Elon Musk explains why Starship is key to harnessing the Sun's power
📅 Jun 11, 2026VideoFromSpace13 MIN9301 VIEWS33 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Elon Musk breaks down the Kardashev Scale and explains how humanity can one day be be capable of harnessing the power of ...
What Elon Musk said
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Elon Musk discussed SpaceX's role in advancing civilization up the Kardashev scale, which measures a civilization's energy harnessing. He noted humanity currently uses less than a trillionth of the Sun's power, making us practically nowhere on the scale. Musk explained that achieving even a micro (one millionth) of the Sun's output would require a massive increase in energy use, and that space-based solar power is essential. He emphasized that Starship's full and rapid reusability is the key breakthrough needed to send millions of tons to orbit, enabling large-scale solar arrays and AI chips in space. Musk stated SpaceX currently launches 85-90% of Earth's mass to orbit, and aims to reach a million tons per year within about three years. He also mentioned the acquisition of xAI (now SpaceX AI) and a chip-building project, and highlighted Starship V3's thrust exceeding Saturn V's by more than double.
Key takeaways
Humanity currently uses less than a trillionth of the Sun's power output, placing us practically nowhere on the Kardashev scale.
SpaceX aims to achieve full and rapid reusability of Starship later this year, enabling flights more than once per hour.
SpaceX plans to increase mass to orbit from about 2,500 tons per year to a million tons per year within roughly three years.
Starship V3 has more than double the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket, with V4 expected to be nearly three times.
SpaceX currently delivers 85-90% of all Earth mass to orbit, with most of the remainder launched by China.
All right. Well, hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out. I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starling team. Figured we'd check in. It's been, you know, typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle,
And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multi-planetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stat stuff. 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?
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.
Yeah. Exactly. 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.
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.
So the actual usable area of land where you can get solar power is quite small anyway. In order to ascend the Kardashev scale, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harness, 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.
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Musk, E. (2026, June 11). Elon Musk explains why Starship is key to harnessing the Sun's power [Interview transcript]. VideoFromSpace. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1112825/
MLA
Elon Musk. "Elon Musk explains why Starship is key to harnessing the Sun's power." VideoFromSpace, 11 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1112825/.
BibTeX
@misc{musk2026_1112825,
author = {Elon Musk},
title = {Elon Musk explains why Starship is key to harnessing the Sun's power},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, VideoFromSpace. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1112825/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
