Elon Musk Reveals New Insane Project - SpaceX, Starship & AI

Well hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out, I got Elon and Ian Dahl with our Starlink team, figured we'd check in. It's been a typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle, acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terror-sized chip building project and so... Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year. And so let's, kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multi-planetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stat stuff. Let's kind of start galaxy-sized and bring people in with the Kardashev scale. What's the big picture? What's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale? Like, how do you decide what progress a civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species, say, visiting us would calibrate how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. And there was a Russian physicist, actually, by the name of Kardashev, who thought about this. And I think it's a good way to characterize it. You ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put 100 gigawatts, or ultimately a terawatt, into space from Earth, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar, and then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips. So the three things you need are mass to orbit, a lot of solar power, and radiators, of course, and a lot of chips. All right, well, let's start ticking down the list. So mass to orbit, that's where Starship comes in. We just had the first flight of E3. It was awesome. I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch in a long time coming. What's Starship's purpose of being? What is it going to be doing? Yeah, so Starship is going to revolutionize space, really. It's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multi-planetary, as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft, and you cannot extend life to the Moon, to Mars, and the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can't make enough rockets unless you can refly them. Just like any other mode of transport, you can imagine that if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive, and basically no one would be flying airplanes. You'd be doing a whole lot more driving. Rapid reusability. Yes. Every mode of transport is reusable, without which it's simply not viable as a transport system. So cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable. With rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. These make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. There have been many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket. Most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they didn't think they could succeed. In order to achieve full reusability, everything has got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy. The rocket can simply be caught by the tower. We haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. Then you've got to achieve full reusability. You've got to go a step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable, such that the rocket lands, gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand, and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection, like an aircraft. This is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. It also happens to be the largest flying object ever made, heaviest flying object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship V3 is more than double the thrust of a Saturn V moon rocket. By version four, we'll be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn V moon rocket. We expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road. One of the fun facts from flight 12, that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown. That's still just a fraction of what V3 can do. Yes. Once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly, we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what massed orbit becomes once Starship is flying? It's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. Even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90 percent of all Earth mass to orbit. I think somewhere between 85 and 90 percent right now. Then most of the remaining mass, I think, is launched by China. Then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US, is the remaining, I don't know, five to seven percent. Now, with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2,500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit. To do so at a pretty short period of time. We think probably we can get to a million tons to orbit per year in about three years, thereabouts. Starship is going to take care of the mass to orbit limiting factor. Yes. Then power generations. It's some mythical place where the internet's in the cloud or something. Yes. Some people envision wires. Some people envision boxes. Effectively, it comes down to a set number of chips. The things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how do you get the power for it. That's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing Starwing technology, the solar arrays, are what we want to utilize that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into space itself. We like to look at this and say, what is the actual engineering problem here? It's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space, as you mentioned. Yes. The AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has gigantic phase ray antennas. It's got parabolic antennas. It's got a lot of laser links. It's much more complicated than an AI satellite. At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. Our current reference design is for NVIDIA Rubin chips. It could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. We'll also have a reference design for TPUs. Essentially, you can put any existing chips into orbit. The current industry seems like it's going to get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI compute, but that doesn't answer the question of, well, how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the TeraFab. Oh, he's looking a step bigger. Yeah. Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. To give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the TeraFab is going to be around 100 million square feet to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute. Then, aspirationally, scale that by an order of magnitude per year. In two and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, in three and a half years, maybe 100 gigawatts. Then, depending upon what progress there is in chipmaking in the rest of the world and with the TeraFab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts. That's twice the current electricity consumption of the United States. I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. I don't know what it's going to think about, but maybe do a lot of simulations or something. Yeah. So, after we've worked through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to, again, try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level two? At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So, our current reference design is for NVIDIA Rubin chips, or it could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. We'll also have a reference design for TPUs. Essentially, you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry, it seems like it's going to get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI compute, but that doesn't answer the question of, well, how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the TeraFab. Oh, he's looking a step bigger. Yeah. Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. To give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the TeraFab is going to be around 100 million square feet to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute, and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So, in two and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, and three and a half years, maybe 100 gigawatts. And then depending upon what progress there is in chipmaking in the rest of the world and with the TeraFab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts. That's twice the current electricity consumption in the United States. I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. I don't know what it's going to think about, but maybe do a lot of simulations or something. Yeah. So, after we've, you know, broken through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to, again, try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level two. Why stop there? Why think small? Because a terawatt actually is very small. I don't want you to think small. Let's not think small. So, there is, in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1,000x from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the moon with a mass driver, essentially, where you do local production of photovoltaics and radiators on the moon. Maybe you bring the chips from Earth, or you could conceivably make the chips on the moon. But you need most of the mass to be made on the moon, so you don't have to transport it to the moon from Earth. And then, because the moon has no atmosphere and only one-sixth Earth's gravity, you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So, you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a railgun type. I mean, it's basically a linear electric motor is the way to think about it.