Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Be Making Regular Flights by 2023

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 why I also say the same thing Starship, we need to make it more pointy Did you say that? Because of the movie? Yeah Really? Hold on I just have the main camera on Okay Okay You literally told them to make the Starship more pointy Because of the movie The Dictator Yep And they know it too It's not like they have an unaware of it I thought it would be funny if we made the rocket more pointy So we did Did it have any effect on the aerodynamics? No Nothing No, we can make it way blunter and be fine But is it better to be pointy? If it wasn't for the movie It's arguably slightly worse But more fun for you Yeah, it looks cooler Well, okay It does look cool Yeah How long do you think it will be before... Are you good, Jamie? What's that? My head's maybe... Yeah, exactly How long is it sticking out of... Is that where it's... Oh, it's not supposed to be okay You're good Alright 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 would be very consistent With that extra pointy rocket? Yeah, with your extra pointy rocket Do you mean Earth to Earth transport? Or Earth to orbit or anywhere? Yes, people are people Anytime where you could just do it with people And have it land all the time I think it'll probably be two years away Two years away That's really nice Two years is pretty cool Two years for people We'll have a lot of flights between now and then That's crazy That's 2023 is not that far away That'll be there before you know it Yeah Wow 2023 Time flies How many times have you had explosions with those in your eyes? When you're on a rocket I don't know, like... Quite a few Six, maybe? Five or six What are those like? What is it like when you watch it explode? When it's supposed to land and it just... This is a test program We expect it to explode Oh, of course It's weird if it doesn't explode, frankly Really? 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 The whole rocket is evolving The engines, the structure, the avionics, the software, the ground systems All evolving simultaneously And the whole production system Which is actually harder than the rocket design by far So the rocket and engine and avionics production system is And the launch system is 1000% harder than the initial design Like at least Really? Yeah So when... Same with cars, it's like 10,000% And it's easy to do a car prototype, it's hard to do production 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 If current trends continue, if we... 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 So we're getting to orbit this year Our goal is to get to orbit this year So... And I don't know if people totally understand Like Starship is the largest flying object ever made This thing will be about... Over 5000 tons of weight on liftoff It's going to go straight up with 5000 tons This is much heavier than any aircraft by far No aircraft even comes close to this weight And it's going straight up Aircraft can't go straight up So it's like the... It's got more than twice... We'll have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V Really? Yeah, yeah It's like a big rocket Why does it need that much thrust? We're trying to... Because you want to go to Mars? Or is this like... We're trying to make life multiplanetary You know... Extend life beyond Earth And in order to do that You have to have high tonnage to Mars And that means you need a big rocket And you've got to fly a lot So the reason why it has twice the thrust of the Saturn V Is to plan for these interstellar trips Uh, interplanetary Interplanetary trips So when you're doing this And you're developing these systems Thinking about regular trips to other planets But you're not just trying to get into orbit right now You're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually could scale up Yeah, we know how to get to orbit We've done that a lot So the really hard thing is We need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket Where all elements of the rocket are reused And they're reused quickly Like an aircraft And this has never been done This is the holy grail of rocketry Is to have a fully reusable rocket Then you need to go one step further It needs to be fully and rapidly reusable You know, it's like Like a plane Yeah, yeah Like a plane lands You refuel it and take off again How do you have time? I've never understand you In regards to the way you run multiple businesses simultaneously I would think that something like this Would require so much concentration It would require I would think this would be your whole being Trying to figure out how to work this Yeah, well I do work a lot It's crazy Yeah And I apologize for the reason I was late As I was literally coming from some critical meetings Just doing Normally I'd be meeting until I work until like 1 or 2 in the morning Every night Not, I mean Saturday and Sunday Usually not, but sometimes How much do you sleep? About 6 hours Oh, that's pretty good Yeah, it's not that crazy For you, that's I mean, for someone who does as much as you That's actually That's impressive That you can squeeze that in Yeah I've tried sleeping less But then total productivity decreases Yeah So you feel like 6 is the number where it's not Yeah, 6 is 6 6 was 6 I can I don't find myself needing more sleep than 6 So when Like with the Saturn V and the space shuttles And all these other rockets They would have these parts that would They would get the ship up into space But they would descend down to Earth and crash into the ocean And they would never use them again That's right How do you avoid that? Like what is the difference between the way these things are structured? Like the whole thing goes together And then it lands together? Well, we're on the wrong planet for a single stage to orbit Right I think one thing to appreciate is like space Getting to space is easy Getting to orbit is hard So you only need maybe 1 or 2 percent of the energy to get to space To where the atmosphere is thin Compared to what you need to get to orbit And if you get to orbit Now you've got to burn off all that energy And you're coming in like a meteor So you need a powerful heat shield It's kind of like super difficult to get to orbit at all And then if you get to orbit at all Then making those stages reusable Means they've got to come back intact And then the upper stage is especially difficult Because it's got so much energy All the energy you put into it you have to take out So you're literally coming in like a flaming meteor And most things would just melt or vaporize So like if you as a human try to come in from orbit You'd just be pink mist Yeah That's a funny way to put it Yeah On Spotify you can listen to the JRE in the background While using other apps And can download episodes to save on data cost all for free Spotify is absolutely free You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience