Datasets:

SansarK

/

ElonData

like 0

https://youtu.be/eb3pmifEZ44

I almost creaking it's seven o'clock in the morning and Elon Musk anxiously waits for his golden payoff his prize for paying his dues in the valley I expect to receive a call that I've just bought which is called McLaren upon its a million dollars record it's it's a it's decadent there are 62 McLaren's in the world and I will learn wonderful back in 95 they weren't very many people on the internet and suddenly nobody was making any money at all most people thought the internet was gonna be a fad not this South African entrepreneur musk sold his first computer program at the age of 12 and he hasn't stopped selling since Wow company it's actually here that's pretty wild man just three years ago I was showering in that the Y and sleeping on the office floor and now Oh see I've got a million our car and quite a few creature comforts it's just some moments in my life okay my values may have changed but I'm not consciously aware of my values having changed my fear is that we become spoiled brats that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective a year ago musk sold his software company zip to which enabled newspapers to publish online for 400 million dollars cash receiving cash is cash I mean those are just a large number of Ben Franklin's it's the perfect car for Silicon Valley it really is there is Jonah in the fastest car in the world I could go and buy one the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my your personal fiefdom how much more interested in trying to build and create a new company so this is an ATM what we're gonna do is transform the traditional banking industry I do not fit the picture of a banker economist is Jimmy raising 50 million dollars is a matter of making a series of phone calls and the money is there I've sunk the great majority of my net worth in draxe.com which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the internet that I've started yes exactly excellent home I think XCOM could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza because if you look at the industry that X is pursuing it's the biggest sector of the world economy is that I McLaren f1 yes oh my god that's a light series of poker games and now I've gone on to a more high stakes game and just carry those chips with me and I haven't gone and taken my winnings with spinnerbait right but I've really put almost all of it back into the new game no I'd say the real payoff is the sense of satisfaction having created the company that I sold yes yes yes for the cards but the car sure the cars sure especially honest I'm sure is gonna make the car we talked any these people who have hit the jackpot early they don't even have a conceptualization of about the money it's funny money it's something you need to think about the amazing thing is it almost none of them quit even when they could it's not a vesting thing it's not that there's some secret clause in there that keeps them from doing it they want to do what they're doing they think that to stop doing that is death I'd like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone that'll be cool

https://youtu.be/afZTrfvB2AQ

I'll try to make this as interesting as possible if you like space you'll like this talk so my background in brief I'll talk a little bit about zip - and us and PayPal and then mostly about space and what we're doing in space so I originally came out to California to do energy physics at Stanford actually and ended up putting in US is in 95 and ended up putting that on a hold to start a zip - and so - I'll tell you a little bit about the full process of exactly what happened there in 95 but it wasn't at all clear that the internet was gonna be a big commercial thing in fact most of the venture capitalists that I told you hadn't even heard of the internet which sounds bizarre up on Sand Hill Road so but but I wanted to do something and if in the end I thought it would be a pretty huge thing and I thought it's one of those things that only came along once in a very long while so I got a deferment at Stanford and and thought I'd give it a couple quarters and if it didn't work out which I thought it probably wouldn't then I'd come back to school and actually might talk to my professor and I told him this he said well I don't think you'll be coming back and that was the last conversation I'm having but they weren't a lot of waste and the only way to get involved the Internet in 95 that I could think of was to start a company because they weren't a lot of companies to go and work for apart from Netscape that maybe you've one or two others so and then have any money so I thought well we've got to make something that's going to return it's going to return money at very very quickly so we thought well that the media industry would need help converting its content from from a print media to electronic and they clearly had money so if we could find a way to help them move their media to the Internet that would be an obvious way of generating revenue there was no advertising revenue on the at the time so and that that was really the basis of zip two and four we ended up building quite a bit of software for for the media industry primarily the print media industry so we had as investors and customers Hearst Corporation my tritter but most of the major US foreign publishers we built that up and then we had the opportunity to sell to compact in in early 99 and basically took that offer quiz for a little over three hundred million dollars in cash and that's that's a currency I highly recommend so so we had that and and but but I wanted to do something something more after was a - so host the sale in fact immediately post a sale I don't really take any time off I think of where where there were the opportunities in this is early 99 where the opportunities remained in the internet and it seems to me that they hadn't been a lot of innovation in the financial services sector so and and when you think about it money as is low bandwidth you don't need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to to do interested to do things with it it's really just an entry in the database the the paper form of money is is really only a small percentage of all the money that that's out there so it should land itself to innovation on the internet and so we thought of a couple of different things we could do one one of the things was to combine all of somebody's financial services needs into one website so you could have banking brokerage insurance and all sorts of things in one place and that was actually quite a difficult problem to solve but we suite we could we sold most of the issues associated with that and then we had a little feature which took us about a day that was devoted to email money from one customer to another so you could type in an email address or actually any unique identifier and transfer funds or conceivably stocks or mutual funds or whatever from from one account holder to another and if you try to transfer money to somebody who didn't have an account in the system it would then forward an email to them saying hey why don't you sign up and open an account so and whenever we demonstrate these two sets of features which say well this this is a picture that took us a lot of effort to do and look how you can see your bank statement in your mutual funds and and insurance and all that it's all in one page and look how convenient that isn't people were definitely home and they would say and by the way we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds they go WOW so so we you're like okay so we focused the company's business on on email payments and the only game going companies called XCOM and then there was a there was another company called can finish which had actually also started out from it from a different area they started off with the Palm Pilot cryptography and then they had as a demo application the ability to beam token payments from one Palm Pilot to another by the infrared port and then they had a website which is called PayPal where you would reconcile the beamed payments and and what they found was that the the website portion was actually far more interesting to people than the Palm Pilot cryptography was so they started leading their business in that direction and then in basically early 2000 XCOM acquired con finiti and then about a year later we we ended up changing the company's name to PayPal and that's this kind of have the approximate evolution of the company and but PayPal was really a case of of where the whole viral marketing it's really a perfect case example of viral marketing like hotmail was where one one one customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you for all the for bringing and other customers so they would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network and so you had this exponential growth the more customers you had the faster it grew so you if there was like bacteria in a petri dish there just goes like does this S curve and in fact I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence and we launched after year one and by the end of year two we had a million customers so gives you an example you could just sense for how fast things grow in that scenario and we didn't have a Salesforce right we actually didn't have VP of Sales we didn't have a VP of Marketing and we didn't spend any money on advertising in about February of last year for those of you probably following it in February last year PayPal went public and we're I think we're the only internet company to go public in the first part of last year it went off reasonably well although I think we had more SEC rewrites than any company I can imagine like we set a record on SEC rewrites this was right around the Enron time and when there was also it's a corporate scandal so they put us through the wringer and then shortly thereafter in about June July we struck a deal with eBay to sell a company to eBay and over for about four and a half billion dollars but that was when eBay stock price was about 55 dollars and they hadn't split so I guess in today's dollars we've got three billion dollars that worked out pretty well it happened coincidentally that I in the first part of last year I've been doing just some background research on on space and let me talk a bit about that essentially what I was trying to figure out why we have not made more progress since since Apollo in nineteen in the 60s we went from basically nothing nothing I'll put anyone into space to putting people on the moon and developing all the technology from scratch to do that and yet in the 70s in the 80s and the 90s we've kind of gone sideways and we're currently in a situation where we can't even put a person into into low-earth orbit and that doesn't really gel with all of the other technology sectors out there the computer that you could have bought in the early 70s you know would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone and so just about every sector of technologies improve why is this not improved so I started looking into that initially I thought well perhaps it's a question of funding and that funding can be garnered by by really marshalling public support so the one way to get the public excited that space would be to do maybe a privately funded robotics paid mission to Mars and so we figured out a mission that would cost about 15 to 20 million dollars which isn't a lot of money but it's about a tenth of what a low-cost NASA mission would be and and the idea was was called Mars oasis where we put a small robotic Lander on the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated nutrient Jail they would hydrate upon landing and you'd have plants growing in a Martian radiation and gravity conditions and you'd also be maintaining essentially a life-support system on the surface of Mars and this would be interesting to the public because they tend to respond to precedents and superlatives and this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled and the first life on Mars so pretty significant and then when I start looking at launch vehicles that the lowest cost vehicle in u.s. is Boeing's Delta 2 which costs about 50 million dollars and and that's a but that's but steep what we were trying to do so I made three visits to to Moscow to Russia to look at buying a Russian launch and it's it's actually pretty interesting going to Moscow to negotiate for a refurbished ICBM if you know on the range of interesting experiences that's pretty pretty far out there but but we actually did get to to a deal but there were so many complications associated with the deal that it didn't I wasn't comfortable with the risk associated with it so when I got back from the third trip I thought well you know why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles because it's not like we we drive Russian cars fly Russian planes or have Russian kitchen appliances and you know when's lastly avoid something Russian that wasn't vodka so I think us is pretty competitive place and and we should be able to to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle so I put together a feasibility study which consisted of of engineers that have been involved with all major launch vehicle developments over the last three decades and we iterated over a number of Saturdays at the beginning of last year to figure out well what would be will be the smartest way to approach this problem of not just launch cost but also launch reliability and we came up with a default design and and that actually is a fortunate timing that feasibility study finished up right around the time that we agreed to sell PayPal to eBay so coincident with that sale I moved down to to LA where there's actually the biggest concentration of aerospace industry in the world it's actually the biggest industry in in Southern California much bigger than entertainment or anything else I was living in pop in Palo Alto for about nine years before that anyway so just took it a little broad broadly about space and where things are today obviously US government manned exploration is not in a great place we've got the three remaining shuttles are grounded it looks like first flight might only be a year from now if that and we've got a vehicle that is incredibly expensive and and really quite dangerous it's a you know for reasons mentioned there it's got a side mounted crew compartment so if there's an explosion that's basically instant death the you've got solid rocket boosters which once you ignite em you can't turn them off and there's something fundamentally dangerous about pre mixing your fuel and oxidizer I think and then it's you've got wink wings and control surfaces when you cut when you we enter you've got to maintain a precise angle of attack even a momentary variance and that can break the whole vehicle apart so and then of course it's got no escape system so if anything does go wrong you're toast and and that you've got a cost that is is really pretty hard to fathom the the the shuttle program when you add up all the pieces is about four billion a year and so you can divide a four billion by the number of flights and it'll tell you what the cost is and if there's say four flights a year which they haven't been for a while then you're talking about that billion dollars a flight the plans to meet at future obviously we've got to continue building the space station so we're going to keep flying the shuttle but but I think it's probably gonna be the minimum number of shuttle flights that we need to launch the long term plans out will it's we called orbital space plane a safe plane in quotes because one of the options is a capsule so should we call maybe overall space thing but the basic idea is to have something that's hopefully a little cheaper and a lot safer than the space shuttle so in particular it's going to have an escape system so if something does go wrong you can abort to safety the the downside is that it's still it while it might be a little cheaper it's still going to be pretty darn expensive fist the estimated cost per flight of orbital space plane is somewhere in the region of 300 to 400 million dollars flight and of that that amount 200 200 million dollars alone is goes to Boeing for the delta 4 heavy expandable booster and and the it's a 15 billion dollar development effort and expected to be completed in nine years now typically typically things have have not been under budget and under time so it's unlikely I think given historical precedent that that it will say within 15 billion dollars and the 2012 timeline and a bit about what's going to ask on it elsewhere in the world in Russia that this is really the Soyuz is our only access to space station it's considerably cheaper considerably safer the Soyuz has a very good track record its crew is top manner there has an escape system there are no wings or control surfaces to go wrong overall it's a pretty good system and the estimated costs are about 60 million dollars a flight which is order bank more than order bank to be less than than the Space Shuttle the thing that constrains them obviously is the weakness of the Russian economy it's very hard for them to embark on ambitious programs with an economy the size of Belgium so China is it's probably the most interesting thing that's that's going on in space the this month China is expected to be only the third cut is expected to launch their first person into space they'll make them only the third country ever to put someone in orbit and that they put a lot of money and effort into this program if anything serves as a spur for human space exploration it is likely to be the China's ambitions in space and and hopefully a sense in America that we want to at least keep up with with China and they have grand ambitions beyond just low-earth orbit they're planning on setting up a Space Station putting a base on laws and eventually sending humans to Mars so what's happening in the u.s. that I think might ultimately surpass all of that stuff is entrepreneurial space activities where things are led by the spirit of free enterprise and I think there's perhaps an analogy here we're just as DARPA served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the Internet in the beginning when it may be the case that NASA has has essentially done the same thing by spending the money developed some of the fundamental technologies in the beginning and then once we can bring so the commercial free enterprise sector into it then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we did that we saw in the Internet so there are several serious Lawrence McClay efforts underway talk about each one there's this burt rutan of Scaled Composites burt rutan is one of the world's foremost aircraft designers and he's developed a suborbital vehicle that they're actually flying out of Mojave and this is an X PRIZE class vehicle there's John Carmack who wrote a quake and doom probably one of the best software engineers in the world one of the best engineers that I know period and he's developing a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle Jeff Bezos who I understand was here last week is it's a huge space advocate and it's my understanding that he intends to spend something in order of a billion dollars over the next 20 years on space exploration and and then space then my company SpaceX and I think within the next several years these entrepreneurial efforts will actually be what drives space exploration so a little bit about each one that's a picture of the Burt Rutan effort it's called white knight is the carrier plane and then spaceship one is the thing that's held in the belly there and the this project is supposedly funded by Fall Allen so there's quite a lot of capital also should make that point quite a lot of capital that's entering this entrepreneurial space sector as well the only drawback I think of this architecture is that it's not really scalable for for something that would get to orbit this is pretty good for a suborbital but I think the architecture would need to change for an orbital vehicle and there's John Carmack 7 he's a little irreverent this is from his website his his vehicle is a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle he's made he's made really incredible progress somebody who has no background in aerospace engineering and is also kind of doing it all himself with him and like three buddies so and I think they will make something that works actually if you can check out their website on which all the aerospace it's pretty interesting stuff but in order to get to orbit this would require a substantial improvement in the mass efficiency in the engine efficiency and probably be a two-stage vehicle Jeff Bezos who sure almost everyone here is aware of he is a pretty huge fan of space in fact his high school valedictorian speech was about the necessity of humanity expanding to other planets so it's pretty important to him from what I understand this is our effort we're spending quite a bit more than the three prior entities that I mentioned in some cases probably an order of magnitude more because what we're doing is really an order of magnitude more difficult we're building an orbital launch vehicle at a two stage very high efficiency engines we're having a sufficiency launch vehicle and it's targeted to the satellite delivery markets so our approach is really to make this a solid sound business and so I've predicated that the strategic plan on a known market something that I we know for a fact exists which is the need to put small to medium sized satellites into orbit and and so that's what we're going after initially and then with that as a kind of a revenue base we will move into the human transportation market it's the long term answer the company are definitely human transportation I think this the smart strategy is to first go for cargo delivery essentially satellite delivery and our eventual a great path is twofold the successor to saturn v bull the super heavy lift vehicle that could you know be used for setting up a moon base or doing a Mars mission that would be the Holy Grail objective on the upper right there you can see a test firing of our engine and on the lower right you can see the alpha stage tank this is an engine test of our main engine which is called Merlin and that that generates about roughly 75,000 pounds of thrust at sea level this is our upper stage engine it's about it it's about 7,500 pounds of thrust in vacuum and this is the a accelerated version of our launch sequence our first launch will be from the SpaceX launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base and approximately March of next year basically early next year and we will be flying a navy satellite maybe communication satellite so it's it's notable because often launch vehicle companies are not able to get somebody they could get a paying customer on their first flight but we've we've been able to do that this is also the Falcon development at SpaceX is the fastest launch vehicle development in history including wartime so that's actually been a burger for space which is about two hours away from Santa Barbara common themes between zip2 and paypal well I guess both of them involved had had software at the as the heart of the technology even though zip to was in was servicing the media sector and also the PayPal was servicing the financial sector the the heart of it was really software and Internet related stuff so certainly that's a huge commonality they were both in Palo Alto where I lived I think we you know took a similar approach to building both companies which was to have a small group of very talented people and and keep it small you know I think PayPal had at at its high probably 30 engineers for a system that I would say is more sophisticated than the federal reserve clearing clearing system I'm pretty sure it is actually because the federal was the clearing system sucks so what else is there it generally you know I think the way both septa and PayPal operate was was really you there was your canonical Silicon Valley startup you know pretty flat a hierarchy you know everybody had a roughly similar cube and anyone could talk to anyone we had a philosophy of best idea wins as opposed to you know the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way it go and obviously you know everyone was was an equity stake holder was anything if there were two paths that you know let's say we had to choose through one thing or the other and then one wasn't obviously better than the other then rather than spend a lot of time trying to which one was slightly better we were just pick one and do it and sometimes we'd be wrong and and and we'd pick this South off a little path but up and it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on on a choice we didn't worry too much about intellectual property paperwork legal stuff we really were very focused on building the best product that we possibly could both up to PayPal with very product focused companies you know that's was incredibly obsessive about how do we build something that is really gonna be the you know the best possible customer experience and and that that that was a far more effective selling tool then and having a giant sales force or thinking of you know marketing gimmicks or there are 12 step processes or whatever I'm not super familiar with Friendster certainly I mean the essence of viral marketing is do you have something that one customer is going where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything and there are there lots of instances of that Princeton might be one obviously hotmail was one PayPal was born eBay was one and and in a situation like that going back to what I said about product product matters incredibly because if you're gonna recommend something to somebody if you've got to really love the product experience otherwise you're not gonna recommend it because you don't want to burn your friend hurdles in the space industry entering the space industry well you know it is a very complicated regulatory structure as you might imagine when somebody tries to build an open a launch vehicle which is not really all that distinguishable from an ICBM there's a lot of regulation and they probably should be because you know you don't want to launch something and end up hitting LA so probably the regulatory staff was very difficult the environmental approvals certainly proven very difficult much more so than we expected I mean here in Silicon Valley you look you know what I came to appreciate in Silicon Valley you live in a libertarian paradise there's almost no regulation and what can be very frustrating is that regulation is often irrational it doesn't make any sense but you've got somebody there who is simply executing a set of rules in a pair of where those rules make sense and you can try to convince them that rules don't make sense and they won't listen to you so probably regulation is the most annoying thing I would say overall though I'm very pleased because I think we've had a very smooth development process and on the whole I can't complain at all yeah why is it so expensive to send something into space well let me tell you what makes a rocket hard the the energy and the velocity required to get into orbit it is is so substantial that compared to say a car or even a plane the you have almost no margin to play with typically a launch vehicle will get about two percent of its liftoff mass to orbit so and that's the case for for Falcon and so if you can only get two percent of what you will rocket ways to begin with to two orbit you could all you if you're wrong by two percent you're gonna get anything to orbit you know come crashing down on the Pacific know it so that means all of your calculations have to be right if you miss if you must calculate something you get an answer wrong it blows up and it's very expensive trying to get all your answers right and then double-checking up there right and testing them all and doing as much as you can on the ground I think that's a lot of what makes rockets expensive the low launch rate typically is also what makes rocket Explorer it's expensive if you had you know thousands of flights a year then it would be a lot cheaper although it's a bit of a chicken and egg because it needs to be cheaper in order to have thousands of flights a year but at the end of the day when you in the final analysis I would say that Rockets really should be a lot cheaper than they are today and and I think the way they're both the way they're operated is just very inefficiently and I think with with SpaceX and Falcon we're gonna we're gonna show that that's that's the case our vehicle will sell for about six billion dollars a flight that our nearest competitor is the Pegasus from orbital sciences which is about twenty five million dollars flight and that has less capability than our rocket so Falcon we represent a pretty substantial breakthrough on the cost of access to space yeah the customer base with SpaceX is just dramatic ly different cups different PayPal PayPal is a consumer product where as SpaceX we're selling rockets and the number of people who want to buy rockets is quite small if anyone here has six billion dollars of once a rocket I mean I'd be glad to sell it to them but so it's much more of an individual selling process it there's a great deal more thought that goes into any purchase of a launch much more so than signing up for PayPal account which doesn't really cost you much so yeah and there's not a lot of viral marketing that's gonna happen with the rocket I suspect I'm hoping that you know my counting on it I think successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes shapes and flavors how much does anyone one particular thing for me you know some of the things I've described already I think are very important I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product it is very important so you know being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing and this context really really liking what you do whatever area that you get into given that you know even if you if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short you know I'd say if and also if you if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working I mean it'll just it's something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work I think SpaceX is about 30 people and and what we do internally at SpaceX is we do all of the design analysis integration of hardware testing and then launch operations but a lot of the heavy manpower stuff like welding together our primary structure the heavy machining and so forth that we outsource so we'd be a much larger company for that all of that internally and so you had up another party question oh yeah actually we don't have any lawyers the the regulatory stuff that we deal with is very technical it's it's really a lot like trying to get an aeroplane certified with the FAA we're just getting a rocket certified so so our documentation is it's very I wish we could offload it to some large they wouldn't know what they had to do so you know how did the Whorton degree help I think it a business degree teaches your a lot of the terminology it introduces you to concepts that you would otherwise you know this terminology is something to be said for that you're introduces you to concepts you would otherwise have to learn empirically I mean I think I think you can you can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business either in school or out of school school and you know in theory should help accelerate that process and I think it you know that often times it does it can be an efficient learning process perhaps more efficient than and empirically learning lessons but really I think you there are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school and there are those that have PhDs so I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know whether that is in school or imperfectly well I should point out that Falcon our first vehicle doesn't really have the same capability as either the Chinese the Russian or the Space Shuttle vehicles that I mentioned Falcon would be in the in the light class of launch vehicles whereas the space shuttle would be a heavy class launch vehicle so it's not it's not quite an apples to apples comparison however the the right comparison would be Falcon compared to the Pegasus from orbital sciences Falcon is six million the Pegasus is 25 million and the way we've gotten our prices low our cost low is we've really focused on every element of the launch vehicle there's really no one silver bullet that has been responsible for a substantial portion of the car savings it's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements and so we've done improvements in the propulsion system the structure the avionics and the launch operations as well as maintain a very low overhead organization and when you add up all the things we've done in those areas that allows us to produce a launch vehicle at six million dollars the as far as PayPal there were a lot of back office relationships that we needed to establish and too attached to various heterogeneous data sources we needed to attach to the credit card system for processing credit cards we needed to attach to the Federal Reserve System for doing electronic funds transfers we needed to attach the various fraud databases to run fraud checks that there was a lot that we had to with interface with and and that that took that took a while but it all came together I think roughly simultaneously I mean developing the software and having it ready full for the general public reasonably coincided with us being able to conclude those deals and interface with the outside vendors and all that took about a year I think one thing that's important is to try not to serialize dependencies so if you put as many elements in parallel as possible that a lot of things have a gestation period and there's really nothing you can do to accelerate I mean it is it's very hard to accelerate that just a gestation period so if you can sort of have all those things just aiding in parallel then that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline I think people tend to sterilize things too much we did do a few patents on paper on the PayPal system although nothing that ever actually mattered so our patents are mostly useful in a defensive situation rather than offensive it can be very difficult to actually prosecute a patent so I'm I think I think in certain industries like pharmaceuticals and so forth patents can be incredibly important in software particularly when you've got a very rapid life cycle where you know you made sure you got a patent but now it's we're done it so who cares it's less relevant in when you've got a rapid life cycle well I don't you know I've looked at the various there are a couple things that I think are pretty bogus one is space mining another is space solar power I mean if you if you calculate how much it costs to bring either the the photons from space full of power you know back to earth or the raw material back to earth it the economics don't make sense they just can't close the economic case not even buy it it's probably off by three orders of magnitude so I think the probably the biggest thing that can happen is if we if we decide to establish a base on the moon or base on Mars and particularly if we if we attempt to make a self-sustaining self-sustaining based self-sustaining civilization on on the Moon or Mars that that is enormous opportunity on probably the trillion dollar level because then you're basically into planetary commerce going on I think that that's pretty huge but but it's it's it's you know it's not going to be space or power it's not going to be space mining I think so let's see the government I'm here who knows maybe we're being spied upon I don't know but but certainly we are there are some restrictions which are really annoying such as that we're only allowed to employ people who have at least a green card or our citizen of the US we're not allowed employ anyone who is does not have permanent residency in the u.s. basically if I can't throw you in jail they wouldn't let you we'll work on rocket stuff and we have if we talk to any foreign nationals we need a technology transfer agreement or something like that from the State Department so our second launch is is actually a non-us government to launch and it's taken us six months to get the state upon approval just to engage in a contract discussion with them so that is problem we had several office actually from a number of different entities for for PayPal and in fact the closer we got to I PR the more more office we got but we always felt that those undervalued the company and subsequently when we were in public I think the public Moloch has kind of indicated the value of the company so I think that that's one of the good things about the public markets is that there are objective value of companies when you're a private company it's very hard to say how much you're worth because you have to basically think of some metric you know are you gonna go for multiple of future earnings are you gonna go of some something of revenue what are your comparables going to be there are all sorts of questions it's really up for debate what sort of value of your company is when you're public it's it's you know it's whatever the market says your your worth that's what you're worth so so yeah so I think a ebay made a number of office prior to going public that were substantially below our that the value of once made Post public and that kind of cleared up the disagreement and then we resolved and what else it was actually got a second part of the equation yeah eBay had a I think there was initially bill point and there was evade payment and and it was really a pretty tough long-running battle of PayPal vs vs eBay's payment system and it was certainly a very challenging I mean I think it was you know there were times where it felt like we're trying to win a land war in Asia and you know they kind of set the ground rules or trying to beat Microsoft in there or an operating system it's really really pretty hard that took a lot of our effort to to actually beat eBay on their own system and that one of the long-term risks certainly for the company was that eBay would one day prevail and one way to retire that risk obviously was to South eBay writing software during the summer of 95 trying to make useful things happen on the internet and I wrote something that allowed you to keep maps and directions on the internet and then something that allowed you to do online manipulation of content kind of a really advanced blogging system and and then we started talking to us to small newspapers and media companies and so forth and we started getting some interest I mean have fun be like what's the internet even in Silicon Valley but then occasionally somebody would bike and they would get a little bit of money from them and then there was basically only about six of us they were myself my brother who I convinced to come down from Canada and a friend of my mom's so and then and then three salespeople we hired on contingency by putting an ad in the newspaper but things were pretty tough and they're really going I didn't have any money in fact I had negative money a huge student debt so Oh in fact I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office so I rented an office instead because that was I was actually I got a cheaper office than I could get a get a place to stay and then we just slept on the futon and shower at the YMCA on pageboy and El Camino I was in the best shape I've been shower workout and you get to go and there wasn't there was an isp on the floor below us just a like little tiny isp and we drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable that gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month so I mean we had just an absurdly tiny burn rate and and we also had you know a really tiny revenue stream but we actually had more revenue than we had expenses so so when we went to talk to these C's we could actually well like I said it's there's no silver bullet that I can point to as to why the vehicle is a lot cheaper we've really focused on reducing the cost across the board I mean one thing our overhead in a 30 person company is you know in order magnitude less than it is in Lockheed or Boeing I just just for starters so even if we did everything the same and both the same launch vehicle we'd be conservative cheaper and then every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity and the reason for simplicity is because that both improves the reliability as well as reduces your cost if you've got fewer components that's for your components to go wrong and if your components turbine I think there's there's I think a fairly significant innovation in our air frame which is semi pressure stabilized monocoque with variable skin thickness and a common bulkhead you know what that means need a diagram to explain it'll but the net result is that it's very cheap and it's a very massive ficient and I think easy to test and quite reliable our avionics system would give you an example our avionics system we use an Ethernet on the vehicle to communicate they've made that may not sound like a great innovation but it is an orange vehicles all the other launch vehicles communicate from the vehicle by these serial cables that run the entire length of the vehicle and so you've got these these giant copper bundles because your arm running up and down the vehicle it makes it heavy it makes it expensive and there's so this these things like that which when you add them all up it makes a huge difference no that's that's a good question that's a good question no I would not I think SpaceX is not this is advanced auto engineering and it may also you know I can't tell you how many people have said that you know the fastest way to turn it the fast way to make a small portion in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one so you know hopefully that doesn't doesn't work out but I would definitely I think space is a tough one for first-time entrepreneurs you're better off starting with something that requires low capital and space is a high capital effort alright last question

https://youtu.be/ao5OdiwKp5k

- I think the government makes a good customer, but not a good venture capitalist. - Stay tuned for cnn.com. (typewriter bell ringing) - [Interviewer] When you dream about space businesses, what do you see as possible five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, as viable space businesses that it's hard for us to see 'cause they're not there? - You have the obvious existing business of satellites of one kind or another, which I think with an improvement in space transportation costs will enjoy an increase in the business, but modest. And then I think you've got space tourism or space adventure, whatever you want to call it. That, I think, is likely to be the biggest driver. And then long-term, I think you've got, assuming that we fulfill the president's vision and we establish a moon base and then go on and establish a Mars base, I think supplying those bases is a huge, huge business. - [Interviewer] How does what you're doing help NASA accomplish its goals? Because NASA wants to set bigger goals. - I think, fundamentally, the way we help NASA is by lowering the cost of access to space, allowing us to do more interesting things for a given budget. In fact, I think what we're doing is critical to the future of NASA. At the current prices that NASA pays for space transportation, I don't think we'll be able to achieve anything interesting in space. As far as business-- - [Interviewer] You would occasionally do a job for them. - Yeah, well I certainly-- - [Interviewer] But you're not going into business with them. Well actually, I view all of the government agencies with an interest in space as customers. So, I view NASA as a customer, certainly. The Air Force, Naval Research Lab, National Crisis Organization. Although, NASA certainly is somebody we would like to be a customer of ours. - [Interviewer] When you say space transportation, we think of transportation, we always think of moving people. You're thinking of moving people, moving satellites, moving cargo? - Well, we're starting off with transportation of satellites to orbit. Or cargo, you could call it cargo. We're starting off with unmanned transportation, and as we prove out the reliability, our intention is to move to human transportation as well. - [Interviewer] Where do you think we are in the life of our space exploration? - We're definitely in a lull, with respect to human space exploration on the government's side. However, what I think we're beginning to see is the dawn of a new era of space exploration. But one that is driven by commercial companies as much if not more than by government.

https://youtu.be/8vBqtKQx7jg

this is now the the third great meal we've had i want to thank the staff here at the sheridan national these just been great meals we've been having here with them several years ago i held i i chaired a couple of other conferences for another association with this this hotel and so when they they came up as the uh the winner of the sweepstakes to have this conference uh i was i was actually pleasantly surprised to see them come at the top of this list that knew that we would have we would have good meals here they just they just never cease to amaze me what they're able to produce and just the vista here i mean looking out i know that we've had the rain had the clouds last night hopefully these clouds will go away so that when we come back for dinner tonight or for lunch on saturday and sunday you'll be able to see the washington view that you just will not get any other location in the washington area it's just amazing the view that you get from this from this room here we want to go ahead into our our program here for lunch because we just have another outstanding speaker it just never stops the speakers that we have on our program here this weekend uh first of all though we have uh an individual who's who's uh coming here today to make a presentation of an award so at this time i'd like to call upon introduce to you an individual dr sam dinkin is the chief economist of optimal auctions a weekly communist at the space review and a space investor he was there at the start of the b2b internet explosion at ge in 1995. he's conducted research at gerne r d and at ibm research at lecg assisting qualcomm with bid strategy and rollout plans he had 100 patents approved for in one year at ibm research including a patent for all externally adjustable implants he gained his spectrum auction clients 200 million dollars he has claimed he has saved his uh electricity auction clients 2.3 billion dollars he is here to present the space journalism prize he sponsored which he can tell you all about [Applause] the space journalism prize is a one thousand dollar prize to the author with the best article promoting sp human space faring that appeared in print uh or on the web during 2004 and i'll do another one next year and on after that the criteria for the prize were impact originality quality of writing and research the entries were difficult for us to judge because they all had excellent quality of writing where all the entries could use a little work is impact in order to become a space-faring race people need to be taught what to hope for the space journalism prize and the space journalism association are about focusing on that duty of the race with that duty comes tremendous power the space journalists are the main influencers on public opinion about space the people are the bosses of congress and the president so journalists influence whether the space budget is 16 billion or 32 billion dollars space journalists influence whether companies succeed in their fundraising space journalists will help determine how the public proceeds perceives the first fatal crash of a private space vehicle will the dead be canonized as martyred heroes or duped victims space journalists have the power to set the human species on the road to becoming eternal next year the space journalism prize will be happy to accept sponsorship we will also be recruiting celebrity judges and including this year's winner the winner this year wrote an amazing series for the st louis post dispatch that included 50 interviews dramatic writing and dense coverage of the epic story of the x prize the prize was a wonderful way to spark the human imagination the story captured the courage hope and tenacity of the sponsors and the winners eli kentish well i'd just like to say that when i was um when i discussed this story with my editors in st louis they said oh no not the x prize not again guys wearing you know aluminum foil under their clothing and i found that it's not all guys wearing aluminum foil under their cone although there may be some of them here but actually i was not interested in space at all and i have to say talking to many of you actually in writing the story and working with you i really developed a true appreciation for people who are out there doing as opposed to just saying something about it so elon and pete diamandis and obviously bert rutan deserve the major credit but really all of you trying to make your dreams happen are a real inspiration for me and i hope to write about people like you for the rest of my career thanks [Music] so i just wanted to say thank you to clark lindsay and jeff baus for being the two judges on the prize in addition to me and thanks to george whitesides for letting me present thanks thank you all okay into the main part of our program to introduce our guest speaker for today i'd like to present to you one of the leaders of booz allen hamilton's aerospace and defense practice and a director of the national space society and a good friend eric fisher thanks bob good afternoon i'd like to add my personal welcome to everybody uh here in this room and not in this room was attending attending the isdc this year this is really an encouraging turnout and a wonderful turnout and i'm pleased and and hope you have all been enjoying the sessions to date and hope you i wish you a good next two or three days as well i'm sure they'll be tremendously exciting i have to admit that i feel a little extraneous introducing the speaker for lunch today because there can't be a person in this room who perhaps doesn't have a shrine to him or to him uh at his or her house these days um elon musk and it's it is my my honor and and pleasure to introduce our speaker today elon musk uh has insight and drive and experience that way outstrip his years after university of pennsylvania and wharton he went on to found what really probably were two of the most interesting and critical and successful internet and enterprise software related businesses uh that were ever founded paypal and zip2 he both founded them as well as random once he got tired with that he sold them off and turned his attention to space where he'd always had a strong interest and certainly in the last short few years elon has become if not the main symbol than one of the main symbols but in my mind probably the main symbol galvanizing and driving force for the entrepreneurial space industry so without further ado since you all know of him well i'd like to invite and welcome elon musk wow that was really kind all right so what i thought i'd do is is kind of look through a presentation on spacex some of you are probably aware of the details of what we're doing and some are probably less familiar so i'll go through it fairly quickly and then try to leave as much time as possible for any questions and you're welcome to ask me you know anything about the rocket or the business i think i can probably answer just about everything maybe a few confidential items um okay first time so basically spacex i started spacex because uh it seemed to me that we weren't making the kind of progress we really needed to make in the cost of access to space um and uh if we don't make cost i mean sort of this is i'm preaching to converted here normally the room is not quite as converted as this room is um but uh so i'm telling you things you already know but you know as long as it costs us hundreds of millions of dollars to put a few people in space not even you know far away space just three or four miles above the source of the earth uh we're never going to get anywhere we're not we're not going to become a space faring civilization i think probably i mean what i what i really think is is the overriding goal and what i suspect most people in the room think is is certainly a is a is an extremely important goal is becoming a space bearing civilization ultimately uh becoming a multi-planetary species um and if we're not on that on that path then we really need to get on that path so given that the fundamental obstacle to that is really the cost of getting there they weren't making progress in that direction that's really why i started spacex and before actually formally starting the company i put together a group of engineers that have been involved with most the major rock developments in the u.s and had some familiarity with the way the russians did it and in fact the current nasa administrator mike griffin was on that feasibility study group so i'm very glad to see he's the new administrator um and we thought we sort of sat around over a series of saturdays in early 2002 and try to figure out is there anything fundamental because i don't really know anything about rockets at that time is there some sort of really difficult physical thing that that makes it fundamentally as expensive as it is and you can't make improvements and um it quickly became obvious that there really isn't anything fundamental that prevents uh chemical rockets from being much cheaper than they are right now um you know giving example um the the propellant cost of the falcon one what it costs to fill the the gas tank essentially is about thirty thousand dollars on and that's on a six and a half million dollar launch initially we want to keep driving that that launch cost down um but you know in airlines that is a dominating factor often the predominant factor in in cost whereas for for rockets it's it's an accounting error um and we need to get to the point where that actually makes or it's not an accounting error and actually unless you have really bad accounting um and you know it's it's actually where propellant cost actually matters um so anyway so the way i usually describe it to people is that the goal is to be kind of like the southwest airlines of this space business when southwest airlines came in airfares were really expensive and and southwest came in affairs they were often you know 15 20 of what he say united or delta was was charging and people at the time said well this this is really impossible they must be compromising reliability or um there must be something messing with this picture they won't be able to sustain those prices uh they've got a business and you know the fact the matter is southwest airlines today is the most profitable airline in the industry has a market cap greater than the sum of all of all of its competitors um and it still offers those prices and and reliability is good on-time performance is good so you know they went and they really rethought the whole space business uh every ass open that's right the whole airline business and and so with that sort of you know a good kind of model to think of what we're trying to do is rethink the business of space transportation now we have i think we've got actually a greater ability to improve in our case because we're actually driving the fundamentals of the technology whereas uh southwest airlines can only improve on the service and have to work with an existing technology base of this you know the 737 um but anyway that's the basic idea and i believe in setting objective benchmarks so because if you can't measure it it's very difficult to figure out if you're improving um and so the benchmark objective is a factor of ten and to put an actual number on that it's less than five hundred dollars a pound to to orbit is is the goal i think we can actually get there before the end of this decade so um it's structured like a silicon valley technology company because that's how i know how to structure companies uh work work well the first two times so hopefully third time as well um and uh you know a few common things there's very flat hierarchy it's you know we're sold in fairly densely packed cubes we have a fairly small engineering team but they're really really the top engineers in their field and uh we have what i call it a high signal to noise ratio where signal is engineering and management is noise and i think there's a lot of big aerospace companies have a very bad signal noise ratio so um and then the the big driver in terms of both reliability and cost improvements is simplicity so that's really our manager at spacex if we can figure out a simpler easier way to do something uh we'll do it we're gonna care about whether it's new technology old technology you know doesn't matter we just want to get the job done um our headquarters are in el segundo which is about a mile south of lax and we have about 75 000 square feet of uh engineering and manufacturing space we actually build manufactured the rocket right there in la which sounds kind of weird to build a rock in l.a but we do and then we do our propulsion and structural testing in texas we have a 300 acre propulsion test facility out there and i'll show you some pictures of that later in the presentation some of the slides brother i'm going to go through pretty quickly thanksgiving uh so we made pretty good progress uh our third birthday will be next month in june and so approximately three years we've designed the entire rocket from scratch gone through design design built and tested the entire rocket both stages the fairing uh two new engines including a pump bed engine and our engine is actually going to be only the second american orbital booster engine developed in the past 25 years the other one being boeing's delta engine and before that the shuttle the space shuttle main engine okay um we've managed to get a few launch contracts um uh two uh with the dod and one with the malaysian space agency and one with a u.s commercial entity which is bigelow airspace and the last one being the falcon 5 launch with bigger airspace being a subscale launch of his space station so that should be doubly cool and then we also you may have seen the announcement that we were awarded a 100 million dollar air force idiq contract uh which hopefully will be used to the fullest extent um and i would expect sort of one to two launches a year uh starting next year on that contract uh i don't know if you saw the the last if you head back one slide sort of the contrast is that just looks black to me but essentially that prior slide was the facility when we moved in this is it one year later we're assembling a prototype on the floor and next slide and then when you're after that uh the coil vehicle is on the launch pad and the flight vehicle is actually currently on the launch pad and uh we expect to do a a hot fire on the pad uh tomorrow so uh because delta iv finally finally odell ii finally launched this morning to 5 a.m or whenever it was and uh so we're cleared to do the the pad hot fire and then the actual launch should take place as soon as the titan 4 defies vandenberg which is uh in approximately the august time frame or july always time right let's see if this works um if it's not showing up then the video is not going to play anyway it's just a launch simulation video if you want to see that video you can actually just go to our website spacex.com and the videos that video along with a number of other video segments is available we post things regularly there uh i'll skip over this sort of reliability stuff um we think it's very important but it's very important but uh not really trying to sell anyone here at launch i think but basically uh yeah simplicity is the key to both um there's uh you know on the cost side there are several key technical innovations and propulsion system structures avionics guidance control launch processes and we're a fairly vertically integrated business we actually literally machine the metal then the metal weld all that sort of stuff in-house because what i've discovered is that the aerospace supply chain is is so bad that as soon as you as soon as you subcontract any significant portion of that work to somebody it becomes very expensive so we've generally found it's more efficient to be vertically integrated than outsourced and uh so falcon 1 uh capability is uh just over a thousand like 1500 pounds to low earth orbit um the falcon 5 capabilities about six tons actually we'll get to that later it's uh the optimization in the case of falcon 1 was really in terms of a cost per flight to orbit so it wasn't a cost per unit mass optimization it was what is the smallest useful vehicle that we can build and deliver satellites on and we concluded that was yet to be at least sort of a thousand pounds to leo and uh we ended up exceeding that uh going to about 1500 pounds um total cost per launch is about six and a half million dollars all in both stages lux kerosene uh what one note where the element actually next slide is the first stage is intend to be reusable it comes back by a parachute to a water landing the pricing does not include any assumptions for usability um i'm actually fairly confident that reusability will work provided the parachute opens i mean i think if the parachute opens and i i i don't think the sea water is going to hurt the rocket um if you see what it goes through on on the test stand and on the launch pad uh where it gets deluged with water high pressure water and you know in a test stand in texas i mean we've had sleet snow rain that's hitting you sideways at 35 miles an hour extremely high winds so i i don't i think if it's uh provided we get get it back i think it'll actually be require very little refurbishment in order to launch a game uh the first stage engine which we call merlin is most of the approximate specifications of it a lot of this is on the website but basically it's a roughly seventy five thousand pound thrust sea level engine and of of modest performance i mean one of the things that we haven't tried to do is try to achieve the highest possible performance our goal has been to create something which is a reliable truck essentially rather than a ferrari so we haven't produced for instance a you know stage combustion super high isp engine this is you need to be pretty good but to get to orbit at all but you don't have to be you don't really have to push the envelope any further than we pushed it here looks like our upper stage engine also locks kerosene and similar in architecture to the first stage engine except that it doesn't have a turbo pump and it's a low pressure engine so falcon 5 which is the falcon 1 development has really um been winding down now for the past several months and essentially it's almost complete at this point so the development focus for about the past year has been more on the falcon 5 which is our medium lift vehicle the falcon 5 is approximately in the class of a delta ii heavy um it's also intended to at least from our standpoint be safe enough to carry people um it has engine out capability so you can lose any one of the main engines and still make it to orbit i think that's actually a very important principle given that airline transportation almost all airliners have multiple engines so if you lose an engine or you don't go down and jet turbines are far more reliable than rocket engines so if that principle makes sense for jet turbines it really makes sense for rocket engines and we expect to be able to accommodate up to five meter fairing as well so it'll have really put some pretty big stuff up there and uh here's some pictures of our test site that's a the our propulsion test type at night next one uh that's our main structural test and falcon one so we actually have a a large steel brace which surrounds the vehicle and the vehicle is hydraulically bent and crushed at various points to simulate flight loads that's a horizontal test stand that's a picture of a merlin engine at full thrust that's our small vertical test stand where we test the upper stage engine and that black pipe there is a diffuser which helps simulate vacuum conditions it's a vertical test stand two which is another picture of merlin in the vertical configuration and that's our really big test and that's capable of testing basically thrust levels up to about 3 million pounds so that that test end runs about 100 feet into the air 70 feet underground and we hope to use that to its fullest capacity and maybe beyond so that'll be exciting and the r in it stands for rocket so is there uh so any questions i can answer oh um you know that's a good question um i think the what what is the throw weight of falcon 5 to mars um well it depends on which trajectory i mean the zero three the zero c3 number as i recall is about uh 1200 1200 kilograms something like that uh yeah it's like about a ton a little over a ton i mean basically it's about as capable as the delta ii heavy is that since the mars exploration rove is there so anything that delta ii could throw to mars uh falcon fight for 30 miles um could you know couldn't really certain people if they were alive um i need something much bigger than that but you could certainly do robotic missions sure we don't like to disclose too much ahead of time because well frankly we'd like to it's more a question of sounding credible anything else because uh we'd like to get some things accomplished before we claim we're going to do other things but the plan is to do a vehicle which is in the class of delta iv uh after falcon 5 and you could you could apply sort of a common booster core approach to that and you know encompassed the entire range of the the elv capabilities so up to about 60 000 pounds to orbit maybe a little beyond that um i i can say that we'll we'll be announcing something fairly significant later this year as far as much more of capability than than is currently represented but we'd like to i ideally i'd like to have falcon 1 launch before we make any big announcement in that direction but you can expect that from a strategy standpoint we're you know called the 7-eleven strategy you know we're going small medium large and extra-large um or big gulf water it's super big um so if alpha one's obviously small falcon 5's medium we'll have it a lodge at an extra large sure actually how much has the range impacted the ranges impacted your cost of development in your future business plan i think um range-related stuff is probably i mean all regulatory staff combined i'd say at most 25 percent of the cost i mean still it's 20 to 25 of the total cost associated with both development and launch um the ablative portion is actually really cheap i mean it's it's uh it costs less than one of our main valves on the engine um so i don't give away some really detailed proprietary numbers but i can say it's really de minimis i mean it costs us more to hire the tugboat to go out there than it does to replace the ablative can you um uh sure um and by the way you know we put out a i put i write a little update every three or four months i've been waiting to get the hot fire done before doing the next update um the the hot fire that we're planning to do which hopefully will take place tomorrow um it was originally supposed to take place on may 3rd and then we had an igniter sensor failure which we lost that day and then we have to go behind the delta ii and so it goes on anyway but it's supposed to happen tomorrow around around one o'clock um pacific time and it's going to be a complete launch simulation including about five seconds of flame on the ground five seconds feels like a long time if you're there by the way then as far as the actual launch date we think we'll be ready to go as soon as uh the titan iv departs which is currently scheduled to be around mid july so and and that's there's a contingency there both on the on the titanfall rocket as well as the payload which is a classified payload um and so we only have limited visibility into that because they won't they won't give you specifics when there's classified stuff involved um but uh we expect assuming that they launch in mid-july we expect the range would give us um a launch because the lane the range has to assign a launch day to us we assume the range would assign a launch day that is within within two or three weeks of the titanfall departure so therefore titanfall left you know i'd say basically august would be a good bet and then as far as kwajalein that's actually going uh very well we have our own little island there called amalek um and uh it's um the concrete is all you know i think the last bit of concrete is getting poured next week so all the concrete for the pads and the propellant storage and the vehicle hanger and all that sort of stuff is almost all done uh we expect to have that launch site active and ready to do something with uh in the in the late august time frame so if time four gets significantly delayed uh then we'll go out of kwajalein and we expect to actually have two rockets one at one at vandenberg one and kwajalein possibly on the pad at the same time my question to you is i presume you are reaching out to a lot of suppliers who are really not part of the space industry what kind of reaction do you get from the holders of these businesses uh that's a good actually we try not to tell anyone outside of space business that's for a rocket because they assume rockets are made of magic so so you know if you tell them for a rocket they go like well you know i don't think i'm quite good enough to do something for a rocket they're like i'll be fine so we generally uh i mean there are some uh suppliers that are airspace suppliers that do do a good job i'd say like uh maratha valves does a good job for example um spin craft does a good job of spinning domes you know there's there's a few i started always sort of paint old aerospace supplies with with the same negative brush i think there are definitely some good ones out there but generally we find as a principle that regular industrial suppliers if you want something cheap fast and it's probably going to work then you should use a regular commercial supplier if you want something that's expensive takes a long time it might work use the aerospace supplier just to follow on his question are there any test facilities in nasa like wind tunnels or rock test stands that you anticipate needing for your future work uh so on there are there any nasa test facilities that we anticipate needing for our work um it's possible uh you know when we get to the really big propulsion stuff that we want to use some of the nasa test facilities you know as general rule you know we don't want to be the ones begging to use facilities so if if if if we're going to use nash facility then that that nasa facility has to behave like we're the customer if they don't have like we're the customer we're not going to we're not going to work work there um and uh you know if we have to sort of justify why we want to work there we're definitely not going to work there um so uh you know i think just for pace of execution reasons um because there's also a lot of paperwork involved using nasa facilities uh we've chosen to use our own facilities um but i think like i said for big stuff or where you know where that's you know it's like one-of-a-kind sort of test facilities uh that's uh that's probably where it makes sense to work work with nasa as far as using test facilities uh sure it's actually on the website uh it's uh basically it's about 50 15.8 million plus about a million in range related fees so you can say 17 all in and that's for a delta ii heavy class vehicle a little more than that yeah about 13 000 pounds so it's a little more capability than adult two heading uh no i mean we've signed falcon 5 to be it's actually consistent with the nasa man standards for uh uh you know as far as safety margins and all that are concerned actually exceeds them most cases um and i think the fact that it's this engine out redundancy is uh you know is good as well um the g loading is certainly uh fine it's you know maxes out at five g's approximately um so uh yeah i don't think there's any any issue with putting people on it elon on behalf of the conference in the national space site we really want to thank you for your talk and being here with us today and accept this memento on our on our behalf thank you very much you

https://youtu.be/U3Y32ADCjLo

Chris okay so this is the space every year we have the panel and every year it all gets a bit less science fiction and a bit more so I'm very pleased that of the representatives of the new space industry the two we have here Elon Musk and Chris Farrell Mehta have actually done things they've actually flown things they've actually built things and there's a lot of talk in the new space sector and here's the people who've actually delivered things Lidl and actually has to get away because he has to talk to NASA at 28 minutes past the hour so we've got to start with you on and so I've got many of you familiar with there with Elon Musk and with space adventures so with SpaceX but if perhaps you could give us the the elevator pitch just to bring people who aren't familiar with with where you're coming from up to speed certainly so hey we have some videos as well if if you're already placed from the videos that might be a good way to start all the SpaceX videos right well while we're waiting for the video I will describe SpaceX so anyway since we last saw you you've flown a rocket yes yes so here in fact okay so we're gonna see that this is a video from our island we launched from a small island in the in the middle of the Pacific it's the closer still I switch to the next video that's the Falcon 1 rocket you see that so far so good yeah and the next clip rocket business desert is a tough well no new world no new designs yeah Space Shuttle Space Shuttle arguably Falcon one is airborne at this time so that video is taken from a nearby island this is the onboard video camera we're about to cycle which goes a little bit which is the round trip actually so this camera is on the second stage of the rocket looking down a wanted to skip portal a few seconds that's the water deluge system some insulating flume still clinging to the rocket okay so we can see there's a bit of a problem there actually no you can't that's not really the nature of the problem the poem occurred right here the entrance shut down all right right so so SpaceX SpaceX I found it approximately four years ago with the goal of revolutionising access to space the it's a simple three-step plan which is both launch vehicles to put satellites into low-earth orbit then step two is build a launch vehicle and spacecraft to provide humans to orbit services to the government and to private sector and then step three would be to provide humans to another planet services to the private sector and in the government we started with a small launch vehicle of Falcon one and the idea behind Falcon one is to be able to test out all the technologies at a relatively smaller scale and prove that out well before we put any people on board yeah the the Falcon 1 launch vehicle is a little over six million dollars alone chits the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any rocket in the world of any production rocket and the if you were close yeah if you want something with the domestic provider like orbital sciences the cost per equivalent rocket would be about 25 to 30 million there are lower cost rockets available from from Russia and Ukraine which are refurbished ICBMs but those are not really currently in production or taken off the shelf and and those much more competitive they're more in that 10 to 12 million dollar range but that's not a realistic price okay so when the rocket hit the hit a dead reef about 200 feet away from the launch pad the satellite planted like a cannibal it flew about 500 feet and landed back on the island went through the roof of the machine shop split a two by six wooden beam and landed on the floor more or less intact well this was a pretty robust satellite and it actually landed about 50 feet away from a shipping container and so I think it was trying to get home one way or another but you know at least we can say we never lost a satellite okay so when are you going to fly the Falcon one again yeah the next digital flight is September October and what the information about the first flight is it was fundamentally a demo or beta flight it was not about the satellite the satellite was there as an afterthought it was a student built satellite and our customer our beta customer which is DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency what they paid for was a response from this launch demonstration and in fact they've bought another launch demonstration which is in September October time frame and then we've got launches scheduled every two to three months thereafter now I see from your website that you have a Falcon 9 which is the big rocket yeah it's either end of next year or possibly early 2008 the Falcon 9 unlike the Falcon 1 is a man rated vehicle it's designed with higher factors of safety and it's much bigger it's much bigger yes it's 25 tons a little bit kind of stuff it's up to up to 25 tons to over yes in fact we have another version on the drawing board that's not on the website that's capable of putting 50 tons to orbit and that vehicle would be capable of if you did two launches of doing moon missions or Mars missions man muslem not quite it's about the the heavier version will be about a third the scale of a Saturn 5 but it's warmer it's more efficient right so its capabilities proportionate to its size or better well the other big thing that's changed since last year aside from the fact that you've flown something is the well I wonder I want to hear from you how important you think it is that NASA has has put up this contract called cots which does not stand for commercial off-the-shelf but kind of does yeah so what is it actually stand for commercial that's commercial orbital transportation services basically they're saying here's half a billion dollars could somebody build us something it can get to the space station please and bright and they've now got six companies and you're on the short list of six provide that service they're gonna make the decision in August you're going to speak to them in about 13 minutes about this do you think that's a big shift is that kind of Lancer saying okay there is something to this new space business after all yeah it's a huge shift NASA essentially has put forward a as you say a half billion dollar program for a replacement to the Space Shuttle is what it amounts to so SpaceX is in the shortlist to build the replacements the Space Shuttle I think we're the lead candidate this would be a falcon 9 based yes would essentially be doing what the Soyuz is doing now exactly in fact the Falcon 9 in its smallest version is a Soyuz class launch vehicle right and I suppose the question for those of you in this business is historically NASA and the incumbent builders of stuff have been the bad guys and you were sort of all never I doubt then we'll go to Mars on our own and all this kind of stuff and now here they are saying well actually we'd like to buy some services from you and I mean is there but there is a big change that was a philosophical change for you as well but collaborate with them or do you do you not care who buys your Rockets sort of someone does I'm agnostic okay I you know we don't make value judgments about our customers they can put a wheel of cheese and spin that money's as good as anyone elses is the point absolutely if they were if they weren't if somebody cuts us they want to put a wheel of cheese in space we'll do that okay we've just had this conference earlier in the month the you know where all the new space guys get together in LA and what was the mood like that was it a big change from last year as this is this changed the landscape I wasn't at the conference last year but I can see the the mood was buoyant I think there's there's a there's a lot of new investment coming into the space sector you have guys like obviously Jeff Bezos Paul Allen John Carmack who did you know doom and quake and it's all these dot-com guys who are using the money well technology guys really yeah so you've made your money in technology and now this isn't you the new frontier okay well I'd like to I'd like to talk to Krista then maybe we can have a bit of discussion about something so so Chris you're a couple of centuries and you are the go-to guy if you actually want to go into space now and you've got your 20 million dollars is that the price yes yeah so you've sent three people to the space station already correct and you've got a queue of others coming three and you also do vomit comet flights that you and that well we don't like to call it that okay sorry we only the reason they called the vomit Konica is they do about sixty parabolas right so they start for the party you start feeling sick after about 15 and that's okay that's enough for me and you also do make flights to the edge of space and now you're starting to get into the business of actually well you're not building any spacecraft are you but you have a outsource or a space probe and you have you have a Russian firm that designed the Buran Russian shuttle all the people who did that tell us about that because you actually have it we use it we're using the Missy Missy Chev design bureau which designed the airframe for the boron program but really we're using the whole Russian space program because well there's a whole cadre of subcontractors that will be involved so this vehicle the Explorer am what right what sort of thing will it let you do well it's a suborbital vehicle it'll go up above 100 kilometres 62 miles and it's reusable its reusable rocket plane carried by it's very similar to spaceship one and I should add that we had that design before birds right but ours is on top Burt's is a drop when do you hope to be able to actually 2008/2009 so basically in the next three to five years we're going to see competition not we're not just going to see the first four sub or I mean we have we have an operational orbital program right now and that's that's what I work on and we're actually developing a circumlunar program where we're taking we use the Soyuz spacecraft to go to the International Space Station and and I actually have a clip oh you've got a clip as well in this scenario but the idea is that the Soyuz few people know that the Soyuz was originally built to go to the moon and this is sort of a thing that was forgotten and we came up with the idea of the circumlunar mission because you know in the unlikely event that the space station isn't available we could still use the Soyuz to go somewhere and so we we began development on this circumlunar mission and we have just a how would that work because there are already flights going backwards and forwards to the space do that I mean the point is that those flights are running already and they were like empty seats that you're putting people in in effect well for the space station okay so this is the this is a Soyuz FG launch vehicle this is a standard launch vehicle and operation right now I guess the beauty of this mission is that we're using a lot of existing technology and you know a nice thing about the Soyuz launcher is that it has a launch escape system so if anything goes wrong with a rocket you can get the crew off and they've actually had to use it on several occasions so that's this is a launch escape system just being jettisoned fairing and here's the Soyuz spacecraft it's solar powered sole battery-powered and so essentially it's it's deployed this is a modified vehicle there we would have to make some modifications to this vehicle in order for it to do the lunar mission we'd have to beef up the life-support system we'd have to thicken the heat shield on it so we'll be able to survive reentry coming back from the moon we come back faster we come back about 24,000 miles per hour so first phase of the mission would be to go to the space station you'd spend about 16 days there with the crew and then an upper stage another stage is launched on another launch vehicle and we could probably going to use a launcher called approach now this upper stage it's very interesting it was originally developed to carry manned crews to the moon and the Russians took that from their lunar program when they cancelled it and they used it they're now using it for commercial launches of communication satellites so that upper stage is is essentially put into the same orbit as the space station the crew undocked with their Soyuz and and then would rendezvous and dock with the upper stage which essentially would be trailing behind the the space station and I apologize for the sort of low-grade CGI here and the reason for that is that this is a mathematical model of the actual ballistics of the mission and the animation is kind of an afterthought we were just interested in in the orbital mechanics of this and so the Soyuz docks to the upper stage the upper stage fires and puts it into a highly elliptical orbit which would then orbit the the Soyuz spacecraft around the the illuminated far side of the moon and we would get within about 60 miles of the lunar surface and it's about two and a half days there and and then two and a half days back and another one of the beauties of this mission is that we don't have to bear the expense of man rating that big rocket to carry a crew on it it's launched unmanned and so we don't really have to do anything new to the rocket to make it safer the the rendezvous with the upper stage takes place in stick in space and so we save a lot of money there and this is uh this is a $200,000,000 with development and the test flight this is an unmanned test flight this is a 200 million dollar mission 100 million dollars a seat there's two seats available coming so the price tag is a hundred million dollars that for anyway come and see me after the sex works out everyone okay so that makes the twenty million to the UPD back this on the prize and you get you get the free holiday on the space station thrown in there that's right and so if anything happens to the upper stage let's say there the launch is delayed or there's a problem with the stage you still get to go the space station that's great Don's gonna have to go in a sec I just wanted to ask because I'm not going to get the chance to ask you right at the end but where do you see actually you have to win this this contract and hope to fly Rockets where do you see this where do you see your company in in three to five years time well I hope that we're the the primary mechanism of getting people to orbit in the world I think that's that's a realistic possibility so that's where we want to be in three to five years and frankly by 2020 I'd like to see us take somebody to another planet and do you feel that the space policy is in is sort of up for grabs at the moment I mean there seems to be no one seems to be very happy with the status quo everyone seems to think it's pretty stupid do you think there's a chance to completely start over and and to have private enterprises a big component why I think the only way that we're gonna become a multi-planet species is through private enterprise it's certainly not going to be through the government and not the government's are terrible at cost optimization and you know so you know I think really to the point at which becoming a multiplanetary species can happen I think you know point at which it becomes an exothermic reaction is if you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars which is I think the only realistic possibility to somewhere in the order of the cost of the you know the the price of median house in California now that's one analogy the yet other price is growing so I think you know that target is is getting easier to achieve every year it gets closer you just know my favorite example of this is if you look at the missions to Amtel Antarctica a hundred years ago the privately funded ones were much cheaper and lost far fewer people than the government-funded ones which tended to go wrong so there's a number of interesting analogies here but okay well that's that's great go back to you Chris what do you think about the the current state of play in the industry I mean obviously the NASA seems to be changing his position does that affect you or does that just mean you have problems well shall be what really affects us and this also affects you on is technology transfer of barriers the US government seems to think that it has this proprietary space technology and it doesn't want it to proliferate around the world while India has a very vibrant man not man but space program they're building satellites they own satellites a geostationary orbit China has a manned space program and a very vibrant communication satellite program and so this technology is pretty much already proliferated so it's it's a very frustrating that you know to a certain degree we have to be very careful that we don't transfer any technology to to the Russians and and really the only thing that they can learn from me is what not to do you know when we learn we learn all kinds of stuff about operations from them and it's been very beneficial and but for Elon it's it's it's a huge barrier and you know it's no I wouldn't say it's a huge barrier it's a pain in the butt yeah but it is I mean our technology is a high percent American so there's there's no technology issues there it's just that if we have a non-us customer it takes us six months to get a State Department permit to talk to them on annex and integrate their satellite you know and I think the the biggest single issue is that we can't hire people who do not have a green card or or not a US citizen so I couldn't have hired myself five years ago ridiculous so that's the biggest single regulatory problem you face I mean you have all these other you have to fight going on with well we have a we have a titanic struggle underway with Boeing and Lockheed about the right to use the spaceport of Vandenberg oh no that's that's minor what we're trying to unseat them for as the primary provider of launch services to the Defense Department right one of the things they're doing is playing dirty on these things but you have to launch from Vandenberg next year actually probably 2008 all of our launches through through 2008 are going to be from our small tropical island in the middle of the Pacific the bills that I should have a white cat or something it is it is unbelievable isn't it but the thing is every year you come back and it's there's more and there's no evidence and there's more more going on but it's less fictitious and do you regard this 500 million dollar contract as a prize by the way yeah well it's not a prize my sense that it's all awarded at the end only after you achieved everything it is awarded at at milestone points right so it is but it said devices the industry of the sense yes it's it's not a cost-plus contract like the standard development contract in fact there's really there's really two contracts going on one is the crew exploration vehicle contract which is what NASA is developing to return to the moon that that is about a 15 to 20 billion dollar contract right then there's a little itty bitty contract which is the half billion dollar cots program okay although it's possible it that because programa altima Trump the the correction vehicle because you might get your foot in the door and you can then start to do other things yeah it's hot past I'm very aware that you need to call someone yeah I need apart if anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer them and we've got six we've got three minutes now so if anyone would like to come to us Chris anything he's gonna stay out here all right make your phone call thank you two questions one what are your plans on the circumlunar project for dealing with solar flares and killing the crew while there can't get back any faster than Newton's laws which was the problem during Apollo they just were lucky basically and then the second question is who do you think is actually going to land on the moon next the u.s. the Chinese or private industry well the answer the second question first will be space adventures and regarding solar flares that NASA they they weren't lucky they actually developed the science of solar flare forecasting and there were space probes in orbit and there is a whole essentially fleet of space probes right now that monitor the Sun and there there's a hardened section in the Soyuz which can can be used as a radiation shield in the re-entry capsule is fairly thick they're actually testing radiation shielding plastic radiation shielding on the space station and so any thick material ideal material would be lets say a some form of plastic water is a good radiation insulators I think we have that problem well under control well we we've identified and exist another existing launch vehicle the lander is essentially under development and we we believe that we can go back to the moon for under two billion dollars that's an even bigger price tag how many people would you imagine taking there would be you could get do people back there would be similar to Apollo type mission I mean clearly there's demand there's demand of at least ten people also for the space station round trips but the number of people who have the kind of money you're talking about for these other things must be even smaller is there and there even to people we developed we developed the the market for orbital and so we've we have at least a dozen people in line for that and we we get more credible enquiries every day we've identified about 1,500 people worldwide that are financially qualified to do a lunar mission and we have some solid leads that must be that a lot of them made their money in the tech industry so they kind of climbed to think of this kind of stuff think about yeah it it has and and there are there are government's that are also interested and we don't necessarily have to use a private individual and but you know go during a break go out here and look at the Pacific Ocean and the the components for most of your computers are made on the other side of the Pacific Ocean at one time that was you know crossing that ocean was a lot like it's probably a lot harder than maybe sending a crew to tomorrow and you know the moon is only 250,000 miles away and it's this huge untapped piece of real estate and you know there we have a few ideas of what it could be used for but I won't even pretend to try and justify it I mean the future will will prove out the moon's utility okay well I think we'll leave it that thank you very much indeed

https://youtu.be/XmKodBNV9RM

please give a warm texas welcome to elon musk [Applause] all right thank you for having me here i appreciate the invitation and i suspect i'll be visiting houston quite frequently in the future uh given the uh classic contract so we've got a great city uh and i always support visiting so we'll talk about spacex give you a little bit better background tell you about the the last launch that we had and uh i'm gonna tell you about where things are going long term and uh at least i leave some time for questions because i find that's often the best part of any uh presentation allows me to interact and really address anything you're curious about so spacex was founded about five years ago the long-term goal was to provide to really dramatically improve the content and the reliability of space transportation uh it doesn't help if you just improve the cost that the liability suffers so reliability is in fact has been a privately focused um and cost secondary uh the initial market was uh small government commercial satellites with the falcon one and the idea behind the falcon was that one was that it would serve as a scale model as uh something where we could test out the technologies and when we make mistakes they're made at a smaller scale rather than jump to immediately to a large rocket and make mistakes which cost 10 times as much so that's really that's the strategy we've been executing and i think it's worked out reasonably well so far but it's worth noting that the plan for spacex from the very beginning was always human transportation so can we really make some progress in in helping humanity become a true space-bearing civilization where a large number of people can afford to go to space uh and uh where it's not limited to just a really small number of people of the year so if we can help set space transportation on a path of continuous improvement in cost reliability as we saw with aviation the early days of aviation were extremely risky extremely expensive but over time that improved and uh you know to the point where today you can buy a non-stop uh flight from from houston to london for the return ticket for 500 uh i think that didn't even used to be possible and then even when it was possible initially used to cost 10 times that amount um and now now it's very affordable so that was brought about by there being constant improvement in aviation over time and so if we can help make that happen then i would consider spacex to be successful if we if all we do is you know be yet another satellite launcher or something like that or or ultimately our only uh you know about as good as soyuz and cost per person to orbit i mean that would be okay but but really not not a success in my book so the long term holy grail is if your account spacex help establish a permanent presence beyond earth personally i think if we can if humanity can uh help establish life on another planet and extend life to make it multi-planetary i think that really would be one of the most important things that we could possibly achieve uh if you think about the important milestones in the history of life itself um and that means going beyond the protocol concerns of humanity uh you know initially there was single cell blacks and then there was multicellular life and then things required skeletons and then some of those things transitioned from the ocean to land uh you get the development of mammals and it's probably that 10 or 12 really big uh milestones in the history of life itself and i think on that same scale would fit uh life becoming multi-planetary and it could be at least as important as life going from the oceans to land and arguably more important uh to invest for knowledge life exists only on earth so if we don't at some point uh propagate beyond that then you know with some calamity that falls alive here that will extinguish it and before we know that maybe the extinguishment of life itself so i think it's really important that we try to do this and if there are if humanity is one able to do this it will require really orders of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transportation and much more reliable space transportation as well so spacex operates on a silicon valley type of mode of operation it's a flat hierarchy close pack cubes uh high internet to manager ratio lots of prototype iterations and cut update on the best idea one type of velocity where what matters is the notes of the argument not the argument the status of the argument uh so we started with three people five years ago now over 300 and i think we'll probably be you know over 400 within 12 months so we're going pretty quickly we're currently a hundred thousand square feet of office in manufacturing space in uh near lax about two miles south of lax and we're expanding to half a million square feet later later this year uh we have a big propulsion structural test facility here in texas uh just uh halfway between austin and dallas um if you everyone know here there's a little town called mcgregor that's where our test facility is and then we've got launch complexes in clarksville and currently our primary launch facility we have a dormant facility at vandenberg and you may have read that we recently were awarded launch pad 40 at cape canaveral which is a great launch paddock so it was used to launch the titanfall heavy lift vehicle until about a year ago so this is what our first building looked like five years ago uh this is what the building looks like that we're moving to later this year that gigantic thing there the ceiling height is about 60 feet it was used to build 747 fuse lodges until last year there's some pictures of our texas test facilities so we have a number of propulsion test stands and structural test stands uh these these are stock nine test stands so the uh one on the left is where we'll be doing the stage hold down firings of falcon 9 so you can see a very very big stand and the fan the top of the concrete is about 130 feet and then the what we call the stability heaven which is this narrow narrow stairwell it goes up about another hundred feet it's the tallest thing for i know 20 or 30 miles uh so we have to put an faa beacon on top so planes don't fly into it and there's a construction elevator along the one leg and then the plumbing uh goes up the other leg and on the right hand side is the structural stand for the pelvic thrust frame so that it's what takes the nine engines of the falcon 9 um and that those hydraulics are capable of pushing down with about a million and a half pounds of force so it's very very staff structure uh just thinking about the you know the spacex track record today which is i think is a good predictor of a future performance the uh the token one was really developed from a clean sheet uh being on the launch pad in three years uh and that includes entire vehicles so the traffic was designed and uh and tested at spacex almost i mean there were a few pieces that will procure it outside but uh we have a very high mass production first stage so ninety four and a half percent uh uh propellant national action first stage uh there's about a about 0.2 residuals included in that uh which i think may be the highest mass fractional uh host stage in the world currently um i think the previous record was helped by the patented first stage uh and that includes um a recovery system so there's a parachute system included there the upper stage is pressure fed uh both the pairing stage synthetic separation systems it's worth noting that the mowing 1a engine made this the main engine on falcon 1 is only the second american content booster engine to see flanking about 25 years the the other one was the rs-68 or delta 4 and before that was the space shuttle main engine it's actually the first new american uh hydrocarbon engine to see flights in i think since the 60s so um and then there's also kestrel uh which is the upstate engine that we developed and that's a pressure pad engine rechargeable pretty good isp um and what other class avionics system which has the advantage of since this was designed in the 21st century as being a 21st century uh uh using 21st century electronics so the guidance control um the the falcon 1 is the first non-explosive orbital flat termination system approved by range safety uh so we actually don't the rocket when the release at the opposite presses the stop button it just shuts off the engine for action it doesn't explode the locking and uh we initially set up at vandenberg and then we're forced to move to kwajalein uh so we did two launch sites and control centers um and sort of looking at the price we started at a price of roughly seven million dollars four years ago and we've kept that price constant which is actually a decline when you take inflation into account so this is two years after starting a company we have the qualification article of falcon 1 on the launch pad at vandenberg and then about six months later we did a static fire all right we have sounds but i guess that's not what i think for some reason so unfortunately we're forced to move from uh vandenberg to quietly uh and so we yeah from may of 2005 to november 2005 we were able to uh set up a launch facility at kwajalein which is quite difficult because we the island we were given in the quarterly answer always just we had nothing on it which was jungle so we're bringing our water uh rt uh kerosene uh all the pressuring offices you know that sort of thing uh and bit definitely had some challenges with uh liquid auction in particular since the quartz one is five thousand miles away from california and about over two thousand miles away from hawaii which is the nearest source of liquid oxygen but we managed to get our first countdown of right on thanksgiving 2005 at tokyo to get to the first uh test flight which was in march of 2006. i need to edit this video because like 60 seconds worth of precursor but um yeah so i think it's worth seeing this this uh timeline because a lot of people don't realize that we actually have the vehicle designed for ready to go three years off starting company um and unfortunately the launch site issues caused us to delay by another year uh effectively uh the this this like i'll talk hopefully it'll thing will take off anymore um but the unfortunately the sad thing is that the issue that caused the problem with the first flight was a collision issue uh due to the quad's climate so there's some probably that would have occurred if they've launched out of vanderbilt what's up later so the planetary basically showed that there was a kerosene leak at the top pump inlet pressure transducer which started about 400 seconds prior to liftoff uh you couldn't see it because the wind was blowing and kerosene is actually vertical to sea simply if it's uh when the wind's blowing you can't actually see that it's leaking the failure review board which was actually co-chaired by p warden once aimed um i concluded that it was due to corrosion's first portion cracking of aluminum bnf on the engine uh that leak ignited a few seconds prior to start and uh the power basically learned during the entire uh powered flight and about 25 seconds into the flight the is going through a healing pneumatic line resulting in loss of helium pressuring and that caused the apparent pre-valve to shut and essentially turning off the engine and other than that everything would look good the vehicle was proceeding along its design trajectory within 0.2 degrees or first stage system is phenomenal and all avionics so we take a bunch of corrective actions uh we include they call robustness by eliminating uh as many settings as possible and going to orbital tube welds uh by replacing aluminum fittings with stainless steel that's a slight match penalty actually the stainless settings cost less than the aluminum settings so this was a cost savings i suppose um and there are a number of changes we also added more detailed procedures it's more personnel for the process so a triple sign-off is required by all uh one more work both the technician will be technically responsible engineer and uh an independent keyway but some work i applied sign up for all working online hardware and then closed our photos and we also went through iphone 9001 certification last year the biggest single change is we massively improved the software help monitoring and launch automation we were monitoring approximately 30 variables we went to monitoring 800 including both the vehicle and the grounds ford equipment and we would have caught the fuel leak if we have the system in place and the countdown is also now fully automated which reduces the potential for human error and allows initiatives focusing the data it also allows us to take some number of personnel out of the countdown process people that were just basically doing the job that the computer was doing so although we added people on the qa side of things we were able to reduce people on the launch upside by having increased automation so iso certificate so as far as gamma flight 2 which took place in march uh we just finished the first flight review with our customer uh that shows that the only over critical issue was lack of slash baffles in the second stage the lux tank and of course the coupling of the control and flash modes uh we did obtain full symmetry and video while passing nominal integration uh there were actually three dishes following the vehicle and although some some dishes fortunately uh at any given point there was one dish uh with a good signal so we were able to splice together telemetry and video to get a full uh formation duration um so all systems and fighters tested demonstrated highly responsive launch if you were following it closely to reel to light the engine uh they bought the tranquility tank and launched in 70 minutes i was considered a successful test flight by adoption and by spacex um and we will be launching our first two operational satellites later this year the first will be uh catch that for navy research lab and the second will be in october and then uh second will be a malaysian space agency satellite in december uh we have a total of five pokemon missions and six five and nine missions on our upcoming schedule and uh we expect to close probably four more falcon one or two more falcon 9 missions in the next through the balance of this year and that should that will bring us to 20 launch contracts in total including the two that have taken place so you talking and there's information on our website if anyone's curious as well but it's designed to nasa safety margins veterinarians and margins of daily tolerance it's roughly 840 pounds of plus 840 thousand pounds of plastic liquid with a mass maximum mass of about 700 000 pounds so so on the order of the soyuz inside uh 12 with the main body diameter ryzen 10k put with the large fairing i actually don't have a picture of the vehicle with a large variant but it's kind of a big fairing you'd see on uh saying atlas 5 or duffel it tickles 150 put with dragon 180 with the launch bearing the nine engines on the first stage are being carefully designed to provide engine out capabilities so if we lose managing you can still complete your mission successfully and depending on the phase of flight you can actually lose multiple engines and slow complete the mission and um basically it's a sort of a 10 controlled type of vehicle so as people are worried about the number of engines that i think it's worth seeing pictures of what the sawyers looks like on the base end there's quite a few flush chambers there uh but the russians have a definition of engine which would only count things by the number of turbo pumps but that's kind of a silly definition because uh by that definition uh the falcon one doesn't have enough stage engine so i think you're going to count by the number of thrust chambers so uh and each flex chamber is mansion uh so australia has 32 engines on the base seven one has uh or had uh eight uh engines on the base so those each have an individual turbo pump so falcon 9 is really quite comparable to saturn 1b you got one extra engine basically so the basic concept of operations for falcon 9 with the dragon spacecraft is real simple it's two stage vehicles so the falcon 9 drops the dragon open over and uh the dragon goes from that parking little bit uh maneuvers are going to turn power to the space station where it's captured by the arm and earth to the station and then re-enters uh you know same way that the apollo capsules 300 floods body re-entry uh lands in the ocean although we have the ability to have a land on land as well we're just starting off with the ocean because it's easy to get the regulatory approvals and that there's mostly ocean so if you need to get down in a hurry you better be prepared around the ocean as far as arcanine itself uh we finished serial number one of the first stage primary structure uh which just to that i think much of this we're shooting after texas uh texas testing science in a few weeks um we'll be starting to push flight units roll number two in three weeks uh it's made of aluminum lithium in the barrel sections and 2219 sort of a standard standard aluminum in the in the domes this year we'll probably produce probably i think two flight units and next year we'll be producing probably six year after that as much as 12 it really depends on what the demand is we have uh achieved our low inc development goals and actually exceeds them slightly the goals were 92 000 pounds of sea level trust and 299 vacuum icp um we've gotten to 94 000 pounds of trust at sea level and clear to maximize fee uh full full mission duty cycle and um we'll expect to finish qualification of the normal one c in july here we have trillion material in place for 25 of the engines this year at 40 or so next year uh we'll start doing integrated stage and engine testing in august most likely um and this could be a progression of multi-engine firings done with one three five and then probably nine but and we will do a full stage hold down the acceptance test of the first flight stage uh before we defend the launch pad actually so this is the only one see just a recent recent firing of the 101c [Applause] goes on for a while [Applause] so you can get actually supported here so uh there you can see the the whole engines on the stand there the the chamber is a mold coupler liner with a nickel cobalt electrical plate at the nickel carbon closeout and the nozzle is a braze tubal nozzle it's actually an architecture it's similar to ssme that's way way less expensive it's interesting so the mother one is isn't designed for a man rating so it's got a few percent margin above flight loads uh and um it's actually more than what's new for nominating uh it's also qualified against foreign object ingestion and we'll be doing uh our objects and have done actually inadvertently uh some foreign object tests and so far it's held up quite well but we'll be doing a formal set of uh fine injection tests to verify that if you if it reflects on a piece of aluminum or steel or some organic or something like that that it doesn't cause the ancient become applied um we want to try to reach 25 or more cycles before any refurbishment and uh ideally it's only an order of 100 cycles before the primary elements need to be replaced the total pump assembly is about as simple as you can have a turbo pump system it's a single shaft with two pumps on it and um sort of installed at the same time by definition i'd use a pimple injector which is in terms of contamination no known combustion instability issues and let me talk a little bit about the chamber nozzle we will be having kevlar slap jacketing between the engines of the falcon 9 so even if you mentioned this compound explosively or in a fire um it would protect it against uh damaging any of its neighbors oh it's worth noting that spacex will produce more booster engines this year than any country except russia so we'll be producing about a total of 30 engines um roughly five castrol engines and 25 million engines um and i think that's more than a country in life except russia certainly more than the rest of us production to mine this picture of the off nine first stage primary structure we're a little cramped in that kind of building and only this gets out by a few inches as far as the second stage um one of the ways in which we've designed self line to be fundamentally lower cost is that the second stage is simply a shortened version of the first stage so it's the same dome same material same tooling uh in a passion line uh and uh which may seem like a pretty obvious move but as far as i know there's no rocket out there that takes this approach each stage is designed like a unique uh spacecraft um so it really it takes us almost no time to make the second stage uh because it's really just two bowel sections and if we don't uh we should finish the first unit in five months and uh no problem things of one every two months by next year uh it will have a a more than one c uh vacuum version as the engine so same engine that you fill there but with a vacuum skirt extension it's a very big bell nozzle uh the avionics guidance control there's quite a lot heritage from falcon 1. interior we could fly the falcon 1 avionics and apart from some changes to the software it would work but we'll be upgrading this to the triple redundant uh voting to the national mandating standards uh we're also going to add multi-engine controls the first stage obviously and then we'll be upgrading the economics to higher radiation tolerance for missions at a long duration will pass beyond the battle and balance and then the preparing all my tooling is done we should have our first production quarter section in a few months and have the pool party in about six months so as far as dragging is concerned looks like all things are good for demo and cdr in august the basic structure is an isolated aluminum pressure vessel with aluminum lithium for the primary load path elements the nose cone and heat shield support structure of carbon fiber composite we finished a structural flash manufacturing test unit earlier this year which was made in the same using the same methods the same materials as the as the flight unit and all materials are ordered for the plant unit the propulsion system of dragon will use 18 uh spacex draco engines uh dracula means little dragon they're roughly 90 pounds of thrust each using nitrogen nitrogen oxide and body methyl hydrazine and it will be used in continuous mode for all the changes and 10 millisecond pulse mode for attitude control so this was a a fairly unique engine um and that pretty advanced uses a face shuttle pencil to achieve extremely fine fault nerd capability and then from a thermal standpoint it's designed to run continuously and continuously so let's see we'll be using titanium propellant tanks uh with the propellant management device and it composition tanks from rda and we'll start testing the engines this summer the heat shield will change to pica as the primer in the trail which is to switch to that because uh it is fully octet tested so it's qualified for an object standpoint um and we have uh it's like uh updated version of sla 561 as backup there's very technical stuff so a lot of people don't know what that means but basically this the brake pad um so uh we will actually be using the sla material on the top nine second stage so the falcon 9 uh recommendation that the falcon 9 is designed to be reusable as well as as well as dragon so the first line second stage needs a heat shield in order to be able to re-enter um and survive and the heat shield we will be using on that is uh is actually an sla e shield but we do not plan on object testing that because recovery of the falcon 92 is an optional thing it's not required so we feel confident enough to actually fly the second stage uh re-entry with the sla that hasn't been off dead tested if it works great it doesn't work well nothing at all um and then parachutes we're working with the urban uh there'll be three main ring sales and two drugs so you can lose either remain using losing lane and you can look at those and pay this to locate very low normal percent later 20 feet per second which is about what a parachutist would come down at and that allows us to transition from the ocean to land pretty pretty easily so on the left there is the structural test unit that i mentioned you can see the machined eye secret door and although the first missions for dragon are cargo we're designing everything for manned loads so it's it's designed to take loads of uh an escape rocket uh and to take high g of bullets and all that stuff and it's also got windows which carver does not need and then on the right you can see what it looks like with the engines when the engines are on so left is like kind of cargo configuration on the basic dragon that the sleeve that connects drag into the booster we use that to carry unpressurized cargo and also it'll contain the solar and the radiator and on the right you can see in the crew configuration uh so we're designing it to have a maximum of seven through uh with two with a w small c from the big c so four small seats and three big seats and then you can see the converting mechanism that interface at the top is where it will go to the space station so the nose cone gets tossed away and that there's space station on that a interface more pictures of it and you can see it stuck on a little section of the space station and that's it and there's actually uh also more videos and pictures and whatnot that you can see on the spacex website um yeah i should also say you know where do i see the future of commercial spaceflight well i think it's gonna i think really entering a new era that's very exciting for commercial spaceflight there's a lot of things happening on the suburban front with jeff bezos and blue arjun he's got some obviously blood retardant scale composites virgin galactic and we've got john carmack who's here in texas with armadillo air states um i think john's gonna do really well uh and and then on the orbital front we've got ourselves some rocket flanking um i think we'll see some of the companies that are doing several work transition at some point to overall activity so i think it's pretty exciting and if all goes well spacex will be flying and supporting the space station for for many years to come and uh you know also potentially supporting things like the bigelow uh space station and uh as you know all sorts of other things that will develop so i'm really really bullish uh on the future of the space flight um and uh yeah so i'm really excited about it are they uh is the question is it possible to put orion on top of the falcon 9 to get it forward uh well it sort of depends on what the mass of the line is considered to be so i think if it was um the capability of the basics of 9 is 10 tons to leo so but there is a heavy version of alkaline that will be developing with the side bleachers which are similar to the double full heavy the conversible approach i believe that you may be able to put a line into a little bit because that's capabilities on the order of 25 megatons so it's just i think within enough possibility well i actually did i didn't do any market research so maybe that's my that's why i did it if i had that market research that would probably got done so no i i i i do think there's a market uh for what we're building i don't think i didn't do any of my research i certainly you know read about what what rockets exist in the world what are they launching and that kind of thing um so you know i knew that at a minimum we should be able to go and compete in the existing market and have some kind of a business even if it wasn't you know really feel anything like that so yeah i mean there's you know i don't think there's any kind of market research you could do that would say okay if you really believe it if you can reduce the cost by this amount then there will be you know this extra number of launchers that occur as yourself that reduced price i think you just have to do it and i hope it turns out to be true um and then make sure that there's a backup plan that's used at least of some value even if you don't achieve the full potential that you've useful that's some bodybuilding process capability the existing market and that's really the strategy that spacex has had um it would at least serve the existing satellite launch market and and hopefully the space station and even if that's all that happens well it's not a terrible thing um but hopefully um by lowering the costs uh improving the liabilities we can we can expand the market substantially um and uh and then i think we do it all the others that enter the market and compete for that business in order to sell the current airline business you know there's a time where no one could possibly uh consider aircraft as a transportation mechanism i mean the things that you maybe got a little joyride in or you know and they're very dangerous and much people die all the time and then you know if you sit in 19 1920 well probably any time before lindbergh even asked your average person on the street you think you'll be able to fly you know from your city to europe non-stop in an aircraft they would have said no way that's ridiculous so if i think you have to go on your purchase with some degree of you know open space yes dragon will be grabbed by the shuttle flight mother station on with the basic standard example picture yeah i can talk to any cv import so well i know how it's going to be any cd import i think there's one in particular that we're supposed to talk about but in theory look at any cdmp oh well there's there's multiple videos we're probably we've got 18 cameras various places on board cameras uh ground cameras tracking cameras uh so what i showed is just a tiny sampling there's a lot more on the website actually the cost of sound to the space station uh well um i guess probably i mean initially initially i think it's probably like ten thousand dollars a pound am i thinking correctly yeah about that that's about ten thousand dollars a pound um and that's called it to the space station as opposed to cognition as far as first in master orbit um the master orbit of falcon line is about thirteen hundred dollars a pound but but that's so that's that's if you're a satellite or something so the thing to get stuff to uh that's to be a space station you need to add dragging to the equation and then you need to basically say well that eats up a ton of useful cargo as well i think that yeah so it's roughly you know approaching three and a half tons for roughly 70 million dollars ish we have to see how the i mean we're not pricing estimates but we have to see what the final pricing turns out to be now to point out the data seems to zero reusability so if we are able to make it reusable to economics work that price could be substantially lower [Music] well we expected probably a lot of commercial fights to geosynchronous solid um you know hopefully some you know launching some planetary missions uh you know stuff to mars or the moon or you know that sort of thing okay um it's your failures okay more questions um so it actually is getting harder and harder for me to write blog pieces i used to like this quite frequently and now uh i've got a pretty big family and uh business things that take up a lot of time so the blog stuff tends to pull to the bottom of the priority list and a lot of times that i feel really guilty about not updating the blog so i would like to try to continue to make a short blog pieces and also try to get a few other people at spacex to light bulk pieces and it has where a lot of people like bug pieces so i don't know i only like them occasionally um that's why tesla is concerned the first production car of the roadster should be out at the end of summer so end of september maybe maybe october and then we'll tesla is working hard on a model 2 which is a 50 000 luxury sports event uh and that's the four-door five passenger public finances by chase bmw and with a targeted debut at the end of 2009 [Music] oh yeah um pogo um uh we have power suppressors on uh each of the nine engines the individual plug this lectures uh so yeah that that should hopefully do the trick uh we have um a couple of outside experts that are uh looking at our pogo uh suppression devices and helping us design them uh you guys showers and you may know him a few familiar other stuff uh and uh there's a few other people bringing on board as well to look at that but probably certainly something we take seriously well thank you [Applause] biggest risks i don't know what the biggest risk is actually uh there are lots of lots of risks but i'm not sure how to order them um exactly to say which one is the biggest one uh you know the last uh demo by two uh this watch mode coupling with the uh with the control frequency of the second stage was number 11 on the on the dynamics control risk list number 11. if you were to merge all the results i don't know would have been number 120 and that's the one that went wrong so how do you know it's a very subjective thing to figure out what the what the real risk is that's going to bite you in the bus fortunately with the knowledge that we'll gain from falcon 1 and we're not going to make uh in retrospect in elementary that are like not having slash battles on the stage so i think we'll be faded from that sort of stuff yeah it's possible we could have some challenges getting to the through the birthing process i don't know that much about it the type of area where i'm all that familiar with uh some uh we're learning a lot at spacex and we have some uh outside companies that are very familiar with the process uh helping out so i think dave over there from odyssey so um and harold is helping us with the safety stuff uh so uh well i wish i could give you a really good i can't i don't know i don't know what the biggest risk is they're just they're all really big and we'll take a lot of attention sorry uh actually i didn't even know it was the 100th anniversary uh good news you've written some good books the i like the the new english mistress that's a good one um we've certainly made some use of existing hardware uh such as quick just impact many other things you mentioned quick disconnects regulators uh uh certainly control valves um most of our control valves are from mirada which is you know provide control valves for the shuttle um we you know we use continual event relief valves uh we use a standard new legs and a lot of your existing satellite componentry in dragon um the big stuff has been developed from scratch we kind of have to do that because if we were to buy if we would cover together stuff from existing uh you know quasi off the shelf uh components then you will be unable to reduce the cost because typically that you inherit legacy components you also while you may inherit their heritage course you'll find out that cost and so we're i'm necessarily forced to make the major items like the engines and the stages and the avionics and the launch apps and all that do that from scratch uh well i think that's at 100 million approximately uh a little more than that uh we've spent more than that so that's the capital uh but we spent more than that because we received our payments for launch we got the first 2001 launches uh we received advanced payments on a number of the other launches uh we passed some quite smile things so i'm not sure exactly i'd have to think about it to i'd probably probably consider that proprietary but we've certainly spent well in excess of a well in excess of 100 billion dollars thus far although i've only invested 100 roughly 100 million dollars yeah i thought i think it would be functioning to ride mcdonald at some point uh some people sometimes think that uh yeah this is a roundabout way of getting me personally to space but uh it would be a lot cheaper to buy right on the toys but that'll definitely make you fly at some point it'll be great yeah cost has been really helpful in speeding things up uh i mean we wanted to go in that direction one time uh anyways that we were taking us a long time would have uh you know we'd have to sort of earn our way there and uh and also we won't be able to take advantage of the expertise that nasa has uh which has been quite helpful uh in designing a reliable vehicle so i think the cost program has been really super helpful um yeah it's been great dealing with everyone there and you know a lot of people sort of say well you know isn't necessarily going to smother you of course you deal with something efficient things and really that hasn't been the case i mean it's with no complaints this bottle it's been great the vanderbilt story is a long and fast way but uh yeah we uh i don't know it's always been unfair but these things happen uh yeah actually the spacex manifest is on the website so if you're curious about the upcoming you know which satellites are being launched and who's the customer and when they're being launched uh there's actually an updated launch manifest on our website i think probably uh well for falcon one be under 12 months maybe nine months uh the what we're doing is we're actually uh buying long lead items ahead of time so we have an inventory of the long read stuff uh and so once you have longer stuff in hand it can take us for as little as nine months to get going and get getting launched off um well falcon 9 well it's probably a little premature to make claims at this point but for the booster at least we will we do plan on having a continuous production line of the booster so here it should take very little time to uh get that going you know go from a contract to a launch you know hopefully six months could be hopefully nine months it couldn't be six months but it really depends on how the manifest is falling out uh there may be other constraints which are not related to spacex directly such as can cape canaveral handle that launch or the other stuff scheduled for that time frame um they really like to see that's when you schedule 12 months or even 24 months in advance so uh so we already need to have a really short time ideally between the contract and launch and if we're able to make reusability work then and we have a constant stream of vehicles coming back and getting refrigeration flying and we're flying every month or even more frequently than that then it's going to be relatively easy to somebody in uh actually our schedule matches pretty well to the planned uh end of the shuttle in 2010 uh we have our first female flight of falcon 9 and woods dragon at the end of next year uh and then we got two more demonstration flights one in uh summer of 2009 and another at the end of 2009. uh and that that third flight will actually culminate in the transfer of i guess demonstration cargo and the return of demonstration cargo back to earth and probably cannot at this point so the real cause there has to be demonstration card there uh because otherwise it would violate some sort of law based acquisition or something like that effect but uh so if that schedule remains true or doesn't slip too much then in 2010 we should be able to start delivering cargo and uh and then depending upon when the constant option b gets exercised which is what adds the escape to the escape tower the life support system the seats uh all the crew related stuff plus the ability for the crew to take over an event of emergency uh so depending on when class 3 gets activated we should be able to i think do uh you know take people to the space station well probably yeah early 2011 something like that it really depends on where things get going well uh if if bigelow has just you know puts up a workable private space station absolutely we'd love to take people down back so i think that will be super synergistic uh we do have a regular launch on the falcon line manifest for launching i think it's a two-thirds scale version or something that approximately that size of is one of the inflatable uh space stations so uh yeah so irrespective of what happens with the full scale version or how well that does and you know whether it's able to sell uh you know uh tell people space station or lease it or whatever we do have one launch on falcon 9 with big globe all right so how many launches can falcon 9 take before it has to be currently retired i think uh it's really hard to make an exact prediction we really have to look at the how what condition it is and when it comes back you know the engines were aiming for at least 25 um full emission dirty cycles before any refurbishment is required of significance uh and ideally upwards of 100 cycles so we'd like to get something like that out of the rest of the falcon 9 as well so it's going to target 20 at least 25 hopefully as many as a hundred but it really it's gonna really depend you know on how much condition things come back in and i think like the jet you know we'll have a maintenance schedule so there'll be some things that need to be replaced every flight some things that need to be replaced every five flights some every 10 flights some that really are just never going to wear out you know any in any kind of reasonable time frame uh and then we'll have an inspection schedule so just like if you a jet engine has a hot section inspection every certain number of hours and you replace this component every certain number of hours will have something similar for the market so we want to try to overall just sort of drive things in the direction of the way that get aircraft cooperated so i don't think a lot of you get as good at that but we just want to try to push in that direction well um yeah i actually yeah i mean i always lived in front of space but um well first of all i grew up in south africa so you know there's not really much space stuff happening here uh and then i only got my citizenship like last year uh and that was five years after i got my green card so i've only actually been allowed illegally to look in space for five and a half years i apologize for not getting that last six months um but that's yeah that's literally i could only legally look in space for the last five and a half years uh yeah it was just general theoretical experimental physics i was undergrad only you know i actually originally was in adoption and did a phd standpoint in the material science symphonics of pioneer genocide capacitors so actually very applied almost really engineering um and that was for use in electric vehicles so i think there's potential to do some very interesting things with if you can drive the energy density of the capacitor uh up high enough then it's really the ideal solution for electric vehicles it's another quality influence causes cycling calendar life uh and extremely high charge discharge rate uh really would you be able to you know recharge your car faster you can vote with gasoline so that would be i think it's if somebody can pick up the capacitors enough good enough energy density and that will really be the optimal solution for electric cars [Music] right [Applause] you

https://youtu.be/tqoLRlpROG8

elon musk is a dropout and a billionaire after receiving an undergraduate degree from the university of pennsylvania he dropped out of the stanford phd program in physics he wound up ceo of paypal which ebay bought for 1.5 billion dollars in 2002 with his fortune made in the virtual world he's created tesla motors and spacex in the real world named for nikola tesla the eccentric serbian-born inventor of alternating current tesla motors will roll their first 100 all-electric cars out factory doors this summer spacex one of many new ventures aimed at commercializing outer space was recently awarded a 278 million dollar nasa contract to build and operate launch vehicles and crew capsules to service the international space station and take america back to the moon elon thank you so much for being with us here at wired science well thank you for having me uh i need to first lay a little bit of a foundation here two days into your physics program at stanford university you quit school to start a company called zip to a media company right uh which is sold a few years later for a paltry 307 million dollars then four years later um ebay buys paypal is that correct a company that you established or helped to establish as well and now you've taken those two enormous successes and you've set your ambition on space how did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship essentially well uh when i graduated from college there were three areas that i thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity the three were the internet space exploration and uh and then changing the economy from a mine and burned hydrocarbon based economy to one which is solar electric which i think is going to be the primary but not exclusive means of energy and transportation have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there no not at all actually i'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity on earth you are yeah absolutely so what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit mars which is really what is an ambition of yours well i think if you consider two paths one where we're forever confined to earth and the other where we're space frank civilization uh out exploring the stars i think the latter is far more exciting and will result in a richer and more diverse uh human experience how can you do that better uh than nasa well uh you know nasa is a customer of ours so there's a confusion in the public mind that that perhaps a company like spacex is competing with nasa but in fact nasa is a customer of ours so we're actually uh providing services to nasa launch services uh and when when the shuttle retires in 2010 so starting in 2011 uh spacex's uh rocket will replace the space shuttle in servicing the space station with astronauts and uh and cargo transportation the name of your rocket ship is called the falcon explorer is that it well the falcon 9 the falcon 9 yes the rocket and then the space the spaceship is dragon dragon yeah so the falcon 9 rocket lifts the dragon spaceship and this dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to earth so it transports the falcon as almost cargo then so yeah the falcon 9 is kind of like the uh the semi okay or something like that um and it trans it the falcon 9 booster rocket takes the dragon spaceship to space and drops it off then it goes to the space station that ducks with the space station uh transfers astronauts or resupply you know cargo whatever the case may be and then the dragon spacecraft uh returns to earth reading some of the speeches that you have given in your your career and how old are you you're like you're practically 23 years you're 23 years old i'm actually 12. you're 12. i was going to say you look terrific but you have said that we got lost along the way with our space program what did you mean by that right i think i think i there was a in some of my congressional testimony i gave a few speeches to to congress well what i mean by that is in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and here we are over three decades later and we can barely get to low earth orbit and i think by any measure that is a step backwards is that for a lack of leadership or technology i think we made the wrong technological choices and i think there was also a lack of uh will at the at the highest levels of government to take the next step and and uh go go well at least go at least stay on the moon and patch build a base there and then go beyond the moon to mars and if you look at the the news articles in the late 60s early 70s the expectation uh was that that by now in the 21st century we would have a moon base and probably even a mars base and i think if you'd asked anyone at that point in time whether we would be unable to go to the moon and have no and not have been to to mars i think they would they would think you're crazy do we need a leadership in that realm do we need a john f kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said one one day a man will walk on the moon do we need that kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step i do think it's very important the president set the the priority and and and determine the the goal uh you know that that we as nation will aspire to and uh you know george bush has his pluses and minuses um but at least one plus is that he he has helped to to steer the space program in a direction that that more or less makes sense um you know the only thing i would i would sort of argue with is that i don't think we should be going back to the moon i think we should be focused on mars i think we saw the you think that's a mistake focusing on the moon i do think i do think we should rather go i think we should rather be focused on on mars you know the moon is kind of like it's kind of like the arctic it's just it's just a very barren place and very very little resources it's small it's not it's not really a place that we can establish uh another human civilization there's a there's a there's a feeling of been there done that too with the moon yeah we saw that movie in the 60s you know the remake's never as good did we really go to the moon uh yes we did we definitely just wanted to check the government is incapable of of suppressing uh a conspiracy of that major of that nature okay good this ambition to explore space absolutely that's an entrepreneur there's there's quite a bit of competition out there there's jeff bezos with blue origin there's richard branson with his virgin galactic right uh and i'm not talking about nasa either there's paul allen uh there's the european space agency in boeing and lockheed martin the chinese the russians let's just throw all of them into this everyone's doing a competitive field how is spacex different how do you think you'll sort of uh surpass them well you know you've you've listed a wide range of of entities there and i think the differences are uh really different depending upon which one you're referring to the uh well let me ask you this question who is your competition we have no serious competition none not presently who's chasing you well uh if you mean chasing and have and has a serious chance of catching then i i think none that i'm aware of uh and and by the way is kind of a hack then well what what uh branson is doing by the way i'm a great admirer of branson uh is really a much smaller technological challenge so their craft would be suborbital so it would go to about mach 3. our craft is orbital it goes to mach 25 so 25 times the speed of sound but that doesn't describe the whole scale difficulty because the the energy required to get those velocities scales as the square of the velocity so to do what branson is doing you need say about nine units of energy due to what we're doing you need 625 units of energy the difference is monumental and then when you re-enter you have to you have to burn off all that energy so uh so that doubles the problem really so i mean what branson is doing from a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the english channel what we're building is something that can circumnavigate the globe it's a very different scale of of of technological difficulty i still think what he's doing is great and by the way i bought a ticket on on his effort yeah yeah so i still think it's great but it's not it's not in the same league technologically so you're not particularly worried certainly not about no certainly not about that no the things that worry me are are we going to make a mistake are we the the the things that can really hurt spacex are i mean our own foolishness uh our own errors can hurt us but not none of the competition that i'm aware of so generally you're worried about what's in front of you not not the other guy in fact you probably don't think about them in terms of how they criticize you or what they think about you i i don't think actually i don't think uh there's much criticism i mean boeing and lockheed of course they would criticize but i don't think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what we're doing um and certainly possibly i think you know what what jeff bezos is working on could ultimately i mean he does have aspirations to get to overton beyond it's just that what they're doing right now is suborbital and at the sort of lower technology level what i think about at spacex is really entirely what are we doing to ensure that our rocket is is going to be successful and that we are truly uh optimizing the the cost and ensuring higher reliability i mean that's just a very very difficult problem there's a reason why there's an idiomatic expression about rocket science being hard it it really is really hard so rocket science really is rocket science yeah it looks hard and it's harder than it looks what's the big goal here what's the long-term plan well the long-term ultimate objective the the holy grail is we would like to help make life multi-planetary that's really what we'd like to do so establish societies on as many planets as possible uh well yeah i think there's only one possibility but yeah i mean even if we can just go from one planet to two i think that's a pretty big step and you'll start with will mars mars is the only viable viable planet so multi-planetary life yeah it's helped make life multi-planetary i think that's an important thing i don't think your goal is big enough ha yeah it's ambitious well like i said we're not don't expect to do it single-handedly but we certainly would like to help make it happen it's fair to say you've made a fortune yeah i think so by any reasonable standard yeah and you know those who work in science probably understand your trajectory but there are those who are watching who would think if i made that money i'd sit on a beach i'd drink beer and i would just watch the sunset kind of like a corona beer commercial have you ever thought about that as a career option you know i find that really pretty boring so that would be torture if i had to do that every day that would really be pretty awful for me is there something about startup businesses that that that really fuels your desire to work well i guess i i i really need to be preoccupied with something uh and i if if i'm just sort of sitting there relaxing i can only do that for a very short period of time and then it becomes unbearable although startups definitely have their highs and lows and there's a friend of mine who has a good phrase uh you know a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss what is the criteria that you establish for yourself for a startup i mean why one business over another yeah well i for me it's always about does this does what i'm doing matter if if we are successful uh does it matter to the world and uh so there are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket company or say a car company or even when i started an internet company because when i started the first internet company nobody had made any money and it wasn't clear that anyone would make any money it was simply from the perspective of the internet being a very important thing and something that needed to be built and so i wanted to help build it well you touch upon something that's interesting is that there is a that benefiting humanity is a very integral part of your criteria no matter what you're starting up yes absolutely really not everybody has that as a prime interest now i think that's that's probably relatively unusual although there are many people that i know in silicon valley for whom that is a significant motivation you said in your endeavor here to explore space that we are committed to failing in a new way if nothing else what did you mean by that just just just how it sounds well i mean we're i mean we're committed to succeed really but if we do fail uh i would hope that we at least add to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make fewer mistakes uh now if mars were not enough uh you you are busy here on earth the world is not enough that's right for you we're aware of what have you no limits my friend uh here on earth you are establishing uh a presence certainly uh with tesla motors tell us a little bit about that this is your electric car company correct right and this is no this is no hybrid car you could buy on a car lot this thing goes from zero to 60 in four seconds isn't that right yes absolutely zero to 16 under four seconds it's faster a better acceleration than any uh porsche currently in production and any ferrari except the enzo and it's twice the energy efficiency of a prius so it's uh you really have the moral high ground and uh you get to you know leave uh the ferrari guy in your dust so well let me start to beat let me ask the obvious well and you don't look like one of those guys who's trying too hard in a ferrari absolutely yeah um you don't look like a jerk you know you know bright banana yellow uh lamborghini or or absolutely i know there's something to point out about tesla which is uh we didn't you know tesla is first car is is a sports car not because we think the world lacks for a sports car but because it is the right entry point for the market if you have a new technology the right place to enter is high unit cost low unit volume uh just as you know when if when a new cell phone come out comes out or a new uh a new laptop or or some new thing uh tends to be expensive at first uh because they're figuring out all the issues and it takes time to optimize and then over time that that technology will become uh cheaper and cheaper and so the model two of tesla uh and maybe i'm leaping ahead here but model two of tesla is a forty nine thousand dollar four door five passenger sedan and that's that's going to be obviously a much broader market segment that that can make use of that car and the model 3 is intended to be around a 30 000 price point and so that's that's really affordable by by almost everyone uh who's who who can buy a new car so the idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible uh but at only at the pace at which the technology uh matures so is henry ford and uh someone you admire well i think henry ford made some very important contributions to uh to business and obviously you know moving moving manufacturing line and that sort of thing uh so i think he's certainly worthy of admiration uh he was a bit of an art duck but you know uh certainly noteworthy but the interest in tesla is is not from the perspective of you know the world needs another car company it's more from uh the perspective of we have a very important environmental problem that needs to be addressed which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere and global climate change which i think is going to be one of the most significant issues of the 21st century and the only way to to really get around that in my view is is really with an electric vehicle and then you need to pair that up with a a zero emission power generation method such as solar power i think is solar power is going to be a really big deal tesla is not a hybrid car tesla tesla's pure electric pure electric so help connect the dots for me why aren't we seeing tesla cars on the car lots then what's keeping them we haven't made them yet uh so the it's we're just finishing up the development right now and anybody can buy this yes how will you actually almost sold out of 2007 production so if somebody does want to buy next year's model they better act quickly one of the primary complaints about hybrid vehicles is they're not fast enough you seem to overcome it you won't have any trouble with this but in fact really uh it's there's something uh uniquely better about uh electric vehicles which is that the talk response is immediate so if you want to pass someone you i mean you just the the the the response of the car is is very immediate it's just it's more fun to drive an electric car uh than it is to drive a gasoline car you know i was going to say that tesla the car the name of the car company is no coincidence is it explain a little bit about that right the company's named after nikola tesla who is an inventor uh he was originally from uh the sort of the area of of yugoslavia in europe but he moved to america when he was young and uh and and was an inventor of the the ac induction motor invented a lot of the principles of magnetism so he was a great man a great great inventor and so the company is named in honor of him so these cars the tesla roadster the first the first issue of the tesla roadster available in 2007 yes in the spring the summer how do you get on the waiting list well you you buy the car you you basically put down a deposit and and we've actually can you do that through the web uh yeah we'll have by the way customer centers all around the country so we'll have one in la one in the the bearish chicago miami new york and eventually nationwide customer centers where somebody does want to see the car in person take a test drive or see the car being worked on i mean we have this idea for the way that the cars are serviced that it should be a really uh really pleasant experience so we have you know some some somewhere between like a starbucks and apple store so you'd go in and you'd see the car being cars being worked on behind a glass partition that would be your car you're watching yeah or somebody else's okay and but it's really clean it's really clean present bright it'll be sort of a uh you know coffee bar available you know just uh we really want to have a very pleasant experience that you don't typically get if you go into a dealership have you heard from toyota have you heard from general motors in ford saying uh he's the company for sale nobody's actually made a formal offer but the interest you know i think one of the one of the biggest values that tesla can can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto interest industry because right now the order interest you know the big car companies believe that a a a viable electric vehicle is not possible and b if even if it was people wouldn't buy it so we need to show that that neither of those are true that the technology works that people want to buy it and that will be the most effective way of of of really driving change in the in the order industries by serving as an example in that matter and if we were to sell the company to one of one of the big car companies i think it would really slow things down you think so absolutely you're very busy enterprising the part of your company that will explore space you're very busy with this car company where do you find time to be ceo of two companies that size well i should correct you that i'm ceo of spacex uh and i'm chairman cf of spacex and that is really my day job so i spent 80 of my time on spacex okay i am the chairman and the principal owner of tesla motors but i do not run it on a daily basis you don't run that on a daily basis no well that was really the question was how do you do how do you run those two large enterprises on a daily basis i is it a couple of phone calls for the tesla folks how's it going i'm busy with outer space right now you guys got that covered i spent about i spent about two two to three days a month on tesla related business and almost all the rest of time is on spacex so spacex is very much my my day-to-day job and then i provide uh product guidance strategic guidance and and obviously funding for for tesla like steve jobs right so he runs apple on a daily basis but he also you know has uh oversight over pixar it's kind of like that and in your day-to-day and and this is this is one of those silly lifestyle questions but how early do you get up in the morning and where do you go to work physically is it an office yeah i go to work at spacex how early do you get up in the morning you know i'm not an early morning person uh so so for young like for young engineers and for inventors and creators they can sleep in until 10 or 11. we have no fixed hours at spacex and i mean my personally i i would i tend to get up around 7 30 or 8 and be in the office around you know 9 9 30. uh but then i tend to stay at about until about 8 pm okay college students across america are saying oh dratz i thought he was going to say like noon but then you go into an office and you you sit with uh in a separate office away from those who are working or do you sit with them no i just have a cubicle at spacex you have a cubicle yeah and are you surrounded by your colleagues there absolutely what is your hope in terms of the impact you will leave on culture this civilization this world global civilization what is it that you you hope to leave here well i think what i'd like to do is help solve some important problems so i think in a small way i helped build the internet and then with respect to the the global warming problem that the transition from from away from oil and other hydrocarbons to to something which is clean and sustainable i hope to have an impact there and then with respect to space i hope to have an impact in uh helping make humanity a multi-planet species elon musk thank you so much for being with us at wireless science to see let me get it straight ceo of spacex and chairman of tesla motors yeah i got other titles but that's about that's about right i think that you're doing pretty good i think you've done very well

https://youtu.be/NytRWJ2OrbE

t-minus thirty-six tank's pressing deck one is triggered ten nine eight seven plus eight plus a year ago carp blanche brought you an interview with wiz kid and rocket scientist elon musk an ex-south african unknown to the general public more than anything elon was a visionary with big dreams if we can build something that's capable of taking people and equipment to mars such that it can serve as a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi-planet species which i think is a very very important uh objective then then i would consider the mission of spacex successful on the 20th of march this year elon came that much closer to achieving that dream elon how are you feeling right now uh great uh we had a very successful test launch uh learned everything we need to know to get our upcoming satellite launch to orbit which was the goal of this mission so we're very excited there was a lot of champagne consumed here at spacex last week spacex is elon's los angeles-based company but how did he make the money to fund his vision elon started a software company called zip2 and began to build his fortune by selling his software he then co-founded paypal one of the world's leading electronic payment systems we sold that to ebay for about one and a half billion dollars and then the ebay share price subsequently rose by a factor of three in that case in that case it was a sale for stock how is having uh a lot of money changed your lifestyle if you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle and anyway it says differently is just but elon wasn't prepared to sit on his bank balance he wanted to reach for the stars his primary aim to take on the big boys like lockheed bowing and aryan space shooting satellites into orbit but at a quarter of the price since the founding of spacex here in the aerospace hub of southern california elon and his team of rockets scientists have worked towards a clear mission make space travel as affordable as an air ticket his capital allowed him to pick the best brains in the business although i am new to the business my team is not his critics warned that he would join a long list of billionaires who've tried and failed the space industry has its movers and shakers rich nations funding government space programs like nasa and then in the private game gifted billionaires who are revolutionizing the industry it all spells big money and big business inside the nose cone of this rocket is the cargo an expensive satellite that has to be exactly positioned to orbit the earth spacex is challenging the industry by building rockets and main engines from scratch we're starting off with a small rocket delivering sort of smallish satellites to orbit and then we're going from that to a medium-lift rocket that's that's designed from the beginning to be capable of taking people to orbit you have to pay the big guns of the industry up to 60 million dollars to get your precious satellite afloat he says that's the result of bureaucracy and inefficiency even when elon gets his way this will change i think cost really matters with this month's launch spacex challenges the likes of virgin galactic and space adventures who took fellow billionaire mark shuttleworth to space in the soyuz built nearly 50 years ago the vehicle is archaic and should be upgraded fast says elon it's a bit of a clunker i mean the thing was designed in the 60s elon has its own views on mark's venture it doesn't do a great deal to advance the goal of humanity becoming space-faring civilization which is what my objective is with spacex an incredible vision and brave plans but were they going to fly now elon had enough finance for three failed launches but a tremendous amount was resting on the first test launch of falcon 1. the reason we started with a small launch vehicle is to be able to survive a problem on launch you know if we i want to be able to make sure we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures elon knew it wasn't going to be easy through a series of trials and attempts he did everything he could to get the first launch of falcon 1 off the ground november the 26th 2005 the very first launch of falcon 1 abandoned due to bad weather so that that's the really hard thing about rockets it's impossible to simulate the the flight path from from standing on the pad to going 25 times the speed of sound in a vacuum december the 19th 2005 the second attempt to launch falcon 1 scrapped due to a faulty valve it's like trying to balance a pencil and end of your finger in a hurricane it's humanly impossible human could not steer the rocket to to orbit for example so it was back to the drawing board february the 10th 2006 the third attempt confronted with a technical delay [Music] there's a hundred things that can happen one of them is success but success was proving to be elusive more tests to validate the rocket hardware launch day was drawing closer and tension was growing yeah definitely i think there's going to be you know a serious pucker factor on launch day then on the 25th of march the first launch of falcon 1 finally took place after just 29 seconds of flight the main engine failed leading to lots of the vehicle the first launch of falcon 1 was a failure for nearly a year no news came from spacex headquarters but behind the scenes the team was working day and night one down and the stakes were really high when elon and his team headed for the launch pad on the remote island of omalek was the second test launch of falcon 1 going to leave elon a hero of private commercial space flight or was he going to be the laughing stock of his well-heeled competitors five first station d-day the 20th of march this year and finally liftoff for elon and spacex we have liftoff falcon has cleared the tower velocity 128 meters per second altitude 2.6 kilometers vehicles passing through max q velocity 450 meters per second altitude 13. the first stage succeeded in going through the earth's atmosphere and into vacuum the second stage achieved rocket separation and then finally deployment stages are second stage ignition confirmed coming up on fairing separation feeling the pacific ocean far below and the curvature of the earth coming into focus as the spacecraft headed out fearing separation is confirmed this marked a near perfect flight just short to full orbital velocity vehicle velocity is 26 34 meters per second altitude 117 kilometers second stage engine performance nominal now you got to an altitude of what about 200 miles about 300 kilometers actually uh which is only it's less than 100 kilometers below this the international space station with this feat spacex has convinced key stakeholders that they have what it takes the vehicle has basically proven itself uh that's our view and that's also the view of our customers which is uh critical we've all of our customers very excited by the results of the test launch and ultimately this is all about business elon has put a lot of his own money on the line to follow his space dreams but he now has serious backers like the united states air force nasa also presented spacex with a contract with 278 million us dollars aimed at trips to the international space station in only a few days since the launch we've had four requests for proposal for additional missions some of your critics said that you didn't understand the whole space business you didn't understand the terms and the dangers what do you think they're saying now from these sort of independent observers out there they're pretty jaded because they've seen a lot of companies come and try to do this no one's been successful so why should we be any different and we have to you know prove it prove that we're going to be different how does this affect the countdown to this wonderful idea of space tourism i call it private space flight versus government space flight and you know falcon 1 is our test vehicle it's what we're using to really figure out all the technologies because falcon 1 is not designed to carry people but our falcon 9 big vehicle is now that the rich are clamoring for a trip to space when choosing to be taken for a ride costing millions it's important to know the difference between sub-orbital and orbital private space flight it's it's a huge huge difference a sub-orbital flight is basically like a cannonball shot they sort of punt you high in the air and then you fall back down that's really what's being sold by richard branson virgin galactic and you know some of the other people out there elon is proposing to deliver full orbital space travel within the next five years it's really i mean perhaps the difference between having a boat that can cross the english channel is sort of sub-orbital and a boat that can circumnavigate the globe is orbital do you think people like boeing and orion space are getting worried yeah i think boeing and ariane are to some degree concerned about spacex because i think they they would have a great deal of difficulty competing with us on on price are there other contenders that can still beat you to the finish line here i'm not really worried about any any of the competitors it's we're either going to do it or if we fail it'll be our fault

https://youtu.be/gVwmNaPsxLc

why don't we just bring up Elon Musk and we'll have a conversation about it welcome to web - Elon so I think I just want to start with with sort of the ultimate gadget like the the dream gadget the six-figure gadget with lots of scarcity so can we bring that picture up we queue the red sort of gadget porn there it is that's a Tesla Road roadster it costs a hundred and four thousand dollars 109 oh yeah although there is a tax credit that will take effect next year bring it down to about a hundred all right so we're still in the six-figure range you're making how many of them will make about twelve hundred a year maybe fifteen hundred year and and when you do make fifteen hundred a year you're going to make a profit on that yeah absolutely so tell me a little bit about this car give me the sort of gadget rundown like the the specs the stats how many cylinders does it have has no cylinders so the car John I mean really so the car is is really I could the elevator phrase is it's faster than a Ferrari more efficient than a Prius it's the zero to 60 time is three point nine seconds and we actually are working on a powerpack upgrade that'll take that down to about three point six to three point seven next year the energy efficiency in terms of miles per gallon equivalent is is about 130 so that's if you took a gallon of oil and you refined that to gasoline and transported to a gas station and how many miles do you get in a car versus you talk about gallon of oil electricity took the the transmission losses into account and then said how many miles do you get out of the car that's how you get the equivalency so it's about twice the energy efficiency of a Prius and and faster than any Ferrari except the Enzo so it's it's really pretty unique proposition but but we can't really get one I mean not only because it's a hundred grand which not everybody's got but you can only make so many of them yeah absolutely in fact one thing the important thing I forgot to mention is that the range is almost 250 miles and that's a combined highway city with the air conditioning on so and you and the charges built into the car so you can just plug it into any outlet like it's a hairdryer it's a hell of it yeah hairdryer or laptop you know it's a laptop with wheels and seats does it happen to have it does like I'm in you know cuz otherwise so yeah yeah so you know common thing we're here is well jeez this is available to a very small number of people it's clearly not going to change the climate and you know so what if a few rich people get energy-efficient to cars you just took my next question away right it's and it's important to emphasize that the point of Tesla the reason I funded it and put so much time and effort into it is is really to get to mass-market electric cars but to get to get there you need to start with something and if you look at any new technology development I think in almost any sphere you start with something which is expensive because its first the first thing is about making making with technology work and then you work that then you go from there to optimize the new technology I'm sure everybody remembers the early days of cell phones or laptops or even more directly and if people are aware of the history of internal combustion engine cars you would know that in the early days of gasoline cars they were considered toys for rich people because everybody else was driving it was riding a horse and and so you need to go through this phase of having an expensive car that is available to appear in order to get to the low cost car that's available to many so if you look at our next the next product we're coming out with which is the sedan and it's a five passenger luxury sports fan it's half the price of this of the Roadster it's called the Model S will be unveiling it in first quarter next year and that you know that cause are gonna be produced at more than ten times the volume of the Roadster so ramon's make about fifteen to twenty thousand cars a year and and it doesn't stop there our third model will be a low cost car that will be I think under $30,000 and and and that call be in the hundreds of thousands of units per year so let's talk a little bit about that because you've had some news in the last couple of weeks and it has been news consistent with pretty much all the rest of the news in the last couple of weeks some layoffs some delays in the S model yeah you you've sort of taken officially the title of CEO you've had a number of CEOs over last couple of years I imagine not easy to birth an entirely new car company it's been tried many times before and most times it doesn't work and they weren't trying to necessarily invent this at the same time so talk to me about why it was that you needed to raise more funds and why it is that you had to delay the ass yeah absolutely and it's true that the last time there was a successful mainstream car startup was was Jeep in 1941 so it's been a while but it's definitely it's a hard task and certainly III didn't actually I didn't think that this would be easy or anything like that but it seems as though if if action wasn't taken then if it was simply left up to Detroit I mean it would be waiting for a very long time well Detroit was in the offices of Nancy last night or yesterday with their tin cups out I mean they were really big cups right because apparently it's about 25 billion dollars that they want well they already have that but they want another 25 billion just so they can keep in business to get the 25 billion that they're gonna get next year I'm curious I mean you just had a round of layoffs see the way you did it was interesting you know sort of as I understand it a special forces approach like you sort of only the seals get through but the Marines and the Green Berets don't in terms of the staff that you kept but you've had a discussion over the last two days that certainly included the discussion of entrepreneurs and startups and the Sequoia memo and you know how do we cut but still go forward and so on how did you get through that is what you know and and and tell us a little bit about that process and what again why did you have to do it yeah well before the market Armageddon occurred the plan for Tesla was to raise about 100 million dollars and go full force into the Model S development we really into the expensive part of the Model S fell if you look at the development costs for something like like a like a car where you've got a lot of capital equipment it sort of looks like a like a hill you know you've got a long sort of tail and then when it comes time to buy all the factory equipment all that stuff you that's where you got to spend you know a couple hundred million dollars and so we intended to sort of get going with that at full force prior prior to the market collapse and then market collapsed and clearly that was that that would have been a very difficult strategy to execute and and so my gut tells me you could have probably raised the money yeah didn't want to give away the equity I think the pricing was too bad I think we the the I think we could have raised the money at very difficult terms essentially giving up control of company and and just with you know very difficult ratchets and all sorts of things involved you did pretty well before you started Tesla maybe you got it looked in the mirror and written yourself a check well I actually have done that so there's a certain point where your tolerance Achatz yeah it's but it's tough to carry it all your up the picture now cuz we got other things to talk about Thanks you can go to I mag Johnny cuz I know you like yeah sorry yeah well in effect that's what what we've done is rather than raise a hundred million we're raising what we have have reached have commitments for forty million from the existing set of investors which is a bunch of people apart from me man you know I'll be providing about you know sort of half that but the other half is coming from from the other investors so and that that's that's enough to certainly get the roads through business and our powertrain supply business when you say you have an outsourced or your your supplying supply to others right yes absolutely in fact that powertrain supply business is part of what will allow us to get to mass market affordable because that business is profitable right it is yes and we expect the rostral business to be profitable in the second quarter next year right so did you ever consider if they can afford a hundred and nine grand why not just price it at two hundred because anyone can I mean you have a waiting list of how long 1200 yeah no it's it's always tough figuring out pricing some people are relatively insensitive to pricing some people extremely sensitive to pricing we wanted the price of our car to be something that was comparable to the gasoline sports car like a Ferrari well it's we're actually cheaper than a Ferrari but but comparable to say of course you know if you look at a Porsche Turbo it's about a 125 thousand dollars so or Porsche 911s is you know high 90s so if we wanted to be something where it's in in the realm of good comparable price to it to other sort of normal sports cause apart from the super exotics I want to move on because we got a lot to talk about very quickly may just ask you again about inside of your philosophy around you couldn't raise that money you needed to lay off staff what was your approach to that so there are two parts to it one was sort of a reduction in force for people that were on them working on the Model S because we just can't afford to sustain you're a large group working in the white lace so we're not that down to about ten percent of the company working on the Model S and then we did an overall review of the company and I said look that let's just let's approach this from a standpoint of I wanted to accentuate the plus key that I have with companies in the startup phase which is which is a sort of Special Forces approach you know it's the the minimum passing grade is excellent and that's best you know it's just that's the way I believe sort of companies need to be if they're ultimately going to be large and successful companies and you know I think we would adhere to that to some degree but would straight from that path in in a few places and that that doesn't mean the people that we let go on that basis were would be considered bad you know just it's just a difference between sort of Special Forces and regular army if you're going to get through a really tough environment and can ultimately grow the company to something significant you have to have a very high level of dedication and talent throughout the organization let's I want to move on because we've got a lot to cover I want to talk a bit about solar Solar City so give us the sort of elevator pitch as to what what what that company does yeah absolutely and I do that it's worth noting you know from a business standpoint my time is split roughly evenly between Tesla and SpaceX right so Solar City I spend hardly any time on and deserve really hardly any credit for like the guys there are just phenomenally good I actually blow my mind so Solar City the value proposition that they have that they're the most efficient provider of solar powered systems for at the residential and small business level by a longshot and they also have a unique financing product which allows people to sign up the Scylla with no money down and your cost of electricity decreases so it's a no-brainer how do you say no to something like that in fact we're expecting similar city sales to actually accelerate within the recession because you saved money so how you know the Seoul city just did a financing round that was about 3x the round it did a year ago that makes it unusual yeah and we're expecting business to at least double in 2009 over 2008 so you say to that yeah so that sounds great too it sounds like if you could merge Solar City and Tesla you could have raised that so actually I had one last question about Tesla that I didn't get to which is maybe unfair but what's how did we get here not not the Tesla piece but how did the automobile industry and uh where it is like help help us understand what happened in Detroit such that we got to the point where the industry literally is not viable you know I I don't think I have a really great answer for that I think there's this issues with with organized labor and there are issues with entrenched management that still wants to run company like it's 1955 so you know there's too many country club memberships and and then and I think that in the manual management sort of focused on the wrong things but GM has this Volt project how is it you could get the Tesla up and running and and the transmission and the drive train done and they've been working on the Volt project seemingly for well at least for five years or something and actually that the both is real relatively new I think so the both is actually inspired by Tesla and Bob Lutz has gone on record as well that's right yeah that's yeah yeah so if that was one of the positive effects that I'd hoped Tesla why not just buy Tesla I'm not sure they could afford Tesla their market you guys get that because the market cap of GM right now is less than Burger King right its 2.8 billion that live well actually Michael Pollan this morning I probably that's probably a good thing that Burger King is market cap has been hammered as well but um yeah they're not they're a 2.8 billion or something like that so everyone's madly doing calculations right now on Tesla's value but yeah so the do you think the bolts going to work do you hope it's going to work if you hope it's gonna work absolutely yeah yeah my motive for project I'm a volunteer at this point there's nothing I want to buy personally that I can't buy and I don't really like yachts or anything like that and so my interest is is really from an environmental standpoint to some degree from a national security standpoint and then and then longer-term from an overall economic situation standpoint which is if you've got a non renewable fuel you better find our noble source or the economics gonna collapse down the road so my interest is like yeah what can we do to get as many you know renewable energy cars on the road as possible you know my personal belief in the in the right solution is electric cars and primarily solar power although windage if them were also good good options and and so one of the things I was hoping would occur would be that the logical companies would look at what Tess has done and and established electric car programs sooner than they might otherwise do so mm-hmm I mean they would eventually do so but if we could sort of show them that the technology is possible to make the technology work and that and that people want to buy electric cars when you do when you make him because previously the car industry had thought you can't make the technology work and even if you did people wouldn't buy it right so if we can prove those those Atlas the premises pulse then that would get the car industry moving in the direction of electric and that hasn't had some positive effect with with Duvall program which directly credits Tesla yeah you know so now what last question on the cars and we're gonna go to space Shay Agassi has coming later and and he's got another sort of an alternative approach to this particular sea simmering which is he you know the the battery pack per se is distinct from the car and there's service stations and a whole grid network and what do you make of that model and and you know do you think the two can coexist or is it one's gonna win and the other is not well I think you know what he's doing is somewhat orthogonal to us or perhaps of this rather in terms of being a competitor it's I think it's more of a sort of symbiotic thing that you know we're making electric cars he's not making electric cars he's helping wants to help build the infrastructure to swap out battery packs and have fast charge stations and that sort of thing we just have a model though right doesn't know just make cars no he's working with some of the other car makers to encourage them to make electric cars but but he's not himself an electric car maker so do you think it's going to work his model yeah I think yes eventually the question is one of timing you know you know we don't have the cart before the horse and so I think what he's doing is right really it's just time will tell whether this is it's a thing to do now or think to you later so let's swap to another really big or potentially really big industry I mean it is a very big industry but it's a mostly government industry which is using lots and lots and lots of gas to hurdle things into space right Rockets right so why did you decide that this was an interesting industry to try to reinvent well so you're winners in college they were sort of I try think of what one of the things that would most change the future of humanity and that the three things I came up with were the internet transitioning to a sustainable energy economy a space exploration in particular the extension of life to multiple planets I didn't really think I'd be involved in the third one I wasn't even sure about the second one but the first one fortunately the Internet you get something started with very little capital so you did a couple of internet companies and that that give me a capital to to work on the clean energy stuff which is where the Solar City and Tesla come in and then the third element was space and yeah I just think it's important that we we make progress in space and that we're you know ultimately that we're on a path so if you sort of put sort of project outwards and extrapolate forward you can see that one day we would be a spacefaring civilization and that there would be life on one many planets life as we know it at least on many planets I think that's just a very exciting future compared to one where life never gets beyond Earth and and they were all the defense of arguments for that of course of like well you know his life going to end on earth and maybe we should sort of back up the biosphere like like sometimes call it you know if you back up your hard drive maybe you should back up life too so I think those defensive arguments are good I mean they're they're valid and and all that but I I'm much more the thing that sort of gets gets me excited is really the the positive side of it of the much greater richness in the scope and scale of life and you know by by being out there and being as making life multiple planets space very gonna be a little stymied here but I mean usually when we imagine what you're talking about we then write a series like Star Trek or we you know we have you know almost every popular culture projection of what you're discussing has men and women in government uniforms right you know out there exploring on behind a civilization back home but you're a matte you're trying to do this as a private enterprise well we have got we have lots of government customers all that we have both your commercial and government customers so tell me practically you know get us to space through Spacek slike how does this happen you're in the early phase I understand and you just had your first launch right well actually with our fourth launch but I first time to orbit so SpaceX is about six years old started from scratch never I never built any physical hardware myself and you know just although I do have a physics background and grew up in a very engineering centric household so you know more an engineer than anything else I guess but you know starting sewing SpaceX I didn't really know no know that much about its space engineering or rocket engineering but I learned quite a lot and as it turns out I wasn't able to hire anyone to be the chief designer of the rocket so I ended up being that myself so like a kid in the backyard products yeah we probably would've gotten to a little bit sooner if I'd been able to hire someone but I wasn't able to so we got to overt enough fourth attempt or would you say it's but it's hard to get to orbit by the way this is the first well I haven't tried but at least not in a rocket I'm a little bit speechless the idea that you know I mean it's rather audacious and I asked Lance Armstrong this question but I'll ask you as well and how much of this is ego I mean it's probably some some meaningful amount of the ego I suppose but yeah it's not go to college and the years smoke and join it like midnight and you're like I think I'll reinvent space first the Internet then then I'll do the energy economy then I'll deal with interplanetary travel haha I'm pretty sure all of us had that moment in college but the only guy actually trying to do it well yes well actually when I thought about it in college it wasn't from a standpoint of I'm gonna go get these things done it was it was really these are just these are what I think are the most important things it's almost certain I will not be involved in at least the space part of it probably not the renewable energy part of it and hopefully the Internet and if I do the internet thing hope they can make enough money to pay the rent that was actually I was not my favorite of mine to be clear wasn't the internet thing worked out pretty well it did but you know I started in 95 and and nobody made any money on the internet and even in Silicon Valley you know we went to bench capitalists in 95 and that sort of heard of the internet most of them weren't even using it and and even if the internet did become widespread or nobody make any money on it and the Netscape went public and that kind of changed people's mindset and I figured at least from Stanford the greater fool theory like even if there's internet scam Internet companies can make money at least some fools willing to pay a lot you know if they go public and so that that good things more and more should but really my perspective was starting my first company it was hopefully I can make enough money to pay the rent and buy food otherwise I would have to go and go to my graduate program at Stanford we're just fine that's sort of my final option graduate program at Stanford seems to be the launchpad for an awful lot of things yeah somewhere cliche at this point yeah you know we're actually we're running out of time but and and you still haven't told us exactly how we're gonna get to space but I know that well at least somebody's gonna be able to get that tour of SpaceX factory which is part of the often auction thank you very much for that I I know I'm being told but it's my show so let's have a couple questions and then and and then we'll let Elon go over here why aren't they I'm sure you'd love to do deal with all of them right so yeah sure absolutely what why aren't well are they in there sort of it and I know invented here I don't know we actually I should say we do have a deal with a major car company it's not a u.s. car company I I can't say who it is but it's pretty if you google around you'll just easy to figure it out haha no Monda wrong hemisphere you know but I'm very excited by that that relationship because it has potential to provide a viable electric car for around $8,000 smart okay I'm gonna stop we have a question over here but essentially for being a pumpkin kind of skiing operation but the article is actually pretty cool too of the hole that they're part of mystery for not following these guys out so my question to you is will you call that out well yeah I mean is that is is it does not have a track record of delivering what they say you know yeah I mean I would you on must to do I guess that is a call out in this guy's book yeah I mean good good I mean if anyone's curious and I think the wired article is reasonably accurate so yeah it's unfortunate we did face the problem with Tesla in the beginning of having to deal with the fact that that many prior electric car companies had been sort of scams or a lot of vaporware and stuff and and the you know with with Tesla having had a bunch of delays and and let it did hurt us perceptually but fortunately we're now in production at ten cars a week and that'll be ramping up to 30 cars a week by early next year and so you're gonna start seeing a lot of these cars on the road yeah so at least it's you know it's real and that I think the people that know me know that you know I might be a little optimistic on schedules but I always deliver right I'm sorry we can't take any more questions but I'm I'm kittens are being threatened to be killed back there I don't if I don't wrap this up so thank you very much Elon for coming you

https://youtu.be/s3RlCVtQ6mA

" we have two all-star panels ahead of us the next one is going to talk about a kind of futurology a(...TRUNCATED)