When we started out, I
thought the whole company
just had a ten percent chance
of success of surviving at all.
So, uh, I find it quite
[inaudible]
and a great honor to be
working with NASA to restore
spaceflight, orbital
spaceflight to, to America.
"Did you pitch to the Air Force
Starship, and do you plan on"
"pitching it out to NASA
for its lunar lander system?"
At this point we're basically
just keeping NASA
and the Air Force informed
regarding Starship.
But the goals of Starship
aren't necessarily...
Really, so they're like,
they're pretty...
They're really
off-scale...
They're on a
different level.
And so I think we need to make
more progress with Starship
in order to establish credibility
with potential customers
like NASA
and the Air Force.
[offscreen]
"Thank you guys"
In fact, I'm headed
to Boca after this.
"Oh, cool."
So it's the first thing that
I'm going to go work on
 is Starship production
later today.
"Cool, I hope some
pictures..."
"ELON DOES THE PRESS
DESERVE A DANCE TODAY?"
[laughter, groans]
I can't set these expectations
of dancing constantly.
I'm not that good
of a dancer.
I haven't had time to
go, like, work on my skills...
"DANCE!"
Nope! Nooo!
"DANCE!" "DANCE!"
"DANCE!" "DANCE!"
I am not your dancing puppet!
I tell you what
I tell you what
After crew launch, 100%.
[laughter]
Alright, it's good to
see everyone...
It's, it's a...
Now, I'm personally super
fired up and excited
and I think it feels like you
guys are too, the public.
You know, it's just going to be
wonderful to get astronauts back
into orbit from American soil
after almost a decade
of not being able to do so.
I think that's just super exciting.
And like I said, with some
technology advances.
You know, like with respect to the
abort system and a few other things.
It'll be on a booster that's reusable
and a spacecraft that is reusable.
So the only part that isn't
 for Falcon/Dragon
 is the upper stage
and the trunk.
So that's still a very big
percentage of reusability.
And I keep saying
reusability, reusability,
but really this reusability is extremely
fundamental to revolutionizing space.
As it would be if it was aircraft,
or cars, or bicycles, or horses.
Everything. You really want
them to be reusable.
And then, and get the
costs all the way down
to simply reload
propellant and fly again.
Just like an aircraft.
 And that's really what's going to open up
space for the average person.
"Are you in talks with NASA to make
Crew Dragon reusable for humans?"
We have been in discussions with
NASA about this for quite some time
and my understanding is
NASA is very open to this.
It's subject to obviously a lot of
additional testing and verification.
What does it take to make it
reusable for humans to fly it again?
Well Crew Dragon especially, even
more than Dragon 1, or Cargo Dragon,
 is really designed with
reusability in mind.
So it has a much more, like, the propulsion
section is essentially waterproof.
And it even has bilge pumps
in the propulsion section
which rings the pressurized section
like a doughnut at the bottom.
So...
We've already taken great steps to
improve the reusability of
Crew Dragon over Cargo Dragon.
And so I think it's for sure
way easier to reuse,
But reusability is of course
contingent on support from NASA.
But obviously the Space Shuttle
orbiter was reusable.
And so NASA is familiar with
the notion of reusability.
But Crew Dragon is designed
to be easily reusable.
So with minimal refurbishment
and with, you know, essentially
it's designed to be rapidly and
almost completely reusable
in the case of Crew Dragon,
which would be great for
lowering costs and
improving launch rate.
And then the booster, obviously
we've proved many times
that the booster
is reusable.
The only thing that's vexing is
that upper stage, of Falcon,
which is not reusable.
But unfortunately we just don't
have the payload capability
to reuse the upper stage
with Falcon.
We will with Starship.
We've got an integrated upper stage
and nosecone or fairing.
That is designed to be fully
reusable from the beginning.
And it has, it's also
quite a big vehicle.
A very big vehicle,
obviously.
So I'm hopeful there's going to
be progress with Starship
and that NASA, DoD, and others will
consider using that vehicle.
But there will be significant overlap
between Falcon 9,
Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon,
and Starship,
to make sure Starship is really ready
and been accepted by our customers
before we retire the
existing fleet of vehicles.
"Do you have an updated timeline
for hops on Starship"
"and when you expect to go to
orbit for the first time?"
Ahh, [inaudible].
[laughter]
I think we'll do, we'll do a
more comprehensive
update on Starship
in the future. But the...
I think we're making very good
progress on the Raptor engine.
We're at serial number 20
of the Raptor engine.
We've completed production on that.
And the production rate of Raptors
is improving significantly.
As well as we're making a number of
design improvements to the Raptor engine.
So each serial number has
some design improvements.
All the way up through, I think,
probably serial number 50.
And so I think that Raptor
is going extremely well.
The primary
structure is slower.
And that's actually part of the reason
I'm going to head out to Boca later today,
to just work on some of the primary
structure engineering issues.
Especially the domes.
Yeah, when you are engaged in
designing and building rockets,
these things that
seem perhaps trivial
 or not that important to
the public or the uninitiated
are actually
incredibly difficult.
Getting the domes right on the propellant
tanks is one of the most difficult things.
It's just a dome, like, how
hard could it be? But it's...
It's hard.
And then getting the interfaces between
the tank and the interstage
or skirt that connects
it to the booster.
And then the interface from the
tanks to the nosecone or fairing.
The body flap
control surfaces.
The landing gear,
or landing legs.
The heat shield.
Just general operations.
And then of course,
for Starship,
being able to successfully achieve on
orbit refilling is extremely important.
But that's actually an example
of where our work
with docking with the Space Station
is actually incredibly helpful.
You see, one of the fundamental
technologies needed to go to Mars,
orbital refilling, is
extremely important.
That means you need to be able
to do precision docking in orbit.
And our work with the Space Station,
precision docking with the Space Station
actually has helped us solve
that very difficult problem
of docking in orbit with
precision, reliably every time.
But now we need to do it
with two giant spaceships.
It's like a space station
docking to a space station.
But I am very excited about
the potential of Starship,
and I think it's going to be
something that can really
have a profound step-change effect
on humanity's ability to go beyond Earth.
Thank you.
