At the forefront of radical spaceflight development is one explosively-growing company, SpaceX, soaring head and shoulders above all competitors in price-to-orbit, that explicitly states as its ultimate corporate goal the human settlement of Mars. At the forefront of electric vehicle (EV) development is one company, Tesla Motors, that has already shattered prior myths about the inherent limitations of EVs, continues to pioneer battery technology, and is gearing up to surpass all prior EV production combined. At the forefront of decentralized solar energy design, installation, and financing is one company, SolarCity, that has expanded from a small startup five years ago to a full-system service with operations in twelve states and continues to grow. What do these amazing, inspiring companies have in common? They're all more or less simultaneously owned and operated (to varying degrees) by one man, Elon Musk.
Musk was born in South Africa, but left the country as a teenager rather than having to face mandatory military service - something that at the time would have largely meant being an enforcer for apartheid. After graduating college in the US (and dropping out of grad school at Stanford), he began to make bold, long-term plans - not merely for himself, but for the whole of humanity. Three problems, he said, were of paramount significance to the future: "One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space."
Addressing the first of those, Musk twice made a fortune building up and then selling innovative Silicon Valley startups, the more notable of which, PayPal, famously transformed Web-based commerce. But with its low barriers to entry, the industry was already frothing with innovation by the time PayPal was sold to eBay, so the global triumph of the Internet was a virtual fait accompli. Not so the other two problems, energy and space.
At the beginning of the preceding decade, progress on both fronts had stagnated: Despite abortive progress on clean energy following the 1970s oil shock, solar power was almost universally ignored if not ridiculed as an impractical, ideology-driven fantasy by the general business community. Wind power had existed in a few places (particularly the Bay Area) for years, but few resources were being invested in expanding it nation- and worldwide. The laptop and, subsequently, mobile IT revolution had not yet come to fruition, so there was no high-volume industrial demand for light, powerful, long-lasting, quick-charging batteries. Meanwhile, automobiles were exploding in size, with huge SUVs and large trucks increasingly hogging the roads, guzzling gas at pointlessly low efficiencies and belching out carbon dioxide at a record pace.
In space, initial interest in commercial development at the height of dot-com bubble optimism collapsed soon afterward, with devastating consequences for the flight manifests of rocket providers. A prominent example was the bankruptcy of Iridium, leading to the cancellation of a planned constellation of dozens of telecom satellites. The US launch industry was essentially annihilated by the combination of the dot-com bubble burst and its own failure to innovate, having lived off of cost-plus contracting from government agencies since its inception. A few years later, the two largest of these contractors, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, were forced by the ongoing consequences of the collapse to combine their launch capacity under a single umbrella, the United Launch Alliance - at the time, a virtual monopoly, and something guaranteed not to innovate while it remained so.
Now, like many people, you may not see the logic in elevating space to the same priority as clean energy, but it's hard to argue with once articulated: Humanity's sole habitat is imperiled, so we can either change how we manage that habitat to mitigate the threat, grow into new habitats, or both. The third option is obviously the best, since it not only limits the amount of risk involved in the current problem, but limits the risk of all other problems humanity faces as well, and brings the resources of a much wider potential economy to bear on solving problems on the ground. In addition, space - and particularly, human spaceflight - focuses every area of science and technology into a profound, interdisciplinary ferment due to the intense level of systems integration demanded by the environment. Energy, battery storage, materials, recycling, medicine, it all benefits because progress in these areas is an intrinsic side-effect of learning how to operate in space.
So, with what some might call arrogance - and I call the self-assuredness of genuine brilliance - Elon Musk decided he was going to single-handedly set in motion the salvation of the human species. In 2002, he founded SpaceX (technically named "Space Exploration Technologies Corporation" - one of Musk's few weaknesses is lack of imagination in naming) with the operational objective of radically reducing launch costs to Earth orbit, and thereby facilitating the long-term goal of human colonization of Mars. A year later, still going full-steam ahead at his rocket company, Musk became chief investor and chairman of a small EV startup called Tesla Motors - a company whose pre-Musk vision had been little more than to achieve a successful niche product. Under his guidance and vision, Tesla's objective became to utterly transform the auto industry and create globally competitive, affordable mass-production EVs.
As far as addressing clean energy, the achievement of Tesla's aims would be the strongest and most direct possible move: Even with a grid still largely powered by fossil fuels, an EV is far more efficient than a gasoline-powered car. Although it might seem counterintuitive, it is actually better to generate electricity from fuel (in a large, centralized power plant) and then power a car electrically than to power the car directly from burning fuel. Nonetheless, Musk soon realized that his agenda was incomplete, and in 2006 became chief investor and chairman of SolarCity - the first full-service solar power company, offering whole-system design, installation, financing, support, and monitoring. Perhaps most important to its success, SolarCity is technology-neutral: It is not wedded to any one manufacturer's panels, or any one type of panels - it rather builds a road between consumers and their desired solar energy system, which is not at all a trivial thing to work through independently.
In fact, road-building can serve as an apt metaphor for pretty much all three of Musk's businesses, and also works for his past achievements. In the late '90s, there were consumers itching to spend money on the Web and Web-based businesses itching to take it, but the path between them remained often treacherous and unreliable. PayPal changed that more than any other single company then or since. People want EVs and the technology exists to make it happen, but prior to Musk's involvement in Tesla no one seemed to have the right combination of innovative technology and business acumen to overcome the auto industry's massive barriers to entry. And in space, the story is now decades old, and littered with broken dreams: Millions of people yearning to travel where No One Has Gone Before, some perhaps to stay, and plenty of them people of great means, and yet rigid, oligopolous, cost-plus-based industry has utterly failed to innovate or deliver lower launch prices. In all cases, there is both a global need and an unmet consumer demand.
And in all cases, they are already well on the path to ultimate success. The Tesla Roadster shattered the oil-industry-promoted myth of the EV as an underpowered, lame, pathetic statement of automotive martyrdom. It leaves Ferraris and Lamborghinis in its dust, accelerates with a portentously rocket-like ferocity, and is one of the sexiest cars ever to exist outside of a showroom. Its initial performance in development was so devastating to the status quo that the Vice-Chairman of GM was said to have immediately ordered a crash program to push the Chevy Volt concept into production.
But the Roadster was just a stepping stone. Along with its progress on the main product, Tesla has also secondarily pursued and supported development of EV recharging infrastructure, battery technology, and new services geared to the unique needs of EV ownership. Today, with the money it has generated from the Roadster, large investments from and/or partnerships with Daimler and Toyota, and a large US Department of Energy loan guarantee, they are retooling a former Toyota factory to mass-produce the next Tesla EV, the Model S - a luxury sedan roughly half the cost of the Roadster, and slated to enter production next year. That too, however, is just a stepping stone to the ultimate objective - an EV economy car code-named BlueStar, tentatively targeted for production in 2015.
On the skyward front, SpaceX has built a long and storied record of struggles and triumphs over the past near-decade of its existence, with Musk personally on the front lines of the entire process. He is not merely an innovative businessman, but also a clever engineering mind who often directly participates in technical decisions without, according to the reports I've seen, falling victim to the micromanagement impulse. The working culture at SpaceX appears to be almost universally lauded for its open-minded environment, visionary long-term objectives, and world-class talent. But it didn't get there without years of slow progress, devastating setbacks, and dismissive attitudes from the existing launch industry.
The original plan was simple and powerful: Build and fly a small, single-engine commercial rocket, the Falcon 1. Use the flights of Falcon 1 as a testbed for a larger rocket with five of the exact same engines, Falcon 5. Use the flights of Falcon 5 as a testbed for an even larger rocket with nine of those engines, Falcon 9. All along the way, the operational processes involved in building, testing, and launching the rocket would be redesigned and made as efficient and low-cost as possible using Silicon Valley-like innovation practices, drastically reducing overall costs. By 2005, SpaceX had built an entire launch complex and (nearly) operational Falcon 1 rocket using less money than traditional aerospace companies would have spent designing them.
Of course, there is a price to innovation, and that price is being willing to walk a grim gauntlet of highly educational failures. The Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit in three consecutive launches, due to three different issues, but by its fourth (and first successful) attempt, SpaceX had still spent less total money over its entire history than ULA typically spends on the marginal cost of one launch. But the experience was not wasted - far from it: Musk decided they had sufficient experience to skip the Falcon 5 altogether and proceed directly to Falcon 9. Two successful launches of that rocket later, it appears he made the right decision.
From the beginning, the Falcon 9 has been designed with human transport in mind, and has developed in tandem with the Dragon spacecraft - a capsule that can deliver cargo or crew to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The company has already won hundreds of millions of dollars in NASA developmental contracts, and over a billion dollars to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) on a commercial, fixed-price basis - which means basically that, unlike cost-plus contracts, cost overruns would be born exclusively by the company rather than the customer, creating an incentive (for the first time) for contractors to reduce costs and avoid overruns. They are also continuing to compete with other companies, particularly ULA, for commercial crew transport contracts to deliver astronauts to the ISS.
But here are some truly beautiful things to know: (1)Musk has sought to ensure that SpaceX does not depend on NASA money - it would merely accelerate the pace of plans that would still be viable even without NASA support. (2)The company has already achieved launch prices somewhere between a 2/3 to half the price of competitors with only two launches of the Falcon 9, and aims long-term to make that reduction a factor of 10. (3)The SpaceX launch manifest already has customers all the way out to 2017. And (4)all of this money is building up in a company specifically organized around the long-term goal of making humanity a spacefaring, multiplanet species.
With a huge Falcon 9 rocket factory in Hawthorne, CA; a huge rocket testing facility in MacGregor, TX; the purchase and refurbishment of a launch complex at Cape Canaveral; a launch complex on Omelek Island in the Pacific; a launch complex at Vandenberg; the Falcon 9 rocket, twice launched successfully; the Dragon space capsule, launched and recovered once; and a number of employees that has nearly doubled every year since its inception; SpaceX has still not spent in its entire near-decade-long history the marginal cost of a single Space Shuttle flight.
The company is already in development of its next generation of rockets, at varying stages of maturity. Most immediate is the Falcon Heavy - a class of super-heavy-lift Falcon 9 variants capable of, among other things, delivering 31,000 lbs to Mars or about four times as much to LEO. But beyond that, in the conceptual stages, are the Falcon X (presumably the letter 'x', not the Roman numeral 10), the Falcon X Heavy, the Falcon XX, and furthest away, the Falcon XX Heavy, which I speculate would have a delivery capacity roughly in the range of "Holy fucking shit that's a big rocket!"
Doing any major job at any of these companies would be challenging, but Elon Musk is CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect at Tesla, and Chairman of SolarCity simultaneously. And he has consistently done a better job at all of them than most corporate executives do in any capacity whatsoever, all while advancing the hope and progress of mankind, building bridges to a clean, secure future on Earth, and paving a road to the stars. Oh, and he married an impossibly hot actress half his age. All in all....