MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium

I good afternoon good afternoon it's a pleasure to welcome you all to this capstone of what has been a truly outstanding celebration of a hundred years of aerospace at MIT I'll be brief as I'm certain that you didn't come here to listen to me before I start I want to reflect briefly on the significance of this week symposium over the last few days we have welcomed to our campus a who's who of aerospace Scholars innovators and legions more than 500 alumni and guests from all over the world have join us to honor the past century of aerospace achievement and MIT central role in the development of Earth transportation the celebration has also provided an opportunity to look ahead to imagine for instance what the rise of autonomous systems will mean for air

travel commerce and space exploration and it's breathtaking truly to recognize and realize the magnitude of the impact that the faculty students staff and alumni of this department have had on earth travel as I look around at the aerospace pioneers who have taken the time to join us this to these events this week the thought that keeps coming back to mine is the realization that core 16 has been involved in every major achievement in the history of aerospace and that is truly remarkable and that reflects the leadership division and brilliance of the faculty administrators and more than 6,000 aeronautical engineers who have earned an MIT degree over the last century as we have seen over the last few days that department remains committed to excellence

and to pushing the boundaries of what is and what might be and there is no question in my mind that MIT is aryl astra the party will continue to be a leading force in aerospace for the next 100 years at least I want to take a moment to recognize professor Jaime Puri Jaime and his team of faculty staff and students have done a truly remarkable job of planning and executing this week's activities they've created a program for which all of us at MIT are very proud of and my deepest thanks go to him and to the department on his team before we begin the Q&A I'd like to direct your attention to a short video produced by a tremendously innovative company SpaceX it shows some of the company's recent successes in advancing private space exploration if you can

promise by computers in start-up second stage pressing thanks for a flight pressure 59 switching to internal power t-minus 5 4 3 2 1 look at the Dragon capsule making its way with international space station station on to be dragging a coin meters and capture is confirmed as they say in Venezuela that's a cool video it is my pleasure to welcome the stars of today show professor Jaime / re is the hn Slater professor and the head of department of aaron astro at MIT and will serve as the interviewer for the afternoon and he'll be guiding a conversation with someone were absolutely thrilled to welcome to our campus one of the most creative minds of his generation Elon Musk Elam is an engineer and entrepreneur who builds and operates companies to solve environmental

social and economic challenges he co-founded paypal and currently dry strategy development and design at two companies he created the space exploration technologies of SpaceX and Tesla Motors is also chairman of SolarCity America's largest solar power provider and Alette SpaceX efforts to be the first private company to successfully launch undock a spacecraft with the International Space Station and for his brilliance as an entrepreneur is impressive creativity as an engineer he is a folk hero to all of us here at MIT please welcome professor hamid / re and mr.

Elon Musk good afternoon over the last three days we have been celebrating a century of MIT aerospace innovation we've looked at the lessons learned from the past the excitement of the present and a speculated about the future the common thing underlined is incredible hundred years has been the passion of the visionaries people like ham soccer do Leto Gardner Draper and Simmons who better than Elon Musk to add to this roster of visionaries and culminate this symposium and join us as we launch our second century of aerospace at MIT Ellen is an innovator and an inspiration to a new generation of engineers and entrepreneurs first of all alone thank you very much for coming it's a pleasure to have you here and welcome to MIT so we'll have a light to start

and ask you if you could elaborate a little bit on what we've seen on the video okay that's quite a lot well I mean what we're staying there is and and I just like like our communications team put it together so I just like sword for the first time in the back there like probably a bit too much slow-mo so the you know what we're seeing there is our Falcon 9 rocket and out Dragon spacecraft and we're seeing some of the initial tests of the reusable version of Falcon 9 that is capable of taking open landing which is reusability is relating the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level what do you think you'll might be able to fly an operational the usual force the stage well we've been able to soft land boost the rocket booster

in the ocean twice so far unfortunately you know sort of SAT there for several seconds then tipped over and exploded much yeah just quite difficult to reuse the point but the unfortunately the unit circle it support it's as tall as a 14-story building so you know when a 14-story building pulls over is quite a quite a belly flop and so what we need to do is to be able to eat the land on a floating platform or ideally boost back to the launch site and land back to the launch site but before we Bruce back to the launch site and try to land there we need to show that we can land with precision over and over again otherwise you're bad could happen but if it doesn't prove back to where it's where we intended so we put it for the upcoming launch I think we've

got a chance of landing on on a floating landing platform we actually have a huge platform that's being constructed at a shipyard in Louisiana right now which is plus huge huge issue I mean it's about 300 feet long by 170 feet wide that looks very tiny from space and and the leg span of the rocket is 60 feet so you know you've got and this is going to be positioning itself up in the ocean with you know with with with engines that'll keep it and it will try to keep it in a particular position but it's tricky you got these big rollers and you know and GPS errors so but you know such compliments it's it's not anchored because it's like out in the bloody Atlantic so so that that's that's where we're going to put we're going to try to land on that on the next

flight and if we land on that then I think we'll be able to reply that Brewster but I it's probably maybe not more than a fifty percent chance or less of landing it on the platform for the first time but there's a lot of launches that will occur over the next year so there's at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months and I think I think it's quite likely probably eighty ninety percent likely that one of those flights will be able to land and refi so I think we're quite close I'm curious to know why you chose to go with the retro thrust rocket for landing as opposed to jazz wings and wheels and run or London or run away like like the chapel see yeah there's a couple reasons the if you like the long-term ambition of SpaceX is to develop

technologies necessary to establish a self-sustaining a city on Mars or civilization on Mars and wings and a runway don't really work if you're going somewhere other than earth if the moon doesn't have an atmosphere so wings in a wheel with wings and wheels are you know there's no run there's no runways in there's no atmosphere not a good choice for the moon and then on Mars there are also no runways and the atmosphere is very thin and so unless you you know like you know try to land something at supersonic velocity so unlike it's just not a good choice for Mars either so so you really have to get good after pulse of landing if you want to go someplace other than Earth which which is why you have rockets because obviously aircraft work quite well on earth

so and then but even put worth recovery you know when you really look at it even if other planets had atmospheres the definitely the penalty for propulsive landing is quite low like you can just do it is easy calculation of what's the terminal velocity and then how identifier the engine at water level to get 200 velocity and and then if you do some interesting things like if you look at our landing gear they're essentially like giant body flaps so the drag of where we deploy the line and give a trap drank massively increases and so we have dual use of landing gear as dried body flaps and as Len as landing gear and it actually cuts the terminal velocity in half and therefore the fuel go with propellant that we need to stop this vehicle in half and actually

it's quite an efficient method of of landing precisely that you can use less mass if you want to do parachutes or water landing but then reasonability is negatively affected and any near-term plans for the reusable second stage product the the the next generation vehicles after that the Falcon architecture will be designed for full reusability I don't expect the Falcon line two have a reasonable upper stage just just because the with with with a kerosene based system the specific impulse isn't really high enough to do that and a lot of the missions we do for commercial satellite deployment are just geostationary missions so that we're really going very far out these are high Delta blessed emissions so to try to get something back from that is really difficult

but with the next generation of vehicles which is it sub cooled methane oxygen system where the propellants are cool too close to the freezing temperature to increase the density we can definitely do a full reusability and that system is intended to be a fully reusable Mars transportation system so not merely to low-earth orbit but all the way to Mars and back I thought we thought over useful at eight years huh I'm an optimistic person but always I I think we could start to see some test flights in the five or six year time frame but we're talking about a much bigger vehicle vehicle together yeah and that we're also going to be upgrading to sort of a new generation of a harder engine cycle which is a full flow staged combustion so what we have right now

as an open cycle engine so I mean right now say like engines are our weakest point that's basics but there will be become as strong as the as the structures and avionics in the next generation okay thank you app so let me a SpaceX is only 12 years old and you have shown that in some aspects you can compete head-to-head with much more established launch service providers like locket and Boeing and the you viens to what do you ascribe disability of a young and conventional company to take on the establishment sure and actually was clarified point like like right now our weakest point is engines with respect to specific impulse but not with respect to thrust to weight we actually have the highest thrust to weight of any engine I think to maybe ever but but

our specific animals the efficiency of the engine is about ten percent worse than the Dennis stage combustion engine of was using the same propellant the it tells about competitiveness I think the I think it most comes down to a pace of innovation our pace of innovation is much much faster than that the big aerospace companies or the sort of country driven systems and this is generally true if you look at innovation from large companies from smaller companies smaller companies generally better at innovating than larger companies and it has to be that way from a Darwinian standpoint because you sort companies would would just die if they didn't try innovating because otherwise people just keep buying the product from the big company so but I mean sir then

why is basics more innovative I think it's probably because we've got I could as a super engineering driven culture I mean it's it's really good we're running kind of the Silicon Valley operating system this is little it's kind of hard to describe like it's like how do you describe Linux like like you know like Linux is more efficient than some other operating systems good enough to remain very less like it could exactly why is like you really have to get into the weeds and but reddit units you have a fairly flat hierarchy you promote rapid communication the best ideas when my best ideas when's culture as opposed to this you know they're having the seniority of the person decide the solution which I mean that should never be the case of engineering choice

be you know a rational basis and and I also believe that the in terms of leadership level I'd much rather for it someone who has strong engineering ability then so-called management ability and you know like we we do hire some MBAs you know but but I would you agree it's usually in spite of the ambien or because of it I think that deserves on a blog you're really pushing the concept of reusability as a way to affordability but would you agree that the only way you justify making a more expensive reusable vehicle is if you can guarantee a minimum frequency of flights and is the market there what how are ending them say five years ten year period who is going to provide that demand where is it going to come from well it is a check in an excerpt situation

I mean the reason that there's low demand for spaceflight is because it's ridiculously expensive and and you know so somebody at some point somebody has Sarah we're going to make something that's much more affordable and and then see what application was developed the yeah that's that's what has happened i mean the situation in rocketry is it's like if an aircraft the imaginative aircraft were single use then how many people would fly I mean local fire we really low you buy a 747 it's like 250 million dollars only three hundred million dollars and need two of them for a roundtrip so nobody's paying like half a billion dollars to fly it from Boston to London and and if that were the case there'd be like a very small number of lights like scientific and

military purposes and people like Hoover say wow that the market for aircraft is so tiny people really love going by boat it was sponsors so you wear if we have brackets that are reusable we could reduce the fully reusable and can get to a decent flight rate the potential is that to get at order of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transport which is vital for establishment establishing a self-sustaining civilization on another planet or even on you know on the moon or some sort of l5 colony or whatever but you really need to get the cost we need a tour of magnitude improvement at least in the class transport in fact I mean relative to the estimates of what it costs do a Mars mission and Mars mission work I think like the some of the lower estimates

are at the 100 to 200 billion dollar level you know for a four-person mission we need we do more like a ten thousand fold reduction I don't to make it viable yeah but well I mean so people can afford to go deuces space tourism as a the customer and people wanting to just pay to be in orbit in that I mean it is some sort of people your privates place private spaceflight is going to be some some amount of market yeah I i don't know i mean really good just we're trying to advanced rocket technology and I mean on one hand if we are even if we get even slightly towards the overarching goal of Mars colonization level technology like we just get slightly there we we certainly have a viable business in launching satellites and service in the space station that

kind of thing because like yeah I mean you're here for like five percent you know so it's not like there's this still a very viable business doing with orbit of this event and it was enough any flight 45 to support calls echo we're like fasting more competitive than the other rocket companies so we do have a lot of people gang up against us these days okay nice time I on this planet let's talk about Mars that's what really excites a lot of the people in the audience a lot of sites many of us how are we gonna get there first of all what are in your mind say to three top technologies that we need to develop the new we need to improve to get this closer to where we want to be true and second I also like some commenters to what would be useful intermediate

missions are we going to use the moon is the moon yeah things I necessary step on our way to Mars other than the moon is necessary stuff but it i think if you've got a rocket and spacecraft capable going to Mars you might as well go to the moon slung along the way I mean it's like I mean it's like crossing the English Channel relatives going to Mars yeah so it's like if you have these ships that can cross the Atlantic would you cross the English Channel probably baidu them to necessary from a logistics perspective no definitely not it's certainly not necessary but you probably end up having a moon base just because by why not yeah so but in terms of the key technology yeah Keith key technologies it obviously be great to have some sort of fundamental new

thing that has never existed before and like pushes the boundaries of physics that would be great but as far as you know the physics that we know today I think I actually think we've got the basic ingredients are there I could I mean if we if you do densified identified methyl ox rocket with on orbit refueling earth orbit refueling so you like load the spacecraft spray spacecraft into orbit you sent a bunch of refueling missions to fill up the tanks and you have the Mars colonial fleet essentially that gets built up during the time between the earth ma's synchronizations which occur every 26 months and then that in the fleet sort of all the pots at the optimal transfer point I think I think we have we don't need anything like so we don't need any any

sort of thing that people don't already know about I believe it but we've got the building blocks but but the mass efficiency is extremely important so having better heat shields that thoroughly usable is radiation on humans or me radiation on humans I country yeah I mean things that can mitigate the radiation effects certainly i mean i think the radiation effects are generally way overblown because if you went to the moon like two weeks in deep space Buzz Aldrin's around many other folks that went that also in the audience yeah great I mean so like obviously didn't course like they're so alive and it you know there yeah they seem ok they're people have been up in the space station for like a year or more they're ok so it's i don't i don't know i mean

the things we can do to mitigate the radiation on roots you know pipe effective placement of the water so let's say the what are you bringing their like tax would ya put that in the direction of the Sun and yeah but I mean I really think about the the substantial appearance that every we do need an efficient of pallet depot on Mars so that's but I mean it really I think this is like there's a lot of I mean obviously a lot of hard work in the engineering that needs to be done but but it's there like the pieces are there you will see robotic missions ahead of human missions going to Mars and to be better around for four people yeah yes I think that be yeah I mean we have like you know the with Rovers on the mall on varsity or not already so I think what

we see more robots on Mars and we probably want to make sure the propellant depot works to be an automated propellant depot and there's some questions as to what do you do for power generation on Mars do you have a nuclear reactor you know if then you got to carry the nuclear fuel their directives are really heavy do you do some lightweight solar power system it's sort of maybe a big inflatable solar arrays or something like that so just power generation on laws and it gives an interesting problem and then just figuring out like how to get all of the bits of efficiency right before creating say methane and oxygen on Mars Mars is go to co2 atmosphere and there's there's a lot of water sort of bearing us oil give me answer question that has been discussed

over the past couple of days should we be considering one trips one way only trips to Mars what's the best approach to colonize the planet is it but what you review it's not socially acceptable you think people will sign up to do it I think it's plenty of people are signed up for a warrior to Mars but maybe if I could have a show of hands who would consider such an option I see some not many or perhaps enough for a couple of missions so it's certainly certainly been up I think it's sort of like is it a one-way mission and then you die or is it one of my mission and you get resupplied that's a big difference we're from the second option yeah exactly but I mean I think it's so it is a big moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back like these

spaceships are expensive okay if they're hard to bulls can't just leave them there so whether or not people want to come back or not is kind of like they can jump on if they want but do you need the space you're back thank you I'm your kind of weird like it was like huge collection of spaceships on Mars over time really well if it's like we're just in the back and of course we're just in the back so that i think that's that's for sure like if necessary it particularly say we want to have a colony of some time that's of significant size yeah that's one question looking at the at the Apollo experience are you concerned that say we land humans in Mars and they in say 10 15 years and they don't know southern the excitement is done we've done it and just go

and dress for the next 50 years like we did with the Polo it's not something that concerns you yeah well that's why I think we should really be setting the goal as the creation of a self-sustaining civilization on Mars not simply a mission to Mars because then we risk you know it would be awesome and cool and would be a new high altitude record and you know great pictures its up but I mean it would be it's it just it's just not the thing that fundamentally changes the future of humanity and this I mean I should sort of explain perhaps the rationale for you know why I think is important to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars because I think some people are aware of that but probably most people aren't and you're hit you hear all these rebuttals

like under all these problems on earth that we need to deal with and should refocus on that and an answer is yes I mean our primary focus your palms on earth but I think that there should be some small amount that's given over to the establishment of of a colony on Mars and making life multiplanetary my small amount I mean some number less than 1 percent of our resources so you know it's not as important as as say health care but it's more important than likes a cosmetics I mean I can propel me know i'm in favor of cosmetics i like them they're great but you know lipstick or calling on Mars so feel may have different opinions but I so I so I think I think we should we should have that and it because the future humanity will fundamentally bifurcate along

the lines of either single planet species or multi-planet species and a multi-planet version of humanity of humanity's future is going to last a lot longer we will propagate civilizations future far longer if we are multi-planet species than ever we are single plant species and and so it's like planetary redundancy backing up the biosphere it's you know it's a we've got all of our eggs in one basket here we should try to protect that basket and do everything we can but but there are some risks that are just extremely difficult to mitigate and some which we will ultimately not be able to mini game so it just seems like the right thing to do and then the question is the expression is what should we do it now or should we just which we wait for some point

in the future and I think I think it's the wise move is to do it now because the window of technology for this is open and it's the first time that window has been open in the four and a half billion year history of Earth we have a long time and and I hope I certainly hope that the window will be open here for you know forever but it may also close and if you look at the history of technology in various civilizations you could say ancient Egypt were they're able to build these incredible giant pyramids and then they've got how to build permit and then they couldn't read hieroglyphics or you look at say Roman civilization and they were able to pull these incredible aqueducts and roads and then they forgot how to do that and then in that indoor plumbing

but if quite how to input plumbing you know it's like you know it's just that there's clearly been a cycle with with technology and you know hopefully but that's an upward-sloping sine wave that you know continues on to be really great in the future but maybe it doesn't yeah maybe there's some bad thing that happens and and so for one percent of our resources we could buy life insurance for life collectively and I think that would be a good thing to this idea thank you thank you AB you know I'm sure the topic of of Martha's going to come again because in a few minutes I like to open the floor for questions but I have a couple more questions I really like to to get your opinion on a related to your association about your involvement with Tesla and solar

city could you tell us a little bit about your nouns plans to construct a battery in the factory and can you elaborate in this watch the driver is it satisfy demands reduce costs improve efficiencies or all of the above look for the pure gigafactory yes so the you know the gigafactory is like the least bad solution we can come up with honestly I mean I think it's actually pretty cool or it's worked out but we're just based with a simple problem of if we want to make electric cars we need enough batteries for the electric cars and and say well last year all lithium iron production combined with 30 gigawatt hours approximately that's nothing okay or these it's nothing when you consider like if you want to make half a million electric cars a year that's

how much you need and there are 100 million new cars made every year there are two billion gasoline or diesel cars on the road worldwide so just do the basic math you don't just need one gigafactory you need like 200 Giga factories just for new car production and that assumes you're only going to replace the fleet at the existing rate which has a refreshed every 20 years so yeah so the given that we want to try to get to full capacity at our premont plant in California of half million vehicles year we need happening vehicles a year of batteries and obviously we can't use all of the other factories in the world combined because people want cell phones and laptops and other things therefore we have to build this factory and when we found we have a great

partner in panasonic Panasonic's taking care of the kind of a cell formation part of it they're actually many aspects to this because it sort of anode cathode separator electrolyte can at the precursor level you've got sort of raw materials coming in from the mines that that sort of beat into a variety of other companies like Sumer top of each other metals and mining and itachi and others and that they do the precursor processing and then how that Panasonic takes the anode and cathode material separate or not does create puts out into a cell then it goes into a tesla section which creates the module which is all the electronics and the packaging and the conductors the safety mechanisms and the cooling loops then the modules go into the pack which then

you know create has a lot of crash structure associated with it the Packers in the car and then and then obviously Tesla is kind of the the landlord of the whole thing as well anyway that's it short of doing that there was no no way to scale so that's why we did it there is no why I brought that app is because as much as we love Tesla's we are in aerospace department where we are really interested in the potential for electric aircraft sure i love i love daily electrical practice everything will go electric pull everything will be really electric except for rockets if we ironic we think that in terms of energy density to make transport aircraft feasible you wouldn't need improvements in of the order of 10 to 100 Wow no that's okay wait when you say 10

to 100 or fourth base line what would even cotton I only film oh no no definitely not vote I so to my opinion please but you are right now is at roughly for a SL that doesn't have like lots of other drawbacks which people always forget to mention when they talk about battery breakthroughs if there's many parameters that are important for a battery and they'll you know hardly a week goes by with us are some huge breakthrough allegedly in batteries but like the factor is outrageous so but for real cells that actually work and don't have like some huge drawback that you except they're currently at about 300 watt hours per kilogram and if you your to have a compelling aircraft you only really need about 400 watt hours per kilogram provided your the percentage

of cell on the craft on the aircraft is high you just need to be anywhere near as high as it is on a rocket but if it's sort of at the seventy percent level at 400 watts per kilogram you can do very decent range and if you sort of move it up to the sort of mid mid to high 70s you can go transcontinental but with you know intercontinental but some sort of west coast to east coast so you need an efficient aircraft but but that's that's approximately by my calculations that the gnomish need 400 watts per kilogram mid to high 70s cell mass fraction which i think is achievable number because I aircraft have all these like unnecessary things like tails and like rudders and elevators like it's not needed okay okay that just just that just gimbal you know its

air using gimbal gimbal the electric fan like some weird reason like gambling murders is normal in rockets and not in aircraft why not okay well it definite plans to get into this business because we love to to see the calcium's develop in that particular area certainly very interesting domain do you have a specific plans I mean I've been toying with the design for an electric supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric aircraft for a while I'd love to do it but I think my mind would explode it's like brains worn out you know pretty saturated working on electric cars and and rockets so okay okay good tapas so let me the last question i will ask is about our students you hire dozens of MIT grad ins for your company's the first question is how are

they doing oh well let bella drink they're doing great so yeah I fact we want to hire a lot more people from MIT that's good news and I'm sure a lot of people in the audience yeah this definitely you know apply to SpaceX applied it to Tesla and like yell at me on twitter if there's something wrong with our admissions process or something it seems to be like I mean it's not the most efficient way to get get to that that is one way excited I don't know if like our you know recruiting and and frying I know processor firing people is is good or I think it's good but I'm not sure so but we want to hire lots of really smart engineers because that's that's how these problems get solved I read the quote which I hope it's true from you tell me that's not the case

that you say that the most common mistake hiring mistake was weighing too much on someone Stalin and not in someone's personality and I think it matters whether someone has a good heart it does yes absolutely so it that's that's generally where if I say words of the hiring mistakes that I've made in the past it's been it's been just as I said it's looking too much at their intellectual capability alone and not on how they affect those around them and it would really matters is before someone's contribution to a company is how they are as individual and how they affect others around them or you could say it's also analogous to a sports team you know if someone the best person on the team is not necessarily the one who scores the most goals it could be

the person who assists in the most goals and and if somebody is if there's one person a team who's just just wants the ball all the time it just wants to kick it at the goal that can actually be detrimental and so it's it is important to two-way personality and just you know they can be a good person and what you like working with them and I kind of think it's didn't just make a difference thank you I like to invite the audience to us some questions I'm particularly like students to ask questions but others are also invited and one thing I will ask is that we keep the questions short so we can't have a few of those okay come up I'm so chaplain what I'd like to ask you Ilan is it looks as if the next decade or two human space flight will be dominated by

you and Bob Bigelow another actually acts Oprah NORs the question is what do you think the proper role of NASA human spaceflight should be in that context other than just giving your contracts well mass has been really helpful to SpaceX you're not not just in terms of giving us contracts but also technically in a number of areas and and a lot of things that we've done its base X have been dependent on things that NASA's done in the past so you know I think we're certainly incredibly grateful for everything that's done in the past and and and for the ongoing support they received from NASA so I'm a huge fan of NASA and but and I think NASA is actually doing the right thing given all of the constraints that they have like if if you know within the context

of being with large government entity that's getting pushed in all sorts of different directions and and has a lot of limitations on what it can do I've been pretty impressed with what NASA has done given all of those constraints and yeah so I think it's you know if NASA continues it continues to sort of expand upon the support of competitive commercial space that's as probably what we'll have the most positive effect on the future of space development thank you so I'm Jordan and I didn't quick question about manufacturing so Obama has had a large question to really get high technology manufacturers in the United States and I think above everything SpaceX and Tesla or excellent examples of that I was wondering one you have a commitment going forward to

have all your manufacturing or majority of it done in the US and then how can other companies really learn from this experience at SpaceX has had and Tesla's has to really do your own manufacturing and house as much as possible sure well I should say that before SpaceX and Tesla our goal was not initially to do your huge amounts of internal manufacturing so we actually tried to do as little manufacturing as possible at first but we found that we had to insource more and more of a time and so I did it with the better start really not from the standpoint of like we really believe in enforcing or outsourcing is just given you know if there's a great supplier that then we would love to use a great supplier and if there's not then we need to you know do it

ourselves like we need to find a way or make away to a good solution and just over time we'd have to we have we've had to make a way more often than not and an open up for for rocketry there's also there are so I to our limitations which is that Rockets are considered advanced weapons technology so we can't just your outsource it to some other country and yeah so and but then I think you're for manufacturing I that very often people think of manufacturing as kind of just some roach process of making copies which it is which actually it isn't Manufacturing is building the machine that makes the machine and if you think the machine is important well folding the machine that makes the machine is also extremely important and more often than not and what I

found is the is the manufacturing is hotter than the original product like for example Tesla we can make like one of a car very easily but to make thousands of a car with high reliability and quality and where the cost is affordable is extremely hard i'd say maybe 10 times hotter than designing than just making one prototype but maybe more and then at SpaceX also there may be approaching an order of magnitude hotter too many packs or rockets and launch that launched a lot of them thing to design one in the first place so I really think a lot more smart people should be getting into me back shirring and it's kind of fun so it's like I don't know how to sort of got a bad name for a while but it's really interesting yeah thank you I've got a question about

the Tesla automobile I understand the drive motor is on the order of 250 horsepower and only weighs 70 pounds which is multiple horsepower per pound I've never seen I've worked in the transit industry never seen and looked in other sources never seen a motor other than one that weighs multiple pounds per horsepower the opposite way so you have an advantage of like an order of magnitude some of it can be explained by high-speed can you explain how you achieve that actually if power-to-weight ratio is of interest to you rocket turbo pumps really take the cake you know that the to a pump on the merlin engine generates 10,000 horsepower and weighs 150 pounds now yeah fuel efficiencies sort of separate question I'm pet power-to-weight is I mean it's at the

ragged edge of like pulling those molecules apart you know it's kind of amazing that I need like you can get 10,000 horsepower in this thing you can basically pick up but for electric motors you know if you have a properly designed you know electric motor AC induction motor getting a high-powered weight ratio and like you know a really great response rate like a low latency and all that extremely low ripple current and we're not in it it's just it just kind of comes naturally to an AC induction motor that the bigger challenge is actually cooling it effectively and then particularly cooling the the rotor because you've got a throat or going it like 18 thousand rpm so the model s we Rico actually cool the rotor in order to have high steady state so also

for electric motor you can have it's easy to get a peak power for a short period of time it's hard to have sustained p power and because you overheat and then it's hard to get high efficiency over a complicated drive cycle but those tend to be the the problem to wrestle with more than say the the peak power like we can get people are pretty easily but sustained power and efficiency of the drive cycle are hard thank you I named sherry I'm a PhD student in course 16 and when you hear about the founding of SpaceX a popular story is that you started it partly because you yourself want to go to space this is true in what sort of timeframe with the current program do you see for you yourself being able to have that opportunity actually that bad that's not that's

not why I sought his face x but and the I mean the easiest thing for me to do would have been to buy a ride on the Soyuz and you know that I would have been able to go to the space station as a number of other people have done but the the thing that I was trying to figure out was how to get us back on on the track of extending life beyond Earth that that's what the that's the reason for starting SpaceX and and I expected it to fail and people sometimes think like well why would you even start that in the first place but the reason with your back before i started SpaceX I expected to I want to do this philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse the surface of Mars and try get the public excited about sending life to Mars because people respond to

questions as positives let's read the first life on another planet the furthest the life that have traveled and I thought well that would get people excited and that would result in NASA's budget getting increased and then we could resume the dream of Apollo so you know that was my initial goal was just to figure out how to get NASA's budget higher the butt but then I came to conclusion that if we don't make if we don't make rockets way better then it won't matter like we can get a budget increase but then we just send one mission to Mars and and then maybe never go there again so so that the Gulf basics really was to make as much progress as possible to advanced rocket technology to the point where hopefully we can establish a colony on Mars or and get

us all these get as far along that way as we can't we'll just try to go as far as we can hi I'm Justin I'm a freshman now that SpaceX has unveiled the dragon v2 which is a man rated capsule I was wondering if you were planning on forming in your own astronaut corps or you're relying on NASA astronauts from here oh well yeah I you know I mean we're probably it's we're building a ship that that NASA is going to use and that other people will use it tows a national corps i mean i kind of think like like this really look what we should be transporting our scientists and engineers you know not it's not in our pilots really you know it's like dragon doesn't need pilots like it you know obviously goes there with just cargo you know we just send up 40 mice they

were not piloting that the crap so it's so it's really it's a means of transporting people to like the sort of earth moon orbit region in order to you know do science basically have been a potentially to the moon to do some exploration there but but but it I kind of think it should be easy to go on a spacecraft you like like you just just be able to get on with no training and go Justin beep you can be hard hi I'm Scarlett I'm a junior in aerospace at MIT as you can tell and I was just wondering now SpaceX and Boeing have both been awarded contracts to build a space taxi and how do you think SpaceX's approach will differ from Boeing's and which one do you think is likely to be most successful Oh Boeing is a fine company of course so yeah I mean what we're

trying to do with dragon dragon 2 is both in your crude crude dragon design is be able to land propulsive ly with precision which i think is kind of the next generation like you consider the first generation always parachutes to a water landing then you know arguably sort of wings and gear landing legs over landing gear then like the sort of third generation is propulsive landing with precision I mean if if you saw a movie about the future with aliens landing how do they land like that okay obviously like I'm gonna be kind of weird if the aliens landed in the ocean with parachutes and like nothing to fear and I like Boeing stick trying to like slightly improve because it's got airbags but it's still an empress ice landing you know it's somewhere in a

huge expansive desert and it's basically landing on air bags and kind of crashing in the desert you know like okay let's so guess one way to land but i but i think the future has to be precise propulsive landing because that's what you need to go to the moon or tomorrow's or anywhere else in the solar system and that's the thing we should be focusing on and yeah we're already going to the space station back by the way like Boeing isn't doing man sorry so comic books are the future well I think a lot of things that are envisioned in sci-fi books returns attached to the wide range of course yeah but a lot of things that are envisioned to do do make sense and yeah I mean it's like okay and like sit so good there isn't some other way to land on the moon you

can't fly clown the moon with parachutes and our bags let's do the lack of atmosphere over there yeah thank you hello there my name is Johannes I'm a junior in core 16 and I'm also international and i was wondering from international perspective how's this trip to Mars going to look like is it going to be an American colony on Mars and that's it or is because of course basic is mainly based here in the US or is it just like everybody join in please well I mean I I don't think it's I mean I'm hopeful there will be multiple colonies on Mars it's this certainly probably spacek standpoint there's nothing you know we don't aim to do anything sort of on an exclusionary basis we're just trying to get there and and then I think then you know we'd love to have

that debate you'll be like oh there's a two American you know like okay baby okay but we've got the source of base on Mars who cares and and I think if there was you know American basin was it would certainly prompt other countries to want to establish their you know based on Mars too but I do think we better to have competition than the cooperation it's not like you encourage companies each in other countries to start their own and Daver to go to Mars as well yes I think I think we're very would be better off with competition route rather than insisting like I'd like in the space station you've got the International Space Station but would we like when when governments all sort of forced to go in lockstep it tends to not make things go faster and yeah

we want some sort of positive competitive element I think so we don't like people going to war or anything but just like some positive competitive element like the Olympics you know something if people compete hard and it's sort of good sportsmanship and everything and the net result is better than if like there was no competition like Olympics with no competition would make any sense and yeah so I think some positive competitive thing would be would be better and we should definitely not insist that everyone all countries go at the same pace or some collection of countries that's a pace that would slow things down dramatically and maybe not even happen just encourage iza to invest in Mars yeah absolutely ISA yeah Chinese Chris I can see over here thank

you all right hi my name is Vasant and my question is are there any natural resources on Mars right now that a colony would be able to use and if so how would SpaceX go about extracting those natural resources when the time comes wedding any natural resource extraction laws would be the output would be for Mars definitely wouldn't make sense to transport more as several 200 million miles back to earth you know honestly like if you had like crack cocaine on Mars like in prepackaged you know pallets it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here very good times for the Martians but not back here these would be the colony to use yeah for the colony to use exactly hello my name is Alexander Brooke you Larry I'm a recent PhD in course 16 and I recently

started up aerospace research and development company and one thing that I'm working on is something called themed energy propulsion where we use external energy to power rockets microwaves or lasers the idea being that you can get very high specific impulse is with very high power I'm curious where space X stands on this kind of technology which are thoughts or if you could comment a little bit yeah the beamed energy thing is interesting I mean I I think it I think it is a worthy area of research so I think its wits with trying to make I'm trying to make something work try to get something to two or 'but or really high delta velocity with with being banerjee and see how how well does it work in practice but I mean I do think there's yeah I'll state some

concerns but these concerns are not meant to say that we shouldn't work in the mic preface it by saying we should work on it the i think that there's there are some scaling challenges with beamed energy if to say what's the actual power output you need to send say a falcon 9 class vehicle to orbit and it's a very very big number like you start meeting like whoa we need like the power of like the eastern seaboard you know to sort of send something falcon the cold falcon heavy class you know what do you need to send something like that or is really a huge amount of energy or a huge amount of power to be precise like actually the power level you need is noisier need you like argument that much on an energy basis but you can't like tell everyone to turn the

lights off in florida so then you need like a huge power plant or a huge capacitor bank or a huge high power density battery array so I'd like to see how this at you know how well does it scale and then and then you say what will help what's the cost of that the huge power power plant and the huge laser array and that kind of thing and how does that compare to the cost per unit mass if you just carry your own oxygen with you and have a lower ISP and don't do any of those things hello my name is Elliot Owen I'm a freshman here I'm very interested in the Hyperloop I made a small working model from my senior project law school and one of the major problems I ran into was tube tolerances so I'm wondering if you can comment on you no problems with tube colleges

and thermal expansion if you're building a 350 mile long steel tube what was the ratio of the pod to tube diameter here two and a half inch internal diameter and about 20 feet long right but have the pod pod diameter to tube ammeter the pod was only a few hundred seven inch smaller than the inside that's the problem so you actually want the pod to you want to sort of a a ratio of the code pod area to you know to vinton tube tube cross-section to pod cross-section of about two you know so so the pot only is like half the cross-sectional area of the tube and because you're still going to want to have some some flow of air over the the pot did you have the cancerous limit yeah well yeah you probably deal with the counter words limit by having a compressor

on the nose but it only partly addresses it and then the rest is airflow around the pod but you definitely you definitely want to have something that's that's really a tight fit and and it cause it also gives start hitting tolerance limitations like that the yeah you and just you just need you need some some play and that's in that system like a tricky thing also for what if you really fast it's just even small imperfections in the surface of the tube which I think I think can be dealt with by essentially having it once the tubes done you did actually need to run something that's going to smooth it out like if you basically need to run a grinder through the through the tube that's going to polish the surface and make sure that there aren't undulations

but in the proposal and I believe like we had the air skis were sprung so that yeah but that's also important okay add thermal expansion if you heat it up 20 degrees this 300c mile long pipe will get 450 feet longer how do you maintain a vacuum seal with expansion joints so you actually have you have to allow expansion at the terminals so it's wherever the terminals are you but you've got to have that that length of expansion and then in the on in the pylons that are supporting it you actually need to allow the each pile on to stretch in X so it's you can't you can't hard constrain it at the pylons we've gotten past the hour now would you be able to take a couple more questions yeah good person like 10 or 15 more minutes perfect alright my name is John

and I was wondering since there's always a growing need for more resources here on earth if like say sometime in the future SpaceX would look more towards obtaining resources from the Moon or Mars or even out farther on asteroids is that like in a plan for SpaceX well we're not really going to try to get resources on the moon because that's you know that would be useful if you're on the moon but not for bring it back to earth so if there's a moon base I suspect that they would extract resources yeah but for themselves I'll try to get through a bunch of question someone answered make make my wife answer a short hi my name is Bob in view of its potential to be possibly the biggest game change or ever do you have any plans to enter the field of artificial

intelligence and in general what are your thoughts on it do you think it's even close to being ready for prime time I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence if I were guess at what our biggest existential threat is it's probably that so we need to be very careful with the artificial hudgens increasing client to think that there should be some regulatory oversight at the internet bigger the national and international level just make sure that we don't do something very foolish I mean with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon you know you know all those stories where is the guy with the pentagram and holy water and he's like yeah sure you can control the demon then work out I think that there will be no Hal 9000 going

up to Mars Hal 9000 would be easy it's way more complex and I mean put howl 9000 a shame yeah I was like puppy dog thank you all right hi my name is Rochelle aniceto and I'm a junior in the arrow Astra Department my question aligns with how a lot of the work toward the mission to Mars is focused on rockets with SpaceX obviously but where do you see the role of telecommunications and communication satellites since there's a lot of traction in this field and this will be very crucial to I guess the overall mission to colonizing Mars so I can repeat the question I just sort of give up the AI thing for seconds absolutely so a lot of the focus with the mission to Mars aligns with rocket SpaceX but a key aspect to eventually colonizing Mars allies with telecommunications

and communication satellites so where do you see this as a viable aspect along with your goals your communications are certainly very important we're going to need turbit level communication between Earth and Mars which necessarily means that you want to have a type being like a laser communication system something like that and and relays you know sort of satellites that relate because sometimes Maz is on the other side of the Sun so you go to bounce the photons around the Sun not through and you know so I think communications get definitely to be important also see I think that on earth is there's a lot of potential for space-based communications like that there's a huge amount of room to grow for having satellite communication systems that provide

high bandwidth global coverage and we'll need the same famas hi I'm Eric Ward I'm a graduate student in the system design and management program and I was reading recently a Japanese construction company i think it's obayashi just announced plans to make a space a space elevator by think 2050 haha and i'm wondering i'm wondering if its base response a Bravo might affect your vision and goals as well I mean I think every awesome if there was a space elevator I wouldn't hold my breath I don't think it's realistic but you know luxury proven wrong so I always think of like charlie and the chocolate factory when I have a space elevator you know but because people sort of manners like an elevator you press up and you just like not yours base this is like a

real is extremely complicated yeah I'm not I don't think it's really realistic to have a space elevator you know and I mean let me this way like at the point of which we have like a bridge from LA to Tokyo yeah which i think is much easier problem then then we or you know about across the Atlantic you know like it some sort of 2,000 mile long bridge to 3011 bridge you know something like that would be you know made of like carbon nanotubes like we I don't think we've got a carbon nanotube footbridge so far let alone some enormous 60,000 mile long space elevator anyway so i think i think we're it's it's it wouldn't be it's not the thing that i think makes sense right now but if so we can prove me wrong and they'll be great thank you all right hi my name

is coach hijo I'm a PhD student here I wonder how you think about Mars one project which try to send crew to Mars one way every two years for reality TV show I think they claim they want to use the modified Dragon capsule for landing and I wonder how you think about their philosophy and that they are technical feasibility thank you well I think there could i mean the illustrations that I've seen basically has them using a bunch of SpaceX rockets and Dragon spacecraft I'm like okay I mean if they want to buy a bunch of dragons and Falcon 9 rocket that's cool we'll set we're senior will certainly sell them Fitz I mean I don't think they've got you know anywhere near the funding to buy even one so I think their ports unrealistic and I think trying to go

to Mars in Dragon is less than ideal here because it's at least as it wants to put it if you go real fast it's maybe a three-month journey and normally everyone like a six to eight months journey that's a long time to spend in something with the interior volume of an SUV so I'd recommend waiting for the next generation technology hi my name is Benson I'm a recent graduate I had another space elevator question actually what do you think would be the difference in public perception if instead of building rockets you were building space elevators how the promo video have changed well I you know I think it would not work it would just be an illustration on a page that doesn't actually have real hardware that would be the difference yeah that mean I just don't

I don't think space elevator is like a very sensible thing hi I'm Evan I'm a sophomore I just a question about the future the supercharger network will renewable energy sources play a big role in the source for that for the network yeah absolutely order plans to overtime is go to a hundred percent renewable power generation for our solar truck supercharged stations we've sort of temporarily going to not not added solar power because in the interest of just having national and international coverage that you can drive anywhere in the US Europe or Asia using supercharges we haven't we haven't constrained that so that every supercharger has to have solar panels there are a few that have solar panels most don't but in a long time all of them will either have

solar panels or otherwise get their power from renewable sources and in long term expected to be solar panels to a stationary battery pack so that the solar panels can sort of charge the stationary battery pack of the course of the week and then the pet that socially record back in the buff of the buff of the energy and release it during peak times because what we see with soup charges is huge differences in usage and you can imagine like you when people go away for the weekend like friday nights and Saturday night as a Friday and Sunday Friday nights and sunday nights huge peak usage people are going somewhere like on a family trip for the weekend but say you know wednesday at 11am low usage so you want to have about gestation about your pack solar panels

and then and there could work even if the power grid goes down you know so that's like I think like that would be cool to have something like even post apocalypse you know you can still drive around okay but how do I can take a couple more if they are quick hello my name is Rita I'm a sophomore in course to some mechanical engineering I'm so I'm more of a car buff myself so concerning Tesla what is your approach to dealing with new companies trying to make it in the EV world like ativa and others is it more of a collaborative approach in terms of sharing technology so we can see more electric vehicles on the roads in the near future or maintaining a competitive edge well I think they're given that we opens post our patents earlier this year I think yeah

i think that suggests that we're trying to be helpful so it certainly you know if there's anything that Tesla can do that's helpful and doesn't distract us from making cars then we're happy to do that and you've also done battery packs and powertrains for mercedes and for toyota we're right right now the fundamental constraint is on battery production so we have to solve that constraint in order for there to be any scaling up of electric cars and that's why we've got the gigafactory and you know and things have to be affordable basically people need a compelling and affordable electric vehicle that is the Holy Grail so that's really what we're trying to get there as fast as we can thank you hi so um I'm Daniel and I'm a junior at MIT and so here's a decidedly

non technical question so I understand that you have consumed lots of science fiction literature films etc yeah that's what you're doing yeah so I was just wondering what kind of works of art that you've that you think have contributed to your zeal for a good future for Humanity whether by kind of influencing your fear like cyberpunk stuff or like making you see something that's awesome like Star Trek or yeah I'm sure well I mean I mean I love technology and so I yeah I mean particularly when I was a kid I just consumed like all science fiction and fantasy you know movies books anything at all even if it's like really schlocky so everybody end in terms of sort of key influences I mean I certainly like Star Trek because that actually shows like more of

a utopian future like it's not like things like on horrible in the future like so many bloody post-apocalyptic future is like okay can we have one that's nice just just a few it's like so I think like that about Star Trek and you're in terms of some sort of key key books and movies I mean obviously Star Wars likes always was the first movie I ever saw so that's going to be fairly influential like I never seen a movie in a theater before it was sort of like just so it was like super oh great and yeah and then tick in terms of books we lower the Rings pulling my favorite book there's already excited by like like are they enough like Jo telcos kind of anti-technology by fantasy are lost in like that so myself yeah yeah it is but it like it's funny at Lauren's

wheeler rings it's awesome book but it's kind of anti-technology so great and I think like the foundation series from Asimov is I could really like one of the best ever and yeah the books you know odyssey clock and hyndland and others like sort of the 2003 best sci-fi with those and recently somebody is recommending to be that you and banks novels as being picked you know fairly good yeah what what do you think is good one of my favorite books is let's see the moon is a harsh mistress it's funny you mention that yeah exact thats highlands best book honestly it's really fun yeah right so thank you thank you the last question all of us busted hi um my name is Ellie Simonson I'm a sophomore here in core 16 um I was just wondering so I know that NASA is working

on the SLS um which I believe after a couple iterations are several iterations they're hoping we'll be able to land on Mars and so I'm wondering if that happens before um you guys develop a rocket that can do that how will that change your focus at SpaceX haha well I I I mean I don't think that you I mean our behavior is gonna we're just going to keep trying to make rocket technology better and better and I mean I think the time frame forward the SLS they are sending people to Mars is pretty pretty far out there so and if it does that's great but it's really it's we are what we need is a technology system that's capable of sending large numbers of people and cargo to Mars it's it's it's cool to send you know one mission sure but that's not the thing that

changes humanity's future the thing that really matters is being able to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars and and for that I don't I don't see anything being done except SpaceX honestly and and that's not to say SpaceX will be successful but I don't see anyone even trying so okay alone thank you very much thank you very much for sharing your time and salt with us we love to have you back anytime at MIT thank you thank you alright this one