Ars: Ten years ago you made a little big bets on the spaceship and Starlink, and most people probably expected one or both to fail.
Musk: Including me.
Ars: Yes. These were huge bets.
Musk: I was interviewed in the early days of Starlink and they asked me what the goal of Starlink is? I said goal number one: don't go bankrupt, like any other [low-Earth orbit] Communications Constellation has gone bankrupt and we do not want to come to the cemetery. So every result that does not lead to death would be a good result.
Ars: Starlink has become really successful. It helped me during a hurricane. And the spaceship is coming. If you look out over the next 10 years, what do you bet you will wear real fruit for SpaceX in a decade of today?
Musk: Well, by far the biggest thing is spaceship. If the Starship program is successful – and we see a way to success, it is just a matter of when we have created the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, the holy grail of Rocketry, as you know. So nobody has ever made a fully reusable orbital vehicle, and even the parts that are reusable have been extremely difficult to use again, so that in many cases the economy was actually worse than a replaceable rocket. The canonical example is the shuttle, where the fully charged, costs of the entire shuttle program, I believe, about a billion dollars per flight.
Ars: I saw one research paper that estimated the fully charged costs, was around $ 1.5 billion.
Musk. Yes. And that is about the same as a Saturn V costs. But the Saturn V as a replaceable rocket had the load capacity of the shuttle four times. So the shuttle was as if the principle of reusability was good, but unfortunately the implementation was not. The shuttle was charged with so many crazy requirements. You know, I have this first principles of five steps to improve things. And step one of my five -step process is to make the requirements less stupid. And for the government it is the opposite. The government makes requirements more stupid.
Ars: So getting a fast and reusable spaceship is the main goal for SpaceX in the next 5 to 10 years?
Musk: Yes, absolutely.
Ars: You have been in the space industry for almost 25 years now. And at that time SpaceX has taken a long way in the direction of solving launch. So if you came in the industry today like a 20-Like, you know, with a few $ 100 million. What would the problem be that you would like to solve? Where do new companies, philanthropists and others have to work on in space?
Musk: We build the equivalent of the Union Pacific Railroad and the train. So once you have the transport system for Mars, there is a huge series of opportunities that open up to do everything on the surface of Mars, including, you know, doing everything, from building a semiconductor FAB to a pizza magazines, in fact built up a civilization. So we want to solve the transport problem and that can enable philanthropists and entrepreneurs to do things on Mars, what everything is needed for civilization. Look at, say, California. There were very few people in California until the Pacific of the Union was completed, and then California became the most populated state in the nation. And look at Silicon Valley and Hollywood and everything. So that is our goal. We want to get people there, and if we can get people there, then there is a literal world of opportunities.
