The Late Show with Stephen Colbert September 2, 2015 Stephen Colbert asks Musk whether he's a superhero or a supervillain — they cover terraforming Mars, reusable rockets and SpaceX's drone-ship landing attempts.
Stephen Colbert asks Musk whether he's a superhero or a supervillain — they cover terraforming Mars, reusable rockets and SpaceX's drone-ship landing attempts.
Transcript For villain. That's what a super villain does.
Superman doesn't say it will drop thermonuclear bombs. That's Lex Luthor man.
Yeah. The slow way would be to release greenhouse gases like we're, like we're doing on Earth to, you know, we've gotten a lot of experience releasing it.
Export. We could export some of our greenhouse gases from Earth to Mars. Now you also have ways for us to get there because as I said, you're, you're one of the CEOs of Space X and I'm incredibly excited. You're the CEO. I'm sorry.
Struck a raw nerve again. Super villain. Now the thing that excites me as SpaceX is that you want to have rockets like the sci fi rockets I was promised when I was a kid.
Yeah. This is the key to getting life to be multi planetary is to have reusable rockets. So if you throw the rockets away every time, it's crazy expensive to go to space. But if you can refly the rockets, it could be comparable to air flight in its costs.
And you've got a rocket called. Is it called the Falcon?
Okay. The Falcon rocket. And your goal is to try to land the Falcon rocket on a barge at sea so you can reuse a ship. A ship.
It has engines, everything, everything.
Seems to be insulting you this year. Well,
if it's got engines, it's a ship.
Okay. And is anybody driving the ship?
Okay. We have a footage of the. This is the last attempt, I think to land the rocket after it successfully delivered a payload. Here it goes. And. Come on baby. Yeah, come on. You can do.
Broke a leg on landing. So it took over.
Oh, how heartbreaking is that to see that when you get that close.
That's definitely, definitely heartbreaking.
Yeah. You don't seem heartbroken.
Well, that happened several months ago. So I, but the, the.
Shake it off. You just shake it off.
The. I think we were actually feeling, I mean sad but happy at the same time that because if we could reduce the landing velocity we could get it to land and stay upright and not explode.
So that is one of the goals of rockets is not to explode.
How long before that's going to be safe enough that my wife would be okay with me getting on a rocket and going someplace?
Probably. Well, I'm not sure if I don't know your wife, but she's right out there.
But I think in terms of when it will be safe enough for people, it's probably about two to three years.
You're kidding. Yeah, that's nothing. Seriously. So two to three years from now. So two to three years now, it could be the beginning of like, here's Joy, George Jetson and Steve Colbert.
Well, in approximately two years, we'll be transporting NASA astronauts to the space station.
What's the next thing that you want to do that is a hopeful future? One of the things I like about what you do is that your vision of the future is very hopeful. That is, it is fixable that the world. There's so much despair, people throwing up their hands at problems of the world that can't be solved. You think that we can put our minds to it and actually make the world a better place. What do you think need more than anything else?
Well, I think the most important thing we need to solve this century is sustainable energy. That's.
Well, you seem like the guy to do it. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for trying to make the future a better place. Elon Musk. It's all.