All right. Well, hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out—I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starlink team. Figured we'd check in. It's been, you know, typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle, acquired xAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terafab chip building project. And so,
Yeah, never a dull moment.
Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year. And so let's kind of connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multiplanetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stuff. It's kind of start galaxy-sized and bring people in with the Kardashev scale. What's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale? Like, how do you decide what progress the civilization has made?
That's the most objective metric that any alien species visiting us would calibrate how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. There was a Russian physicist, actually, I think by the name of Kardashev, who thought about this, and it's a good way to characterize it. You can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet—that's type one. And then type two would be how much of the star's power are you harnessing? And then type three would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing? These are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale. If you say, what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing? It's a very, very tiny number. And basically we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. The sun is truly an immense thing. It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is. But this gives you sort of a sense of scale.
Yeah, it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.
Very big difficulty jump, yes. And level three—we don't even know how to do level three really. AI will figure it out.
One way to appreciate the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system.
So the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. It's everything, and then of the remaining 0.14%, most of that is Jupiter, one planet.
So we're still lightweight.
Yes. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun.
But how much energy are we talking, like coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth?
Yeah, the incident solar energy on the cross-section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's power output. And the vast majority of that we cannot use because 70% of Earth is water.
Yeah. We should technically—our planet should be called Water. Because it is 70% water, and I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they calling it Earth when it is mostly water? We're the Greenland's-not-green of the solar system.
Yeah. Even though we're 70% water and of the 30% that's land, a bunch of it is Antarctica or Siberia—very northern Canada type of thing. Very difficult, not places people typically want to live, and you're not going to get a lot of solar power at the poles.
So the actual usable area of land where you can get solar power is quite small. Anyway, in order to ascend the Kardashev scale or in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to, say, a millionth of the power output of the sun,
You would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million. So we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. And a trillion is a million times a million. So basically we're practically nowhere on the Kardashev 2 scale—practically nowhere.
So in Kardashev scale we're all still...
Nonexistent register. We're not even...
Yeah, we're not registering. Not even a microsol.
No. One microsol would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.
Yeah. That's our goal. And this is both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are, and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy—to try to achieve power harnessing being one millionth of what the sun outputs.
And so to actually start a microsol, to actually start getting there though, we're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. There has to be a need. You want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously until this point in human history, there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that maybe now's the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two? I mean, getting to a percent of the sun's energy,
Maybe not a percent. Let's move the decimal point back. You're an extremely kick-ass civilization if you get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilization is going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least. So in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashev scale, we need to launch satellites to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling, because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum. And so what we're proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the Kardashev scale to, I don't know, be kind of like a respectable civilization. So when the aliens—hopefully there are aliens out there—and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used.
Yeah. That's not like totally pathetic.
Which is the current situation.
And so before we start sending data centers, sending all of this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so this is almost impossible.
So things it takes to scale: you need to have a large mass-to-orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us. That large mass—you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put a 100 gigawatt or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar, and then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips. The three things you need are mass to orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators, and a lot of chips.
All right. Well, let's start ticking down the list. So, mass to orbit—that's where Starship comes in. We just had—
First flight was awesome.
I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch. And like, long time coming. What's Starship's kind of purpose of being? What is it going to be doing?
So Starship is going to revolutionize space, really. It's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multiplanetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot extend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft, and you cannot extend life to the Moon, to Mars, and the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can't make enough rockets unless you can refly them. Just like any other mode of transport—you can imagine that if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
You're doing a whole lot more driving, rapid reusability.
Yes. Every mode of transport is reusable, without which it's simply not viable as a transport system. Cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable. With rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. And these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there have been many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket, and most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they didn't think they could succeed. In order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect—the engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy. The rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. Then you've also got to go step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection like an aircraft. This is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. It also happens to be the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship V3 is more than double the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. By version four, we'll be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn V moon rocket. And we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.
One of the fun facts from flight 12—that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown, and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do.
I mean, once we're flying massive amounts, really rapidly. I mean, we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what mass to orbit becomes once Starship is flying?
It's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit—I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. And then most of the remaining mass I think is launched by China, and then the rest of the world including the rest of the US is the remaining 5 to 7%. Now with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2,500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit. And to do so in a pretty short period of time. So we think probably we can get to a million tons to orbit per year in about 3 years thereabouts.
Starship is going to take care of the mass to orbit limiting factor. And then power generation. So first—and Ian, maybe you can help—people probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say like data center in space. Like, we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there. These actually look pretty different. So kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.
Yeah. I think it's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't actually know what the inside of a data center even looks like, right?
Yeah. And it's some like mythical place where the internet's in the cloud or something.
Yeah. Some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but effectively it comes down to a set number of chips. And the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how do you get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing Starlink technology, the solar arrays, are what we want to utilize—that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into space itself. We like to look at this and say, what is the actual engineering problem here? And it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space, as you mentioned.
Now, the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has gigantic phased array antennas. It's got parabolic antennas. It's got a lot of laser links. It's much more complicated than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have all the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. So given the two, the easier one to design for is the AI satellite.
Yeah, just a little bit bigger.
