How do you decide what progress the 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, I think by the name of Kardashev, who thought about this, and 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 I. And then Type II would be how much of the star's power are you harnessing? And then Type III 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 I 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. It's a big difficulty jump going from Level I to Level II.
Very big difficulty jump. Yes. And Level III, and we don't even know how to do Level III.
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. 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. We're like, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun.
Well, but how much energy are we talking like 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, you know, 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? We're the Greenland's not green of the solar system. Yeah. A bunch of the, exactly, even we're 70% water, and of the 30% that's land, a bunch of it is, you know, Antarctica or, you know, 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 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 II scale, practically nowhere. So in Kardashev scale, we're all still nonexistent, we're like not even registering. Yeah, we're not even a micro-soul. Yeah, we're not even a micro-soul. One micro-soul would be an epic, 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...
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. Like there has to be a need. Like you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that like 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 go like, we'll move the decimal point back. 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. Yeah. So in order to start to make some progress on 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. Yeah, which is the current situation.
And so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible.
Yeah. What does it take to scale? 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 know, 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 to orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators of course, 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. Yeah. We just had first flight to V3 was awesome.
I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch. Yeah.
And like long time coming. What's kind of, what's Starship's kind of purpose of being? What is it going to be doing?
Yeah. So, Starship is going to, it's 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 ascend 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. Yeah. Unless you fly, 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. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, 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. They've also, you've got to go a 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. Yeah. 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. I mean, 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. So yes, 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, 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 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. 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. Like these actually look like pretty different. And 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. Yeah. Some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but like 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 to get, how do you get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starwing 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 like 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. Yeah. Now, the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has gigantic phased array antennas. It's got, you know, parabolic antennas. 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 of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. So, I mean, given the two, the easier one to design for is the AI satellite. Yeah, it's just a little bit bigger. Just bigger. Just make stuff bigger. Yeah. I was like, so we've got this is our AI1 if you guys want to walk us through. Yeah. Yeah. So, the first thing that we're really looking at here is like first you've got to make something compelling, right? And we thought that the right place to start is around the 150 kilowatt like peak power level. But as we look at the workloads with our experience with xAI, we get to actually see that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute. There's a difference. What we're showing here is kind of a draft version of the version one of the SpaceX AI satellite. AI1 I guess you could call it. And it seems like a reasonable place to start is 150 kW peak power, 120 kW sustained power. And to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiators, size of the solar panels, the assumptions here are 250 watts per square meter for the solar array and about 1,400 watts per square meter for the radiators. So the radiators, these are double-sided radiators, are radiating both sides. They're oriented knife edge to the sun. And 1,400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal. Over time, we think we could probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1,400 watts per square meter for the solar panels and radiators respectively. But this gives you like a, is pretty much what the satellite's going to look like. It's a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small by comparison. And these are like evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date. Yeah, that's really I think the cool part to me is that we're looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V3 Starlink vehicle. So I'm like really excited to then just take those and make it bigger. Yeah. Part of what we want to convey here is that there's not some magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the AI satellites. As Ian said, a lot of this is technology we've already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. So we basically, we don't think this is a super hard problem compared to things we already do. There would also be probably something on the order of a terabit of connectivity, of laser link connectivity from the satellite. The 150 kW peak power level roughly matches what say an Nvidia GB300 rack would do. So you've got a GB300 with 72 GPUs. Its peak power, I think, is around 140 kW, but it's rarely, it's almost impossible to get it to be at that peak power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120 kW average power, but it can peak up to 150. So it's basically think of it as a rack of compute in space. And then you can connect these racks of compute to either each other via the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellation, and then Starlink can then send that data to the ground using the existing Ka and Ku antennas on the vehicle. It also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So, and this would not be at a particularly high latency, you know, we're talking about, you know, maybe being around 600 to 800 kilometers above the Earth, and light travels 300 kilometers per millisecond. So that's about, you know, 3 milliseconds away basically. It's not very far. Won't worry about that too much though. It's sometimes people think there's going to be some like high latency. I'm like, yeah, it's no, speed of light moves pretty fast. Light moves pretty fast. It's a tall one. Yeah. Yeah. I think the cool thing also is the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar arrays for the V3 vehicle. Kind of in that realm where we're flying today. Yeah. So, I mean, they got about a 70 meter wingspan. So, these are fairly large. We're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there. But you like to say like space is in the name. Like there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even, you know, up to a million satellites, you got plenty of room to move around up there. Yeah. Space is really big. So it's not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous. Like if you zoom in close to the satellite, it looks big. But if you actually look at it relative to the Earth, these satellites are so tiny you can't even see them. So they're very, very tiny compared to Earth. And I mean we have about 10,000 Starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now. Right. We are the only operator that has any experience at that scale. It's a great thing that, you know, we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and fly them safely. That's a number one goal when we look at the constellation. We're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop, right? So we've got this which... Yeah. So we're in that building kind of in the middle which... Yeah, we're sitting in that building right now. This is my first time here. The building is massive. It's like you come around the corner, you see it through the trees, and you're like, 'Oh, wow.' But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we? Uh, yes, we're going to, in fact, we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already. And then we will be building out the ISAT production building soon. And yeah, so we expect to have the ISAT production, the solar production, and all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year. So if anybody wants to work on AI satellites, this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also, so I mean like right behind us, the machines are humming. We're still making all of our user terminals for Starlink here. That's not going anywhere. In fact, we're turning on new production lines for new units, right? Uh yes. In fact, these are the new Starlink terminals, which we made in much higher volume than the current terminals. You know, ultimately, we think there's probably going to be a few hundred million Starlink terminals out there. And then the Starlink direct to cell constellation will connect directly to people's cell phones and enable high bandwidth communication directly from your phone to space.
