00:00Let's talk about Starship, Sinead. And I am curious. I mean, most investors seem to have
00:05relative confidence that we will see this in full force sometime soon. You understand the
00:12technology. Are we there? We are not there yet. Now, you know, your previous guests have
00:18brilliantly outlined that what Elon is really good at doing is selling stuff. We have also
00:22seen that Elon is also very good at building and manufacturing stuff. The one thing I would say
00:27about Starship that should leave some people with a few more questions in their mind, let's
00:33just say, is the sheer complexity of what they are trying to do with Starship versus their
00:39former, well, the current rocket that they're using to launch, the Falcon rocket. So, you
00:45know, I think what we're going to see and what we're starting to see is engineering slippage
00:49against timelines and budgets starting to become overrun, which is the one thing that we know
00:54Elon is typically not known for doing. And the reason being that the level of complexity
00:59of Starship is categorically much, much larger than the Falcon rocket. And so, it's going
01:06to be really interesting to see if we can look at that R&D timeline against NASA's expected
01:13timelines, but also their internal timelines to see whether or not they're going to be able
01:17to stay on track for not only their own expenditure on the CapEx, but also to be able to start
01:22delivering
01:23much needed revenue gain in terms of Starlink and other projects.
01:27Is there any risk? I mean, there's been a lot of talk about that they need to prove Starship's
01:33commercial viability, I think, next year, by next year, if they're going to participate
01:38in NASA's Artemis 3 mission, which is effectively, you know, us going back to the moon and presumably
01:45beyond. Is that sort of the deadline that we're looking at right now?
01:49That is certainly a deadline. Now, you know, NASA has been pretty strict with SpaceX and
01:55they're not getting any special treatment here. They've kind of said if there's slippage
01:59on this timeline, the revenue that you're going to get from the government in terms of
02:03the Artemis and the space projects that you're doing through NASA is going to be taken away
02:08from you. So, there certainly is a real risk here that SpaceX is going to want to stay on
02:14track here. Howeverly, you know, in terms of the revenue that they're actually going
02:18to get for the Artemis missions, it's really small compared to the other business units that
02:22they have. You know, it's a fraction of what they would try to get, let's say, in the AI
02:28or the returns that they would need in the compute space. However, where the Artemis project
02:34is important for SpaceX is strategically. Now, Elon's, a lot of the mission and the vision
02:41around this company has been built on his kind of very long-term desire to go to Mars. He pulled
02:47back on that recently and kind of said, you know, I'm not sure Mars is actually the mission,
02:52the goal anymore of this company and kind of reiterated that, you know, the moon and the
02:57Artemis project is a much better vision. And even then has kind of pulled back on that more recently
03:04to say, you know what, we wanted to increase civilizational and human reach in space. Maybe
03:11the way to do that is with orbital data centers instead. So, what I would kind of be looking for
03:17here is if we are seeing the mission and the vision changing so quickly coming out of SpaceX,
03:23what are we to be looking for in terms of engineering and R&D? And if we're seeing the
03:28goal posts moving, which I suspect they are, from Elon's personal motivation, and he's not that
03:34interested in space exploration anymore, where is that going to be reflected in revenues? And I think
03:40the move to orbital data centers and away from our kind of Artemis NASA missions is going to be
03:48important. Strategically, they will want to stick to those timelines, though, because they
03:53kind of need to. The burn rate for Starship development is $3 billion or more a year.
03:58Wow. For a company that's fairly loss-making at the minute, that's not nothing.
04:02Yeah. Well, what exactly ends up being the end result here? I mean, I know in the past,
04:08Musk has talked about this idea that he wants a Starship rocket basically launching every hour,
04:12which, you know, worries me for a lot of reasons. But also, like, what exactly are we taking up? Do
04:17we
04:17need that much stuff going up every hour? I mean, maybe I'm just, you know, from a different
04:21generation where, you know, we had, you know, it seemed like a rocket launch once, you know,
04:24every few months. But, you know, that's a lot. And I guess, and I don't mean to be glib about
04:29it,
04:30but I'm looking at it more from a cost-effectiveness accretive to the bottom line.
04:36Is that type of launch schedule, if he is indeed serious about that, is there enough demand for the
04:43product, for the service, I should say, to justify that?
04:46This is such a good question, because what we always hear about in this industry is Elon's vision
04:51vis-a-vis supply. I want to send rockets every, you know, X days, hours, minutes, whatever,
04:57whatever he thinks about that morning, it becomes kind of, you know, the next strategy in place.
05:03However, let's actually look at what demand is driving this. And very interestingly, you know,
05:09ultimately, you have SpaceX at the minute delivering the vast majority of launches,
05:14U.S. launches, and certainly global launches, a lot of them are going through SpaceX. However,
05:21what we've seen, you know, the entire industry was kind of, as it moved out of the government and
05:26into this kind of commercial stage, was predicated on the cost of launch falling through Falcon's launch,
05:33which was going to kind of create this boom in demand. What we saw was that the cost of launch
05:40fell, but the price to the customer did not fall to the extent that was expected. And what we saw
05:46in return was that the demand did not increase as analysts once expected. So when you look at the
05:54demand for launch at the minute, most of SpaceX's launch is for its own services. So, you know,
06:02I guess the question is, is Elon going to be able to generate the demand downstream to justify Starship
06:10launching as often and as much cargo as?
06:18So I think we lost Sinead's connection there. Sinead, I do have one last question before we let
06:25you go. And this has to do with the idea of the singularity of what Starship is and what it
06:31represents and whether you, as a scientist, believe that there could be any sort of meaningful
06:38competition to it. Right now, Falcon 9 for a while was the only game in town. I assume,
06:43assuming Starship makes it on the timeline, it will be the only game on town for a while. But there
06:49are a lot of other companies out there that think that they can actually be a player in this as
06:53well.
06:53Do you see the potential for real competition in this space?
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