(applause)
- Good morning.
I'm so pleased to be here.
And I'm so pleased to be able
to share with you some of the experiences
and the activities that we're doing at SpaceX.
I do believe that what we're doing at SpaceX
will bring proximity to the globe.
♪ It's a God-awful small affair ♪
♪ To the girl with the mousy hair ♪
♪ But her mummy is yelling no ♪
♪ And her daddy has told her to go ♪
♪ But her friend is nowhere to be seen ♪
♪ Now she walks through her sunken dream ♪
♪ To the seat with the clearest view ♪
♪ And she's hooked to the silver screen ♪
♪ But the film is a saddening bore ♪
♪ For she's lived it ten times or more ♪
♪ She could spit in the eyes of fools ♪
♪ As they ask her to focus on ♪
♪ Sailors fighting in the dance hall ♪
♪ Oh man look at those cavemen go ♪
♪ It's the freakiest show ♪
♪ Take a look at the lawman ♪
♪ Beating up the wrong guy ♪
♪ Oh man wonder if he'll ever know ♪
♪ He's in the best selling show ♪
♪ Is there life on Mars ♪
(applause)
- I still get chills when I see our videos.
They're fantastic.
And one of the reasons why we make these videos,
is to bring back peoples' looking towards the stars,
and being excited about space,
and space exploration again.
For those of you that don't know about SpaceX,
we are a small company, solely devoted
to the concept of building space transportation systems
that will ultimately take people to other planets.
We've got our initial sights on Mars,
but there's plenty of places to visit after that.
We're focused on rapid innovation,
and we actually have almost 7,000 people right now.
Over $10 billion worth of revenue on the books.
And we've successfully flown the Falcon Nine,
and the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle 52 times.
We've taken the Dragon spaceship
to the International Space Station, successfully 14 times.
And we're doing this, not necessarily to make money.
In fact we joke that the easiest way
to create a small fortune in the aerospace industry
is to start with a large one.
(laughter)
But what we are focused on doing,
is lifting peoples' eyes to the skies,
thinking about space exploration again.
And harnessing public imagination.
The driving principles, and these are relevant
for any entrepreneur, set audacious goals.
And by the way, we were talking about audacious goals,
and I'm so glad that this week,
the Audacious project was announced as well.
It's one of the founding words
that we use at SpaceX, is audacious.
Think big.
Even if you fall short,
you probably have done something extraordinary.
We have a relentless focus on driving innovation,
and improving every cycle.
You achieve that by proximity, and by feedback.
Instantaneous feedback.
We have a building block approach to what we're doing.
We started with a small launch vehicle, Little Falcon One.
Flew it a couple of times.
Went to a bigger vehicle, Falcon Nine.
Glued three of those Falcon Nines together,
to form the Falcon Heavy,
which you saw in the video, first thing.
And then our next project on the launch vehicle side
will be the Big Falcon Rocket, and the Big Falcon Spaceship.
And that will be the vehicle
that ultimately transports people beyond Earth.
Our people are our greatest resources, for sure.
We walk that talk.
It's not just a saying we make.
We could never do what we did,
without the workforce that we have.
They are extraordinary people, and they work hard every day.
Very similar to you all here in the audience.
Wanted to chat, just give you a tiny bit
of background on the company.
I think it's relevant for entrepreneurialism.
We started in 2002, and we ended 2002
with about 14 employees.
Actually, exactly 14 employees.
I was the 11th employee at SpaceX, actually, in 2002.
This is my 16th year at this extraordinary company.
And since 2002, what have we achieved?
We've launched 52 times.
We will, this year, if we maintain our manifest,
we will have launched as many vehicles
as our competitors, who have been in the business
for many dozens of years longer than us.
So we've launched 52 times.
We've landed many times as well,
and that's the key piece of technology
that's necessary in order to look to the stars,
and take people to other planets.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that.
Rapid operational reuse.
Imagine if rockets were more like ...
Or imagine if airplanes were like rockets today.
Right now rockets are used once.
You spend millions of dollars building this capability,
and after its mission, you toss it,
or it tosses itself into the ocean.
I think that's a bad steward element of the environment.
So not only do we wanna reuse this capability
so that you can be more like an aircraft,
think about going from London to Los Angeles.
If that aircraft was only used once,
not many of us would fly.
And proximity would have a very different perspective.
We'd have a very different perspective on proximity.
So we must be able to make rockets reusable,
and that's fundamentally what we're doing at SpaceX.
And achieving, most recently.
I'm gonna show you a video
of how you do achieve great things.
You start with failure.
(upbeat band music)
(applause)
So I wanna give you a slightly different perspective
of landing a rocket.
Instead of being third person,
I want you to be first person.
So imagine yourself on the top of this booster,
and you're coming home.
This is slightly sped up, but not that much sped up.
So hopefully you will all experience that.
And I'm gonna do another beauty shot,
of the brother and sister boosters, landing side by side,
after that extraordinary Falcon Heavy launch in February.
Yay.
(applause)
So we focused on the rocket piece,
and I do want to talk a little bit
about the crew cabin piece.
We are working with NASA.
We were one of the two companies
that were blessed to have been given
the very difficult, but critical job,
of taking people back to space.
So we are working diligently
on upgrading the Dragon cargo ship,
which currently takes supplies
and food to the International Space Station.
We're upgrading that to be able to carry astronauts again.
Which is an extraordinary program.
We're making great progress.
We should have a vehicle capable
of taking people to the ISS later this year.
And we will demonstrate that
in an autonomous mode this year as well.
Very exciting program.
So we've got Falcon Nine, we've got Falcon Heavy,
we have Dragon.
Now we're gonna move on to the next vehicle,
and that vehicle is incredibly exciting.
That will be the ship that takes people to Mars.
But there's also some other things
that that vehicle can do, that will help more people
on this planet gain proximity.
(upbeat music)
(applause)
I am particularly excited about that capability,
rather than going to Mars.
I can visit my customers overseas
in Dubai, in Riyadh, in London,
and get home in time to make dinner.
(laughter)
Which I also love doing, by the way.
So you take that spaceship,
you leverage it to really change the possibilities,
and the transportation here on Earth,
and then you can also leverage that ship
to take people to Mars, to explore,
to go beyond where we've gone before.
And this is just a quick kind of summary
of kind of a thought piece on what a settlement on ...
Early settlement on Mars could look like.
So, hopefully you've learned a little bit about SpaceX,
about what we're trying to do,
and the possibilities that are enabled
with thinking about space transportation
in a completely different way,
as well as leveraging that
to bring people closer together here on earth.
Thanks very much for your time this morning.
(applause)
Yay.
- Amazing.
- Thank you.
- So, I have a real beginner's question.
I'm sure you get asked this all the time.
But, I read that men are from Mars,
and women are from Venus.
So I'm just wondering, is the plan
to send the men home to Mars,
and we're gonna go to Venus?
Because I think it's a lot closer, right, Venus?
So is that the plan?
- Venus is a little closer, but it's toxic.
(laughter)
- Just, good to clear that up.
I have a more serious question for you.
Star Wars or Star Trek?
- Firefly.
(cheering)
- And I have to ask you about climate change.
It's been a big theme for our forum this year.
And obviously, Elon's been very outspoken
in naming climate change as a great threat
of this century.
And of course he took a stance
in withdrawing from Trump's advisory committee,
once the Paris agreement was kind of questioned.
(applause)
So, thank you for your organization's leadership on that,
and I just was kind of curious if you have other projects,
or things in mind, other than the sustainability
of the rockets, which you kind of spoke to,
which kind of guides what you're doing,
thinking about climate change.
- Well, there's no question,
Elon doesn't have companies that aren't focused
on making our planet better.
And part of that has to be focused on
what you're doing to the environment.
- For that little fella.
- Exactly.
And our children.
There's a number of things that we're doing.
We're moving away from the carbon-based fuel
that we're using right now on Falcon Nine and Falcon Heavy,
to a LOX methane system.
We're also ensuring that we have enough capability
of our vehicles, so that not only do we
not want to pollute the planet
by trashing the vehicles and dumping them in the ocean,
but that we're bringing them back and reusing them.
And then when they're done, they become monuments, actually.
There'll be monuments galore all over the planet
of the rocketships.
So, cleaner propellants, and ensuring
that we're not just dumping all that metal.
- Thank you.
And I also have to commend you on the leadership
that your organization also took
over the recent revelations around data and privacy.
SpaceX deleted its Facebook page, am I right?
Was that a difficult decision.
Because, I just have to commend you
for kind of stepping forward and making a statement
on the importance of protecting, you know,
democracy and elections.
- There are a lot of difficult decisions.
I don't think that was one
particularly difficult decision to do.
(laughter and applause)
- Gwynne, thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us.
(applause)