It’s always good to be able to have fun doing your job, and it sure looks like Elon Musk is able to squeeze in some good times under the many hats he wears leading Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Of course, it helps to be the world’s richest man, too, not to mention having some big successes under your belt.
Musk’s SpaceX has already proven that it can accomplish some incredibly difficult feats.
Re-usable booster rockets are an absolute game-changer for the aerospace industry, but SpaceX didn’t stop there, becoming the first non-government entity to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station. The company also has its sights set even higher — to the Moon, and possibly Mars, aboard its Starship design.
So far, Starship has made more headlines for the massive explosions resulting from its tests than much else, but that’s the cost of trying incredibly hard things and the engineers at SpaceX surely learned some important things from those tests all the same.
The rest of us just learned something interesting about Starship as well.
In a wide-ranging appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk expounded on life in Austin, Texas, predicting the city would become America’s next big boomtown , and also gave a little insight into Starship’s design process with an unexpected tidbit.
At least part of Starship’s design was inspired by the 2012 Sacha Baron Cohen movie The Dictator .
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That’s right, Starship owes its look to Admiral General Aladeen.
As he spoke with Rogan, Musk cited a scene from the movie in which Aladeen analyzes a missile designed by his weapons engineers and finds that it’s too blunt.
“It is too round on the top. It needs to be pointy,” he tells them. “Round is not scary. Pointy is scary.”
“You literally told them to make the Starship more pointy because of the movie *The Dictator*?” Rogan asked.
“Yep, and they know it, too,” Musk said. “It’s not like they’re unaware of it. I thought it would be funny to make it more pointy, so we did.”
And as Musk went on to admit, while a pointy rocket might be more scary, it’s not as great for performance as you might think.
After Rogan asked if making the rocket’s nose pointy would help with aerodynamics, Musk replied that “It’s arguably slightly worse. But it looks cooler.”
Well, Starship *does* look cool.
And another prototype is expected to launch soon, hopefully to put the learnings from previous attempts into practice and finally stick the landing. In his interview with Rogan, Musk added that if all goes according to plan, Starship will successfully orbit the planet later this year, and by 2023, it could be flying humans around regularly.
