Elon Musk: Aiming for Mars

Elon Musk: Aiming for Mars

Neil deGrasse Tyson, in ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’, takes us on a voyage around the universe in a “ship of the imagination” a sleek looking ship with shiny chrome exteriors and a chair in the main cortex with a view to rival all others, as Tyson himself sits in the chair and peers out at the marvels of the universe.

Space is the final frontier (high five to my fellow Trekkies out there), and for many, it is the destination of tomorrow. Who would have thought that we could be colonizing Mars within the next few years? Elon Musk has taken us closer to that dream than anybody else has and he is only getting started.

Who is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a 45 year old South Africa-born entrepreneur who is known today for having created Zip2 (and making over $300mn in its sale), PayPal (and making over $1.5bn in its sale), Tesla and SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation actually, but SpaceX sounds much better). He also happens to be the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man/Tony Stark that Robert Downey Jr. plays in Marvel’s movies.

 Here is Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster, a trademark character Tim Urban of waitbutwhy.com uses to personify our procrastinating minds.

“I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact,” is a famous quote from Musk. He’s always had a liking for all things space and a great aptitude for learning. When he was still a pre-teen, he enrolled in a 6-month course to learn BASIC (a programming language system) and completed it in 3 days before going on to write a video game on his own. The game, called Blastar, was a classic arcade shooter, the kind prevalent in the early days of the computer age, but it was set in space. He sold this game for $500.

At 14, he is said to have had an ‘existential crisis’, quite like the ones all of us have been through at some point when we were teenagers. He turned to ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ for answers and came out knowing what he considers his life mission: to save humanity. “…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it,” said Richard Branson

Musk has a Wharton Economics and Physics degree, and would have had a PhD from Stanford had he not left the University two days into his term.

What’s He Up To?

Now, one can assume Musk is intellectually gifted and technically qualified enough to start and run companies like PayPal and Tesla considering he has degrees in Physics and Economics, but building and launching rockets is a different ballgame altogether, and that’s what he’s doing at SpaceX. Not only that, he is planning to send humans to Mars within the next 15-20 years and build colonies there. Before we proceed, you should probably know that Elon Musk has no formal training in rocketry, but he started building rockets because he just, kind of, decided he wanted to. That’s the short answer, and it’s not much different from the long answer. Musk has no formal training in rocketry, but he does have an eye for new markets. In the early 2000s, he and others saw the opening NASA was creating by retreating from the business of launching spacecraft to low earth orbit. In 2002, he jumped into that gap, founding Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—or SpaceX—going into competition with other, generally more-established companies such as Boeing and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences.

After beginning work with SpaceX, he had three rocket launches end in fire and smoke, burning up a lot of cash along with a few NASA-owned satellites. SpaceX was nearly bankrupt when the fourth rocket launch went successfully in September 2008 and he procured a contract from NASA worth $1.6bn.

Ultimately, Musk wants to become the Apple of the rocket business, though Musk demurs on that analogy without demurring on the idea of assuming a similarly dominant role in the space sector. His biggest, dreamiest target is sending people to Mars—which does not make him unusual unless he can actually achieve it. He says that he could fly human passengers there for as little as $500,000 per seat, but in this case, he may be over-promising. The laws of economics might be even harder to overcome than the law of physics and neither has been cracked sufficiently yet to make a Mars mission achievable. As for whether Musk himself would go? “I would like to go to space, but I have to forgo that,” he told TIME in 2012, citing his five sons and multiple companies. “I have to be careful with personal risks.”

Compared to other people and companies, Musk has an unusually futuristic outlook. He has made and shared his plans for as far away as his death on Mars after he helps a million people move there on his rockets at $500,000 per ticket. It is easy to dismiss this as marketing hype – and people did dismiss a younger Musk.

What does all of this mean for the rest of us?

One psychological barrier to learning from other people’s lives is the narrative fallacy (also known as the hindsight bias) – making a neat story out of facts that at the time of their happening made little sense. We do it to deal with the randomness of life – we explain it away because we know how the story ended. We’d rather not figure out why we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

The media often write this way. Articles about Musk call him a “genius”, who he is, but labels like this make his accomplishments sound like a foregone conclusion. They are not. For example, he still has to deal with big oil companies that want to see Tesla go down.

One thing that the very near future could bring is a conflict between Musk and the controversially elected leader of the country he lives in. This conflict could put a wedge in Musk’s plans for Mars. Intelligence and ignorance have never learned how to coexist.

A prime example of this is technology business magnate Elon Musk and USA’s President-elect Donald Trump. Here we have one man in power who does not believe in climate change and another very powerful man who has devoted his life to prevent it from happening. Even though Musk is reacting calmly to the developments, many believe that it is only a matter of time before he slides into one of his long argument-supported rants.

To Musk, someone speaking against him is probably much more tolerable than someone starting a slur campaign against renewable energy is. Negating the effects of greenhouse gases and the importance of clean energy is going against life, or even worse, going against science and progress.

Trump vs. Musk seems to have the potential to influence the environment-friendly economy, but let’s move to the more galactic side of things. Imagine Musk is actually able to pull off the ideas of creating cost-efficient ways to get to Mars. Imagine for a moment, that SpaceX’s launch of Falcon Heavy next year goes perfectly as planned, and it becomes the most powerful operational, reusable rocket in the world, and Musk goes on to send cargo and passengers to Mars early in the 2020s. What would that mean? How big (or small) of a shift would multi-planetary human life be on the evolutionary scale?

This is the vision Elon Musk has. As amazingly exhilarating that feels, we still have a long way to go for that to be a reality. In Musk’s words, “All we have to do now is to figure out how to reduce the cost for a trip by 5 million percent of its current cost!” Piece of cake.

In any case, if living on Mars is indeed possible one day, one thing is for certain; the phrase, “I love you to the moon and back,” wouldn’t carry nearly as much weight as it does today.

-Jai Vyas