Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship Technical Presentation shocked the entire industry!

vehicles pitching code range. There goes another one. Using Starlink, we're we're operating at just a much higher frequency. Yeah. So, the the the why, it's always important to explain the why of things. And the the why of Starship is that uh we want to be a multilanet species to extend consciousness beyond Earth. I think for two main reasons. One is to ensure the long-term survival and prosperity of life as we know it in consciousness. Um which if we are a multilanet species and ultimately a multi-stellar species out there among the stars, the probability of survival is much much longer. Um that's kind of the you know defensive aspect or life insurance for life collectively. But then there's also they also need to be things that are inspiring and exciting and that give you reason to live. Life cannot just be about solving one tragic problem after another. There must be also reasons to get get up in the morning and be excited about the future. And a future where we are a space ring civilization is infinitely more exciting than one where we are not. Yeah. this the the SpaceX team has done an incredible job of building out um really the the most advanced rocket uh manufacturing facility that has ever existed. This this is far beyond any rocket fabrication facility that has ever been built. This is essentially alien level technology and it was all built here uh basically down by the rear Grand River and close to the beach. It's an incredibly improbable location and this used to be a sandbar. I think we're about, you know, 3 ft or about a meter above sea level. Um, so, um, it's it really was was nothing. If you see the time lapse from, uh, Sandbar to, uh, two two launch towers um, and a gigantic rocket factory with, uh, with high bays and we're going to be building something called the gigabay, which is like a one of the the largest enclosed volumes on Earth. Uh so so it's sort of like a gigantic Borg cube uh that we're going to be building here for uh you know for for building and storing these uh gigantic rockets. Uh it's really spectacular and anyone can come and visit. So the because we're on a public highway um and we're literally by a public beach uh you can actually come and see the rocket. You can you quite close up. I mean, you can drive past it and uh and you can also look at the factory and anyone could do this from anywhere in the world. So, just you can come and visit and and check it out. I think it's pretty cool that it's just not right now. Just not right. Just not right now. Just not when we're launching because there's some safety issues, but but the but the rocket's often just just sitting on the pad without any propellant in it and then you can just you can just come here and visit. It's very easy. Yeah. Yeah, we're aiming for ultimately thousands of ships to be built per year, which is what's needed in order to uh construct a city on Mars that is self-sustaining. And the the major fork in the road of destiny will be when uh the Mars city is capable of surviving even if the resupply shifts from Earth stopped coming for any reason. And that reason could be something cataclysmic or it could be that it that civilization simply subsided. Um there's always this debate throughout history of will civilization end with a a bang or a whimper. But either way um if the the critical thing is to get to the point where Mars is self- sustaining and can survive even if the resupply ships stop coming for any reason which means that you need to build an entire base of industry on Mars in order for Mars to survive. for example, it's not simply enough to build a chip uh you know like a computer like a computer chip factory, but you need the ability to build computer chip factories. Um so this is this is going to really take a lot of tonnage. I mean my my guess is at least a million tons to the surface of Mars and um maybe it takes less than that but uh it's going to be it's going to be a lot. Um but this is this is a very exciting future. Uh it's one which will ensure the long-term uh survival and prosperity of of life and consciousness and and it's the critical stepping stone uh to get from uh this solar system to uh other star systems and perhaps go out there and explore and and perhaps we'll encounter uh alien civilizations that maybe maybe they're alive now but or maybe they enjoyed a period of prosperity for millions of years and but also died out millions of years ago. So it's uh humbling to think of the age of the universe according to the standard model of physics being approximately 13.8 billion years old. So uh an incremental million years would would be uh three digits past the decimal point. And if you look at say our civilization and measure our civilization by uh the first evidence of writing which is about 5,500 years ago um civilization as measured from the first writing is only 1 millionth of earth's existence or blip. Yeah. Yeah. Flash in the pan so far. Yeah. So there's I posted a video uh yesterday of just a a brief scan of part of the Starship factory and you can get a sense of this the scale of the factory. Um and uh yeah I guess we could talk a bit about uh why Starship is the way it is. Um you like for example like why is half of the ship uh black and half of it is silver colored and that's because uh the bottom half of the ship the bottom as seen from orbital entry is has a a heat shield on it. So the the black there is the is the heat shield and the and then the the core structure of the rocket is um a special alloy of stainless steel. Um and uh and that's where you see the the sort of shiny silver parts are stainless steel. Um the reason for steel over aluminum is that the heat of of um atmospheric entry and the heat of the the rocket engines uh is uh enough to melt easil easily melt aluminum but steel is much more resilient against both a sand heating uh but especially the uh re-entry heating and um and you don't have to paint it. uh which is um actually very difficult at to paint a large object that is going through cryogenic cycles and have the paint stay on. It's quite uh challenging and that's where Raptor really starts to come in. Most advanced engine on the planet giant lightsaber. No, that's a lightsaber and a half. Um you would get vaporized in an instant if you were standing in front of rafter. So, uh, yeah, BTO crisp in a in a like a less than a second. Um, so, yeah. So, in order for, uh, in order to create, um, a fully reusable orbital rocket, uh, you have to advance the state-of-the-art in every part of the rocket. That means the engines have to be better than any engine ever. The structures got to be better than any structure ever. You've got to um you've you've got to have um a means of bringing the rocket back to the launch pad. You've got to have a fully reusable orbital heat shield. And that no one has ever made a a fully reusable orbital heat shield. The space shuttle, for example, required um 9 months of refurbishment between flights. So the the the space shuttle heat shield would come back essentially partially broken and would require um many months of of re refurbishment in order to fly again. What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately. So um the ship both both the ship and the booster would be caught by the tower arms. Um, and the the the booster would be placed immediately back on the launch stand and the ship the ship's got to orbit Earth at least once. Um, um, and but but then could be back potentially in one orbit, but in most cases several orbits. Um, so the ship would come back several hours later, but then be caught by the arms and placed on top of the booster. You could also have multiple ships ready so that a single booster could service uh five or more ships so that you you could be flying the booster every in theory every hour. Um this is a kind of a profoundly fast speed obviously for the largest flying object by far ever made. Um, but it's the reason why we catch the tower we catch the the booster with the tower arms and the ship also will be caught with the tower arms because that's the fastest way to get the the booster and the ship back to flight. Um, if we had instead put put landing legs, which we've done before for the the the ship tests, we actually had landing legs that flipped out and the the ship would ship we've we've successfully demonstrated uh landing with legs. Um, but if you do that, if we were to do that with the booster and the ship, uh, here we'd have to, uh, land somewhere else with the legs, then lift the rocket, stow the legs, transport the rocket back to the pad with, which is, uh, very unwieldy when you've got a gigantic thing. Then it would be picked up by these tower arms and placed in the uh, launch mount. um that would that would uh delay the reusability dramatically and would add a lot of mass with the landing legs. So that's why we catch the rocket with the tower arms because it's the same tower arms that put the rocket in the launch mount um are used to catch the rocket. Uh and that means that we can put the booster back in the launch mount in less than an hour after liftoff. In fact, the booster is going to come back very fast. like you know five or six minutes later this boost is coming back one way or another or not coming back. Um so so then you really have propellant full time which can be brought down to about 30 40 minutes and that means you it is theoretically possible to fly the booster again in less than an hour. Yeah. Yeah, I mean there are thousands of engineering challenges that remain uh for both the ship and the booster, but um the single uh maybe the single biggest one is is the reusable orbital heat shield. Um we all confident uh in in making a fully reusable orbital heat shield, but it will require many flights, many iterations to figure out where the weak points are in the heat shield. uh where we need to change the design. Uh either strengthening the tile or ch or changing the the the thick the how big the gap is between tiles. Um changing what's underneath the tile. Uh there there's there's a there there's a you know 100 different variables that we could tweak um with the with the ship the ship tiles uh the heat shield heat shield tiles. Um but the only way to know exactly what we should be adjusting is uh to fly repeatedly and be able to examine the ship um upon landing. And um we we have successfully brought the ship back um through the atmosphere and achieved a soft landing multiple times. Um so we know that this is possible, but we have in the process shed many uh heat shield tiles. So, we need to be able to do this without shedding heat shield tiles and um and do so repeatedly. And and I think what you're seeing now is the Starship, this is CG of it coming in and landing on the tower, much like the booster, but there's some additional challenges there where we need to make sure we don't scrape the tiles off as we slide along the We can't shuck the heat shield. Don't crush the ship. Rapid reusability. If we shuck the If we shock the shuck the tiles, then that's obviously going to fail the reusability test. Um yeah, so the rocket garden that that Bill mentioned, um we have a actually a whole bunch of boosters and ships and we'll be adding to them over time. So you can see an evolution of Starship um just by driving down the highway. A crucial technology that we hope to demonstrate next year is this orbital refilling much like aerial refueling. It's essential for um being able to send significant payload to Mars. So you essentially send you send a ship to orbit with uh a few hundred tons of payload, sort of a filled payload bay. Uh but the once it gets to orbit, the the tanks will be mostly empty. And then you send up additional tanker ships to refill the the Mars ship's uh tank so that when it so it can thrust from Earth orbit to Mars and have enough propellant left for landing. So this is um orbital refilling is also not something that's ever been demonstrated before. So that would be a brand new technology. Uh we we have we obviously have at SpaceX figured out how to dock repeatedly with the space station. So in a lot of ways this is uh like docking. Um and um in some ways it's easier in that we're the ship where SpaceX is docking with its with its own craft. Um but no one has ever demonstrated propellant transfer uh in orbit to the best of our knowledge. And uh and so this would be propellant transfer at very large scale. And um but with full reusability and propellant transfer uh we those are the the key technologies needed for uh building a city on Mars. And um I'm confident that the SpaceX team, which is incredibly talented, will achieve this uh this these goals and we will be landing ships on Mars in the future and building um life on Mars, building green houses and and life on Mars and uh ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it. And it's important to note here that obviously uh you know we are effectively stewards of life uh here on earth that uh the other creatures cannot build space spacecraft and get to get to other planets. So if there were to be a cataclysmic event like a giant meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs um or ultimately the sun will expand to envelop earth and destroy all life. We know this this is this is an undisputed fact. Um then uh if we don't take life to another planet light all life will be destroyed. So, it's incumbent upon us to ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure long-term survival of uh life as we know it on planet Earth. Yeah. I mean, I think like understanding our planet better, being able to move people around the planet, make the make it feel smaller and more accessible. You could go anywhere on the Earth, you know, in less than 40 minutes basically in terms of flight time. So, I I really do see Starship as being this thing that can connect us just like Starling connects our information, this can connect us more physically. Yeah. So there's there's really nothing faster than um a rocket really. An orbital rocket is the fastest thing um that we know of that that uh of the fastest means of transport. So like you could go from LA to Sydney in less than half an hour. Um you could go LA to Tokyo in less than half an hour. You go from New York to Singapore in half an hour. Everything's probably half an hour basically. Some things might be 10 minutes. Yes, sure. I mean, yeah, sign me up for that, please. Um, all right. Cross the Atlantic in 10 minutes. No problem. Please. Yes, sign me up. You're going 25 times the speed of sound. So, that's 30 times faster than than a commercial aircraft. And it's a whole hell of a lot better view. Yeah, it's a hell of a view. Yeah. All right, cool. Um, anything else, guys? Anything else? I mean, we could say a lot more. I suppose I just Maybe we should go check in on the rocket and get on. We're going to go back on console to hopefully the weather's supports a launch tonight. Um and uh yeah, thanks for tuning in and uh yeah, thanks for your support.