SpaceX Technical Talk: AI Satellites at Scale June 8, 2026 Elon Musk and the SpaceX team give a technical talk on manufacturing, launching and operating AI satellites at scale — the orbital compute backbone of the merged SpaceX AI, from Starship cadence to the AI-1 satellite and gigawatt-class power in space.
Elon Musk and the SpaceX team give a technical talk on manufacturing, launching and operating AI satellites at scale — the orbital compute backbone of the merged SpaceX AI, from Starship cadence to the AI-1 satellite and gigawatt-class power in space.
Transcript Moderator
All right, well hello everybody and welcome. Hanging out. I got Elon and Ian Dahl with our Starlink team, figured we'd check in. It's been a typical Space X year. Launched a brand new vehicle, acquired xai, now Space X. I announced a terror sized chip building project.
And so yeah, never a dull moment.
Moderator
Yeah, never a dull moment, typical year. And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multi planetary. Starting to climb up the Kardashev scale, maybe show off some cool new AI SAT stuff. It's kind of start galaxy sized and bring people in with the Kardashev scale.
Moderator
What's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale?
Like how do you decide what progress the civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species say visiting us would calibrate how, how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that is any given civilization has been able to harness. And there was a Russian physicist actually by the name of Kardashev who thought about this and it's good, I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is you can have, you can, you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's type one. And then type two would be how much of the stars power are you harnessing? And then type 3 would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing? These are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now we're very low on the Kardashev 1 scale. Like if you say like what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing? It's a very, very tiny number. And basically we're harnessing almost nothing of our, our star's power. So the sun is truly an immense thing. It is. It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is. But this gives you sort of a sense of scale.
Moderator
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.
Very big difficulty jump. Yes. And level three, and we don't even know how to do level three. Really, we'll get. Yeah, yeah, exactly. AI will figure it out. Yes. One way to appreciate the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system. So the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system, it's everything. And then of the remaining 1, you know, 0.14% most of that is Jupiter 1 planet.
Moderator
So we're still lightweight.
Yes. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category where we're like, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun.
Moderator
But how much energy are we talking like coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth?
It feels like, yeah, the incident solar energy on the cross section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's power output. And the vast majority of that we cannot use because 70% of Earth is water. Technically our planet should be called water because there is 70% water. And I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they calling it Earth when it is mostly water?
Moderator
We're the Greenlands, not green of the gala of the solar system.
Yeah, a bunch of the even we're 70% water and 30% less land. A bunch of it is, you know, Antarctica or you know, Siberia type of thing. Very northern Canada type of thing. Very difficult to not, not places people typically want to live. And you're not going to get a lot of solar power in the, at the poles. So the actual usable area of land that where you can get solar power is quite small anyway. In order to ascend the Kardashev scale, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to say a millionth of the power output of the sun, you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million. So we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. And a trillion is a million times a million. So, so basically there's, we're basically practically nowhere on, on the sort of the Kardashev 2 scale. Practically nowhere.
Moderator
So on Kardashev scale we're all still non existent.
We're like not a, you know, we're not even. Yeah, we're not registering not even a Microsoft. Yeah, we're no. And so to actually one Microsoft would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.
Moderator
Something to aspire to.
Yeah, yeah, that's our goal. And like this is I think both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve power harness being one millionth of what the sun outputs. And so to actually start a. Microsoft
Moderator
actually start getting there though. We're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need, like you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that, like, maybe now's the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two?
I mean, getting to a percent of
Moderator
the sun's energy, maybe not a percent. Let's go like we'll move the decimal point back.
You're an extremely thick ass civilization. If you get to 1% of the sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilization is going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least. So in order to start to make some progress on the Kardashian scale, we need to launch satellites to, to, to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling, because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum. And so what we're proposing here and what we intend to do is to try to climb the Kardashev scale to be kind of like a respectable civilization. So when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know, where we have some respectable amount of the sun's energy being used, that's not like totally pathetic, which is the current situation.
Moderator
And so before we start sending data centers, sending all this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost impossible.
Yeah. What does it take to scale? Yeah, so things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mass to orbit capability, which is what starship will give us, that large mass. So you know, you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put 100 gigawatts or ultimately a terawatt into space from Earth, you need, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar, and then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips. So the three things you need are master orbit, a lot of solar power, and, and radiators, of course, and a lot of ships.
Moderator
All right, well, let's start ticking down the list. So master orbit, that's where starship comes in. Yeah, we just had first flight v3 was awesome. I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch.
Moderator
And like long time coming. What's kind of what Starship's kind of purpose of being, what is it going to be doing?
Yeah, so Starship is going to, it's going to revolutionize space really. It's, it's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multi planetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft. And you cannot extend life to the moon, to Mars and rest the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can't, you can't make enough rockets unless you fly, unless you can refly them just like any other mode of transport. You can imagine that if, if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
Moderator
You're doing a whole lot more driving.
Every mode of transport is reusable without which is simply not viable as a transport system. So cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable with rockets. It's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. And these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there have been, you know, many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket. And they, most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they, they didn't think they could succeed. In order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got it. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket. Instead of putting on landing legs which are heavy, the rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. And then you've got to achieve full reusability naval if you want to go step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection. Like an aircraft.
This is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been A rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. It also happens to be the, the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made. The most powerful moving object of any kind of B3 is more than double the thrust of it. The Saturn 5 moon rocket by version four will be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn 5 moon rocket. And we expect this, we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.
Moderator
One of the fun facts from Flight 12, that was actually the heaviest payload Space X has ever flown, and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do. So yes, I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly, I mean we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what mass orbit becomes? 1 Starship is flying, it's, it's many
orders magnitude greater than what is the case today. So Even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. I think somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. And then most of the remaining mass I think is, is launched by China. And then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US is, is the remaining, I don't know, 5 to 7%. Now with, with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit and to do so in a pretty short period of time. So we think probably we can get to a million tons to orbit per year in about three years thereabouts.
Moderator
Starship. Starship is going to take care of the master orbit limiting factor.
Moderator
And then power generation. So first and Ian, maybe you can help people probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say like data center in space. Like we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there. Like these actually look like pretty different. And so kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.
Yeah, I think it's, it's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't actually know what, what the inside of a data center even looks like, right?
Yeah. And it's like mythical place where the Internet's in the cloud.
Yeah. Some people envision wire, some people envision boxes. But like effectively it comes down to a set number of chips. And the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how to get, how do you get the power for it. And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starlink technology, the solar arrays are what we want to utilize that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center in space.
We like to look at this and say like what is, what is the actual engineering problem here? And, and it's, it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space, as you mentioned.
Yeah. Now the, the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has, has gigantic phased array antennas. It's got, you know, parabolic antennas, it's got a lot of laser links. It's a, it's, it's much more complicated than an AI satellite. And a satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. So I mean given the two, the easier one to design for is the, the AI satellite.
Moderator
Yeah, it's just a little bit bigger.
Moderator
Just makes stuff bigger. Yeah, I was like, so we've got, this is our AI one. You guys want to walk us through?
Yeah, so, so the first thing that we're, we're really looking at here is like first you've got to make something compelling, right. And we thought that the right place to start is around 150 kilowatt, like peak power level. But as we look at the workloads with, with our experience with xai, we get to actually see that, that we can also support about 120 kilowatts of average compute.
There's a difference. What we're showing here is kind of a draft version of the first one of the SpaceX AI satellite, an AI one I guess you could call it, and seems like a reasonable place to start is 150kW peak power, 120kW sustained power. And to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the radiator, size of the solar panels. The assumptions here are 250 watts per square meter for the solar array and about 1400 watts per square meter for the radiator. So the radiators, these are double sided radiators are radiating both sides. They're oriented knife edge to the sun and, and and it's 1400 watts per square meter is a very achievable goal over time. We think we can probably do above 250 watts per square meter and above 1400 watts per square meter for the solar panels, radiators, respectively. But this gives you like pretty much what the satellite's going to look like. It's a lot of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small, like the virus.
And these are like evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date. Yeah, that's really, I think the cool part to me is that we're looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V3 Starlink vehicle. So, so I'm really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.
Yeah. Part of what we want, what we want to convey here is that there's not some magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the satellites. As Ian said, this is a lot of, this is technology we've already made for the Starlink V3 satellites. So it's, we basically, we don't think this is a, a super hard problem compared to things we already do. There would also be something on the order of a terabyte of connectivity of laser link connectivity from the, from the satellite. The 150 kilowatt peak power level is roughly matches what say an Nvidia GV300 rack would do so. But a GV300 with 72 GPUs, its peak power I think is around 140 kilowatts. But it's rarely, it's almost impossible to get it to be at that peak power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around 120kW average power, but it can peak up to 150. So that's, it's basically think of it as a rack of compute in space. And then you can connect these racks of compute to either each other or the laser links or directly to the Starlink constellations. So you can close the link with the Starlink constellation and then Starlink can then send that data to the ground using the existing KA and KU antennas on the, on the vehicle. It also has laser to laser links to the ground as well. So and this, this would not be at a particularly high latency. You know, we're talking about, you know, maybe being around 6 to 800 kilometers above the earth and light travels 300 kilometers per millisecond. So that's, it's about, you know, three milliseconds away, basically. It's not, not very far.
Moderator
We'll worry about that too much then.
It's not. Sometimes people want to think there's going to be some like, high latency. I'm like, yeah, it's no. Speed of lightning was pretty fast.
Moderator
Light moves pretty fast.
I think the cool thing also is the, the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar arrays for the V3 vehicle.
Kind of, kind of in that realm
where we're flying today.
Moderator
So, I mean, they got, they got about a 70 meter wingspan. So these are fairly large. We're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there. But you like to say like spaces in the name. Like there's, there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even, you know, up to a million satellites. Yeah, you got plenty of room to move around up there.
Yeah, space is really big. So it's not like, it's not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous. Like, if you zoom in close to the satellite, it looks big, but if you actually look at it relative, relative to the Earth, the satellites are so tiny you can, you can't even see them. So they're very, very tiny compared to us.
Moderator
And I mean, we have 10, about 10,000 starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely now. Right.
We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. It's, it's a great thing that, you know, we have this background so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and, and, and, and fly them safely. That's, that's a number one goal. When, when we look at the constellation,
Moderator
we're going to be building a lot of satellites and we're going to be building them here in Bastrop. Right. So we've, we've got this, which. Yeah, so we're in that building kind of in the middle, which.
Yeah, we're sitting in that building right now.
Moderator
This is my first time here. The building is massive. Like, you come around the corner, you see it through the trees and you're like, oh, wow. But we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we?
Yes, we're going to. In fact, we already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already. And, and then we will be building out the air production building soon. And yeah, so we expect to have the air production, the solar Production and all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.
Moderator
So if anybody wants to work on AI satellites, this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also so I mean like right behind us the machines are humming. We're still making all of our user terminals for Starlink here. That's not going anywhere. In fact we're turning on new production lines for new units, right?
Yes. In fact these are the new Starlink terminals which we made in much higher volume than the current terminals. You know, ultimately we think there's probably going to be a few hundred million Starlink terminals out there. And then our Starlink direct to cell Constellation will connect directly to people's cell phones and enable high bandwidth communication directly from your phone of space.
Moderator
All right, we're, we're two limiting factors down. We've got master orbit got putting solar and Pew third one's chips.
Yes. So at least in the beginning we can obviously launch the, the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for Nvidia Ruben chips or could be either GV300 or, or even chips and we'll also have reference design for TPU's and essentially you can put up, put any, any existing chips into, into orbit. But the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI computer. But it, that doesn't answer the question of well, how do you get to a Terrawatt? That's why you need a tariff.
Always looking a step bigger.
Yeah, yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude you need a gigantic ship factory to give you a sense of scale here. We expect that the tariff AB is going to be around 100 million square feet which is 10 times the size of the Tesla Gigafactory Texas.
Moderator
And what aside from just, you know, I'm going to need Starship point to point to get from one end to the other. Aside from just the size, what's going to make this unique different from any other chip building operation on the planet?
Well I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the tariff app. But fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there were no fundamental technology breakthroughs and you simply, you could simply scale the existing chip making technology with a lot of difficulty to a terawatt of chip output per year. That's if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that's, that's a, that's like having a billion chips per year with a kilowatt per radical. So a billion full radical equivalent chips, each doing a kilowatt. And then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that.
Moderator
A lot of people today even think orbital data centers were like a decade away.
Yeah, I think we want to try to give people a sense of, of the time frame we, at least the time frame we're aiming for. I mean, you know, people should take this with a grain of salt to some degree, because this is, this is just our best guess. So this is not a, this is not a promise of what we'll do. This is what we, what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space. AI compute and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So in two and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year to space, and three and a half years, maybe 100 gigawatts. And then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world, and with the tariff going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is a thousand gigawatts, which is, that's twice the current electricity consumption of the United States. I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see. It's a lot of satellites. I don't know what you think about, but we do a lot of simulations or something. Yeah.
Moderator
So after we've, you know, worked through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to again try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev Level 2.
Why stop there? Why think small? Because the terawatt actually is very small.
That's nothing small. So there is, in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1000x from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the Moon with a mass driver, essentially where you do local production of photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the Moon, maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably make the chips on the Moon and you need most of the mass to be made on the Moon so you don't have to transport it to the Moon from Earth. And, and then because the Moon has no atmosphere and only 16 Earth's gravity. You can, you can get, you can accelerate the satellites into deep space without a rocket. So you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a, like a rail gun type. I mean just, it's basically a linear electric motor is the way to think about it.
Moderator
I was like, I think we can show people.
Moderator
I mean, if that doesn't get you excited for the future, I don't really know what will.
I'm fired up to sit to see a mass driver on the moon. That would be very cool. Yeah. Sci fi future. Yeah. Yeah. It would also mean that if we're, if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, it would mean that anyone who wants to go to the moon will be able to go to the moon and I think that'll be pretty cool. Yeah.
Moderator
And I'm going to be jumping first in line to get up there.
Yeah, I mean, you know, everyone should go to the moon at least once. I think. Just once.
You can move there if you want. Go live on the moon.
Moderator
We'll see. Thanks guys for chatting with me for a little bit.
Moderator
Excited to see a whole new, whole new kind of satellite. Whole bunch more starship launches, more chips, more solar, more everything. It's a big future, but I'm excited to see everybody at this company go out and build.