How To Build A Self-Sustaining City On Mars | Saurav Shroff, Starpath

Summary

In this interview, Saurav Shroff, co-founder and CEO of Starpath, discusses the company’s mission to make life multiplanetary by building the essential infrastructure for a self-sustaining city on Mars. The conversation covers the two critical machines needed for Mars colonization: fully reusable rockets (being developed by SpaceX) and rocket propellant production plants on Mars, which Starpath is building. Shroff explains that 90-95% of the power on Mars will be spent producing rocket propellant, essentially running an “inverse rocket engine” to convert Martian water and CO2 back into methane and oxygen fuel.

Starpath has developed the lowest-cost, fastest-driving, highest-performance Moon/Mars rovers ever made, at around a hundred thousand dollars compared to NASA’s hundreds of millions. They’ve also vertically integrated solar panel production after finding that existing space-grade solar panels cost 10-20x their entire system budget. The company now sells these panels to satellite companies at about a tenth of competitor prices. Shroff discusses the technical challenges, the importance of fast iteration cycles, and why SpaceX’s Starship program is essential for making Mars colonization economically viable. He estimates that building a self-sustaining city requires around a thousand Starship flights over 10 synods.

Highlights

”A Mars city will spend 90 to 95% of its power producing rocket propellant”

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“A Mars city will spend 90 to 95% of its power producing rocket propellant. So the rocket propellant production plant on Mars can really be thought of as the second most important piece of infrastructure you need to build a city on Mars and the core engine that makes the city on Mars run.” — Saurav Shroff, 2:03

”An over 100x cost reduction on rovers”

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“At Star Path, we’re building rovers for the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we’re talking about an over 100x cost reduction.” — Saurav Shroff, 7:44

”Solar panel quotes were 10 to 20 times our entire system budget”

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“The quotes we got from vendors for just the solar panels were 10 to 20 times more than what we want to spend on the entire system. So we wanted to spend $10 to $20 per watt. And we were getting quotes between $100 and $400 per watt for just the solar panels.” — Saurav Shroff, 9:17

”Mars is fundamentally more interesting because it has organics”

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“Mars is a fundamentally more interesting planet because it has organics. So it has carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and with organic compounds you can make a completely self-sustaining city on Mars. There’s nothing that humans consume that you could point to on Mars and say like okay that’s not possible to make.” — Saurav Shroff, 12:24

”Rover one took 3 weeks to build for $10,000 or less”

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“We went to Home Depot, we bought some parts, and we’re like, okay, let’s make something with wheels that moves. Rover One took us only 3 weeks to build. We spent 3 weeks and probably $10,000 or less. Rover One pretty much didn’t work.” — Saurav Shroff, 27:26

”A million tons to Mars equals a self-sustaining city”

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“A million tons to the surface of Mars is what it takes to make life multiplanetary roughly speaking if you want it to be permanent. Each Starship can carry 100 tons to the surface of Mars per flight. So you need a fleet of a thousand that makes 10 trips.” — Saurav Shroff, 49:37

”The idiot index in aerospace is at least 100 to 1”

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“The idiot index is the ratio of the cost of the finished goods to the cost of the raw inputs. In aerospace, the idiot index can be like hundreds or sometimes thousands to one where you buy a product that might be $10,000 but if you had the design, you could fabricate it for 50.” — Saurav Shroff, 79:18

Key Points

• Two essential machines for Mars (0:40) - A fully reusable rocket and a rocket propellant production plant on Mars are the two key pieces of infrastructure needed for multiplanetary life

• 90-95% power for propellant (2:03) - A Mars city will spend 90-95% of its power producing rocket propellant, making the propellant plant the core engine of any Mars settlement

• Inverse rocket engine concept (3:05) - The propellant production plant works as an inverse rocket engine, taking CO2 and water and using solar power to convert them back into methane and oxygen

• High school chemistry process (4:06) - The chemical process to produce rocket fuel on Mars is simple high school chemistry - splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then reacting hydrogen with CO2 for methane

• Three machines for implementation (5:41) - Starpath builds three machines: solar power generators, chemical processing plants, and mobile rovers that mine Martian dirt

• Rover cost reduction (7:44) - Starpath builds rovers for low hundreds of thousands of dollars versus NASA’s hundreds of millions, an over 100x cost reduction

• Solar panel vertical integration (8:15) - After finding space-grade solar panels cost 10-20x their entire system budget, Starpath vertically integrated solar production

• Selling to satellite companies (9:48) - Starpath now sells solar panels to satellite companies at about 1/10th the price of existing vendors

• Mars vs Moon long-term (12:24) - Mars is more interesting than the Moon because it has organics (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen) enabling a truly self-sustaining city

• SpaceX Starship fleet (14:59) - SpaceX is building toward a fleet of 1000+ Starships, with the overwhelming majority destined for Mars

• Scaling Starship production (15:51) - Currently SpaceX makes tens of Starships per year, soon hundreds, with plans for mass production at unprecedented scale

• Why multiplanetary matters (17:56) - Extending consciousness across planets provides insurance against extinction and allows human consciousness to flourish in new ways

• Starpath founding story (24:16) - Saurav left SpaceX to start Starpath after realizing no one was building the essential Mars infrastructure

• First 10 rovers (26:53) - Starpath built their first 10 rovers focusing on rapid iteration and vertical integration

• Simulating Martian soil (33:09) - They test rovers on simulated Martian regolith that matches Mars soil composition

• What if SpaceX didn’t exist (35:11) - Without SpaceX, there would be no point to Starpath - the reusable rocket is the prerequisite

• Fast iteration importance (40:14) - Maintaining fast iteration cycles even as the company scales is crucial for continued innovation

• Starship flights for Mars city (49:19) - Estimates suggest approximately 1000 Starship flights over 10 synods to build a self-sustaining Mars city

• Biggest risks (1:02:43) - Execution risk is the main challenge - the technology works, but scaling production is difficult

• Finding aligned talent (1:11:31) - Hiring people genuinely motivated by the multiplanetary mission, not just the paycheck

• Idiot index concept (1:18:46) - The ratio between what you pay for something and what the raw materials cost - higher ratios indicate manufacturing inefficiency

Mentions

Companies

• Starpath (0:00) - The company Saurav founded to build Mars infrastructure
• SpaceX (14:59) - Building the Starship rocket essential for Mars colonization
• NASA (6:42) - Has built Mars rovers costing hundreds of millions each
• JPL (10:19) - NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, historical satellite customer

Products & Technologies

• Starship (14:59) - SpaceX’s fully reusable rocket designed for Mars missions
• Martian regolith (33:09) - Simulated Mars soil used for rover testing
• Space-grade solar panels (8:15) - Starpath’s vertically integrated solar panels at 1/10th industry cost
• Mars rovers (6:11) - Starpath’s lowest-cost, highest-performance planetary rovers

People

• Saurav Shroff (0:30) - Co-founder and CEO of Starpath
• Elon Musk (mentioned in context of SpaceX’s Mars vision)

Surprising Quotes

“It is physically impossible to make a rocket that can fly from Earth to Mars and back without refueling on Mars.” — 0:00

“A Mars city will spend 90 to 95% of its power producing rocket propellant.” — 2:03

“The rocket propellant production plant in simple terms can be thought of as the opposite of a rocket engine… an inverse rocket engine.” — 3:05

“At Star Path, we’re building rovers for the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we’re talking about an over 100x cost reduction.” — 7:44

“The quotes we got from vendors for just the solar panels were 10 to 20 times more than what we want to spend on the entire system.” — 9:17

Transcript

0:00 Making life multilanetary will extend the light of human consciousness. It is physically impossible to make a rocket that can fly from Earth to Mars and back without refueling on Mars. So the rocket propellant production plant on Mars can really be thought of as the second most important piece of infrastructure you need to build a city on Mars and the core engine that makes the city on Mars run. What Star Path is building is the machines that make that possible and make it possible at unit economics that make the cost of a round trip to Mars a price that a middle-class American can afford.

0:30 This is Sarav Shro and he is the co-founder and CEO of Star Path and Star Path is basically trying to make life multilanetary or was founded to make life multilanetary. Do you want to just start off with what are the inputs to basically making a self-sustaining city on Mars? Yeah. Uh well, first of all, thanks for coming. Um totally. So there there’s basically two machines that you want to make uh to start to make life multilanetary on Mars. Um the first machine is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. So this is a rocket that can fly

1:01 and refly like an airplane where the primary expense in operating the rocket is fuel and you know the secondary expense is is refurbishment or maintenance or whatever. Um but but the primary expense is not building the rocket. Um this is important because if you don’t make a fully and rapidly reusable rocket uh the unit economics of transporting uh cargo and crew to the surface of Mars will be far too expensive. Um the second machine that you need to make uh doesn’t necessarily meet the eye. It’s not necessarily as obvious. It’s a rocket propellant production plant on Mars. Um and this is

1:32 because it is physically impossible to make a rocket that can fly from Earth to Mars and back uh without refueling on Mars. Now, if you make a rocket um that can fly to Mars but can’t get back, um the the journey is both costly and morbid. Uh so nobody will go. Um and so you need to make a rocket propellant production plant on Mars. Um and it turns out that um if you sketch out a city on Mars really in any way, if you imagine it with a few people, a lot of people, a short stay time, a long stay time, whatever, that city will spend 90

2:03 to 95% of its power producing rocket propellant. So the rocket propellant production plant on Mars can really be thought of as um the second most important uh piece of infrastructure you need to build a city on Mars and the core engine um that makes the city on Mars run. So can you basically go into the math on how the 95% uh works out? Yeah, it’s super shocking fact uh upfront, but basically um so so first of all the question is like how do you make rocket propellants? Um for a vehicle like Starship um the vehicle consumes oxygen and methane. In a rocket engine the

2:33 oxygen and methane burn to produce obviously energy uh in the form of heat um and CO2 and water. Um the rocket propellant production plant on Mars ingests water which is in the Martian crust and CO2 which makes up the majority of the Martian atmosphere um and adds power uh via solar energy uh to turn that CO2 and water back into um methane and oxygen. So the rocket propellant production plant in simple terms can be thought of as the opposite of a rocket engine. A rocket engine takes like an inverse rocket engine.

3:05 It’s an inverse rocket engine. And so a rocket engine is approximately speaking the most energetic device. I mean roughly uh short of like a nuclear fusion reactor or or like a grenade. But even a grenade is like pretty low energy compared to you know 33 rocket engines on the bottom of a rocket. So rocket engine is like the most roughly energetic thing that the human species has ever made. Um and what we need to do is go to Mars and build a machine that does the opposite. Um so so now you can start to picture like okay why is it the case that uh all the energy that we you know 95% of the energy we produce on

3:35 Mars um will be spent on rocket rocket propellant production. Well it’s because um you know you’re undoing the most energetic thing um that that humans really do ever. Um and so and so what Star Path is building is the machines that that make that possible and make it possible at unit economics that uh make the cost of a round trip to Mars a price that a middle-ass American can afford. So basically how does the technology work of um taking uh this you know water and everything from the surface of Mars and then the CO2 in the atmosphere uh and turn it into rock fuel. How does that work?

4:06 Yeah, it’s so so at a chemistry level um the production of rocket fuel on Mars is extremely simple. It’s like high school level chemistry. Um what you do and and I’ll talk about the chemistry first and then the implementation with robots after. Um what you do is you take uh dirt out of the ground that has water in it. You heat up the dirt to extract the water um as pure water with obviously no dirt in it. Um you then take the water and you split it into oxygen and hydrogen which are of course um you know water the water molecule is made of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. So you split it into oxygen and hydrogen which is the

4:38 most energetic part of the process. Um rocket fuel just to recap here is oxygen and methane. So we now have one component of a rocket fuel uh for simplicity we’ll call it half although it’s actually 80%. Um, and to produce the methane component, which is the other 20%, you react the product hydrogen from splitting water with the CO2 that is abundant in the Martian atmosphere, um, to produce methane. And that reaction actually releases a little bit of energy which feeds back into the process. So, from a chemistry standpoint, it’s super simple. In fact, um, high schoolers will remember that in their high school chemistry class, uh,

5:09 they probably did something to the tune of like putting a nail uh, in a bucket of water and like seeing some bubbles form. that is just extremely low efficiency um and high unit cost water electrolysis. Um so from chem from chemistry standpoint it’s it’s like a total total total walk in the park. Um and this is actually a part of the reason why methane and oxygen were selected as the propellants for Starship. And you know we hope that that uh trend continues if more companies develop similar vehicles from a robotic implementation standpoint. Um that process breaks down into three machines. Um in no particular

5:41 order um one machine generates power. Um, in the early days that’ll be done with solar energy. Um, and in the long term it’ll be done with nuclear. Um, the second machine is a machine that ingests dirt that’s mined um and does the chemical reaction I just described. Um, and then the third machine is a mobile robot that drives around the surface of Mars um, and digs up huge amounts of dirt um, as a raw feed stock uh, for this process. Um, and uh, and we build all three of those machines um, and we’re designing them to be produced

6:11 at massive scale. Um, so for context, we built the lowest cost, fastest driving rate and highest performance uh, moon or Mars rover ever made. Um, and uh, in a few years time we’ll build a factory that can make thousands of them every year. Previously, how much does a Mars rover cost for like NASA to build? It’s a good question. Um, there are a lot of NASA rovers that have been that have been built in the past. Yeah. None of them have been made for under $und00 million and many of them have been made for over $500 million. Um, importantly, does that include the cost to launch them to Mars? No, that number does not

6:42 include the cost to launch Mars research. Um yeah, and and for context, I’m referencing both rovers that that NASA has made for the moon and for Mars. Um so, so NASA has built um a ton of what I would call really impressive science machines. So machines that are optimized to do like 50 disjoint experiments on, you know, water concentration, mineral type, soil type, you know, various questions that scientists around the world um have been asking. But what NASA has never done is

7:12 ask themselves, okay, how cheap can I get the unit cost of water on Mars and subsequently how cheap can I get the unit cost of propellant? Uh this question is only relevant when your objective is to make life multilanetary. Um and it’s a totally irrelevant question for the objectives that NASA has in my opinion admirably chased over the past called three decades which is to advance science. So, in the past, just to answer your question directly, uh the number has been hundreds of millions of dollars uh to build rovers. Um where if NASA were to build a second or third version of that rover, it would still cost them tens of millions of

7:44 dollars. At Star Path, um we’re building rovers for the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we’re talking about an over 100x cost reduction. Um and that’s driven by vertical integration of all of the components that make the rover challenging to manufacture. Um or I should say costly to manufacture. um and a design that’s designed around mass production. Yeah. And I know you mentioned that you basically uh set out to kind of build the propellant production and then suddenly you ran into the situation where the cost of uh solar panels which we’re looking at and like we have in the

8:15 background here. Um they’re just like orders of magnitude more than you really need them to be. Um how did you decide to basically go from just propellant production to now building solar panels? Yeah. Was that process? Yeah. So um for for context, we didn’t really decide um to go from from just building propellant production to building solar panels. Um the early days of Mars will be solar powered. Um so we started by building massive deployable structures that could get you huge amounts of solar power production on the surface of the moon and on the surface

8:45 of Mars. Um and what we initially did was we built the structures um and then we went to try and buy the solar cells um from the existing marketplace of vendors that sell solar cells and solar panels and solar modules mostly to satellite companies. Um and what we found was that the unit economics and you’re not going to believe me but but I I promise you I’m not lying. The unit economics of buying just the solar panels. So the quotes we got from vendors for just the solar panels, which mind you, we have to build deployable solar panels, rovers to mine dirt, and

9:17 plants to process the dirt into rocket propellant. So for just the solar panels, we’re 10 to 20 times more than what we want to spend on the entire system. So we wanted to spend, you know, on a per watt basis, which I’ll explain, you know, what I mean by on a per watt basis later, like $10 to $20 per watt. And we were getting quotes between $100 and $400 per watt for just the solar panels. Um and so what we did uh was like I said earlier we vertically integrated the production of that product um for our own purposes so that we could build a base on the moon and a

9:48 city on Mars. Um it would just be completely financially impossible to do it by buying solar panels from the existing marketplace of vendors. Um and then after doing that um and we didn’t plan to do this at all but after doing that we realized like okay well we have extremely valuable product on hand. All of the satellite companies are trying to scale their operations. the supply chain can’t keep up in production rate and definitely can’t keep up in cost. Um so we’ve now entered that marketplace as well. So now we sell solar panels to satellite companies um for about a tenth the price that you can get uh from from the vendors that we ourselves tried to

10:19 buy from um and failed and failed to buy from. Yeah. And so I want to try to understand why did previous uh solar panels cost so much when solar cells cost so much. It’s it’s a tough question to answer because I don’t work at the companies that uh that make those products. Um, but roughly speaking, the satellite supply chain, meaning the supply chain for for all components that go into satellites are based on, you know, what I would call extremely low volumes and high unit costs. So, they’re they’re sort of based on the economy of yesterday where, okay, maybe a satellite company is building a satellite for NASA

10:50 or for JPL or for for VIAD or something where there’s like three satellite launches a decade. And when there’s three satellite launches a decade, um, you know, and you’re building a business that supplies the company that makes, you know, a satellite every thousand days instead of a satellite that makes a company that makes a satellite like every thousand minutes. This wasn’t designed to for scaled production. Yeah. It wasn’t designed for scale production. And the incentives are completely misaligned where, you know, if you tell uh, you know, a customer that’s buying, you know, 50 kilowatts of panels every 2 years like, “Hey, I’ll charge you 10x for 10% more

11:21 performance.” That looks like a good deal. Um but uh the economy is shifting obviously I mean towards scale and lower unit cost. Um and the supply chain really hasn’t changed much since I mean the early 2000s. So um you know the businesses that exist today are supplying companies of yesterday and um you know Star Path while we didn’t necessarily intend to be in the business of supplying satellites um we’re really looking at supplying the satellites of tomorrow where companies want to build you know constellations of thousands of satellites that service you know really big markets like telecom and earth

11:53 observation and stuff like that. I know that you were thinking about basically trying to also build a similar propellant production facility on the moon, but then I think it’s kind of like moved and shifted away from that. Why did that happen? So, so I would say, yeah, you’re you’re kind of right, not entirely right. Um, the products that we build uh the rover and and the plant so that the machine that digs dirt and the machine that processes the dirt and turns it into rocket propellants um are designed for the moon. Um so they will work on the moon. Um and there’s a lot of interest particularly from government customers

12:24 uh to build a base on the moon and we think that that’s going to happen. Um that being said in the long long long term so 10 years from now, eight years from now, 20 years from now um if you ask the question like okay out of the out of the two planets or I guess moon’s not a planet but for simplicity the two planets uh moon and Mars which one’s more interesting? Um Mars is a fundamentally more interesting uh planet because it has organics. So it has carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and with organic with with organic compounds you can make a completely self-sustaining city on Mars. There’s

12:54 nothing that humans consume that you could point to on Mars and say like okay that’s not possible to make. You can make obviously rocket propellants, obviously electricity, obviously water for drinking, obviously oxygen for breathing. Okay, that’s the majority. You could also make Tylenol. You could also make computer chips. You could make, you know, vitamin C. You could make, you know, bread. Um, and it wouldn’t be necessarily trivial to make those things. Um, but you could. So, from a standpoint of like what planet from first principles physics is more interesting uh to go build a huge base on, it’s definitely Mars. Um, you know,

13:26 Mars is a world where, you know, in a 100 years we could turn it into a planet that looks not quite like Earth, but, you know, way more like Earth um than it does today. And the moon, for the moon, the same story really can’t be told. There’s no world where there’s liquid oceans on the moon. Um, there’s no world where there’s an atmosphere on the moon. There’s no world where you have Tylenol production on the moon. And so from long-term standpoint, that’s true. Um, and at this point, is it just because the moon just doesn’t have the same like resource composition? Exactly. So the moon the moon doesn’t have access to the same organic

13:57 compounds that Mars does. Um, so if you wanted to make something like uh bread, um, you would find that from an elemental standpoint, the actual elements that go into making bread, some of them aren’t present in large quantities on the moon. Um, so even if you take out the fact that like, okay, there’s barely any water on the moon, there’s no atmosphere, the nights are 14 days, the days are 14 days, um, and you just look at the fact like, okay, theoretically with infinitely capable technology, could I make this a planet that that’s livable? The answer is no. Um, but with Mars, the answer is absolutely yes. It’s just challenging to

14:27 make that technology, and we’re up for the challenge. Um, and and now that um, you know, sort of like if you look at like, okay, like what what entities in the world define where humans are going to go? Um, obviously a company like Star Path will be, you know, one of those major players in a few years, but right now there’s basically two major entities and it’s NASA and it’s SpaceX. Um, and SpaceX has been very clear publicly about their objectives and SpaceX is building a rocket that can go to the moon and Mars. Um, but if if you look at their their publicly uh their publicly talked about plans, you know, the overwhelming majority of the rockets

14:59 that they’re building are Marsbound. Um, right now SpaceX is building a factory that can make tens of Starships per year. Soon it will be hundreds of Starships per year. Um and the fleet of starships will be a thousand plus. Um low both low earth orbit and the moon are very close. So there is no reason to have a fleet of a thousand starships unless you’re sending them to Mars. In fact, just two starships could service the entire low earth orbit market for satellites and something like five Starships could service, you know, effectively infinite volume of cargo to

15:30 the surface of the moon. Um the only reason why SpaceX is building a thousand Starships or or fleet of a thousand starships which they’ve talked about publicly um is because uh the roundtrip journey to Mars uh and back takes about 4 years. And so if you want to do you know a million tons of cargo to the surface of Mars you have to have a big fleet uh because you know you can’t refly the fleet every day or every two days or every 5 days like you can with low Earth orbit and the moon. I also find it kind of interesting that it’s honestly like at least short term like way more efficient to just uh basically scale the production of starships on

16:02 Earth instead of trying to even get the Starships back from Mars in the first place cuz it’s just so much easier to put up a production facility here. Yeah. So, in the early days in the early days and uh SpaceX has now talked about this publicly although you know I’m not a spokesperson for SpaceX so to take this with a grain of salt um you can or sorry in the early days they will not be bringing Starships back from Mars. They’re they’re one-way trips. Um, and they’re they’re they’re primarily one-way trips for the reason that uh building the infrastructure on Mars um is extremely extremely challenging to enable Starships to fly back home. Um,

16:32 and that’s why we exist. Um, so so SpaceX will tell you that, you know, they’re going to fly Starships back from Mars. I don’t know what date they’re talking about these days. Um, our goal is to make that possible at least four years sooner than they’re expecting. Um, and so how do you do that? Yeah, it’s a great question. So I mean star path’s primary technology um is uh our primary objective is to make it possible to fly starships back from Mars to Earth um by building propellant production plants on the surface of Mars. Um there are a few other technologies that sort of like questionable like whether you do or don’t need them uh to fly back from Mars

17:04 like you know some people talk about the fact that like maybe you need a landing pad uh to launch from on the surface of Mars. That one’s sort of like TBD. I think the answer is like probably yes. And you know, we may be able to solve that at some point. Um, we haven’t thought about it, you know, super in-depth because it is not really the bulk of the challenge. The bulk of the challenge is like, okay, my rocket on Mars needs 2,000 tons of propellant. The current production rate of propellant on Mars is squarely 0 g. It’s not even 0 kg, 0 g. Okay. Um, so you have to get from 0 g to, you know, whatever 2

17:34 billion g. Um, and you have to do it in a short enough time where the propellant that you produce on Mars doesn’t boil off. Um, so you have to make that 2,000 tons in just a matter of, you know, a few days or a few weeks. So that’s that’s like really the bulk of the challenge. Um, and that’s what the products that we build solve. Um, and uh, and so, you know, we won’t talk too loudly about the dates we think that that’ll happen, but uh, what we what we do say is it’s a lot sooner than you think. Why is it important to you to basically make life multilarary and be a part of that journey? Yeah, I I think this is

18:05 like the most important question and uh you know there’s two there’s like two angles to think about it like the first is philosophical which we’ll go down and the second is business which I think is like you know it’s important but it’s far less important than the philosophical angle. Um the philosophical angle is is is fairly straightforward. It’s just um making life multilanetary will extend the light of human consciousness. Um, humans are like Earth is like a ping-pong ball in an Olympic size swimming pool and life is like a thin like almost impossible to see layer on the outside of that

18:37 ping-pong ball. And um, you know, to us the Earth looks big because we ourselves are small. Um, but what we don’t understand is that human life is fragile. And um, you know, there are tons of things, some in our control and some out of our control, that sort of threaten the long-term survivability of humans on Earth. And I’m an optimist. Like I really hope that you know all of the things all the technologies we make that threaten the life of humans you know don’t get used ideally don’t get made. Um but uh you know to deny that there’s any risk there is is like is like totally totally like putting being a ostrich and sticking your head in the sand.

19:07 Yeah. It’s like it’s like okay your ping-pong ball uh life is like you know like a nanometer thick coating or like a 5 nanometer thick coating on the outside of this ping- pong ball. um and you have like you know like like a like a bomb that can like that can like blow up the ping- pong ball and you’re like oh like is this a good idea like should I have multiple ping pong balls and the answer is like absolutely yes um you know today if you try to project like okay what is the expected lifespan of humans I think you could if you’re really generous describe it as being in the tens of thousands of years like okay we’ve got this technology

19:37 nuclear weapons boweapons etc we hope that nobody ever uses them um okay what’s the expected time span over which somebody does make a mistake I would love to be an optimist and say that that’s like 50,000 years. Okay, so like whatever thousand plus generations. Um, keep in mind we’ve only had these technologies for like three generations. So like I’m like I’m like saying I think we can survive the creation of nuclear weapons for for a hundred times more time than they’ve existed. Um but if you make life multilanetary um particularly if you if you start with Mars and then

20:09 you expand to like you know some of the some of the other moons in the solar system um you can easily project that number like okay what’s the expected lifespan of humanity to be in the millions of years and then once you’re in the millions of years um now you can project all sorts of new technologies that enable humans to do things like light speeded travel uh maybe we can make you know Dyson spheres um and so if like if your objective I mean if your objective is to have a good time on earth then yeah absolutely Mars is not for you. But if your objective is to make humans the greatest species that have ever been, uh Mars is

20:39 a great first step to one increase our longevity and two increase our skill uh in the ability to proliferate across the galaxy. So the philosophical angle is really um going to Mars is a is a first step in extending the light of human consciousness. We’re a very small light in a very big place. Um and to make that light brighter, uh Mars is is definitely our first step. It’s almost like God want us to do it. Um the business angle is like gave us a side quest. Yeah, he gave us a side quest. He’s like here’s a planet. It’s like kind of shitty. Um fix her upper. It’s a fixer upper. It’s good enough

21:11 that you could go there if you were like good at camping. It’s like camping extreme edition. Um and uh if you’re really good at camping, you can like you can make it like a paradise. You can have liquid oceans and you know which okay in my in my definition of paradise is like liquid ocean is a paradise. Um and uh a little bit of an atmosphere. Uh you can have you know it’s it’s got a pretty shitty atmosphere. You can make it a little less shitty. Uh you can nuke the poles, which okay, a lot of people talk about it’s not that good of an idea, but um you can make the atmosphere a little bit better. Um and then from the business side, it’s like, okay, well Mars offers something

21:42 that can’t be sold on Earth, which is the greatest adventure that humans have ever done, period. Like there is no like people in the past. I mean the the the original like the origin of the term venture capital is capital that was given to people to go on ventures like or ad ventures ad ventures, right? Vent venture capital was initially created so that you know you you know like a a courageous sailor could go buy a boat and try to like sail

22:12 to an island and hopefully find like I don’t know potatoes or something or like or like ore um and then bring it back to wherever you started from. Um, and so you know, like, uh, Mars is Mars is is is a place that allows us to sell the greatest adventure of all time to people who want to go. And our job is just to make it so that the price of going to Mars is lower than the price that people want to pay for this incredible adventure. So you’re you’re basically thinking about it from the perspective

22:43 of okay SpaceX SpaceX is going to solve the transportation to and from and here’s like some other angle where you can radically help that mission but it’s not directly the transport part. Yeah, absolutely. So we we’re definitely not in the business of making rockets. Um and uh we we don’t find ourselves to be competitive with companies that make rockets whatsoever. Um, all we’re saying is that, um, if you want Mars to be an explosive, proliferative business, which is a prerequisite for it being a proliferative thing that humans do at all, right? We’re not we’re not going to

23:15 do a $1 trillion charity project uh to go to Mars. It’s just like, you know, maybe it’ll happen, but, you know, not not practically, right? It won’t happen. Um, and so, but honestly, it wouldn’t I don’t think the money would be spent well either if it was a massive charity product project. you typically need some good incentives, right? You need to have you need to have aligned incentives. It needs to be the case that people who want to go to Mars are paying and the things that they want uh to build those things require you to make the city bigger and better. That’s how you’re going to get a big and good city on Mars that’s self-sustaining, not

23:46 like you know a project where you like think about it and like theorize what would be great and and try to do it. It’s just like there there are no examples of that happening in history. Um, so you know, from from business angle, it’s like what can more sell? Well, what it can sell is um extreme novelty, the greatest adventure of all time. Um, and uh, and so and so if you want, no matter how good your rocket is, if the rocket even if the rocket’s free, there still has to be a thing on the other side of that rocket that somebody that somebody wants and wants to pay

24:17 for. So, let’s talk about like when you first started the company, how were you thinking about the like kind of critical path to getting to here and then also to just like making the thing happen? Yeah. So, actually when we first started the company, we had like tons of wrong input assumptions. What were those? Yeah, dude. We we thought that Starship was going to fly in 2024 to Mars, which at the time, okay, looked like it it was on Elon. Yeah. Yeah, I mean like we we’re on Elon time and um you know I’m always an optimist so you know I didn’t want to I didn’t want to say that we think Starship’s going to fly in 26

24:48 when SpaceX thought it was going to fly in 24 like okay 24 uh and it really looked like it. Um so that was one of the wrong assumptions we made and and you know dates are a little bit different although I still think Starship’s like one of the more incredible programs in the world. Um I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion. Um and uh you know our our our path to success was um simple. was okay um build the equipment that will make a city on Mars possible um and then wherever possible take that equipment and deploy it on the moon uh both to earn revenue um which is a more complicated question

25:20 that I can get into later um and also to test it um and so so more or less that plan is the same um so so I mentioned earlier the products we build today excuse me the products we build today um are designed for use on the moon um and that is because the first missions of our equipment to space will be to the moon even if we think that in the long term the vast majority of deployments will be on the surface of Mars. Um and uh and so that’s what we’ve done. I mean we we’ve built uh like I mentioned earlier the lowest cost uh moon rover ever made. Um we’re preparing that for a

25:51 flight. Um you know I’m not at liberty to share dates but soon soon. And um you know it’ll be it’ll be pretty epic. It’s going to have you know I don’t want to spoil stuff um that uh that we haven’t talked about yet but uh it’s going to be pretty amazing. And um and so on once we have you know the vast majority of the technology deployed on the moon at some call it you know small to medium scale and by small to medium scale I mean huge scale in the context of things that have been deployed in the past but small scale in the context of things that we’ll deploy in the future.

26:23 Um then we’ll turn to Mars um and so m we’ll start mass-producing the goods um rover plant solar farm etc uh for the surface of Mars. Um, and when the time comes, we’ll send a huge huge huge amount of uh payload to the surface of Mars that’s capable of generating megawatts of power uh and thousands of tons of propellant. So for for the rover, like how what was the process for iterating on that and like making it something that actually functions and like what was the act like end goal that you were going after with that, especially because it’s going to start going on the moon first.

26:55 Yeah. So, so, um, rover development at Star Path, I I think is like a first of its kind program, um, where instead of taking like a complicated set of requirements, you know, and and trying to build a design uh, that works for every one of those requirements where, you know, maybe we’ve never done it before, so um, you know, we sort of have to take like a safe bet uh, on every single one and spend a ton of money. We said, okay, let’s just first start, let’s just make a rover in the shortest possible amount of time. Um, so the rover behind you, the one that’s white and gold, we call Rover 10. And that’s

27:26 because we’ve made nine rovers before it, um, the first one was literally made out of 8020, which is like commodity aluminum beam that you can buy from Home Depot, McMaster car, wherever. Um, and we built it in 3 weeks. So you guys just went to Home Depot, bought some parts, and then bingo. We we went to Home Depot, we bought some parts, and we’re like, okay, let’s try to make, okay, out of all these requirements, like, okay, it needs to survive cold temperature, this, that, whatever. Let’s ignore them all and start with the simplest set of requirements. Like let’s make something with wheels that moves. And believe it

27:57 or not, Rover Rover one, you know, to say that it moved would be true. To say that it moved well would be a stretch. A little bit of a stretch. Right. Right. Exactly. And then and Rover One took us slowly 3 weeks to build. Uh so we built it in a garage basically in San Francisco uh where the company started. Um we spent 3 weeks and probably $10,000 or less. I don’t actually remember on Rover One. Rover One pretty much didn’t work. Uh we looked at it and we made a document called uh problems on rover one to be fixed on rover 2. Um and it was like a long list. We then said okay how quickly

28:28 do we think we can make a rover 2 that then actually fixes all these problems. Um and it turned out the answer to that question was something like 5 weeks. Um okay great. So now we have Rover 2. Uh Rover 2 I’m now remembering also made out of 8020. Uh now now it has some sort of custom sheet metal steel parts. Uh it like kind of drives. It’s got a unique suspension. Uh, we like learned a thing or two about like the balance of the wheels. How much did the cost of Rover one versus Rover 2? What was the difference? A few hundred bucks or a few thousand. Rovers one through five were all built

28:59 in like under eight weeks each and all cost under $15,000. I mean, they’re just like we’re just going as fast as we possibly can to understand, you know, like, okay, what are like what okay, what shape works? Like what material works? Like if I put the wheel outside of the axis of steering, like does the wheel bend inwards? says the wheel bend outwards and we were just we were basically just on an exercise like how quickly can we learn about what it takes to make a robot and where the actual limits are. Um then with rover 7 onwards we started actually trying to build a machine that would work in space. So

29:29 rovers 8 9 and 10 were all progressive steps um in in in terms of like okay rover 8 uh worked in a vacuum kind of it probably didn’t actually but like it sort of like theoretically might have. Um, Rover 9, um, also sort of like like a little bit better, like worked in a vacuum, was like sealed against dust. Um, and now Rover 10, uh, is our first rover that actually came out of what we call what in the industry is called a thermal vacuum test, which is sort of like the graduation exam, uh, for moon rover. So, it’s like a thermal vacuum test where you like put a robot uh, in a big chamber. Uh, the chamber simulates

30:00 the conditions of various planets. Our test was for the moon. Um, and you evaluate whether or not uh, well, a does it break. Okay, thank god rover 10 doesn’t break. Um but also like you know is our model of like how it how it behaves thermally, how it be behaves mechanically correct. Yeah. Um and so from rover 1 to 10, it’s like two and a half years or whatever. Um you know it cost us no more than well I don’t know that we can share publicly. I’ll say that it cost it I I’ll say that it cost at least a hundred times less or at least 10 times less than you’d think. Um and uh now now we have like less than a million dollars for all

30:31 of them or something. Um not quite but you’re not far off. Okay. It was like a few million dollars for all of them. Um, and now Rover 10 within a few million dollars um is the lowest cost of production and the lowest cost of development rover to ever pass TAC to our knowledge. Um, and what is TVAC? Uh, TVAC is the thermal vacuum test. So, it’s like the it’s like what I was talking about a few minutes ago. It’s the it’s a graduation exam for a rover. Um, it’s a big chamber simulates the conditions of a planet. Uh, TVAC stands for thermal vacuum. Um, and uh, it’s

31:01 like the final test that you put a robot through to figure out like, okay, does it work? Um, and now we’re building Rover 11, which is even better than Rover 10, um, in a bunch of different ways. I could get into like a technical list. It would take forever. Um, but it’s better than Rover 10. It’s easier to produce. Um, it’s more robust, it’s faster, etc. Um, and uh, Rover 11 will be finished uh, early next year. And so for for rovers 1 through 10, uh, I know that you were testing them in like a thermal vacuum chamber. Were you also like going out and if are aren’t they going to just be like collecting a

31:32 bunch of basically dirt? And so are you like going out to a desert to, you know, have them collect dirt? How did you test them? Yeah, it’s a great question. So actually right where you’re sitting, if you look behind you, you can see um a bunch of scuff marks in the concrete. That’s because right here, there used to be a 25 ton pit of semi-seemented concrete. So it’s like it was like semi soft concrete. Um and you know like you know we we we would drive the rover into the pit uh you know mine stuff like evaluate how well it m stuff. Eventually, we got rid of the pit because it was sort of like a a safety hazard. Like, you know, every time the

32:03 rover mines stuff, it like releases huge clouds of dust um that are like, you know, I would say lifespan shortening to breathe in. So, we removed it. Um and now we do sort of like more scientific testing now that we’ve got the mining portion down. Um for Rover 10, we actually put a slab of that same concrete in a thermal vacuum chamber. So, it was like not just mining, but it was mining while super cold, while being like you while in a vacuum. uh basically under the simulated conditions of actually mining on the moon. Um and so I

32:34 mean and and oh my god this is a crazy question. Back during the rover one days we had uh literally a sandbox uh in our office. Like people would come over and be like, “Oh, is this like the play pen for engineers?” Like as a joke. It was not a play pen for engineers. No. No. So gross. I do not recommend a sand pit in your office. Um but we would use that to test like, okay, driving capability, mining capability. Super super crude. Like, okay, does this shape work? does this shape not work? Um, and uh, you know, like really really basic stuff like that. But now we sort of elevated to the scientific level where we like calibrate the strength of the

33:05 material, put it in a vacuum. It’s it’s arguably more boring nowadays, but um, you have to do the science to get it right. So, how do you get like the best simulated uh, soil composition of marsh and soil on Earth? Yeah, I mean, this is like a a super long question to answer. Um, the short answer is you make some guesses and you just take the worst possible case. M um there’s like you know between 50 and 100 research papers on this and they’re all like kind of the same in that they’re like okay here’s our guess as to

33:37 what it might be. Um this is like the range of values we expect where the range is like you know one on the bottom and like 75 on the top. Well they’ve taken like Martian soil samples so we kind of know what it is. Right. Right. Yeah. So we know a little bit about Mars from NASA’s uh from NASA’s missions to Mars. Um and uh we know that uh we know that the Martian soil is at least probably softer than soil on the moon. And so really really what we’ve done is we’ve taken like okay we’ve read all the literature. Um we know that there are there are like 700 possible

34:08 configurations of dirt and just said like okay what’s the worst for our equipment? The worst for our equipment is you know if the dirt is is what’s called subangular meaning that the the actual you know pieces of dirt are sharp at a microscopic level um and that they’re sort of like cemented and frozen solid. So what we do when we test is we just buy simulated subangular dirt, freeze it with liquid nitrogen with a calibrated amount of water in it to get it to be that super hard material. Um now all of our engineers think that in the real world when we actually go to the moon and Mars, we’re going to find

34:38 that it’s like pretty chill, way softer and yeah, pretty chill as you’re saying. Um but the only right path forward from a like you you can’t engineer around a guess. You have to engineer around like okay the worst case is this. So, um, we’re going to build a machine that can handle that. And, uh, you know, it’s not so bad. Like, like mining equipment is, uh, you we mine harder and nastier stuff on Earth all day, every day. Uh, you know, for like lithium mining, iron ore mining, I mean, everything. Um, so it’s not like there isn’t, you know,

35:09 knowledge base, you know, among the human civilization of like how you dig up hard dirt. Let’s run a hypothetical scenario. In a hypothetical world where SpaceX does not exist and the capability of like reusable rockets doesn’t exist, would you be trying to build that? Is that something? I would personally be trying to build reusable rockets if SpaceX never existed correct. I think I think the real answer to that question like I would love to say yes like oh yeah, I would do anything uh to make Mars happen. I think the real

35:41 answer to that question is that like SpaceX is the reason why people believe that challenging things in aerospace are possible to do in the first place. Like if you take SpaceX out of the equation and you ask yourself like what does the aerospace industry look like, it looks kind of like a lot of other industries where you sort of assume the innovation has dried up. Like it looks I mean I don’t know much about oil and gas but it looks like what I think of as oil and gas which is like the same thing over and over where the companies have probably done what can be done to make

36:11 it more efficient already and it’s kind of commoditized across every single competitor right I mean like that’s I don’t know much about oil and gas to be very clear but that’s what I think of when I think of oil and gas and I think of I think sand spacex the aerospace industry looks almost the same and so my real answer to your question is sort of a non-answer which is I think sand spacex you probably wouldn’t even have like you probably interview five aerospace companies a month I don’t think any of them would exist sand SpaceX not just for the economic reason not just for the economic reason that like oh they wouldn’t be able to launch their stuff

36:42 into space for a price that they can afford but also for for the reason that like SpaceX and the things that they’ve done have made other people in the world think like okay if you put your mind to it and you hire the best talent and uh you know you you like you cut down on fluff and you cut down on bureaucracy that you can actually produce produce an outsized return in terms of technology developed per dollar. um that uh you know like I won’t name names but like other companies are not the most confidence inspiring in like it’s not like you look at you know some of the programs that you see in the rest of the

37:14 industry and think to yourself oh yeah like if I copy that I’m going to be able to change the world right um but if you just copy you know Starlink not for Starlink but like you know you make a Starlink for something else low cost high rate you know serves a big market you could see a world where a new technology like reflect fact you’re talking about changes the world. What’s been the biggest like technical hurdle or technical challenge uh so far? I mean there are a lot of sort of disjoint technical challenges. I would

37:45 say the biggest um you know there’s there’s no particular biggest my team will be mad at me if I like cite one thing that’s the biggest the the thing that I would say is is probably the biggest is actually a broader problem with the US which is the access to lowcost high rate manufacturing particularly when you make real goods the difficulty of making that good is sort of like a risk adjusted analysis of how good a thing is when you’re designing it against how how quickly and frequently you want to buy it. So, like if you’re designing, I’m just going to give you a simple example.

38:16 If you’re designing like a motor assembly for a a robot, and this is fresh in my mind because last night I was watching an engineer design a motor assembly for a robot. You know, if the motor assembly cost $10 to manufacture, which it theoretically absolutely could if you fully automate the manufacturing process, well, not the whole assembly, but like it could cost like a $100. Okay. Um, most of it could cost 10. Yeah. um if it costs $10, you’ll just buy one every day. You’ll just like wherever you are at 8 p.m. you’ll just buy it. In fact,

38:48 you in fact, if if if in the future, you know, manufacturing was so inexpensive, you know, that like you could make like a an assembly like the one I’m talking about for $10, you would just have an Optimus robot and a software program that automatically buys your design every day and and assembles it the next day. So that whatever is wrong with the design, you immediately know the morning after, right? But in the real world, um you could have a mistake in your design that you might find out, you know, if you’re good a month after you made it or a week after you made it. If you’re

39:19 really good, maybe a day, but in a lot of cases like six months. And that’s because if the design corresponds to a machine that costs 50,000 200,000 or in old aerospace like $5 million to make, you’re not going to make a lot of them. And instead, what you’re going to do is like analyze the out of it and eval you’re you’re just going to be extremely careful and extremely slow at the design stage. And so what I would say is like you know this is kind of a copout answer because it’s not one specific big technical hurdle. The biggest technical

39:49 hurdle broadly is that the ability to fabricate the things that we design um is not next to free and if it was next to free which I totally think it will be in you know 5 6 or 7 years um the rate at which we could iterate would be you know at least double maybe triple. Um the cost of our goods would be you know maybe 50% better. Um and uh we’d be a heck of a lot cheaper at manufacturing or sorry developing new technologies um if we could manufacture them quickly at scale. You’ve been very clear and like

40:20 thoughtful about trying to make it so your iteration loops are super super tight and you’re also like just trying to go through iterations, you know, make the robot in the first place, see what went wrong, see what we need to improve, do it again, and then just run through those iteration loops. Um how did you kind of come to that philosophy? And then what are you doing to as the company scales keep that sort of same philosophy? Two great questions. So I would say that you know we we are not the inventor of the idea that iterating fast makes your end product better, cheaper, more

40:51 quickly. Um you know there are probably like 20 amazing companies out there that can be pointed to as the source of inspiration um for this being a good idea. Um and now maybe like 200, right? counties that do the same thing. So we we by no means are the proprietor of this idea. We are just astute observers in looking at the fact that the companies with the highest market cap, the best products, the most talented engineers, the best ability to hire those engineers, the most compelling products. I don’t know if I

41:22 said that already. Um are the ones that iterate quickly. Um and you know, you could name you can name some names. um what we do and and the second part of your question is is is also super important which is like okay when you when you grow how do you make sure that a 100 person org can also turn you know a design once every week or once every two weeks if needed um the answer lies mostly in making sure that the responsibility of your engineer is really clearly defined. If it’s the case

41:52 for example and this is the case at a lot of companies that you have a product the product has a product manager and you know the team has like six people and or whatever number of people doesn’t really matter and each you know for each person on the team you know one person has a has their hand in a thing right then to go fabricate that item and test it out you now sort of need like the either implicit or explicit approval of seven people. If instead what you do, and this is the model that a lot of in my opinion really great companies use.

42:23 Um if instead what you do is you say okay um I have a growing team yes but I’m not going to put more people on one thing. I will just make sure that the scope that each person is is working on shrinks and the expected quality grows. Then it can be the case that like okay even though there’s a 700 person team you know this motor assembly or this you know hinge assembly or this computer or this camera is actually is the delivery of that product is is only up to just one person and if that one person is responsible for delivering it and is

42:55 equipped with the money and the tools and the in-house machining and the in-house production to to prototype fabricate that part quickly um then your iteration speed will be exactly the same. Um and then the second component is like culture. Um which is like okay well you know does your team like three months as an iteration cycle or does your team care about making the iteration cycle a as small as possible and both of those things are important for us. How big is your team by the way now? Uh the team’s about 16 people. Um we’re growing as fast as we can find good people.

43:25 Yeah. So uh if you’re watching this please apply. Yeah. And how old is the company? Is it like four years old? Yeah the companyy’s about three and a half years old. Um, we started out super small, just the founders. Um, like I said, in effectively a garage in San Francisco. I mean, it was like a really, really, really shitty place, like a rattly garage door. Every time someone drives by, it’s super loud. And uh uh the basic thing the basic thing for Star Path is uh we want to be we want to be ready to launch a huge amount of payload

43:57 to Mars that can produce on the order of low megawatts of power which roughly speaking is enough for a a civilization of a few hundred people. Um right when the rocket’s ready. And so when we started the company we thought that date was in like 2 years. Yeah. Um we were wrong. Um, was that actually positive that you were wrong and because you had an extra few years that was easier to basically work out kinks and stuff? I mean, I I would say it’s actually it’s neither. We’ve just we’ve just we’ve just calibrated the growth rate of the company according to when we think the rocket’s going to be going to be ready.

44:28 It’s sort of like a moving target. And um, from our standpoint, it’s way better to do that than it is to uh start developing the technology when we’re certain that the rocket will will be ready because at that point, we’ll be too late. like the the the real value of star path as measured to humanity is the date that uh a self-sustaining city on Mars forms that can happen. Yeah. And then like with or without starath. So so without star path you might say like okay well it’ll happen at some date. Our our goal is to make that as soon as possible. You know to say that we think it can be done

44:58 in 10 years would be I think a bit ambitious. You can get a long ways in 10 years. Um and so so waiting an extra for context for for those watching you can only fly to Mars once every two years. So, so there’s a window in 2026. There’s a window in 28 in 2030 in 2032. Well, the 2032 one spills over in 2033, but you get the gist. And so waiting basically missing a window is missing deal. Yeah, it’s a huge deal. It’s missing two years where during those two years, you could have let’s say launched a mission, gathered data, used the data

45:30 to fix or improve the products, and then scale production of those products for like a 10x bigger deployment the following year. So it’s like if you wait 2 years, you could conceivably be 10 10 times behind where you want to be if your plan, which ours is, is to grow 10 times window over window for the first few windows. So in 2030, we could be where we would be, you know, in 2028. Um, hypothetically if it happened. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it’s like you you don’t want to miss a window. So from our standpoint, we’re basically just like, you know, a cheetah hunting its

46:01 prey where the prey is the rocket launch and and we are the cheetah and the movement of the cheetah represents technology. It’s kind of a bad analogy, but yeah, uh we’re tracking a moving target. So when we started the company three and a half years ago, we thought, okay, we’re going to be launching super soon. There have been some benefits in going slower, but you know, my I would have liked it to be faster, which okay, everybody would have. Um and uh and uh you know I I also will say that you know our opportunity like the opportunity for making a really really really big splash on the first Mars window um is there now? Um and it

46:32 wouldn’t have been the case if the if the rocket launched sooner because we wouldn’t have been able to build as much. Has has SpaceX said publicly how many Starships they’re trying to launch on the first uh mission? Yeah, so Elon has said publicly and like I said I’m not a spokesperson for SpaceX, so like reference their website. Um Elon has said publicly that they want to send a few test ships to Mars in 2026, which I’m optimistic about. Uh like three or 10. I don’t know if there’s a number. I think five or something. Hopefully it’s enough. Yeah, hopefully it’s enough. But no cargo. So just just like you try try to get the

47:03 ship to land. It’s extremely challenging problem to get a ship to land on Mars. It’s like it’s like hitting a bullet that’s moving. Um where like the bullet is like the size of like a you know like a it’s extremely small in the context of you know how far you’re traveling. So, it’s it’s very challenging. We’ve done it before. We’ve also missed before. Like Mars missions in the past do not have a 100% success rate even hitting the planet Mars. Yeah. Um so, and what what do you know what went into the misses? Like why that happened? Yeah. Yeah. It’s so straightforward. So, so basically when you when you’re trying to get to Mars, what what you’re doing

47:33 is you’re slingingshotting around the sun and you’re slingingshotting around the sun to try to catch Mars on the other side of the sun from where you launch. If you launch, let’s say this is the sun, uh, and Earth is moving around like this, um, and Mars is moving around in a bigger circle. We’ll just call them circles for simplicity. When you when you go to Mars, what you’re trying to do is slingshot around the sun to catch Mars halfway around the other side of the sun. Um, so like roughly speaking, I mean, this is not exactly true, but like if you leave in the summer, you’ll end you’ll get there in the winter. It’s it’s really not true, but for

48:05 simplicity, we’ll say that it’s true. Um, and if you make your curve ever so slightly wrong, you will like not only will you overshoot or undershoot insane. Yeah. And that and that and that distance can be so big that, you know, maybe you get in Mars, you know, influence. Yeah. It could be like a few hundred thousand miles. And if and if you miss, you know, you could like slingshot around Mars, which would be terrible if there was crew on board because they would be certified dead. Um, it’s it’s a grim take and, you know, I’m optimistic about developing technology to make sure that doesn’t happen.

48:35 or if you undersshoot uh you may sort of like you know wrap around Mars and actually actually leave like go out of the solar system. Um so there’s like a lot of ways you can miss and the only way that you can’t miss is if you hit the atmosphere cuz once you hit the atmosphere then you can use aerodynamic controls and land. No, not not not like an airplane but um you the atmosphere the atmosphere can be gripped so to speak and you can land. So 2026, SpaceX wants to send experimental vehicles, and I’m I’m I’m really hopeful that they succeed. You know, there’s been some recent successes that are really

49:07 awesome. Um, and then in 2028, SpaceX says that they want to send, you know, an even larger fleet of experimental vehicles. And then in 2030, they’re saying, uh, they want to launch a a large fleet of vehicles. And this is all public information, by the way. So you you can look this up and find this information. But yeah, Elon has been very clear that he really wants to basically scale the number of of Starships heading to Mars like maybe even by more than an order of magnitude every single time because that’s the only way like I think he said something like it needs to be over a thousand starships going in order to make life multilanetary and like a self-sustaining city.

49:37 Yeah. So we we can just work out the math roughly live. Um the approximate number of tonnage of tons that you need to get to the surface of Mars from Earth to make the to make a city that’s self-sustaining is about a million. There’s like some debate that that number might be 100,000 or 10 million or whatever, but nobody thinks it’s like you don’t want to undershoot. You don’t want to undersshoot first of all and nobody thinks it’s like drastically different. So a million tons to the surface of Mars is what it takes to make life multilanetary roughly speaking if you want it to be permanent. Like okay, the city will not die even if the ship stop coming from Earth for any

50:09 reason. Um each starship can carry thereabouts 100 tons to the surface of Mars per flight. So what this means is that you need to have if if you had a fleet of a thousand uh that could carry 100 tons each, you can now carry a 100,000 tons per fleet trip. Meaning each time the fleet goes and comes uh from Mars and then if the fleet makes 10 trips then 10 trips of a thousand a fleet of a thousand ships um will be a million tons a million tons which is a self-sustaining city.

50:40 Um you know I I actually have some optimism that that number will actually be a lot bigger. I mean, Starat’s business, of course, is not modeled around, you know, there being a 10,000 or 100,000 size fleet of Starships, but I I I do have some optimism that it might either be a bigger fleet in number or a bigger fleet in terms of the size per ship. Um because, you know, it’s my opinion that like once you have um a business that works on Mars, like once you have it, like once you have the cost of transport below the threshold price that people want to pay, um that million ton city roughly correlates to a million people. I think you could sell way more

51:12 than a million people on going to Mars. Um, especially if it’s only like, you know, you you have a minimum you have to stay there for, let’s say, like four to six years and then you can come home if you want or like some number of people can come home at that point, right? I mean, for first of all, I’d say like you you probably want to make sure that your supply of transit from Mars back to Earth is bigger than your demand. Like the last thing you want is for people to feel trapped because nobody will go somewhere that they that they think they’ll feel trapped. You always want to make sure that the ships coming from Mars back to Earth when there’s crew on Mars uh are greater than

51:43 the number of people that like you should have empty seats. You know, obviously from business standpoint, you don’t have empty seats, but you just want to basically like fill it with cargo or something. Yeah. Fill it with cargo. Yeah. You don’t you don’t want to have it be the case that that that that somebody who wants to do something can’t because now you go from the greatest adventure of all time to like the greatest prison of all time. Yeah. greatest prison of all time which like it’s our responsibility as as humans as as friends of each other to not imprison our friends. Okay, so relatively straightforward but you know going going back to my my comment on

52:13 scale like you know I I totally understand Elon Elon’s take that okay you want to have a million people to have a self-sustaining city and roughly speaking agree with it. That being said, when airplanes were made, um people said, “Okay, airplanes are extremely costly.” Um, and you know, they’re going to be used in these niche circumstances where like you really need to get from one place to another or maybe have a lot of money. Um, and now airplanes are less expensive. Energy is a little bit cheaper. Um, I think I I forgot exactly how many, but it’s like over a 100 million annual passengers or more than that. Yeah, there’s hundreds of millions of

52:44 passengers per year. Now, obviously, flying on an airplane is very different than flying to Mars. But my basic point here is just that it’s very hard to predict. Like a million is a good is is a number that’s based on what’s required to make life multilanetary. But if you think about it from a business and demand standpoint, if you shoot for a million, you’re actually way more likely to overshoot than undershoot. Because a million means that you’ve built a compelling product that is broadly liked by people who buy it. And so if a product is broadly liked by people who buy it, you make it better over time. uh there’s no reason why you couldn’t sell,

53:14 you know, 10. I think 100 is probably your limit where it’s like, okay, at a 100 million people, you’re now looking at a a meaningful portion of the of the species, right? Like over 1%. Um but uh yeah, so like, you know, I I I have I have like, you know, hopeful aspiration. Um I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic that the future actually has way more than a thousand Starship size vehicles or or maybe a thousand, but they’re way bigger. Yeah. And like by future, you mean like near-term? I would I would assume that eventually you’d want like tens of thousands every launch window.

53:46 Yeah. I mean like no reason to not have an insane amount going from it’s super challenging. Yeah. By near-term I mean like 20 years. Um it’s super challenging to predict like what happens in 20 years. If I could predict what happens in 20 years. I would just go to the you know I would go to poly market and just you know become a billionaire. Um as in I would just you know make some bets on uh you know high 01% probability and then like pay off 10,000 to1 sort of Um so it’s hard to predict but but from first principle standpoint it’s like what what the challenge we’re looking at is okay how

54:19 do we make a product which is transit to Mars including obviously return journey uh what you do when you’re there and everything in between food water everything that’s so compelling um that people uh actually want to buy it and obviously we’re starting by building the thing that’s the most important which is the propellant production plant um but you know when you look at that problem it’s not obvious that you couldn’t solve and you you you couldn’t close that for five or 10 or 20 million people. Um you know it there there there’s if you could close 100 thousand there’s no

54:50 reason you couldn’t close 10 million. Um so I’m definitely optimistic that it’ll be more um you know time will tell. Ironically, like on making Starship uh rapidly reusable and like going from Mars to Earth, it seems like the propellant is a huge deal. But then actually, if it takes like 95% of the energy that’s going to be used on Mars just in the propellant making process, the hugest big thing is just making enough energy. Um and so for you on making solar panels, how are you thinking about like really ramping the

55:22 scale of of manufacturing these solar panels so that you can kind of make all that energy? Yeah. Okay, so a totally totally correct input assumption that you need to make a ton of energy on Mars uh to make a city there. Um the the approximate number is about 100 kilowatts per person. It’s like 10 to 100 kilowatts per person. And can you put that in like context? Like the average house is like two to five maybe sometimes 10 kilowatts. Like a big a big house with air conditioning is 10 kow. Um you know small house with no air conditioning is like 2 kow. Um when I was growing up my house pulled an

55:54 average of 1.3. Um that’s because my family’s like super interested in So it’s going to be like 50 to 70 times average consumption on Earth on Mars. Yeah. But I gave you the per household number on Mars and I give you the sorry on Earth and the per person number on Mars. So it’s actually like it’s actually more like 200 times 200 times. Do you like 200 times the power per person because most of that energy is spent on powering the plant that makes the fuel for that person that they will eventually use when they go home. And I mean the rockets are like the size of a swimming pool. So you’re talking about

56:25 like swimming in rocket propellant u just to give you a sense of scale um you need to make a lot of rocket propellant. Yes, exactly. So going back to your question, how do you plan on scaling uh solar solar power production? You’re definitely right uh at the input that you need to make a lot of energy. Um and that’s the by the way the key sort of just for for context for those listening. Um Star Path just announced a commercially available solar product for satellite companies. So we make our own solar panels now. Um, and if you’re a satellite company, you can buy them for about a tenth of the cost um that they could be otherwise purchased from

56:57 existing vendors. Um, we did not intend to enter this marketplace. Um, but the reason we entered this marketplace is because of what you’re saying, which is that we needed an extremely scalable biggest conraint. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s one of the biggest constraints. I mean, I would say technology is the biggest constraint, but from a manufacturing standpoint, the the good that we need to produce the sheer biggest quantity of measured in count is solar cells. We need like 100 million solar cells uh on the surface of Mars uh to make even a moderatelysized city. Let’s actually uh put that into context as well. How many solar cells do we have on Earth? Oh boy, I actually don’t know the answer

57:28 to that question, but a lot. Um okay, so the the the approximate the unit of measurement for solar on Earth is watts. And I believe that the total production of solar modules in the US is on the order of about 10 gawatts per year. I could be wrong, okay? Don’t quote me on that. Um the total production of solar modules for this is a better question all space applications combined is about 40 megawatts 50 megawatt about about 50 million watts is all of the power that’s

57:59 used on every spacecraft launched from Earth today out of which the majority of that is Starlink and that’s like a rough number you might as well just call it 100. I mean I think Starlink is already like over 90% of all satellites in orbit. Right. Yeah. So Starlink Starlink’s majority obviously they account for the the the majority of the power but just to give you a sense of scale all spacecraft that orbit Earth uh every year the spacecraft that are manufactured it takes about 40 million watts uh of solar panels to power those. For Mars you want to have you’re not going to believe me about 40

58:32 gawatt of total power. 40 gawatt. So 1 million sorry 1,000 times more power. Now out of that 40 gawatt will probably produce about four using solar energy. So or yeah so about a tenth. So about 100 times more power than all of satellites combined. And then past 4 gawatt um there’s roughly speaking a threshold at around it’s actually less than 4 gawatt but there’s a threshold around a gigawatt where it becomes more cost effective to develop a nuclear reactor. And so and so early on we’ll power Mars using solar cells. And that’s the product that we

59:03 produce in the biggest single quantity today. It’s not necessarily the most uh important product we build. I would say that that’s probably not true. Um but it’s the product that we produce in the biggest scale. Um and uh we have a mostly automated production line that makes uh those cells at at a pretty magnificent rate. So we can make you know millions of watts per year today. Um and uh in the future we’re going to scale that all the way up to you know maybe four or 500 megawatts. Um, and then that sort of four or 500 megawatts per year production rate will level it out. Uh, and the and the remainder of the growth for the city on Mars will

59:35 actually be powered by nuclear. Um, and that’s because nuclear gives you a couple beneficial traits. The first is that um, your total power produced per mass is a little bit better. So, you’re able to cram more power onto a rocket, which as you’re trying to scale the power up a lot, you’re going to want Are you talking about like just shipping uranium basically? Exactly. So, if you just ship Well, you you would ship early on a complete nuclear reactor. Um, but that could nuts. You can ship a nuclear reactor on starships. Well, to be clear, you you can’t like there’s a huge regulatory over uh, you know, there’s a huge regulatory, you

60:08 know, burden. It’s also it’s also the technology doesn’t exist yet. Um, so you there there doesn’t exist, for example, a 10 megawatt nuclear reactor I can buy today, which I would if I could, and then put it on a Starship. The small modular doesn’t exist yet. Yeah. I mean, people are making it there. There are a lot of great companies actually in this area that are working on nuclear reactors, some for space. Um, and so that technology will come around. Um, you know, it’s unclear yet whether Star Path will be in the manufacturing business of that product or the buying business of that product. Um, but the advantage of solar in the early days, the reason why we use it is because the cost and schedule are

60:40 better. The cost to get a solar panel that works is extremely low compared to a nuclear reactor. Um, and we can do it today. In fact, we’ve done it today. Um and uh you know there is there are no regular there are no rules that say you cannot launch a solar panel to space. In fact a solar panel is launched to space four times a week on a Falcon 9. Uh every Starling satellite has a solar panel. Every satellite that goes to space has a solar panel. So are they launching four times a week now? Uh something like that. Something like that. It might be like three times a week. So maybe I’m exaggerating but yeah they’re they’re about like a you know between 100 and 200 Falcon 9 launches.

61:11 Very like proven like this is a known thing. People do it all the time. Extremely known. Extremely known. Yeah. Um and so um yeah so so h how do we scale? Well the the production is automated. Automated production is easy to scale. Um you just buy more lines. So if you have a line that produces some amount and you want to make 10 times you just buy 10 lines. You just factory factorial it and just basically copy paste. Exactly. You you factorial the production of of solar panels um which is something that we’re actively working on right now. And uh in the long term you’ll factorial the production of nuclear reactors. you know, there’s some

61:42 great companies out there that I recommend you look at that that are working on that uh for earth applications. Um and uh and so yeah, scaling the production of solar panels actually not the most challenging thing in the world. The more challenging part, which is the problem that we’re solving today is dialing in one production line or in our case two um that can make uh you know solar panels well. Um and then once you have a production line that works, copy and pasting it like you said Factorio style is not the challenge. There there’s some making the first one is the Yeah, making the first one’s the hard

62:13 part. We’re mostly there. Ironically, I think I think Elon basically says like uh prototyping is easy, production is hard. So, you’re kind of thinking that actually it’s just going to be um prototyping is hard, production is going to be relatively easy relative to that. Well, I mean, I would call I would call the creation of one production line production. And that is hard. And that is hard. And that is hard. So, I I would I would agree with Elon that production is hard. Prototyping is easy. You want to make one solar panel with your hands, that’s a pretty doable thing. It’s doable. It’s a pain in the ass. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s doable. And then, you know, if you want to make a million, uh, you need a machine.

62:44 Yep. Okay. So, what what do you think the biggest risks are for your business, like making it actually work? Yeah. I mean, there are like sort of two categories of risk and uh I basically price one of those as zero and the other one as being uh a ch like a sort of combined challenge of both. So, the first the first challenge is that can you make technology that works? And I price this at zero because, you know, as in zero risk, because even if you can’t make technology that works, it’s just a question of how many tries you need. We

63:16 think it’ll take us two or three tries. We could be wrong. And even if we’re wrong, uh the business will still work. Um and uh okay, so that that’s one category of risk. The second category of risk, which I think is far more important to understand and evaluate, is okay, the business explodes, it’s worth 50, hundred billion dollars or more. If people want to go to Mars and you’ve built a product, which is a transportation service, a return service, and housing, etc., when you’re

63:46 there, that’s compelling enough that people want to pay for it. Um, and this is a much more important question to ask because it really will lead you down the path of developing the correct technologies that people want to actually buy. Um and so um the biggest risk of them all is that even if you make a fully and rapidly reusable rocket, a lowcost rocket propellant production plant, a habitat that’s beautiful and delightful to live in and a food production system that makes delicious food and all of the other things um that that would make you know the best case outcome for everything

64:17 sort of a garden of Eden situation. Even the risk, the biggest risk for Star Path is that even if you do that, the value proposition to customers to travel to Mars for 100, 200, 300, $400,000 in the long term, okay, the prices early on will not be that is is not a good enough value proposition to convince people to go. Um, and if that’s the case, um, then, uh, you know, start Star Path won’t work, but that is not a reason not to try, right? Like there’s like say to say I’m not going to try to build a city on Mars because I don’t think people will like it is like the

64:48 equivalent of saying you know I will not build you know abundant electricity because I don’t think that the needs the power needs should go up. Yeah. I think I think the the first pitch uh for people going to Mars is roughly similar to like do you want to be a Navy Seal and like do you want to go through that program to try to prove that you are like the best and push yourself to the limit sort of situation. I mean I I I I think the Navy Seals are incredible. So I I wouldn’t say that like I would you know if I was going to Mars I would not compare myself to a Navy Seal. I would put a Navy Seal above me. But I think the pitch is similar to

65:18 that which is like do you want to do do you want to embark on what is almost certainly to date the greatest adventure uh that any human has ever done despite for millennia humans dreaming about an adventure as epic as this. Do you want to do that? Um, and I think we can get, you know, for the first few ships of hundreds or thousand, not hundreds and th not hundreds of thousands, but hundreds or thousands of people, like that pitch will work. And so I’m completely not worried about the first 10 ships or the first 100 ships. Um,

65:49 what I’m worried about is how do we make a product that is so compelling in seven years time where once you’re past or 8 years time or 10 years time where once you’re past that initial few ships um you know I say few it’s still like a lot but once the product goes from completely novel to less novel how do you still make it the case that uh people want to go to Mars for the prices that you can sell a a roundtrip ticket uh to them for? Yeah, I think the novelty will stick around for a while.

66:19 I don’t know if it would ever go away, honestly. Like, if I hope you’re right. I hope you’re right. I think Well, I I think for even if if even if you said um only novelty for the first million people to go to Mars, that’s still how many, you know, in perspective of number of humans alive. That’s like under It’s under a tenth of a percent. Yeah, exactly. And I think it will be an It’s actually Oh, sorry. It’s just over a tenth. No, it’s under a tenth of a percent by mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s not clear. It’s not clear to me. Um but but from our perspective, it’s very simple. It’s

66:49 like, okay, start with the things. Start with the basics that matter the most. Energy production, propellant production, which by the way, we haven’t talked about this yet, but propellant production also implies the production of water and oxygen for drinking and breathing. So, it’s like because that’s just part of the process. Yeah, it’s just part of the process. So, like oxygen as a liquid is fuel for a rocket. If you turn a tiny bit of that into gas, you now have oxygen for breathing. And then, of course, we talked about how water is a pre-product of oxygen. And so if you just take a little bit of water out of the system before you turn it into oxygen, um that’s for humans. That’s for humans to drink. It’s a

67:19 negligible quantity. Like you know, you will not you will not out drink a rocket engine. So in in in the process of making the rocket fuel, you basically make way more water than you could ever need for humans. Yeah. So what we say the sort of like the sort of like line that we repeat is by produc by by creating a rocket propellant production plant, you create a virtually unlimited supply of water for drinking and oxygen for breathing. basically like use as much damn oxygen as you want. You could have a leak. I mean, you’d have other problems if you had a leak in your habitat, but um you know, from a from a from a production

67:50 standpoint, you could have a leak in your habitat and it wouldn’t be a big it wouldn’t be a big deal. Um but yeah, from our standpoint, it’s simple. It’s like, okay, start with the basics, the thing that matter things that matter the most, prop production, life support, power. From there, uh, four years, six years down the road, um, start answering the question of how do I make sure that this business is continues to have a compelling product offering in the in the worst case that the novelty does wear off. Like, okay, you and I hope the novelty never wears off. People are eager to go once they realize it’s accessible and it’s safe and they’re not going to die.

68:20 And they’re not going to die, right? There’ll be some people who will you can get over the hurdle of you’re probably not going to die on takeoff or landing. Yeah. So, like I would be willing to go even if I was going to possibly die. What? What? What percentage? 20%. You You’d go one in five or one in uh I die one times. Wait, one in five. Well, that would be 20%. Wait, really? 20% chance? Yeah. So, 20% is my threshold for going. Like, if I was 50/50 likely to die, I think I would say, you know, let’s send some. I don’t think I would do 20%. I think I

68:52 would probably do like 01%. Yeah, like an airplane zero, basically. Well, no, no, I think an airplane is like once every 12 million passengers. Airplane is like extremely extremely good. It’s insanely good. I think I think we don’t necessarily want to be selling the public on this like one in five chance of death. I’m just saying like my threshold is one in five. For me personally, I don’t expect that to scale. And um you know I think we should aim for a safety of like 100 100% safety or 99 you know like we should aim for

69:23 basically zero. There there will be some okay like practically speaking you can’t you can’t say like I’m gonna colonize a planet and then nobody dies ever. Um there’ll be some mistakes but I think we should aim for a safety that’s like you know I think airplanes good a good a good safety that’s a good benchmark. Yeah. Everyone goes on airplanes. Nobody cares about it. I think the really important thing is basically you you and I think Elon’s very conscious of this. You can’t have you can’t set a precedent for the first Starship that goes to Mars with humans on it blows up because if that happened that would be horrible for the mission. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you look back at

69:54 um Demo 2, which was Dragon’s first flight, um there’s like I mean, I think there’s a documentary about it at this point, but basically like the opinion that SpaceX team had at the time, according to, you know, what you could find online is like, okay, what like whatever we need to do to make sure that the rocket doesn’t blow up, we’re going to do that. Um so, that’s like a great safety posture for the first few missions. And then after the first few missions, hopefully maybe you do like maybe you do maybe you like only do your risky stuff on missions with no humans on it. Yeah, Optimus is on board. Yeah, Optimus is on board. Or like, you

70:25 know, our robots on board and uh you know, we say this all the time. It’s like our our technology like because we’ve we’ve taken the idiot index of production so low um is low cost of manufacturing enough that it’s completely fine for us to take some risk that the rocket blows up. M like in in in the normal aerospace world, you know, like if you’re a satellite customer, like your satellite costs so much money that um you you know, if if you’re the rocket company and you blow up the satellite, it’s like a nightmare. Like you like you have to

70:56 get insurance, the insurance costs a lot because of course there’s big risk and the payout’s huge. Um, but for us it’s like we want to build we want to build equipment that’s effectively commodity as at least for us to produce to the point where you know if you blow up like one in 10 robotic missions like we don’t care. I want to be very clear. I’m not suggesting you should blow up one in 10 human missions. I think you should blow up zero in 10 human missions. But for a robotic mission one in 10 blowing up no problem. Even even one in three blowing up is no problem. That’s just a a 33%,

71:27 you know, or 50% overhead um in terms of uh building 50% extra stuff. Yep. It’s like no big deal. So, I know when when uh Airbnb started, I think Brian, Joe, and Nate basically didn’t hire anyone for I think it was like the first two years, and they basically just built the company, were extremely conscious uh about not hiring the wrong type of people, and they were very focused. I think at the beginning Brian had this line where he would ask someone you know if you knew that you were going to die in 10 years. Uh would you still like what would you want to do? Would you still be wanting to work

71:59 on this company or would you go do something else? If something else then probably go do that. Um how you know I know you said you basically have 16 people now um and you’re very conscious about how you’re hiring. How have you kind of found people that are very aligned with the mission and uh are excited about this kind of future that you’re trying to build? Yeah, I mean the I would love to give you some like magic bullet answer. Um the short answer is just not hiring a lot of people we interview. Um it’s it’s like it’s tough. What’s the biggest reason that you don’t hire someone? The biggest reason we don’t hire someone

72:31 is we don’t think that um you know basically we don’t think they have the mission alignment we want. We want people who work at Star Path to look at the problem we’re solving and go holy this is the next big thing. And um we want people who work at Star Path to like read about how the technology we’ve built is quote unquote impossible, which is like common place for us to to find on the internet that like, you know, something that we’ve done in the real world is is quote unquote impossible in the eyes of someone else and be like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me.” Um you know, we’re keep on doing it. Yeah, we’re just going to keep on doing

73:03 it. Um and so you know we find tons of smart people um tons of people who are extremely good at um you know the things that we want them to do and uh we still make tough choices which is to not hire some people even if they’re really good um because we want um extreme mission alignment. Um and uh okay but you you you asked like sort of an implicit question under there which like if I found out that I was dying in 10 years what would I do? Um, and it got when you were talking about it, it got me thinking and I think the answer is if I knew that I was going to personally die

73:33 in 2035. Okay. So, that leaves the Mars 28 window 2030, 2032 and 2033. 20 2034, I think, right? Or no. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it would be like 2035. So, like if I was going to die, okay, four or five Mars windows, I think we would we would stick to a similar plan for the next year and a half, 2 years, which is to get uh equipment onto the surface of the moon for testing. Um to be confident that the the machines we’re going to produce that scale actually work. Um and

74:04 then as soon as we have confidence for any particular machine, just like do whatever is needed to finance the living out of it and make like tens of thousands of units and store them in a fac store them in a warehouse. That’s what I would do. It’s just like, okay, well, we know the machine. Like, it’s not like making a city on Mars is like this like super complicated thing where we don’t know what the implementation is. We know the implementation. It’s like make robot that produces power, water, oxygen. Oops. And then like like a long trailing list of other stuff. Um, we know how to make the robot that does the robots that do the bulk of

74:35 that. Um, so if I was going to die in 10 years, I would just I would just I would just do everything I can to make as many of those robots u before I die. So like m like maybe you only need 100,000 to make a city on Mars and I just make all 100,000 right now. Which by the way in automotive terms is small numbers. Like it’s very normal for a car to make 100,000 units a year. It’s like in fact low like Yeah. No, that would be a very bad car. Yeah. a shitty car would be like a I think Ferrari does really

75:07 low production on a few models and stuff. But yeah, like a Model 3. I don’t know the numbers, but I think it’s likeions. It’s like a million or something. Well, yeah. And they want to scale it to, you know, or at least, you know, whatever the autonomous vehicle is. It’s going to be like 20 plus million a year or something like that. Well, those are crazy numbers, and I hope they achieve them. But my point is just like 100,000 robots is like small fish in the game of um robots at scale, which which automotive is the best example of robots at scale. I love this uh Jeff Bezos like the regret minimization framework where he basically says like project project

75:38 himself out to age 80 and look back and say like what would I have regretted if I didn’t do like what actions would I regret not taking? Um what are those actions for you? Um it’s hard to answer without just saying like what I’m doing now. Um I would say at least on that list. Okay, so obviously on that list is doing whatever we can to build the city. Um, definitely also on that list is doing whatever I can personally after we finish developing the technology to go live in the city. Like one of the things I I talk to my parents about sometimes is

76:09 like once we’re done making the technology here, I kind of want to just go do like I don’t know if this like PC, but like a bit of like slave labor. Like I want to I want to just go to Mars and just like do the shittiest few jobs. Grunt work. Yeah. Just grunt work. Like because at the end of the day like you know numbers on a screen going up are important for businesses but they don’t feel the same as like you know the type of stuff you do as a kid which is like build a fort with your friends. And so like I want to do like the manual the shitty manual

76:41 labor on Mars so that I can feel like the whole spectrum of satisfaction equivalent of working at McDonald’s on Mars. Oh for sure. Yeah. 100%. Like if McDonald’s has a Mars, dude, if McDonald’s has a Mars, think about how fun it is. Like, okay, at McDonald’s on Earth, you’re like frying fries, which is like not that interesting, but the equivalent of Mar Okay, well, for some it’s interesting. I I used to work at a at a burger store when I was younger. It’s called Five Guys. It’s like I love frying fries. I actually love cutting the fries, but we don’t need to get too far into that. Um, it’s really fun. um like the equivalent of of cutting potatoes on

77:13 Mars will be like repairing the cutting teeth for a mining robot where like each tooth that you repair corresponds to like you know seven tons of mine material. So like just imagine how how like rewarding that is to like sharpen a tooth, put it in a bucket and be like, “Dude, this bucket represents like the oxygen production for like 75 people, you know, that would die without these teeth or or or like you know, like you hypothesize like what do you think what do you think the like Yeah. Just like what do you think grunt like the the

77:43 manual labor jobs on Mars will be? Obviously, most of it will be automated, but a couple things here and there will still be manual. need like labor jobs for 100 to 1 million people, 100,000 to 1 million people sort of situation. Yeah. Yeah. So I I would just want to go to Mars. So my bucket list for minimizing regret is to go to Mars and do one of those things. Um and then maybe like you know if if possible like if easy you know get on a spaceship and like visit Jupiter or something. Not not the planet just orbit. Obviously you land on Jupiter you’re dead as a doornob

78:15 but um you know I I’d like to maybe go see some of the gas giants up close. Um, I mean there’s some pictures we have that are like sort of like dynamic super resolution where like we have shitty pictures and we’ve like made them better using After Effects and whatnot um that are so so cool of like various cloud patterns and storm patterns on Jupiter. So maybe I’d want to go see those. But it’s like from a feasibility standpoint it might be like well you know a lot of money but definitely going to Mars and doing some labor is on the list. Um and uh and past

78:46 that I don’t have much on my bucket list. Isaiah from Valor talked about the idiot index in the uh nuclear reactor industry being like 140 to1 or more. Um what is the India index for space and how are you kind of like lowering that? Yeah. Um it’s hard to say but it’s at least 100 to1. And 100 to one is sort of like past a threshold that you and I were talking about today that you know I won’t name you know it’s it’s past a threshold where you definitely need there’s no excuse for 100 to1 idiot index we love we uh we we talked about before

79:18 this started we talked about the index which is not if you’re yeah this is just me but if you’re above 60 to1 idiot ind do you want to explain what the idiot index is for people to understand for those who are listening the idiot index uh is a is a is a index that can be defined for any finished good which is the ratio of the cost of the finished goods. So maybe your iPhone’s $1,000 to the cost of the raw inputs. Raw inputs. Now practically, yeah, practically you want to define the idiot index where the denom or sorry the numerator, the finished good product is

79:49 the price that you pay and the the the the uh denominator is the price of all of the commoditized inputs. So you don’t want to call like a chip 1 cent because like technically it’s 1 cent of silicon. you want to say like, okay, the chip is like two bucks because that’s the lowest you can that’s a commoditized good and we already know that you really can’t get a chip below two bucks at least for now. Um, and in aerospace the idiot index can be like hundreds or sometimes thousands to one where like you buy a product and and we buy products like this all the time for,

80:19 you know, for for early missions where, you know, we haven’t yet vertically integrated it. We’re like the product might be like $10,000 where if you had the design for the product, you could fabricate it for 50 or 20 where like the idiot index is like hundreds and hundreds to one. And the idiot index is a good sort of gut check as to whether or not um the finished good has like if you’re if you’re like if you’re is a is a good deal. And if you’re if you’re basing some sort of economic model or constraint against the price of an item, you also want you also want to know the idiot index. Like you don’t want to say

80:50 something like, oh, it’s impossible to build build a city on Mars because you know like NASA’s moon Mars rover cost a billion dollars. Well, it’s like the the idiot index, which okay, it’s hard to call the NASA Mars rover idiotic because it’s not. It’s like an extremely capable machine, but at the end of the day, it’s very expensive to build. Um, and so if you wanted to make a thousand of them, you would not take the price of making that thing and multiply it by thousand. You take the price of that thing, see how much you can improve it, which might be itself a,000 times, and then multiply it by

81:21 like 500 million to like 500,000. Yeah. So, you could NASA could have a robot that costs 500 million, you could make it for 500,000. Actually, ours costs less than 500,000. Um, and then you would multiply that number by,000 to see like, okay, what does it cost to make a,000? Um and uh and nuclear the idiot index is super high mostly because of this this is like the big irony mostly because of regulatory. Yeah. It’s it’s not just it’s not just that’s only half the irony. It’s mostly because of regulatory and further furthermore the the majority of the regulatory burden in making

81:52 nuclear reactors comes from people who care about the environment which is like which is like fate loves irony. Nuclear reactors are like one of the best technologies for protecting the environment because you have effectively emissionfree energy production. Like basically zero emission relative to all other forms of relative even better like it’s better than solar. It’s better than wind. And I’m a big fan of like every energy form of energy production in the world less than probably like coal mining. Um and uh it’s even better than those. So like like nuclear is like the ultimate technology. And you know regul

82:22 regulation makes the the idiot index super high. And in aerospace, the idiot index is super high because almost all of the goods are sold at extremely low volume. So like if you’ve made a thing, you know, it costs 100 bucks to make, but you spent 200 grand making it and you’re only going to sell five. Well, it’s at least 40 grand. And if you want to make a profit, it’s going to be 200 grand, right? Per unit. Um, and so you’re asking about like, okay, what’s our experience like buying in the case of solar panels, solar panels from, you know, existing vendors? I don’t know what their profit margins

82:53 are, but all I can say is that because they’re only selling to a few satellites every year, they’re only selling to a few satellites every year, there’s no incentive to make the price small. And when the when the price is like $1,000 a watt, where on Earth we make solar panels for like 44 cents per watt, okay, you can go to Home Depot and buy a panel for like under a dollar a watt. Um uh you know, the incentive to make the production cheap isn’t really there. Um and so yeah, so so the idiot index is super high and more or less like the first order of

83:24 magnitude improvement you can make on the idiot index uh for any given good in aerospace is by just trying to make it cheaper. Like if all you do is you ask like okay what are the expensive parts like what are the parts of this that make it expensive? Is it labor? Is it like a unique material that there’s only one supplier of? Is it like a a finished good from another company that has a high idiot index? um and you just remove that, you you you’ll usually get a 10x improvement. So if if all you want is 10x better, um all you got to do is like for most applications is just look at

83:56 the thing, ask why it’s expensive, find the thing that costs the most, which usually accounts for 90% of the cost and remove it in one way or another. Maybe you remove it by like testing a cheaper alternative and it works. Maybe you remove it by integrating the production like vertically integrating the production of that costly good that’s making expensive um or or some other creative solution. And this is like, you know, I won’t speak for other companies, but this is like roughly speaking how like all of the products that have seen scale in the space industry, of which there are a few, have reached that just like, okay, what’s expensive? Okay, delete that. Uh, add something else

84:27 that’s, you know, maybe maybe like 20% worse and a thousand times cheaper. In some cases, better and cheaper, too. Um, and uh and and basically we do the same thing. Now, in some cases, you want to make you want to make like a a more than 10x improvement. Uh maybe like maybe in the case of rovers it’s like okay 100x improvement whatever and and so in that circumstance you s you sometimes have to take like a completely different approach like okay maybe maybe the reason why this is expensive is because you have a requirement that isn’t real maybe it’s the case that you think you

84:57 need uh you know fault tolerance or redundancy but actually you know if you work out the economic model and you say like okay 90% or like 10% of my machines will fail completely that that’s actually that’s that that’s actually much cheaper than you know making it so darn reliable that only 1% of your machines fail. Um, and so like sometimes those are like, you know, tech tricks you can use to make your your cost basis way lower. Um, but it’s it’s pretty case by case and and actually the first thing gets you like most of the way there. Like if you just ask like, okay, why is this motor $40,000,

85:30 which is like a you can shop for motors online for spacecraft that are $40,000. Like easily you can find that. Um, and and you just like you just like ask yourself like, okay, which step of making this motor like costs 40 grand or 20 grand? Um, and and either just delete the motor entirely and and make a new one or um or or something in between. You can get like usually from 40,000 to