Обеденное совещание Национального клуба прессы 29 сентября 2011 г. Илон Маск выступает перед Национальным клубом прессы в Вашингтоне, округ Колумбия, а затем отвечает на вопросы журналистов: будущее пилотируемых космических полетов после космического челнока, план SpaceX по полету астронавтов NASA, многоразовые ракеты и доставка людей на Марс.
Илон Маск выступает перед Национальным клубом прессы в Вашингтоне, округ Колумбия, а затем отвечает на вопросы журналистов: будущее пилотируемых космических полетов после космического челнока, план SpaceX по полету астронавтов NASA, многоразовые ракеты и доставка людей на Марс.
Расшифровка Good afternoon and welcome to the National Press Club. I'm Mark Hamrick of Associated Press where I'm a broadcast and online journalist covering business and financial news and in this capacity I'm the 104th president of the National Press Club. We are the world's leading professional organization for journalists committed to our profession's future through our programming events such as this while fostering a free press worldwide. For more information about the National Press Club, we'd invite you to visit our website at www. That's3ws.press.org and to donate to programs offered to the public through our Eric Friedheim National Journalism Library. You can visit that on the website as well. So, on behalf of our members worldwide, we'd like to welcome our speaker here today and those of you attending today's event. Our Head Table includes guests of our speaker as well as working journalists who are all club members. If you hear applause in our audience, we'd like to note the members of the general public are attending today, so it's not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalistic objectivity. We'd also like to welcome our C SPAN and public radio audiences. Our luncheons are also featured on our member produced weekly podcast from the National Press Club which is available for free download on itunes. You can also follow the action on Twitter using the hashtag pound npclunch. After our guest speech concludes, we'll have Q and A and we'll ask as many questions as time permits. Now it's time to introduce our Head Table guests. And please note that a journalist's presence at any Head Table, particularly during this political season, does not imply or signify an endorsement of the Speaker. So I'd ask each of you here at the Head Table to please stand up briefly as your name is announced and we'll begin from your right. We begin with Paul Schinkman, who's a reporter with WTOP News and we might note a third generation Press Club member which is a special thing. Heather Forsgreen Weaver is a freelancer and she is with our book and author Committee leadership. Ron Bagent of the Kuwait News Agency. By the way, he hails from the US South. He is chair of our Newsmakers Committee and doing a great job there as well. Kristin Grantham is communications director with SpaceX and a guest of our Speaker. Welcome. Angela Greiland King is a transportation reporter with Bloomberg News and our Membership Secretary on our Board of Governors. Tim Hughes is general counsel with SpaceX and guest of our Speaker. Skip over the podium for a moment Melissa Charbonneau with News Hook Media is our fantastic speakers committee chair. Really doing a wonderful job for us there this year. Thank you so much, Melissa. We'll skip over our speaker for just a moment. Lee Perryman is director with ENPS with Associated Press. He's the speaker's committee member who organized today's event. Thank you very much, Lee. George Dewey is senior Vice president, Marketing and communications with SpaceX, a guest of our speaker. Welcome. Frank Moring is deputy Managing editor for Space Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine. Robert Schlesinger is opinion editor, U.S. news World Report. Adam Kano is Vice president, Client Strategy with TMP Government, Vice Chair of our broadcast committee here at the National Press Club. Please give them all a warm round of applause. One might be inclined to call our guest speaker today a Renaissance man, but to do that would set him back several hundred years. So that wouldn't be fair. But with South African and Canadian heritage, he is an engineer whose passion for solving problems necessitated that he become an entrepreneur and inventor. We're told that he multitasks, that he's a workaholic. We're told he got in at 3am this morning here. He probably drives fast, we're told, but with a preference for energy efficient vehicles. And he thinks a lot about life in space, from software businesses to the Internet. Let's not forget about electric cars, solar energy and space rockets. His friends say that our speaker today does everything with absolute conviction, even when he believes in something. When he believes in something, he is unstoppable. He has said that if he thinks the stakes are important enough, he'll do it, whether the odds of success are high or low. In February, Forbes magazine ranked him as one of the nation's 20 most powerful CEOs, 40 and under. Last year, Time listed him as one of the 100 people who most affect the world. Esquire said that he's one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century, and there have been many other awards and recognitions along the way. He bought his first computer at the age of 10. He taught himself how to program that, and by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software, a space game for the Commodore 64 platform for about $500 at age 17. In 1988, he left his native South Africa for western Canada to live and work with his mother's family. In 1992, he won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where where he received an undergraduate degree in business from the Wharton School. He got a second bachelor's degree in physics, he headed to Stanford and a graduate program in applied physics and material science. A goal was to create ultra capacitors with enough energy to power electric cars. But after two days he left to start a company with his brother which provided online content publishing software for news organizations and Ka Ching. In 1999 AltaVista acquired that for about $341 million. Next our guest speaker co founded an online financial services and email payment company, you probably have heard of it, in 2001 that became PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock. So he used the proceeds to help start Space Exploration Technologies in 2002 where he is CEO and CTO. In 2008 SpaceX won a NASA contract to replace the cargo transport function of the space shuttle to support the International Space Station with astronaut transport in mind. And in 2009 SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit. He is known as an original investor, chairman of the board and eventual head of product design at Tesla Motors where he led design of the all electric Tesla Roadster. Today Tesla also sells electric powertrain systems to Daimler and Toyota. He is the primary investor and non executive chairman of SolarCity. Our guest speaker has been compared to Henry Ford, Howard Hughes and even the fictional Tony Stark. Iron Man. He has been described as the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr. S interpretation of the character and he had a cameo in Iron Man 2. Appropriately enough, the SpaceX factory was used in the film. We hope he got some money from that as well. He's not without critics and skeptics however, including some who doubt that SpaceX's economies of scale can sustain the low cost business model. But he insists that he is proving them wrong today. So the founder of PayPal, the world's largest Internet payment system, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, manufacturer of the all electric Tesla Roadster automobile and Model S sedan, and non executive chairman of SolarCity, a leading provider of solar power systems in the US is here today and we're grateful for that to talk about the future of human spaceflight. As head of SpaceX, developer of rockets and vehicles for missions to Earth orbit and beyond. Our guest views space exploration as a key next step in preserving and expanding human life and he's promoted making life multi planetary, starting with Mars. It is an appropriate follow up to our luncheon this summer that featured NASA administrator Charles Bolden and astronaut Mark Kelly, all of this serving as proof that you do not need to be a rocket scientist to be a National Press Club luncheon speaker, but it helps. Please give a warm National Press Club welcome to one of the most interesting personalities and entrepreneurs of our day, Mr. Elon Musk.
Thank you for having me. It's really an honor to speak here for the National Press Club. So I have an exciting announcement with respect to space, and I think one which should be provide some inspiration and some belief that the innovation is alive and well in America and going in really interesting directions. But before I'm going to get to that, but I'm going to preface that with the logic that explains why such thing is important, because it may not be immediately obvious. So, first of all, going back to why am I in space and electric cars and solar power and Internet stuff. It goes back to when I was in college and I was trying to think of what were the most important things that would affect the future of humanity, what could have a significant positive effect on the future of humanity. And the three things that I came up with were the Internet, sustainable energy, both production and consumption, and then space exploration, but specifically making life multiplanetary. And I didn't expect when I was in college to actually be involved in all three of those areas. But as a result of some success in the Internet arena, that gave me the capital to get involved in very high capital endeavors like cars and rockets, which really are very high capital. So the reason for I'm mostly going to talk about space. So I want to explain sort of why do I think space is really important and what about space? And because I believe in sort of building things up from, you know, from a rational sort of framework of logic. And so you start with sort of, well, how do you decide that anything is important? And I think the lens of history is a helpful guide here in that things that are. That may seem important in the moment, but actually aren't that important in the grand scheme over time. If you look at things over a broad span of time, the things that are less important kind of fall away. And if you look at things from the broadest possible span of time as it relates to life itself, the evolution of life has been primitive. Life, I think, started around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. And what are the important steps in the evolution of life? And obviously there was the advent of single celled life. There was differentiation to plants and animals. There was life going from the oceans to land, there was mammals consciousness, and I would argue also on that scale should fit life becoming multiplanetary. And in Fact, I think consciousness, it's the next step, actually, because you really kind of need consciousness to design vehicles that can transport life over hundreds of millions of miles of irradiated space to an environment that they did not evolve to exist in. It would be very convenient, of course, if there was another planet just like Earth nearby, but that's unlikely and as it turns out, not the case. So. So I think you couldn't really. There's no way for life to sort of, just by dint of natural selection, just sort of get over to Mars and survive. So you need consciousness. You've got to design. So I think it is the next natural step. So I think if one could make a reasonable argument that something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it's important and maybe worth a little bit of our resources. And one can also think of it from the standpoint of life insurance. There's some chance, either as a result of something humanity does, or as a result of something natural, like a giant asteroid hitting us or something, that civilization, life as we know it, could be destroyed. There's clear evidence for life being destroyed multiple times in the fossil record. So we don't need to guess that this is something that can occur. It has occurred. And the Permian extinction being a particularly interesting one, because I think that destroyed somewhere between 90 and 95% of all species on Earth, which doesn't tell the full story because most of the remaining species were fungi. So unless you're a mushroom, you're out of luck. So if we think it's worth buying life insurance on an individual level, or perhaps it's worth spending more than spending something on life insurance for life as we know it. And arguably that expenditure should be greater than zero. So then we can just get to the question of what is an appropriate expenditure for life insurance. And, you know, I think probably if it's something like a quarter of a percent of the gdp, that would be okay. I think most people would say, okay, that's not too bad. You know, it's. But you want it to be some sort of number that is much less than we spend on health care, but maybe more than we spend on lipstick. You know, something like that. And I like lipstick. It's not like I've got anything against it. So, yeah, I can't wait for that comment to go out there. So that's kind of the thing that I think it's important that we give a little bit of our mind space towards. And I think it's also one of the Most inspiring and interesting things that we could try to do. It's one of the greatest adventures that humanity could ever embark upon. And life has to be more than about solving problems. You know, if all that life is about is solving problems, why bother getting up in the morning? There have to be things that inspire you to, you know, that make you proud to be a member of humanity. And you know, the Apollo program is certainly an example of that. Only a handful of people went to the moon and yet actually we all went to the moon. We went with them vicariously, we shared in that adventure. I don't think anyone would say that that was a bad idea. That was great. So, you know, we need more of those things. At least we need some of those things. And even if someone's in a completely different industry and a completely different walk of life, it's still something that's going to make you feel good about the world. And that's another reason why I think we should try to do these great things. So now then, let's get to the question of, well, how do you do, how do you make life multi planetary? What are the fundamental obstacles to that? Because it's all well and good, if everyone agrees that's worth, worth doing. But if we can't do it, well, it doesn't matter. So the pivotal breakthrough that's necessary that some company has to come up with to make life multi planetary is a fully and rapidly reusable orbit class rocket. This is a very difficult thing to do because we live on a planet where that is just barely possible. If gravity were a little lower, it would be easy. If it was a little higher, it would be impossible. So even for an expendable launch vehicle where you don't attempt any recovery after a lot of smart people have done their best to optimize the weight of the vehicle and the efficiency of the engines and the guidance system, everything you get maybe 2 to 3% of your lift off weight to, to orbit. That's not a lot of room for error. So if your rocket ends up being just a little bit heavier, you get nothing to orbit. And this is why only a few countries have ever reached orbit. Now you say, okay, well let's make it reusable. Which means you've got to strengthen the stages, you've got to add a lot of weight, a lot of thermal protection, you've got to do a lot of things that add weight to that vehicle and still have a useful payload to orbit. This is, now you're saying of that meager 2 to 3% and maybe if you're really good, get it to 4. You've got to add all that's necessary to bring the rocket stages back to the launch pad and be able to refly them and still have useful payload to orbit. So a very difficult thing. This has been attempted many times in the past and generally what's happened is when people have concluded that success was not one of the possible outcomes then that the project's been abandoned. Well, some government projects kept going even when success was not one of the possible outcomes, unfortunately, but then eventually they get cancelled. So it's just a very tough engineering problem and it wasn't something that I thought. I wasn't sure it could be solved for a while, but then I think just relatively recently, probably in the last 12 months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved And I think SpaceX is going to try to do it. Now, we could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success here, but we're going to try to do it. And we have a design that on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, it does work. And now we need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't, reality wins. So that speak to be determined and the simulation that you may have seen in the lobby coming in, which will be posted to our website website right around now, is will show you a simulation of what we plan to do. Now, that simulation is mostly accurate, but there are a few areas which are inaccurate. In some cases, just due to timing constraints, we weren't able to work with the simulation people to get it completely accurate. In some cases we're keeping a few technical things under our hat, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what we intend to do, which is to land basically for the first stage. After stage separation, turn the stage around, relight the engines, boost back to the launch pad and land propulsively on landing legs. And then with the upper stage, after dropping off the satellite or Dragon spacecraft, then do a deorbit burn re enter, you need quite a powerful heat shield, steer aerodynamically back to the launch pad. You don't actually need wings, by the way. This is a common misperception. To steer aerodynamically you just need some lift over drag number and lift vector and steer back launch pad, then land propulsively with the upper stage, also with landing gear. And so we'll see if this works. But it's going to be certainly an exciting journey and if it does work, it'll be it'll be pretty huge. Because if you look at say the cost of Falcon 9 rockets, which is quite a big rocket, it's about a million pounds of thrust and it is the lowest cost rocket in the world. But, and even so, it's about 50 to 60 million dollars. But the cost of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only about $200,000. So obviously if we can reuse the rocket say 1,000 times, then that would make the capital cost of the rocket per launch only about $50,000. There'd be maintenance and other things that would factor in there and fixed costs and some overhead allocation and whatnot. But it would allow for about a hundredfold reduction in launch costs. And this is a pretty obvious thing if you think about it as applied to any other mode of transport. You can imagine that if planes were not reusable, very few people would fly. 747 is about $300 million. You'd need two of them for a round trip. And yet I don't think anyone here has paid half a billion dollars to fly. And the reason is because those planes can be used tens of thousands of times. And so all you're really paying for is fuel and pilot costs and you know, just sort of incidentals. And the capital cost is relatively small. So that's why it's such a giant difference. I thought of another way I mentioned that, you know, we could probably afford a quarter of a percent of our GDP for making life multi planetary. That's the cost if you have a fully reusable rocket. The cost if you don't have a fully reusable rocket on the same barometer would be 100% of the GDP. And that would mean no money for food, health care or anything else. And obviously that's impossible. So that's why I think a fully and rapidly reusable system is fundamentally required for life to become multi planetary for us to establish life on Mars. Mars is the only realistic option for another planet. Venus being too hot, Mercury being way too hot. Jupiter being a gas giant. And the moons of Jupiter are a possibility, but it's much further out and harder in a lot of different ways. And the moon is sort of too small and resource poor to make life multiplanetary. Emphasize not just to have a little base, a little base is not that interesting. But a self sustaining human civilization that's on multiple planets where life could continue even in the event of a calamity on Earth. That is the real thing. Yeah, so I think this is pretty exciting and I think everyone and Everyone in America and arguably rest of the world should be pretty fired up about what we're doing and hopefully wish us well and we'll do our best to succeed in this regard. And yeah, it's definitely going to be an adventure. And I'll say one final thing, which is that sometimes people say, well, what is the business model for Mars? And sometimes they think, well, can you mine Mars and bring things back? And like that is not a realistic business model for Mars because it's always going to be far cheaper to mine things on Earth than Mars. But I do think that there's a business model where if you can reduce the cost of a flight to Mars or moving to Mars to around the cost of middle class home in California, which these just seem to be rising over time, maybe not recently, but certainly pretty expensive, so maybe to around half a million dollars. Then I think you would have enough people would, would buy a ticket and move to Mars to be part of creating a new planet and be part of kind of the founding team of a new civilization. You don't have to have, you don't obviously have to be willing to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there's 7 billion people on Earth now. There'll be probably 8 billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that's still 8,000 people. And I think probably more than one in a million people would decide to do that. So that's what I think is sort of the Mars business model, if you will. And then ultimately Mars can probably export intellectual property like software and inventions and things like that. If you can sort of beam it back with photons, that's sort of the better way to go. All right, so I'm happy to answer any questions.
Well, thank you very much. Obviously, given the diverse nature of your own interests and pursuits, we'll ask you to stay here as soon as you grab a drink of water, which is required on Earth if you want, that might be more difficult. So we're going to start with the space piece. And if you'll just stand up here right by my side and we'll just sort of wing it one by one. Talk about how you see the practical application of this technology that you just described, sort of in the near and intermediate term, if it's successful.
Well, in the near term, the technology will be applied to launching satellites and to resupplying the space station, taking cargo and crew up there. That's the near term thing and that's what SpaceX's current business is predicated on we are doing okay in that regard. We've got about $3 billion of revenue under contract.
And that's better than okay. Yeah, let's just say $3 billion.
Yeah, I mean, it's spread out over the next five years, but it's not all at once, unfortunately. And we do have to do lots of things to get that money, but that's not bad. And so we have been profitable for the last four years, not hugely profitable, but moderately profitable. And we expect to be the same this year. And I think that's somewhat necessary because obviously if the amount of money going out exceeds the amount of money coming in, then sooner or later we'll die. So we have to make sure that we have more money coming in than going out. But that seems to be going reasonably well.
And you described to me earlier that right now you're the leading essentially vendor for launching satellites into space right now.
Well, if measured by launch contracts awarded, that is correct. So the United States has been uncompetitive in the international launch market for a long time, and Russia has actually been the leader in that regard, followed by Europe and then to a lesser degree, India and China, although China's. Obviously, China is growing rapidly and except in the last few years where the United States has done the best, and that's due entirely to SpaceX.
So obviously you're a person very interested in performing in innovation, and that's something, it seems, the United States does well in the space business specifically. How can we maintain that competitive edge? And are we maintaining it in the sector generally within our nation right now?
Well, as far as launch is concerned, I think it's fair to say that the United States has by far the most competitive launch capability with SpaceX as a result of SpaceX, and the only realistic potential competitor is China. I tell you, it's not the easiest thing competing with national governments, which are heavily subsidized. And they certainly have set their sights on us and have told us that. But that's okay, I think we'll win. But we have actually, with respect to China, we have a conscious strategy of filing the absolute minimum number of patents. We file very few patents. And the rockets, we were very careful about cyber security and we're very careful about physical security because there's obviously a history of absconding with intellectual property in China and the enforceability of patents against the Chinese government is zero. So that's contrast that to Tesla, where Tesla files a lot of patents because competitors are commercial companies and There is enforceability, so not to worry about launch. We'll take care of that.
Let me come back around a little bit to maintaining the national standard. As you know, there's been an active debate in Congress, we're in Washington about, you know, what is the appropriate role for government. Of course, there was a different approach to that in times where cash was more flush. And it seems to some degree or a great degree, you're a beneficiary of that in the sense that we're outsourcing some of this within our own country.
is the inability, the apparent inability of the federal government to spend on this going to be an inherent problem for our country?
Well, we do spend a fair bit on space. I mean, much more than any other country from a government standpoint. So I think it's what will continue to be the biggest vendor on space in the United States. But by the same time, I think that the budgets in absolute terms will decrease just because of overall compression on the federal budget. And we have a huge budget crisis and largely have our head in the sand and are ignoring the reality that we're spending far more than we're bringing in, and that chicken will come home to roost. So I think we can expect massive compression of all budgets, including space, from a government standpoint, just because we simply won't have any other choice.
Well, I want to get more to the SpaceX piece, but since you just now talked about sort of the way that you should do business as a government, there's obviously a political issue right now that's out there about how. What is the appropriate role of government in encouraging job creation? You have 1500 employees at SpaceX. You're having those jobs in the United States. I guess you have a launch facility in the Marshall Islands.
Yeah, well, actually, our primary launch facility is Cape Canaveral, and then we're building a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. We're not currently using the Marshall Islands launch site. We did use that initially, but the logistics are just too difficult getting out there because, like Water World out there, it's a zillion miles from anywhere. So it's convenient in some ways, but then inconvenient from a logistic standpoint. So our primary society is Cape Navel and then Vandenberg. And then we also plan on establishing a commercial launch site, which would. Because I think that makes sense because Vandenberg and the Cape are actually Air Force bases. And it makes sense to sort of concentrate Air Force and perhaps NASA business at those two facilities and then concentrate commercial launch activity at a commercial launch site, just as it goes with aviation.
So what's your sense, as in the political debate here in Washington, do you have trouble creating jobs within your company because of the way the federal government is operating currently or what you envision as the way the policy is managed generally?
Well, there are. I should first of all say that, you know, SpaceX would not be where it is without the help of NASA, both historically the great things that NASA has done and currently with the. The business that NASA gives us. So. And the expert advice and everything. So I should make sure to very strongly credit NASA in this arena in terms of how helpful they've been. We do have a bit of a challenge with the Air Force and this is something where I'm sort of surprised that there's not more journalistic interest because the Air Force is currently proposing to extend the sole source monopoly of Boeing and Lockheed until 2018. And the reasoning given for that is preservation of the industrial base. Although for some reason, oddly enough, we're not included in the industrial base. And this is doubly odd because the main rocket used by Boeing and Lockheed is the APIs 5, which has a Russian main engine and a center airframe, the interstage and a forward airframe, the fairing, which are made in Switzerland. So which industrial base are we talking about preserving? The one in Russia. That doesn't make much sense.
So you sense that's a political problem?
You know, we have 1% of the loving power, Boeing and Lockheed.
That's a political problem.
If this decision is made as a function of lobbying power, we are screwed.
I think you just earned some journalistic attention. Well, let's get a little bit more to the space business here because we do have a lot of questions and I want to make it be fair to our audience to get in as many of those questions as time permits. And obviously these are some far flung questions, literally as well as figuratively. Someone asks, what will today's announcement be? How will today's announcement divert resources from sending humans to the International Space Station? And I would probably add, if at all.
No, I wouldn't consider this to be in any way a diversion. This is a parallel effort. And so it's not really impacting our sending of cargo to the space station, nor is it affecting our human spaceflight development activities that we're doing in partnership with NASA, which is going really well. So think of this as sort of a parallel thing. It doesn't really affect the ascent phase of the vehicle, but we're really trying to have the descent phase not be hits atmosphere and explodes. You know, that's actually what happens to all rockets. Otherwise that's a good goal to keep.
Given the grounding of Russia's rocket fleet. Our Are you in discussions with NASA to accelerate launch dates for the International Space Station missions? And what happens with your scheduled November launch with the possibility that the ISS may need to be evacuated?
Yeah, with the Soyuz failure that occurred recently, it actually will likely result in a delay in our launch to the space station because it sort of pushes out the other missions. And NASA rightly wants to have the appropriate level of astronaut, the right astronauts and a number of astronauts with the right training and everything onboard the space station when we arrive. So it looks like things will be more like January for the launch of the space station. And that is contingent upon on the Russians meeting the schedule that they've currently stated.
How do you evaluate the fact that we're using Russia as an important partner in our space program right now? How do you feel about that? What are the risks and what are the benefits?
Well, I think despite the recent failure of the Soyuz, it is actually a good vehicle. It has a good track record. I think there may be some concerns going, going future long term with Russia in that a lot of their expert rocket engineers have retired because it's much more compelling financially to go into the oil and gas industry in Russia than it is to go into the rocket industry. So you sort of that expertise is tailing off and I think that may lead to decreased reliability for Russian rockets in the future. Hopefully it doesn't.
But does that give the advantage to China then?
Well, I think long term, like I said, I think China is the serious competitor long term. If you look at Russian rocketry since the fall of the Soviet Union, there's really been no significant developments. The technology has barely progressed. No new rockets have launched since the fall of the Soviet Union. So what that means is as soon as that technology levels exceed it, then they're rendered redundant and they have no ability to compete. And I think that's likely what will occur with the Russian launch industry.
So how much longer do they have unless they start doing some serious work as being a viable Space program there?
And how soon does that mean that at that point China moves in? I mean, essentially in that space that they're occupying?
I'm quite confident we can take on China.
Yes. Let's get to another question.
Maybe I'm conflict, but I'd rather bet on us than China.
Well, you're on the record and I think you have a lot of people cheering for you, so obviously we'll see what happens. We'll invite you back.
Exactly. Could be famous last words.
Given the failed progress launch and the risks of trusting the very survival of the International Space Station entirely to Soyuz for years to come, there's something of a state of emergency until US crews begin. Can you fast track development and human rating to result in crewed launches beginning in about two years? And if not, can you speed up the process by any amount? Could you launch in an emergency?
Yeah, well, I think here it's important to clarify what can the system do that we've done? The Falcon 9 dragon system that we're launching today, what can it do? If the degree of safety required was equivalent to that of the shuttle, we could actually launch astronauts on the next flight, on the one going up, which will likely go up in January. The system is fully capable of carrying biological cargo, you know, which is, you know, people. So. However, what it doesn't have is a launch escape system. And the shuttle also does not have a launch escape system. And both NASA and we agree that a launch escape system is a wise move. So we are. It'll take us about two years, maybe at the outside three, to develop and qualify the launch escape system. And the way we're doing the launch escape system is, I think, a significant innovation beyond what's done in the past, where the escape thrusters are built into the sidewall of the spacecraft so you can actually use those same thrusters for propulsive landing, which is cool. And we're actually talking with NASA about potentially doing missions to Mars and other places using Dragon as kind of a general test, a general science delivery platform to various places in the solar system. So that's an important distinction. We could launch, like I said, we could launch satellites next flight if requirements same as shuttle. But for if we wanted to add ultrascape system, two to three years.
Questioner asks NASA has a legacy of openness and transparency, unlike private companies would. While you're flying private payloads, a private model will continue to work for you. However, once the American taxpayer starts footing the bill, and I guess the supposition is here more aggressively, what assurances can you give that SpaceX will be as open and transparent as NASA and other aerospace systems Problems or need you be?
Well, you know, we're relatively speaking a pretty open, transparent company. Now, there are some restrictions here which are itar restrictions. They're not restrictions that, you know, we have any choice over because advanced rocket technology is considered protected technology. So you can do harm with those. Right, right. You know, we can't give. We can't sort of just published to the general public detailed, detailed analysis of failure investigations that contain secrets on how to make rockets. That's actually a violation of the law. But all that information is available to NASA and to the faa. So our, you know, formations that we do for NASA, NASA has quite a detailed oversight role. And then the FAA as well has an oversight role. So if you're comfortable flying commercial aircraft, then you should be pretty comfortable with what we're doing in commercial rocketry.
And yet with NASA, there's obviously any number of tragic events that occurred where human life was lost. And in the sense that obviously they're using private companies as partners, but essentially it was under the NASA and government brand, essentially flying the American flag. Can a company like yours sustain a loss like that as a private enterprise? Would people be willing to give you as much, dare I say, space in the event of a tragedy that they would be their own government?
Yeah, I think that'll be okay. I mean, if you look at all other modes of transport, aircraft, boats, cars, familiar with cars, there's loss of life in every mode of transport. And if one set a standard that you couldn't have loss of life, then there would be no transport. You wouldn't even be allowed to walk. So you have to allow for some amount of risk. It needs to be reasonable and measured, but you have to allow for that. But I don't think that a commercial company. I think a commercial company arguably would be better able to deal with that than a government entity because, you know, government. Then you have the congressional hearings, and it tends to become sometimes a political football.
Congress has a willingness to investigate private companies as well.
Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah. But I think that certainly occurs where it seems like there's been sort of a violation of the rules or something like that, but certainly something that's within the rules. I mean, obviously there are fatal car accidents every day, but you don't get a congressional hearing on it.
I'm trying to think, man. I think you're right. Let me follow up. Then. Someone asks if you took NASA out of the equation in the sense of being responsible or important for your future business. Is there enough private satellite and other government payload business to keep you going if for some reason NASA wasn't in the picture? Or is that a concern at all?
Yeah, well, certainly NASA is our largest customer and our most important customer. But if you look at our launch Manifest we have over 30 Falcon 9 missions under contract. Thirteen of those are with NASA, so, so effectively we've got maybe about 40% or so of our business with the government. But then if you consider, let's say you made pencils, well, about 40% of your business would be with the government. So it's not, that's not an unreasonable number.
Fair enough, fair enough. Here we're getting to the workforce issue. Someone writes in the audience today, my son, not me, is a mission controller at Houston's Johnson Space Space center, which obviously is relevant to the future of your business as well. Many of his friends with the shuttle program have been let go and are interviewing via video for jobs with your company. Any suggestions on what you're looking for?
Sure. Well, you know, if you look at the amount of money that is allocated to commercial space relative to the overall NASA budget, you'll see it's a pretty small number. The, you know, sort of last fiscal year was about $300 million, but that was split over four companies. So we got about 75, I think, or something like that. So that's I guess about half a percent of the NASA budget. So it's important to bear in mind that we'd love to hire a lot more people than we currently hire, but we can't also can't run out of money and die, so we can only hire a few people. In terms of what characteristics we look for, we generally quite engineering centric, so we're big fans of what have people done from a hardcore engineering standpoint. What tough engineering problems have they solved, how did they solve them? And you know, we're sort of less interested if it's sort of been a more of a paper oriented role that they've had because you know, we try to try to minimize that at SpaceX.
So are you more demanding an employer than NASA would have been?
Well, that's a tough question to answer. Give it a shot. I think, I think we're probably more demanding. I mean, I guess, you know, NASA's a large organization, so I think the level of demand that people face in different parts of NASA varies considerably. And I'm sure that there are parts of NASA which are just as demanding, maybe more demanding than SpaceX. But SpaceX is an extremely demanding organization and we expect people to work super hard and, and be very good at the job.
Given that Tesla and SolarCity are your response in a sense, among other things, to climate change, how do you answer politicians who say that they're not sure it's actually happening?
Okay, well, you know, I think, boy, the climate debate is an interesting one. So if you ask any scientist, are you sure that human activity is causing global warming? Any scientist should say no, because you cannot be sure. So on the other hand, if you said, do you think we should put an arbitrary number of trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and just keep doing it until something bad happens? They'll probably say no, too. We essentially are running an experiment, and that experiment is to test the carbon capacity of the oceans and atmosphere. Now, that experiment may turn out to be fine, it may also turn out to be really bad. And it's just. I just don't understand why we'd run that experiment, particularly when you consider that at some point we have to get to something that is sustainable. We have to have sustainable production of energy and consumption of energy, because tautologically, if it's unsustainable, you will run out of it. And you can simply say, well, let's say hypothetically, CO2 was good for the environment, and let's say, hypothetically, the United States possessed all the oil in the world. Well, you'd still have to get off oil because it's a finite resource and as you start to run out of it, the scarcity would drive the cost up and cause economic collapse. So why not do it sooner? And I'm not saying that it needs to be a radical or immediate change or that people need to now inject a great deal of misery into their lives to avoid CO2, but. But we should lean in that direction. We should lean in the direction of supporting technologies that are sustainable and lean slightly against technologies that are unsustainable. That just seems pretty sensible, even if environment isn't a factor. And in fact, my interest in electric vehicles predates the current climate climate issue. I mean, I was interested in electric vehicles 20 years ago when nobody was really talking about global warming, because I just thought it was the obvious means of transport. So. But I do think, you know, the climate thing does add urgency to things, and I do think we will see quite a significant increase in the cost of oil. Just from a demographic standpoint. You've got China and India and a few other countries that represent almost half the world's population and have very few cars on the road, but are rapidly adding cars to the road. And so you can expect a doubling of demand. And I think it's going to be difficult to see to achieve a doubling of supply.
Have you changed anything in the wake of the federal Solyndra investigation? And do you have any concerns about an inquiry into government loans and contracts? Will Tesla DOE loan applications stand up under such scrutiny?
Yeah, I mean, so in the case of Solyndra, you know, Solyndra has obviously become somewhat of a political football here. Speaking of footballs earlier, you know, the DOE programs, they're necessarily our portfolio of programs where, where some number of the things that are funded there are going to fail. That should be assumed, should not assume that a 100% success. And in the case of Solyndra, people forget that private investors lost twice as much as the government did. So it's not. And there were some really first rate venture capitalists in Solyndra. It's not as though these were suckers. So if you've got first rate venture capitalists who've lost twice as much money as the federal government, you have to say, okay, you know, I mean, it was a bet, the bet didn't work. But that doesn't mean it's, you know, something really terrible happened. I mean, the most you could say is that Solyndra executives were too optimistic. You know, they presented a better face to the situation than should have been presented in the final few months. But then if they didn't do that, it would have become a self fulfilling prophecy of as soon as the CEO says I'm not sure whether we'll survive, you're dead. So, you know, I think people are making too much of the Solyndra thing. I mean, and do I think there are parallels with Tesla? I mean, we got to learn from the DOE from a different program, I should point out. But in our case, we have significant capital reserves and we have more money at Tesla than we need to complete the program in question. And we don't face the same issue that Solyndra faced, which is extreme competition from China on a commodity product that drove the cost per watt of solar panels from $4 a watt down to one. That's the fundamental reason why Solyndra went down, is Solyndra would have been okay at $2 a watt, but not one. And that's it. And here's another thing which is not getting enough press, which is how much money do you think the Chinese government's put into solar? Estimates are about 40 billion. Okay, so we've got our team with operating on a pittance. We got China operating on 40 billion and our team lost. That should be no surprise.
Do you worry that that's tarnished the view by the American public of the solar industry in the United States?
You know, there's probably a little Bit of tarnish, but you know, it's unwarranted tarnish. SolarCity. Now, the story that occurred with the cost per watt of solar was something that I thought I expected would occur. So if somebody had asked me, do you think solar industry is a good investment? I would have said, no, you're going to get your ass kicked. But so SolarCity works on balance of system where they do everything except the panel and they own the end customer relationship. They're kind of like Dell or Apple. Dell Raffle don't make the CPU or the memory or the hard drives, but they design the overall system and they provide it to customers through the sales and marketing service. And that's what SolarCity does. SolarCity is doing super well and they're growing at 50 to 100% a year with positive cash flow, which is pretty incredible. And yeah, I just show up at board meetings to hear the good news. It's really great. All credit to those guys, so. And for them, the more rapacious the competition on solar panels, the better it helps you. Yeah.
Well, if you wouldn't mind, we'll do some finishing business here. So if I can just step up there for a second, then we'll get a couple more questions in. If you'll just stand by. So as many of you know, we're almost out of time. And before asking the last question of the day, a couple of house keeping matters to take care of. And first among those is just reminding you about some immediately upcoming luncheons. Ken Burns, the documentarian filmmaker, will be here on Monday to talk about his new film prohibition. On October 5th, Ron Paul, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. That's the 5th of October, and that event is sold out. We just announced October 24th, TMZ's Harvey Levin will talk about the changing landscape in entertainment news. So before I get to the last question, if you'll just come right over here, we present our speakers on a routine basis with our token of our appreciation and thank you very much, our National Press Club coffee mug.
Thank you, Elon. So we'll see if we have time for more than one question here at the end. But the these are on the lighter side, as many of you know in the audience. Let me ask you, first of all, what's the one great idea that you've seen from somebody else? And as the slogan goes, I could have had a V8. Why didn't I think of that? There's probably been more than one. But which of those loom largest in your mind? And please stand up to the microphone. A great idea that you saw someone else had and you wished you had had it yourself or express that idea.
Oh, well, there's lots of great ideas that people come up with all the time. I don't necessarily wish I'd had them myself, but certainly what Larry and Sergey came up with. Google was really smart with the backward links to pages. Obviously, what Facebook has done. Twitter, I mean, there are great examples in the Internet.
And yeah, those are American companies.
Yeah. IPad, you know, obviously. IPhone, you know, I think Apple, Google, Facebook. I mean, these are examples where it's like, you know, you're sort of like, who's our competition? You're like, not even sure. Okay,
How is it that America's able to innovate so well, given all the challenges, when we have great companies like that performing so well?
In other words, in many ways, the nation continues to be a great innovator.
How do you explain that? How does that continue to happen? Why is that?
Well, the United States, it's kind of like the statement about democracy. You know, it's sort of. It's a bad system, but it's the least bad. Well, the United States is the least bad at encouraging innovation. And then Silicon Valley, actually, I'd say is particularly good at encouraging innovation. But Silicon Valley is just orders of magnitude better than any other place in the world for creating new companies and fostering innovation. It's quite remarkable. So I don't think we initially need to worry about some other country out there out innovating. Us, I don't think theorized, like almost all innovation in the world comes from America. It's true. I mean, a ridiculous percentage. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. And I think we need to be concerned about excess regulation, A tax structure that doesn't potentially doesn't promote. Promote innovation. Because the thing to remember is when companies are little, they're like tadpoles. I mean, they just die very easily. And so you need to have an environment which tries to protect little companies and help them get bigger. And Silicon Valley does that very well. America in general does that very well relative to other countries. But most other countries tend to foster and protect or otherwise they tend to protect the big companies. Big companies don't need protection. Very well put.
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Absolutely. Our family thanks so much.