Elon Musk, Satellite 2020 Conference, Washington DC, March 9, 2020

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Falcon 9 at the time and when I asked you what's what's the point of all this you said to send human beings back into space on a u.s. built rocket from a US built facility so that we could permanently reset all other other planets and here we are we're right on the brink here of sending humans back into space the crew dragon is in Cape Canaveral how do you feel that you're on the doorstep here yeah it's great that we're about to launch people to orbit it's been a long time a long road 18 years yeah good kid could be a kid could be in college right now is it like sending your kid off to college well we haven't done it yet but it's a long time you're packing you're packing the bags you're ready to go can you talk about the talk about the the road from the space shuttle to the crew dragon I can talk about the the what are some of the challenges that you faced in creating a human rated space fluh spacecraft for for human spaceflight well where are some of the challenges that you encountered along the way well the thing that the thing that concerns me most right now is that unless we improve our rate of innovation dramatically then there is no chance of a base on the moon or a city on Mars not I'll be like yeah this is my biggest concern crew dragon was we've already taken it to the space station aback everyone aware that we just had like basically a dummy you know so and it's us what then we're done massive amount of testing you know pushing all the corner cases and just a truly ridiculous amount of testing it's like definitely had us off to the dragonish years and supporting team at NASA for going through a truly staggering number of tests now that now that that said dragon really is just a low Earth whole but transport vehicle it's it's really just it's capable of taking a few people at what is still a very high cost to Earth orbit I technically we could send people around the moon on Dragon but I'm not sure it one too it's do too small so it it's good good to get this done but it's I think we need to be very careful of getting stuck in a local maximum and you know the Space Shuttle was something that was really stuck in a local maximum for a long time and yeah we don't want to be that situation I mean frankly why is why does all you still fly I'm a car live is probably turning in his grave right now interesting it's this dream quite it was designed in the fifties yeah right right if you told them I just told car 11 the other guys that that still reversal we flank Sawyer's in 2020 they'd be like that's crazy here we are so we don't want to be that situation you know it's a solid vehicle it's just like it's time to move on right right and so we you know we started late I sourced a lot of these questions from that from the public in the audience we're also going to do a Q&A here so I'm just gonna jump right into the questions that we received so I mean the most popular question we got was like what are the greatest challenges are the biggest challenges we face expanding our presence in space and exploring and eventually resettling new worlds there's really just one thing that matters that is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that that's the one thing that matters and it needs to be reasonably big or your payload to non payload ratio will be kind of whacked you know what would be good so just like you wouldn't want a super tanker going like you know container ships you have a container ship with thousands of containers you don't you know have like a bunch of tiny ships with little outboards on them cruising across the Pacific that would be silly so you have big ships when you want to go long distances with the Cirrus cargo so we need a fairly big but definitely rapidly and completely reusable rocket this is the fundamental thing without that we're nowhere and what level of reusability is SpaceX actively pursuing for for Falcon 9 for Dragon for starship I think Falcon diner dragon have the there are asymptoting that their their type their technology architectures asymptoting meaning like it it really would not make sense to have a block six Falcon nine you know from where we are right now it just doesn't make sense that's why we have a big focus in terms of new technology development on starship for Falcon and Falcon and Dragon are kind of like operational vehicles at this point so they're that they're good products they're operational but but there's not really we need a whole new architecture and that's what starship is about and Sasha needs to be fully and completely reusable and rapidly so I mean it's it's being designed for about an you know to TV really want relaunched an hour after landing with with zero nominal work like it is you could have scheduled maintenance you or you could have like something like a spoke issue just like commercial aircraft but you're expected do the only thing you expect to change on a regular basis is propellant and it's got to be fast so yeah now that for the ship you you're gonna wait unless you're launching due east from the equator you better have figure out some way to get get bush the ship over or ground track to pass over the landing site otherwise you're too far away so the ship maybe it might take you know three orbit for orbits maybe to get back over the the launch site but it but I think we want to aim for a capability of three flights a day for the show most of which is taken up with getting the orbital you know ground track to come over the launch site mm-hmm and then an hour for everything else and you know everybody's interested in in the the mission to Mars planetary resettlement I'm talking about reusability for the launch vehicle what are your thoughts on in space resource utilization for example water oxygen soil from the moon perhaps maybe the go to Mars do you have any plans to utilize resources in space for the mission to Mars nope I mean apart from orbital refilling I think that's very important so you better so there's one exit besides a fully on or fully under Africa rapidly reusable rocket you need to also have orbital refilling or retaking that's got to be that's fundamental because then you can essentially recoup all of your mass fraction delta-v in Earth orbit you can leave with full tanks and it could be from immediate low Earth orbit or you know something that's maybe elliptical or something like that if you want to go higher energy but that's that's crucial for getting to to March the moon is neither here nor there I mean the using moon would be like okay if you want to cross the Atlantic maybe you want to go to Iceland probably know that you know but you know to visit sure but you know it's not like a mandatory stop you know so and also for the mission to Mars what advancements we talk a lot about hardware and physics problems and then what about advancements in software you know we didn't bring this up and recently a familiar with the game designer Jonathan Blow he referenced you in a keynote he was given and he said that you you had talked about technology naturally decays because skills natural fade and one of the things he identified was a decay in software the degradation in software is this something we have to address in doing something like going to Mars and since all of the stuff runs on software well software is an increasing part of any piece of technology I mean Tesla the car is extremely configurable it's basically like a laptop on wheels so software matters enormously there and really for example for full autonomy the only gating factor is software the hardware is all there that's required it has been for last couple years well the final piece hardware was upgrading the computer to have more compute power so software is extremely important the point you're relating to which is that you know I was referring to as technology does not automatically improve right people are used to the phone being better every year oh and I mean iPhone user but I think like some of the recent software updates have been like not great certainly feeding it to that point like broke my email system let me put the like quite fundamental so yeah there sure is a lot of software out there and some of its like the people that wrote it are retired or maybe dad you know so like now how do you fix it it's gonna be an issue and we definitely need a lot more smart people working software and not just troubleshooting old problems no just troubleshooting old problems it's actually very important to retire old code bases and and not just maintain the forever because the the difficulty of maintaining them becomes extremely high and at some point you just gotta read you the code base so we'll come back to the Mars mission because I know we've got some audience questions on that you know we're at a satellite conference I'm gonna ask you some questions about satellites StarLink what's the long-term vision for StarLink how do you see the role of StarLink as it relates to mobile broadband and 5g sure so I mean that both the whole purpose of SpaceX is really to help make life multiplanetary and then but the revenue potential of launching rocket launching satellites servicing the space station why not that's you know type taps out around three billion dollars a year but I think providing broadband is more like an order of magnitude more than that probably thirty billion a year as a rough approximation and we're still like probably below five percent at that point so it's not like I want to be clear like so like stalling cuz some huge threat to telcos I want to be super clear it is not in fact it will be helpful to telcos because start like what will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with with landlines or even with with cell radio stations with cell cell towers 5g is great for high-density situations like being here in DC or you know New York's I'm Cisco that kind of thing 5g is great for high-density situations but it's actually not great for the the countryside you know for rural areas it's it's not it's not great you need you need range and so in any any kind of sparse environment five days is really not not well suited but it's great great for in it for for City Denton city situations so StarLink will effectively serve the I don't know three or four percent hardest to reach customers for telcos or people who simply have no connectivity right now or the connectivity is really bad so I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos and I was I was gonna ask you what customers you know we're ideally suited for StarLink but I guess since you mentioned that it would be it would be these three to four percent at the very something like that at the very edge what is the customer experience like been for those people and what's the cost of acquiring those services well it will be a tribute a good experience because it'll be very low latency and we're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds so somebody could could play a fast response video game at a competitive level like that's the threshold for the latency so then and bandwidth the bandwidth is a very complex question but let's just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies play it play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed right and then the challenge for anything that is space-based is that the the size of the cell is gigantic so it's like said it's great for for very low - maybe maybe mediums sort of sparsity situations but it's not it's not good for high density situations so we'll have some small number of customers in LA but we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough what is what is the equipment on the ground look like for this yeah I'm so good the ground equipment just looks like well exercising it looks like a little you it looks like a UFO on a snake so the at least the version one of the uses hem '''l will actually have actuators on it so that it can it can improve the pointing accuracy so you don't have to do that it's very important that you don't need a specialist ourself to install the goal is that this the instructions in the box will there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order a pointed sky plug-in you do it eat the order see you it doesn't matter and it will work plug and play literally but also point it's guy was I can't see the satellites you can't see the satellites you can't see you just wanted to talk about just some of the design concerns that were raised by astronomers you can talk about a little bit about how you working maybe working with astronomers to alleviate these concerns or are you working on the designer altering it or are the concerns overblown I mean how do you feel about what has been raised I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries zero that's my prediction will take corrective action if it's above zero so you're not giving like Orion a hat or anything things no I mean this there's a so much people get a little excited because when when the satellites are first launched that they're they're tumbling a little bit so they were like they're kind of like they're gonna blink and because they haven't stabilized and then and they're they're raising their orbit so they're they're lower than you'd expect and they're kind of necessarily gonna reflect in ways that it's not the case when they're on orbit but now the other the satellites are on orbit I'll be impressed if if somebody can actually tell me where where all of them are I've not met someone who can tell me where all of them are not even one person interesting so that I mean it can't be that big of a deal we are tasting fair we are actually working with senior members of the the the science community and antenor astronomers to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites so you know we're and we're running a bunch of experiments too for example just have a paint the phase array antenna black instead of white and we're working on a a sunshade because that there there are like certain angles where if a Sun gets you know just sort of just right and there's not like a little sunshade we're not talking about a lot here then you can get a reflection and so we were launching a sunshade changing the color of the satellites and otherwise minimizing the the potential for any impact even like it aesthetically this this should not be an impact I think recently when shot well in Bloomberg was quoted as saying that you know you were exploring splitting StarLink from SpaceX did you talk a little bit about that why that would happen and how you see both of these independent companies functioning and just talk a little bit about that you were thinking about that zero was that we're thinking about that what zero zero zero not thinking about it at all we need to make the thing work it's it's far from obvious that I mean it's real important to just set the stage here for leoch communications constellations guess how many Leo constellations didn't go bankrupt zero right 0y iridium is doing okay now but the iridium one went bankrupt Volcom went bankrupt Globalstar bankrupt Teledesic bankrupt imma leaving it without this bunch of others that didn't get very far also in bankrupt anyway the word bankrupt so you're focusing on making it work first not to bankrupt right I'm not gonna there's a big there would be a big staff have like more than 0 in the not bankrupt category how would you I mean with how does it work then with the the business of SpaceX since you're like I mean you are launching other constellations is that is that an issue does that cause like a conflict or we're launching out the constellations or you're launching other satellites oh yeah sure whatever yeah no problem of course so there's no like yeah even if I can have a good deal like no problem you know I want constellation on SpaceX sounds good to me so I mean I think that you know I think there's there's the world seems to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth so we're certainly happy just launched other satellites and you know we don't think StarLink is gonna destroy all other satellites or something like that or definitely not alright yeah we were just want to be in the not bankrupt category that's our goal since your since you're now the company of SpaceX now you know you're you're building you're launching satellites are you are you looking at expanding the business of SpaceX and other areas of commercial satellite connectivity maybe like we talked a little bit about the you know you're already building like technology on the ground are there other areas that you're looking to get into in terms of commercial space connectivity or satellite services no we're there's just this two major new technology programs at SpaceX that's StarLink and starship like it's kinda has star in the name of a too much if we were just called like Lincoln ship if you divide the one by the other these stars net out and then was just making sure that's it or as I know anyway it would be some secret project that's the secret I even I don't know about it you don't have a business under the chairs I don't think there's anything major so I want to I want to give time for the people in the audience to ask some questions but you know we talked about starship so development at Boca Chica is moving on pretty quickly and yeah actually that was a real reason as ladies because that broke chica my apologies it was just working on starship with the team there so it's pretty cool out there actually I like it tell us a little bit about the work that's underway what we can expect in the future for for starship well we're building a production line for production line is the hard part you're making one of something it is well at this point you know like frankly designing rockets not that hard especially with an expendable rocket just not really a hard problem you could literally read books they'll tell you exactly how to do it the hard part is now actually building that thing even once is hard and then building a production line is a thousand percent harder like at least a thousand percent harder yeah maybe more so just in general production and manufacturing is underappreciated I think especially in the u.s. frankly so we should really pay a lot more attention and care a lot more about manufacturing this is yeah this is an honest day's work let me tell you what inspired some of the design aesthetics of the spacecraft and it's stainless steel it's a it's a striking design versus basically what would inspired a you know your vision for the way it looks way it functions like Wyatt why stainless steel why well we were going to make it out of advanced composites and the advanced composites that cost like $60 a pound over 60 dollars a kilogram like a little more than that maybe a hundred thirty dollars a pound and there was 60 to 120 plies for the the tank it was taking forever he wasn't making a good progress cost crazy money and I was like okay switching to aluminum lithium is also a pain in the neck would you that that's what we use for the Falcon 9 tanks because it's hard to weld because of the reactivity of the lithium so you know what's easy to weld steel Steel's really easy to world and stainless steel doesn't even require paint that sounds great because the paint chops are pain in the neck and you won't try painting something that's got to go to drop to cryogenic temperatures and then band a lot it's like forget it I mean that paint wants to come off like the no tomorrow it does not like to stake so then you could use special paint and then the special paint also can't you get like when you're going vertically at like supersonic you get the basically static electricity build-up called tribal electrification although it reminds me the trouble of Troubles but you can basically zap yourself if you have paint that the wrong paint yeah so there ain't no paint is great yeah so we need a big friggin big-ass paint shop for starship well it's problem to think one less problem and paint doesn't weigh zero you know they these to paint the the shuttle external tank white but didn't like like well we're adding a lot of weight to this thing and it's big pain in the neck so we'll just have it stay orange so just not painting it's great so then you know and we're not the first to use steel like they used 301 in the early atlas program Charlie Bossert I think it was I think was his idea and obviously other people involved but Charlie boss said by the way that guy's underappreciated he kicks ass it's really great to read about it as stuff he's awesome so he's 301 so obviously it's not a new alloy I think we're gonna start switching to a different alloy pretty soon and then just treat the alloy constituents because we should be able to better in 2020 then they were that they did unlike the 50s you know so I mean come on so I think we'll probably start switching away from 301 maybe that next month or two now the funny thing is that like I actually knew that steel especially 301 full hard steel couldn't be that heavy because the original atlas had a very good mass fraction right so it can't be that wrong with that and if you look at the normal sort of standard material sheet for the 301 it will usually not tell you what that it work hardens dramatically and improves the strength dramatically with work hardening and also at cryogenic temperatures it improves strength dramatically so then the if you combine the work hardening with the the cryo strength improvement you get an effective strength weight that is about the same as advanced composite now if you will generally make a mistake with composites because they'll look at the material sheet and not realize that okay with composites you could have a big knockdown because you basically have composites or string and glue and so you and and you can't just like have like let's say you with your problem cause for having four pliers of carbon you can't just have four players you need like five or six because in case you damage one or something like that and you say what's your worst-case allowable for a d' bond or something like that so the actual knockdown you end up taking for composites is more than you would for a metal structure so people often so it's like a classic movie mistake is to overrate carbon fiber because you just you look at the material data sheet and it looks like an obvious move but it's not so Airy so at cryogenic temperatures the steel is has a de facto strength weight about the same as advanced composite but that doesn't not even counting the fact that you have to paint the composite during to paint this deal then there's a another factor which is if you want to have a reusable vehicle it's gonna get hot composites don't like getting a lot so you know typically your your composite maybe is comfortable up to around 150 200 Celsius something like that you know and things start getting pretty sketchy around 250 C I mean like you start having to use advanced resins and all that kind of thing so whereas Steel's pretty happy at a thousand see you know nope no problem with at 500 considered fiber at sea all day and brief periods of a thousand C no problem so then for a reasonable vehicle you now need zero heat shielding on the leeward side nobody you need some heat shielding just Souter due to radiative heating the bank so you don't have a lot of convective heating at hypersonic would you have radiative heating and then you can thin out the windward side of the heat shield because the thickness of the of the heat shield tile is driven by the temperature on the backside of the tile where it mounts to the primary structure so if your primary structure can take a high heat that means you can thin out the tile so think of it like these like like oven mitts or something you know if you have like how hot can your hand go and that has sets how thick your oven mitt is right so then you can have like I said no no he chilled on the leeward side on it and then heat shield on the windward side so now your actual total mass of a steel of a reasonable Steel's spacecraft is less than that of the most advanced carbon fiber vehicle and you could possibly imagine yeah Wow does it happen by accident by the way it may sound like some great insight but it actually happened because we were moving too slowly on composite and I was like we cannot move the slowly or we'll go back up so just do this with steel so yeah I mean the design has to be focused on problem-solving otherwise you're going to spend too much time trying to figure it you don't start with it yeah yeah I'm like sort of taken to management management by rhyming if the schedule is scheduled as long your design is wrong all right very true it's good good point yes with that I want to go to some audience questions we asked the audience through the the app to submit this question so I believe we have a few that we've pulled here so we've got some over here can we and can you come closer over here so we can we can see you let's say alright our first question hello I'm Jane Zundel I'm a graduate student Stanford my question for you is as you look back on your career in the space industry what has been the most surprising or unexpected challenge that you faced and along those lines if you were to go back in time and talk to your 20 year old self would you do anything differently go back in time do your 20 year old self I mean I think if I get it I think it would make a far fewer mistakes I would see if I could guard like it here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do please do not hear them yeah I'd be a very long list and like here let me hire you write it down or something you know I mean it's a hindsight 20/20 so it's hard to say I mean number of I've made so many foolish mistakes I have a lot count honestly I mean some of these things I just wish I liked just like that's a simple sort of mantra management by rhyming I mean it it worked for Homer okay the management of our rhyming is the thing I was saying like if but if the schedules long the design is wrong we've overcomplicated the design many times and I think you should just gone with a simpler design with the acid test being how long will it take to for this to fly and if it's can take a long time don't do it do something else if you look at say Falcon 9 I you know it's got a aluminum lithium tank but then the unpressurized structures are carbon fiber composite and really one of the worst possible things you could do to a joint is take something with a high coefficient of thermal expansion high CTE put it go take it from room temperature to cryo and then connect it to something that has zero CTE you know basically zero I would like a carbon fiber so now you've got a real pain in the asteroid basically so in order for that to work you've got at the tanks got a shrink radially and you've got these super expensive heavy bolts that are like a beam in bending across you know that are then taking load into the interstage and they just really want to share off or snap off this is crazy you know really should just have a continuous metal structure but that's obvious that should be done they'd be way better you know things expand to fully available resources so then like or sometimes you should say no to things that you that you don't you know like the original Felton one team which the the fairing tanks engines or everything pretty much was maybe a little over a hundred people now SpaceX is like six thousand people I think some like now so really really just is it I simplify your product as much as possible you know and then like I think of some of the ways which how does the SWAT engineer make dumb mistakes included you know is optimized something that shouldn't exist don't optimize something that shouldn't exist if people are trying to do this in college you can't say no to the professor you know this is gonna give you the the exam and you've got to answer all the questions or they will get angry so and give you a bad grade so then you be always optimize the yours answer the question all the times you should say this is the wrong question all right in fact the question is definitely wrong to some degree just how long and I think to just generally taking the approach that your design is some degree wrong probably a lot more than you think your goal is to make it less wrong over time we have that it's good right another question hi my name is Julie 7 sage and mr makovski have said in the past that you think that college degrees shouldn't be that important and that I've been showed in job listings in places such as Tesla however in places like sis industry including even at SpaceX in the satellite development area many of the job listings say that you need at least a bachelor's degree and prefer at least a master's degree so my question to you is with more jobs asking for higher levels of degrees where the scholarships are not changing amounts and that is getting harder and harder every year to pay tuition even with using scholarships how can colleges and industries make it easier to afford college but at the same time being able to pay grad students and employees well and also to make sure that there is a large-scale access to good colleges especially to underprivileged communities so that everyone can be a part of the future rebuilding thank you well first of all you don't need college to learn and learn stuff ok everything is available basically for free you can learn anything you want for free it is not a question of learning there there is a value that colleges have which is like you know seeing whether somebody's it's can't somebody work hard at something including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments and and kind of soldier through and get it done you know that's that's like the main value of college and then also you you know if you you if you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people you're on edge for a while instead of going tractor right into the workforce so I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning there it is I know we started late and I know wait we we don't have much time left but to build on Julie's question here how does somebody like you with a very long term mission of going to Mars how are you cultivating the next generation of leadership to take you there I mean this is this is a long term project you might we might not be around to see us finally resettle on Mars or maybe maybe no I mean I hope I'm not dead by the time I people go to Mars that would be a great great outcome I think it might be you know if we don't improve our pace of progress I'm definitely you know gonna be dead before we go to Mars so I'm just like would like to not be dead when by the time we go to Mars that's my aspiration here so if it's taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people to orbit we better improve our rate of innovation or you know based on past trends I am definitely gonna be dead before Mars so we're going to improve our pace of innovation a lot so yeah I guess what I'd say is you I can tell you can see you how do you communicate that vision you have to that to the somebody who could maybe take over for what you're doing and to see things the way you're seeing them in terms of the mission well we have a lot of good good people at SpaceX that a lot of really talented people in fact I wonder like sometimes how we can make use of their talents in the best way because you know I think we're often not using their talents in the best way yeah but you know to the point of the question I've just asked I'm gonna make sure tell so recruiting does not have anything that says requires university because that's absurd but there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability like you just can't if you're trying to do something exceptional they must have evidence of exceptional ability I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability in fact ideally you dropped out and did something I mean obviously you know look at like you know gates a pretty smart guy he dropped out jobs pretty smart he dropped out you know Larry Ellison smart guy he dropped out like obviously not needed so did Shakespeare even go to college probably not well I'm thank you so much I wish we could take more audience questions I know we have it we have a hard stop but thank you you on for stopping by thank you let's give him a round of applause for stopping by and speaking to us did you have rest of your evening and thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Space Policy and Politics

Views: 64,231

Rating: 4.8453712 out of 5

Keywords: Elon Musk, SpaceX, Starlink

Id: ywPqLCc9zBU

Length: 47min 19sec (2839 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020