Elon Musk, a cofounder of PayPal, is arguably the most 21st-century entrepreneur on the planet. In addition to running Tesla Motors, the electric-car manufacturer, and SolarCity, which sells and installs solar panels, he is the founder of SpaceX, the only private enterprise currently launching rockets into space. Here, he explains why we need to become a spacefaring species.
The Iraq war, the presidential election, and the debt crisis dominate today's headlines, but will amount to little more than a footnote in the long-term annals of history. To figure out what is truly significant, we need to take the longest possible view. There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness. The next big moment will be life becoming multiplanetary, an unprecedented adventure that would dramatically enhance the richness and diversity of our collective consciousness. It would also serve as a hedge against the myriad--and growing--threats to our survival. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct.
What stands in the way? The ridiculously recalcitrant problem of big, reusable, reliable rockets. Size is fundamental for technical reasons. Only about 1 percent of the liftoff mass of a highly efficient rocket can be accelerated to Mars transfer velocity--it is hard to get there. Reliability is important for obvious reasons. Even the safety record for manned missions close to Earth would be unacceptable. And reusability is critical for economic reasons. Airlines exist because planes are reusable. With the partial exception of the space shuttle, rockets are single-use.
Somehow we have to solve these problems and reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 100. That's why I started SpaceX. By no means did I think victory was certain. On the contrary, I thought the chances of success were tiny, but that the goal was important enough to try anyway.
We're making progress. If we succeed in recovery and reflight of our Falcon 9 rocket, which carries 11 tons of payload into orbit, it will be the first fully reusable orbital rocket and one of the most significant developments since the dawn of rocketry. At $35 million to manufacture, it's already four times cheaper than comparable single-use vehicles from Boeing or Lockheed. However, since Falcon 9 costs only $200,000 to refuel (and reoxidize), an efficient refurbishment and launch operation would allow the production costs to be amortized over many flights. This has the potential to bring the per-launch price down to about $1 million, a hundredfold improvement over current costs. And if that happens, life will become sustainably multiplanetary in less than a century.
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