7/28/2014 Shooting for the Stars - WSJ

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WSJ. MAGAZINE
Shooting for the Stars
October 28, 2011
Elon Musk whipped into work this morn-ing
in a cherry-red sports car and now he's
lounging in his cubicle in a blue T-shirt and
jeans talking about protecting humanity by
colonizing Mars and making us a
multiplanetary species.
He sounds ridiculous.
The entrance to his office building is sleek
white minimalist"Iron Man" come to life.
But walk through the huge glass doors and
you enter a place where a boy's comic-
book dreams meet reality. It's one thing to
imagine a spaceship, another to see, a
few steps away from Musk's desk, the
Dragon capsule scorched from its fiery
descent from space. His company,
SpaceX, built the Dragon and it blasted off
on its first try in December 2010, orbited
the earth and plopped down into the
Pacific Ocean, and now here it is.
Around the Dragon, in this cavernous
former Boeing 747 factory in Hawthorne, California, 1,500 young engineers and techs are
building four more Falcon 9s. Musk has contracts for over 30 more launches worth $3
billionincluding $1.6 billion from NASA. If all goes according to plan, in late December
his third F9 launch will dock with the International Space Station. This 40-year-old is
dreaming the stuff of nations.
And that sports car? It's a Tesla and he's the company's CEO and co-founder. It's
electric, goes from zero to 60 mph in a neck-snapping 3.7 seconds, travels 245 miles on
a single charge and there are now 1,850 of them silently cruising the streets. Next
summer his new version, an all-electric sedan that seats seven, should hit showrooms.
For extra credit, Musk is also the largest investor and chairman of SolarCity, a solar-
panel provider.
Elon Musk doesn't do anything small. In
explaining the goals of his companies, he
says, "Tesla and SolarCity are about trying
to solve the world's most important
terrestrial problem, which is sustainable
energy, and SpaceX is solving the problem
of the millennium, which is making life
multiplanetary."
A native of South Africa, Musk graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania with
degrees in business and physics and then enrolled in a doctorate program at Stanford in
applied materials science. Two days later he dropped out and, with his brother, created a
software company called Zip2, which was later sold to Compaq, a $300 million
transaction that made him rich. Instead of sunning on a yacht off the south of France for
"Humanity will be conf ined to Earth unless someone
invents a reusable rocket." -- Elon Musk Photograph
by Ralph Gibson
WSJ Magazine's "Innovator of the Year Awards"
gives this year's technology prize to entrepreneur Elon
Musk.
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the rest of his life, however, he decided to try to save the world.
When he heard that NASA had no plans to send astronauts to Mars, it boggled his mind.
The financial problem seemed straightforward, if not simple: Existing rockets employed
old technology, used once. "Imagine," he says, "if you built a new 747 for every flight."
Musk launched SpaceX in 2002 and built and designed his own engines from scratch.
"I'm head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO, so I don't have to cave to some
money guy," he says. He launched his rocket with a team of eight in the control room,
instead of dozens. The result: He's offering to send a 10,000-pound payload to
geosynchronous orbit for $60 million (compared to an industry standard many tens of
millions higher). And if he can figure out how to recover the first stage of his F9, he'll have
done what no one has ever done beforecreated a fully reusable rocket which costs
only $200,000 per flight for propellant. "Humanity will be confined to Earth unless
someone invents a reusable rocket," he says. "That is the pivotal innovation to make life
multiplanetary. I've been pacing around the house at 3 a.m. trying to figure out how to
make the F9 reusable," he adds, pacing around his cube. "And I think I have."
Musk isn't the only rich guy gazing at the stars. There's also Richard Bransonbut his
vehicle travels a mere 62 miles high and doesn't go orbital. There's Amazon's Jeff Bezos
but his secretive company's first small prototype blew up in early September. And
there's a slew of others, including United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of giants Boeing
and Lockheed Martinbut they use updated versions of Atlas and Delta rockets, old-tech
workhorses that aren't going to change anything. Of all the new companies trying to
develop rockets, Musk alone has lofted a wholly new one into orbit.
As for electric cars, the biggest auto companies in the world remain miles behind Tesla's
performance: The Chevrolet Volt travels all of 35 miles by battery power before a
gasoline-fueled generator kicks in. Tesla's forthcoming sedan, with no internal
combustion engine, will get you 160 to 300 miles, depending on the battery pack you buy.
Last year Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla, which purchased an old Toyota-GM plant
in Fremont, California, to begin manufacturing its next model.
To put it simply, Musk is dreaming bigger and further into the future than anyone else out
there, and he's putting his money where his mouth is. Just three years ago his first three
rockets had failed and Tesla was nearly bankrupt. Instead of retrenching, he fired Tesla's
CEO, took on the role himself and poured his remaining cashsome $75 million in all
into the company. Today SpaceX is profitable, and SolarCity, he says, is "cash positive."
(He says Tesla will be too, once the new model is out.)
Musk's grandest dream is to make a trip to Mars cost "about as much as a middle-class
house in California." Then, he says excitedly, we can begin terraforming Mars. "It would
be the most difficult thing humanity has ever done, but also the most interesting and
inspiring. Do you want a future where you're confined or reaching toward the stars? I
can't wait to go."
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ARCHIVED COMMENTS |
DAVID STONEMAN
He does all this while all the other cash rich companies are afraid to use theiir money
to innovate, or for that matter hire. Go Musk.
Roger Hall
Big ideas, good article. Re-usable rockets leads to cost advantages over the rest of
the heavy launch industry, and that is good business, if he can do it with repeatability.
Newest
Dec 4, 2011
Nov 6, 2011
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