Elon Musk

So is that why it's harder than Falcon?

It's because it's just more energy?

It's a lot of new technology.

It's pushing the performance envelope.

The Raptor 3 engine is a very, very advanced engine, by far the best rocket engine ever made.

But it desperately wants to blow up.

I mean, just to put things in perspective here, on liftoff, the rocket is generating over 100 gigawatts of power.

It's 20% of US electricity.

It's actually insane.

But sometimes, yeah.

So I was like, how does it not explode?

There's thousands of ways that it could explode and only one way that it doesn't.

So we wanted to not merely not explode, but fly reliably.

on a daily basis, like once per hour.

And obviously, it blows up a lot.

It's very difficult to maintain that launch cadence.

And then, I'm going to say, what's the single biggest remaining problem for Starship?

having the heat shield be reusable, such that no one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield.

So the heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase without shocking a bunch of tiles.

And then it's going to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe.