A (24:08)
We're pushing the limits of physics here. So. And really, in order to make a fully reusable orbital rocket, which no one has succeeded in doing yet, including. Including us, but Starship is the first time that there is a design for a rocket where full and rapid reusability is actually possible. So it was not. There's not even been a design before where it was possible. Certainly not a design that got made any hardware at all. We live on a planet where the gravity is quite high. Like Earth's gravity is really quite high. And if the gravity was even 10 or 20% higher, would be stuck on Earth forever. Yeah, we could not use. Certainly couldn't use conventional rockets. You'd have to, like, blow yourself off the surface with, like, a nuclear bomb or something crazy. So on the other hand, if. If Earth's gravity was just a little lower, like even 10, 20% lower, then getting to orbit would be easy. So it's like. It's like. It's like this. If this was a video game, it's set to, like, maximum difficulty, but not impossible. Okay, so that's what we have here. So it's not as though others have ignored the concept of reusability. They've just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. And we've been working on this for a long time at SpaceX, and I'm the chief engineer of the company, although I should say that we have an extremely talented engineering team. I think we've got the best rocket engineering team that has ever been assembled. It's an honor to work with such incredible people. So it's fair to say that we have not yet succeeded in achieving full reusability, but we at last have a rocket where full reusability is possible. And I think we'll achieve it next year. So that's a really big deal. And the reason that's such a big deal is that full reusability drops the cost of access to space by 100, maybe even more than 100, actually. So it could be like 1,000. You can think of it like any mode of transport. Like, imagine if aircraft were not reusable. Like, you flew somewhere, you throw the plane at. Like, imagine if, like, the way conventional rockets work is, it would be like if you had an airplane and instead of landing at your destination, you parachute out and the plane crashes somewhere and you land at your des and you land in a parachute at your destination. Now, that would be a very expensive trip and you'd need another plane to get back, but that's how the other rockets in the world work. Now, the SpaceX Falcon rocket is the only one that is at least mostly reusable. You've seen the Falcon rocket land. We've now done over 500 landings of the SpaceX rocket, of the Falcon 9 rocket. And this year we'll deliver probably, I don't know, somewhere between 2,200 and 2500 tons to orbit with the Falcon 9 Falcon Heavy rockets, not counting anything from Starship.
