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The reason why Elon Musk started working on reusable rockets "I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try and understand why they're so freaking expensive If one could make them reusable like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically The cost of the fuel was... show more

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How a single, obvious question led Elon Musk to create SpaceX and changed space travel forever: “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" From day one, Elon's mission has been crystal clear: make rockets fully reusable, just like commercial airplanes "The cost of space travel would drop dramatically, because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2 to 0.5 percent of the cost of the rocket But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, ‘Okay, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel’”

How a single, obvious question led Elon Musk to create SpaceX and changed space travel forever: “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" From day one, Elon's mission has been crystal clear: make rockets fully reusable, just like commercial airplanes "The cost of space travel would drop dramatically, because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2 to 0.5 percent of the cost of the rocket But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, ‘Okay, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel’”

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10,882 views • 4 months ago

ELON IN 2010: FULLY REUSABLE ROCKET NEEDED TO MAKE LIFE MULTI-PLANETARY "The really big breakthrough, the fundamental invention that's needed to make life multi-planetary, is a fully reusable orbit-class rocket system. The Space Shuttle is partly reusable, but the main tank is thrown away every time, and even the parts that are supposed to be reusable are so difficult to reuse or refurbish that the Space Shuttle costs about four times as much per flight as an equivalent expendable vehicle. There have been many attempts to build a reusable rocket system, but they have always been canceled once they discovered that success was not one of the possible outcomes. But this is fundamentally something that has to be solved if life's got to become multi-planetary. At SpaceX, we're hoping to make some progress in that direction." Source: Elon Musk lecture at Yale University. October 14, 2010.

ELON IN 2010: FULLY REUSABLE ROCKET NEEDED TO MAKE LIFE MULTI-PLANETARY "The really big breakthrough, the fundamental invention that's needed to make life multi-planetary, is a fully reusable orbit-class rocket system. The Space Shuttle is partly reusable, but the main tank is thrown away every time, and even the parts that are supposed to be reusable are so difficult to reuse or refurbish that the Space Shuttle costs about four times as much per flight as an equivalent expendable vehicle. There have been many attempts to build a reusable rocket system, but they have always been canceled once they discovered that success was not one of the possible outcomes. But this is fundamentally something that has to be solved if life's got to become multi-planetary. At SpaceX, we're hoping to make some progress in that direction." Source: Elon Musk lecture at Yale University. October 14, 2010.

Mario Nawfal

24,015,507 views • 2 years ago

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."

DogeDesigner

32,196 views • 1 month ago

🚀 Starship will be the 1st fully reusable orbital rocket in history. Liquid oxygen, liquid methane, and a cost-per-launch that could drop below trans-oceanic air freight. Elon put it simply: "The cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant." If that holds, the economics of space will get rewritten entirely. Source: SpaceX, Elon Musk

🚀 Starship will be the 1st fully reusable orbital rocket in history. Liquid oxygen, liquid methane, and a cost-per-launch that could drop below trans-oceanic air freight. Elon put it simply: "The cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant." If that holds, the economics of space will get rewritten entirely. Source: SpaceX, Elon Musk

Mario Nawfal

51,520 views • 1 month ago

ELON MUSK: Starship will let anyone travel to the Moon or Mars. The key breakthrough is fully reusable rockets. Like cars and planes, rockets will be reused every flight. This cuts the cost of space travel massively and makes regular trips to space affordable.

ELON MUSK: Starship will let anyone travel to the Moon or Mars. The key breakthrough is fully reusable rockets. Like cars and planes, rockets will be reused every flight. This cuts the cost of space travel massively and makes regular trips to space affordable.

DogeDesigner

32,611 views • 5 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

“The goal is to radically improve the cost of transport to space. If aircraft were not reusable, if aircraft were single use, then you would have to buy a new aircraft with every flight and air travel would be prohibitively expensive.” — Elon Musk

“The goal is to radically improve the cost of transport to space. If aircraft were not reusable, if aircraft were single use, then you would have to buy a new aircraft with every flight and air travel would be prohibitively expensive.” — Elon Musk

Dima Zeniuk

16,094 views • 7 months ago

ELON: REUSABLE ROCKETS JUST MAKE SENSE “You can imagine if aircraft were not reusable. Like you flew somewhere and had to throw the plane away. The way conventional rockets work, it’s like having an airplane where instead of landing, you parachute out and let the plane crash somewhere, then you parachute to your destination. That would be a very strange trip, and you’d need another plane to get back. But that’s how other rockets in the world work.” Source: Joe Rogan

ELON: REUSABLE ROCKETS JUST MAKE SENSE “You can imagine if aircraft were not reusable. Like you flew somewhere and had to throw the plane away. The way conventional rockets work, it’s like having an airplane where instead of landing, you parachute out and let the plane crash somewhere, then you parachute to your destination. That would be a very strange trip, and you’d need another plane to get back. But that’s how other rockets in the world work.” Source: Joe Rogan

Mario Nawfal

127,326 views • 8 months ago

Elon Musk: Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1 but has 400 times the payload. “One of the most profound things is that Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1. That's the difference between a fully reusable rocket or an expendable rocket. The fully reusable rocket with low-cost propellant and autogenous pressurization actually costs less than a tiny expendable rocket. Falcon 1 is about half a ton to orbit. The Starship 3 will be 400 times more payload for less than the cost of a Falcon 1. Ultimately, I think we might be able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down to around $2 or $3 million. These are unthinkable numbers. Nobody ever thought this was possible but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this.” SpaceX Update, April 4, 2024

Elon Musk: Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1 but has 400 times the payload. “One of the most profound things is that Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1. That's the difference between a fully reusable rocket or an expendable rocket. The fully reusable rocket with low-cost propellant and autogenous pressurization actually costs less than a tiny expendable rocket. Falcon 1 is about half a ton to orbit. The Starship 3 will be 400 times more payload for less than the cost of a Falcon 1. Ultimately, I think we might be able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down to around $2 or $3 million. These are unthinkable numbers. Nobody ever thought this was possible but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this.” SpaceX Update, April 4, 2024

ELON CLIPS

29,437,361 views • 1 year ago

“Starship will let anyone travel to the Moon or Mars. The key breakthrough is fully reusable rockets. Like cars and planes, rockets will be reused every flight. This cuts the cost of space travel massively and makes regular trips to space affordable.” 一 Elon Musk

“Starship will let anyone travel to the Moon or Mars. The key breakthrough is fully reusable rockets. Like cars and planes, rockets will be reused every flight. This cuts the cost of space travel massively and makes regular trips to space affordable.” 一 Elon Musk

DogeDesigner

56,916 views • 3 months ago

Elon Musk explains how to get startup ideas When asked how he comes up with startup ideas, Elon responds: “I tend to think of things from a sort of physics standpoint… what’s the best way to accomplish something? And then pursue that. That’s also a good way to determine if something’s far from its optimum.” He gives rockets as an example: “You could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that’s what prior rockets have cost. Or you can say, well, what is a rocket made of? What are the material constituents? What do they weigh? What’s the cost per unit mass? And that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. So if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape, then you can achieve a much better outcome.” He also thinks combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation: “What have people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries? That’s I think also a great source of ideas. But usually you just struggle on a solution and try a bunch of things. Most of them don’t work and occasionally one does.” Source: VANITY FAIR (Oct 2014)

Elon Musk explains how to get startup ideas When asked how he comes up with startup ideas, Elon responds: “I tend to think of things from a sort of physics standpoint… what’s the best way to accomplish something? And then pursue that. That’s also a good way to determine if something’s far from its optimum.” He gives rockets as an example: “You could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that’s what prior rockets have cost. Or you can say, well, what is a rocket made of? What are the material constituents? What do they weigh? What’s the cost per unit mass? And that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. So if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape, then you can achieve a much better outcome.” He also thinks combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation: “What have people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries? That’s I think also a great source of ideas. But usually you just struggle on a solution and try a bunch of things. Most of them don’t work and occasionally one does.” Source: VANITY FAIR (Oct 2014)

Startup Archive

33,984 views • 1 month ago

“Elon Musk has, you know, encountered this in spades when he first started this idea of reusable rockets. People were laughing him off the stage... But it took a lot of money to break through. And part of the reason is because there were a lot of people getting very rich at building a rocket to go to space and then burning that rocket up and having to build a whole new rocket... Congress would come to me and say, Steve, see, you're wrong. Elon Musk blew up a rocket... and he's a fool. And we're not going to give him any money. But they were listening to lobbyists saying Elon Musk is a risk.”

“Elon Musk has, you know, encountered this in spades when he first started this idea of reusable rockets. People were laughing him off the stage... But it took a lot of money to break through. And part of the reason is because there were a lot of people getting very rich at building a rocket to go to space and then burning that rocket up and having to build a whole new rocket... Congress would come to me and say, Steve, see, you're wrong. Elon Musk blew up a rocket... and he's a fool. And we're not going to give him any money. But they were listening to lobbyists saying Elon Musk is a risk.”

Shawn Ryan

64,521 views • 1 year ago

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 • 11 months ago

ELON: THE ESSENCE OF REVOLUTIONIZING SPACE TRAVEL IS REUSABILITY “It’s mostly not disruption, it’s creation. With SpaceX and reusable rockets, there really weren’t any reusable rockets, but the essence of revolutionizing space travel is reusability. If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high. With respect to electric cars, there weren’t any electric cars when we started making them. You couldn’t buy any, to the best of my knowledge. So with Tesla we wanted to make electric cars compelling and affordable. That was the goal. And with respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robots at this point.” Source: ELON CLIPS

ELON: THE ESSENCE OF REVOLUTIONIZING SPACE TRAVEL IS REUSABILITY “It’s mostly not disruption, it’s creation. With SpaceX and reusable rockets, there really weren’t any reusable rockets, but the essence of revolutionizing space travel is reusability. If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high. With respect to electric cars, there weren’t any electric cars when we started making them. You couldn’t buy any, to the best of my knowledge. So with Tesla we wanted to make electric cars compelling and affordable. That was the goal. And with respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robots at this point.” Source: ELON CLIPS

Mario Nawfal

46,979 views • 8 months ago

ELON: REUSABILITY TO REDUCE SPACEFLIGHT COSTS 100-FOLD “The goal is to radically improve the cost of transport to space. If aircraft were not reusable, if aircraft were single use, then you would have to buy a new aircraft with every flight and air travel would be prohibitively expensive. If you can do that, then it's potentially a hundredfold reduction in cost of spaceflight.” Source: Danish TV DR, February 2018

ELON: REUSABILITY TO REDUCE SPACEFLIGHT COSTS 100-FOLD “The goal is to radically improve the cost of transport to space. If aircraft were not reusable, if aircraft were single use, then you would have to buy a new aircraft with every flight and air travel would be prohibitively expensive. If you can do that, then it's potentially a hundredfold reduction in cost of spaceflight.” Source: Danish TV DR, February 2018

Mario Nawfal

81,615 views • 8 months ago

Elon Musk just described the most expensive mistake in engineering history. It lasted 70 years. Musk: “If we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.” That wasn’t a thought experiment. That was the actual business model of spaceflight since 1957. Build a rocket worth billions. Fly it once. Let the ocean swallow it. Then start over from nothing. Ships are reusable. Trains are reusable. Cars are reusable. Planes are reusable. If it can’t fly twice, it’s not transportation. It’s a stunt. For seven decades, spaceflight was a stunt. Musk: “Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket.” Barely possible means it was always possible. The gravity was always light enough. The atmosphere was always thin enough. The margin was always there. “Barely possible” was rounded down to impossible. The entire industry believed the rounding, not the math. Musk: “It’s the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. You simply cannot send this to the moon, to Mars, and to the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket.” Every single-use rocket was a vote to stay grounded. For 70 years, the vote was unanimous. Starship didn’t break a law of physics. It proved “impossible” was a policy, not a constraint.

Elon Musk just described the most expensive mistake in engineering history. It lasted 70 years. Musk: “If we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.” That wasn’t a thought experiment. That was the actual business model of spaceflight since 1957. Build a rocket worth billions. Fly it once. Let the ocean swallow it. Then start over from nothing. Ships are reusable. Trains are reusable. Cars are reusable. Planes are reusable. If it can’t fly twice, it’s not transportation. It’s a stunt. For seven decades, spaceflight was a stunt. Musk: “Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket.” Barely possible means it was always possible. The gravity was always light enough. The atmosphere was always thin enough. The margin was always there. “Barely possible” was rounded down to impossible. The entire industry believed the rounding, not the math. Musk: “It’s the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. You simply cannot send this to the moon, to Mars, and to the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket.” Every single-use rocket was a vote to stay grounded. For 70 years, the vote was unanimous. Starship didn’t break a law of physics. It proved “impossible” was a policy, not a constraint.

Dustin

44,846 views • 7 days ago

ELON: I DON’T DISRUPT—I CREATE “With SpaceX, with reusable rockets, there really weren't any reusable rockets. But the essence of revolutionizing space travel is reusability. If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high. With respect to electric cars, there weren't any electric cars when we started making them. You couldn't buy any to the best of my knowledge. So, with Tesla, we wanted to make electric cars compelling and affordable. That was the goal. With respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robotics robots at this point. There are sort of gimmicks, but there are no actually useful robots. I think Tesla's going to make the first actually useful humanoid robots. This will be quite a revolution.” Source: U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, November 19, 2025

ELON: I DON’T DISRUPT—I CREATE “With SpaceX, with reusable rockets, there really weren't any reusable rockets. But the essence of revolutionizing space travel is reusability. If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high. With respect to electric cars, there weren't any electric cars when we started making them. You couldn't buy any to the best of my knowledge. So, with Tesla, we wanted to make electric cars compelling and affordable. That was the goal. With respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robotics robots at this point. There are sort of gimmicks, but there are no actually useful robots. I think Tesla's going to make the first actually useful humanoid robots. This will be quite a revolution.” Source: U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, November 19, 2025

Mario Nawfal

53,253 views • 8 months ago

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

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

ELON CLIPS

43,664,130 views • 1 year ago

When Elon Musk started SpaceX, his closest friends showed him a compilation of rocket failures to talk him out of it The industry joke was brutal: "How do you make a small fortune in the rocket business? Start with a large one” If he had stopped after seeing those failures, we wouldn’t have reusable rockets, Starship, and the multi-planetary dream. All these would be dead in the water humanity would remain a single-planet species forever. Instead, we are on the doorstep of Mars

When Elon Musk started SpaceX, his closest friends showed him a compilation of rocket failures to talk him out of it The industry joke was brutal: "How do you make a small fortune in the rocket business? Start with a large one” If he had stopped after seeing those failures, we wouldn’t have reusable rockets, Starship, and the multi-planetary dream. All these would be dead in the water humanity would remain a single-planet species forever. Instead, we are on the doorstep of Mars

X Freeze

548,938 views • 4 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

40,975 views • 4 months ago