Elon Musk explains why Starship is key to harnessing the Sun's power

Acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terrorized chip building project. And so, Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year.

Um, 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 subjective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. Um, and there was a Russian physicist actually I think by the name of Kardashev, um, who thought about this and it's I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is 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. Like 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. So 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.

Very big difficulty jump. Yes. And level three, we don't even know how to do level three really. We'll get there. Yeah.

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.

Yes. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. We're like Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun. But how much energy are we talking coming from the sun especially compared to what we're using here on Earth? It feels like... 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. 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?

Yeah. A bunch of the, exactly. Even we're 70% water and of the 30% that's land, a bunch of it is Antarctica or Siberia type of thing, 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.

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.

Yeah. We're so we're not registering.

One micro would be an epic achievement relative to where we are right now.

Yeah. Yeah. That's our goal. Like this is I think 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 harness being 1 millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a micro.

Maybe not a percent. Let's go. Like, we'll move the decimal point back.

Yeah. So things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us. That large mass. So 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. So the three things you need are mass orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators, of course, and a lot of chips.

Yeah, 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 multi-planetary 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 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. Every mode of transport is reusable without which 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. 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. And then you've got to achieve full reusability. Then you've also 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 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.

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, I don't know, 5 to 7%. Now with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2500 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.