When we were at a family party a few weeks ago, my wife brought up the following question: “Who would you have dinner with if you could have dinner with anyone in the world?”
After clarifying the rules of the dinner (no family members, no dead people), we started by listing some of the usual suspects: Barack Obama, J.K. Rowling, Lionel Messi, Oprah, George W. Bush. We all agreed that it would be interesting to have dinner with people who are famous as well as former presidents, no matter what our political affiliations are.
We also thought of some people who were not quite as well known, but were famous to each of us individually. These were people like Kara Goucher (for those of us who run), Dave Grohl (for those of us who rock!), and David Copperfield (because … magic).
For me, the easy answer was Elon Musk. I have been fascinated with everything that he has been able to accomplish over the last 15-20 years and am even more fascinated by what he is trying to do for our future.
He is trying to save the human race from extinction!
Seriously, that is his main goal with all of the projects and companies that he is working on, especially SpaceX and Tesla. He wants to make sure that we, as a species, will have the best chance to survive in the future.
Elon’s goal: Save the human race from extinction.
One of my goals: Encourage people to live a great life … with the help of money.
OK … Elon’s goal is a bit loftier than mine!
In this article, I will explore why Elon wants to achieve this goal and how he will use SpaceX to help him achieve it.
Before SpaceX and Tesla
One of the first companies that Elon helped to start was X.com. This company was eventually merged with a company named Confinity to become the company that we know today as PayPal. Of course, the goals of founding this company were not to save the human race. Instead, this company was envisioned as the future of online banking.
Not that exciting when compared to Elon’s main goal!
However, it was pretty exciting for Elon and the other shareholders of PayPal when it was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Since he was the largest shareholder of PayPal, Elon ended up walking away with about $180 million dollars from this transaction.
Pretty good for a few years of work!
Now, let’s take a minute and put ourselves in Elon’s position. Let’s say we just sold a company and made $180 million dollars. Would we keep it safe, investing in simple options? This would allow us to limit our stress and be guaranteed to never run out of money. We might take a few years off and buy a small yacht or do a lot of traveling. Or maybe we would buy a company in an industry that we had a lot of experience with. Perhaps banking, computers, or something that we have already done?
Those would have all been fine, normal, and viable options for Elon. Those are even things that most of us would have done, if we were put in his situation.
Why Elon went into space
However, Elon did not sit around and rest. He didn’t even invest in an industry or company that he was already familiar with. Instead, he started a rocket company. Because … well … banking and rockets are similar?
Actually, starting a rocket company was kind of an accident for Elon. This accident leads back to the 1960s and all of the hype around the space program back then. As anyone who was alive back then could tell you, the moon landing in 1969 was extremely cool. It was amazing that we were able to send someone to the moon using simpler technology that what we currently have in our cell phones.
Going to the moon was also talked about by pretty much everyone in the United States and around the world. People gathered around their TVs to watch the moon landing and the astronauts who went there became iconic figures.
Of course, getting to the moon was about more than just a sense of adventure and scientific exploration. There was also the backdrop of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. As a matter of fact, that was probably the reason that we were able to get to the moon when we did. Both countries invested a lot of money into their space programs to help determine which country was superior.
However, after the United States won the race to the moon, there wasn’t another frontier that could be explored as easily because the technology for additional exploration wasn’t yet available. Sure, we went to the moon a few more times. However, when moon exploration resulted in disaster during the Apollo 13 mission, public enthusiasm (and funding) started to wan.
So from the early 1970s until the turn of the century, public enthusiasm for space exploration was low. We did a lot of cool things in space, like building the International Space Station and putting satellites in orbit around the Earth. However, nothing topped the 1969 moon landing.
As a great Wait But Why blog post details, it was kind of like a magician pulling a whale out of a hat in 1969 and then trying to keep everyone excited by pulling a rabbit out of a hat in the years thereafter. It just wasn’t that excited when compared to the moon landing!
Elon’s thought
Elon recognized that the excitement for space exploration had long since faded. So, since he was a multi-millionaire, and prone to doing crazy things, he thought of a way to rekindle the excitement for space exploration.
What if he could send a rocket to Mars, plant something in a greenhouse, and send a picture of this plant back to Earth?
Wouldn’t that be enough to rekindle the excitement for space exploration? After all, technology had come a long way since the 1960s. Maybe technology had even advanced enough to get people to seriously think about exploring Mars and even sending people there. However, public enthusiasm had to be piqued. Elon thought that putting a plant on Mars would help to make people excited about space exploration again.
In 2001, Elon set off to Russia with $20 million and the goal of buying a few Soviet rockets left over from the Cold War days. He felt that he could use these rockets to help send the plant and greenhouse to Mars. The problem was, he wasn’t taken seriously and ended up leaving empty-handed.
He probably should have stopped right there. He probably should have known that his dream to put a plant on Mars would have to stay a dream and never turn into a reality.
However, he didn’t let the setback in Russia squash his dream. Instead, he expanded it. After all, he was getting ready to sell PayPal and knew that he would have a little bit of time on his hands soon.
So why not start a rocket company?
Why Elon started SpaceX
In 2002, SpaceX was founded.
And the reason that it was founded is what makes Elon so fascinating.
His goal, with the founding of SpaceX, was to put 1,000,000 people on Mars! He actually wants to colonize Mars and make humans a multi-planetary species!
Colonize Mars? We hadn’t even been to the moon in 30 years. How could we put 1,000,000 people on the Red Planet, where nothing is currently alive? And, even more importantly, why would we want to colonize Mars? Why would we want to take 1,000,000 people from their comfy homes here on Earth and bring them to a desolate, unforgiving planet like Mars?
Again, the answer has to do with saving the human race from extinction.
As you may already know, there have been a lot of events over the past 500 million years or so that have caused mass extinctions. We are not sure exactly what all these events were, but we are sure that there have been 5 mass extinctions over this time. Some may even say that we are in the midst of a 6th mass extinction right now, due to human caused changes.
Either way, we know that there have been events which have caused entire species to become extinct. We also know that there are going to be many more extinction events. For instance, there could be an asteroid that covers the planet in dust or just a shift in a climate.
Without a doubt, there will be another mass extinction event. Of course, we don’t know when it will happen and the odds are very strong that it won’t happen in our lifetime. But it definitely will happen. And we as a species could become extinct!
Elon knows this. He also knows that we can help to prevent mass extinction as a human race by becoming a space-faring civilization. For instance, if a large enough asteroid were to hit earth, there might be a chance that the entire human population could be wiped out. However, if there were millions of humans on another planet, then at least our entire species wouldn’t become extinct.
Basically, Elon wants to create a backup plan for our planet.
Many early troubles
After Elon’s troubles in the Soviet Union, he founded SpaceX. And he found out that a rocket company and rockets in general are really difficult to build.
However, even though rockets are difficult to build, his company eventually built a rocket and was ready to test it. With a nod to the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars, the Falcon 1 took off on March 24, 2006. Unfortunately, like many rockets, the first test launch ended in failure. Similar failures on launches 2 and 3 took place in 2007 and 2008.
The problem was, after the 3 early failures Elon and SpaceX were running out of money. Although he originally invested $100 million into SpaceX, most of this money was used up by the 3 launch failures. So, by late September 2008, Elon was down to his last chance. Fortunately, this launch succeeded.
Success!
It’s important to recognize how much money and effort Elon invested in the development of this company. It’s also important to know how close SpaceX was to going broke.
At the end of 2008, we were stuck in a recession and it became almost impossible to find funding for most companies. If it wasn’t for that successful fourth launch and a subsequent $1.6 billion contract with NASA, SpaceX would have certainly been bankrupt.
However, because of this huge success, SpaceX had the opportunity to grow into the company that it is today. If you look at the schedule for upcoming space launches, SpaceX seems to be every fourth or fifth launch throughout the world.
Pretty incredible for a company that was one launch away from bankruptcy in 2008!
How SpaceX will get to Mars
Despite finally getting to space, SpaceX couldn’t just be like any rocket company. Instead, they have innovated by reducing the price of each launch. In 2018, the company was able to launch a kilogram of weight into space for 5 or 10 times less than many of its competitors. And the costs are still going down!
SpaceX has realized that having reusable rockets was one of the keys for bringing costs down. After working on reusable rockets for years, they finally launched the first ever reusable rocket in 2017.
As costs continue to come down, it will eventually become possible for us to go to Mars!
Of course, when the first astronauts go to Mars, the costs will still be enormous. However, the goal is eventually for people to be able to purchase tickets to Mars for a price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars!
Think about that.
Instead of buying a vacation home or a huge motorhome, someone could decide to move to Mars!
When costs come down to a price that allows even a small portion of the population to afford a move to Mars, a colony will eventually be established. And after the colony is established, more people will continue to hear about moving to Mars. It will be like moving to the “New World” back in the 1600s. Adventurers, entrepreneurs, and people just seeking a change will hear about friends and neighbors selling all of their belongings and buying a ticket to start a new life on a brand new world!
Eventually, we will colonize Mars and become a multi-planetary species! We will have helped to save the human race from inevitable extinction by becoming a space-faring society. After traveling and living on Mars, obvious next steps will be traveling to other moons within the solar system and even other star systems.
And it all started with Elon Musk! Can you see why I think that he is the coolest person alive?
By the way, he also started a pretty cool car company. But that’s an article for another time …
*If you enjoyed learning about the world’s coolest person, be sure to click at the top of the page to subscribe and get the next article delivered directly to your inbox! No annoying spam ever. I promise!
**For additional reading, check out this excellent book by Ashlee Vance. You may even want to buy it instead of just renting it from your local library. It’s really that good!
***Tim Urban wrote an excellent set of posts about Elon on his fascinating website, WaitButWhy.com. If you like this brief introduction of Elon, you can spend a couple of hours reading Tim’s posts. And be sure to check out some of Tim’s other writings about science and technology. I especially liked this one about artificial intelligence and this one that discusses the question of whether we are alone in the universe.
So … who would you have dinner with if you could have dinner with anyone in the world. Let us know in the comments below.
And, as always, thanks for reading!
~Nathan
Let’s keep living a great life … with the help of money. So what’s next?
- You can travel for free by using rewards credit cards.
- You can get motivated and get out of debt.
- You can check out the next post or the previous post and continue to learn.
But no matter what you decide to do, let’s leave the ordinary behind and take action today!
