SATELLITE 2020 Keynote

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intelligence begins at launch [Music] all right hi everybody welcome to satellite 2020 sorry we got off to a late start DC traffic is a killer but my name is Jeffrey ill I'm conference chair and I'm here with Elon Musk chief engineer and founder of SpaceX Elon thank you so much for being with us thanks thanks for thanks for having me I guess it was a 11 years ago that we met yeah and when we met 11 years ago we were talking about Falcon 1 Falcon 9 at the time and when I asked you what's what's the point of all this you said to send human beings back into space on a u.

s. built rocket from a u. s.

built facility so that we could permanently reset all other other planets and here we are we're right on the the brink here of sending humans back into space the the crew dragon is in Cape Canaveral how do you feel that you're on the doorstep here yeah it's great that we're about to launch people to orbit it's been a long time a long road 18 years yeah good kid giving kid giving college right now is it like sending your kid off to college well we haven't done it yet but it's a long time you're packing you're packing the bags you're ready to go can you talk about the talk about the the road from the space shuttle to the crew dragon I can talk about the the what are some of the challenges that you faced in creating a human rated space spacecraft for for

human spaceflight well where are some of the challenges that you encountered along the way well the thing that the thing that concerns me most right now is that unless we improve our rate of innovation dramatically then there is no chance of a base on the moon or a city on Mars no I'll be low yeah this is my biggest concern crew dragon was real we've already taken it to the space station are back your luck people aren't aware of that we just had like basically a dummy you know so and it's us what then we're done massive amount of testing you know pushing all the corner cases and just a truly ridiculous amount of testing it's like definitely had us off to the dragon engineers and supporting team at NASA for going through a truly staggering number of tests

now that now that that said dragon really is just a low Earth orbit transport vehicle it's it's really just it's capable of taking a few people at what is still a very high cost to Earth orbit I technically we could send people around the moon on Dragon but I'm not sure we'd want to it's due to small so it it's good good to get this done but it's I think we need to be very careful of getting stuck in a local maximum and you know the the Space Shuttle was something that was really stuck in a local maximum for a long time and yeah we don't want to be that situation I mean frankly what Y is why does so you still fly I'm a car live is probably turning in his grave right now interesting it's this dream quite it was designed in the 50s yeah right right if you

told I'm gonna just old car live on the other guys that that still reversibly flank Sawyer's in 2020 they'd be like that's crazy yeah we are so we don't want to be that situation you know just solid vehicle it's just like it's time to move on right right and so we you know I know we started late I sourced a lot of these questions from that from the public in the audience we're also going to do a Q&A here so I'm just gonna jump right into the questions that we received so I mean the most popular question we got was like what are the greatest challenges are the biggest challenges we face expanding our presence in space and exploring and eventually resettling new worlds there's really just one thing that matters that is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket

that that's the one thing that matters and it needs to be reasonably big or your payload to non payload ratio will be kind of whacked you know what would be good so just like you wouldn't want a super tanker growing it like you know container ships you have a container ship with thousands of containers you don't you know have like a bunch of tiny ships with little out ports on them cruising across the Pacific that would be silly so you have big ships when you want to go long distances with the Cirrus cargo so we need a fairly big but definitely rapidly and completely reusable rocket this is the fundamental thing without that we're nowhere and what level of reusability is SpaceX actively pursuing for for Falcon 9 for Dragon for starship I think Falcon

diner dragon have the there are asymptoting that their their tech their technology architectures asymptoting meaning like it it really would not make sense to have a block six Falcon nine you know from where we are right now it just doesn't make sense that's why we have a big focus in terms of new technology development on starship for Falcon and Falcon and Dragon are kind of like operational vehicles at this point so they're that they're good products they're operational but but there's not really we need to hold in your architecture and that's what starship is about and social needs to be fully and completely reusable and rapidly so I mean it's it's being designed for about you know TV really want relaunched an hour after landing with with zero nominal

work like it is you could have scheduled maintenance you or you could have like something like a spork issue just like commercial aircraft but you're expected the only thing you expect to change on a regular basis is propellant and it's got to be fast so yeah now that for the ship you gonna wait unless you're launching due east from the equator you better have figure out some way to get get those the ship overall ground track to pass over the landing site otherwise you're too far away so the ship maybe it might take you know three orbit four orbits maybe to get back over the the launch site but it but I think we want to aim for a capability of three flights a day for the show most of which is taken up with getting the orbital you know a ground track to

come over the launch site and then an hour for everything else and you know everybody's interested in in the the mission to Mars planetary resettlement I'm talking about reusability for the launch vehicle what are your thoughts on in space resource utilization for example water oxygen soil from the moon perhaps may be the go to Mars do you have any plans to utilize resources in space for the mission to Mars nope I mean apart from orbital refilling I think that's very important so you better so there's one exit besides it fully in review fully under Africa rapidly reusable rocket you need to also have orbital refilling or retaking that's got to be that's fundamental because then you can essentially recoup all of your mass fraction Delta be in Earth orbit

you can leave with full tanks and it could be from immediate low Earth orbit or you know something that's maybe elliptical or something like that if you want to go higher energy but that's that's crucial for getting to to Mars the moon is neither here nor there I mean the using the moon would be like okay if you want to cross the Atlantic maybe you want to go to Iceland probably know that you know but you know to visit sure but you know it's not like a mandatory Saab so and also for the mission to Mars what advancements we talk a lot about hardware and physics problems and then what about advancements in software you know reason I bring this up and recently are you familiar with the game designer Jonathan Blow he referenced you in a keynote he was given

and he said that you you had talked about technology naturally because skills naturally fade and one of the things he identified was a decay in software degredation in software is this something we have to address in doing something like going to Mars and since all of the stuff runs on software well software is an increasing part of any piece of technology I mean Tesla the car is extremely configurable it's basically like a laptop on wheels so software matters enormously there and really for example for full autonomy the only gating factor is software the hardware is all there that's required it has been for last couple years what well the final piece of hardware was upgrading the computer it's have more compute power so software is extremely important

the point you're relating to which is that you know I was referring to is technology does not automatically improve right people are used to the phone being better every year oh and I mean an iPhone user but I think like some of the recent software updates have been like not great certainly feeding into that point like broke my email system we put the like quite fundamental so yeah there sure is a lot of software out there and some of its like the people that wrote it are retired or maybe dad you know so like now how do you fix it it's gonna be an issue and we're definitely a lot more smart people work in software and not just troubleshooting old problems no just troubleshooting old problems it's actually very important to retire old code bases and and

not just maintain them forever because the the difficulty of maintaining them becomes extremely high and it's one point you just got to redo the code base so we'll come back to the Mars mission because I know we've got some audience questions on that we're at a satellite conference so I'm gonna ask you some questions about satellites StarLink what's the long-term vision for StarLink how do you see the role of star link as it relates to mobile broadband and 5g sure so I mean the whole purpose of SpaceX is really to help make life multiplanetary and then but the revenue potential of launching rocket launching satellites serves in Space Station why not that's you know type taps out around three billion dollars a year but I think providing broadband is is

more like an order of magnitude more than that probably thirty billion a year as a rough approximation and we're still like probably below 5% at that point so it's not like I want to be clear like so I'm like stalling I guess I'm a huge threat to telcos I want to be super clear it is not in fact it will be helpful to telcos because start like what will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with with landlines or even with with cell radio stations with itself cell towers 5g is is great for high-density situations like being here in DC or you know New York temperatures call that kind of thing 5g is great for high-density situations but it's actually not great for the the countryside you know for rural areas it's it's

not it's not great you need you need range and so in any any kind of sparse environment 5 G's is really not not well-suited but it's great great for in it for for City Denton City situations so StarLink will effectively serve the I don't know three or four percent hardest to reach customers for telcos or people who simply have no connectivity right now or the connectivity is really bad so I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos and I was I was gonna ask you what customers you know were ideally suited for StarLink but I guess since you mentioned that it would be it would be these three to four percent at the very like that at the very edge what is the customer experience like then for those people and

what's the cost of acquiring the services well it will be attributed good experience because it'll be very low latency and we're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds so somebody could could play a fast response video game at a competitive level like that's the threshold for the latency so then and bam bandwidth the bandwidth is a very complex question but let's just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies play it play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed right and then the challenge for anything that is space based is that the the size of the cell is gigantic so it's like said it's great for for very low - maybe maybe mediums sort of sparsity situations but it's not it's not good for high density situations

they will have some small number of customers in LA but we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough what is what is the equipment on the ground look like for this what the ground equipment just looks like well I think it's like sizing it looks like a little you it looks like a UFO on a stake so the at least the version one of the uses terminal will actually have actuators on it so then it can it can improve the pointing accuracy so you don't have to it's very important that you don't need a specialist ourself to install the goal is that this the instructions in the box will there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order a point at sky plug in you do it either order see you it doesn't

matter and it will work plug and play literally but also point of sky was I can't see the satellites you can't see the satellites you can't see you just wanted to talk about just some of the design concerns that were raised by astronomers you can talk about a little bit about how you working maybe working with astronomers to alleviate these concerns or are you working on the designer altering it or are the concerns overblown I mean how do you feel about what has been raised I I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries zero that's my prediction we'll take corrective action if it's above zero so you're not giving like Orion a hat or anything like things no I mean this there's a so much people get a little excited

because when when the satellites are first launched that they're they're tumbling a little bit so they're like they're kind of like they're gonna blink and because they haven't stabilized and then and they're they're raising their orbit so they're they're lower than you'd expect and they're kind of necessarily gonna reflect in ways that it's not the case when they're on orbit but now the other the satellites are on orbit I'll be impressed if if somebody can actually tell me where where all of them are I've not met someone who can tell me where all of them are not even one person yes thing so that I mean it can't be that big of a deal but we are taped there we are actually working with here members of the the the science community and antenor astronomers

to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites so you know we're and we're running a bunch of experiments too for example just have a paint the phase array antenna black instead of white and we're working on a a sunshade because that there there was like certain angles where if a Sun gets you know just sort of just right and there's not like a little sunshade we're not talking about a lot here then you can get a reflection and so we were launching sunshade changing the color of the satellites and otherwise minimizing the the potential for any impact even like a at least aesthetically this issue should not be an impact I think recently when Shotwell and Bloomberg was quoted as saying that you know you were exploring splitting StarLink from

SpaceX could you talk a little bit about that why that would happen and how you see both of these independent companies functioning and just talk a little bit about that you were thinking about that zero was that we're thinking about that what zero zero zero not thinking about it at all we need to make the thing work it's it's far from obvious that I mean it's real important to just set the stage here for leoch communications constellations guess how many Leo constellations didn't go bankrupt zero alright zero it iridium is doing okay now but the iridium one went bankrupt Volcom went bankrupt Globalstar bankrupt Teledesic bankrupt I'm believing it without this bunch of others that didn't get very far they also went bankrupt anyway the word bankrupt so

you're focusing on making it work first not bankrupt right I'm not gonna there's a big that'd be a big staff have like more than zero and then not bankrupt category how would you I mean with how does it work then with the the business of SpaceX since you're like I mean you are launching other constellations is that is that a an issue does that cause like a conflict or we're launching out the constellations oh you're launching other satellites that's right oh yeah sure whatever yet no problem of course so there's no like you know even if I can have a good deal of it like no problem you know I won't just constellation on SpaceX sound good to me so I mean I think that you know I think there's there's the world seems to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth

so we're certainly happy just launched other satellites and you know we don't think star link is gonna destroy all other satellites or something like that or definitely not all right yeah we were just wanting to be in the not bankrupt category that's a goal since you're since you're now the company of SpaceX now you know you're you're building you're launching satellites are you are you looking at expanding the business of SpaceX into other areas of commercial satellite connectivity maybe like we talked a little bit about the you know you're already building like technology on the ground are there other areas that you're looking to get into in terms of commercial space connectivity or satellite services no we really there's just this two major new technology

programs at SpaceX that's StarLink and starship well like it's kinda has star in the name of a team we were just cool like Lincoln ship if you divide the one by the other it stars net outs and then was just making sure that's it cause I know anyway it would be some secret project that's so secret I even I don't know about it you don't have a business under the chairs I don't think there's anything major so I want to I want to give time for the people in the audience to ask some questions but you know we talked about starship so development at Boca Chica is moving on pretty quickly and yeah actually that was a real reason as ladies because I was at Boca Chica my apologies I was just working on starship with the team there so it's pretty cool out there

actually I like you tell us a little bit about the work that's underway what we can expect in the future for for starship well we're building a production line for production line is the hard part you're making one of something it is well at this point you know like frankly designing rockets is not that hard especially if it's an expandable rocket just not really a hard problem you could literally read books they'll tell you exactly how to do it the hard part is now actually building that thing even once is hard I mean building a production line is a thousand percent harder like at least a thousand percent harder yeah maybe more so just in general production and manufacturing is underappreciated I think especially in the u.

s.

frankly so we should really pay a lot more attention and care a lot more about manufacturing losses yeah this is an honest day's work let me tell you so what inspired some of the design aesthetics of the space craft and stainless steel it's a it's a striking design first first base graphic what would inspire your vision for the way it looks wave functions like Y stainless steel why well we were going to make it out of advanced composites and the advanced composites that cost like $60 a pound over 60 dollars a kilogram like a little more than that maybe 130 dollars a pound and there was 60 to 120 plies before the the tank it was taking forever you weren't making good progress cost crazy money and I was like okay switching to aluminum lithium is also a

pain in the neck we do that that's what we used for the Falcon 9 tanks because it's hard to world because of the reactivity of the lithium so you know what's easy to weld steel Steel's really easy to world and stainless steel doesn't even require paint that sounds great because the paint shops are paying the neck and you want to try painting something that's got a go to drop to cryogenic temperatures and then band a lot it's like forget it I mean that paint wants to come off like there's no tomorrow it does not like to stake so then you could use special paint and then the special paint also can't you get like when you're going vertically at like supersonic you get the basically static electricity build-up quote Triborough electrification although it

reminds me the trouble of troubles but you can basically zap yourself if you have paint that the wrong paint yeah so it was no paint is great yeah because we need a big friggin big-ass paint shop for starship yeah well that's problems I think one less problem and then paint doesn't weigh zero you know they these to paint the the shuttle external tank white didn't like like well we're adding a lot of weight to this thing and it's big pain in the neck so we'll leave just have it stay orange so just not painting it's great so then you know and we're not the first to use steel like they used 301 in the early atlas program Charlie Bossert I think it was you know think was his idea obviously other people involved but Charlie busted by the way that guy's underappreciated

he kicks ass it's really great to read about his stuff he's awesome so he's 301 so obviously it's not a new alloy I think we're gonna start switching to a different alloy pretty soon and then just treat the alloy constituents because we should be able to better in 2020 then they were they didn't like the 50s you know so I mean come on so I think we'll probably start switching away from 301 maybe the next month or two now the funny thing is that like I actually knew that steel especially 301 full hard steel couldn't be that heavy because the original Atlas had a very good mass fraction right so it can't be that wrong with that and if you look at the normal normal sort of standard material sheet for a 301 it will usually not tell you what that it work hardens

dramatically and improves the strength dramatically with work hardening and also at cryogenic temperatures it improves strength dramatically so then the if you combine the work hardening with the the cryo strength improvement you get an effective strength to weight that is about the same as advanced composite now if you will generally make a mistake with composites because they'll look at the material sheet and not realize that okay with composites you could have a big knockdown because you basically have composite saw string and glue and so you and and you can't just like have like let's say your problem cause for having for pliers of carbon you can't just have four players you need like five or six because in case you damaged one or something like that

and you say what's your worst case allowable for a D bond or something like that so the actual knockdown you end up taking pro composites is more than you would for a metal structure so people often so it's like a classic movie mistake is to overrate carbon fiber because you just you look at the material datasheet and it looks like an obvious move but it's not so area so at cryogenic temperatures the steel is has a de facto strength weight about the same as advanced composite but that doesn't not even counting the fact that you have to paint the composite don't paint this deal then there's a another factor which is if you want to have a reusable vehicle it's gonna get hot composites don't like getting hot so you're typically your your composite maybe

is comfortable up to around 150 200 Celsius something like that you know and things start getting pretty sketchy around 250 C but I mean like you start having to use advanced resins and all that kind of thing so whereas Steel's pretty happy at a thousand see you know no pain no problem with by 500 considered fibre at sea all day and brief periods of a thousand sino ROM so then for a reasonable vehicle you now need zero heat shielding on the leeward side normally you beat some heat shielding just Souter due to radiative heating on the back so you don't have a lot of convective heating at hypersonic we do have radiative heating and then you can thin out the windward side of the the heat shield because the thickness of the of the heat shield tile is driven

by the temperature on the backside of the tile where it mounts the primary structure so if your primary structure can take a high heat that means you can thin out the tile so think of it like these like like oven mitts or something you know if you have like how hot can your hand go and that assets how thick your oven mitt is right so then you can have like I said no no no he chilled on the leeward side on it and then heat shield on the windward side so now your actual total mass of a steel a reasonable Steel's a spacecraft is less than that of the most advanced carbon fiber vehicle you could possibly imagine yeah Wow but this is happen by accident by the way it may sound like some great insight but it actually happened because we're moving too slowly

on composite and I was like we cannot move this slowly or we'll go bankrupt so that's good do this for steel so yeah I mean the design has to be focused on problem solving otherwise you're going to spend too much time trying to figure it you don't start with it yeah yeah I'm like sort of taken to management management by rhyming if the schedule is scheduled as long your design is wrong right very true it's good good point yes with that I want to go to some audience questions we asked the audience through the the app to submit us question so I believe we have a few that we've pulled here so we've got some over here can we and can you come closer over here so we can we can see you let's say all right our first question hello I'm Jane zündel I'm a graduate

student at Stanford my question for you is as you look back on your career in the space industry what has been the most surprising or unexpected challenge that you faced and along those lines if you were to go back in time and talk to your 20 year old self would you do anything differently go back in time do your 20 year old self I mean I think if I get it I think it would make a far fewer mistakes I would see if I could guard like it here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do please do not hear them yeah I'd be a very long list and like here let me and you know write it down or something you know I mean it's behind size 2020 so it's hard to say I mean number of I've made so many foolish mistakes I have a lot count honestly I mean some of

these things I just wish I liked just like that's a simple sort of mantra management by rhyming I mean it worked for Homer okay the management of our rhyming is the thing I'm saying like if but if the schedule is long the design is wrong we've complicated the design many times and I think you should just gone with a simpler design with the acid test being how long will it take to for this to fly and if it's going to take a long time don't do it do something else if you look it's a falcon 9 eye it's got a aluminum lithium tank but then the unpressurized structures are carbon fiber composite and really one of the worst possible things you could do to a joint is takes me with a high coefficient of thermal expansion high CTE put it go take it from room temperature

to cryo and then connect it to something that has zero CTE you know basically zero or like a carbon fiber so now you've got a real pain in the ass joint basically so in order for that to work you've got at the tanks got a shrink radially and you've got these super expensive heavy bolts that are like a beam inventing across you know that I've been taking load into the interstage and they just really want to share off or snap off this is crazy you know really just have a continuous metal structure but that's obvious that should be done that'd be way better you know if things expand to full the available resources so then like sometimes you should say no to things that you that you don't you know like the original thought one team which the the fairing tanks

engines or everything pretty much was maybe a little over a hundred people now SpaceX is like six thousand people I think some like now so it's or it really just is it I simplify your product as much as possible you know and then like with the figure but I think of some of the ways which how does the SWAT engineer make down mistakes included is you know is optimize something that shouldn't exist don't optimize something that shouldn't exist if people are trained to do this in college you can't say no to the professor you know this is gonna give you the exam and you've got to answer all the questions over they will get angry so and give you a bad grade so then you you always optimize the yours answer the question all the times you should say this is the

wrong question all right in fact the question is definitely wrong to some degree just how wrong and I think just generally taking the approach that your design is some degree wrong probably a lot more than you think your goal is to make it less wrong over time we have that it's good right another question hi my name is Julie seven sage and mr.

monkey have said in the past that you think that college degrees shouldn't be that important and that I've been showed in job listings in places such as Tesla however in places like sis industry including even at SpaceX in the satellite development area many of the job listings say that you need at least a bachelor's degree and prefer at least a master's degree so my question to you is with more jobs asking for higher levels of degrees without scholarships are not changing amounts and that is getting harder and harder every year to pay tuition even with using scholarships how can colleges and industries make it easier to afford college but at the same time being able to pay grad students and employees well and also to make sure that there is a large-scale

access to good colleges especially to underprivileged communities so that everyone can be a part of the future rebuilding thank you well first of all you don't need college to learn and learn stuff okay everything is available basically for free you can learn anything you want for free it is not a question of learning there there is a value that colleges have which is like you know seeing whether somebody's it is can somebody work hard at something including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments and a car soldier through and get it done you know that's that's like the main value of college and then also you you know if you you if you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people you're on edge for

a while instead of going drag it right into the work force so I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning there it is I know we started late and I know wait we we don't have much time left but to build on Julie's question here how does somebody like you with a very long term mission of going to Mars how are you cultivating the next generation of leadership to take you there because I mean this is this is a long-term project you might we might not be around to see us finally resettle on Mars or maybe maybe no I mean I hope I'm not dead by the time I people go to Mars that would be a great great outcome I think I might be you know if we don't improve our pace of progress I'm definitely you know

gonna be dead before we go to Mars so I'm just like would like to not be dead when by the time we go to Mars that's my aspiration here so if it's taking us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people to orbit we better improve our rate of innovation or you know based on past trends I am definitely gonna be dead before Mars so we're going to improve our pace of innovation a lot so yeah it's a you I can tell you can see you how do you communicate that vision you have to that to the somebody who could maybe take over for what you're doing and to see things where you're seeing them in terms of the mission well we have a lot of good good people at SpaceX that a lot of really talented people in fact I wonder like sometimes how we can make use of their

talents in the best way because it you know I think we're often not using their talents in the best way yeah but you know to the point of the question I was just asked I'm gonna make sure Tesla recruiting does not have anything that says requires University because that's absurd but there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability like you just can't if you're trying to do something exceptional they must have evidence of exceptional ability I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability in fact ideally you dropped out and did something I mean obviously you know look at like you know Gates is a pretty smart guy who dropped out job is pretty smart he dropped out you know that re Allison smart guy he dropped out like obviously

not needed so did Shakespeare even go to college probably not well I'm thank you so much I wish we could take more audience questions I know we have it we have a hard stop but thank you you on for stopping by thank you let's give them a round of applause for stopping by and speaking less did you either message to your evening and thank you very much [Applause] [Music]