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ELON: SOMEONE HAS TO SOLVE ROCKET REUSABILITY — WHETHER IT’S SPACEX OR SOMEONE ELSE “The cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon 9 is 0.3% of the cost of the rocket. So, it's a very tiny number. It's very similar to an airplane. How much does it... cost to fuel up an airplane, and how much does it cost to buy an airplane? They're very different things. If humanity is ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining base on another planet, it's critical that we solve this problem. Whether it's SpaceX or someone else, someone has to solve the problem, and we can have a hundred-fold reduction in the cost of spaceflight. That's what SpaceX has been trying to do, and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company. So far, I've not been very successful in that regard, but I think we have a handle on it. We've got a design that closes in the simulations. If we can build that thing, it should work.” Source: SXSW, March 2013show more

Mario Nawfal

3,508,131 subscribers

2,652,391 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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11 Comments

I Love America News1 year ago

MAGA!

UserInterface5 years ago

Will Elon Musk and SpaceX Ever Reach Mars? #mars #elonmusk #science

Relaxing News1 year ago

Reminder that nobody from Biden admin publicly congratulated Elon or SpaceX for catching the Starship with giant mechanical arms, representing the critical first step of his multi planetary vision.

Freedomite1 year ago

@elonmusk We are witnessing the tinkering of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, the Wright Bros, and Henry Ford in real time. @elonmusk is generational and @X puts us in the same room.

XJournalK1 year ago

@elonmusk Rapidly Reusable Rockets 🚀 RRRs

Rahim Ali🚀🤖🔋1 year ago

I love how Elon and the team at SpaceX are relentless in solving rocket reusability no matter how tough the task at hand is it does not make them want to walk away and let another company figure it. SpaceX wouldn’t be where it is today without the relentless pursuit engraved into the culture and with flight 7 on the horizon many learnings will be applied to future flights. Good job to the SpaceX team and Elon.

Crazy Moments1 year ago

How would you summarize Elon Musk in one word?

United Patriots1 year ago

@elonmusk Elon doing everything in his power to save America, and in turn, Humanity.

RT1 year ago

@elonmusk Gateway of Mars.

Jacob1 year ago

@elonmusk Spending fortunes on disposable rockets is as absurd as throwing away airplanes after each flight.

Tardi1 year ago

TARDI's preferred ride is @SpaceX, and we are here since the daw of time and saw all rides.

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DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis: Elon is doing amazing things with SpaceX “I think there will be a solution to the energy problem. So free, pretty much free, renewable, clean energy one way or another, fusion or better solar. And then that will unlock us to really travel the stars. Because the main cost, Elon does amazing work with SpaceX and those things, but the main cost is still the rocket fuel, right? The energy cost. So if that's sort of zero somehow, because we can just make infinite rocket fuel out of seawater once we’ve cracked fusion.” Source: Muskonomy

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Elon Musk on Starship today: "The fundamental breakthrough of Starship is that it will be the first orbital rocket that is fully reusable, so this might sound like an obvious thing, but because in every other mode of transport, whether that's aircraft, cars, bicycles, horses, ships, these are all we take it for granted that they are reusable, an aircraft journey would be very expensive if you had to throw the plane away every time, and that's how rockets have been in the past, but it's very difficult from a technology standpoint to achieve full reusability for a rocket. We've got part of the way there with Falcon 9, but we'll get all the way there with Starship, and once you achieve full reusability, then it's simply a cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant, because now you can reuse all aspects of the vehicle, and the propellant we used for Starship is liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the cheapest propellant you could possibly get. The cost of propellant for Starship will be less than the cost of jet aviation fuel, which means that you should be able to actually send cargo to space for less than the cost of cargo on an airplane going on a transoceanic trip."

Elon Musk on Starship today: "The fundamental breakthrough of Starship is that it will be the first orbital rocket that is fully reusable, so this might sound like an obvious thing, but because in every other mode of transport, whether that's aircraft, cars, bicycles, horses, ships, these are all we take it for granted that they are reusable, an aircraft journey would be very expensive if you had to throw the plane away every time, and that's how rockets have been in the past, but it's very difficult from a technology standpoint to achieve full reusability for a rocket. We've got part of the way there with Falcon 9, but we'll get all the way there with Starship, and once you achieve full reusability, then it's simply a cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant, because now you can reuse all aspects of the vehicle, and the propellant we used for Starship is liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the cheapest propellant you could possibly get. The cost of propellant for Starship will be less than the cost of jet aviation fuel, which means that you should be able to actually send cargo to space for less than the cost of cargo on an airplane going on a transoceanic trip."

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ELON MUSK: "The major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. No one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial re usability with Falcon 9. We've now landed the boost stage over 500 times, but we have to throw away the upper stage. The upper stage burns up on reentry and the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium sized jet. So with Starship, which is a giant rocket, it's the largest flying machine ever made, we should prove full reusability, which will be a profound invention, because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability. So it makes putting large satellites into space very low, very cheap."

ELON MUSK: "The major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. No one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial re usability with Falcon 9. We've now landed the boost stage over 500 times, but we have to throw away the upper stage. The upper stage burns up on reentry and the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium sized jet. So with Starship, which is a giant rocket, it's the largest flying machine ever made, we should prove full reusability, which will be a profound invention, because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability. So it makes putting large satellites into space very low, very cheap."

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Elon Musk: Starship is next-level. It's the first rocket that can take us to Mars. “Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, an order of magnitude or something like that. It's a lot. It's really next-level. The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and then above that we cannot afford to do it. Right now, you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars. So, we need to get that to something that is actually possible at all.” From: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 28, 2021

Elon Musk: Starship is next-level. It's the first rocket that can take us to Mars. “Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, an order of magnitude or something like that. It's a lot. It's really next-level. The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and then above that we cannot afford to do it. Right now, you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars. So, we need to get that to something that is actually possible at all.” From: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 28, 2021

ELON CLIPS

1,190,578 views • 10 months ago

ELON: STARSHIP IS THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED ROCKET BY FAR “Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by an order of magnitude or something like that. It's really next-level. The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and then above that we cannot afford to do it. Right now you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars. So, we need to get that to something that is actually possible at all.” Source: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 2021

ELON: STARSHIP IS THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED ROCKET BY FAR “Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by an order of magnitude or something like that. It's really next-level. The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and then above that we cannot afford to do it. Right now you couldn't fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars. So, we need to get that to something that is actually possible at all.” Source: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 2021

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🧠David Friedberg explains the great hope of Artificial Superintelligence: Massive leverage on time to solve thousand-year problems "I don't think that humans are limited in our ability to solve problems." "I think we're limited in terms of time, and what digital intelligence gives us is leverage on time so that we can now tackle ever more complex tasks." "This idea of superintelligence is that it could give us immense leverage in solving that complex problem that we otherwise may be challenged to solve over decades, or hundreds of years, or think about one day solving a problem that would take humans thousands of years to solve." "So if I as a human said, 'I would like to harness fusion power similar to what the sun uses to make energy, and I wanna do that on Earth,' today, we're in, call it year 40 or 50 of a research cycle of humans trying to solve that particularly complex problem." "It's a scientific problem, it's a discovery problem, it's an engineering problem." "Functionally, leveraging to complexity is where this becomes super compelling for humans." "And it's why I think we can and should be highly optimistic about living very long lives, and traveling anywhere we want, and having abundance in food, and having abundance in resources, and having abundance in recouping our time to do the things we want to do instead of the things that we have to do today."

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The All-In Podcast

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Elon Musk, 13 years ago: A fully and rapidly reusable rocket is barely possible. SpaceX is going to try to do it. We could fail, but we're going to try to do it. “The pivotal breakthrough that's necessary, that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary, 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. It's just a very tough engineering problem. I wasn't sure it could be solved for a while. But then, relatively recently, probably in the last twelve 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.” National Press Club, 2011

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ELON MUSK EXPLAINS THE REAL PURPOSE OF SPACEX "SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it, as precarious and delicate, because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else We have 9,000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship So the bottom line is, I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues That's the purpose of SpaceX"

ELON MUSK EXPLAINS THE REAL PURPOSE OF SPACEX "SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it, as precarious and delicate, because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else We have 9,000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship So the bottom line is, I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues That's the purpose of SpaceX"

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2,147,382 views • 5 months ago

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Elon Musk: We hope to achieve full rocket reusability this year, a profound invention that will drop the cost of access to space by a factor of 100. “The key breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. No one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial reusability with Falcon 9 by landing the boost stage. We've now landed the boost stage over 500 times, but we have to throw away the upper stage. The upper stage burns up on reentry for Falcon 9, and the cost of that is equivalent to a small-to-medium-sized jet. Hopefully this year, we should prove full reusability for Starship, which will be a profound invention because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability.” Interview at WEF, January 22, 2026

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Trump: And if they're not willing to make a movie inside the US and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. So that's sort of a threat to our country in the sense and it's been a very popular thing.. moviemakers love it.

Trump: And if they're not willing to make a movie inside the US and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. So that's sort of a threat to our country in the sense and it's been a very popular thing.. moviemakers love it.

Acyn

114,281 views • 1 year ago

ELON MUSK — REAL PURPOSE OF SPACEX "SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it, as precarious and delicate, because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else We have 9,000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship So the bottom line is, I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues That's the purpose of SpaceX"

ELON MUSK — REAL PURPOSE OF SPACEX "SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it, as precarious and delicate, because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else We have 9,000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship So the bottom line is, I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues That's the purpose of SpaceX"

🌋🌋 Deep₿lueCrypto 🌋🌋

16,161 views • 5 months ago

Elon Musk: I started reading about rockets to understand why they're so freaking expensive. “I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so freaking expensive. Where does the $60 million go for the Delta II? Now Delta II, I think, is $100 million or something, some crazy number. And Delta II is a relatively small rocket. If you go to one of the bigger rockets, it's anywhere from $200 to $400 million. Anyway, so I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and that they could be a lot less. Even in an expendable format, they could be less. And that if one could make them reusable, like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically, the cost of space travel would drop dramatically. Because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket. It's like a plane. How much is the cost of the fuel in the plane versus the plane itself? It's at least a two-order-of-magnitude difference. But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel.” Interview at the Computer History Museum, 2013

Elon Musk: I started reading about rockets to understand why they're so freaking expensive. “I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so freaking expensive. Where does the $60 million go for the Delta II? Now Delta II, I think, is $100 million or something, some crazy number. And Delta II is a relatively small rocket. If you go to one of the bigger rockets, it's anywhere from $200 to $400 million. Anyway, so I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and that they could be a lot less. Even in an expendable format, they could be less. And that if one could make them reusable, like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically, the cost of space travel would drop dramatically. Because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket. It's like a plane. How much is the cost of the fuel in the plane versus the plane itself? It's at least a two-order-of-magnitude difference. But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel.” Interview at the Computer History Museum, 2013

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"What is P vs NP and how does it relate to human knowledge?" Avi Wigderson (Turing Award & Abel Prize winner): "In a very basic way, all the problems we want to solve are really NP problems. A subset of it is the problems we can solve. So the question of P versus NP is whether we can solve all the problems we want to solve, whether we can know everything we want to know. This is basically about the limits of our knowledge. You can think there is no limit to what we may want to know but I claim that essentially in any human endeavor, what people are searching for have the property that when a solution is found, it is easily recognized. NP are all problems that we can honestly say we really want to solve and P are those that we can solve. Whether they are equal is just the very fact that a solution can be easily recognized would imply that it can be efficiently found. That means that we can know everything we ever want to know, it's a fundamental question about human knowledge."

"What is P vs NP and how does it relate to human knowledge?" Avi Wigderson (Turing Award & Abel Prize winner): "In a very basic way, all the problems we want to solve are really NP problems. A subset of it is the problems we can solve. So the question of P versus NP is whether we can solve all the problems we want to solve, whether we can know everything we want to know. This is basically about the limits of our knowledge. You can think there is no limit to what we may want to know but I claim that essentially in any human endeavor, what people are searching for have the property that when a solution is found, it is easily recognized. NP are all problems that we can honestly say we really want to solve and P are those that we can solve. Whether they are equal is just the very fact that a solution can be easily recognized would imply that it can be efficiently found. That means that we can know everything we ever want to know, it's a fundamental question about human knowledge."

Ryan Peterman

20,069 views • 1 month ago

Box CEO Aaron Levie: The Cost of Intelligence Will Go to Zero "We now have an API into intelligence. The cost of that intelligence will go down to the cost of the bare metal. Whatever the underlying cost of the GPU is, that's what you're going to pay with a little bit of margin. Then it's all about if you can build software that takes this complicated technology and delivers it to customers to solve real world problems." Aaron Levie discussing the future of AI on Y Combinator's Lightcone Podcast

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Here's Elon Musk back in 2010 announcing that SpaceX is going to try to build a fully and rapidly reusable orbit-class rocket. “The pivotal breakthrough that's necessary, that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary 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. Even for an expendable launch vehicle where you don't attempt any recovery, you get maybe 2% to 3% of your liftoff weight to orbit. Now you say, okay, 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. 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 launchpad and be able to refly them and still have useful payloads 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 the project's been abandoned. It's just a very tough engineering problem. It wasn't something that I thought I wasn't sure it could be solved, for a while, but then 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. We could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success here, but we're going to try to do it. 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.” National Press Club, September 29, 2010

Here's Elon Musk back in 2010 announcing that SpaceX is going to try to build a fully and rapidly reusable orbit-class rocket. “The pivotal breakthrough that's necessary, that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary 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. Even for an expendable launch vehicle where you don't attempt any recovery, you get maybe 2% to 3% of your liftoff weight to orbit. Now you say, okay, 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. 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 launchpad and be able to refly them and still have useful payloads 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 the project's been abandoned. It's just a very tough engineering problem. It wasn't something that I thought I wasn't sure it could be solved, for a while, but then 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. We could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success here, but we're going to try to do it. 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.” National Press Club, September 29, 2010

ELON CLIPS

14,920 views • 10 months ago

Here's Elon Musk in 2011 announcing he believes full and rapidly reusable rockets are achievable. “The pivotal breakthrough that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary 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. It's just a very tough engineering problem. I wasn't sure it could be solved for a while. But then, relatively recently, in the last twelve months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved. SpaceX is going to try to do it. We could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success, but we're going to try to do it. We have a design that, on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, does work. We need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't, reality wins.” National Press Club, 2011

Here's Elon Musk in 2011 announcing he believes full and rapidly reusable rockets are achievable. “The pivotal breakthrough that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary 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. It's just a very tough engineering problem. I wasn't sure it could be solved for a while. But then, relatively recently, in the last twelve months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved. SpaceX is going to try to do it. We could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success, but we're going to try to do it. We have a design that, on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, does work. We need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't, reality wins.” National Press Club, 2011

ELON CLIPS

19,955,019 views • 1 year ago

$RKLB New Peter Beck interview today on Bloomberg: Does SpaceX's dominance threaten Rocket Lab? "No, I don't think so. The reality is SpaceX is a space company, but also very much an AI company and a bunch of other things as well. Rocket Lab is a very squarely focused pure play space company. I think it draws investors into the sector. And when they go looking, Rocket Lab is really the clear number two with respect to launch frequency and those kinds of things. So no, I'm not too worried about that.” "So do you find yourself complementary to SpaceX? Or are you in direct competition with Elon Musk?" "In some cases we are in direct competition, but also very complementary. We are an end-to-end space company. We're the second most frequently launched US rocket in the world behind SpaceX, so the rocket bit is competitive. But two-thirds of our business is building satellites and spacecraft and supplying components to the rest of the space industry. So in that sense, not really a competitor at all."

$RKLB New Peter Beck interview today on Bloomberg: Does SpaceX's dominance threaten Rocket Lab? "No, I don't think so. The reality is SpaceX is a space company, but also very much an AI company and a bunch of other things as well. Rocket Lab is a very squarely focused pure play space company. I think it draws investors into the sector. And when they go looking, Rocket Lab is really the clear number two with respect to launch frequency and those kinds of things. So no, I'm not too worried about that.” "So do you find yourself complementary to SpaceX? Or are you in direct competition with Elon Musk?" "In some cases we are in direct competition, but also very complementary. We are an end-to-end space company. We're the second most frequently launched US rocket in the world behind SpaceX, so the rocket bit is competitive. But two-thirds of our business is building satellites and spacecraft and supplying components to the rest of the space industry. So in that sense, not really a competitor at all."

ValueOverPrice

48,871 views • 21 days ago

Elon Musk in 2008: "NASA was going to pay Russia $70M per astronaut. SpaceX could do it for $15M" Musk is presenting SpaceX to a small audience. He shows a video of the Falcon 9 first stage firing: "This is almost a million pounds of thrust in vacuum, about four times the maximum thrust of a 747. It's pretty much Armageddon down there. You don't want to be standing at the base of that test stand." He explains the NASA contract: "The contract SpaceX has right now is to demonstrate cargo transfer to the space station and return of experiments to Earth. What we're hoping NASA will exercise is an option on that contract to also carry astronauts. I think they will exercise that option fairly soon." On the coming gap in American spaceflight: "The Space Shuttle is retiring in 2010. So unless our spacecraft is active, the US will not have the ability to send people to orbit. For about five or six years, unless SpaceX is successful, there will be no American manned space capability. There'll just be the Russians." He describes the situation bluntly: "The Russians are charging us over $70 million per seat after the shuttle retires. They got us over a barrel and they're doing us hard. We'll spend half a billion dollars per year on the Russians just buying tickets for six or seven astronauts to go to the space station." Musk shares SpaceX's cost: "Our cost per person, even assuming no reusability, assuming every bit of it is expended and no refurbishment, is about $15 million per person. And it's us. The jobs are here. So I think it's kind of a no-brainer. But no-brainers in Washington DC don't always happen." On Congress: "We've been given money for the cargo portion but not for the manned portion. The amount we're asking for to get this done is $300 million. For every year that we're dependent on the Russians, we have to send them half a billion dollars. It seems kind of ludicrous. But anyway, that's DC." Someone asks about the space elevator: "The idea is you have this really long cable, like 40 to 60,000 miles long, with the ends way out in space and the base on Earth. There are a lot of issues with the space elevator. It relies on super strong materials, carbon nanotubes. Until we build, say, a carbon nanotube footbridge, then I think we should not really be thinking too much about building a 60,000-mile elevator. Not this century." On space solar power: "If there's anyone in the world who should love space solar power, it's me. I'm chairman and the largest shareholder of a solar company called SolarCity, and I've got a rocket company. So it should be perfect. Unfortunately, I don't think space solar power makes sense. I wish it did because that'd be awesome. But even if you assume it costs zero to transport the solar panels to space, when you take into account the equipment to convert the energy to microwaves, then equipment on the ground to convert it back to electricity, just that capital cost blows you out of the water. It's not competitive with terrestrial solar power. So there's no point in even thinking about it." On fuel costs: "The fuel and oxidizer cost is really super low. For our big rocket, it's only a couple hundred thousand dollars. For our small rocket, it's about $30,000 or $40,000. If you just look at the propellant cost, it's very, very cheap." On the long-term goal: "One of the design goals for Falcon 9 is that it can go from in the hangar to in the air in under 60 minutes, which would be super fast for a rocket, particularly a big rocket. It's going to take several flights before we get there. But as long as we lay the foundation and make sure the design is capable of that, we can at least have the possibility of getting to a flight an hour in the future."

Elon Musk in 2008: "NASA was going to pay Russia $70M per astronaut. SpaceX could do it for $15M" Musk is presenting SpaceX to a small audience. He shows a video of the Falcon 9 first stage firing: "This is almost a million pounds of thrust in vacuum, about four times the maximum thrust of a 747. It's pretty much Armageddon down there. You don't want to be standing at the base of that test stand." He explains the NASA contract: "The contract SpaceX has right now is to demonstrate cargo transfer to the space station and return of experiments to Earth. What we're hoping NASA will exercise is an option on that contract to also carry astronauts. I think they will exercise that option fairly soon." On the coming gap in American spaceflight: "The Space Shuttle is retiring in 2010. So unless our spacecraft is active, the US will not have the ability to send people to orbit. For about five or six years, unless SpaceX is successful, there will be no American manned space capability. There'll just be the Russians." He describes the situation bluntly: "The Russians are charging us over $70 million per seat after the shuttle retires. They got us over a barrel and they're doing us hard. We'll spend half a billion dollars per year on the Russians just buying tickets for six or seven astronauts to go to the space station." Musk shares SpaceX's cost: "Our cost per person, even assuming no reusability, assuming every bit of it is expended and no refurbishment, is about $15 million per person. And it's us. The jobs are here. So I think it's kind of a no-brainer. But no-brainers in Washington DC don't always happen." On Congress: "We've been given money for the cargo portion but not for the manned portion. The amount we're asking for to get this done is $300 million. For every year that we're dependent on the Russians, we have to send them half a billion dollars. It seems kind of ludicrous. But anyway, that's DC." Someone asks about the space elevator: "The idea is you have this really long cable, like 40 to 60,000 miles long, with the ends way out in space and the base on Earth. There are a lot of issues with the space elevator. It relies on super strong materials, carbon nanotubes. Until we build, say, a carbon nanotube footbridge, then I think we should not really be thinking too much about building a 60,000-mile elevator. Not this century." On space solar power: "If there's anyone in the world who should love space solar power, it's me. I'm chairman and the largest shareholder of a solar company called SolarCity, and I've got a rocket company. So it should be perfect. Unfortunately, I don't think space solar power makes sense. I wish it did because that'd be awesome. But even if you assume it costs zero to transport the solar panels to space, when you take into account the equipment to convert the energy to microwaves, then equipment on the ground to convert it back to electricity, just that capital cost blows you out of the water. It's not competitive with terrestrial solar power. So there's no point in even thinking about it." On fuel costs: "The fuel and oxidizer cost is really super low. For our big rocket, it's only a couple hundred thousand dollars. For our small rocket, it's about $30,000 or $40,000. If you just look at the propellant cost, it's very, very cheap." On the long-term goal: "One of the design goals for Falcon 9 is that it can go from in the hangar to in the air in under 60 minutes, which would be super fast for a rocket, particularly a big rocket. It's going to take several flights before we get there. But as long as we lay the foundation and make sure the design is capable of that, we can at least have the possibility of getting to a flight an hour in the future."

Grey

56,512 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk: For Starship to work, we still need to solve a problem that has never been solved by anyone. “What's the single biggest remaining problem for Starship? It's having the heat shield be reusable. No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield. The heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase without shocking a bunch of tiles. And then it's going to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe. Isn't that hard because it's kind of fundamentally a consumable. It just needs to last a very long time. We have brought the ship back and had it do a soft landing in the ocean. I've done that a few times. But it lost a lot of tiles. It was not reusable without a lot of work. So even though it did come to a soft landing, it would not have been reusable without a lot of work. So it's not really reusable in that sense. That's the biggest problem that remains. So if you want to be able to land it, refill propellant, and fly again, you can't do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing.” Interview with John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel, February 5, 2026

Elon Musk: For Starship to work, we still need to solve a problem that has never been solved by anyone. “What's the single biggest remaining problem for Starship? It's having the heat shield be reusable. No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield. The heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase without shocking a bunch of tiles. And then it's going to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe. Isn't that hard because it's kind of fundamentally a consumable. It just needs to last a very long time. We have brought the ship back and had it do a soft landing in the ocean. I've done that a few times. But it lost a lot of tiles. It was not reusable without a lot of work. So even though it did come to a soft landing, it would not have been reusable without a lot of work. So it's not really reusable in that sense. That's the biggest problem that remains. So if you want to be able to land it, refill propellant, and fly again, you can't do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing.” Interview with John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel, February 5, 2026

ELON CLIPS

40,863 views • 3 months ago

Reporter: “What’s your favorite upgrade to the plane and how much did it cost taxpayers to upgrade the planes?” President Trump: “It cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. So this was a gift from a country that has treated us very well… Qatar. I went to Boeing and said, ‘Who has the best [747]?’ They said, ‘Qatar.’ There’s never been a plane like it.” “I said [to the Amir of Qatar] I would like to use it… He said, ‘No, no, I would like to make a contribution to the country.”

Reporter: “What’s your favorite upgrade to the plane and how much did it cost taxpayers to upgrade the planes?” President Trump: “It cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. So this was a gift from a country that has treated us very well… Qatar. I went to Boeing and said, ‘Who has the best [747]?’ They said, ‘Qatar.’ There’s never been a plane like it.” “I said [to the Amir of Qatar] I would like to use it… He said, ‘No, no, I would like to make a contribution to the country.”

RedWave Press

582,437 views • 5 days ago