From PayPal to Planetary Travel 97
A user writes "PayPal founder Elon Musk muses about his plans to send rockets to space and his eventual hopes for making life 'multi-planetary.' 'I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,' Musk said. SpaceX is not new, but in a speech at Virginia Tech, Musk talked about the company's troubles and its lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed as he tries to get a slice of the valuable Air Force contracts."
Re:Cosmic Radiation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Launch cost reduction should be our number one space research project. Sending people to the moon and mars when launch costs to LEO alone are 7-15k$/kg is just silly. It's unsustainable. It's asking to get yourself a new albatross around your neck as ISS has started to become.
With the money put into these projects, we should fund a huge amount of launch cost reduction research. Fund development at big companies. At small companies like SpaceX. Fund materials and component research. Fund scramjets. Fund nuclear thermal. Fund ballistic launch. Fund it all. Find what works, toss the rest. It will take money. A lot of it. But once we have reduced launch costs, we get to keep them that way
Elon Musk is NOT PayPal's founder (Score:5, Interesting)
PayPal was founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. Elon Musk's competitor, X.com, merged with PayPal in 2000. Elon Musk became PayPal's CEO and Peter Thiel stepped down. Elon then ordered the PayPal system to be rewritten for Windows (it previously ran on Linux). This rewrite was strongly disliked by engineering, but Elon Musk persisted. The Windows rewrite was completed after six months of hard work, but was deemed too unstable to use. Elon Musk was fired by the board of directors of PayPal in late 2000 through a vote of no confidence. He would have destroyed PayPal.
Peter Thiel stepped up to become CEO, again, and made PayPal into a gigantic success.
C'mon, Elon! (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest problem with Musk is the lack of information at his website. If you want to generate a political movement (and that's what he's trying to do -- vying for Air Force contracts is the very definition of politics) you need to have much better publicity.
And his website sucks. While it's kind of pretty, there's almost no content. The news [spacex.com], in particular, is weak --three sentences and movie that won't play on Linux about the most recent static firing.
He has no excuse. He built PayPal! He knows the 'net! He has seen the kind of virtuous circle that can be built up through good communication. I cannot for the life of me understand why SpaceX fails so spectacularly in the communication mission.
And don't say that they are trying to keep their proprietary details secret -- if he's really interested in promoting inexpensive space travel, he'd *want* those secrets out there!
I contrast this with Carmack's spectacular Armadillo Aerospace [armadilloaerospace.com] site. All of his successes, failures, dead ends, oopses -- all presented in more detail than any sane person could ever want. With Carmack, you really feel like you can understand the process as much as you can without picking up a welding torch.
Anyway, I really can't complain. I'm sitting around making movies instead of spaceships -- please treat this rant as constructive criticism.
Thad Beier