Limitless Podcast - SpaceX's 11th Starship Launch and Elon's Vision for Space

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

In this episode, we discuss SpaceX's groundbreaking (and explosive) launch of the fully stacked Starship, marking a key step for Mars colonization. We discuss the advanced heat shield, potential cost reductions for launches, and the new Starlink V3 satellites enhancing global internet access. We also dive into the engineering marvel of the Raptor 3 engines, and SpaceX's vision for the future of space travel.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️https://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 SpaceX Launch and Explosions1:49 Importance of the Starship Launch3:03 The Heat Shield Breakthrough5:14 Building a Sustainable Future on Mars7:35 Satellites and Starlink V39:51 The Size and Structure of Starship14:14 Innovations in Raptor Engines16:17 SpaceX's Unique Position in the Industry17:21 The Vision for Life on Mars19:21 The Future of Space Travel22:04 The Next Generation of Rocket Technology24:01 Conclusion and Future Launches------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/Josh_KaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

So just yesterday, SpaceX launched their fully stacked starship, which measures almost 500 feet tall. It's the largest object that's ever gone to space. And two parts went up. Both parts came down. And they both exploded. Catastrophic explosion. And the explosion was gigantic. Everything that went up came down.

Everything blew up. But the point of this mission is that that's actually exactly how we're supposed to go. It was a wild success. These test flights, when SpaceX sends these up, they're not expected to land. In fact, most times they don't. And this is the first time where it actually landed in the right place. So, Ejazz, what you're seeing in this video here is the booster that is kind of hovering above ground before falling into the ocean and exploding. So this was amazing.

I know you were also watching the launch last night. What were your first impressions? What did you think watching this? My first impressions was, why is this thing exploding, Josh? And I have to be honest for our listeners here. Josh, I see you're rocking the SpaceX hoodie. SpaceX hoodie. Let's go, baby.

You can see that I'm rocking a horse, which is pretty much the opposite of a rocket. I'm old school. I'm old-fashioned. And I'm like, okay, this rocket is cool. Elon's launched a bunch of spaceships already. What's so special about this? And after digging under the hood, Josh, this is actually super impressive. I think the one line, which kind of like bamboozles me about SpaceX's vision, is they're building the infrastructure for space.

I think up until, you know, very recently, many. people thought of space as like this kind of like cool thing. It's like, yeah, it's a once in a lifetime mission. It's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But what SpaceX is trying to do is reduce the cost of that to the equivalent of like a bus ride so that it becomes pretty normal to colonize humans outside of Earth. But can you explain why this launch is so important, Josh? Yeah. So Starship Mission, I mean, like you were saying, to back it up, is the intention is to get to Mars. And they're very dead set on getting to Mars. And the problem with getting to Mars is that you need to have a low cost per kilogram to orbit. That's kind of how this thing works, is if you can't

get mass to orbit, then you can't create a copy of Earth to live on Mars. And the thing with colonizing Mars is that you actually need every single thing that Earth needs in order to be self-sustainable in the case that the planes or the rockets stop coming. So, Ejas, if you send, let's say, 100 million tons to Mars, but you forget vitamin C. Everything dies over a certain period of time. So you really need to be able to deliver every single critical element for life. And that requires a ton, literally metric tons of mass to orbit. And the problem is getting that cost down to as low as humanly possible. So back in the day with the space shuttle program, it costs $60,000 per kilogram to orbit. With the new starship, the projection is hopefully going to be as low as $50.

per kilogram to orbit. So this is like a huge decrease in how they're able to do this, and the reason they're able to do this is because of rapid reusability. And that's what we saw yesterday. That was the idea of the test yesterday, is to test how reusable these rockets are. So we probably should talk about the reason why this test in particular was different than all the others. And it's because of the heat shield. Now, the heat shield is a very critical part of this rocket, because the heat shield is the single most challenging part to get right. in order for the rocket to relaunch itself. So what we're seeing here is the crux of the heat shield, the way that they've been able to make it work. Because a lot of times, the reason why a rocket

can't survive is when it comes back to orbit at 25,000 kilometers per hour, it's really freaking hot. And that's a lot of plasma, it's a lot of heat, and it just melts everything. But what we're seeing here on screen is this thing called the bakery, where Starship literally bakes 18,000 of these tiles, the same way your grandma would. They take some ceramic, they throw it in an oven, they cook it, And on the way out, comes out these little hexagons. They stack 18,000 of them together, and it blocks the shields from overheating. The problem is, again, just the reusability, where you need to be able to get this rocket back to Earth and then take off rapidly right afterwards.

And the problem is that they've been falling apart. They've kind of fallen off. Some of them don't hold. Some of them cameras are the heat properly. So what they did is they invented this thing called the Crunch Wrap, which is such an outrageous name. Oh, from Taco Bell. Yeah, we're seeing it's a dim,

CrunchRap Supreme. Literally, like the CrunchRap Supreme, that's where they get the inspiration from. And I love this. And what we're seeing on screen is, they were actually able to take these tiles, these little ceramic plates, and then they wrapped them in this felt material.

And the problem when you're going through space really hot is the metal expands and contracts quite a bit. So you need to have space in between the tiles, but that space let a lot of heat in. So what they did is they created this kind of malleable material, which is the felt. And it allows the metal to heat up and expand and condense and shrink.

while keeping these heat shields all intact. And it was amazing. And what happened on this launch was they lost less than 1% of the heat shield tiles, where in the past, they lost 5 to 10%. So the fact that they got this number down so low is the single, probably biggest win of this entire test flight yesterday that we saw was the fact that they have a reusable heat shield. It's never been done before at this scale. Wow. Okay. So if I were to summarize what you just said, Josh, you're saying that the reason why Elon is testing out so many of these rockets and blowing all of these up is to come to the ideal rocket architecture that can colonize humanity outside of Earth. Have I got that first part? Absolutely. Yeah. You got to build something that scales and that can

be mass manufactured. Okay, cool. And so to get there, he needs to reduce the cost of taking heavy stuff up, right? Like right now, when it started off with the first rocket from NASA, it was super expensive, hundreds of millions of dollars, reducing that cost to something much, much, much cheaper than that is important, but also reusability is important, right? Josh, that's one way to kind of like drive it down. It's like if I can use the same rocket ship over and over again and not have to reconstruct a new rocket ship every time one comes down and crashes, we should be fine, right? So both of those things kind of are running in parallel.

And you're saying one major factor to help us get there are these heatproof shields or these heatproof tiles, which are getting built in this like this SpaceX bakery is what we're calling, right? Are these things literally made of ceramic? They're literally made of ceramic. It's so funny. It's just like what you did in like elementary school, middle school art class. It's no different than that. They put a little coat on the top.

It's like a little more sophisticated than that. But basically they're just baking ceramic taco. Okay. So where my mind goes to immediately next, Josh, is with the things that they're taking to space, what kinds of things are they going to be taking to space? I get the Mars thing, right? And that I still can't quite wrap my head around because I'm like, okay, what materials are you taking that?

Are you taking bricks to build a house? Like, how do we know if we can even live there? But the most immediate thing that I remember us speaking about a few episodes ago was satellites, right? And these satellites are part of Starlink V3, which is getting their new satellite structure, which is basically going to beam down.

I think it was like 60 terabits worth of data to Earth, which is the equivalent of me having like super fast internet, internet, cabled internet at home, but anywhere I am, like wherever I am if I'm a quaint little mountain side where I usually won't have reception. Am I getting that right? Is there any other thing that I'm missing in between satellites and building homes on Mars? Well, that's pretty much it. It's satellites. And then the satellites fund the mission to get to Mars. So Starlink is one of the largest cash cows of SpaceX, along with the private missions that they send up on behalf of governments or private industry, where they will take large satellites and they will send them

into space. What Starship enables, like you said, EJAS is just much bigger objects into orbit. So like you mentioned, the Starlink V3 has 60 terabits of downlink speed per launch, whereas the Falcon 9 launches with the Starlink V2 or 2.5 that they're at now, they only had 3 terabytes per second of downlink. So every single one of these Starship launches is equivalent to 20 old launches, which is just an outrageously large scale at how quickly they're going to improve this network. And not only that, but the latency comes down, the tall bandwidth goes way up. It has a much further range. And yeah, we're seeing on screen kind of the difference between them. So the version 1.5, fairly small. Version 2, pretty big. Version 3 is like gigantic. It is so much

bigger. 10 times larger than V1.5. So much larger. And it's really exciting because version 3 satellites will enable people like me and you to actually be inclined to use the network. A lot of people now, for Starlink, the users, they're in the middle of nowhere. They're not in very highly populated areas because that's where it kind of works the best. There's not a ton of bandwidth on the network. If you live in the middle of the woods somewhere remote or if you live in like some super far in place in a jungle, you use Starlink. It works amazing. But when you apply these high bandwidth satellites, not only can you use them in more densely populated areas, but like we had in our episode a few weeks ago, you could actually go direct to sell. So, I just if we're going on a

hike somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Well, now your cell phone could actually get service, too, thanks to these new satellites. So it enables this huge unlock in terms of satellites, but then also in terms of SpaceX Starlink satellites, but then also in terms of private industry. There's a lot of telescopes. There's a lot of rovers, like a lot of these larger objects that want to go to space but have no vehicle to take them there. Starship enables that. And all of these tests like you were mentioning, the Test Flight 11 last night, it's all in an effort to find a flight proven architecture, basically create the blueprint that you could then copy and paste and start doing this at scale, like we saw with the last rocket at the Falcon 9.

Okay, Josh, I want to talk about the spacecraft itself. This thing is huge. What we're seeing is an image of this spacecraft next to some old models. We've got the old school NASA models. And just height-wise, this thing is crazy. And, and, it's super thin. Like if I remember correctly, the outer shell of this spacecraft is the thickness of two credit cards put together. Sorry, how is that possible? It's outrageous. They use HFS, which stands for hard F and steel. And Ejas, if you, if you, that is the scientific name. It's HFS, I swear, do you look it up? There's no way. That's right. I'm going to look that up. Well, it's real. And actually, you can go outside and see this right now, EGES, because if you go and

check out the cybers trucks that are rolling down the road, which there are plenty of in the city. They are wrapped with the same exact HFS that is on Starship. It is just a cold, rolled stainless steel that is super strong. You're not lying. It's called HFS. And it's remarkably strong. That's why your cyber truck is bulletproof. It's because it's made of the same stuff that Starships are made of.

And a lot of the complexity comes from actually pressurizing the cabin so that they don't either collapse under pressure or over-expand under pressure. But the scale is gigantic. Isjas, what we're seeing here is the starship basically consists of two parts. There's the first stage, which is at the bottom. That's the booster. They call that super heavy. And then there's the second stage, which is the actual ship on top.

And both of those ones stacked together are 394 feet tall. So that is the equivalent to about 40 stories tall. So, you know, if you ever stood on top of a 40-story building you've looked out, that is the view from the top of starship. It is unbelievably tall. It's 30% taller than the Statue of Liberty. I think it's 60 feet shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza. This thing is like gigantic. And yeah, you can see here for scale of the video.

People just look tiny. So Josh, the super heavy part, part one, the booster, is that primarily to get the ship, you know, up into the air? Is that primarily just like fuel and rocket boosters? That's exactly right. So the booster exists literally for its name to boost the ship into Earth orbit, or lowerth orbit at least because Earth's atmosphere super dense. It takes a lot of energy to break through it. But once you've broken through it and you're in the lower orbit and going into outer space,

there's a lot less atmosphere, there's a lot less friction against your ship. You just need that smaller top part to actually go out into deep space. And this is where the payload is, right? Exactly. So the entire booster, that whole bottom part that you're seeing, it's all fuel. 100% of that bottom part is fuel. And then most of the top part is actually fuel too. Like a large percentage of the stack is just fuel. And then towards the very top of the bay is about room for 150 tons of reusable payload. So it's a lot of fuel. And actually, one of the interesting things that they're going to start doing with the next version, version three of the rocket, is they're going to refuel that top part in space. So what they'll do is they'll send up two versions of the ship.

One is a tanker, and then one is the actual ship. They meet in orbit, and they kind of like kiss each other and then one refueles the other and that's how it's able to get out to Mars. So it's this really remarkable thing. What we're seeing here is the rendering of the version three. And that's exactly the kissing that I'm talking about. They have a tanker and then they have the ship. And they connect and that's how you refuel it. So this launch that we just watched that was intentionally exploded is the sign before we move on to this next version that we're seeing on our screens, right, Josh? Can you tell us what the major differences are and what we can expect? Yeah, so one of the biggest differences, this is the thing that I am absolutely obsessed with, is the Raptor 3 engine.

So they have a whole new engine architecture that you're using. And as a result, a lot of things need to change. So what you just saw in the past one, it was a new fuel tank. Everything about the outside mostly looks the same. Everything about the inside is changing. So the fuel distribution is changing a lot of the telemetry things, the grid fins that control the ship are changing. but the most notable part is these Raptor 3 engines. And I just if you go back actually to that image,

I love this image so much because it shows the three iterations of Raptor, and it just shows like what a great company is possible, is capable of doing. Seems much less complex than the biggest versions. Yes, but it's much more powerful too. So that Raptor one engine was so complicated. It looks like a bird's nest. There's so much stuff going on. It's really difficult to understand.

It has to have its own heat shield built in, and it weighed 2,000 kilograms. So it's not very reusable. It weighs a ton, and it is only able to, I mean, only able to. The thrust that you can get out of it is 185 tons. Raptor 2 looks a lot more elegant. And Raptor 2, that decreased the weight by 400 kilograms. It has some more heat shield built in, so there's a little less maintenance before

and after each flight to reuse it, but still pretty complicated and lifts the thrust up to 230 tons. Now, Raptor 3 looks like you could put that in a museum. It's gorgeous. All of the complexities are embedded inside of the engine. It is much more complex. And yet, it has a record setting 269 tons of thrust. It weighs 100 kilograms even less than Raptor 2. And there are no major limitations, meaning it can just go up into orbit, come back down, relight, and go right back again. So it is this unbelievably complex engineering challenge that they took on. and that they were able to do. And I think it's a testament to how SpaceX operates.

It's just really considering these things from first principles. Like, how can we make an engine the best possible thing? Using no off-the-shelf parts. All this is custom tooling. And as a result, they got an engine that is way faster and like, look at this video. It is so much force. That's 269 tons of thrust from one single engine. It's a marvel.

This seems like something straight out of a movie, Josh. I feel like if you tell anyone that how many of these did you say are going to be in the new new ship? Oh, I want to say there's 31 to 33, something like that. There's a good bit of it. Right. Right. So if you told me that, hey, 33 of these two credit cards worth thick raptor rockets are going to blast 150 tons and much, much more probably in V3 up into space into orbit, I would probably laugh at you. I would probably laugh at you.

be like this thing is flimsy. I don't know if I could trust this. Why is it wiggling around? There is no other company that is building like this, Josh. And I was trying to think about, you know, other kind of competitors that come even near SpaceX. And I just fall flat every single time. I think Elon and SpaceX and the engineers and what they've built and what they've achieved to date is in a league of their own. Truly. There's nobody who's close. There's a lot of companies who are trying to build interesting things. But there is genuinely no one on Earth who's close in the sense that if SpaceX shuts down tomorrow, we have no space program. We have no easy and affordable way of getting satellites into lower Earth orbit. We have no aspirations for becoming multilateral

species. Like a lot of things, we have no redundant internet. If we lose connection down on Earth, we have no secondary network to exist in space. So it is very much a monopoly. And you could start to understand why when you see how complex these things are, how big they are at scale. And I love the image you're showing here because there's also a really great culture there too. This is an image from their, I guess, from Star Base, right? Where they take these things off from? It's to get into Starship, actually. It's the top level. And before you walk in, you see this painting, which is just probably the most inspiring thing ever if you're an astronaut going up in one of these things. And it's this beautifully like hand-painted astronaut holding his hand out, Starship in the reflection,

standing on Mars. Wow. It's really amazing. And one of the funny things is a lot of of people just, there's this disconnect between saying we're going to Mars and then actually understanding the downstream effects of getting to Mars. And I think a funny thing that I learned from following SpaceX over the years is that they actually have entire teams dedicated to coming up with life on Mars, meaning like, here is everything we need to ship, here is how the government structure is going to look, here is how we're going to distribute supplies, here is how we're going to build the first base, the second base, the third base. And there are teams that have been doing this for years because they are so certain that their mission will succeed that they will be able

to get life on Mars. And they do have a rough timeline trajectory. I think first moon missions are going for 2028 and then the Mars mission around 2030, I believe. So within the next five years, people will actually, or at least rockets will be on their way to Mars, which is, it's just cool. It's a really exciting thing. Yesterday's launch was amazing progress. Everything that could have gone right went right. And it was really a step in the right direction because the last couple of launches, This was launched number 11. They had some serious problems. Like there was one of the rockets, it fully exploded prior to even getting off the launch pad.

Total detonation destroyed the launch pad. They had to rebuild it. There was another rocket that when it tried to get pressurized, it totally exploded. So there's been a lot of problems along the way. Last night's flight was amazing. Everything went about as good as it could have. And what we're going to see soon is they're going to try to actually catch the starship rocket, which is going to be a really exciting.

exciting development, because once they get that thing caught, we're on our way. I really hope this happens in my lifetime. I hope that the cost of travel to get to space is affordable enough that I can go with me, my kids, maybe even my mom, and kind of like see what's up and out there, maybe even a colony on a different planet. It's interesting. As we have gone through this conversation, I kind of think as Mars is like the first step to all of this. I remember when I was a kid growing up, thinking like Mars was this like really, really far off thing to happen, definitely not in my lifetime. And now it just seems like, you know, it'll happen. And then we're on to the next big kind of planetary jump. Satellites getting out there, moving different types of

payloads, whether it's like telescopes that you mentioned earlier. I feel like it's all just phase one. I can't even imagine what comes next. But I know that there's only one company that is doing this. it is SpaceX. They cut the cost of spaceflight initially down to, what was the Falcon 9 cost cutting? Josh, do you remember this? They cut it down to like a 12th or like 12th. It's one of those numbers. It was so outrageously a low number. Yeah, of how how low it went relative to others. There's also a video, Ejohn, I'm going to send you that I would love to show because it's just it's awesome to see the effect it has on other people. Like, it's more than just, just a mission. So one of the cool things is the downstream effects of getting to Mars means that

we have unlocked a ton of new technology. It means that we're able to create food and life on another planet, which means we need to have a lot of forms of portable energy, a lot better battery technology, a lot better agricultural technology. But also, this video that we're showing on screen is like, well, it's inspiring the next generation to want to do cool, badass stuff. Like, it's so fun being able to sit down and watch these launches and see like these kids just sitting down I'm like getting super expired. Because for a long time when children were growing up, like the thing they wanted to be was an astronaut.

That was the coolest thing. And now the most popular answer is like, oh, I want to be a TikToker or I want to be an influencer. And I really, I mean, personally, I love the idea of people starting to get inspired by seeing things like this to want to do these ambitious things, to build rockets, to go to outer space, to build satellites, to give us internet from the stars. Like, it's just more than anything, it's an inspiring mission. And thankfully, they've managed to put an extra. economic engine on it to continue to fund the progress that happens and to continue to work on this

mission of getting payload to orbit. Where do I buy this stock, honestly? I know it's still a private company, but I need to get my hands on this. Makes me very bullish, Elon, if I wasn't already bullish enough on all his other companies, if I wasn't already clear about that on this show. Josh, is there anything else that you need to share with us about this? Well, there's one more, like forward-looking thing that each, as you actually mentioned this to me a little while ago, is that you're like, well, why can I not get to London in like 20 minutes? And this is very much that answer is like if you are able to really just perfect the reusable rocket ship where you create an airplane, but for vertical takeoff and landing, I mean, when we were watching the launch last

night, that starship went across the world in an hour. Like, it was on the complete other side of the planet in an hour. So if you can create this technology and you can actually really refine it, produce it at scale and you lower the cost to orbit down to $50 per kilogram, well, I would imagine the cost to lower the orbit or sub-orbit, which takes you up and then over and then into Europe, would probably be not that expensive and you could basically get anywhere in the world in like 45 minutes or less. See, the funny part is I think you could sell a lot of people on that. I think a lot of people will start talking about sex would be super bowl. If I told my mom that, like, hey, you could

go to Japan. It's been a dream of hers to go to Japan in 20 minutes. She would be down. Yeah, so I think that's an important thing they want to leave people with is it's not only about getting to Mars. It's the second order effects that come from understanding the technology to get to Mars, where we can mass produce these rocket ships. If we have all this new technology, it gets applied to a lot of really interesting industries, like the vertical takeoff landing rockets where you and your mom could go to Japan for lunch and then come home before dinner time. And like that's just an easy and normal thing. So it leaves a lot of, I think, optimism and excitement around for me. And I think for a lot of people who watch all these launches, it's just, it's awesome to see. There's more coming.

As we were talking yesterday, we got to go to Texas, go see one in person. We're going to go. We are going to go. Let's do it because that would be a dream. These things are awesome to see. We're going to have it in the background as Josh and I live stream our updates about it. I cannot wait. I need to get myself a SpaceX hoodie as well.

Hell yeah. Yeah, well, we'll get matching hoodies. And also Easter egg, for anyone who's near Texas, there's a law in Texas where all of the beaches are public. And Starbase, where they launch these starships, the beach sits right next to the launch pad. So you can actually go to the beach and be like less than a mile away from this gigantic rocket ship and really get a great view of it. And just see what it's like up close. So when we go, that's exactly where we're going. And I am really looking forward to seeing one of these in person because, my God, what an exciting thing that would be.

I can't wait. Well, Tom Cruise of Top Gun, step aside. There is a new cowboy. He's a space cowboy in town. Elon is leading the way on SpaceX. I cannot wait for the next couple of launches. It seems to me that every new launch gets that much less complex, but somehow way more powerful and somehow way more cheaper.

And I still, I know I keep talking about it, somehow way more thinner. Josh, unless there's anything else to say, let's round this up. Let's wrap it up. That's it. So the next launch is going to be version three. This was the last launch in version two architecture. The whole new, the new launch is brand new. Everything about the internals are going to be new. All this new stuff is rolling out. We will be here covering it all the way. But until then, that's been an episode on SpaceX, Starship. Launch 9? Launch 11? Launch 11. I'm losing track of these things. Yeah. It's 11. Thank you guys for watching. As always, very much appreciated. Any final prompts before we go? No. But tell us if you enjoyed this space episode. Josh and I, I consider myself an amateur when it comes to these things. Josh is super enthusiastic and plugged in, and I love learning from him. But do you guys enjoy learning about this stuff?

If not, is there a different angle that we can cover? Are there other space companies out there? I already know the answer. There is not. Let us know. Well, thank you for watching. We'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.