SpaceX All-Hands Company Talk with Elon Musk (2017) September 8, 2017 Elon Musk's full company all-hands talk in September 2017, reviewing SpaceX's record year — the reflight of flight-proven rockets and Dragon, the road to ~20 launches, Falcon Heavy, and Mars. SpaceX released the video publicly on January 9, 2024.
Elon Musk's full company all-hands talk in September 2017, reviewing SpaceX's record year — the reflight of flight-proven rockets and Dragon, the road to ~20 launches, Falcon Heavy, and Mars. SpaceX released the video publicly on January 9, 2024.
Transcript Full transcript on x.com → All right. Congratulations on an awesome week. Two perfect flights and landings. Unbelievable. I think it was three days apart, basically. Well, okay, two, like four. Well, less than 72 hours. Whatever. It's like anyway. Buggy fast. Yeah. 40, 48 hours. Ish. Between flights. So that's. And they both work closely. Well. So yeah, this is a. Yeah. I don't know about you guys, but man, I felt real good after that one earlier this week. And does that make us. Are we 19 light landings?
18 landings. Sorry, 18 landings, yeah.
How many, how many landings? How many landings where the rocket doesn't subsequently explode? Okay, just 16. You mean 16.
It's like posing it as a math riddle. I mean, like, so we've got 16 successful landings and counting and we're starting to make it seem like it's normal for rockets to land, which is fantastic because that's how it should be. I mean, this year has been a revolution in the state of rocketry. It's pretty damn incredible what you've accomplished. I think you should feel very, very proud. Never want to suggest complacency, of course, but you should feel very proud of yourself for getting SpaceX to this point where we've now made every other rocket look ridiculous. It's like if you had an aircraft company and like SpaceX was making aircraft and our aircraft took off and landed at your destination and all of the competitors had aircraft. Once you got over your landing spot, you jump out with a parachute and the plane would crash. You're like, man, that seems like a bit of a waste. So it's pretty amazing to see that happen now on a regular basis. Multiple Reef Loan rockets as well. Yeah. I mean, this is nuts. So we did more launches than China or Russia or Europe or the rest of the US combined.
Yeah, already. I have to tell you, if I was at one of these competitors, I would be polishing my resume right now.
But again, don't want to get too cocky. Don't worry. Don't tempt fate in these situations. So they get very superstitious. Believe in anything. So, yeah, it's just incredible to see such a. I mean, and our rocket is. The shots of the rocket on ascent, I think are so beautiful. I mean it's one of the most beautiful pictures I've ever seen of anything. Weak in the knees. Weak in the knees. So we've launched now three flight proven boosters. Flight proven, yeah.
By the way, three was the important number for our pre flown customers going forward because the insurance community says after three successful, there's no difference in risk from their perspective. So,
Yeah, it's amazing how kind of sort of inverted the space industry is that you would think flying on a rocket that has never flown, never left the ground is somehow better than flying on a rocket that has completed, successfully completed an entire mission without any damage. Like, wait, like if we again go back to the aircraft thing, an aircraft rolls out of the factory, do you want to be the first one to fly it? No way. That's crazy. It's like gentle. Some very experienced test pilot will gently fly it around the airfield multiple times, increase speed and altitude and then each time, long way they'll have things they need to fix. And that's actually how rockets should work too. It should be like, hell, no, I don't want to be on the initial flight of a rocket. How do I know it works? That's because you get to the flight proven ones.
Yeah, we need to. Where's the music you want to sing? I'll play for my iPhone. I'm actually going to play for my iPhone.
We'll have to redo the video.
Can we redo the video? We're going to play it with some music. It.
What are you expecting that?
My wild desire I fell into a ring of fire I fell into a burning ring of fire I went down. It is doing bad. And the flames went higher and it burns, burns, burns. The ring of fire. The ring. I mean, Johnny Cash's predictions as a futurist are amazing. How did he know? How did he know? How did he know? I fell into a burning ring of fire. Got.
Oh, excuse me. Quiet. Like literally pressing me off. It won't go off. Okay, there you go. So CRS 12 was the last new Dragon space path, Dragon 1. Yep. So that, that's. Yeah, that's. That's really the end of a, of a great initial build era. So obviously you can fly several, several more times to Dragon 1, but it means we can shut down. Shut down or we can reallocate resources away from that at this point. Right.
Yeah. So in fact, Dragon reuse has really not got much awareness and I think that's something we need to educate the public on as well. So if you look at an F9 Dragon stack, a massive percentage of that system is reusable, obviously the booster, which is. Call it 70% of the. Sorry, I want to. I'm like Swallowing my words. And I want to try to enunciate the word. Sorry. I got almost no sleep last night. I was like, brain stopped, not working probably. Yeah. So that version one of Dragon has done incredible duty. I'd just like to. Let's just give it a hand to Dragon.
I mean, we designed that thing. When we designed Dragon 1, we had no idea what we were doing. Like, just. And so it worked. And it works so far. It's worked perfectly. Again, touch wood. I mean, it's just incredible track record. Also flown, done a reflowing Dragon. And so the keys obviously, for. What really matters for reflight is are we able to do rapid and Rapid and complete reflight. Rapid and reflight, where there's no refurb. That's the aspiration. So. Because obviously we have the example of the shuttle, which was semi reusable except for the primary launch structure, which was the. The thing took the loads, the big orange tank, all the rest of it was in theory reusable, but none of it was reusable quickly or inexpensively. And so the shuttle ended up costing more than an expendable vehicle with the same payload capability. And that actually stopped a lot of people from trying to create reusable rockets because they would look at the shuttle as a. As a case example of why reusability doesn't work. But that's a sample size of one. Okay. It's like not. Doesn't mean anything. But certainly something that's going to be very important for us to realize the fruits of the reuse is to have that reuse be as economically efficient as possible and as rapid as possible without affecting reliability.
Yeah, exactly. BFR is literally going to have. Is literally designed from the beginning to have dispatch capabilities that are equivalent to or better than a 747. So particularly for the boost stage, the boost stage is going to come back and land on the pad. You can basically do a boost stage launch of BFR every hour if you wanted to. 24 launches a day, maybe even more than that. So. That's when I say we're aiming for aircraft like reusability. It's exactly what I mean. As you guys know me, there's never a need to read between the lines. Just read the lines now. You know, you've got the. There's like so much. There's so much good stuff.
And this is only part of it, obviously.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. What if there's anything you want to say? Do you have a mic or I have a mic. Oh, you do?
I have a mic. I'm doing color commentary.
Okay, great. Perfect. Yes. Mystery Science Theater 3000. There's a node reference of node references. So the tie group bins, which are pretty fantastic looking and they seem to work really well, dramatically increase our control capability on reentry. These are obviously critical for the Falcon Heavy, particularly the side boosters. So that's worked out pretty well. But I think this is the largest titanium casting in the United States or maybe in the world. Do we know that or.
Which. Earth or Earth. Earth in the world. Okay. So, wow, that's just. It's like. Yeah. Way better than the world's biggest pumpkin. That's like world biggest tie forging or tie casting. And far better for usability since it does not need the, you know, all the little cork strips applied all over the place that catch on fire and make it look like the grid fin is burning and it's not going to and the rocket's going to crash, which is what it looked like last time. Falcon Heavy coming together. This will be exciting.
Yes. So, yeah, for Falcon Heavy launches, it'll be the largest and most powerful. Well, the most powerful and I guess highest payload to orbit of any rocket since Saturn V, if it reaches orbit. So Saturn Vampire, put that on, may it reach over, please.
I mean, it's sort of a vinyl coating.
Okay, we're screwed then. Just because this was vinyl, we need
We didn't practice this, by the way. It's a comedy routine. It's all extemporaneous.
Yeah, yeah. This is Tuesday night. Open mic night's Friday. Friday open mic night, yeah. So Falcon Heavy awesomeness, this is incredibly spectacular. You've got three times the thrust, three times the thrust of a Falcon 9. So we're talking about five million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Five million. Saturn V was only seven and a half. So Falcon Heavy would be two thirds of the thrust of a Saturn V. It's really mind blowingly large amount of thrust and with a payload capability that is certainly in full expendable mode is twice that of the more than twice that of the next best rocket. In fully apples to apples comparison and with reusability, it still is the highest payload to orbit, I believe of any rocket to leo. Is that. Am I just saying something that's completely untrue or is that a no?
Okay. Yeah, good. If it's not the highest, it's Very, very close. Particularly if you land the boosters downrange, you should still be able to recapture all three boosters, get the fairing, and then the only thing that you're not recovering is the interstage, sorry, the upper stage. So then the percentage of the vehicle that is reused is extremely high for a Falcon Heavy flight. Assuming all three cores come back and the fairing comes back, you're talking about a reusability percentage that's above 90. So it's like. That's really crazy. Yeah, So, yeah, so that's pretty huge progress on all fronts. I mean, these are literally these things that are coming up, the most exciting things on Earth period. Like, it's like, what else is going to happen if Falcon Heavy is going to launch in December or January? October.
Aspirationally. December. Yeah, we're aiming for December for Falcon Heavy launch. But like, it'll be the coolest thing in the world that happens in December. Or if it's January in January in all of Earth. That's what you're working on. You're working on the most interesting thing on Earth. Trying to get beyond Earth. We don't know what's out there, but for sure, on Earth it is. You're literally working on the most exciting thing. And yeah, so
It's going to have a really cool payload in those cones. So I really hope this thing doesn't blow up anyway. All right,
happy to talk. Okay, so the Crew Demo 1 spacecraft is completing a completed integration mate. It's in the clean room for final integration. Incredibly exciting. Like if Falcon Heavy is the most exciting thing in December or January, this is the next most exciting thing, I think.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, when Dragon 2 flies, it'll be first flight of Dragon 2 will again be the most exciting thing that happened on Earth for at least several weeks around it. So I don't know of anything that would be more aliens landing, you know, I don't know. But Dragon 2 is all about restoring the United States ability to transport astronauts to low Earth orbit and not be dependent on the Russians or the mercy of Putin, which is a very small thing. I mean, there hopefully. But he's charged the Soyuz seat prices started off at $20 million a piece. Now they're 80 million. 80 million per seat on Soyuz.
I bet they'll go down after we fly.
Yeah. Competition is a beautiful thing.
Ferrying 2.0. I'm really excited about ferrying fairing 2. Obviously it's a huge improvement over fairing 1 in every way and also very well designed for reusability. So we're getting very close to recovering the fairing intact and achieving reusability on a fairing, because the fully counterfeit cost of that fairing is on the order of five or six million dollars. So every time we get that bearing back and we reuse it, provided the recovery and the reuse cost, the recovery and refurb costs are minimal, we would be saving upwards of $5 million per launch with a reuse bearing. And I think it's good to have sort of thought experiments to understand why is it worthwhile to do something. Well, imagine if there was a giant pallet of cash floating through down from space, and all you have to do is catch it and you will have a pallet of $5 million in cash floating through the sky. You can either let it sink to the bottom of the sea or wash up God knows where. Or catch it. I think we should catch it. But that will also be. Nobody's ever done that. Nobody's ever. Nobody's ever. I'm not sure even anyone's really even have proposed that idea, have they? I don't know, maybe some in some obscure location it was even proposed, but I've never heard of it being proposed, even proposed, let alone getting done. So that'll be really cool. There's garrett.
Hey, it's garrett on the left,
I think. Looking pretty good, actually.
Yep, I see. Yeah. So I think we've got a pretty sweet looking. This is definitely the best looking spacesuit I've ever seen. Like, yeah, I think it's better than most. I mean, you're hard pressed to think of a movie spacesuit that's better. And those don't actually work. They're just like, you know, they don't actually work at all. But this looks good and it works. And it's a good basis for us to create an EVA suit so people can go outside in space. And a Mars suit that's comfortable, looks decent, and you can like, you know, go for a hike around Mars in your Mars suit. So we'll be making many variants of these suits with increasing levels of sophistication. I mean, have you seen the other space suits out there? It's like, man, like, one of the key things about what we're trying to do here is get kids who are trying to make a career decision to make a career decision in favor of space. And one of the things that has kind of really like a limbic resonance with people is if they see a spacesuit that looks awesome. And we want that like limbic system response to be. I want to wear that spacesuit one day. That's the reason to make it why it actually matters. To make it look super cool is to convince real smart kids coming out of college don't go work on Wall street and have your soul slowly drain from you. You can you know, work on rockets and maybe wear that spacesuit one day and help make life multi planetary. It still blows my mind. Like I was having a conversation just a few days ago with like someone, they're like well why do you care about Mars? Like or going anywhere away from Earth. I'm like what? What are you talking about? Of course. Don't you want a future where we're a space faring civilization and a multi planet species isn't that vastly more exciting? Vastly. I mean it's incomparably better than being a single planet species that's just going to sit around and sort of we will war with each other and eventually the civilization will collapse through some natural man made thing. That's what happens to one planet civilizations. But eventually it happens to multi planet civilizations too. But they might go for 100 million years, you know, so the first human writing is less than 10,000 years old. That's nothing. So anyway, trying to make the future good for humanity, make sure that there's an insurance policy for life itself and. But I think really in terms of getting people fired up, certainly what gets me fired up is that it makes the future exciting and you want to look forward to the future. You wake up in the morning, it's like yes, we're going to Mars. You know, going beyond, even beyond Mars, we'll go to Ceres, we'll go to the moons of Jupiter and sort of, you know, planet and moon hop all the way out of the solar system. Like damn, damn.
We've got some charts here on Texas and what they've been able to achieve as far as improving rate and making things easier, all so that they can focus on even more exciting things.
Yeah, so we're really running a lot of Block 5 engines. Like firing engines become routine and then hopefully we'll be moving soon to we just put the to integrated stage testing so the engines do not get fired individually. We just mount the engines here in Hawthorne, send it to Texas, static fire proof the tank and instead of like saying things back and forth all the time and reintegrating things here, which is like the logistical nightmare, particularly as our launch rate increases. So yeah, Things are feel like they're going great in Texas. And yeah, We have static fire for all. The Draco thrust is complete. Yeah, those things have worked out pretty well. And then Raptor feels like it should have some sound too. Yeah, it's whisper quiet. This engine could hear a pin drop. It was a very large pin. Still going. This is not a loop. This is actually the engine still going. Still going. Yeah. All right. So yeah, Congratulations to the Raptor team for developing an engine that has gone through 1200 seconds of firing 42 main engine tests and has not blown up. Like let me tell you, in the early days of Merlin, which is a far less sophisticated engine than Raptor, it blew up a lot in the beginning. We're like yay, it's still there. You have some launch anomaly or a fire. So this is a fire, that's no problem. If it's like tiny pieces of shrapnel, then that happened quite a lot. And most engine development programs, in fact there might not be a single engine development program where they managed to get this much out of an initial dev engine. The space shuttle main engine developments, they would vaporize those engines constantly. And we're at roughly 200 bar pressure in the chamber. So it's very high pressure system. And the flight design will be a step beyond the this development unit. It'll be lighter, more capable in terms of throttling, end up having crazy high thrust weight. It's going to have 250 bar chamber pressure. And then over time I think we'll be able to inch that up to 300 bars which are really incredible. And then there'll be Raptor 1, Raptor 2, Raptor 3 and with BFR and BFS we're making version one, there'll be version two, version three. So if you don't. Only a tiny portion of the company is working on BFR and Raptor. That's sort of just like, sort of like an advanced scouting mission. And then as we are able to ramp down our engineering time on Falcon and Dragon and free up production resources, then we'll gradually move, I don't know, probably 70, 80% of the company towards the BFR system. But if it feels like, well, maybe I'm getting left out of all the cool BFR stuff, don't worry about it because there'll be BFR9 or 9 version 9 that's confusing with Falcon 9, but there'll be many versions of many, many versions of VFR as far into the future as we can imagine. And yeah, people think that the size of VFR version 1 is big. You should see what it looks like when you say now let's really optimize the cost per ton to the surface of Mars. You start looking at like 1000-1500 metric tons of payload to the surface of Mars as opposed to 100 tons with version 1. So either VFR version 2 or BFR version 3 would be aiming for an order of magnitude increase in payload To Mars over BFR1. I think you need. BFR1 is, I think it's the exact right place to start because it's not too big, that it's unwieldy for satellite launches. So it's small enough to be really solid for Earth satellite launchers and give customers a bigger fairing, 9 meter diameter fairing. So you could conceivably put for example like an 8 meter diameter dish or have the, if you want to launch like Super Hubble that had order of magnitude more resolution, you could do that with vfr obviously launching our own communication satellites, launching dodo intel satellites, science satellites. And if you saw my presentation in Adelaide, which I did after a really insane amount of jet lag and realizing I am not a spring chicken, I am like a late summer, early fall chicken, can I just shake off the jet lag that easy? But I think I got some of the key points across and I think one of the most mind blowing things there is that the cost per flight of BFR as a fully reusable system is less than the cost per flight of Falcon 1. Like that's mind blowing. But when you think about it, actually that makes total sense because if you wanted to charter a 747 round trip from California to Australia, it's half a million dollars. So round trip, you have the entire 747 to yourself there and back. Half a million dollars. If you wanted to buy a new, a single engine turboprop plane, it's at least one and a half million dollars. And it can't even reach Australia. And you're like can't reach Hawaii, you'll be like having to bail out and swim the rest of the way. So you can see these. It really makes sense. Like of course, something with high reusability like 747, even though it's a gigantic aircraft or an A380 or pick one gigantic aircraft. Cost per mission is less than tiny expendable aircraft. Like three times higher, four times higher, Not a little bit different. Yeah, so it's pretty crazy. That's how significant reusability is. I Find this something that we really have to always be reminding ourselves of is we want rapid and complete reusability. We do not even want to do a paint. We don't even want to paint the rocket between flights like we did that with a commercial airliner and painted like a south repainted Southwest Airlines flight flight every time it landed. Well, I don't know, you'd need a day or something. So then you can go from southwest doing say eight to ten flights a day on a 737 going back and forth to San Francisco to one. They just dropped the value of it by an order of magnitude. And all you did was paint the plane with some very quick drying plane if it's only a day. So again, really need to keep reminding ourselves of the utter importance of rapid and complete reusability. And congratulations to the satellite team for getting Tintin. I think Tintin is almost ready to ship. It's planning to fly in December. There's an amazing amount of technology in Tinson and yeah, it'll be the first SpaceX satellite. Now the satellite stuff I'm always a little reluctant to talk about because it generates like headlines and stuff. And really we just need on satellite stuff to be real quiet, sort of heads down, get the technology done, get it up there, get at least 400 so that we can start turning on satellite broadband in many places of the world. And the satellite stuff is actually what's going to enable us to take our revenue stream from, call it 3 to 4 billion a year. Currently we're about a $2 billion year run rate as we win more business, more NASA business, more DoD intel business, you know, but as you, and then, and then a private crew. So private crew, private astronauts that want to either go to space station or do a loop around the moon. That's maybe another half billion a year or something like that. But if you just think of all of the launch, all of the things you can do with launch in a conventional way, really tap out. Maximum 4 billion, but probably closer to 3, 3.5 billion. So still a significant increase from where we are now. But the satellite Internet is what will allow us to get to $30 billion a year in revenue. So the satellite stuff is going to be extremely important, extremely important because with that kind of cash flow we could, we can actually build that base on Mars. Even if no one helped us. And they will, there will be people who want to help us in the private sector, public sector. I really hope, I hope NASA, you know, dream scenario would be that NASA issues something like for the. Something just like the original cargo resupply, you know, the cargo carts, where it was like multiple competitors, you bet a fixed price with milestones. And if you don't meet your milestones, you get fired and they recompute the remaining money to someone else. So in the beginning it was SpaceX and Rocket Plane Kistler. Rocket Plane Kistler, no surprise, did not meet their milestones. But then Orbital stepped in and they did. So that would be really cool to have something where it's outcome based. There are clear milestones, but it also doesn't have a ton of onerous sort of bureaucracy that impedes progress. Yeah, cost for Mars. Yeah, it's cost for Mars. That worked out really good with, particularly with the progress side of things.
But big aerospace companies don't want that program.
That means they have to like work hard. I don't like that. Like situations where losing is not possible. All right, so we've made great progress on refurbishment facility. We have something I really personally can't wait to have active is the SpaceX boundary. So we're going to actually, we're actually building our own foundry where we can make advanced materials of any type with a very short lead time. So instead of being at the mercy of casting suppliers which will charge us huge amounts of money and take ages and deliver a mediocre result that has generally been. There might be one rare casting supplier that I've never heard of who does that, but otherwise all casting suppliers are super long time, crazy money and mediocre outcome. So having our own foundry here, we think we can cut that iteration by at least an order of magnitude. So you could design a part, get the tooling fab and cast it and have that part done inside of a month and long term inside of a week. Yeah, so that's a. I don't know if. Is Charlie coming somewhere?
Hey, do you want to say a few words about the foundry? Yeah, it's like 15 years of. 15 years of being in casting supplier health where we've been. So it's like it might be nice to finally exit that.
SpaceX employee
Exactly. So, yeah, we've had lots of people working on putting together all the plans for the foundry and the really great news is it's kind of bringing together the materials team we started here a couple years ago, as well as all the production folks and talking about that. But we're going to be able to do everything in house from basically CAD drawing to having the final Part going onto the rockets or most of them is going to be on the engines components.
I mean, the thing that you described to me was. I mean, actually I found it hard to believe, but I think it is. There's nothing in physics that says it can't be true. But what do you think? Obviously not right at the beginning, but let's say we go forward two years from now, half ass from you get the part design to somebody has a product that can fly.
SpaceX employee
Right. So in terms of the actual touch times we need, it's probably about a week. So I said it. Yeah. So part of that. Part of that is you can get
SpaceX employee
one week. One week, yeah. So everybody knows what the goal is. A big part of that is being able to simulate what we need to do. Because a lot of the industry uses a ton of trial and error. And one of the benefits we have is a lot of understanding. We can actually simulate how the casting actually works so we don't have to make a whole bunch of molds and then do it over again. So we get to make the mold right away and we can print the mold. Nowadays, we don't make it out of wax. We make it out of printed plastic. And then we have some really cool robotic machines that can basically shell that mold in just a day today. Usually that takes weeks and weeks at traditional suppliers.
SpaceX employee
Yeah, yeah. And then again, they screw it up and have to do it all over again. So the casting part actually is really slow or really fast. It just, you know, you melt and pour it in a few minutes and it's going to be really cool looking. So I want all you guys to come by and take a look. When we get the casting fac facility going, it's pretty cool to have lots of molten metal flown around.
I think it'd be cool to just say, like, just sort of test ourselves, to say, how fast could it be done? In theory, from CAD design to here's your finished cast part. That's flyable. The actual just in. I think physics will allow us to do this in a day.
SpaceX employee
Yeah, we can actually do all the physical things in a day.
Half a day. 12 seconds. This is like, it's a subtle thing that many people who have not been exposed to the terribleness that is the casting supply chain will realize this will literally be the most advanced and most capable foundry, I think, anywhere, anywhere on earth. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, you know, the foundries and
SpaceX employee
I've been in all of them.
So this is going to be the most advanced.
Okay, yeah. So there we go. This is like a huge, this is like an amazing, like, you know, it's amazing. A sort of hidden ace. To have the two requirements you gave me with, it had to be the most advanced foundry and it had to
SpaceX employee
be five minutes from the desk, so.
Yeah, exactly. So I can go see it, no problem. So it's going to be just like five minutes that way. Yep. So yeah, I'm super excited about the foundry and being able to iterate rapidly on advanced metallurgy and for production.
SpaceX employee
And as an example, we're designing a very custom alloy for Raptors that's going to be going in, we'll be passing it in our own foundry. It's going to be awesome.
So yeah, all right, well, I'll just say I'll repeat those words. So the Raptor, particularly on the, on the ox pump side has to have a very oxidation resistant metal. Otherwise if you have, you know, high pressure hot pure ox or very oxy rich gas, it will want to combust almost anything. So and, but it's also got to hold high pressure. And so we've been working on an alloy to achieve that. I think we're at least in version 2, maybe 3 of the alloy. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that foundry is going to be an amazing superpower that SpaceX possesses that no one else does anywhere. So. Yeah. And then we finally acquired a company. SpaceX's entire existence has grown organically. Most companies grow through acquisitions like the vast neuro. The growth is acquisitions. Ours has been entirely organic, with one tiny exception being EDM Express. Because I kept asking, there's gotta be some companies out there that we'd like to acquire. And acid test being is if we interviewed those engineers, or at least a large number of those people for SpaceX that we would hire them. And so we found one in EDM Express so that they're now part of SpaceX. Right. So far so good on 2017 launch manifest. So we have five launches to go, which would take us to, yeah, 20 launches for the year, pretty incredible. And then next year we'll be doing probably 30 launches. There's 27 slated right now, but I think there's probably some other launches that will answer that period of time. So they call it like approximating 30 launches in 2018. Once we start launching our own Constellation, we'll be using even in the beginning, probably 15 to 20 Falcon 9 flights a year. So we'll be doing a launch a
probably in the 2019, probably mid-2019. We'll be approaching a cadence of one launch every seven days. Which means some launches will be just a day apart or even same day because it's not evenly spread. So if you think it's crazy now, stay tuned for this crazy train is going on as a long journey. And then when we get to, when we start flying, VFR is like the booster is intended to do 1000 flights a year, at least per year, not lifetime per year. I'll try to make that change as close as with the expectation between flights of zero refurb, literally zero. Now there will be scheduled maintenance. So just like jets, you know, jets have scheduled maintenance, scheduled inspections and that kind of thing, we're going to do the same thing with bfr. In fact we're going to be using the same, a lot of the same rules and regulations that apply to commercial airliner aircraft which are incredibly reliable. And yeah, we'll be doing probably more than a thousand long term, maybe more than a thousand launches of the booster and then each that the VUSA would fly to orbit initially with the bfs. And then I still feel a little nervous saying those words in front of sometimes a conservative. Not you guys, but when I'm there with the Vice President, I just had a small meeting with the Vice President and he was talking about bfr. I'm like wow, big Falcon. Yeah, it sure is. Definitely. But if you just do the basic math of what does it take to create a self sustaining city on Mars. We're going to have to be launching something down the road. Something on the order of. It's at least it's not 10 bfs that's, that's way too tiny. And it's, it's probably not a hundred. That's still probably too tiny. It's probably on the order of a thousand VFs, you know, big freaking spaceship like, like Battlestar Galactica like friggin migrating to Mars on, with every rendezvous, something on the order of a thousand because that's what you need to create a viable civilization. You could do it slower if you had something on the order of 100, but it's definitely not less than 100. And then for every ship flight the booster is going to probably fly five to seven times with most, with all of those flights except for the ship being on the tank being a tanker. So this enormous beast of a booster is going to be going up and down like an elevator. Several times. Yeah, several, several times a day. I'm highly confident, I am certain we can do this. Certain. No doubt the path may be bumpy along the way, but the physics is right. I think we've got a design for the ship and for the booster that I think is pretty damn great, particularly for version one. So we're going to try and knock that sucker out as fast as possible and get it flying. And yeah, the future's like, it's like my mind sort of blown. Has blown several times. You know, just like thinking about this, wow, how can this be real? But it is, it's real. Yeah. Yeah. So. And like I said, I think there's a good chance there's more than that in 2018. Yeah. And then next year obviously launching the first American astronaut crew since the shuttle retired in a US vehicle. Shuttle's last flight was what was that, like 6, 2011. Yeah, six years ago. So next year it'll be seven years, a seven year gap since the United States was able to put astronauts into orbit with a U.S. vehicle. And that's really, that's gonna be, I mean that's gonna be super next level. Like all of Earth will be tuned in for that launch. Like basically Earth. Some. More than a billion people will watch that launch. Yeah. Very important to get it right. Yeah, that's going to be a high pocket factor day unavoidably should be. So Gwen, this especially is something that you should be talking about. I've had almost no exposure to this.
So we are doing pretty well on sales, both commercial and government. The commercial market for geo satellites has come down, unfortunately not our fault. But interestingly, people that want to fly in Dragon. So private crew has increased pretty dramatically. We're actually working on three separate private crew missions, which is really exciting. Actually. Four. Four separate private crew missions. We did sell over 100 launches in our history very recently with $12 billion in contract both passed. And moving forward, also a third of our missions right now. We just flew three and I said that was the critical number for customers to convert. A third of our missions going forward were all in pre flown. I think by late next year it'll be 50% and then I think in 2019 it just won't be part of the conversation. It'll just be a rocket. Sometimes it's new, sometimes it's been flown before. It doesn't matter.
It'll be normal. Yeah. No one will even ask. I already talked about private astronaut missions. We are competing right now for six national security space missions, three GPSs and three actually they're Falcon Heavy launches. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we're going to win the three GPS launches because those are on Falcon 9s. But the heavy missions are going to be tough for us to win. But still, I'm hoping we get at least one of those three and we'll find out starting in December through March or so of next year. So definitely on the government side, they're starting to rely more heavily on us.
Absolutely. And I do want to emphasize like the Falcon Heavy missions are really important. Those are very high dollar value missions. Like they bring in a ton of revenue for SpaceX because we're competing against like, you know, like a very big hog as a competitor, like real fat hog. So they're just pillaging the taxpayer right now. ULA is for a heavy class launch. You don't even know what want to know what that number is? It's like criminal. It's nuts. So this is something where we can offer the government and the taxpayer effectively a massive reduction in cost while still having it be a hugely positive cash flow for SpaceX. So it's a great win win situation. But we have to prove that Falcon Heavy works because they. Look at one point I was thinking, should we call it the Falcon 27? Because that would continue the naming convention with respect to boost engines. But that sounded a bit scary. So Falcon Heavy, that fooled no one. So I want to just be clear. Falcon Heavy is not an afterthought or something that is of low importance. It's actually very important and probably has in excess of a billion dollar a year revenue or something like that. At least a billion. It could be more for Falcon Heavy launches which if we didn't have Falcon Heavy we would not be able to access.
Is that it's a little high, but it could be.
Yeah. But compared to what they pay for, like, yeah. Save more than a billion. Yeah. Delta 4 heavy is like 800 million something. Nuts. All right. They won't say it's like, you know, like trying to buy some, something, some rugged flea market or something. It's like they won't say what the price is because they want everything to be negotiated. But what we hear is that Delta 4 Heavy is something on the order of $800 million a flight. That is. And that's if they fly every year and if it's higher, if they don't.
Oh, half a billion. Oh, it just gets better. This is like good from the sense of like this is not going to be hard to compete with, but sad because of the enormous amount of tax dollars that are being torched with a rocket with Delta 4 Heavy being $800 million if it launches every year, which it's not currently stated to do, and 1.3 billion if it launches every two years. That's like, we're like less than the number after the decimal point with more capability. Yeah. So. We do want to watch our cost growth though, as we get. It's amazing how costs expand to fully available volume. And I do think at times we've been a little cavalier about cost and. But it's always important to remember that the money we have to help make life multi planetary, which is the fundamental goal of the company, the fundamental goodness that we're trying to, the great goodness that we're trying to help make happen is very much dependent on how much revenue do we get minus how much cost do we incur. We want that to be a big gap so that we can apply that difference to Mars colonization and doing a lunar base and other things. I'll come around to the lunar base thing. I think it's like we should have a lunar base, but it's got to be like a permanently occupated base. It's sort of like we've got a base in Antarctica and we should have a base on the moon and then just go anywhere in the solar system. Homework. This, this chores, this chores. The. I don't. First I'd like to say thank you and express deep appreciation for going through the certification process. I know that is very often boring and painful, but it is necessary, it's absolutely necessary in order for us to achieve the Mars goal. So sometimes you think if you're working on some government certification thing and it seems like it's really frustrating, you just remember that what you're doing is important. It's vital to the future. We cannot succeed without that certification. Yeah, Yeah. That clap was for all the people taking the pain of which there was light. So this is a sweet machine. It looks amazing. Like I really feel good about, I really feel good about this design. It's so far, it's so far in advance of anything that has ever been proposed. It's just not even comparable really. We're talking about something here which is designed to be able to operate in, to be able to land on planets with or moons with no atmosphere, a thin atmosphere, a thick atmosphere, to be able to do point to point flights on Earth, which actually the general public is more excited about than going to other planets. They're just like Earth, 99% plus people. They would actually see the value of all of SpaceX's value being in Earth point to point Earth, because that's the thing they'll use because they want to leave the comfy environment of Earth. So I think that the long distance Earth to Earth stuff is actually going to end up being a real big thing. I mean, if you could say take sort of a fast hydrofoil out to a floating platform off of, you know, out in the ocean of LA, you could get there in 15, 20 minutes with something that's doing, you know, 50, 60 knots. Like they have these ferries between Hong Kong and Macau that operate at that speed real smooth and process customs while you're on the ship. So you just get on the ship, process customs, have your bags in stowage, so you get rid of the whole airport thing. Because airports are real hell. So effectively, because we weren't using the whole airport infrastructure, we sidestep that with basically just big drone ships. We scale up the drone ship situation. We're getting really good at that. And so you could be like a 15 minute, maybe 20 minute boat ride, embark and then half an hour flight from, maybe 35, 40 minute flight from LA to London or Paris. So it's really nice. We know this, but most people don't that anything in low Earth orbit is circling the Earth every 90 minutes. So it's going around the Earth several times a day. Which means a system like this, you could actually cover all of those hops with one vehicle in a day. You could literally bounce. And most at that time it's going to be on the launch pad getting refueled or refilled, I should say. And the economic, I'm actually feeling pretty optimistic about the economics of Earth to Earth transport for a couple of reasons. One is that because it's moving so fast, you can get 10 times as much use out of it as an airliner. So if you go for LA to Sydney, it's about a 14 hour flight. You can't even do a round trip in. Even if they did their absolute best, it would take more than 20, it would take 28 hours. And that's if they land and they get like Formula One style fuel injection. It's 28 hours. This is California to Australia, 30 minutes. So maybe 35, you know, round up a little, you know, extra five minutes of matter. But the point is that it's, it's more than a, it's what it's, you can use. You can use this system 10 times for every one use of a commercial airliner. Like what? Wow. Like that, that's, that was, that's quite a revelation. So your capital cost is then 10 times better than an aircraft, provided we have truly achieved rapid reflight without refurbishment. Which also I'm highly confident can be done for Earth. Earth stuff. Because the heating is not. Is not so crazy that the heating is mild compared to rendering from like Mars or someplace further out in the solar system. And then we're also using the cheapest source fuel that exists on Earth, which is liquid methane. So super cheap fuel. It's an of ratio of 3.5, so it's three and a half tons of oxygen for every one ton of methane. Methane's super cheap. LOX is practically free or very low cost. You can get lux for like 5 cents a kilogram, 4 cents a kilogram, probably maybe 3 cents. It's just air that you compress and liquefy and minus the nitrogen. Actually if you ask most people what are you breathing right now? They would say oxygen. It's like, no, you're mostly breathing nitrogen. Yeah. Then try explaining rockets and see what happens. Anyway, this is going to be a pretty incredible system. That's just version one. It's just version one. Isn't that stunning? That's like, wow, that's so beautiful. And yeah, we are actually going to do that. They're actually going to do that. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. My mind's kind of blown, so it's hard for me to talk. I still have a few more slides to go. I know this is running long. We'll. So we'll go through the rest of the slides quickly. There's just so much material. So much is being done, so much is being accomplished. I've never felt better about the future of the company. The potential is just utterly mind blowing. Yeah. I mean, and that's what I've said this before many times, but it's an honor working with you. Thank you for what you're doing to make this happen. And I know it's real hard. You know, sometimes if you're wondering why are you working late or sacrificing this, that or the other thing. Just remember what we're trying to do. This really matters. It really matters. Priorities. As always, reliability is number one. We've got this certification. These are all really important things. Getting Pad 40 back afterwards, blowing smithereens. Falcon heavy. Yeah, you guys can read. But perhaps the thing worth noting on the slide, the important thing worth noting is what's at the bottom of the list as the lowest priority. It's bfr. So if in doubt, all those other things actually have a higher priority than BFR work. Because if we don't do those things. There will be no bfr. We must do those things. This is the. In the adventure game, you must first do these quests. Let me speak in true nerd. If you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, which I did a lot, Then we must complete the subquest before the big boss fight at the end. Yeah, as I mentioned, every bit of spending matters. Even if it's like $0.50 or $50,000 or $500,000, it all adds up. So we want to be really frugal with every penny we spend because we got to get that gap between revenue and cost to be as big as possible in order to develop, to be able to pay for the development of BFR and the satellite constellation. This is some of, you know, some SpaceX values, I think. Well, I mean, I don't know if I completely agree with these, but physics, please. But yeah, just focus on the mission. Always remember that. What is the longer term mission? Our mission is to revolutionize spaceflight, make life multi planetary, increase the probable lifespan of human civilization, and have something that people all around the world can wake up to and feel inspired. There are so few things, so few things that people can be inspired about. When you read the news, it's all like one terrible thing after another. How many things are inspiring that actually make you want to live? It's one of them best one, I think. Yeah, I don't know about that last point. It's working smarter a lot longer. The truth is we need to work smart and long. We do need to wear smart and long, but it can't be at a level where you get fried. It's got to be like marathon level, not sprint level. Nobody can sprint for a whole marathon length. You'll just die. So it's really, it is work smart and work hard, but at a rate that does not cause you to deep fry your brain. Yeah, you know, but the reality is like we're trying to colonize other planets, build a whole revolutionary earth to earth transport system and provide global Internet. This does not happen on a 40 hour week, no matter how smart you are. It does not happen on a 40 hour week. No way.
The key on the work smarter piece is if there's some stupid thing in your way, there's some dumb rule, or there's something that's getting in your way of doing the best work, which is actually the best way to do work because it's exciting and you feel like a sense of accomplishment. But if there's something getting in your way, please tell your manager your supervisor, your director, email me or Elon, we're here to fix and get rid of the shit that's in your way so that you can do great work. Yeah, that's our job.
Exactly. I say work smarter. I agree. I think what Bryn's saying is right. Like, if you find yourself doing something that seems really pointless and inefficient and could potentially be featured in a Dilbert cartoon or that show the Office, it's like, wait a second, this sounds like Dunder Mifflin. That's wrong. There's something messed up. You should definitely fight the system and push. What the. Do not accept the foolishness that you were given. Fight back at anything that seems like corporate bureaucracy is just happening, like entropy.