Co-Founder, Technoking of Tesla, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Tesla
Elon Musk All Hands Meeting 2024
Meeting with Elon sharing the results of the past year and what the future brings with the Boca Chica Staff.
Video Credit to Space and Elon Musk Via X (Twitter).
Video Credit: SpaceX
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About Elon Musk
Elon Musk recently oversaw SpaceX’s public listing on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, which he said was the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets. During the event, Musk stated that he had originally given SpaceX “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all” and recalled telling people, “Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don’t… we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization.” He described SpaceX’s mission as “to take the fiction out of science fiction” and said the company aims to make humanity multi-planetary, adding, “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts.” The IPO was widely reported to have made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. In addition to the IPO, Musk discussed SpaceX’s plans to build AI satellites and space-based data centers. In an interview with SpaceX employees in Bastrop, Texas, he said that the company’s AI satellite is “actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite” and noted that the current reference design calls for Nvidia Rubin chips. He also spoke about a “terrafab” facility that he said would be approximately 100 million square feet, roughly 10 times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, and discussed using a mass driver on the moon to launch materials into deep space. Separately, Musk oversaw the final delivery of Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles, which he called a “bittersweet moment,” emphasizing that those cars “showed that an electric car could actually be the best car of any period.”
Transcript (72 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:12
All right, it's been an incredible year. The SpaceX team, I think, is the best space team that has ever been assembled on the face of the Earth by far. And the achievements of the past year demonstrate that to a degree that is mind-blowing. Like, what you have achieved over the past year is nothing short of incredible, and one day we will indeed occupy Mars. So let's go through everything that SpaceX has achieved, that you've done. And it's actually going to take a while, by the way. This is going to take a minute.
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Elon Musk1:01
So first of all, with Falcon we have achieved the most launches of any rocket in a single year ever. The next best was the Soviet Soyuz, which I think did a little over 60 launches in a year, and we did 96. No other family of orbital-class rockets has launched more than 60 three times a year, and we did 50% more. Falcon Heavy also surpassed in terms of heavy-lift vehicles the record for Saturn V. With five launches last year, we exceeded the Saturn V record, so that was pretty incredible on Falcon Heavy.
This gives you a sense in pictures of how incredible that was. For a while there, I'd be posting something and wonder, is this like the launch that just happened or the one that is happening? Because there were three launches that happened in the space of a few days. But this is all the launches on one page, and it's really, really incredible. All made it to orbit, all landed. So a huge handful of the Falcon team—that was incredible. Two-thirds of the missions were Starlink, but a third were for other customers—for NASA, for other communication satellites. So it was a combination of Starlink plus a lot of other missions.
Even if you just take the non-Starlink portion of the flights, that was more than any other vehicle last year by a long shot. We launched NASA's Psyche, ESA's Euclid, the X-37B space plane, multiple Transporter missions. We did missions for OneWeb, Telesat. And we're actually on contract to launch Amazon's Kuiper constellation. And we treat everyone fairly. We managed to do 19 flights on a single Falcon 9 booster, which is really incredible—in three and a half years. That booster did 860 satellites and delivered 260 metric tons to orbit. So it's like, wow.
There's a lot of wows. It's worth noting how long ago it was that we landed a booster—it was actually eight years ago, in December, roughly eight years ago. And since that time we've landed 260 times. 260 landings—it's just like, wow. There were a lot of people that said it couldn't be done, and then there were a lot of people that said even if it could be done, it's a dumb idea—that it wouldn't pay off, that it wouldn't make sense. But we've shown that in fact it is absolutely the right idea. Reusability is the key to a great future in space. It's essential. We need reusability for rockets just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses. Obviously reusability is essential.
And the fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi-planet species is a fully and rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.
All right, so it's—I mean, it's incredible how much has happened in eight years. You know, I wonder what things will be like eight years from now. And hopefully we have—I think we will have landed on Mars, and I think we will have sent people to the Moon, and maybe if we get lucky we will have sent people to Mars within eight years.
You know, the key question or the key test, perhaps, for civilization is: do we make it through the great filter of going from a one-planet civilization to a multi-planet civilization? And if we do become a multi-planet civilization, we may go out there to other star systems and discover many long-dead one-planet civilizations. And we don't want to be one of them—that's lame. We don't want to be one of those lame one-planet civilizations. But I think we should always regard civilization as fragile, as not something that has an inevitable upward trajectory. I mean, I read a lot about history, and if you look at history, civilizations are anything but permanent. Many civilizations have risen and fallen over the centuries and millennia.
Eventually the Sun will expand, boil the oceans, and destroy all life on Earth. Now admittedly that's several hundred million years in the future, but it's only about maybe 10 or 20% of the existence of Earth itself. If Earth is four and a half billion years old, then another 10 or 20% longer and intelligent life would not have evolved, because it's taken us a long time to get to this point. So that's really the key test: do we become a self-sustaining multi-planet civilization while civilization still exists, or don't we? That's really the key question. I think we've got a good chance, but it's not a sure thing. That's why time is of the essence. I think we want to make Mars self-sustaining as quickly as possible. It's not just a question of getting people to Mars, but it's getting enough tonnage and equipment to Mars to enable Mars to be self-sustaining. The key test being that if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars die out or does it continue? That's really the fundamental threshold to pass.
The Fermi Paradox, the great filter—the Fermi Paradox is: where are the aliens? If life is common, if intelligent life is common, shouldn't we see a lot of evidence of it? Now, I get asked a lot about aliens, actually, and I usually say I am one. Well, actually I used to be, according to Homeland Security—it said 'alien registration,' literally.
Okay, but the truth is I actually have not seen any evidence of aliens, which I think is maybe a bit more troubling than if I had. I have not seen any, and I'd be on it—I can pretty much guarantee I would post about it instantly. I'd be like, 'Yep, we got one, this is a spaceship for sure.' But I have not seen anything, so that leads me to think that we're more likely to be a tiny candle of consciousness in a vast emptiness, a vast darkness. The civilization that we have is really just this very, very small candle in a vast darkness, and we just must do everything possible to ensure that that candle does not go out.
Anyway, I think we can do it, but we need to move fast because you just never know. There could be—at any given point—Stephen Hawking, I believe, said he thought there was roughly a 1% chance in any given century of civilization ending. That was his rough estimate. I think it actually might be higher than that, so we just want to go there fast.
So, getting back to Falcon 9, back to reality. These are all the launches we've done, and you can see how the cadence of launches has rapidly increased over time. I think people online have actually assembled videos showing every launch, and it just gets crazy fast as you get to 2023. So we've done a 93-flight Falcon. We're now qualifying Falcon 9 to be able to do 40 flights, and we're aiming for maybe as much as 150 flights this year.
And then let's not forget fairing recovery, because actually a lot of people don't realize we recover the fairing as well. This was actually very difficult to recover the fairing, so it was an immense amount of effort. But we now quite regularly recover the fairing, and we've refown fairings 300 times. So congrats to the fairing recovery team—that was actually pretty damn hard.
Oh, and then of course we do operate basically a small navy. I think people don't always know that. We have drone ships and support ships of various kinds, so we've got a small fleet of ships, and we operate them very efficiently. I think people also sometimes don't know the size—you can see the size of the ship by the person walking around on it. It's not small. So it looks cool—I like this sort of Darth Vader aesthetic. I like it.
We're also getting much better with the pad turnaround. We achieved a three-day pad turnaround, and I think we're aiming to hopefully get under 24 hours pad turnaround by the end of this year. In terms of launch rate—it's been 15 years since flight four of Falcon 1, the first one to reach orbit. So 15 years since we got anything at all to orbit, and now we're aiming to have 150 flights with this vehicle this year.
These are big rockets at this point. Falcon 1 is a little rocket—in fact, when I see Falcon 1 right now, I'm like, 'Man, I think I could probably tuck that under my arm, take it home, launch it in the backyard or something.' It looks so cute. But at the time, Falcon 1 did seem extremely difficult. It took us four flights to reach orbit, and it did seem kind of big at the time, but now it's an adorable thing.
So the most profound metric, the metric that really describes the magnitude of what SpaceX achieved in 2023, is the mass-to-orbit number. You can see the incredible change year over year. In 2021 we were slightly below the rest of the world. In 2022 we roughly doubled what the rest of the world did. And last year we were 80% of all mass to orbit. So when we say 'rest of the world,' we mean the rest of the space industry—Europe, India, China, Japan, everyone. There's not a lot of industries where a company is doing like 80% of everything.
And what's really mind-boggling is that number should increase by 50% this year. So I guess on the order of like 90% of all mass to orbit, not counting Starship. If we start launching Starship, Starship is roughly 100 tons to orbit with every flight. There's a path to getting Starship to do over 200 tons with full reusability—200 tons to useful orbit with full reusability. And it's really an incredible amount—1,200 tons of useful load to orbit last year. That's just astounding. I think that really deserves a round of applause. Wow, I mean, that's the most mind-blowing thing.
And the rate of increase is just astonishing. Now, these numbers will actually look very small in the future. In order to build a city on Mars, we will need to be in the million-ton-to-orbit range. Maybe a little higher, ideally. But if you just try to get things to the right order of magnitude, I think it's roughly a million tons to Earth orbit. That'll get you roughly 200,000 tons to the surface of Mars—approximately 20% of whatever you get to Earth orbit you can get to the surface of Mars.
And figure like maybe we need at least a million tons of useful load to the surface of Mars for it to become self-sustaining. That self-sustaining threshold is actually a very tough threshold to meet, because even if you're missing a tiny thing, eventually Mars will die out. You've got to be able to not just build, for example, computer chips, but you need to be able to build computer chip factories. Because if you can't build a computer chip factory, the factory that you do build will eventually break down, and then you will have no chips, and then that's it. So it's kind of like a long sea voyage where if you're just missing vitamin C, you'll cruise on for a while, but then your teeth will fall out and you'll die. That was a real problem in the old days.
Anyway, it's quite a high threshold. Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet—it needs some work. It's not like you can just run around outdoors and fish or live off the land. You can't live off the land on Mars. So it's really quite a lot of work that's required to make that work.
So Dragon—amazing amount of progress with Dragon, and an incredible track record of success. As of last year, the Dragon fleet's time on orbit exceeded the Space Shuttle fleet. We had cumulative over 1,300 days of time on orbit as of last year. So Dragon has now had more days in orbit than the entire Space Shuttle fleet. It's like, wow. And Dragon has now visited the Space Station more times than the Space Shuttle as well. This is an incredible achievement by the Dragon team.
As I was saying, this really has been—incredible. 2023 was like maybe the best year in company's history. I mean, it was the best year in the company's history, actually. So there's a lot of great things to go through. And I'm not one who gives out false praise, so that's really mind-boggling what you've achieved. All of the missions last year used a flight-proven Dragon. These Dragons had all flown before. And this year we're looking to fly maybe seven or eight Dragon missions. So it's really been a fantastic success by the Dragon team.
This doesn't have audio—there's no sound in space. That's a great-looking spacesuit and Dragon interior. So we've now sent 42 humans to orbit. To be precise, space is relatively easy, but orbit is very difficult. We've now taken 42 humans to orbit and back. And I have to say, if there's one thing I wish for, it is that we bring them all back safely. If I had one wish, that's what it would be.
We also have now completed a second crew arm in Florida. We've got two launch pads that are capable of sending astronauts to orbit. This is going to be great for being able to shift missions between Pad 40 and Pad 39A.
We've got our first spacewalk, and so we've got to redesign the suit so that you can actually move around in it and you don't just—like, if you just inflate the suit, you're basically one of those balloons at a party. So it's quite hard to still be mobile in an inflated suit and have the joints move and stuff. And then we will actually evacuate the whole spacecraft, so everyone, even those that don't go on the spacewalk, will still be in vacuum. So obviously very important that it work—you don't want a little hole in the suit or something.
But I think, obviously, we're going to put a lot of testing into this. But this is going to be another significant milestone, which is to have a suit where you can be in the vacuum of space with nothing at all and just be out there. It's hard to conceive the concept of nothingness. It's not technically nothing—there's a small number of particles per cubic meter—but it's pretty damn close to nothing. If you lose too much oxygen, that's it—there's no place to get oxygen from. So like an airplane even at high altitude can increase pressurization pumps and get more atmosphere because there's atmosphere around you. Dragon springs an oxygen leak and that oxygen leak is too significant, there's no place to get oxygen—you're just going to die. So the requirements for getting everything perfect are insane. Everything's got to be absolutely perfect to work. I mean, we did not evolve to live in space, obviously. So it's a tough one, but this is really going to be another great milestone—to actually have someone floating out there in the vacuum of space and come back.
And we do want to have a space suit that you can walk around in, because if you're on the Moon or on Mars, you want to be able to walk around. So having a high-mobility space suit that isn't crazy expensive, ideally, and that you can walk around in comfortably is a big deal. It's actually an important thing that needs to be developed and ultimately made in large numbers. Because if we send, say, a million people to Mars, that's a million space suits or a million Mars suits that you need. So we'll have to make a lot of these things.
And we're also going to launch Starlink on that flight. So coming to Starlink—this is basically a whole separate company—but we're basically rebuilding the internet in space, which is pretty wild. And I want to emphasize, it's supplemental to the terrestrial internet. Sometimes people think, well, is Starlink just going to take over and destroy all the terrestrial internet? It definitely will not. But what Starlink will do is give access to the internet to people that either don't have access, or where their access is extremely expensive, or very, very bad access.
So this is a massive enabler for improving and enabling people in remote locations to learn anything. You can basically learn almost anything for free on the internet right now. For example, MIT has all of its lessons on YouTube. You can learn almost anything if you've got an internet connection. But if you don't have an internet connection, you're limited to, I guess, books or something. So Starlink is a game changer for improving people's quality of life around the world. This might be the single—well, certainly one of the—I think it might be the number one technology that improves people's standard of living around the world. It's certainly a candidate for potentially being the most profound thing that actually improves quality of life of people around the world, which would be really something to be proud of, obviously.
So we're now introducing the V2 minis—the next-generation satellites that we're introducing to the constellation. These are twice the capacity of last year—from 88 terabits per second to 165. Our biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds. That actually makes a really big deal for the quality of internet experience. Also, if you play video games, like I sometimes do, this is important—otherwise you lose.
So that's actually a very, very hard problem, but because we're a low-Earth orbit constellation, the speed of light is—what do you think the speed of light is? 300 kilometers per millisecond. So if we're at 550 kilometers, think of it like roughly 2 milliseconds up, 2 milliseconds down. If you go up, down, up, down, it's 8 milliseconds—speed of light limitation. And then almost everything else we can actually address—we can't go faster than the speed of light yet, but we can get the rest of the time below 10 milliseconds. So then it'll be more responsive than ground internet in most cases, which is really what we're after.
We also have now launched the argon Hall thrusters, which are very low cost and use argon, which is plentiful. So we've gone from using krypton—which is not that rare, I mean if Superman did come here you'd be like, you can get some krypton, squirt gun or something like that. Krypton is a noble gas that is moderately rare, but we would actually be using a huge percentage of the world's krypton if we were launching with the Gen 2 satellites. So we moved to argon, and argon is actually extremely plentiful. In fact, right now you are breathing approximately 1% argon. So there's a lot of argon. This is really the first significant argon Hall thruster, and certainly by far the most cost-efficient and most power-efficient. Really great job by the Starlink team to create this thruster and many other upgrades.
Then there's in-space laser stuff. This is by far—I think we've now sent at least a thousand times more data, maybe 10,000 times more data over laser links in space than any other system before. I think we'll soon be like a million times more data transferred, maybe more than that, through the Starlink laser interconnects between the satellites. So we now have 9,000 active space lasers. Sort of vaguely reminds me of Dr. Evil—lasers from space. Well, I guess I made that joke a long time ago. Dragon does have a laser for docking with the space station. So it's like dragons with lasers—I mean, better than sharks with lasers.
And each link, each laser link, is capable of 100 gigabits per second, and we're looking to increase that.
So this is an animation of all the places where Starlink is active. Obviously a lot of the Starlink activations depend on country approval. So as we're able to get country approval, then you see rapid adoption within a country. And hopefully we'll get—most of the rest of the countries will get approval hopefully this year, and we'll be able to go almost worldwide. Some countries are probably unlikely to approve our system, but most countries we think we should be able to get to.
And our goal this year is to activate service in more than half of the world's population. So that would be fantastic. But I do want to emphasize—because we're all going to put this presentation online—that Starlink is supplemental to terrestrial internet. It does not replace it. Starlink does really well for low population density areas, but it is really not going to be competitive in high-density cities. It's really low-density situations, which is really where the need is. So it works well with other internet providers, is what I'm saying.
Then we've got community gateways. I'm told this is a town called Aniak in Alaska. So that's a real place. We're putting a lot more gateways down. As we increase the number of gateways, that improves latency.
We've now shipped our next-gen hardware—that's a version four of the user terminal. That allows us to lower the cost of Starlink, and we'll be introducing the Starlink Mini later this year, which can fit in a backpack. So that'll be pretty cool for anyone who wants a very portable Starlink. And we just opened our Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas. That's just about 20 minutes away from Austin. Yeah, in general, we're going to have a massive round of applause for Starlink—that is for sure—because the achievement level there is amazing. Let's just have a massive round of applause.
Yeah, sorry, it's hard to clap with this thing. The Starlink achievements are really mind-blowing. The Starlink system is an anomaly in the matrix.
And then we also just recently launched our first direct-to-cell satellites, and we were able to send text messages directly from a phone to the satellite and then back down again. We did intentionally misspell these things, by the way. Although actually, when I first saw it, I was like, is this real? It turns out it is in fact real. Some Dogecone jokes, basically. So it's kind of amazing that you can actually close the link between a phone in your hand and a satellite that's hundreds of miles away. And the satellite can hear the tiny signal that your phone is outputting—which is like such a faint whisper, it's ridiculous. But it can actually somehow hear that faint whisper and be able to communicate with a phone. I think that's one of those things—like, is that actually physically possible? But it is.
Now I do want to emphasize, this is also not a competitor to phone companies. This is something that will be supplemental. It's going to be very helpful for remote areas where there's no cell connectivity, or once in a while within a city if there is a place that has no connectivity. Starlink will be able to communicate with phones. But I think it's something on the order of seven megabits per second within a cell, and the cells are sort of hundreds of square kilometers in size. So it's really good for text messages. You could technically do video if you're the only one or if there's only a few people in that cell, like if you're in the middle of the Pacific or something. But it is something that is going to be very helpful and will, I think, save lives of people. If somebody's sort of hiking in a remote region and they get lost, well now their phone could actually work, and I think it will actually save a lot of lives, which is cool.
And then we have seven announced partnerships. So we've got T-Mobile in the US, Rogers in Canada, Optus in Australia, One New Zealand, Swisscom in Switzerland, KDDI in Japan, and Entel in Chile and Peru. And we expect to announce a number of other telco partnerships this year. So this is definitely something where we're, again, in partnership with telcos. I just basically don't want telcos to get really mad at us—that's what I'm saying. We want to support the telcos.
So this is slowed down a little. But that first launch did take a while to get off the pad. Got worried there for a second.
When that took off, I was like, wow, I can't believe it took off. That was my reaction.
I think it's incredible that we took off twice last year. I mean, even though I've been very closely involved with the Starship program from the beginning—and actually I lived out here, this is my primary residence for three years—this used to be a sandbar, basically, what we're looking at here. And now it's got an advanced rocket factory and a gigantic launchpad, and we got a whole bunch of rockets out there.
But I'm still amazed that it actually got put together and it took off. I'm like, wow. Starship is more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V. It is by far the biggest flying object ever made. And with some upgrades down the road, it'll actually be, I think, probably over 20 million pounds of thrust. Saturn V is 7.5 million, so it'll end up being three times the thrust of Saturn V. And it's going to fly a lot—it has to fly a lot. It's going to end up flying several times a day from many different locations in the world.
I think there's a pretty good chance that it does Earth-to-Earth transport as well, because the fastest way to get from one place to another on Earth is—an intercontinental ballistic missile. But just make sure you delete the nuke and add the landing part, basically. That's the fastest way to get somewhere.
And then between Flight 1 and 2, we made a number of massive upgrades. There was obviously a massive upgrade to the launch pad. We've got like over many Niagara Falls here. I mean, the water pressure is so much that if it went straight up, it would actually destroy the rocket—that's how much water pressure it is. And it worked. I actually went and looked at one of the first things I went and looked at after the second launch was to check out the launch pad, because obviously after the first launch we dug a pretty big hole. And honestly, it looked like there was no damage at all. You could just launch again, basically, for the pad itself. So it's great work by the team to radically improve the launch pad overnight.
Yeah, people always like to use the Statue of Liberty for stuff. The Statue of Liberty is not that big. I've been there—I actually climbed up the Statue of Liberty in the tiny staircase a long time ago. But anyway, this is a big rocket, and it will get bigger over time.
I don't know if you guys watched Kong versus Godzilla—it's like one of the most insane movies I've ever seen, but it's kind of entertaining in its sheer madness. The crazy thing is that our launch tower is bigger than Mechazilla, and it's going to do basically the same thing but with the arms—catch the rocket. And I tell people, yeah, we're going to catch the largest flying object ever with giant mechanical arms. They're like, 'There's no way that's real.' I mean, we could give it legs too—just give it legs and have it tromp around. That'd be pretty cool.
And then we're also going to build a second tower.
So we're going to really be launching a lot, and we're going to be upgrading one tower while we launch from another tower. So two towers is important.
There are actually so many upgrades between Flight 1 and 2 that it would actually take hours to go through them all. But one of the biggest upgrades was going from hydraulic to electric actuation of the engines. That actually saved a lot of mass and complexity. The electric TVC—it was just one of the biggest upgrades. We also massively upgraded the heat shield. The engines themselves were massively upgraded. Literally everything on the rocket—there might have been thousands of upgrades between Flight 1 and 2. So really gigantic improvements between Flight 1 and 2, and also many improvements between Flight 2 and 3.
And we've got a whole development plan to, like I said, ultimately get to a fully reusable rocket that does over 200 tons to orbit on a regular basis—full reusability.
Hot staging—I mean, hot staging was a change that was basically—I don't know, just really within a space of like three or four months, maybe less—going from just kind of separating the rocket without anything to actually lighting the upper stage engines while the first stage engines are still thrusting. And not blowing up the ship, which was an amazing achievement. I was like, wow. And it worked, so I was like, wow.
So yeah, big round of applause, guys. Wow. Flight 2 almost made it to orbit. Ironically, if it had a payload, it would have made it to orbit. Because the reason it actually didn't quite make it to orbit was we vented the liquid oxygen, and the liquid oxygen ultimately led to fire and an explosion. Because we wanted to vent the liquid oxygen—we normally wouldn't have that liquid oxygen if we had a payload. So ironically, if it had a payload, it would have reached orbit. I think we've got a really good shot of reaching orbit with Flight 3, and then a rapid cadence to achieve full and rapid reusability.
I mean, the kind of mind-blowing thing is like—there is an actual path that we are on to make life multi-planetary. Can you freaking believe that? Like, what? We just got to get done before civilization ends. But I think a thing is going to happen right here.
So in terms of getting there, we want obviously to accelerate the production and testing, get to a high cadence. For any given technology development, how many iterations do you have and what is the amount of time between each iteration? Every time we launch, we learn. Every time we launch or do a test, we learn something more. So increasing that cadence of launching and testing—and it's always better to sacrifice hardware rather than sacrifice time. Like, time is the one true currency. So it's the fastest path to, as I was saying earlier, rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.
So we've got a version two ship that will be more reliable, better performance, endurance. We've got a version three ship design that will stretch—will be even taller, probably end up being, I don't know, 140 meters before it's all said and done, maybe 150 in the end, in terms of length. So believe it, even taller than it currently is.
With Flight 1, the goal was not to blow the pad up and ideally get some distance, which we did. With Flight 2, it was to get past staging—so we achieved the goal of getting past staging and almost orbit. And then Flight 3, we want to get to orbit, and we want to do an in-space engine relight from the header tank and prove that we can reliably de-orbit. We want to do a tipping-point header dome propellant transfer—this is important for the NASA Artemis program. And we want to also demonstrate the payload door for the sort of Pez dispenser for delivering the Starlink—the really giant satellites to orbit.
Like I said, the mass to orbit, ultimately, of Starship will be—over time, I think—millions of tons of payload to orbit. So compared to present-day mass to orbit, it'll be more than a thousand times greater than mass to orbit currently. That's what it will be eventually, or it needs to be.
We also want to demonstrate on-orbit refilling. This is very important for the NASA Artemis program. We're very proud to be part of the NASA Artemis program. I'm always incredibly grateful to NASA for their support and for trusting us to take astronauts to orbit, to transport cargo to the space station, and to be an integral part of getting astronauts back to the Moon.
One of the other questions I get a lot is, 'Did we really go to the Moon?' I've gotten that from a lot of people. And I'm like, yes, we went to the Moon—more than once, in fact. But the crazy thing is that it's been over half a century since we last went to the Moon.
You know, that's—maybe that's what causes people to be skeptical: how come we can't go to the Moon now? It was 66 years from the first controlled powered flight of the Wright Brothers in 1903 to landing on the Moon in '69—so only 66 years. But over 50 years have passed since we last went to the Moon. But now we're going to get back there, and we're going to go back there soon. And we're not going to go just once—I think the next step is to build a Moon base. Like Moonbase Alpha—make sci-fi real. Not remove the fire part of sci-fi.
But in order to go and land on the Moon, one of the technical challenges we have to solve is orbital refilling—where the Starships dock on orbit and transfer propellant. We've gotten very good at docking, because we dock with Dragon to the space station, which is actually more complicated than docking with our own spacecraft. So we have a lot of expertise in docking, and I'm confident we will solve this. We just ideally want to solve it hopefully by the end of this year, but certainly by next year. That's a big deal—this is one of the fundamental technologies that's necessary to build a city on Mars and to have a Moon base.
And then we'll also be launching some very big satellites—the world's biggest pizza pans. We do hope to do this by the end of this year.
More about the NASA Human Landing System. As I said, we're extremely grateful to NASA for entrusting us with a fundamental part of the Artemis program. We want to make sure we do a great job for NASA. We are a very fundamental part of the Artemis program, so if we do not succeed—which we will—but in order for the Artemis program to succeed, we must succeed with Starship. And like I said, we actually want to far exceed what NASA's asked us to do. We want to go far beyond the NASA requirements and actually be able to put enough payload on the Moon with enough frequency that you could actually have a permanently occupied Moon base. That's the next really big threshold from Apollo—is to have an actual Moon base.
I remember seeing this—I guess kind of cheesy sci-fi show a long time ago called Moonbase Alpha. I don't know if anyone's seen that, but the moon actually drifts away from Earth. Now, this is not going to happen, but it was a cool show—Moonbase Alpha. But we need a real Moonbase Alpha, and we're going to do it.
Then, as I was saying, this is the long-term goal. This is what we want Mars to look like—Starships coming and going, an incredible, beautiful Mars City, and a flourishing civilization on Mars. And ultimately we can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet with terraforming—it just needs to be warmed up, really. Then it could ultimately be an Earth-like planet, and we could bring life from Earth—we could extend life from Earth to Mars. And really, it has to be humans, because it's not going to be the dolphins. But we can bring all the creatures with us, and we can ensure that life on Earth continues on Mars, even after Earth becomes unlivable in the distant future.
So anyway, I'll go into questions.