SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk tells US Air Force the era of fighter jets is ending

(Senior Airman Christian Conrad/U.S. Air Force)

Billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk is thought for pioneering disruptive technology like reusable rocket ships and electronic cars, however at some point of an look Friday at a conference on the U.S. Air Force, he changed into disruptive for different reasons.

During a hearth chat at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium, Lt. Gen. John Thompson, who leads the Space and Missile Systems Center, asked Musk whether or not he had any innovative thoughts approximately how aerial fight might be revolutionized.

The answer turned into less whimsical than what changed into likely anticipated.

“Locally autonomous drone battle is wherein it’s at, in which the future will be,” Musk stated. “It’s now not that I want the future to be this, that’s just what the future will be. … The fighter jet generation has passed. Yeah, the fighter jet technology has passed. It’s drones.”

Hushed murmurs and laughter rippled throughout the target market.

“OK. Let’s go again about failure,” Thompson stated, converting the problem lower back to the early days of SpaceX.

Musk’s answer become hardly an unique one. The Air Force and different army services had been embroiled in a decades-lengthy debate approximately the balance of manned and unmanned era, and how future leaps in synthetic intelligence should each enable and complicate the guidelines of engagement on a battlefield.

But the discussion — and Musk’s willingness to move off script — highlighted a nevertheless-obvious culture conflict among the greater conservative, chance-averse Air Force and the dynamic, freewheeling commercial area industry, even as the Defense Department stands up the Space Force and casts an keen eye on a area-era boom.

Much of what Musk talked about with Thompson lined up with common Air Force speaking points: The SpaceX founder endorsed young airmen to examine physics and computer era, saying each disciplines have “excellent predictive power.” He anticipated that AI would possibly be the most transformative era to emerge over the next five years. And he urged the service to take massive risks to get “radical outcomes.”

But sometimes, matters got weird. At one point, smooth jazz began playing, leaving Musk and Thompson struggling to speak over the bleating of a saxophone. At another, Musk as compared low-fee get entry to to space to the construction of a railroad that might competently bring tourists to the West Coast with out the risk of calamities that would force the ones making the journey to eat their compatriots.

Also at the event, Musk praised competition at some point of a discussion on reusable rockets, which SpaceX is developing.

“Not to cause controversy, however in my opinion, the Joint Strike Fighter — there need to be a competitor to JSF. I recognise that’s [a] controversial problem,” he stated, referring to Lockheed Martin’s F-35. Lockheed beat out Boeing in 2001 for the JSF contract, however the downselect and the cancellation of the F-22 application left the Defense Department with no different fifth-generation opportunity to the F-35.

Unsurprisingly, Thompson did not comply with up on that point.

Two times throughout the hourlong chat, Musk entreated the Air Force to make the Space Force emulate Starfleet, the iconic space business enterprise made well-known in “Star Trek.”

“We’ve were given to make Starfleet happen,” he stated as the audience applauded. “We want real large space ships that could go a ways places. And this can possibly get me into the most problem of all: I assume there need to be a new uniform.”

“When the public thinks approximately Space Force, that’s what they suppose,” he added. “We want the sci-fi futures, the good sci-fi futures, to be actual. And, ideally, to grow to be real whilst we’re still alive.”

Current Breaking News