- [Elon Musk] There are many troubles
in the world, of course.
These are important and
we need to solve them.
But we also need things that make us
excited to be alive.
That make us glad to
wake up in the morning
and be fired up about the future,
and think, yeah!
The future's gonna be great!
Space exploration is one of those things.
This is the 11th anniversary
of the first time SpaceX reached orbit.
It was actually our fourth launch.
If that launch had not succeeded,
that would have been the end of SpaceX.
What's really hard to
grasp at a visceral level,
is that this giant ship
will do the same thing
that Grasshopper did.
This thing is gonna take off,
fly to 65,000 feet, about 20 kilometers,
and come back and land in
about one to two months.
The ship dry mass would
be approximately 120 tons.
The initial Mk1 prototype
is closer to 200 tons.
In series production, I
think it will probably
be about 120 tons.
In terms of its usefulness,
it'll be able to do about 150 tons,
with full reusability, to orbit and back.
The cost of a fully reusable system
is basically the cost of the propellant
which is mostly oxygen.
The Falcon architecture is about
2 1/2 tons of oxygen for
every one ton of fuel.
This is 3 1/2 tons of oxygen
for every one ton of fuel.
Earlier, I was talking
about how Starship enters
and how it's controlled.
It's really quite different
from anything else.
It's really falling.
So we're doing a controlled fall.
So with a rocket, you're
actually trying to brake.
You're trying to create
drag instead of lift.
It's really the opposite of an aircraft.
You want the most amount of
drag that you can produce,
and you want some lift,
especially when you're
in the upper atmosphere,
mostly so that you can control
the maximum heating rate.
So it comes like this,
and then starts falling,
and then just falls like a skydiver.
It's just controlling itself,
and then it turns and lands, like that.
Incredibly elaborate explanation.
And then you get a sense for it.
This is much better. (laughs)
There you go, see?
Same thing. (laughs)
But it'll look totally nuts
to see that thing land.
The Starship will have
three sea-level engines
that move up to about 15 degrees angle
and three vacuum engines that are
optimized for efficiency,
that will not move.
They will be just fixed in place.
That allows us to have
the biggest bell nozzle
vacuum Raptor engines.
Aspirationally, the
target is a 380-second Isp
for the vacuum engine.
In space geek terms, this
is really a great number.
Ultimately we decided to have heat shield
hexagonal ceramic tiles
that are basically very light,
but very crack-resistant.
At first, it feels like, "Oh, steel.
"Does that mean it's heavy?"
No, actually it's the
lightest construction.
Steel is the best design decision.
On this whole thing is
a 301 stainless steel.
At cryogenic temperatures, a 301 stainless
actually has about the
same effective strength
as an advanced composite
or aluminum-lithium.
Unlike most steels, which get
brittle at low temperature,
301 stainless gets much stronger.
There's another benefit.
It also has a high melting temperature.
For a reusable ship, you're
coming in like a meteor.
You want something that does
not melt at a low temperature.
You want something that
melts at a high temperature.
This is where steel is
extremely good as well.
Steel has a melting temperature
around 1500 degrees Centigrade,
whereas aluminum, maybe
300 or 400 degrees.
Same thing for carbon fiber,
and that's really pushing it.
Having that much higher
melting temperature
means that you don't need any shielding
on the leeward side of the ship
when it comes in for entry.
The shielding you need
on the windward side,
the hot side, is massively reduced
because the thickness of the tile
is dependent on how hot
does the back of the tile
that interfaces with the airframe get.
Because the steel can take
a much higher temperature,
your heat shield is much lighter.
It's $130,000 a ton for the carbon fiber
and $2,500 a ton for the steel.
So the steel is about 2% of
the cost of the carbon fiber.
It's very easy to weld stainless steel.
The evidence being that
we welded it outdoors
without a factory.
This gives you a sense of size.
So the little pixels there are a human.
cannot get to orbit without the booster
So the booster is designed to take
up to 37 Raptor engines.
I'm not sure if we'll go that high.
The booster is designed to be able
to take multiple engines out.
We are going to be
building ships and boosters
at both Boca and the
Cape as fast as we can.
I mean, it's gonna be really nutty
to see a bunch of these things.
I mean not just one, but
a whole stack of 'em.
The way that Mk1 and
Mk2 cylindrical sections
were built, with basically plates.
So a series of plates to
create each cylinder section.
With Mk3 and beyond, we will literally
take the coil of steel from the mill,
unspool it, change the curvature
to a nine meter diameter,
and do a single seam weld.
It will also be thinner, which
makes it lighter and cheaper.
And we would seek to go to
orbit with probably Mk4 or Mk5.
This is gonna sound totally nuts,
but I think we wanna try to reach orbit
in less than six months.
The priority is to build at least
two Starships at each
site, at Boca and the Cape.
And then start building the booster.
The main constraints on launching
the booster is engines,
because obviously a booster
has a lot of engines.
Doing the tanks and the
legs, and say, the grid fins,
that is not a constraint.
That we can get done fast.
Including development engines
from now through orbit,
we probably need 100 Raptor engines.
Our production rate right now
is maybe one every eight to 10 days.
Our target is to get to
a Raptor engine every day
by Q1 next year.
Another key step is refilling on orbit.
So that the Starship can get to orbit
with, let's say, 150 tons of payload
for the moon or Mars or beyond.
it can get tankered [sic] to fill up its propellant tanks
and it can depart from low Earth orbit
with 1200 tons of propellant.
Your delta velocity is
enough to transport 150 tons
to the surface of the moon or Mars.
It's actually harder to
dock with the space station,
than it is to do orbital refilling.
The pressurized volume on Starship
is around 1,000 cubic meters.
So if you had 100 people, you'd have
10 cubit meters per person,
which is, especially
in a Zero-g situation,
that's actually quite a lot of room.
By the way, 1,000 cubic meters I think
is close to what the space
station pressurized volume is.
Starship is launching space station
pressurized volume on every flight.
It's quite a lot.
Definitely possible that the first
crewed mission on Starship
could leave from Boca.
To the best of my knowledge,
both places will launch crewed missions.
We would think it would be very exciting
to have a base on the moon,
even if it's just a science base.
Whether or not people
want to live on the moon,
there's definitely a lot
of science to be done.
The critical thing that
we need to focus on,
I think, is the fastest path
to a self-sustaining city on Mars.
As far as we know, we are the only
consciousness, or the only
life, that's out there.
There might be other life,
but we've seen no signs of it.
People often ask me, "What do you know
"about the aliens" and that.
I'm like, "Man, I tell you,"
"I'm pretty sure I'd know
"if there were aliens.
"I've not seen any sign of aliens."
I think we should really do
our very best to become
a multi-planet species
and to extend consciousness beyond Earth
and we should do it now.
(audience clapping)
Thank you!
