Elon Musk's Full SpaceX Update From Today

Yeah, never a dull moment.

Like 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 by the name of Kardashev 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 a Kardashev one scale. Like if you say like 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, and we don't even know how to do level three. Really? We'll get... 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.

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.

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.

Yeah. Exactly. Even we're 70% water and of 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 two scale, practically nowhere.

Not even a micro-soul.

No.

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 a power harness being 1 millionth of what the sun outputs.

I mean, getting to a percent of the sun's energy...

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 a 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. That's not like totally pathetic. Which is the current situation.

Yeah. What does it take to scale?

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 GW 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.

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 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. We'd be 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. 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. 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 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 4, 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.

Yes.

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 at 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. 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 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. It's just a little bit bigger.

Just makes stuff bigger. Yeah.

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 if you've got a GB300 with 72 GPUs, peak power I think is around 140 kW. But 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 that'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 by the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellation. So you can close the link with 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. And this would not be at a particularly high latency, you know, we're talking about maybe being around 600 to 800 km above the Earth. And light travels 300 km per millisecond. So that's about 3 milliseconds away basically. It's not very far.

It's sometimes people think there's going to be some like high latency. I'm like yeah no speed of light moves pretty fast.

Yeah.

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.

We are the only operator that has any experience of 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.

Yeah we're sitting in that building right now.

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 AI production building soon. And yeah, so we expect to have the AI 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.

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.

Yes. So 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. And 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 gigawatt a year of AI compute, but that doesn't answer the question of well, 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 which is 10 times the size of the Tesla Gigafactory Texas.

Well, I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the Terrafab, but fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there were no fundamental technology breakthroughs and you could simply scale the existing chip technology with a lot of difficulty to a terawatt of chip output per year. If you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that's equivalent, that's like having a billion chips per year with a kilowatt per reticle. So it's a billion full reticle equivalent chips each doing a kilowatt and then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that.

Yeah. I think we want to try to give people a sense of the time frame, at least the time frame we're aiming for. I mean, you know, people should take this with a grain of salt to some degree because this is just our best guess. So, this is not a promise of what we'll do. This is what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, which is 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 gigawatt a year to space, in 3 and a half years maybe 100 gigawatt 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 gigawatt which is twice the current electricity consumption of the United States.

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

Why stop there? Stop. Why think small? Because the terawatt actually is very small. Think small. Let's not think small. So in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1000x 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 to the moon from Earth. And then because the moon has no atmosphere and only 1/6th 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 rail gun type. I mean just it's basically a linear electric motor is the way to think about it.

I'm fired up to see a mass driver on the moon. That would be very cool.

Sci-fi future. Yeah. It would also mean that if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the moon will be able to go to the moon. And I think that would be pretty cool.

Yeah. And you know, everyone should go to the moon at least once, I think.

Yeah, you can move there if you want. Go live on the moon.

All right, sounds good. It's exciting. Great. Let's race.