Transcription
All right. Well, hello everybody and welcome, uh, hanging out. I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starling team. Figured we'd check in. It's been, you know, typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle, acquired XAI, now SpaceX AI, announced a terra-chip building project. And so, yeah, never a dull moment. Yeah, never a 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 multilanetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI stat stuff. 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? Um, that's the most objective metric, uh, that any alien species, say, visiting us, uh, would calibrate how much progress we've made, um, as a civilization. And one of the most subjective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. Um, and, uh, there was a Russian physicist, actually, I think by the name of Kardashev, um, who thought about this, and it's, and it's, I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is, uh, you can have, you can, you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's, uh, Type One. And then Type Two would be, uh, how much of the star's 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.
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, uh, are we harnessing? It's a very, very tiny number. Um, and, uh, and, and basically, we, we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. So, the, the sun, uh, 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, um, 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. We'll get... Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. AI will figure it out. I told one way to appreciate 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 then of 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, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun. But, but how much energy are we talking, like, coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth? 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, uh, you know, 70% of Earth is water.
"Yeah."
Uh, we should technically our planet should be called Water. Um, 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 greenlands, not green, of the, of the galaxy, of the solar system.
Yeah. Um, a bunch of the, the, exactly, even, even we're 70% water and of 30% that's land. A bunch of it is, uh, you know, Antarctica or, you know, Siberia type of thing. Very northern Canada type of thing. Very difficult to, not, not places people typically want to live. And you're not going to get a lot of, uh, 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, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, uh, you have to go to space. If you wanted 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 a million times a million. Uh, so, so basically, there's, we're, we're basically practically nowhere, um, on, on the sort of the Kardashev Two scale. Practically nowhere.
"So in Kardashev scale, we're all still, we're like, not, we're not even..."
Yeah. We're, we're, we're so, we're not, we're not registering.
"Not even a micro-Joule."
Yeah. We're...
"No. And so to actually..."
One micro-Joule would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.
"Something to aspire to."
Yeah. Yeah. That's our goal. Like, this is, I think, both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are, and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve, uh, power harnessed being one millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a micro-Joule...
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 a need. Like, you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously, until this point in human history, like, there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that like, maybe now is 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. Let's go. Like, we, we'll move the decimal point back. You're an extremely kick-ass 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 orbit Earth, uh, and capture, uh, solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and, uh, deal with cooling, because, uh, cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. Um, you can just radiate to the 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 know, be kind of like a respectable civilization. Um, so when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there, and they, uh, maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have, we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used.
"Yeah."
Um, that's not like totally pathetic.
"Which is the current situation."
And so, before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there 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, um, are: you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us. Uh, that large mass. So, you know, you 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 gigawatt or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, uh, you need, uh, you, you will 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 you need are mass to orbit, a lot of solar power 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. We just had...
"First flight to V3 was awesome."
I know. You were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch. Yeah.
"And like, long time coming. What's kind of, what's 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 multilanetary, as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You, you simply cannot extend the, the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft, and you cannot extend life, uh, to the moon, to Mars, and the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. Uh, the cost is simply prohibitive. You, you can't, you can't make enough rockets, uh, unless you fly, unless you can refly 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, flying would be far too expensive, and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
"You're doing a whole lot more driving."
Rapid reusability.
Um, every mode of transport is reusable, um, without which is simply not viable as, 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 deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. Um, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. Um, and there have been, you know, many prior attempts to create a, a fully reusable rocket. Um, and they, 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. The, the engines, the structure, the avionics, um, the choice of propellant, uh, 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. Then you've also, 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. Uh, this is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. I, it also happens to be the, the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, uh, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship B3 is more than double the thrust of it, the Saturn 5 moon rocket. Uh, by version four, we'll be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn 5 moon rocket. And we expect this, we expect Starship to be flying, um, 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 once Starship is flying?
It's, it's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So, even with Falcon, uh, 9, Falcon Heavy, uh, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. Um, I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. Um, and then most of the remaining mass, I think, 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 2500 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, uh, 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.
"Sure. 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 there. 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, effectively, it comes down to, uh, a set number of, of chips and, 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? Uh, 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, uh, that expertise to, 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 AI satellite is, uh, actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. It's a Starlink satellite has has gigantic phased array antennas. Uh, it's got, you know, parabolic antennas. It's got, uh, 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, a 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."
Just bigger.
"Just make stuff bigger."
Yeah. I was like, so we've got...
"This is our AI1. If you guys want to walk us through."
Yeah. So, so the first thing that we're, we're really looking at here is like, first, you got to make something compelling. Uh, right. And, and we thought that the right place to start is, uh, around the 150 kilowatt, like peak power level. Um, but as we look at the workloads with, with our experience with XAI, uh, we get to actually see the, that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute. There's a difference.
And what we're showing here is kind of a, a draft version of the version one of the, of the SpaceX AI satellite, an AI1, 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 watts per square meter for the radiators. So the radiators, these are double-sided radiators, are radiating both sides. They're, uh, oriented knife-edge to the sun. And, uh, and, and it's 1400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal. Over time, we think we could probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1400 watts per square meter for the, uh, solar panels and radiators respectively. Um, but this gives you, like, a, 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."
Uh, 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, I'm like, really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.
"Yeah. Part of what we 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 we've already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. So, uh, it's, it's, we, we basically, we don't think this is a, a super hard problem compared to things we already do."
Mhm.
Um, there would 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 kW peak, uh, power level is roughly matches what, say, an Nvidia GB300, uh, rack would do. So, you've got a GB300 with 72 GPUs. Uh, it peak power, I think, is around 140 kW. Um, but it's rarely, it's, it's almost impossible to get it to, to be at that peak power. Um, a more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120, 20 kW 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, um, or directly to the Starlink constellations. So, you can close the link, uh, with the Starlink constellation, and then Starlink can then, um, uh, send that data to the ground, uh, using the existing KA and KU, uh, antennas on the, on the vehicle. Um, it also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So, uh, and this, this would not be at a particularly high latency. You know, we're talking about, you know, maybe being around 6 to 800 km, uh, above the Earth, uh, and light travels 300 km per millisecond.
So, that's, uh, it's about, you know, 3 milliseconds away, basically. It's not, not very far.
"Won't worry about that too much though. It's sometimes people think there's going to be some like high latency. I'm like, yeah."
"It's no, speed of light moves pretty fast."
Light moves pretty fast. A tall one.
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"I think the cool thing also is the, uh, the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing, uh, solar arrays for the V3 vehicle."
"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..."
You like to 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 the 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 are the only operator that has any experience of 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 a 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 AIAT production building soon. Um, and, uh, yeah, so we expect to have the, this AIAT as production, the solar production, um, and, uh, all of that operating at 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 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, Reuben chips, or could be either GB300 or or Reuben CHFS. Um, and, uh, we'll 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, the current industry, uh, seems to be, uh, it seems like it's going to, I don't know, get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of, of AI compute. But 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 a gigantic chip factory. And to give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the Terafab is going to be around 100 million square feet, which is 10 times the size of the, uh, the Tesla Gigafactory Texas."
And what, aside from just, you know, 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 and, and you simply, you, you could simply scale, uh, the existing chipmaking technology, uh, with a lot of difficulty, uh, to a terawatt of chip output per year. Uh, that's, if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that's, uh, that's equivalent, that's like having a billion chips per year with a, a kilowatt per reticle. So, it's a billion full reticle 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 think 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 we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, um, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space, uh, AI compute, um, and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So, in 2 and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, in 3 and a half 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 terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts, which is that, that's twice the, the current electricity consumption of the United States."
I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. So...
"I don't know what it's going to think about, but, uh, we need to do a lot of simulations or something."
Yeah.
So, after we've, you know, broken 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?
"Cuz a 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 1000x from a terawatt per year, the, the only way that we can really say 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 make the chips on, on the moon. Um, and, but you, 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 1/6th Earth's gravity, you can, 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.
I think we can show people Heat. Heat. I mean, if that doesn't get you excited for the future, I don't really know what will. I'm fired up enough to see 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, we'll be able to go to the moon. And, uh, I think that would be pretty cool.
"Yeah. I'm, I'm going to be jumping first in line to get up there."
Yeah. I 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.
Thanks, guys, for chatting with me for a little bit. Excited to see a whole new type, 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. Great. Aces.