Elon Musk Reveals New Insane Project - SpaceX, Starship & AI

Yeah.

Yeah, never a dull moment.

What's the big picture?

Like how do you decide what progress a civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species say 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. And there was a Russian physicist actually named by the name of Kardashev who thought about this, and it's a good way to characterize it.

Yes, 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 necessary to make life multi-planetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft, and you cannot extend life to the moon, to Mars, and to the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can't make enough rockets unless you can re-fly 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.

Yes. Reusability. Yes. Every mode of transport is reusable, without which it is simply not viable as a transport system. So 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. 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. It's 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. And then you've got to achieve full reusability. You've got to go a step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, 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 4, it will be pretty much three times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. And we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.

It's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So even with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. I think it's somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. And then most of the remaining mass, I think, is mostly by China and then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US, is the remaining, I don't know, 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 a 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.

Yes.

Yeah, some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but like it actually 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 to get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like 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, laser links. It's much more complicated than an AI satellite. At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for Nvidia Rubin chips, or could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. We'll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to, I don't know, get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI compute. But that doesn't answer the question of how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the terrafab.

Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. And to give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the terrafab is going to be around 100 million square feet to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute. And then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in 2 and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 GW a year to space, in 3 and a half years maybe 100 GW, and then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world and with the terrafab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 GW. That's twice the current electricity consumption in the United States. I think there'll be an appetite for that, but we'll see.

I don't know what he's going to think about, but maybe do a lot of simulations or something.

At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for Nvidia Rubin chips, or could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. We'll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to, I don't know, get to maybe around 100 GW a year of AI compute. But that doesn't answer the question of how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the terrafab.

Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. To give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the terrafab is going to be around 100 million square feet. So, to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute. And then aspirationally, scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in 2 and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year of space, in 3 and a half years maybe 100 gigawatts, and then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world and with the terrafab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts. That's twice the current electricity consumption of the United States. I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see.

It's I don't know what it's going to think about, but we need a lot of simulations or something.

Why stop there? Why think small? The terawatt actually is very small. Let's not think small. So, in order to get to another three orders of magnitude, 1,000 times from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the moon with a mass driver. Essentially, where you do local production of photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the moon. Maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably make the chips on the moon. But you need most of the mass to be made on the moon so you don't have to transport it from Earth. And then because the moon has no atmosphere and only 1/6 Earth's gravity, you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a railgun type. It's basically a linear electric motor is a way to think about it.