Interview: Elon Musk on SpaceX Plans -June 8, ’26 (Transcript)

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 maybe now’s the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two?

ELON MUSK: I mean, getting to a percent of the Sun’s energy?

DAN HUOT: Maybe not a percent, let’s go like, we’ll move the decimal point back to 0.1%.

ELON MUSK: I’d say you’re an extremely kick-ass civilization if you get to 1% of the Sun’s energy. And I’m like, wow, that civilization’s going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least.

So in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashev scale, we need to launch satellites to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling, because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. You can just radiate to a vacuum.

And so 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. So when the aliens— hopefully there are aliens out there, and they maybe finally decide to talk to us— we have some respectable amount of the Sun’s energy being used. Yeah. That’s not like totally pathetic.

DAN HUOT: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Which is the current situation.

What It Takes to Scale: Mass to Orbit

DAN HUOT: And so before we start sending data centers, sending all of this to space, there are some limiting factors that we gotta get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, what does it take to scale? Yeah. So things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mass-to-orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us, that large mass. So 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 100 gigawatts or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar, and then you’re going to need a terawatt of AI chips. So the 3 things you need are mass to orbit, a lot of solar power, and radiators, of course, and a lot of chips.

DAN HUOT: 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 of V3. It was awesome. I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch. Yeah. And then like long time coming. What’s kind of— what’s Starship’s kind of purpose of being? What is it going to be doing?

Starship: Revolutionizing Space Travel

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so Starship is going to revolutionize space really. It’s the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multi-planetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale.

You simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft and you cannot extend life to the moon, to Mars, and to the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can’t make enough rockets. Yeah. Unless you can re-fly them.

Just like any other mode of transport, you can imagine that 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.

DAN HUOT: Be doing a whole lot more driving.

IAN DAHL: Rapid reusability.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Yes. Every mode of transport is reusable without which it’s simply not viable as a transport system. So cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable. Yeah.

With rockets, it’s much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. And these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there have been many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket. And most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they didn’t think they could succeed.

In order to achieve full reusability, everything’s got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. 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. 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’ve got to achieve full reusability. You’ve got to go a step beyond that, which is 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.

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. I mean, it also happens to be the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship V3 is more than double the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. By version 4, we’ll be pretty much 3 times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. And we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.

Starship’s Impact on Mass to Orbit

DAN HUOT: 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.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

DAN HUOT: 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?

ELON MUSK: 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 we’re somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. 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%.

Now 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. And to do so in a pretty short period of time. So we think probably we can get to 1 million tons to orbit per year in about 3 years, thereabouts. Starship.

Data Centers in Space

DAN HUOT: 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 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.

IAN DAHL: Yeah, I think it’s pretty interesting. A lot of people don’t actually know what the inside of a data center even looks like, right?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And it’s some like mythical place where the internet’s in the cloud or something.

The AI-1 Satellite: Design and Capabilities

IAN DAHL: Yeah, some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but effectively it comes down to a set number of chips and the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how to get the power for it. And that’s where a lot of what we’ve worked on for existing Starlink technology, the solar arrays 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.

We like to look at this and say, what is the actual engineering problem here? And 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.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Now the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has gigantic phased array antennas. It’s got parabolic antennas. It’s got a lot of laser links. It’s much more complicated than an AI satellite. An AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don’t have all of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. So, given the two, the easier one to design for is the AI satellite.

DAN HUOT: Yeah.

IAN DAHL: It’s just a little bit bigger.

ELON MUSK: It’s bigger.

DAN HUOT: Just make stuff bigger. Yeah. So we’ve got this — this is our AI-1, if you guys want to walk us through.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

IAN DAHL: Yeah, so the first thing that we’re really looking at here is, first you’ve got to make something compelling, right? And we thought that the right place to start is around the 150-kilowatt peak power level. But as we look at the workloads with our experience with xAI, we get to actually see that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute.

ELON MUSK: There’s a difference. Yeah. What we’re showing here is kind of a draft version of the version 1 of the SpaceX AI satellite, AI-1, I guess you could call it. And seems like a reasonable place to start. It is 150 kilowatts peak power, 120 kilowatts sustained power.

And to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiators and size of the solar panels, the assumptions here are 250 watts per square meter for the solar array and about 1,400 watts per square meter for the radiators. So the radiators — these are double-sided radiators, radiating both sides. They’re oriented knife edge to the sun. And 1,400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal.

Over time, we think we can probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1,400 watts per square meter for the solar panels and radiators respectively. But this gives you a — a prism is pretty much what the satellite’s going to look like. It’s a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small by comparison.

IAN DAHL: And these are evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

IAN DAHL: That’s really, I think, the cool part to me is that we’re looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V3 Starlink vehicle. So I’m really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, part of what we want to convey here is that there’s not some magic that’s necessary that doesn’t exist for the AI satellites. As Ian said, a lot of this is technology we’ve already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. So we basically don’t think this is a super hard problem compared to things we already do.

There would also be probably something on the order of a terabit of connectivity, of laser link connectivity from the satellite. The 150 kilowatt peak power level roughly matches what, say, an NVIDIA GV300 rack would do. So if you’ve got a GV300 with 72 GPUs, its peak power I think is around 140 kilowatts. But it’s almost impossible to get it to be at that peak power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120 kilowatts average power, but it can peak up to 150. So think of it as a rack of compute in space.

And then you can connect these racks of compute to either each other by the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellations. 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 vehicle. It also has laser links to the ground as well.

And this would not be at a particularly high latency. We’re talking about maybe being around 600 to 800 kilometers above the Earth, and light travels 300 kilometers per millisecond. So that’s about 3 milliseconds away, basically. It’s not very far.

DAN HUOT: Won’t worry about that too much then.

ELON MUSK: Sometimes people think there’s going to be some high latency. I’m like, no, speed of light moves pretty fast.

DAN HUOT: Light moves pretty fast. It’s a tall one.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

IAN DAHL: I think the cool thing also is the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar arrays for the V3 vehicle, kind of in that realm where we’re flying today.

Building at Scale: The Bastrop Facility

DAN HUOT: Yeah. So they’ve got about a 70-meter 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, space is in the name. There’s a lot of space up there. And so even when you’re talking thousands or even up to a million satellites, you’ve got plenty of room to move around up there.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, space is really big. So it’s not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous. If you zoom in close to the satellite, it looks big. But if you actually look at it relative to the Earth, these satellites are so tiny you can’t even see them. So they’re very, very tiny compared to Earth.

DAN HUOT: And we have 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?

IAN DAHL: Yeah. We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. It’s a great thing that we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and fly them safely. That’s the number one goal when we look at the constellation.

DAN HUOT: 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 got this — yeah. So we’re in that building kind of in the middle, which —

ELON MUSK: Yeah, we’re sitting in that building right now.

DAN HUOT: This is my first time here. The building is massive. Like 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?

ELON MUSK: Yes, we’re going to — in fact, we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It’s under construction already. And then we will be building out the AI.Sat production building soon. And yeah, so we expect to have the AI.Sat production, the solar production, and all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.

DAN HUOT: So if anybody wants to work on AI satellites, this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We’re also — 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?

ELON MUSK: Yes. In fact, these are the new Starlink terminals, which we made in much higher volume than the current terminals. Ultimately we think there’s probably going to be a few hundred million Starlink terminals out there. And then the Starlink Direct-to-Cell constellation will connect directly to people’s cell phones and enable high-bandwidth communication directly from your phone to space.

Chips, the Terafab, and the Road to a Terawatt

DAN HUOT: All right, we’re two limiting factors down. We’ve got mass to orbit. Putting solar in the compute, third one’s chips.

ELON MUSK: Yes. So at least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for NVIDIA Rubin chips, or could be either GV300 or Rubin chips. We’ll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry seems like it’s going to get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI compute. But that doesn’t actually answer the question of, well, how do you get to a terawatt? That’s why you need the terafab.

IAN DAHL: Always looking a step bigger.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. 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 Tesla Gigafactory Texas.

DAN HUOT: And what, aside from just the size — 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?

ELON MUSK: Well, I think over time there’s going to be a lot of technology evolution with the TerraFab, but fundamentally it’s about scale. So even if there were no fundamental technology breakthroughs, you could simply scale the existing chipmaking technology with a lot of difficulty to a terawatt of chip output per year. If you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that’s equivalent to having 1 billion chips per year with a kilowatt per radical. So it’s a billion full radical equivalent chips, each doing a kilowatt. And then you’re going to need a lot of memory to go with that.

DAN HUOT: A lot of people today even think orbital data centers were like a decade away.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I think we want to try to give people a sense of the time frame we’re aiming for. People should take this with a grain of salt to some degree because this is just our best guess. So this is not a promise of what we’ll do. This is what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute.

And then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in 2.5 years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, and 3.5 years, maybe 100 gigawatts. And then depending upon what progress there is in chipmaking in the rest of the world and with the TerraFab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts — that’s twice the current electricity consumption of the United States. I think there will be an appetite for that, but we’ll see.

IAN DAHL: It’s a lot of satellites.

ELON MUSK: I don’t know what it’s going to think about, but we need to do a lot of simulations or something.

Beyond Earth: The Moon and the Mass Driver

DAN HUOT: Yeah. So after we’ve worked through all the limiting factors, we’ve kind of topped out what we can do on Earth. What is the next step to try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level 2?

ELON MUSK: Why stop there? Why think small? Because a terawatt actually is very small. That’s not thinking small. So in order to get to another 3 orders of magnitude, to 1,000x from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the Moon with a mass driver. Essentially where you do local production of photovoltaics and radiators on the Moon. Maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably make the chips on the Moon. But you need most of the mass to be made on the Moon so you don’t have to transport it to the Moon from Earth.

And then because the Moon has no atmosphere and only 1/6th Earth’s gravity, you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a railgun type. It’s basically a linear electric motor is the way to think about it.

DAN HUOT: That’s a good thing we can show people. I mean, if that doesn’t get you excited for the future, I don’t really know what will.

ELON MUSK: I’m far enough to see a mass driver on the Moon. That would be very cool.

IAN DAHL: Yeah. Sci-fi future. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It would also mean that if we’re bringing that amount of mass to the Moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the Moon will be able to go to the Moon. And I think that would be pretty cool. Yeah.

DAN HUOT: I’m going to be jumping first in line to get up there.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Everyone should go to the Moon at least once, I think. Yeah, no. Just once.

DAN HUOT: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: You can move there if you want. You can go live on the Moon.

DAN HUOT: We’ll see. Thanks guys for chatting with me for a little bit. All right. Excited to see a whole new kind of satellite, whole bunch more Starship launches, more chips, more solar, more everything. It’s a big future, but I’m excited to see everybody at this company go out and build.

ELON MUSK: All right, sounds good. It’s exciting. Thanks guys.

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