SATELLITE 2020 Keynote 9 mars 2020 Musk évoque Starlink, Starship, l'avenir des vols spatiaux habités et la réduction des coûts de lancement lors d'une discussion au coin du feu à la conférence SATELLITE 2020.
Musk évoque Starlink, Starship, l'avenir des vols spatiaux habités et la réduction des coûts de lancement lors d'une discussion au coin du feu à la conférence SATELLITE 2020.
Transcription Announcer
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our satellite 2020 opening day keynote sponsored by Maxar. Please take your seats. The program is about to begin.
Elon Musk
Ladies and gentlemen, a message from our session sponsor, maxar.
Announcer
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Elon Musk
Sa. Sam. All right.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Hi everybody. Welcome to Satellite 2020. Sorry, we got off to a late start. DC traffic is a killer. But my name is Jeffrey Hill, I'm the conference chair and I'm here with Elon Musk, chief engineer and founder of SpaceX. Elon, thank you so much for being with us.
Elon Musk
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I GUESS it was 11 years ago that we met.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
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 the point of all this? You said, to send human beings back into space on a US built rocket from a US built facility so that we could permanently resettle other planets. And here we are. We're right on the brink here of sending humans back into space. The crew Dragon is in Cape Canaveral. How do you feel that you're on the doorstep here?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's great that we're about to launch people to orbit. It's been a long time.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Long road.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Yeah.
Elon Musk
Kid could be in college by now.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Is it like sending your kid off to college?
Elon Musk
Well, we haven't done it yet, but it's a long time.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
You're packing. You're packing the bags you're ready to go. Can you talk about the, talk about the road from the space shuttle to the crew Dragon? Talk about the. What are some of the challenges that you faced in creating a human rated space spacecraft for human spaceflight? What were some of the challenges that you encountered along the way?
Elon Musk
Well, 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. Not I'll be. Yeah, this is my biggest concern. Crew Dragon was, we've already taken it to the space station and back. A lot of people aren't aware of that. We just had like a, basically a dummy, you know, so. And it's just what then We've done massive amount of testing, you know, pushing all the corner cases and just a truly ridiculous amount of testing. It's like definitely hat is off to the Dragon engineers and supporting team at NASA for going through a truly staggering number of tests. Now that said, Dragon really is just a low Earth orbit transport vehicle. It's really just, it's capable of taking a few people at what is still a very high cost to Earth orbit. Technically we could send people around the moon on Dragon, but I'm not sure we'd want to. It's due to too small. So it's 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 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, why is, why does Soyuz still fly? I mean Karlev is probably turning in his grave right now.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Right, interesting.
Elon Musk
It's an interesting question. It was designed in the 50s.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Yeah, right, right.
Elon Musk
If you told them, if you told Karlev and the other guys that they'd still be, we'd still be flying Soyuz in 2020, they'd be like, that's crazy. Yeah, we are. So we don't want to be that situation. You know, it's a solid vehicle. It's just like it's time to move on.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Right, right. And so we, you know, I know we started late. I sourced a lot of these questions from the public in the audience. We're also going to do a Q and A here. So I'm just going to jump right into the questions that we received. So I mean the most popular question we got was like, what are the greatest challenges or the biggest challenges we face expanding our presence in space? And exploring and eventually resettling new worlds.
Elon Musk
There's really just one thing that matters, that is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. 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, won't be good. So just like you wouldn't want a super tanker growing like you when you, 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 outboards on them cruising across the Pacific. That would be silly. So you have big ships when you want to go long distances with cirrus cargo. So we need a fairly big but definitely rapidly and completely reusable rocket. This is the fundamental thing. Without that we're going nowhere.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
And what level of reusability is SpaceX actively pursuing for Falcon 9, for Dragon, for Starship?
Elon Musk
I think Falcon 9 and Dragon have, they're asymptoting their technology architecture is asymptoting meaning like 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 good products, they're operational, but there's not really. We need a whole new architecture and that's what Starship is about. And Starship needs to be fully and completely reusable and rapidly. So I mean it's, it's being designed for about an hour to be relaunched an hour after landing with, with zero nominal work. Like you could have scheduled maintenance 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 now for the ship, you've got to wait unless you're launching duties from the equator. You've got to have figure out some way to get the ship orbital ground track to pass over the landing site, otherwise you're too far away. So the ship, maybe it might take, you know, three orbits, four orbits maybe to get back over the, the launch site. But I think we want to aim for a capability of three flights a day for the ship.
Elon Musk
Most of which is taken up with getting the orbital ground track to come over the launch site and then an hour for everything else.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
And you know, everybody's Interested in the mission to Mars. Planetary resettlement. When talking about reusability for the launch vehicle, what are your thoughts on in space resource utilization? Utilization, for example, water, oxygen, soil from the moon, perhaps, maybe to go to Mars. Do you have any plans to utilize resources in space for the mission to Mars?
Elon Musk
Nope. I mean, apart from orbital refilling, I think that's very important. So you've got to. So there's one example. Besides a fully and fully and rapidly reusable rocket, you need to also have orbital refilling or retanking. That's got to be. That's fundamental because then you can essentially recoup all of your mass fraction Delta V in Earth orbit. You can leave with full tanks and it could be. Could be from low Earth orbit or something that's maybe elliptical or something like that. If you want to go higher energy. But that's crucial for getting to Mars. The moon is neither here nor there. I mean, using the moon would be like, okay, if you want to cross the Atlantic, maybe you want to go to Iceland. Probably not, but to visit, sure. But it's not like an mandatory setup, you know.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
And also for the mission to Mars, what advancements. We talk a lot about hardware and physics problems. And what about advancements in software? You know, the reason I bring this up recently. Are you familiar with the game designer Jonathan Blow? He referenced you in a keynote he was given and he said that you had talked about technology naturally decays because skills naturally fade. And one of the things he identified was a decay in software. Degradation in software. Is this something we have to address in doing something like going to Mars, since all of this stuff runs on software?
Elon Musk
Well, software is an increasing part. 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 and has been for last couple years. Well, the final piece of hardware was upgrading the computer to have more compute power. So software is extremely important. The point you're alluding 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 and I'm an iPhone user. But I think like some of the recent software updates have been like, not great. Certainly feeding it to that point, it like broke my email system. Like, what the. This is like quite fundamental. So yeah, there sure is a lot of software out there. And some of it's like the people that wrote it or retired or maybe dead, you know. So like now how do you fix it? It's gonna be an issue. We definitely need a lot more smart people working software and not just troubleshooting old problems, not just troubleshoot shooting old problems. It's actually very important to retire old code bases and not just maintain them forever because the difficulty of maintaining them becomes extremely high at a certain point. You just gotta redo the code base.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
So we'll come back to the Mars mission because I know we've got some audience questions on that. You know, 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 Starlink as it relates to mobile broadband and 5G?
Elon Musk
Sure. So I mean the whole purpose of SpaceX is really to help make life multi planetary and then, but the revenue potential of launching, launching satellites, servicing the space station, whatnot, that's, you know, taps out around $3 billion a year. But I think providing broadband is more like an order of magnitude more than that. Probably 30 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 some, like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear. It is not, in fact it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with cell radio stations with cell towers. 5G is great for high density situations like being here in D.C. or New York, San Francisco, that kind of thing. 5G is great for high density situations, but it's actually not great for the countryside. You know, for rural areas. It's, it's not, it's not great. You need, you need range and so any, any kind of sparse environment, 5G is, is really not, not well suited, but it's great, great for, in it, for, for city density situations. So Starlink will effectively serve the, I don't know, 3 or 4% 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.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Okay. And I was, I was going to 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 at the very, at the very edge. What is the customer experience like then for those people and what's the cost of acquiring the services?
Elon Musk
Well, it will be truly a good experience because it'll be very low latency and we're Targeting latency below 20 milliseconds so somebody could play a fast response video game at a competitive level. Like that's the threshold for the latency. So then. And bandwidth. Bandwidth is a very complex question, but let's just say somebody will be able to watch high def movies, 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 size of the cell is gigantic. So like I said, it's great for very low to maybe medium sort of sparsity situations, but it's not good for high density situations. We'll 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.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
What does the equipment on the ground look like for this?
Elon Musk
So the ground equipment just looks like. Well like I said, it looks like a little. Looks like a UFO on a stick. So at least the version one of the user terminal will actually have actuators on it so that it can improve the pointing accuracy so you don't have to. It's very important that you don't need a specialist to install. The goal is that the instructions on the box will. There's just two instructions and they can be done in either order. Point at sky, plug in. We do it either order sequence doesn't matter and it will work. Plug and play literally. But also point at sky can't see the satellites. If you can't see the satellites, it can't see you.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Just wanted to talk about just some of the design concerns that were raised by astronomers. Can you talk about a little bit about how you working, maybe working with astronomers to alleviate these concerns? Or are you working on the design or altering it or are the concerns overblown? I mean how do you feel about what has been raised?
Elon Musk
I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. So you're not launching them? We'll take corrective action if it's above zero.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
So you're not giving like Orion a hat or anything like that.
Elon Musk
Everything's no, I mean there's a lot of people get a little excited because when the satellites are first launched that they're tumbling a little bit. So they're like they're kind of like they're going to blink because they haven't stabilized. And then. And they're raising their orbit so they're lower than you'd expect. And they're kind of necessarily going to reflect in ways that is not the case when they're on orbit. But now that the satellites are on orbit, I'd be impressed if somebody could actually tell me where all of them are. I've not met someone who can tell me where all of them are. Not even one person. Interesting. So, I mean, it can't be that big of a deal. We are taking. We are actually working with senior members of the science community and senior astronomers to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites. So, you know, and we're running a bunch of experiments to, for example, just have a. Paint the phased array antenna black instead of white. And we're working on a sun shade because there are like certain angles where if the sun gets 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're launching sunshade, changing the color of the satellites and otherwise minimizing the potential for any impact. Even like as the astronomy. Aesthetically, this should not be an impact.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
I think recently Gwen Shotwell in Bloomberg was quoted as saying that 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.
Elon Musk
We're thinking about that. Zero.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
We're thinking about that.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Zero.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Not thinking about it at all.
Elon Musk
We need to make the thing work. It's far from obvious that. I mean, it's real important to just set the stage here for LEO Communications constellations. Guess how many LEO constellations didn't go bankrupt? Zero. Right? Zero. It. Iridium is doing okay now, but the Iridium one went bankrupt. Orbcom went bankrupt. Globalstar, Bankrupt. Teladisic, bankrupt. Am I leaving anyone out? There's a bunch of others that didn't get very far. They also went bankrupt. Anyway. They all went bankrupt.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
So you're focusing on making it work first.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
I'm not gonna.
Elon Musk
That would be a big step. Let's have like more than zero in the not bankrupt category.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
How would you, I mean, with. How does it work then with the business of SpaceX, since you're like, I mean, you are launching other constellations. Is that an issue? Does that cause like a conflict or.
Elon Musk
We're launching other Constellations.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Oh, you're launching other satellites?
Elon Musk
Oh, yeah, sure, whatever. Yeah, no problem. Of course.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
So there's no like, you know, we're
Elon Musk
even giving them a good deal, by the way, like, no problem. You only launch constellation on SpaceX. Sounds good to me. So, I mean, I think, you know, I think there's. The world seems to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth. So we're certainly happy to launch other satellites. And you know, we don't think Starlink is going to destroy all other satellites or something like that, or. Definitely not. All right. Yeah, we always want to be in the not bankrupt category. That's our goal.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Since you're, since you're now the company of SpaceX now, you know, you're building and launching satellites, are you, are you looking at expanding the business of SpaceX and 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?
Elon Musk
No, we already, there's just, there's two major new technology programs at SpaceX. That's Starlink and Starship. Well, it kind of has Star in the name of it too much. Maybe we should call it like Link and Ship. If you divide the one by the other, the stars net out and then it's just Link and chimp. But that's it as far as I know, anyway. Some secret project that's so secret I don't know about it.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
You have a business under the chair.
Elon Musk
I don't think there's anything major,
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
I want to give time for people in the audience to ask some questions. But we talked about Starship, so development at Boca Chica is moving along pretty quickly.
Elon Musk
Yeah, actually that was the real reason I was late, 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 it.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Tell us a little bit about the work that's underway, what we can expect in the future for Starship.
Elon Musk
Well, we're building a production line. Production line is the hard part. You know, making one of something is. Well, at this point, you know, like, frankly, designing rockets is not that hard, especially if it's an expandable rocket. It's not, not really a hard problem. You can literally read books that'll you tell you exactly how to do it. The hard part is now actually building that thing even once is hard. Then building a Production line is a thousand percent harder. Like at least a thousand percent harder, 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. This is, yeah, this is an honest day's work, let me tell you.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Also what inspired some of the design aesthetics of the spacecraft. It's stainless steel. It's striking design for a spacecraft. What inspired your vision for the way it looks, the way it functions? Like why stainless steel? Why? Well,
Elon Musk
we were going to make it out of advanced composites and the advanced composites that cost like $60 a pound or $60 a kilogram, like a little more than that, maybe $130 a pound. And there was 60 to 120 plies for the, the tank. It was taking forever. We 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 we use for the Falcon 9 tanks because it's hard to weld because of the reactivity of the lithium. So you know what's easy to weld? Steel. Steel is really easy to weld. And stainless steel doesn't even require paint. That sounds great because the paint drops a pain in the neck. And you want to try painting something that's got to go to drop to cryogenic temperatures and then bend 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 stick. So then you could use special paint and then the special paint also can't get like when you're going vertically at like supersonic, you get basically static electricity buildup called triboelectrification. Although it reminds me of the trouble of troubles. But you can basically zap yourself if you have paint that the wrong paint. So anyway, no paint is great. We need a friggin big ass paint shop for starship.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
One less problem to think about.
Elon Musk
One less problem. And paint doesn't weigh zero. They used to paint the shuttle external tank white. But the like. Well we're adding a lot of weight to this thing and it's big pain in the neck so we'll just have it stay orange. So just not painting it is 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, I think it was his idea. Obviously other people involved, but Charlie Bassett, by the way, that guy is underappreciated. He kicks ass. It's really great to read about his stuff. He's awesome. So here's 301. So obviously it's not a new alloy. I think we're going to start switching to a different alloy pretty soon and then just tweak the alloy constituents because we should be able to do better in 2020 than they did in like the 50s, you know, so, I mean, come on. So I think we'll probably start switching away from 301 maybe in 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 original Atlas had a very good mass fraction, right? So it can't be that wrong or bad. And if you look at the normal sort of standard material sheet for 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 temperature temperatures, it improves strength dramatically. So then if you combine the work hardening with the cryo strength improvement, you get an effective strength to weight that is about the same as advanced composite. Now, people will generally make a mistake with composites because they'll look at the material sheet and not realize that, okay, with comparison composites, you've got to have a big knockdown because you basically have. Composites are string and glue. And so you get. And you can't just like have like, let's say your problem caused for having four pliers of carbon. You can't just have four pliers, you need like five or six because in case you damage one or something like that and you say what's your worst case allowable for? Or a D bond or something like that. So the actual knockdown you end up taking for composites is more than you would for a metal structure. So people often. So it's like a classic newbie mistake is to overrate carbon fiber because you just, you look at the material data sheet and it looks like an obvious move, but it's not. So anyway. So at cryogenic temperatures, the steel has a de facto strength weight about the same as advanced composite. But that doesn't even counting the fact that you have to paint the composite, you don't have to paint the steel. Then there's another factor which is if you want to have a reusable vehicle, it's going to get hot. Composites don't like getting hot. So typically your composite maybe is comfortable up to around 150, 200 Celsius, something like that, you know, and things start getting pretty sketchy around 250C. I mean, like, you start having to use advanced resins and all that kind of thing. So whereas steel's pretty happy at 1000C, you know, and no problem at 5, 500, consider it 500C all day and brief periods of 1000C. No problem. So then for a reusable vehicle, you now need zero heat shielding on the leeward side. Normally you need some heat shielding just due to radiative heating on the back, so you don't have a lot of convective heating at hypersonic, but you have radiative heating. And then you can thin out the windward side of the heat shield, because the thickness 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 oven mitts or something. You know, if you have like, how hot can your hand go and that's how thick your oven mitt is, Right? So then you can have, like I said, no, no heat shield on the leeward side on it and a thin heat shield on the windward side. So now your actual total mass of a steel, of a reasonable steel spacecraft is less than that of the most advanced coast carbon fiber vehicle you could possibly imagine.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Yeah.
Elon Musk
Wow. This happened by accident, by the way. This may sound like some great insight, but it actually happened because we were moving too slowly on composite and I was like, we cannot move this slowly or we'll go bankrupt. So just do this with steel.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
So, yeah, I mean, the design has to be focused on problem solving, otherwise you're going to spend too much time trying to.
Elon Musk
You don't start with a. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, sort of taking to management by rhyming. If the schedule is long, your design is wrong. Right, Very true.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Good point.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
With that, I want to go to some audience questions. We asked the audience through the app to submit us questions, 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 see you? All right, our first question.
Elon Musk
Hello, I'm Jayden Zundal. 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?
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Go back in time to your 20 year old self?
Elon Musk
I mean, I think I'd. If I get, I think it would make far fewer mistakes obviously if I could go like, here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do, please do not do them, wouldn't we all. That'd be a very long list. And like here, let me write it down or something. You know, I mean hindsight's 20 20, so it's hard to say. I mean a number of. I've made so many foolish mistakes I lost count, honestly. I mean some of these things I just wish I like that's simple sort of mantra management by rhyming. I mean it works for Homer. Okay, management wire rhyming is that thing. I was saying if the schedule's long, the design is wrong. We've overcomplicated the design many times. And I think we should have just gone with a simpler design. With the as a test be being, how long will it take for this to fly? And if it's going to take a long time, don't do it, do something else. If you look at say Falcon 9, it's got an 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 take something with a high coefficient of thermal expansion, high cte, put it, take it from room temperature to cryo, and then connect it to something that has zero cte, you know, basically zero, like carbon fiber. So now you've got a real pain in the ass joint basically, right? So in order for that to work, you've got to, the tank's got to shrink radially and you've got these super expensive heavy bolts that are like a beam and bending across that are then taking load into the interstage and they desperately want to shear off or snap off. This is crazy. You know, really you should just have a continuous metal structure that, that's obvious that should be done. That'd be way better. You know, things expand to fully available resources. So then like sometimes you should say no to things that you, that you don't, you know, like the original Falcon 1 team which did the fairing, tanks, engines, everything pretty much was maybe a little over 100 people. Okay. Now SpaceX is like 6,000 people, I think something like that. So really just simplify your product as much as possible, You know. And then like if I think of some of the ways in which. How does a smart engineer make dumb mistakes? Including, you know, is optimize something that shouldn't exist. Don't optimize something that shouldn't exist. But people are trained to do this in college. You can't say no to the professional. You know, the professor's going to give you the exam and you've got to answer all the questions or they will get angry and give you a bad grade. So then you always optimize the. You always answer the question. A lot of the times you say this is the wrong question, 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.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Do we have a. Let's go to another question.
Audience Member
Hi, My name is Julie Seven Sage and Mr. Musk, you have said in the past that you think that college degrees shouldn't be that important. And that has been shown in job listings in places such as Tesla. However, in places like this 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, the scholarships are not changing amounts and that it's 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. 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 we're building. Thank you.
Elon Musk
Well, first of all, you don't need college to 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 is a value that colleges have, which is like seeing whether somebody's. Can somebody work hard at something, including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments and kind of soldier through and get it done. You know, that's like the main value of college. And then also, you know, probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce. So I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
There it is. I know we started Late. And I know 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 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. We might not be around to see us finally resettle on Mars or maybe.
Elon Musk
No, I mean, I hope I'm not dead by the time people go to Mars. That would be a great, a great outcome. I think I might be, you know, if we don't improve our pace of progress, I'm definitely, you know, going to 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 taken 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'm definitely going to be dead before Mars. So we're going to improve our pace of innovation a lot. So yeah,
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
I guess what I would say is I can tell you can see. How do you communicate that vision you have to that to somebody who could maybe take over for what you're doing and to see things the way you're seeing them in terms of the mission?
Elon Musk
Well, we have a lot of 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 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 want to 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 try 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. He dropped out. Dove is pretty smart. He dropped out. You know, Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out. Like obviously not needed. Did Shakespeare even go to college? Probably not.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Well, thank you so much. I wish we could take more audience questions. I know we have a hard stop, but thank you Elon for stopping by.
Jeffrey Hill (interviewer)
Let's give him a round of applause for stopping by and speaking to us. Enjoy the rest of your evening and. Thank you very much.