All right, well, hello everybody and

welcome.

Hanging out I got Elon and Ian Doll with

our Starlink team. Figured we'd check

in. It's been a typical SpaceX year.

Launched a brand new vehicle.

>> Yeah.

>> Acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI. Announced a

terra-sized chip-building project. And

so

>> Yeah, never dull moment.

>> Yeah, never dull moment. Typical year.

And so let's kind of wanted to connect

some of the dots on how this all feeds

into making life multi-planetary.

Starting to climb up Kardashev scale.

Maybe show off some cool new AI stuff.

Let's kind of start galaxy-sized.

And bring people in with the Kardashev

scale.

>> What's the big picture?

>> What's the big picture? What is the

Kardashev scale?

>> Like how do you decide

what progress a civilization has made

that's the most objective metric

that any alien

species, say visiting us, uh would

calibrate how how much progress we've

made

as a civilization. And one of the most

objective ways to do that is the amount

of power that

is any given civilization has been able

to harness.

Um

and

there was a Russian physicist actually

by the name of Kardashev, um

who thought about this and

it's a it's good I think it's a good way

to characterize it, which is

uh

you can have

uh

you can you can assess how well a

civilization is harnessing

the power available on the planet.

That's type one. And then type two would

be

uh how much of the stars

power are you harnessing? And then type

three would be how much of the galaxy's

power are you harnessing?

Um

these are very objective and measurable

numbers.

Uh so

right now we're very low on the

Kardashev one scale. Like if you say

like what proportion of

uh, our planet's power

are we harnessing, it's a very, very

tiny number.

Um,

and and basically we're we're harnessing

almost nothing of our star's power.

So the the sun

is truly an immense thing.

It is

it is difficult with words to

characterize just how immense the sun

is, but this gives you sort of a sense

of scale.

>> Yeah, it's it's it's a big difficulty

jump going from level one to level two.

>> Very big difficulty jump, yes. And level

three and we don't even know how to do

level three, really.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. AI will figure it

out of course. One way to appreciate the

the size of the sun is to think about

how heavy is the sun compared to all the

rest of the mass in the solar system.

So the sun is about 99.86%

of all mass in the solar system.

It's uh,

everything and and then all the

remaining

uh, one, you know, 0.14%

most of that is Jupiter.

One planet.

>> So we're still lightweight.

>> Yes.

Uh,

the entire mass of Earth is in the tiny

miscellaneous category. We're we're like

a Earth is a tiny dust mote

compared to the sun.

>> Well, then but how much energy are we

talking like

coming from the sun, especially compared

to

what we're using here on Earth? So it

feels like

>> Yeah.

The incident solar energy on the cross

section of the Earth is roughly a half

billionth of the sun's

um,

power output.

Um, and and the vast majority of that we

we cannot use because

you know, 70% of Earth is water. Yeah.

Which technically our planet should be

called water

because it is 70% water and I think an

alien civilization visiting us would be

like, why are they calling it Earth when

it is mostly water?

>> We're the We're the Greenland's not

green of the of the galaxy of the solar

system.

>> Yeah.

>> Um

>> A bunch of the the Exactly. You know,

even

We're 70% water.

And then of the 30% that's land, a bunch

of it is uh I

you know, Antarctica or

you know,

Siberia type of thing. Very northern

Canada type of thing. Very difficult to

Not not not places people typically want

to live. And you're not going to get a

lot of

solar power in the at the poles.

So, the actual usable area of

land that where you can get solar power

is quite small. Anyway, in order to

ascend the Kardashev scale or in order

to

get to any meaningful percentage of the

sun's

energy harnessed, uh you have to go to

space.

If you want to get to say a millionth

of the

power output of the sun,

um

you would have to increase

civilizational energy harnessed by

much more than a million.

So, we currently use much less than a

trillionth

of the power output of the sun.

Um and a trillion is [clears throat] a

million times a million.

Uh so so basically this

We're basically practically nowhere

on on the sort of the Kardashev two

scale. Practically nowhere.

>> So, on Kardashev scale, we're all still

>> We're non-existent. We're non-existent.

We're We're like not of We're not even

Yeah. We're We're We're so

We're

not We're not registering.

>> Not even a micro soul.

>> Yeah. We're

>> No.

>> And so, to actually

>> soul would be an epic epic achievement

relative to where we are right now.

>> Something to aspire to.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, that's our goal.

>> And like

this is I think both simultaneously

an incredibly adventurous goal relative

to where we are

and and yet not particularly adventurous

as a percentage of the sun's energy to

try to achieve uh

power harness being 1 millionth of what

the sun outputs.

>> And so to actually start a micro solar

>> Yeah.

>> to actually start getting there though,

we're not just going to throw solar

arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch

of the sun. Like there has to be [music]

a need. Like we want to go up there and

do something meaningful. And

obviously until this point human history

like there hasn't really been a need.

What has changed

to make us think that like maybe now's

the time to start trying to notch a

percentage point or two?

>> I mean getting to

a percent of the sun's energy

>> Maybe not a percent. [clears throat]

Let's go like we'll move the decimal

point back a couple of years.

>> extremely kickass civilization if you

get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm

like, "Wow."

That civilization is going to be

uh

vastly more powerful than us to say the

least.

>> Yeah.

>> Um

So in order to start to make some

progress uh on the Kardashev scale, we

need to

uh launch satellites to

to to orbit Earth

uh and capture

uh solar power and

that uh avoids the need to build massive

power plants on Earth and uh deal with

cooling cuz uh

cooling is actually much easier in space

than it is on Earth. Um you can just

radiate

>> to a vacuum.

>> Um

and um

and so what

what we're proposing here and what we

intend to do is to try to climb the

Kardashev scale to I don't be kind of

like a respectable civilization.

Um so uh when the aliens hopefully there

are aliens out there and they uh

maybe finally decide to talk to us, you

know,

where we have where where we have some

respectable

uh uh, amount of the sun's energy being

used.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, that's not like totally pathetic.

>> [laughter]

>> Which is the current situation.

>> And so before we start

sending data centers, sending all of

this to space, there are some limiting

factors that we got to get through that

would traditionally make it so like this

is almost impossible.

>> Yeah, what does it take to scale?

>> Yeah.

>> Um, so things it takes to scale uh, are

you need to have uh, a large mass to

orbit capability, which is what Starship

will give us.

Uh, that large mass so you know, we

ultimately need to send millions of tons

to orbit and beyond.

And you need the power associated with

that. So if you want to put a 100

gigawatts or ultimately a terawatt into

space from Earth, uh, you need uh,

you'll fuel at some point need a

terawatt of solar.

Um, and then you're going to need a

terawatt of AI chips. So the three

things on you need are mass to orbit, a

lot of solar power, and and radiators of

course. And uh,

a lot of chips.

>> All right, well let's start ticking down

the list. So mass to orbit, that's where

Starship comes in. Yeah, we just had

first flight V3, it's awesome.

I know you were there. It was crazy to

see that rocket launch and like long

time coming. What's kind of what

Starship's kind of purpose of being?

What is it going to be doing?

>> Yeah, so Starship is going to

it's going to revolutionize space

really. It's um,

it's the first rocket design

uh, that is capable of full and rapid

reusability.

Now reusability is the fundamental

breakthrough that is necessary to make

life multi-planetary uh, as well as to

ascend the Kardashev scale. You you

simply cannot ascend the the Kardashev

scale unless you have a re- reusable

spacecraft and you cannot extend life

uh, to the moon, to Mars, and to the

rest of the solar system without a

reusable rocket. Um the the the cost is

simply prohibitive. You you you can't

you can't make enough rockets.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh unless you fly unless you can re-fly

them. Uh just like any other mode of

transport, you can imagine that if uh if

we had to throw away airplanes every

time we flew, uh flying would be far too

expensive and basically no one would be

flying airplanes. You'd be doing a whole

lot more driving.

>> Rapid reusability.

>> Yes. [laughter]

Um

every mode of transport is reusable um

without which is simply not viable as a

transport uh system. Uh so, cars,

planes, boats,

horses, bicycles are all obviously

reusable.

>> Yeah.

>> Um with rockets, it's much harder to

make a rocket reusable because Earth has

a

a deep gravity well and a thick

atmosphere. Uh and these make it just

barely possible to achieve reusability

with a rocket. Um and there've been

you know, many prior attempts to

create a re- a fully reusable rocket. Um

and they mo- most of those attempts have

been abandoned partway through because

they they didn't think they could

succeed. Uh in order to achieve full

reusability, everything's got to be

perfect. It's the engines, the

structure, the avionics, um

the choice of propellants, uh

you you've got to you've got to go to

extreme measures for mass optimization,

which is why we have the tower catch the

rocket instead of putting on landing

legs, which are heavy.

Uh the the rocket can simply be caught

by the tower. And we haven't achieved

full reusability yet, but we do expect

to achieve that hopefully later this

year with Starship. And then you you've

got to achieve full reusability they've

also you've you've got to go a step

beyond that, which is

um

make it rapidly reusable such that

the rocket lands, it gets caught by the

tower, gets put back on the launch stand

and can be flown again without any

refurbishment or laborious inspection

like an aircraft.

>> Yeah.

>> Um this is incredibly difficult. This is

the first time that there's ever been a

rocket where that is possible.

That's what makes Starship so profound.

It It also happens to be

the the largest flying object ever made,

the heaviest flying object ever made,

the most powerful moving object of any

kind.

Starship B3 is

more than double the thrust of it, the

Saturn 5 moon rocket.

By version 4 will be pretty much three

times the thrust of the Saturn 5 moon

rocket. And we expect this

We expect Starship to be flying

more than once per hour down the road.

>> One of the fun facts from flight 12 that

was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX

has ever flown and that's still just a

fraction of what V3 can do. So

>> Yes.

>> I mean, once we're flying

massive amounts

really rapidly. I mean, we already fly

the majority of payload to space with

Falcon.

Do people even really understand what

mass to orbit becomes when Starship is

flying?

>> It's It's many orders of magnitude

greater than what is the case today. So,

even with Falcon

9 Falcon Heavy

SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth

mass to orbit. I think it's somewhere

between 85 and 90% right now.

And then most of the remaining mass I

think is is launched by China and then

the rest of the world including the rest

of the US is

the remaining I don't know, 5 to 7%.

Um

Now with with Starship,

we'll be aiming to go from

somewhere around 2,500 tons a year to

orbit to millions of tons per year to

orbit.

Um and to do so in a pretty short period

of time. So, we think probably we can

get to

a million tons

uh

to orbit

per year in in in about

3 years thereabouts.

>> Starship Starship is going to take care

of the mass to orbit limiting factor.

>> Yes.

>> And then power generation. So first

and Ian maybe you can help.

People probably struggle to visualize a

little bit when you say like data center

in space like we're not going to

slap engines on a building and fly it

up. They're like these actually look

like pretty different. And so kind of

walk through how you take something

that's in a giant building on the ground

and turn it into something that's

functional in space.

>> Yeah, I I think it's it's pretty

interesting. A lot of people don't

actually know what what the inside of a

data center even looks like, right?

>> Yeah.

>> And it's some like mythical place where

the the internet's in the cloud or

something.

>> Yeah, some people envision wires, some

people envision boxes, but like it it

effectively comes down to

a set number of chips and and the things

that we need to launch into space are

actually quite small when we look at it.

Uh the more challenging part is figuring

out how to get how do you get the power

for it? And and that's where

a lot of what we've worked on for

existing like Starlink technology, the

solar arrays um

are what we want to utilize that

expertise to be able to build a

satellite that can actually launch the

critical components of the data center

into space itself.

Um

we like to

look at this and say like what is what

is the actual engineering problem here?

And and it's it's really a combination

of delivering power and then taking the

waste heat and energy away and sending

it into the vacuum of space as you

mentioned.

>> Yeah. Uh

now the the the AI satellite is

actually much simpler than a Starlink

satellite. It's a Starlink satellite has

has gigantic phased array antennas.

It's got

uh

you know, parabolic antennas, it's got

uh

let you know, a lot of laser links.

Um

It's a It's It's much more complicated

than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is

essentially a lot of uh solar cells, um

radiator, and uh you still need some

laser links, but you don't have all of

the the super complex uh

antennas that you have on a Starlink

satellite. So,

I mean, given the two, the easier one to

design for is the um the AI satellite.

>> Yeah.

>> It's just a little bit bigger.

>> It's bigger.

>> Just make stuff bigger, yeah. I was

like, so we've got

this is our AI one. If you guys want to

walk us through.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, so So, the first thing that we're

we're really looking at here is like you

first you've got to make something

compelling, uh right? And And we thought

that the right place to start is uh

around the 150 kW like peak power level.

Um but as we look at the workloads with

with our experience with XAI, uh

we we get to actually see the the we can

also support about 120 kW of average

compute. There's a difference.

>> Yes. And what we're showing here is kind

of um

a a draft version of the

version one of the of the SpaceX AI

satellite. The AI one, I guess, you

could call it. Um and uh seems like a

reasonable place to start is 150 kW peak

power, 120 kW sustained power. And um

and to give you a sense of what does

that actually look like in terms of the

size of the radiators, size of the solar

panels. Um

the assumptions here are uh 250 W per

square meter for the solar array.

And um

about 1,400 W per square meter for the

radiators. So, the radiators is a

double-sided ra- radiators are radiating

both sides. They're uh

oriented knife-edge to the sun.

And uh and and it's

1,400 W per square meter is a very

achievable goal. Uh over time we think

we can probably do above 250 watts per

square meter and above 1400

watts per per square meter for the

uh

solar panels and radiators respectively.

Um but this gives you like a a

This is pretty much what the satellite's

going to look like. It's uh a lot of

solar panels, radiator, and then

everything else is pretty small by

comparison.

>> And these are like evolutions of of

things that we have actually already

launched in in in our Starlink

constellation to date.

>> Yeah.

>> That's that's really I think the the

cool part to me is that we're we're

looking at solar technology that we

already are are going to use on on the

V3

uh Starlink vehicle. So

uh I'm like really excited to then just

take those and make it bigger.

>> Yeah. Part of what we want to want to

convey here is that this there's not

some

um

magic that's necessary that doesn't

exist for the AI satellites. Uh

As Ian said, this is a lot of this is

uh technology that we've we've already

made for the Starlink V3 satellites.

Uh so it's it's we basically we don't

think this is a a super hard problem

compared to things we already do. Um

there will also be probably something on

the order of a terabit of connectivity

of laser link connectivity from the uh

from the satellite. Um

The 150 kilowatt peak uh power level is

roughly matches what say an Nvidia GB300

uh rack would do. So if you if you've

got a GB300 with 72 GPUs, uh

its peak power I think is around 140

kilowatts.

Um but it's rarely it's just it's almost

impossible to get it to to be at that

peak power.

Um a more reasonable uh operating

envelope would be around 120 20

kilowatts average power. Um but but it

can peak up to 150. So that's it's

basically think of it as a a rack of

compute in space. And then you can

connect the

these these racks of compute to uh

either each other by the laser links

or directly to the Starlink

constellation.

So, you can close the link with the

Starlink constellation and then Starlink

can then

send that data to the ground using the

existing KA and KU antennas on the on

the vehicle. It also has laser to laser

links to the ground as well.

So,

and this this would not be

at a particularly high latency. You

know, we're we're talking about

you know, maybe being around

6 to 800 km uh

above the Earth

and light travels 300 km per

millisecond.

So, that's

about

you know, 3 milliseconds away basically.

It's not not very far.

>> Don't worry about that too much then.

>> It's not so much people worry and think

there's going to be some

like high latency. I'm like,

no, speed of light moves pretty fast.

>> Light moves pretty fast. It's a small

one.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I think the cool thing also

is the the radiators themselves are

about the same size as the existing

solar arrays for the V3 vehicle.

Um kind of kind of in that that realm

where we're flying today.

>> Yeah.

>> So, I mean they got they got about a 70

m wingspan. So, these are fairly large.

We're talking about building a lot of

them and putting them up there, but

they you like say like space is in the

name. Like there's there's a lot of

space up there. And so, even when you're

talking

thousands or even, you know, up to a

million satellites

>> Yeah.

>> you got plenty of room to move around up

there.

>> Yeah, space is really big. So, it's not

like it's not like space is going to get

crowded. Uh

space is is enormous. Like if you zoom

in close to satellite, it looks big. But

if you actually look at it relative

relative to the Earth, these satellites

are so tiny, you can you can't even see

them.

So,

they're they're very very tiny compared

to Earth.

>> And I mean, we have 10 about 10,000

Starlinks in orbit right now. We've got

a pretty good idea of how to operate

just really large constellations and do

it safely now, right?

>> We we are the only operator that has any

experience at that scale.

Uh it's

it's a great thing that you know, we

have this background so we know how

tightly we can pack the satellites and

and and fly them safely. That's That's

it. Our number one goal when when we

look at the constellation.

>> We're going to be building a lot of

satellites and we're going to be

building them

here in Bastrop, right? So, we've we've

got this, which

>> Yeah.

>> So, we're in that building kind of in

the middle, which

>> Yeah, we're sitting in that building

right now.

>> This is my first time here. The building

is massive. Like you you come around the

corner,

>> you see it through the trees and you're

like, oh, wow.

But we're about to kind of put this

building to shame, aren't we?

>> Uh yes, we're going to

In fact, we already have the solar

manufacturing facility. It's under

construction already.

And uh

and then we will be building out the AI

satellite production building soon.

Um and uh

Yeah, so we expect to have the

the AI satellite AI satellite

production, the solar production, um

and uh all of that

operating at uh

some reasonable volume by the end of

next year.

>> So, if anybody wants to work on AI

satellites, this is kind of going to

become the hub of that. We're also So, I

mean, like right behind us the machines

are humming. We're still making all of

our user terminals for Starlink here.

That's not going anywhere. In fact,

we're turning on new production lines

for new units, right?

>> Uh yes.

Um in fact, these are the new Starlink

terminals, uh which we made in much

higher volume than than the current uh

terminals. Um

you know, ultimately we think there's

probably going to be a few hundred

million Starlink terminals out there.

And then our the Starlink direct to cell

constellation will

um connect directly to people's cell

phones and enable

uh high-bandwidth communication directly

from your phone to space.

>> All right. We're We're two limiting

factors down. We've got mass to orbit.

Got putting solar in the few

third one's chips.

>> Yes. Um so

at least in the in the beginning, we can

obviously launch the the chips that are

already being made. Um

So, our current reference design is for

Nvidia uh Rubin chips or could be either

GB300 or or Rubin chips. Um

um

And uh

we'll uh also have a reference design

for TPUs and and essentially, you can

put up put any any existing chips into

into orbit. Um but

the

current industry

uh seems to be

uh it's It seems like it's going to

I don't know

get to maybe around a hundred gigawatts

a year of of AI compute.

But it

that that doesn't answer the question

of, well, how do you get to a terawatt?

That's why you need uh the terafab.

>> Always looking a step bigger.

>> Yeah.

Yeah, in order to get to the next order

of magnitude, uh you need uh a gigantic

chip factory.

Uh to give you a sense of scale here,

uh we expect that the terafab is going

to be around a hundred million square

feet.

Uh which is

ten times the size of the uh the Tesla

gigafactory Texas.

>> And what, aside from just, you know,

what I'm going to need Starship

point-to-point to get from one end to

the other, aside from just the size,

what's going to make this unique

different from any other chip building

operation on the planet.

>> Well, I think over time there's going to

be a lot of technology evolution with

the Terafab. But fundamentally, it's

about scale. So, even if there were no

uh

fundamental technology breakthroughs,

uh it's and and uh you simply you you

could simply scale uh the existing

chip-making technology uh

with a lot of difficulty uh to a

terawatt of chip output per year. Um

that's if you're looking with just from

the logic die standpoint, that's uh it

that's equivalent that's like having a

billion

chips per year

with a a kilowatt per radical. So,

there's a a billion full radical

equivalent chips uh each doing a

kilowatt. And then you're going to need

a lot of memory

to go with that.

>> A lot of people today even saying

orbital data centers were like a decade

away.

>> Yeah, I think we want to try to give

people a sense of

of the time frame.

Uh we

at least the time frame we're aiming

for. I mean, you know, people should

take this with a grain of salt to some

degree because this is this is just our

best guess. So, this is not a this is

not a promise of what we'll do. This is

what we

what what what we are going to try to do

and think we probably can do.

Um which is to get to roughly uh an

annualized rate of a gigawatt per year

by the end of next year uh in terms of

space uh AI compute. Um and then

aspirationally

scale that by an order of magnitude per

year.

So, in 2 and 1/2 years hitting an

annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year

to space, in 3 and 1/2 years

maybe 100 gigawatts, and then depending

upon what progress uh there is in

chip-making

in the rest of the world and with the

Terafab uh

going beyond that to scale to a a

terawatt per year, which is 1,000

gigawatts.

Which is that that's twice the elec- the

current electricity consumption of the

United States.

>> Yeah.

>> I think there will be an appetite for

that, but we'll see.

>> It's a lot of satellites.

>> I don't know what he's going to think

about, but

we need to do a lot of simulations or

something.

>> Yeah.

So, after we've, you know,

worked through all the limiting factors,

we've kind of topped out what we can do

on Earth,

what is the next step to

again, try and actually notch maybe some

percentage points towards becoming

Kardashev level two?

>> Why stop there? Stop Why think small?

>> You're uh cuz the terawatt actually is

very small.

>> think small.

>> Let's not think small. Um so, there is

in order to get to another

three orders of magnitude to

1,000 X from a terawatt per year,

the the only way that we can really see

see that you can achieve that is on the

moon with uh a mass driver, essentially,

where you do local production of

uh photovoltaics and

solar and radiators on the moon. Um

maybe you bring the chips from Earth or

you could conceivably

uh make the chips on on the moon. Um

and but you need you need most of the

mass uh to be made on the moon, so you

don't have to transport it to the moon

from Earth.

And and then, because the moon has no

atmosphere and only 1/6 Earth's gravity,

you can you can get you can accelerate

the AI satellites into deep space

without a rocket. So, you can basically

shoot them into space using um

an electromagnetic

gun, like a like a railgun type I mean,

just it's basically a linear electric

motor is a way to think about it.

>> Is that I think we can show people

>> [music]

[music]

>> I mean, if that doesn't get you excited

for the future, I don't really know what

will.

>> I'm fired up to sit to see a mass driver

on the moon. That would be very cool.

>> Yeah. Sci-fi future.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Um

it would also mean that if we're if

we're bringing that amount of mass to

the moon, it would mean that anyone who

wants to go to the moon

uh will be able to go to the moon.

And uh I think that'll be pretty cool.

>> Yeah. And

I'm going to be jumping first in line to

get up there for

>> mean

You know, everyone should go to the moon

at least once, I think.

>> Just once. Yeah.

>> You can move there if you want. You can

go live on the moon.

>> We'll see.

>> [laughter]

>> Thanks, guys, for chatting with me for a

little bit.

>> All right.

>> May excited to see whole new tech whole

new kind of satellite whole bunch more

Starship launches

more chips more solar more more

everything. It's

It's a big future, but I'm excited to

see everybody at this company go out and

build.

>> All right. Sounds good. It's exciting.

Thanks, guys.