SpaceX Founder and Chief Engineer Elon Musk delivered a wide-ranging fireside chat at SATELLITE 2020, sharing updates on Starlink and Starship while coining rhyming management maxims.
On Starlink, Musk shut down IPO speculation and referenced failed LEO predecessors: “Guess how many LEO constellations didn’t go bankrupt — zero. Iridium is doing OK now, Teledesic and others went bankrupt. We are focusing on making it not go bankrupt.”
Explore the Show Daily 2020 Day 2 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Musk said Starlink would serve hard-to-reach customers: “It will serve the 3% to 4% hardest to reach customers for telcos. … I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos. We won’t have a lot of customers in Los Angeles.” He said Starlink is targeting latency below 20 milliseconds and the ground terminal “looks like a UFO on a stick.”
On management philosophy: “If the schedule is long, the design is wrong. The acid test is how long will it take for this to fly. You need to simplify your product as much as possible. A lot of times you should say this is the wrong question. Your goal is to make your design less wrong over time.”
On college education: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. You can learn anything you want for free. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, they all dropped out.”
On Starship: “We need a whole new architecture. It needs to be completely re-usable. It needs to be re-launched an hour after landing. Production and manufacturing is something I see as very under-appreciated in the U.S.” VS
