8 ms·

Elon Musk's mission to Mars

106 points by susanhi 13y ago

jaxytee 13y ago
Between running Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, and conceptualizing the hyperloop, Elon is the yang to Steve Job's "Focus on one thing" yin.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  But then Jobs had Apple and Pixar/Disney. You can have more than one company as long as you have the right people running it for you.
  - Pwnguinz 13y ago
    I think the point is that Jobs himself only ran one company at a time, though he had many successes. Elon is doing at least three things at once (Chairman of the board of Solar City. CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX), and the Hyperloops looks to be a fourth.
    - hkolek 13y ago
      FWIW, in the case of Solar City he consistently emphasizes in his interviews that he has to basically "just show up at board meetings and hear the good news" and that most of the credit goes to the guys in charge there. But anyway, I'm deeply impressed by this guy, especially since he is not only CEO but also Chief Designer at SpaceX and Product Architect at Tesla.
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      I was mainly referencing Solar City which he doesn't really run. A good example of someone who doesn't focus on one thing and is hugely successful is Richard Branson. Virgin Group has more than 400 companies.
    - melling 13y ago
      Incorrect. Steve was CEO of Pixar and Apple at the same time. He found it to be exhausting. In Isaacson's book Steve believe this weaken his immune system which led to his cancer, which Isaacson discredited.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Elon is not the only example. John Carmack is another one. Video Games, Rockets, Cars, you name it. When you are curious AND efficient at learning & developing solutions, you often end up breaking new grounds. There are tons of examples out there of people successful in many fields.
- unemployment 13y ago
  Jobs never planned on leaving Earth, and shall remain, stuck as dust on this planet, as Elon makes his peace with the universe on Mars.
speeq 13y ago
"SpaceX's focus on reusable technology has slashed costs – the company says it can get an astronaut to the space station for $20m, versus $70m charged by Russia for a seat on a Soyuz rocket. SpaceX is testing reusable prototype rockets that can return to Earth intact, rather than burn up in the atmosphere. If successful, rockets could be reused like aeroplanes, cutting the price of a space mission to just $200,000, for fuel." This is amazing.
- throwmeaway33 13y ago
  I wonder what the Russian's cut is. Since they are the only people that can send astronauts to space right now, they can charge basically any price they want.
  - anovikov 13y ago
    They used to have a huge markup some 15 years ago. No longer. It's hard to determine price of a crewed Soyuz mission, but an unmanned Proton rocket, when ordered to launch Russian military satellites (which obviously can't bear much markup because it is the parts of the same system buying from each other, large markup only means increasing taxes) is 1.5x the price of a Falcon 9 launch, with a low orbit payload about 1.5x Falcon's and GEO orbit payload about 1.1x Falcon's. So any and all price advantage Russian rockets used to have over American is now eroded due to increased salaries (an aerospace engineer got about $500-$1000 a year 15 years ago and about $10K a year now) and lower SpaceX prices.
znowi 13y ago
In order to get support they compromised and agreed to pay for essentially anti-environmental ads for a couple of key conservative senators. And that was not right. You should fight on the merits of the cause, not play some Machiavellian game where you agree to support things that are bad in order to get some things that are good passed. Says a lot about integrity of our beloved Internet giants. Among the key supporters of FWD.us initiative, apart from Facebook, are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. And also, HN's own PG :)
arethuza 13y ago
'If he dies there, what should be engraved on his tombstone? Musk frowns a moment, then grins. "Holy shit, I'm on Mars, can you believe it?"' Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now. Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars. NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
- morganwilde 13y ago
  This is easy to overlook, but if he's correct and will be able to achieve his goals, those 80,000 plus people will have one man to thank. Although it is still so unbelievably hard to imagine that, with so many obstacles ahead. As with any highly risky enterprise, I think he should be increasing his odds by raising one or more prodigies of his own, that would be able to carry on with his work, if he himself wasn't able to.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    When you say "raising" - I hope you mean mentoring rather than other options...
    - morganwilde 13y ago
      Yes, absolutely, I'm not sure what other options are there, but yes, mentoring was what I meant.
    - prawks 13y ago
      Cloning? I think we know Musk's next venture...
      - DiabloD3 13y ago
        Immortality, actually.
jkn 13y ago
An old argument for going to Mars is that spreading beyond Earth is necessary for survival in the very long term. It makes sense, but it always seems like there are so many other causes, more urgent, to spend our resources on. Musk's answer to that: "The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time." I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  You can't wait for perfection. This is the classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs fallacy. If you wait until the "more fundamental" layers are perfect you will wait too long or wait forever. And in many cases you will miss out on opportunities which feedback to "lower" layers from higher ones. It's important to spend an appropriate amount on different sorts of activities, but the appropriate amount is never to spend nothing on "higher level" stuff. Consider science, for example. A lot of money was effectively invested into very esoteric sciences in the 18th through 19th centuries while the world was generally very poor, struggling to feed itself, struggling with disease, and so on. The seemingly logical, and compassionate, thing to do in those eras would have been to ignore esoteric pursuits and concentrate on dumping as much time, effort, and money into making everyone's lives better. But that would have been disastrous. It would have meant that science would have lacked an understanding of genetics, of micro-biology, of chemistry, of electromagnetism, of physics, and so on. And that would have stunted the development of the industrial age (steam engines, and later electric motors), it would have stunted the development of new food crops, of fertilizers, of sanitation systems, of vaccines, of radio/television/networking, etc. Without which the entire world would be essentially as poor as it was in the 18th century, instead of with billions of people having access to stable food supplies, clean water, etc. and over a billion people living in wealth with a few billion more on the way to that level of wealth in the next few decades.
qwerta 13y ago
We can not survive in outer space in our current form. Human body requires too much resources, is sensitive to radiation and needs gravity. But this may change in near future :-)
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  We can simulate gravity in space with centripetal force. The other problems are definitely present. The ISS is a good testbed for developing solutions to these problems, and I'm optimistic about our future deep-space travel capability.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    there's way more radiation outside earth's magnetic field, and then even more outside the solar system - I don't think the ISS is a particularly good example. Hmm, perhaps you're more right on a second reading - "as a testbed for developing solutions" might work.
michaelraven 13y ago
Here's my input on the subject: http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-could-cut-travel-time-to-mars-from-6-months-to-under-30-days/ http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-co...
InclinedPlane 13y ago
The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that. The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it. It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
- Retric 13y ago
  I think the secret to Space X is there an engineering company in a bureaucracy heavy industry. It reminds me of a technical problem a friend was dealing with he had a basic design for a toy that he was trying to get manufactured and spent a few weeks emailing back and forth why the design was impossible, until he went over and discovered the issue was a base he said should be about 1 inch thick needed to be 1/4 an inch thicker and they just looked at the constraints and said impossible. It's great for rockets to have more effecency, be lighter, and carry more cargo, but it's hard to balance the design around what is overall cheaper and more efficient rather than just chasing better specs.
elmindreda 13y ago
> inspiration for Iron Man's playboy superhero Tony Stark ...except Iron Man was created eight years before he was born.
- Lambdanaut 13y ago
  They're referring to the re-invented character from the recent Paramount Pictures films. He was their "model" that inspired the character. That's what they say, anyways. Elon Musk isn't nearly as socially heroic as Tony Stark, he's a stuttering nerd. Not that that's a bad thing. He's a genius, but they're really nothing alike except for them both being overly ambitious and successful entrepreneurs.

106 points by susanhi 13y ago

Between running Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, and conceptualizing the hyperloop, Elon is the yang to Steve Job's "Focus on one thing" yin.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
But then Jobs had Apple and Pixar/Disney. You can have more than one company as long as you have the right people running it for you.
- Pwnguinz 13y ago
  I think the point is that Jobs himself only ran one company at a time, though he had many successes. Elon is doing at least three things at once (Chairman of the board of Solar City. CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX), and the Hyperloops looks to be a fourth.
  - hkolek 13y ago
    FWIW, in the case of Solar City he consistently emphasizes in his interviews that he has to basically "just show up at board meetings and hear the good news" and that most of the credit goes to the guys in charge there. But anyway, I'm deeply impressed by this guy, especially since he is not only CEO but also Chief Designer at SpaceX and Product Architect at Tesla.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    I was mainly referencing Solar City which he doesn't really run. A good example of someone who doesn't focus on one thing and is hugely successful is Richard Branson. Virgin Group has more than 400 companies.
  - melling 13y ago
    Incorrect. Steve was CEO of Pixar and Apple at the same time. He found it to be exhausting. In Isaacson's book Steve believe this weaken his immune system which led to his cancer, which Isaacson discredited.
ekianjo 13y ago
Elon is not the only example. John Carmack is another one. Video Games, Rockets, Cars, you name it. When you are curious AND efficient at learning & developing solutions, you often end up breaking new grounds. There are tons of examples out there of people successful in many fields.
unemployment 13y ago
Jobs never planned on leaving Earth, and shall remain, stuck as dust on this planet, as Elon makes his peace with the universe on Mars.

speeq 13y ago

"SpaceX's focus on reusable technology has slashed costs – the company says it can get an astronaut to the space station for $20m, versus $70m charged by Russia for a seat on a Soyuz rocket. SpaceX is testing reusable prototype rockets that can return to Earth intact, rather than burn up in the atmosphere. If successful, rockets could be reused like aeroplanes, cutting the price of a space mission to just $200,000, for fuel." This is amazing.

throwmeaway33 13y ago
I wonder what the Russian's cut is. Since they are the only people that can send astronauts to space right now, they can charge basically any price they want.
- anovikov 13y ago
  They used to have a huge markup some 15 years ago. No longer. It's hard to determine price of a crewed Soyuz mission, but an unmanned Proton rocket, when ordered to launch Russian military satellites (which obviously can't bear much markup because it is the parts of the same system buying from each other, large markup only means increasing taxes) is 1.5x the price of a Falcon 9 launch, with a low orbit payload about 1.5x Falcon's and GEO orbit payload about 1.1x Falcon's. So any and all price advantage Russian rockets used to have over American is now eroded due to increased salaries (an aerospace engineer got about $500-$1000 a year 15 years ago and about $10K a year now) and lower SpaceX prices.

znowi 13y ago

In order to get support they compromised and agreed to pay for essentially anti-environmental ads for a couple of key conservative senators. And that was not right. You should fight on the merits of the cause, not play some Machiavellian game where you agree to support things that are bad in order to get some things that are good passed. Says a lot about integrity of our beloved Internet giants. Among the key supporters of FWD.us initiative, apart from Facebook, are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. And also, HN's own PG :)

arethuza 13y ago

'If he dies there, what should be engraved on his tombstone? Musk frowns a moment, then grins. "Holy shit, I'm on Mars, can you believe it?"' Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now. Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars. NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars

morganwilde 13y ago
This is easy to overlook, but if he's correct and will be able to achieve his goals, those 80,000 plus people will have one man to thank. Although it is still so unbelievably hard to imagine that, with so many obstacles ahead. As with any highly risky enterprise, I think he should be increasing his odds by raising one or more prodigies of his own, that would be able to carry on with his work, if he himself wasn't able to.
- arethuza 13y ago
  When you say "raising" - I hope you mean mentoring rather than other options...
  - morganwilde 13y ago
    Yes, absolutely, I'm not sure what other options are there, but yes, mentoring was what I meant.
  - prawks 13y ago
    Cloning? I think we know Musk's next venture...
    - DiabloD3 13y ago
      Immortality, actually.

jkn 13y ago

An old argument for going to Mars is that spreading beyond Earth is necessary for survival in the very long term. It makes sense, but it always seems like there are so many other causes, more urgent, to spend our resources on. Musk's answer to that: "The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time." I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...

InclinedPlane 13y ago
You can't wait for perfection. This is the classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs fallacy. If you wait until the "more fundamental" layers are perfect you will wait too long or wait forever. And in many cases you will miss out on opportunities which feedback to "lower" layers from higher ones. It's important to spend an appropriate amount on different sorts of activities, but the appropriate amount is never to spend nothing on "higher level" stuff. Consider science, for example. A lot of money was effectively invested into very esoteric sciences in the 18th through 19th centuries while the world was generally very poor, struggling to feed itself, struggling with disease, and so on. The seemingly logical, and compassionate, thing to do in those eras would have been to ignore esoteric pursuits and concentrate on dumping as much time, effort, and money into making everyone's lives better. But that would have been disastrous. It would have meant that science would have lacked an understanding of genetics, of micro-biology, of chemistry, of electromagnetism, of physics, and so on. And that would have stunted the development of the industrial age (steam engines, and later electric motors), it would have stunted the development of new food crops, of fertilizers, of sanitation systems, of vaccines, of radio/television/networking, etc. Without which the entire world would be essentially as poor as it was in the 18th century, instead of with billions of people having access to stable food supplies, clean water, etc. and over a billion people living in wealth with a few billion more on the way to that level of wealth in the next few decades.

qwerta 13y ago

We can not survive in outer space in our current form. Human body requires too much resources, is sensitive to radiation and needs gravity. But this may change in near future :-)

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
We can simulate gravity in space with centripetal force. The other problems are definitely present. The ISS is a good testbed for developing solutions to these problems, and I'm optimistic about our future deep-space travel capability.
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  there's way more radiation outside earth's magnetic field, and then even more outside the solar system - I don't think the ISS is a particularly good example. Hmm, perhaps you're more right on a second reading - "as a testbed for developing solutions" might work.

michaelraven 13y ago

Here's my input on the subject: http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-could-cut-travel-time-to-mars-from-6-months-to-under-30-days/ http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-co...

InclinedPlane 13y ago

The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that. The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it. It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.

Retric 13y ago
I think the secret to Space X is there an engineering company in a bureaucracy heavy industry. It reminds me of a technical problem a friend was dealing with he had a basic design for a toy that he was trying to get manufactured and spent a few weeks emailing back and forth why the design was impossible, until he went over and discovered the issue was a base he said should be about 1 inch thick needed to be 1/4 an inch thicker and they just looked at the constraints and said impossible. It's great for rockets to have more effecency, be lighter, and carry more cargo, but it's hard to balance the design around what is overall cheaper and more efficient rather than just chasing better specs.

elmindreda 13y ago

> inspiration for Iron Man's playboy superhero Tony Stark ...except Iron Man was created eight years before he was born.

Lambdanaut 13y ago
They're referring to the re-invented character from the recent Paramount Pictures films. He was their "model" that inspired the character. That's what they say, anyways. Elon Musk isn't nearly as socially heroic as Tony Stark, he's a stuttering nerd. Not that that's a bad thing. He's a genius, but they're really nothing alike except for them both being overly ambitious and successful entrepreneurs.