Elon was the keynote today at the Dell World conference in Austin. This is a link to the keynote and he is introduced at 48:25 and primarily discusses Tesla. At 56:10 he switches topics to SpaceX and starts with a video I hadn't seen before including footage from the CASSIOPE launch, GH, and the SES-8 launch.
Transcript:http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/opening-keynote-with-michael-dell-and-elon-musk-austin-tx-2013-12-12Yawn.
[Do you ask why other people don't just try harder?] A little bit, yeah. Actually, it's more like, I think people self-limit more than they realize. I keep getting asked this question: how do you do more innovation? I think the number one thing is people should just try. Literally, just try. Like, did you try yesterday? Did you try today? It is quite - it takes a lot of mental exertion to innovate and I think it is helpful to learn about different industries and try to cross-pollinate because very often people get silo-ed in a particular industry. So, me running both Tesla and SpaceX has been helpful because I see how both industries work and I can take things from one to another. Yeah, so, I'll give you a couple of examples. One is, say, the Model-S is an all aluminum body and chassis and we employ some advanced drawing techniques and advanced casting techniques and so forth, so that's like a fairly obvious thing if you're coming from the aerospace industry. You don't see a lot of aircraft made out of steel, but cars are all almost made out of steel. In order to make the Model-S light enough to make the non-battery-pack portion of the mass light - you can get more range. The two big factors for range are - what is your aerodynamic drag and how much does the car weigh. Those are overwhelmingly the big factors for range, and so, making the car weigh less was really important, and not just for range - for handling and acceleration. So that was like an obvious thing, to make a car out of aluminum but the Model-S is, actually, the only car made out of aluminum in North America. In fact, there are very few cars made out of aluminum worldwide. The only other passenger vehicles are made in Europe, that are made out of aluminum. So that was an obvious thing to do, and on the other side, the car business is very good at manufacturing. It's actually incredible that a car, which is a super complicated object with dozens of subsystems, can actually be bought for the amount of money that it's - you know, you can get a pretty good car for $20,000. So, in taking the manufacturing techniques that were developed in the automotive industry and applying them to rocketry has been really helpful. In fact, our head of production at SpaceX came from the car industry. He used to run production of the Mini for BMW.
Here's a clip of just the SpaceX highlights reel.
