#1609 - Elon Musk

Elon Musk (0:18)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

I never saw that one.

Elon Musk (0:19)

There's a scene where he's...

They show him the new missile they've developed, but it has kind of a round head. And he says, you need to make it more pointy. To his engineers. And actually, that's what I also said, the same thing. You know, Starship, we need to make it more pointy.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

Did you say that? Because of the movie?

Elon Musk (0:45)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:46)

Really?

Elon Musk (0:46)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:46)

Hold on.

Okay. You literally told them to make the Starship more pointy, because of the movie The Dictator.

Elon Musk (0:59)

Yep.

And they know it too. It's not like they haven't been aware of it. They thought it would be funny if we made the rocket more pointy, so we did.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

Did it have any effect on the aerodynamics?

Elon Musk (1:10)

No.

Joe Rogan (1:11)

Nothing?

Elon Musk (1:11)

No, we can make it way blunter and be fine.

Joe Rogan (1:14)

But is it better to be pointier? If it wasn't for the movie...

Elon Musk (1:17)

It's arguably slightly worse. But like...

Joe Rogan (1:22)

But more fun for you.

Elon Musk (1:23)

It looks cooler.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

It does look cool.

Elon Musk (1:26)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:26)

Yeah.

Elon Musk (1:27)

It's just...

Joe Rogan (1:29)

How long do you think it will be before... Are you good, Jimmy?

What's that?

Elon Musk (1:35)

My head's maybe... Yeah, exactly. You good? How long... My head is sticking out... Is that where it's...

Oh, is that supposed to be okay?

Joe Rogan (1:44)

You're good. How long do you think it's going to be before you have like regular flights with that where you can take off and land like an airplane where it will be very consistent?

Elon Musk (1:56)

With our extra pointy rocket?

Joe Rogan (1:57)

With your extra pointy rocket?

Elon Musk (2:03)

Do you mean Earth-to-Earth transport?

Or to orbit, to anywhere? Yes, people or people.

Joe Rogan (2:09)

Anytime where you could just do it with people and have it land all the time.

Elon Musk (2:16)

I think probably two years away.

Joe Rogan (2:18)

Two years away.

That's really nice. Two years is pretty cool.

Elon Musk (2:23)

Two years for people. We'll have a lot of flights between now and then.

Joe Rogan (2:26)

That's crazy, that's 2023 is not that far away. That'll be there before you know it.

Elon Musk (2:31)

Yeah, 2023 Time flies.

Joe Rogan (2:34)

How many times have you had explosions with those things?

Elon Musk (2:39)

I don't know, like quite a few. Six, maybe five or six.

Joe Rogan (2:43)

What are those like? What is it like when you watch it explode? When it's supposed to land and it just...

Elon Musk (2:51)

No, these are test program. We expect it to explode.

It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly.

Joe Rogan (3:00)

Really?

Elon Musk (3:00)

Yeah.

Because we're trying to develop advanced rockets at a high speed. And if you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge.

And the whole rocket is evolving. The engines, the structure, avionics, the software, the ground systems, all evolving simultaneously. So, and the whole production system, which is actually hotter than the rocket design by far. So the rocket and engine and avionics production system is, and the launch system is a thousand percent hotter than the initial design. Like, at least.

Joe Rogan (3:36)

Really?

Elon Musk (3:36)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:37)

So, when...

Elon Musk (3:38)

Same with cars, it's like 10,000%. It's easy to do a car prototype, it's hard to do production.

Joe Rogan (3:46)

So, when you're looking at, you're scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years.

Elon Musk (4:00)

If current trends continue, if you plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years.

Joe Rogan (4:16)

So, when...

Elon Musk (4:17)

We're getting to orbit this year. Our goal is to get to orbit this year.

I'm not sure people totally understand, Starship is the largest flying object ever made. This thing will be about over 5,000 tons of weight on liftoff. It's gonna go straight up with 5,000 tons.

This is much heavier than any aircraft by far. No aircraft even comes close to this weight. And it's going straight up, but aircraft can't go straight up. So it will have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V.