Elon Musk - the Future of Energy & Transport

My name is Andrew Hamilton. I am the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to this Oxford Martin School conference to see the Sheldonian packed to the rafters for a very distinguished guest. It is a great pleasure for us to welcome Elon. Musk, who will talk about the

future

of

energy

and

transport

ation. This is a lecture in the Oxford Martin School series. The Oxford Martin School, as you all know, is a very dynamic interdisciplinary research school here at Oxford focused on many of the challenges of the 21st century and of course one of them is

transport

ation, so listening to

elon

musk

Today it fits perfectly with the priority of the Martin School.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to the Principal of Martin School, Professor Ian Golden. Ian has been Principal since September 2006. He is South African. You will hear it in a few moments. Tonight there is a South African connection with Lincoln, which we are all very happy and proud of. Ian came to Martin School. As I said six years ago. of the world bank, where he was vice president and before that he was director of development policy at the world bank, so it is a pleasure to introduce you to our speaker tonight. Thank you very much, Vice Chancellor.

Welcome Elon. It is a huge pleasure to bring. great minds together and that's why my job as Head of Oxford Martin School is so fun and meaningful because we are dealing with the biggest challenges of the 21st century. In Elon Musk we have someone who focuses on two key areas: transportation and

energy

. an extraordinary intellect, but he combines his science with business acumen and a commitment to society, which is unusual; It is the combination of not only business but also science and the knowledge of how to apply it that makes him a truly special visitor tonight, an extraordinary talent with the right commitment to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

He is the engineer and entrepreneur who builds and operates companies to solve global environmental, economic and social challenges. He is the CEO and chief designer of Tesla motors. He will see the car outside and the CEO and Chief Technology Officer. Elon, a spacex officer at spacex, is the chief designer and has overseen the development of the rockets that have now taken him to the space station twice. They have received the NASA contract for 1.6 billion to provide a commercial cargo replacement and, as he will tell us. Without a doubt, they have now also committed to taking astronauts.

It is an extraordinary thing to visit the factory, as I had the privilege of doing so and seeing not only the energy and commitment of Elon and his team, but also the originality of how much of what they did. they are doing is original how much they are taking away it has been necessary for governments before four governments have achieved what

elon

has achieved never before has an individual done so much and so quickly for space in addition to his work on spacex as if that were not enough Your hardworking Tesla is developing a car that has now won this year's Car and Automotive Trends Car of the Year.

Now, for those of us who don't follow cars, this is the equivalent of winning the emma the grannies and the oscars at the same time. year, for all of us academics, two Nobel Prize winners, is quite a remarkable achievement and, after having driven it, he was kind enough to entrust me with his roadster. Having driven one of his cars, I felt like I was in a rocket ship, it had this g force. I have never experienced this car before, I think it will revolutionize transportation because it will allow people to see that things can be done without carbon that were previously unimaginable.

Additionally, he started and ran Solarcity, which is developing and is now the largest producer of solar energy systems in the US. He started at PayPal, which he co-founded and you all know about PayPal, became its CEO and then He moved on to these other things. The vice chancellor mentioned that we have a connection with South Africa. We went to the same high school and we both ran away, he went from there to get his degrees at Pennsylvania and Wharton and in many ways he has surpassed that, but the work he was doing, including supercapacitors, continued to drive a lot of what What he does today is this incredible combination of vision, courage and ability that has caused many to compare him to a 21st century version of what Brunel was in the 19th century and Henry Ford in the 20th century.

I have no doubt that he will benefit us in ways we have not yet imagined. He exemplifies the ambition of the Oxford Martian School and its interest in solving the problems of the 21st century and it is a great pleasure to invite him to address us. . I think thank you very much for the type of production um it's an honor to be here this is an incredibly beautiful theater um and uh it's amazing to be in a place designed by christopher ram um and uh and speaking of brunel I'm actually a big fan of brunel um and I have I have five children and I really wanted to name one of them Brunel um or Ice and Bard.

I like them, not like um, hopefully, one in the

future

, so I guess I'll tell you the kind of story of. um pretty much how I got here or you know the various things that I did and maybe why I did them and I hope that's a little bit helpful and then we'll have a pretty long question and answer session. So I'm looking forward to hearing, feel free to ask me any questions, no matter what, for whatever we're doing. Actually, I'm always always interested in negative comments. Actually, so, the way I started was, um, I just started. in South Africa I went to Winter Pretoria out loud and uh and then I left on my own initially to go to Canada and then to the United States to go to university and graduate from undergrad um I had to make it a decision um and uh uh a path it would have led to Wall Street and I guess a pretty big salary and then the other one would have been to go to graduate school and try to solve a technical problem and uh i i i don't do it very close to the first one so I decided to go to Silicon Valley and go to Stanford and trying to work on ultracapacitors for use in electric vehicles and I really think there's potential for a significant breakthrough in that. area and actually having an energy storage mechanism that's better than that than batteries, it's not necessary for transportation to go electric, but I think it's something that would accelerate that, so, I was about to get into get .

In graduate school and then on the Internet, it was clear that the Internet was going to be something that was going to be very important for the future, so I thought I could spend five years in a graduate program and figure out that answer. is that there's no way to make a capacitor work and maybe get some good articles published and that kind of thing and uh uh, but that would be the most unfortunate situation, I thought, you know, because you can come to One of the possible things is to determine that success is not one of the possible outcomes.

I couldn't really bracket the uncertainty around that, so I thought I can do that or I can work on building elements. of the Internet and this was in '95 so no one had made any money from it, but I thought the Internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity, where it would be like humanity got a nervous system where everyone suddenly, any part of humanity would know what the collective would have access to collective knowledge and that's true, it's really quite remarkable. In the past you would have to do it and if you wanted to access a lot of information, how to be nearby. a big library or something like the big ivory ship nearby and then that will be the only way to get access to the information and now with the Internet with everything online you could be somewhere in the jungles of South America and if you have access to an Internet connection, you have access to essentially all the information in the world with a tremendous amount of analytical power behind that, so I think it's literally gone from a situation where people communicated almost as if by osmosis, yes I can imagine some kind of creature, a simple melted multicellular creature that would communicate using fairly slow chemical signals.

Now any part of humanity knows what every other part of humanity is doing immediately. It's pretty amazing, so I want to be a part of building that anyway. I decided to create a couple of internet companies and that worked reasonably well so the first one helped put the media companies online and then we sold them and then we started another company that you may have used called Paypal and we sold it for a huge amount of money on eBay and that left me in the fortunate position of having the capital to pursue the other two things that I thought would most affect the future of humanity. sustainable energy both the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable way, which I think is possibly the most pressing problem of the 21st century and then the other one which is the extension of life beyond the earth, so the one I did first was the space company and the genesis of that is kind of interesting because at first I didn't think it would be possible to create a rocket company and I thought what would really make a difference is having a mission to Mars, a kind of little paleo to the surface of Mars that would excite the public and reignite the passion for space exploration so that we could go beyond what we did with the Apollo program and I thought it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the high point of space exploration human and it wasn't something like that that I was able to witness in real time because it was -2 when they landed, so, uh, it just seemed like Although if I thought about the future, one where we were a true space-carrying civilization, exploring the stars and making the things we read about in science fiction books and movies real, that sounds like a really exciting future. it kind of made me feel good about the future, um and one where we were forever confined to earth, it made me feel a little sad, so, yeah, that's what I was really trying to figure out, how can we reverse that?

Um and then like I said at the beginning, I didn't think it would be possible to create a space company because it seemed like the purview of governments, but my first thought was well, let's see if we can if we do a philanthropic mission to Mars and get the public excited about the idea of go there and then that would lead to a bigger budget for NASA and then we could go there and hopefully it would work so I figured out how to compress the cost of the spacecraft and the communication systems and the payload and so on and then um , it would have been a small greenhouse about a meter wide with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel that you would land on, you would hydrate the gel upon landing and you would have this great photo of green plants against a red background in the US, that's called the photo of money and the public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives, so this will be the first life on another planet, the farthest place where life is.

I've traveled once and I thought well, that would get people really excited and maybe they could imagine the people there. We could certainly discover a lot of scientific and engineering data about what was needed to maintain plant life on the surface of Mars. So I got over most of that and what I was obsessed with was the rocket, so getting there in the first place, and there were the American options from Boeing and Lockheed that were just too expensive, I couldn't afford them, so I went to Russia three times to negotiate the purchase of an intercontinental ballistic missile um, of course, I'm talking about desperate times that call for desperate measures um and and I went there, so I did, I made three visits there and um in the end I was able to negotiate a price, in I actually bought three of these things via the largest ICBMs in the Russian fleet, but, but, they were still quite expensive and on the third trip I came to the conclusion that I would be operating under the wrong premise that I had, in I was actually wrong about the willingness to send people to Mars to expand the space frontier, um, and actually, in retrospect, it was pretty silly of me to think that those people weren't interested in such a thing or in The Last Time I Lost. the world to do this, in fact, people had actually thought that it is not possible or not possible to obtain an amount of money that would not materially affect their standard of living, so I came to the conclusion that even if we manage to do this quest that wouldn't be enough that would maybe add a little more to the world to do it but it wouldn't make it clear to people that there was a way um and and and this is almost an opposite case, I think if you can show people that there is a way, so there is a lot of will, so after that third trip, I learned a lot more about rockets at that time and I had a series of meetings, just kind of brainstorming sessions with people in the space industry to try to understand if I was missing something fundamental about the ability to improve rockets, and this is where I think it's useful to use the analytical approach in physics, which is trying to reduce things to first principles and reasoning from there rather than reasoning by analogy, etc. and the way this was applied to derogatory was to say:Well, what are the materials that go into a rocket?

How do you know how much each payroll component weighs? What is the cost of that raw material and that and that? we're going to set a minimum as to the cost of the rocket and that actually turns out to be a relatively small number um certainly well below five percent of the cost of a rocket and in some cases closer to one or two percent um and so on. I call it maybe the magic wand number, so if you had a bunch of raw materials on the ground and you could just wave the magic wand and rearrange them, then that would be the best scenario for a rocket, so I could see, well, There's clearly a lot of room for improvement, even if you consider the rockets expendable, um, and I guess that's what I mean by thinking about things from the beginning. main point of view if, on the other hand, you were to analyze it by analogy and say: well, the analogy would be what are all the other rocket companies, how much do their rockets cost, what have other rockets historically cost and that would be a kind of analogy, but it doesn't really illustrate what the true potential is, so I think it's kind of a first principles approach, it's a good way to understand what new things are possible, so this is a good framework, and it doesn't mean you'll be successful, but you know that you can at least determine if success is one of the possibilities that are important.

I think so. I started Spacex and initially decided to make a small rocket called Falcon. one that was capable of putting about half a ton into orbit and this didn't go well and it was quite difficult to attract key technical talent and of course I was quite ignorant of many things and made many mistakes. the way and the first three flights of the falcon failed or rather, certainly did not reach orbit, the second and third flights possibly reached space, but did not reach full orbital speed and unfortunately the fourth flight worked. um and if it hadn't been like that, spacex wouldn't be around because I would have basically run out of money, so that would have been a little stressful and um, thank God, uh, it's a and actually, uh, this all happened in 2008. , so yeah, there really was no ability to raise outside money in any meaningful way in 2008, which is a financial crisis, so you can imagine trying to raise money saying well, yeah, we just had four failures and the world is in financial ruin. . but would you like to give us some money?

Definitely not, um, fortunately that was successful, um and um, and we were able to move from Falcon 1 to start designing the Falcon 9, which is an order of magnitude larger vehicle and in fact, it's more than 20 times the size. payload, so it has a payload in orbit of over 10 tons, um and uh, and that has actually gone much better, uh, because we had the Falcon One experience to use um and and. Part of the research we started with Falcon 1 was because I thought we were going to make a lot of mistakes and if we're going to make a lot of mistakes, then it's better to make those mistakes on a small scale rather than a large scale. scale um and that seems to have worked because on Falcon 9 we've had four Elk Nine flights and they've all been successful, so I think that principle seems to have worked reasonably well, you know? touch word life lives coming soon um but um and I think that and then we also developed the dragon spacecraft because um somewhat opportunistically nasa announced that they were going to retire the space shuttle from space and they needed that they didn't have the budget to develop a transportation capacity of cargo to the space station through the normal big government way, and so they put it out to bid for a commercial industry for the first time in NASA history.

It was a pretty big step and we were lucky enough to win one of those contracts um and then the other company couldn't execute it and so they cut them and we ended up being the primary means of um transporting cargo to and from the space station um so we just we did the first two missions um uh for the first two space station resupply missions uh this year um and then fortunately they both worked uh and then going from there NASA then said well, what about the astronaut transport and um and so they um put out a big competition and um and awarded two contracts for uh for Ashmore Transport, one of which was for Boeing, they got a little bit bigger contract and then another one for us, so hopefully in about three years we'll have Dragon version 2 and the next generation Falcon 9 rockets. transporting astronauts from the space station, then we have the Falcon Heavy, which is about three times the capacity of the Falcon 9 and which will hopefully launch in about a year or two and which will actually be the most powerful rocket in the world by a factor. of two um so we're making steady progress um Falcon Falcon Heavy to put that in perspective it has about sixty percent of the capacity of the Saturn V Moon rocket so if you were to combine two flights of Falcon Heavy with orbital uh .

In the encounter and dimming, you could send people back to the surface of the moon, so I think now we're talking about advancing the frontier, which I think is quite important, and then the really important advance which is . It is needed in rocketry and the fundamental objective that we aspire to achieve is to have a completely and quickly reusable rocket. This had not been achieved before the space shuttle was an attempt to achieve this, but unfortunately it was not a successful attempt. Well, the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, which was also the main ascent mistake and even the parts that were reusable were so difficult for the space shuttle to reuse that it ended up costing four times as much as a rocket. expandable. of equivalent payload capacity, um, like that, but it was the right target, but it missed the target, um and I think this is really incredibly important.

I think it may not be completely intuitive, but I think maybe if we mean it. to other modes of transport makes more sense because all other modes of transport are completely and quickly reusable and that applies to a bicycle, a plane, a horse, in fact, in any kind of normal life, you will be quite foolish if you know that you discard your horse after every trip, you know, or throwing away the plane after flying it. The cost of a 747 is about $300 million and you'd need two of those to make a round trip from Los Angeles to London, but no one, not me.

I think someone has paid half a billion dollars to do that and no one would want to do it, I mean there would be a lot of boat and train travel and that kind of thing if that was the real cost, so it's extremely important in rockets to achieve a full and rapid reusability, this is not an easy thing to do because of the Earth's gravity, well, and just the basic physics of things, um, so there have been many attempts to create a reusable rocket, but in general, well, Everyone, they were also canceled along the way, once people realized that they wouldn't be successful, in fact they were usually canceled quite some time later, it was obvious that they wouldn't be successful, so the essence of the problem is If you design an expandable rocket and do a good job, you'll get two to three percent of your launch mass to orbit.

So if you say right how much mass it takes to return that rocket and be able to fly it again quickly, well, about two to three percent, so basically you can't put anything into orbit, that's how it's been in the past, so to do something useful, what do you have to discover. How can you get a much larger percentage, say ideally on the order of four percent of your takeoff mass to orbit in an expandable configuration and then compress the reusable elements down to about two percent to have a net orbit payload of two? percent um and then you could have something that's quite useful um and the cost of the propellant is only about, say, point three percent of the cost of the vehicle if you take Falcon 9, for example, which uses fairly expensive fuel relatively. speaking, I think there are lower cost options, the cost of refueling a refueling booster on Falcon 9 is about two hundred thousand dollars and the cost of the rocket is 60 million, so it's like an airplane, I mean, it's just if you were going to refuel a plane, it's not very expensive, you want to buy a new plane, very expensive, um, so at this point I'm reasonably sure it can be done and now it's a matter of executing it to make that design work. um and to see if there are any problems and there will probably be some craters along the way so I don't expect this to be a smooth ride as long as the rocket doesn't land on anyone everything will be fine so that's really what What Spacex is focused on right now is increasing the size of the rockets and trying to achieve this full and rapid reusability, so if you're curious you can just be pretty public about things and you can follow along on the Spacex website , so that's what we're doing on the Spacex side and in parallel we have Tesla, which is developing electric vehicles and kind of going full step into a separate story and tell me if I'm going to go on too long and stop me. at any time feel free to leave it's getting boring so with Tesla the goal is to try to create electric vehicles that are more attractive than gasoline vehicles as a product I mean the fundamental problem that we have in um. in energy and transportation it's the tragedy of the commons, you know, we have the CO2 capacity of the oceans and the atmosphere that is priceless or mostly priceless, so it's almost like we're throwing garbage into the atmosphere . and no one is paying for garbage collection, so it's the most unfortunate situation because there are quite significant vested interests in oil, gas and coal, with huge amounts of money, it's a pretty difficult battle to fight and you can't wait. just turn around and kill themselves or something like that, they'll fight hard and then they've been um and unfortunately it requires fighting hard and um and creating products in the absence of attacks on products that create CO2. that are not based on the relative economics of using hydrocarbon fuels versus electric cars and that was our goal for Tesla from the beginning and I'm really excited to see that we have actually achieved that goal with the model that, as mentioned, It recently took top honors, it received the car of the year award in the car of the year and that was on a very difficult battlefield. gasoline because, um, and I hope this is seen as a pivotal moment in transportation where people you know finally appreciated that an electric car could be better than a gasoline car, um, and then moving forward into the future, our goal with Tesla it must continue to refine the technology, increase the scale of production, um and um, and make an electric car for the mass market, uh, that, that, almost anyone can afford it, um, that is the third step of the strategy, so the first step was high price and low volume. step two price medium volume medium step three price low high volume so we're at step two and now we want to move on to step three as soon as possible um and we didn't get a lot of criticism at Tesla for creating the roadster that we made in collaboration with lotus um and uh if people were complaining about why are you making this expensive sports car um and with the implication that we felt there was a shortage of sports cars for the rich and when rushing to fill that unmet need, you know, the real reason is that any car That we do low volume manufacturing, which is the first version of the technology, is going to be expensive no matter what that car looks like, so I could make something that looked like a very standard Toyota Corolla, or a Ford Fusion or something like that, and it would have cost Say, seventy thousand dollars, but no one will pay that for what looks like a mid-size economy sedan.

They just won't do it or very few people would, but people are willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a fast sports car and that's why we start with that at that level and then with another big design iteration and an increase in volume to that we had economies of scale, we were able to create the models and then with another volume increase of another order of magnitude and another major design revision, that is what will allow us to cut the price in half again and then Tesla also supplies powertrains to Mercedes and Toyota and perhaps others will do it for other auto companies in an effort to help them accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

So that's what Spacex has been and I should definitely mention it. solar city um because you have to generate electricity in a sustainable way as well as consume in a sustainable way and people say well that electric cars do not create pollution at the level of the power plant um and um it should be it should be taken into account that for For any fuel source, it is always better to generate power at the power plant level and then charge the electric cars and run them on any fuel source because power plants are much moreefficient in extracting energy than internal combustion.

Car engines are at least twice as efficient and generally about three times as efficient. So for any fuel source, it's all you know, even if the entire world was always powered by hydrocarbons, it would still make sense. make electric cars but of course we also need to find a sustainable means of generating energy and I think the most likely candidate for energy generation will be solar energy. I think the physics of this is pretty obvious because the Earth is actually almost entirely solar powered today, as it is, um, um, it would be an ice ball frozen at I don't know three or four kelvin, um, if it weren't for the sun and our entire precipitation system is powered by the sun. the ecosystem is powered almost entirely by the sun at 99.999, except for some chemotrophs at the bottom of the ocean, so, that's, it's pretty obvious, I think once you try to take a small portion of that energy, in reality is not much and you convert it. that in electricity for society use, so I am pretty sure that solar energy will be the biggest source of energy or electrical energy for humanity in the future and it will be combined with other things of course. like hydropower and geothermal and in fact I think nuclear power is not a terrible option, as long as you are not located in a place that is susceptible to natural disasters, that I also think defies common sense, but always and when there are.

There are no major earthquakes or weather systems that have names, so I think nuclear power can be a sensible option and there are much safer and better ways to generate nuclear power. I'm talking about fission, then it existed. in the past, when nuclear reactors first came out, and then, and then, at some point in the future, every night to make fusion work, of course, that would be pretty cool, but in the meantime, I think indirect fusion, being solar energy, is the solution. uh it's a good thing and that's what Solar City is doing is really trying to improve the economics of solar energy and they're doing a great job.

I don't run the company, so credit to the city of Seoul really goes. to the two key guys who run that company, but they're doing a great job of really accelerating the adoption of solar in the US, so hopefully they'll come to the UK as well. that's all, um, thank you very much, uh, Elon, that's why you make it look so easy, if just a small fraction of us could achieve that in our lives, I think we would be absolutely delighted, uh, but thank you both for being OK. to answer questions and answers, I know that's what you were really waiting for today, so we have a roving microphone, we have some time and please keep your questions clear and concise, for elon, I'm afraid there are no microphones at the level higher, uh, it will be difficult for the people carrying the roving microphone to get to the highest level, so if you want to ask a question, go down to this level, uh, from the sheldonian who would like to go first, lord reese over here.

Well, an incredible talk. Can I be greedy and ask two questions? One of the limitations of both projects is that the energy is not concentrated enough. Batteries can't store energy as densely as liquid fuel and even liquid fuel isn't dense enough to have an efficient launch into space, so I'm wondering if you could speculate on that and the second question I wanted to ask is about the Robotics in the future, I guess even though you can have a driverless car, people still want to drive the Tesla. They themselves won't want to leave that to a robot, but do you think the advancement of robots is going to change people's perspective on human spaceflight, so the concentration of energy and the role of the robot?

Yes, absolutely, in fact, energy density basically. The amount of energy that can be stored in a given amount of mass or volume has been a fundamental limitation for electric cars for a while, um and uh, and then that is combined and correlated to some extent with the cost per kilowatt hour, the cost of storage. that energy in a car um now with the advent of lithium ion technology uh that I think is really what enabled a cool looking car and lithium ion batteries continue to improve it's kind of average about eight eight eight or nine percent per year which, when compounded over several years, ends up being a significant improvement and as I mentioned in my talk, I think even if there was no improvement in um no, there's no fundamental improvement beyond lithium ion batteries, I think we could still take All ground transportation, all ground transportation, could go electric, we need, we need further advancement for airplanes, where the energy density requirements are at least two or three times more significant, but even with the current generation of lithium ion, I think we could go mass market with with ground vehicles um and actually our focus is more on reducing the cost of the battery pack and then improving the energy density um so I think we're in a pretty good place, I'm pretty much and actually now I'm reasonably optimistic that there will be a breakthrough in high-end density capacitors, um, and um, it's kind of interesting if you do the base type, you do the basic physics on the potential energy density of a capacitor, um, using natural materials, um, it's pretty hard to beat lithium-ion batteries, but if you can find a way to make some kind of non-natural materials, I guess they're precise at the molecular level, then I think you can really make some pretty significant advances, and that.

The ability to do that was actually developed, it was developed in the field of photonics, and applying the kind of advances in photonics to capacitor technology is what has the potential for a really big breakthrough there, so I think that we can see something about that. level, but it's not totally necessary for cars, for rockets, well, there's no way to make an electric rocket, that's for sure, unfortunately, you can't escape Newton's third laws, I think maybe I mean, there certainly have to be some Nobels. prizes awarded uh if there's a way around it that would be really very convenient um but uh I think it's possible with a really efficient combustion rocket to achieve settlements on Mars I think you'd probably want to switch to uh methane um I think it's actually methane or hydrogen are kind of the two best options uh there and probably leaning slightly in the direction of methane because it's easier to handle than hydrogen methane is just ch4 versus h2 um and both can be produced on the surface of Mars, which which is important, so yes, in fact, I must say that I am pretty sure at this point that it is possible to create a self-sustaining civilization on Mars using only a methane or oxygen, a hydrogen and methanol based launch system and yes, alone and it needs to be a fully reusable methanol or hydrogen launch system, it can be done and the key thing I was trying to figure out was with In volume, is it possible to reduce the cost of moving to Mars to less than half a million dollars?

I think anyone can argue about the exact threshold, but I think that's the threshold at which enough people could save money and move to Mars. you know, I mean, that's how America was basically created and they come back if they want, they don't like it, of course you get a free return cricket. um, I mean, actually, I mean, sometimes there's a debate about going to Mars. way, um and if that makes things easier and I think for the initial flights maybe, but in the long term to reduce costs, you need to get the spacecraft back, if people come back it's relevant, but you need to get the ship back because those things are expensive.

So anyone who wants to come back can just jump on um so that's it but until a few years ago I wasn't sure that success was one of the possible outcomes and now I know I'm pretty sure that success is possible. Of course, there's a long way between what's possible and making it a reality, but I think it's possible and then robotics, right, I think you can achieve a lot with robotics. I'm a little worried if robotics gets too cool, what's the point for us? So, I think it's something. Either robotics becomes so good and it doesn't make much sense to us, I guess I don't know, or they're not as good as us, in which case we have to go and I would recommend the second one um and I hope the future does if not is there some kind of AI apocalypse um yeah, the gentleman here good evening thanks for answering questions uh I just had two quick questions, one about tesla and the second about spacex, I was wondering if I'm familiar with the Saber engine, the hybrid engine, um, which is, um, there's a team of hard-working Rolls-Royce engineers working on it in the Oxfordshire group at the moment, it's a hybrid engine that generates air on the way up and it's you.

You talked about it earlier in your talk, um, that you're looking specifically at reusable space delivery vehicles and rockets, so that was the Space Spacex one and the test storm was what happened to the original Tesla prototype, the Mule, oh um, yeah, well, we still have. the original mule, one of the tesla roadster, um and here I should give credit to a small company in southern california called ac propulsion um that had a vehicle called the t zero um, so our first mule was actually taking a release of sorts of lotus. lock the AC propulsion drivetrain and then make it drive um and then yeah, we originally thought it would be um this is another example of making some mistakes, silly mistakes, but the idea at the beginning with tesla was to use the propulsion powertrain of AC and the Lotus lease and get to market quickly with an electric car.

It turned out that the AC propulsion powertrain didn't really work very well and wasn't scalable for production. It had a lot of problems so we had to completely redesign the powertrain and then elise um because our car ended up being 50 heavier and had a different weight distribution and low points, we invalidated the entire crash structure and we had to completely redesign the chassis um and in the end I think about seven The percentage of the parts were in common with the launch, so almost nothing, but we actually inherited some of the limitations of the launch, so okay, okay, sir, and then, but tonight There is much more time, so I will try to be less long. than my answers, but regarding hybrid air-breathing stages, I haven't seen how the physics of that makes sense, there may be some assumptions I have that are incorrect, but Really, for an orbital rocket, you're trying to get out from the atmosphere as soon as possible because the atmosphere is thick like soup when you're trying to go fast and, um, and it doesn't help that the atmosphere is mostly. not oxygen, you know, it's kind of 80 nitrogen, so mostly what you are is chaff, not wheat, and having a big intake is like having a giant break, so the breakup effect tends to overwhelm the advantage to ingest. 20 oxidizer um regular, so you can say the boost stage is five to ten percent bigger and get rid of everything and that's it, thank you, you know, the gentleman down here, I should say this is being filmed, like this that if any of you don't want to be filmed, don't ask a question or tell the people filming here afterwards that you'd like them to extract your questions, but you're supposed to be happy.

For the record, good evening, with new technologies that have made the availability of shale gas really cheap and with the rise of the US energy sector, do you think there will be a limitation on the development of sustainable energy in the next decade because of the new energy boom that we are facing right now, yes that is a good point, new technology and innovation can have a disadvantage, one of the disadvantages is the ability to extract many more hydrocarbons than we thought were possible, even once you start getting them. In deep methane or deep natural gas, you're actually tapping into things that aren't related to dinosaur fossils.

Methane is a natural gas. There are places in the solar system where there are primarily methane atmospheres. It doesn't, it doesn't require an organic origin, so if we dig too deep for methane, we'll actually reach a level that's never been seen before, even in Earth's earliest history. very dangerous, I think, um and uh, but that's why I think it's important that electric cars can compete without economics being a factor and, but, I think this is very dangerous, uh, to be extracting large amounts of hydrocarbons. from deep within the earth and putting them into the atmosphere, sooner or later something very bad will happen and, yeah, it's just, and I mean, there's a lot ofpeople, particularly in the US, who are vehemently against electric cars. and kind of sustainable energy, it's quite difficult to reason with them, actually, you know, they'll say, well, you know, some scientists don't think it's a problem, and I say, well, you know, you can find a certain number of people who I won't agree with anything, um and uh, you know this, this actually reminds me of the tobacco industry, where for a long time they complained that you saw ads claiming that tobacco was healthy for you, I mean, it's hard to believe.days, but um and then there were these reports where there seemed to be some correlation between lung cancer and smoking and they were like our scientists had done experiments and shown that there is nothing, there is no relationship at all, it's completely a nuisance. and um and so get to the point where almost any reasonable scientist would say yes, of course smoking causes lung cancer and all sorts of other bad things um not definitely, but it's extremely likely and yet the tobacco industry would still say oh scientists I disagree because one or two percent of the scientific community didn't feel that way and that's kind of like and then the public just listens to the scientists disagreeing, no they're not here. 99 percent of them think it's stupid, um, yeah, so it's definitely kind of hard.

And hopefully, I mean, hopefully, that transition will happen before it's too late. I mean, there's already quite a bit of momentum in the direction of climate change and the removal of hydrocarbons from the crust and their placement into the atmosphere is accelerating. I think it's very reckless, anyway, which is why I think it's the biggest problem of the 21st century. You are an incredibly successful and very modest man, but my question is about failures. I think we would always think you were modest. My question is. about failure, so I was wondering what you're trying right now or what you think you'll try in the future that you don't expect to succeed at.

I think I'd stick with electric cars and rockets for a while, um, and yeah, it was never really my intention to run Tesla, in a way, because running two companies is a big burden, actually, um, um, ya you know, sometimes you're surrounded by people who think, oh, if you're the CEO of the company then they imagine that if they were the CEO of the company they would take a lot of vacations and do a lot of fun things it's like that doesn't work at all work work that way what you really get is a distillation of the The worst things that happen in the company are like and anyway, so the idea of ​​taking on something else is, it's very scary, but I mean, possibly at some point in the future, certainly not in the short term.

I think there is. an opportunity to create an electric jet essentially and I think you could create an electric jet that that's really exciting, something that would be a purely electric supersonic vertical takeoff and landing and just a vaguely forward, I think that's a different way. I'm pretty sure it's doable, as long as there's a rough doubling of energy density in batteries or capacitors, so basically around the 500 watts per kilogram level is where it starts to make sense, and then there's um, I think there is. the possibility of a kind of fifth mode of transportation, which I've talked about, as mentioned tangentially, which is what I call it a kind of hyperloop, um, and um, you know, I would like something like that. post something about that maybe in the next month or two um once Tesla is in steady state production um and I want to flesh it out a little so that um and pre-address some of the rebuttals that people will come up with um rather than just put it out there and then happy for the rebuttal to happen and to have a rebuttal unaddressed, um, but I guess the way to think about it is, um, it's like a cross between a concord and a railgun, the knight in blue . shirt at the door, then we'll step aside hello, thanks for a great chat, at the risk of asking for trade secrets.

I was just wondering having built the Falcon rockets, what was the final conclusion of your analysis and why your rockets. They were much less expensive than government projects, well not that, the full answer is quite complicated and requires at least some understanding of how rockets work, but if you divide a rocket between the cost of the engines, the airframe and the electronics and then the launch operation itself, those are the drivers of the marginal cost and then there is the fixed cost of the company, which is the one that, you know, we should divide by the number of launches that are made, but enough look at the margin. cost drivers, it means that significant progress must be made on the engines, important airframe electronics and the launch operation.

In fact, it would be easy to point to one of those areas, but success in one of those areas would only have a small effect, so let's say. you had three engines, well, that alone would reduce the cost of the rocket by probably thirty percent, the cost of the launch by thirty percent, and that's not much, that's not a huge advance, or free electronics or airframe. , you actually have to compress them all a little bit and then, like I said, you have to make them reusable. I can give kind of an example, an illustrative example on the fuselage that may be useful, the normal way you build a rocket fuselage is a machined isogrid and Ice, that's where you take a high strength aluminum alloy plate and stiffeners are machined to get integral machine rigidity into the plate and I apologize, it's going to be a little technical, but imagine you have a metal plate and you're just, um, cutting triangles, um, and that's how the ones are typically made.

Rockets and most of a rocket are propellant tanks, these things have to be sealed, to maintain pressure and everything, and they have to be pretty rigid, so that's what was done then. the approach we take is rather to build it um and start with skin sections and the friction still weld stiffness in the skins in the skin sections um and uh this is a big improvement because if you machine remove With the material that you have left, maybe time five percent of the original materials, you have about 20 to one material waste plus a lot of machining time and it is very expensive if you can roll the blade and mix the stiffness well, then the material waste. can be five percent, so since the other one is essentially inverse, um, where you know, instead of having a ratio of 20 to one, you have a ratio of 1.1, meaning you have a 95 waste, it's a five percent waste, which is a big improvement, and then you can also improve the mass fraction because if you still have the stiffness, you can increase the profile and the geometry and improve the stiffness geometry, so you can have something that Let's say five centimeters. high, whereas if you machined it from a plate, it would be limited to the plate that can be two or three centimeters high, so you actually end up with something that is more advanced and in the sense that it is a better mass fraction. but it was also a fraction of the cost, that's one example, but there are a lot of things like that.

I saw one of the most amazing 3D printers when I visited, oh yeah, take carbon out of the transport group at the Oxford Martian school, so Elon, the question I have for you is to tell you that we can see that our society is going to go through a major change due to the climateization of the carbon problem that we have and looking back at our history, South Africa went through a major change one of the key enablers for that was the scenario work with clemson where they had the high road scenario and the road low and that allowed people to imagine what would be a good outcome and what would be a bad outcome, which one is your?

Good result for the challenge of climate change, how would you imagine what that right would be? What a good world would be like with this challenge of climate change. Well, I think what we need to do is be the best we can do to achieve that. it would be the carbon tax um and uh so I think if we were to just the market system will work extremely well if it has the right information um to work uh so if we just apply a carbon tax and then we increase it accordingly. Whether it achieves the goal of maximum carbon in the atmosphere, that's the right way to go, uh, and countries really need to act, you know, unilaterally, people can't have this, well, you know, if so or Which country is not. doing it, I'm not doing it right, okay, set a good example, you know, and I hope that over time other countries will fall in line or be excluded, so I think that's probably the smart decision and then we can avoid it all. that there's no need for subsidies and special incentives which are really a retrograde way of trying to deal with the lack of a carbon tax, so I think in a good scenario, the best possible scenario would be for something like that to be instituted.

Yeah, um, and we're still going to have a significant increase in carbon in the atmosphere, temperatures will continue to rise. Sea levels will rise, uh, there will be, um, uh, but it should be like that, I mean, the Dutch can handle it, you know. There are probably a lot of diet companies, there are a lot of options in the lesbian business, I think, but I think if we take action reasonably early, we can avoid a calamitous outcome, if we only take action, say, towards the end of the century then it's going to be extremely bad um um and um I don't think people appreciate the fact that there is climate momentum, you know, climate change, it's like you stop now even if we immediately stop all carbon production, the momentum will continue and it's going to raise temperatures, it's going to raise water levels, it's going to make storms more powerful, all of those things, so yeah, so no, I'm trying to like what's the good that I can get out because we do, we do a tax. to carbon, we minimize carbon production, we move to sustainable transportation energy production, what you like, there will be some kind of solar wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and some nuclear energy, I think we have to accept that that nuclear energy . it's a good option in certain places um and um and then I think the most likely outcome is that it will be good and reasonably good when there is damage, but we could recover.

I actually think that will happen so no, I'm quite optimistic about the future, I'm not suggesting complacency in the least, but I am, I'm optimistic about the future, I'm trying to find a woman, the lady in the back, hello, please. favor. Forgive the pessimism of this question, but could we spend so much energy running across the planet's surface that we don't have enough to eventually get off it to another planet if we wanted to, and if so, how much time might we have? To that point, yeah, I actually think as long as the sun shines we'll be fine, that and that, if we had to, if humanity had to get all of its energy from the sun, could it, could it.

It's actually a really amazing amount of energy coming to us from the sun. And I mean, it's interesting that, if you take the area of ​​land used by nuclear plants, including the exclusion zones and everything, and you say, "Okay." what generates more power is the nuclear power plant or just cover it with solar panels in most cases it is solar panels just the area used by the nuclear power plant in solar panels to generate more power because you actually have to have a large exclusion zone. Can't you just put a nuclear power plant in the suburbs and with a bunch of people around it, so you have to have this big, clear area?

So they use a lot of area and um, but just to give you an idea of ​​how much energy can come from the sun, this is literally true. What I just said, um, the gentleman reading, jump for that. Hi, thank you very much for your talk, I think you're a visionary um, so you talked before about establishing some sort of colony on Mars and you've talked before about hopefully retiring to Mars um, so my question is why Mars, like that that people have talked about the upper atmosphere of Venus or various moons. so why definitely not venus why why okay but why martial oh okay so just by process of elimination um mercury is obviously too close to the sun um um you definitely understand I mean maybe there's a narrow habitable zone on the back of mercury, but i think that's kind of asking for trouble with that um and then venus um i mean, venus would be a lesson in what the earth could become, you know, in the worst case scenario, um, which is kind of superheated at high pressure um well in the case of the Venus acid bath so it's literally a high pressure, high temperature acid bath um so it's definitely not a good place to do another one I want I mean, I think the longest any probe lasts even on Venus is measured in hours um and then the moon is close but it's actually a small rock, you know, that's just circling the earth with no atmosphere um some very limited amounts. of iceof water uh that are like in permanently shattered craters um and um and then it has a 28 day rotation cycle, which is not good for plants, so it would be quite difficult to create a self-sufficient civilization on the moon, something that is coming to Mars, hey, Mars is definitely a fixer-upper.

The planet is not perfect, but it is doable, I mean, it has a rotation period of 24 and a half hours, so it is remarkably similar to Earth. It has a little less than half the gravity of Earth, so it is much closer gravitationally. It has a lot of water ice. uh this is almost all Mars has water trapped as ice in the ground, the salt turned out to be non-toxic according to the probes we sent there, so you could clearly add if you had a greenhouse and some fertilizer and you just warm things up and You pressurize them a little bit, then you could grow plants on Mars and Mars has a CO2 atmosphere that plants like to consume, so plants consume CO2 and generally exude oxygen, so I think it's very, very feasible to create a massive self-sustaining base on Mars and then ultimately terraform the planet to make it like Earth, so we can just walk around outdoors.

It would also be a longer-term project, but, but that's how it is. within the realm of possibilities, um and then of course going beyond that, you'll like Jupiter and the gas giants and you could potentially do something on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but that's a lot harder than it was um, Alex Heller, who is he. the head of mathematics, physics and life sciences and October also my girlfriend in physics, so I loved your talk and I hope to talk more. NASA and Issa at NASA in particular have done a lot to transform our understanding of the solar system through wonderful planetary missions.

The Apollo program, although it had a political and military dimension, was persuaded in the later stages to bring back some rocks, which totally transformed our understanding of the inner solar system through examples, so how are things going? you can say it? Tell us how you envision private space exploration taking over from the major space agencies and JPL and organizations like it in the future and with this move toward privatization. How are we going to be able to address scientific priorities instead of commercial priorities and solar system exploration? Of course, yes, I think space exploration will be a combination of private and government activities and, in fact, for Spacex there are a lot of things that we want to do to enable scientific missions, um, and, and enable NASA and JPL. to be able to um and facilitate others to uh to do a lot more with a given budget um and um in fact we have had several conversations with jvl who is located quite close to spacex um about the use of um our falcon rocket and the dragon spacecraft uh , was version two of the dragon spacecraft will have propulsive landing capabilities, so version two of the dragon spacecraft will be able to land on any liquid or solid surface in the solar system, so there is the potential to turn that into a widespread scientific instrument delivery platform for any part of the solar system and then if you can see where you could, you could figure out how to do a sample return, you know, if you're the earth dragon and then and and you have a smaller type of rocket of sample return housed inside the dragon spacecraft that could return some Martian regolith which would be cool so we're exploring some ideas there and I think we'll see in At least at least some scientific missions will be done in the future, maybe many of them, um, it's still the early stage, but we have one from Jason 3, which is a joint NASA mission that will launch on one of our rockets in about two years um and then, of course, we will supply the space station um so I think it's going to be a mix of government commercials, I'm all for any medium, we'll make it happen, so you don't know much about commercial government?

Let's just do what works for all practical purposes. Is it too early to think about establishing some not rules but some attitude towards comments? Make it common because you know that businessmen are going to do it. go and try to mine things there, there are a lot of minerals and valuable things on Mars and to prevent it from being exploited, what kind of thinking do we have to do now? Well, I don't think it's going to be economical to extract things. on Mars and then transport them back to Earth because the transportation costs would exceed the value of whatever you care about, but I mean there will probably be a lot of mining on Mars which is useful for a base on Mars, but it's unlikely that be transferred.

Back on Earth, I think the economic exchange between, say, Mars would be primarily in the form of intellectual property, anything that can be transmitted by a photon, that's what I think is the most likely exchange of things. um, that will happen um, yeah, uh, but yeah, I mean, I don't think we should worry too much about the kind of exploitation of Mars, essentially it's uh, um, yeah, I mean that would be a high class problem that we would deal with security, okay, um. a lot of hands on your back uh the gentleman uh yeah hello I just want to ask two quick questions real quick we've been having a lot of discussions about the food vest and also debates I just want to get your opinion on the It's very likely that the use of biofuels as a means of transportation and also the use of electric cars exert some type of tension on the electrical grid of our cities.

I just want to ask what kind of adaptations you would like to see made on the broadcast network. Sure, so, no, I'm not the biggest fan of biofuels, because I think it's difficult, you know, I try to try to look at things like just calculating basic, I mean, really elementary physics. things and uh and say well, what percentage of the incident sunlight is tied to usable chemical energy and then once you have that chemical energy, how much of that translates into electricity and you have to compare, of course, that total. efficiency just by having solar panels, um and I mean, unless I've made some really dumb mistakes, but uh, you're about 100 times off with biofuels, I mean at least two orders of magnitude, um, so if you do you do, essentially what you boil. up to is how many um what is your what is per square meter of electrical energy generated with the best case biofuel I'm not talking about taking every assumption and maximizing it, so don't worry, don't say, well, maybe there's something that someone I could invent something better, say what's best.

I just wrapped the whole thing up and then I had incredibly efficient, maximally efficient plants. It can't violate any laws of thermodynamics, but it's like assuming you're on the edge of the laws of thermodynamics in all those cases and biofuels, at least for terrestrial biofuels, there's no way this makes sense. You end up being about 0.2 percent. You know, it is efficient in converting sunlight into electrical energy, while solar panels. Commercial solar panels are 20 percent efficient, so why would you use biofuels? And from time to time, it's not like there are large tracts of unused arable land, so you have to say well, this if you go for biofuels will result in wild areas. are being grown or an increase in food prices and then you can also say if it is possible if all food production in the world is stopped to generate enough energy to meet the world's needs and, yes, that could probably be correct, actually, if I stopped all food production, um, you could meet the world's energy needs, so now there's a chance that, um, it's ocean-based, um, because the Earth's surface is mostly ocean, so if you could find a way to, um, maybe, maybe, some kind of ocean algae based. solution where you're not limited by surface area, although I still think you'd have to compare that to a bunch of floating solar panels, and I think you still lose with floating solar panels, so I can't see how that would work. sense, so what was the second question, the second question, the power grid exactly, so yes, at some point there will need to be improvements made to the power grid, but because of that, there is a huge disparity in peak power used during the day and the Energy use at night and most electric car charging happens at night and we have a pretty solid empirical basis for including this because we can look at all of our customers and plot their energy usage. power and it's predominantly at night, it's just Basically, like your cell phone, you go home, you plug it in and it charges overnight and this is what you know, the power grid has to be sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year with some power plants. it doesn't work, that's how early you have to size the grid sometimes so it doesn't work that way, but and and, most of the time, you have enormous amounts of excess capacity, and then in the United States there was a study.

I've done years of this kind of study on all kinds of things, complete nonsense. I love the word studies, um, but I think the study is actually probably accurate. um, that could replace about 70 percent of the passenger miles in the United States. At least I'm not sure how to apply in Britain, but at 70 passenger miles with no changes to the network, assuming charging occurred predominantly at night and then if you combine that with increased use of solar panels in homes and businesses, has localized energy. generation and the good thing about solar energy is that it tends to even out energy use because you're only generating energy during the day when and that's when you tend to use the most energy and uh and particularly on summer days where you have air conditioning running and Air conditioning is a big consumer of electricity and you generally only need it when it's hot and sunny so that's when you need it the most, so I think we're doing okay on the grid front, at least for the near future.

It will only become an issue once, say, EVs get closer to at least 10 or 20 of the vehicles on the road and then I think the problem can be addressed in a fairly localized way. I'm afraid that's so. all we have time for that, I know many of you have your hands up, we will blog and try to encourage Elon to participate when he has a second of his time and clearly there will be a lot of different things happening at oxford martin school around this in which we would like to involve all of you I am also going to ask the vice-chancellor to make some final comments ladies and gentlemen it is worth remembering that the great advances in the exploration of the world in the past centuries came from this combination that was mentioned in the time for questions about government sponsorship, but private genius and drive and it was the pioneers who discovered the squaws who crossed the Atlantic who explored the western reaches of Canada and the United States and I think you will agree. with me today as we listened tonight to a true pioneer and as we imagine the possibilities of space exploration, we listened tonight to some of the possible solutions that could get us there as ian golden, i had the great pleasure of visiting elon at spacex in the angels it is difficult to describe the scale of the ambition the scale of the company as the rockets are built you see not only a real focus and dedication in solving practical problems in this huge factory the size of many football fields, Not only are rockets built but there is also great ambition in the new designs for transporting astronauts, as we have heard that attempts are being made to convert rockets into reusable vehicles and I think today we have really had an idea of ​​the way in which the Elon's mind and I think it has happened. for all of us an object lesson in innovation and no, don't limit your ambitions, go back to first principles, be prepared to make a lot of mistakes, but not so many that you exactly run out of money and perhaps the last and most important of all, no you do it. buy intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Russians, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a fascinating conference, a fascinating question and answer session, let me thank you all for participating so wonderfully, but most importantly would you join me in thanking Elon Musk for coming to Oxford to visit us. us and for giving us such a wonderful exhibition tonight.