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Elon Musk Thinking
Back in 2008, Elon Musk SpaceX Presentation to The Hollywood Hill!!!
00:17:09
Back in 2008, Elon Musk SpaceX Presentation to The Hollywood Hill!!! #ElonMusk Follow me on X https://x.com/Astronautman627?t=RFQEunSF2NwRkCOBc6PkkQ&s=09
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- [00:01]
Pluralsight Narrator
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- [00:31]
Grainger Narrator
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- [01:02]
Elon Musk
So it's a quick update on Tesla. You have to unmute. Hold on one sec. Hello? Yeah, so I'm sure people have been reading about the auto loan bailout and all that sort of stuff. So it's kind of a travesty of what's going on. Although I don't think it's going to last too long. Long into the Obama administration there was a $25 billion loan program that Congress approved to fund energy development of energy efficient vehicles essentially to wean ourselves off of oil. And ironically the Big three then came to Washington and said now give us that money for our day to day operations, building gas guzzlers, which is obviously somewhat of a version of the intent. And unfortunately with the job situation being the way it is, Congress has acceded to that demand and is my understanding currently giving 15 to 25 billion to the big three to fund their day to day operations, which I believe gets them to about February. I'm not kidding, it's not even an exaggeration. Although the speaker, Speaker Pelosi has also said that as soon as the new administration comes in, they're going to replenish that fund. So I think it'll be okay. But certainly if you have the opportunity to express to anyone in D.C. or in the press the importance of developing clean energy vehicles, please take the opportunity to do so. In the case of Tesla, Tesla actually is not applying for any bailout funds, although some of the press have mistaken that what Tesla has done is apply for funding to develop lower cost mass market vehicles and essentially the exact intent of the legislation. So hopefully there's still some money left over to actually do that after the Big three have taken what they take the Tesla Roadster. I think a lot of people are familiar with that. That's the two seater sports car. In fact, my car, which is Production Unit 1, is parked outside if anyone's curious to see it. There's also Tesla Sales and Service center on Santa Monica Boulevard. So if you want to pop in and take a look at the car at that time, you're also welcome to do so. And we're about to deliver our 100th production Tesla next week. And that's interestingly enough, our 100th customer is Sam Perry. If anybody watched when Obama won and Oprah was crying on some guy's shoulder, that same guy's 100 customer. So it's a bit like Zelig. I mean, he's sort of everywhere. So anyway, he's a really great guy and lives in the Bay Area, is going to take delivery of his car on Tuesday. So I'm going to hand him the keys personally and thank him for being a customer. And there's an important point about Tesla, which is whenever somebody buys the Tesla Roadster, even though it's a $100,000, $109,000 sports car, and it's kind of a fancy sports car, every penny that Tesla makes goes into development of lower cost mass market vehicles. So the company doesn't issue any dividends, nor will it ever. My salary is minimum wage, so I'm a volunteer, basically. It's just an important point because sometimes people think, well, gee, what's the point of making these expensive cars, which are sort of toys for rich people? How's that really helping the environment? The important point to bear in mind is that when you have new technology, it takes time to optimize that technology. If you think back to the early days of cell phones or laptops or pretty much anything new, it's expensive in the early days because the first job with a new technology is you've got to make it work. And then you make it in small volume, you sell those cars. But a critical point is that you can't get to the low cost cars unless you start with the expensive cars. And that's a point that sometimes lies. Anyway, that's enough on Tesla. I'll jump into the space stuff and I'll kick it off with our last flight video. So this is actually on a remote tropical island. We launch a small rocket, Falcon 1, from an island in the Kwajalein Atoll. So it feels a bit nefarious to be launching rockets from Trochule Islands. Yeah, I feel a bit like a Bond villain in this Case, it's basically just a dummy satellite. So this was basically a test flight to get to orbit. So this is actually our fourth flight. The flights two and three made it to space, but they didn't make it all the way to orbit. And it's actually a lot harder to get to orbit than it is to get to space. You can get to space just by going up to Mach 3. But to get to orbit you have to have a minimum of Mach 25. And that doesn't actually explain the full difficulty because the energy scales with the square of the velocity. So getting space, nine units of energy. Getting to orbit, 625 units of energy. It's about 70 times harder to get to orbit than to get to space. And that's why there's only been about half a dozen countries in the world that have actually reached orbit. So this is actually the first completely privately developed rocket to reach orbit, and also the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach orbit. This is the Falcon one. It's named Falcon after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Looks nothing like it. But so the music in the background is a high roller from the crystal method, actually with rockets. The only semi reusable rocket in the world right now is the space shuttle. And I say semi reusable because the main tank is actually thrown away every time. So it's typically, well, really almost. In all cases, rockets are not recovered. They basically re enter and either burn up or crash into the ocean and sink to the bottom type of thing. Now with Falcon 1, our intent is to recover the first stage, which unfortunately we weren't able to do in this flight. The telemetry coming down showed that it didn't have enough thermal protection, so it actually ended up burning up. We need to increase the thermal protection. The fuel is a high purity kerosene. So it's sort of a very clean form of jet fuel, basically with no sulfur content. It's not the greenest thing in the world, but we do buy lots of carbon offset. So it's 9 degrees north latitude. Yeah, exactly. We're making use of the Earth's rotation to help with the insertion velocity.
- [09:02]
Grainger Narrator
Could you actually go out? Wouldn't it be easier to go into.
- [09:06]
Elon Musk
Space and then come taxing back into orbit? Well, the only way to go up and stay up is to reach orbit. The gravity is actually almost the same force at say 200 miles above Earth's surface as it is on the surface of the Earth. The only reason people seem to be sort of floating around, but actually what's Happening is they're zooming around the Earth super fast, and the outward acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity. And so when that's neutralized, you have what appears to be zero gravity, but you're actually just sort of falling around the Earth. Do you run into space junk with all the junk out there, do you have to navigate through all that? We've not encountered any space junk issue, although there's been a lot of launches up there and there have been issues like where the Chinese blew up a satellite and scattered bits all over the place. It's so big up there that the statistical chance of being hit is tiny. But for things which carry people like the space station and our Dragon spacecraft, they actually have micrometeorite shields so they can take a high impact, which is essentially a high speed bullet coming at it.
- [10:18]
Interviewer
I know this is a pretty big picture, but what's the bigger picture that this hits into?
- [10:22]
Elon Musk
Ah, the bigger picture. Very good question. So the reason I started SpaceX was because the cost and reliability of getting to orbit and beyond has not really improved since the 60s. In fact, it's gotten worse. And if you look at the trajectory over time, it's not an improving trajectory. If you would extrapolate that the cost trajectory and Steve could tell, it could, can affirm that if you were to extrapolate to the future, you would basically be able to afford no launches at some point because it actually was getting more and more expensive. So I started SpaceX to really reverse that trend and make it affordable to get to orbit and beyond. The huge breakthrough that SpaceX aspires to achieve, and this is a very difficult thing, is to make a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So with Falcon 1, the first stage is intended to be reusable. With Falcon 9, both stages are intended to be reusable. Now it's going to take as many launches to figure that out and get the stages back safely and optimize the refurbishment for flights and make sure they're reliable and all that. But that's sort of the big technical breakthrough we're aiming for. And you can imagine in any mode of transportation, if you had a reusable vehicle or expendable vehicle, it would be a night and day difference. I mean, how many people would have driven here if their car was single use? And that applies to any mode of transport, bicycles, horses, planes, really pretty much anything. So we've got this weird situation in space where vehicles can only be used once. In fact, if you want a return journey, you've got to tow one behind you. So that's what we're aspiring to. It's a tough goal. We're not saying we can't achieve it, but we're aspiring to achieve that and I think we will. But to explain why that's so difficult, when an orbital rocket is, after they've really optimized the weight of the rocket and used the most advanced materials, and the engines are incredibly efficient and you've pushed everything to the maximum, you typically get about 3% of the lift off weight to orbit. So if you make even a small mistake in the design, if you give 3% off, you know, got nothing. And that's for expendable single use rockets where they're not trying to make the rocket robust enough to have multiple flights. They don't try to make it robust enough to re enter safely. It doesn't have to have heat shields and all that other stuff. So when you add in all those things, if that exceeds 3%, well, you're getting nothing to orbit. So to make it reusable and still deliver a useful payload is extraordinarily difficult. And no one has ever succeeded in doing that.
- [13:23]
Interviewer
So once you streamline your application, what does that serve?
- [13:28]
Elon Musk
Right, so I'm getting, I'll get. So the why. Essentially I should actually you're right. I should proceed this with the why and then, and then the how. We're stupid. So no take things for granted being in the space business. But so I'm a huge believer in the extension of life beyond Earth. So making life multi planetary, I think is one of the most important things we could do. So then why is that important? Well, how do you say that anything is important? How do you judge importance? Well, if you look at things on an historical time scale, and the further you zoom out more, the important stuff stays behind and the unimportant stuff, you can't see it anymore. And if you look at the span of life's evolution on Earth, the multi billion year history of Earth itself, of life on Earth itself, you can really point to about half a dozen major steps on the evolution of life. There's obviously single celled life, multicellular life, differentiation to plants and animals, life moving from the oceans to land, mammals consciousness, those are sort of like the big ones. And that's why we're here talking. And on that scale also would fit, I think, the extension of life to multiple planets. So life becoming multi planetary. It would be at least as important, if not more important than life going from the oceans to land. Oceans to land. You could jump back in the ocean if you got uncomfortable. But going to another planet, you've got to go over billions of miles of hostile space and then land and try to create an ecology on a planet that is nothing like the planet that we live on today. Well, our current planet may become more like that planet if we're not careful. But so if you have something which arguably could fit on the important scale of the evolution of life itself, then it's reasonable to say it's important and should get some of our resources and say well what is some of our resources? Well, probably less than what we spend on Medicare and more than what we spend on lipstick. You can sort of bracket it. We spend a lot of lipstick by the way, which I think is great. But if you said, well maybe we should spend a quarter of a percent of our economic product on the extension of life to another plant making life planetary, I think that would be like a reasonable number. And that's several tens of billions. So I don't think it could be done for that. But a critical element is having that reusable orbital craft. So that's the fundamental breakthrough that's necessary for us to be able to afford to do it at a price that is going to be palatable to the general public.
- [16:46]
Interviewer
I think that once we are multi planetary we'll look back and think about the kind of fuels that we use to get out there.
- [16:55]
Elon Musk
Probably going to look silly.
- [16:58]
Interviewer
What are your wildest ideas about the fuels that we'll be using down the line?
- [17:03]
Elon Musk
Well, my wildest idea about fuels, I think long term once we, or if we I suppose figure out fusion. If you can have a compact fusion reactor and that would be the best energy source and then you need to sort of shoot something out of the back end which is basically high energy ion engine powered by a fusion reactor, I think that's pretty much about as good as you're going to get. I mean theoretically from a physics standpoint, sorry, a gravity. Maybe a solar sail. Yeah, a solar sail is an option. Now the sun doesn't have a lot of force because if you stand outside you don't feel yourself getting knocked down by the sun. So you need a big sail in space and it can work and it's an option. And particularly if you had say a cargo ship going from Earth to Mars where the time of the journey wasn't that big of a deal, then that could be actually a good option.
- [18:09]
Grainger Narrator
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