How the industry is being affected so far.

Inside Elon’s plan. He’s building a shipyard, probably more than one.

[Update a few minutes later]

SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build one to two Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each.

“That’s f**king insane,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s insane,” Musk replied.

“I mean, it really is.”

“Yeah, it’s nuts.”

“As I look across the aerospace landscape, nobody is doing anything remotely like this,” I said.

“No, it’s absolutely mad, I agree,” Musk said. “The conventional space paradigms do not apply to what we’re doing here. We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable, to make life multi-planetary. I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships, and each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable.”

I don’t know if I’ve related this or not, but at the Space Settlement Summit in Pasadena in November, there was a Canadian mining engineer who had managed the asteroid mine in Sudbury, who told us that we had no idea what the resources on the moon were, and wouldn’t know until we did some serious drilling. Not the little toys that NASA uses in rovers, but major drilling rigs to go deep into the body.

I told him (before the assembled) that I greatly appreciated his comments and that this was the kind of thing that space advocates needed to hear. I said that for people who wanted to develop the solar system, we tended to think pretty small, and that it was probably a consequence of hanging out too much with NASA.

[Early afternoon update]

Elon will be doing a fireside interview at the Satellite show in a few minutes.

[Update a while later]

He was supposed to start at 1600 EDT, but he’s been delayed to 1630, so you still have time to log on.

[Update at 1338 PDT]

It’s almost forty minutes late, but about to start.