Elon Musk: Designing a Rocket Is Easy—Mass Production and Reuse Is the Real Challenge

Elon Musk: Designing a rocket is trivial, but making lots of them is extremely hard.

“At this point, designing a rocket is trivial. There are tons of books, you just have to read them. If you can understand equations, you can design a rocket.

For example, designing a two-stage rocket with 2% of your liftoff mass to orbit is a piece of cake.

The next step is that you want to make even one of those things. Making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard. The designing of it is not hard, but the making of even one is hard.

The making of a production line that builds and launches many is extremely hard.

And then, the next level beyond that would be creating a fully reusable system and having that be in volume production and volume launch. That's super, super hard.

I keep emphasizing to SpaceX, the hard part is making it, making lots of them, and launching frequently. Because it can't be reused like the shuttle. It's got to be rapid and complete reuse.”

AFA Air Warfare Symposium, February 28, 2020