WATCH: Elon Musk discuss Starlink Internet at MWC 2021 - Livestream

[Music] [Applause] ladies and gentlemen hello it is an absolute pleasure to be with you in person this afternoon and hello to all those watching online two thank you very much for joining us my name is justin springham i'm the publisher of mobile world live and i will be your moderator for this very special keynote session this is the big one right the keynote we've all been waiting for at mwc 21. this year seems particularly appropriate to welcome elon musk to mwc after defying all conventions in the banking industry the auto industry and the aerospace industry markets many felt were impossible to transform elon musk now plans to do the same with the connectivity industry spacex is leveraging its experience in building rockets and spacecraft aiming to launch the world's most advanced broadband internet system please welcome mr elon musk elon it is great to see you a very warm welcome from mwc um i would also like to start elon by wishing you on behalf of everyone here at mwc a very happy and somewhat belated 50th birthday happy birthday for yesterday elon [Applause] elon we're going to talk obviously about spacex the wider goals for spacex um before we do that i would love to focus on starlink now this is a plan to provide the world with broadband coverage via satellites you've actually compared the project to rebuilding the internet in space you're an engineer at heart elon what has driven you to take on this new challenge well uh there's a need for connectivity in places that don't have it right now or or where it is connectivity is very limited or very expensive um but uh if any possible like i said that's simply not available so uh you can think of starlink as filling in the gaps between 5g uh and fiber and um and really getting to the parts of the world that are the the hardest reach the the most difficult to reach uh three percent possibly five percent um and i think it really quite nicely complements uh fiber and uh and 5g nice complementary technologies you're saying and we'll dive a bit deeper into that um elon first of all give us a bit of a kind of high level overview as to how far progressed starlink actually is what have you done so far so uh we've launched and now have active over 1500 satellites um let's see the i mean there are a few interesting stats the the combined power of all the satellites is over five megawatts so there um there's over five megawatts of solar from all the satellites combined uh it's um they're capable of outputting about 30 terabytes per second of data and um and it's starting in uh actually next month um almost almost next month i should say starting in august uh we should have uh global connectivity uh for everywhere except the polls um i know as i said it's it's it's really meant for sparsely populated uh regions um so the uh because our our spot size taking talking in terms of cellular is uh quite big so we're well suited to low to medium density areas but but not too high density areas in the high density areas we will be able to serve a limited number of customers um and um but it is operational um we recently passed the strategically notable number of 69 420 active uh users um and we're i think on our way to having a few hundred thousand uh users uh possibly uh over 500 000 users um within uh 12 months so [Music] it's growing rapidly um and we're continuing to innovate the user terminal and the uh the satellite and the uh the ground stations and sort of gateways and points of presence um i think we're operational now in about 12 countries and more being added every month so it's like it's it's a nice compliment uh to fiverr and to 5g um and uh it's also uh although we can't talk about about those deals uh today because our partners are ready to announce them i think it can be quite useful to a lot of telcos for uh data backhoe uh so just you know if people have cellular stations in remote regions uh just uh using starlink for data backhaul to their network can be a very cost effective way of doing data backhoe and then notably for solving relative to say other satellite communication systems uh we are at around 500 kilometers uh whereas the the synchronous satellites are around 36 000 kilometers so latency for a sonic system is uh similar to latency for ground-based uh fiber and 5g so we're expecting to get latency down under 20 milliseconds so you can still do it it feels very fast like there's no lag and you can you can play for example competitive video games on a starting system this is a a very tough market elon i mean if we look back over the last couple of decades it has been littered with failure we go as far back as the 1990s there are big names um that no longer are with us they've tried to make satellite broadband as success you've also now got strong competition um the likes of uh of amazon and oneweb are also now attempting to launch new satellite broadband projects um what is it that that makes starling different to what's gone on in decades beforehand elon but also with your new competition as well what is it that makes you different yes um well when i gave a talk a few years ago about starlink i was asked what what's my goal for starlink and i said well our goal is not to go bankrupt because every as you point out um every other low-earth orbit communications constellation um erdogan has gone bankrupt uh now some of them have emerged from bankruptcy um but with the let's just say the original owners uh did not benefit from from those constellations um yeah they've either gone bankrupt after most of them went bankrupt before even uh deploying their constellation fully and and and even the ones that did this deploy their constellation they they saw it bankrupt you know um they did subsequently emerge from bankruptcy but you know um and obviously companies like iridium and opcom are are doing reasonably well today but not for the original uh owners um so step number one for starting is don't go bankrupt that is uh and you know and then we if we succeed in not going bankrupt then that'll be great and we can move on from there um but i do think from a technology standpoint uh starlink is uh quite different from prior leo constellations in that the technology that we're deploying is is very advanced uh what happens often with space-based technology somewhat ironically is that it tends to be older technology that exists on the ground uh so companies generally have been very conservative so they've said well we wanna we want technology that's proven to work on the ground and then we have to test it very you know for four years to make sure it's gonna work in the vacuum of space with you know a higher radiation load and that kind of thing and uh and so the technology that's generally been launched into orbit has been uh older technology and we took the opposite approach and said we're going to make technology that is uh in some ways at least more advanced than what is on the ground and we're just gonna take a chance and and uh so we have uh what's probably fair to say are the most sophisticated but the most advanced uh phase rate uh technologies that uh best of knowledge no one has not even it's not not even at that sort of military level uh it has this level of sophistication with phase-grade technology and that's that's sort of quite important for a fast-moving rear constellation because the the terminal which is user terminal that's also phase array uh and the terminal on these uh the tool and the satellite the antenna on the satellite they're both phased array so you can switch uh from one satellite that's moving rapidly overhead to another one and do so at the microsecond level so there's no you can't tell as as the system is switching over from one satellite to another there's no change in latency or data from one satellite to another um and a single satellite uh can illuminate many different uh user cell spots on the ground so and it's and it's a digital phase array system so uh we can continue to program import and reprogram the system uh to greater efficiency because it is digital so like since the best technology is the most uh advanced phase rate system in the world um so that's pretty cool um [Music] we also um have a advantage of a of a launch system that is capable of very high launch rate and capable of putting a lot of mass towards i believe um last year spacex delivered about two-thirds of all payload to orbit and this year we may deliver closer to eighty percent of all payloads orbit of earth just with that position you know so and off the remaining of course the remains he's seen for this year if we actually put close to 80 percent or payload forward but uh i've been remaining let's say roughly 20 percent about 12 percent would be china or their about and then eight percent is everyone else so the shared share uh master urban capability of the falcon 9 rocket is uh because it is reusable booster and the the fairing is reusable so we only have to make the upper stage uh is um that has never existed before um and the and the cost of mass orbit also is the lowest it has ever been so because of reusability so this is uh the two worlds work together quite well um but it has been quite an adventure learning how how to make these advanced satellites and learning how to make so many of them and the user terminals of the gateway and the satellites for example use a spacex developed uh krypton hole effect thruster um or which basically shoots out high speed ions of krypton it's kind of cool superman watch out for our satellites don't go close to them [Music] um and um just in general it's quite a clever satellite and then we're getting close to launching satellite 1.5 which has laser intersatellite links um and that will be used for especially for uh continuous connectivity over the uh arctic and antarctic regions uh or basically the for the high polar regions high the higher latitude regions um and then next year we'll start launching a version two of our satellite which which will be significantly more capable um and then you know all satellites from 1.5 onwards will have major satellite links and then we'll start getting our gateways and our points presence to really directly to the the major server centers so the data really goes directly from the user terminal right from user terminal directly to the server center so if somebody's using uh youtube or netflix or uh or a you know google search or xbox whatever the case may be uh amazon web services the the the the data flows in the shortest path possible thus minimizing latency in general so even if even if big chunks of the internet uh go down then you still have connectivity um so i'm pretty excited about the future it's looking you know we're confidence but it's looking quite positive uh and like i said uh just it serves as a as a great natural complement to um uh major talco fiber and 5g talk us through if you can elon the the finances of this huge project how much you investing in starting how much you prepared to invest in starlink well um i think especially depends on how you count investment uh it is sort of what's the total i mean one way to account investment is like what's the total amount of money invested before selling becomes positive cash flow um and um and do you how much of that do you include falcon 9 and everything we've done there um you know i think probably before we go to you know fully positive cash flow it might be it'll be at least five billion dollars uh and maybe as much as 10. um so it's quite a lot and um yeah and then if you say like well how much do we invest even after it goes positive cash flow i think what because you keep investing a great deal at that point in order to not be made um irrelevant by continued improvements in uh cellular and continued extensions of cellular or or or low-cost geosynchronous satellites uh which you know geosynchronized often can conserve a a very large swath of territory but but the total bandwidth they conserve is is not that great and the latency is high but still we we need to be able to offer our service at a you know a comparable or ideally lower rate than gto satellite connectivity um so anyway so it's basically total investment probably it's like at least five maybe 10 billion dollars and then um over time it's going to be made it's a multiple of that i don't know it could be 20 or 30 billion over time there's a lot basically yeah it is a lot of money um and to recruit that investment obviously you need customers and subscribers elon just in terms of the basics to get myself set up with a starlink dish and that's going to cost me what about 500 approximately to get started and then how much would the monthly subscriptions be yeah um so right now we're basically it's like five hundred dollars to uh order edition and basically it's about the same it's the same price everywhere in the world the only thing that changes from one country the next is are our taxes and import duties so it's the same price everywhere in the world um we're taking into account account sort of exchange rates and import duties and transport and stuff like that so um and then it's a hundred dollars a month um and um i mean to teletrack we are losing money on that terminal right now uh that terminal costs us more than more than a thousand dollars um so we obviously are subsidizing the cost of the terminal uh now we are working on um sort of uh next generation terminals that uh are you know provide the same level of capability roughly same level capability but it costs a lot less so that's one area of development for us um because obviously selling terminals for half price is not super compelling at scale um you know doing millions of that you know it's that's tricky um and uh and over time we would like to reduce the terminal cost from 500 to i don't know 300 or 250 or something like that um we do make it very easy to install so because we we knew that uh our customers would be all over the world in you know often in very remote regions uh and regions where some people have like installed their stalling terminal on a cabin high up in a mountain that doesn't even have electricity or just got it's got like a you know solar panels or something it's like not even connected to the grid so so it's like okay we have like a mountain climber or something to go install that if it needed a professional dollar so we designed our system to not need a professional installer uh you can literally take it out of the box uh and uh within less than five minutes uh have connectivity so the instructions are just two instructions um which is a point the terminal uh at the sky and plug it in uh and you can do that in either order it doesn't matter you can plug it in and then point it at the sky or point this guy and plug it in it's like pretty easy so anyone can basically make it work and um and does not need a professional installer elon you've got the mobile industry watching you today i'm sure when they came into the room or they started watching this uh wondering what impact starlink was going to have on on their business they probably wondered whether you were friend or foe you started off by talking about how you can be complementary to 5g and and fiber as well wondering if you see any potential for partnerships with mobile operators is this something you can work together on yeah in fact um so we have uh two two quite significant partnerships that um with a major country telcos um that uh i'd like to be able to announce now but but we obviously would defer to our partners to make any announcement um and we are in discussions with a number of other telcos uh also to provide uh styling access um and this is like so this is this is helpful for for backhaul it's also helpful because a number of countries have requirements that in order to receive a 5g license that you have to provide um rural coverage um and and a lot of cases the rural coverage just it does not mean it's very difficult to make the economic case for rural coverage uh so effectively the the urban customers end up subsidizing the rural customers sometimes to a very very significant degree and so in some cases just like well can you just take care of the um kind of the rural customers that are acquired by our 5g license um and and then we're like sure we'll we'll do that and it's it's the most like i said it's usually the most difficult to serve three to five percent of the customer base uh so um so those are the two sort of deals that we're doing is are are you know where a 5g licensee has a rural uh survey requirements uh except set by the government and uh and in some cases where they they do have 5g um cell towers but they the the difficulty is achieving backhaul well elon we will keep a very close eye on the uh identity of those two operators um let's take the conversation a little bit wider elon obviously spacex is relatively new to the satellite space but you are not new to operating in space i think spacex is is now more than 20 years old um you've been very open on your plans to return humankind to the moon um but you're not satisfied with that we will know that you want to go one step further uh landing landing humans on mars um i'm wondering how does starlink fit in with these overall ambitions with spacex yeah so spacex was really started with the goal of um trying to make life multi-planetary or making as much progress as possible towards making life multi-planetary um the uh you know in order to make life multi-planetary and become a spacefaring civilization uh in the true sense of the word uh the rock technology must be improved dramatically uh in particular there the holy grail for rocketry is a rapidly reusable reliable rockets rrr like a pirate so with with falcon 9 we've achieved think the most efficient reusability of any rocket to date um we've got uh boosters now that have flown uh 10 times and and some that will uh that are slated to fly 20 or 50 times so this is a lot of reuse that we're getting um we're also now getting quite good at catching the nose cone or fairing and so um when you look at the cost of the rocket you've got about uh about 60 of the cost uh depending how you counted about 60 of the cost in the first stage about 10 percent in the fairing so that means we're recovering about seventy percent of the cost of the rocket and then you've got about 27 of the class in the upper stage which is lost every time about 10 percent of the cost in the launch itself and the recovery and refurbishment process so this is really this is really a very good number for a rocket um but we still need to uh take us to another level with and that's why we have the starship development which is much bigger up if it's biggest rocket ever developed it will have more than twice the thrust of the saturn v moon rocket and is designed for full and rapid reusability so this is with a with a hundred ton uh to orbit capability possibly with with further refinements 150 times to orbit um and uh with the ability to launch with no zero expected reverb publishment between flights but like so like an airplane um moreover it uses a lower cost of propellant uh so it's a three and a half to one mass ratio of uh oxygen to fuel and the fuel is uh liquid methane which is the lowest cost fuel in the world and the pressure uh is uh autogenous uh oxygen and methane gas uh instead of helium with uh falcon 9. uh so bug lamp uses helium uh it's used as a rocket propellant jet fuel essentially which is actually quite expensive and helium for pressure which is quite expensive and so the the the cost of propellant for sasha even though is much bigger will be really comparable to the cost of falcon 9 but it will have full and rapid reusability so the crazy thing is that if things go as according to plan we'll have a rocket with a 100 ton to old capability that uh has a marginal cost for launch of around two million dollars which is less than a little falcon one rocket that we started out with and then was it with the rocket like with stalling or was starship i should say um uh when you add in orbital refilling um years which really means that uh two starships need to dock on orbit uh one at one for uh transferring propellant to the other sort of like like aircraft uh aerial refueling but there's orbital refilling uh primarily of oxygen then you can deliver over a hundred tons to the surface of the moon or mars possibly 200 tons so um starship is is uh the first system that will be capable of building a a base on the moon and a city on mars and when will we see starship elon you can see it's a progress online right now it's just quite followed quite rigorously on the internet um in fact often if i want to see what the latest thing is i just go on the internet because it's being developed in south texas on right next to a public road so never remembers the public have a telephoto lenses pointed at our vehicle um so we're hoping to do our first uh orbital launch attempt in the next um next few months um and we'll certainly have a booster and a ship an orbital cable booster and an oval cable ship and the uh overall launch site will all be ready within the next month or so i also understand that there may be a rocket launch later today in just a few hours yes this is a another falcon 9 launch uh this is one of our transporter missions where we do a whole bunch of small satellites from uh mostly from uh third parties so it's um but this is like this is sort of like the cone of like uh like a bus uh you know just many many small satellites from many different parts of the world that are not ours uh are being launched into orbit hopefully uh successfully understand elon we only have a couple of minutes left um just as a kind of closing thoughts and and reflections elon i mean all this week at mwc um it's obviously been great to come back to events in person we've been talking a lot about leadership this week um and as a leader you seem to be mission driven and i'm wondering what kind of criteria you look for when when you take on new challenges because you do you seem to go for challenges and not just necessarily opportunities um you know what what what kind of gets you really excited well yeah yeah i suppose so the what spacex's trying to do is to uh extend consciousness the scope and scale of consciousness beyond earth um and um and then what tesla is trying to do is to sort of ensure that life is good on earth uh you know with sustainable energy um and um your link is sort of oriented towards um long-term ai human symbiosis so i mean generally these companies are oriented towards like what uh what actions can i think of to do to maximize the probability of the future is good um and and that that future includes the expansion of the scope and scale of consciousness um and this is based on my fundamental philosophy of you know we don't really know what all the answers are or even what questions to ask but if we're able to expand the scope of scale consciousness then we are better able to know what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe with that elon sadly we are out of time it has been an absolute pleasure to talk with you today uh we've been delighted to host you at mwc thank you so much for your time i'd also like to say obviously we've been talking to you virtually the invitation is there if you would ever like to come to mwc in person perhaps february 22 we would love to host you again thank you so much for your time best of luck with the starlink project and obviously the wider spacex program ladies and gentlemen please give the biggest hand to mr elon [Music] musk thank you very much thank you thank you [Applause] elon [Music] you

Channel: CNET Highlights

Views: 329,661

Keywords: event, livestream, 2020, live

Id: RcnVTgrgThE

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ericandcat]

Lmao he actually said the 69,420 thing