Moon and Mars. The competitive advantage we have at SpaceX is that we launch rockets and reuse them. No one else can do that. Everyone else sends up a rocket one time for $200 million, and then it burns up. We take it up like an airplane and bring it back down, use it over and over again. Mechazilla catches the rocket when it lands with its arms, holds it, and then all we do is refuel and send it up again. So I'm sorry, you don't need me Ron, you're so good at this. But Starship is going to change the world, both on planet Earth and off. The difference between Starship and Falcon 9 is that both the first stage and the second stage of Starship are reusable. The breakthrough, as Ron mentioned, was reusability. Elon founded this company in 2002 with a singular purpose and sole vision: to build the transportation systems necessary to put people on other planets. Current-day rockets are one-use—the first stage gets dumped in the ocean, the second stage generally in orbit, creating havoc for satellites. Starship will change everything. The cost of getting people and cargo to orbit will drop dramatically. Starship is so big that the concept of how we put things in space is totally different. You can bring satellites back for repair if they're not working, fix them on the ground, and relaunch them—because the only real cost will be the fuel. Mechazilla is necessary because the first stage comes back suborbital, gets caught gently on the launch mount, and then it can pick up another Starship, refuel, and go. This will make flying rockets much more like flying airplanes. Think about what life would be like if aircraft were one-time use—you fly here from Austin, Texas, and then they toss the aircraft. Life would be very different.
So what are the issues as far as using it over and over again? At one point we want to launch two or three a day when we're going to have this long-term mission to get to Mars. How hard is it to get permission to do that?
Permission is a different thing. Technology is easy. Physics is easy. People are hard. And regulatory people are the hardest.
And why are the regulators so hard? And how are we going to deal with that?
Well, regulations—if you think about SpaceX and what we've done in this industry, a big year for a space company is 10 launches a year, maybe 12. We flew 96 last year. We'll do something over 130 launches this year. The regulatory regime and the rules associated with that—we're built for that 10-launch-a-year-per-company pace, not 100 or 130 or 160. If you launch 10 times a year, roughly once a month, the regulatory system has time to license that launch. I launch Falcon every two or two and a half days, and the regs just weren't built to keep up with that.
How do you get that to change?
Well, regs take 5 years to change, so we'll be working through waivers—they're called guidance papers—to try to operationalize the regulatory regime. We never complain about regulation. It's not that there is regulation—it's that regulation in the US, maybe globally, maybe everywhere except China, is slowing technology down. It's not helping, it's slowing. All we ask is: regulate industries, make them safe, make them right, make them fair—but you've got to go faster, much faster.
Is anyone else trying to land rockets over and over again and use them over and over again?
China has had some success in that, and there are other organizations in the US that are also trying to land rockets. We're now doing more satellite business—instead of just launching other people's satellites, we're making them ourselves. We make a lot of satellites, 50 or 60 a week. I started my aerospace career in 1988—my children say it was just after the Ice Age. In that time frame, one satellite launch per year per company was a big deal and it would take 10 years to develop that satellite. We developed the Starlink system—we started the program in 2015, launched in 2019. We're on what we call version two, but it's probably like version three and a half. We build 60 satellites a week. We're doing this also for Star Shield.
Star Shield—to explain what that is?
So Starlink is the commercial product that we have.
Who has Starlink? Wow, you guys need to buy Starlink. It's the best Internet available. How could you not own Starlink? I have seven of them. I have one on my car in fact, because I live in Central Texas and I used to drop calls when I was chatting with Elon or in meetings with Elon, and I knew that was a loser. So I got a mini and put it on ski racks on my Model S Tesla, so I don't drop calls with Elon anymore.
Way better, it's way better. So Star Shield is basically a derivative of the commercial product Starlink for government use, government applications.
So you once told me that one of the only things that's preventing my grandchildren from speaking Mandarin is SpaceX.
Oh no, that was very bold of me. Probably true. But the idea about Star Shield—it protects our nation. It is certainly not the entire suite of things that are important for national security, but it's a very important element of it. I think it's very important.
And the other satellites that you're building, for mass use, or what?
So we have the Starlink system, which is broadband available globally—the beams will go down anywhere on the globe. We still have licenses to get; I think we're in 114 countries and markets, with about 100 or 120 to go. So that is broadband—in your car, on your RV, in your home, camping. That's Starlink. Star Shield is a derivative of that again, for government use, with slightly different concepts employed. And then we also have started launching what we call our direct-to-cell business—some people call it direct to device—where your cell phone is actually communicating with low-Earth-orbiting satellites. We'll be rolling that out very quickly, probably within the next month or so. Initially it will be very light data and messaging—text messaging—and as we continue to evolve the product and the satellite system, it will do more.
So when can you—you mentioned a good space company before was able to do 10 launches, we do over 100, one satellite a year we do thousands. Why? How do we get there? Can anyone really catch up, and how?
Well, I hope others can catch up, right? Competition is good for industries. You guys should want competition—it keeps us tight, it keeps us very focused. But at least on launch and both satellite production and deployment, we are ahead. It will be hard to catch us on launch, because launch—I actually think launch is harder than satellites. And that is not to diss my Starlink team by any stretch, but launches are hard. It's this million pounds of explosion that you have to keep controlled and directed in the right way so that the rocket goes up. It's going to be hard to catch us, but I certainly hope people try.
But—is the key reusability, or is it the learning algorithm, or what?
So there's a couple of elements of magic to SpaceX. First of all, Elon started it at exactly the right time—timing was very important in our success, for sure. Elon is magic sauce for this company. He's not only technology-driven, but he's run very successful companies, and he focuses on the technology in concert with the business itself. So we've made technology decisions that ended up being very good for business. It wasn't like the business people on this side and the tech folks on this side—we've been a very integrated team since the beginning. And frankly, I have 15,000 of the finest employees on planet Earth. Yeah, they're amazing.
And then you mentioned that with Starship, we potentially will get to a cost of a flight with just fuel, largely just fuel. If I go back, I think in the shuttle the cost per kilo to low Earth orbit was around $50,000. We reduced it by 90% with Falcon 9, potentially reduce it by another 90%. What does it mean for all of us if we can really get costs so much lower with space launch?
What we're hoping to do with the work we're doing is to allow ordinary people to go to space. I would love—I want to go to the Moon. I think Elon wants to retire on Mars. I'm not interested in Mars—I don't like camping, and I think it will be a really long time till Mars is nice enough, probably not in my lifetime. But we want people to fly to other planets, to go to the Moon, to go to Mars. And maybe—certainly not this century, maybe next century—our great-grandchildren could fly to other planets beyond our solar system and find sentient life somewhere else. That to me is the coolest part of what we're doing. Can you imagine going and meeting other sentient beings?
So how many planets do you think there are that are the size of Earth, that are the same distance from the Sun, that have nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen?
I just read last week actually that I think 20% of star systems have planets in what they call the habitable zone. So it's billions of—potentially more than billions, because I think there's a billion trillion star systems, and roughly 20% of those would have planets. I'm not saying that they all have life, certainly not evolved to where we are. Some might have evolved further than us.
So 14 billion years ago the Big Bang, 13 and a half billion years ago the first light, and then Earth is 4 billion years old, and humanity here has only been 20, 30, 40,000 years.
I think slightly older than that—there's actually quite a bit of disagreement in that, but roughly. By the way, I do believe that there are other sentient beings. I certainly hope it's not just us—that feels both egotistical and frightening at the same time. So I do believe that there is other life. I don't think they've gotten here yet. We can argue about that over a glass of wine.
Museum of Natural History, yeah.
So, Museum of Natural History—when you go there, in the dinosaur room, in front of it there's five or six glass boxes, and you look into them, and it says that each one represents an extinction event on planet Earth of all life, for six different times. Which is what Elon is talking about—how he wants to have another place to live if this happens, or to figure out what we can do with our spaceships to prevent that from happening again. So you obviously think that this is potentially to happen again?
I think it's inevitable. I think it's the cycle of planets, and luckily those cycles are in millions of years—tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. So I probably am not going to catch it in my lifetime, but hopefully progeny—well, hopefully I will have children, grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren. But at some point it is likely to happen. And so I think it's really important for humans to proliferate and to go to Mars, and then go to Proxima, and then wherever the next nearest star system is with a habitable planet. So the competitive advantage—why other people can't easily do what we do—is that we can use the rockets over and over again, and they keep getting better and better.
And I look at rockets just like a tube—it looks like a tube to me. What's so complicated about it? And by the way, you talked about how Starship is so big. How big is it? Is it the biggest rocket ever?
Yes, it's very big. Very big—it's a technical term. It's gigantic. Have you gone for a launch? You've been, right? It looks like a high-rise New York office building lifting off the ground. It's like 30 or 40 stories tall.
So take a 30- or 40-story building in New York and put rockets on it and expect it to fly.
Yeah. Remembering that rocket engines are just controlling a giant explosion in the chamber and directing the exhaust this way so that the rocket goes this way. It's a lot.
So you're an engineer too. I'm told about these skip meetings Elon has. He comes here, gets a bunch of people in the room, says we should do this, and people just look at each other and say, 'How can we do that?' And then he leaves, and you say, 'Well, if he says you can do it, you can do it—you figure out how.' So he has these skip meetings, skip levels. Tell us what those are.
I actually think skip-level meetings are a really important management technique for any company. What you want to do is make sure your direct reports are not withholding information or preventing bad news from rising. It's a natural tendency—it's not like these employees are bad. I feel like my job is to solve problems that people who work for me were not able to solve themselves. If I can't solve a problem, I'll send it to Elon, and I try not to do that. You don't like sharing bad news, but the earlier you share bad news, the better, because then you have more time to solve the problem. Skip levels are important because sometimes people are a little more candid or a little more worried, even if their manager thinks they're going to solve it. It's nice to know as early as possible. The other reason is to meet the folks that work for you. With 15,000 people, I couldn't meet everyone every year. There are lots of people I've never seen, never said hi to, and this is a valuable opportunity. Skip levels don't just have to be one level. I love to meet with our technicians building our rockets and spaceships—bring them into a room, chat with them in groups, just to make sure things are going well. The further you get away from the vision and the pulse of the company, the easier it is to move off track. It's human nature. So I think it's really important to tighten that up, make sure everybody understands what we're doing and why, and it keeps people quite focused.
So one of your directors is a friend of Elon's from college, and he's on the board of SpaceX and Tesla. He was telling me about these meetings—15 people would come, supervisors not invited, just the people who do the work, each one with a separate discipline. And Elon would call on one of them and say, 'So what do you do?' A broad question initially, and then they keep drilling down, drilling down, drilling down, until the person can't answer and says, 'I'm sorry, Elon, I don't know the answer to that.' And it was clear that Elon knows more about the discipline than the person performing the tasks. Is that accurate?
