| ELON MUSK Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Ashlee Vance New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2015 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-06-230123-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-06-230123-3 | 392pp. | HC/FCI | $28.99 | |
"We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade," said Peter Theil, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. "On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S. We would rather explain his success as being a fluke. There's the whole Iron Man thing in which he's presented as a cartoonish businessman—this very unusual animal at the zoo. But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it's a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon." – Page 321 |
A final assessment of Elon Musk's contributions to society must wait until he has finished making them. But this much can be said without fear of rational dispute: Musk has changed the industries in which he is participating in positive ways.
Sad to say, NASA and its traditional contractors are no longer the can-do operations we remember from the days of Apollo. They still perform useful work in space, but mainly with robotic probes. ISS is useful too, but it is a far cry from what it ought to be: a facility where crewed spacecraft are checked out and sent off deeper into the solar system. For this, we have Congress to thank.
Richard Shelby is the senior Senator from Alabama. Huntsville, Alabama is the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Marshall currently supports the ISS and has long been the lead center for NASA's propulsion research. Shelby is determined to preserve that role and the jobs that go with it — even if this means preserving overpriced rockets which regularly slip their development schedules.
"Some of the most disheartening moments of the hearing arrived when Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama took the microphone for questioning. Shelby felt compelled to play the role of hometown booster by repeatedly pointing out that ULA had enjoyed sixty-eight successful launches and then asking Musk what he made of that accomplishment. The aerospace industry stands as one of Shelby's biggest donors and he's ended up surprisingly pro-bureaucracy and anticompetition when it comes to getting stuff into space. "Typically competition results in better quality and lower-priced contracts—but the launch market is not typical," Shelby said. "It is limited demand framed by government-industrial policies." – Footnote, Pages 251-2 |
Shelby is not doing this all by himself. Every member of Congress is delighted if he has a NASA center or major contractor in his district. American aerospace has become risk averse and addicted to a sort of corporate welfare. It tends to operate according to the dictum, "There's always time to do it over, but never enough to do it right the first time." This is why SpaceX and the other new-space startups can run rings around the old guard — if they are permitted to.
I say it's vital that they be permitted to.
"The Earth is too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all of its eggs in." – Footnote, Pages 197-8 |
Previous to the advent of this company, homeowners could put solar photovoltaic systems on their houses, but they had to pay for them up front. The cost of a decent-capacity system would run into tens of thousands of dollars, and even though it would repay its cost over a span of years, the large initial outlay meant few homeowners could afford it.
Enter the brothers Lyndon and Peter, Musk's cousins. At his urging, they studied the market for solar systems and came up with the idea of leasing PV systems to homeowners. SolarCity is now the largest provider of personal PV systems in the U.S. with [400,000] customers. The lease can be transferred if customers sell their house, and at the end of the lease, they can upgrade if they choose to panels using more efficient solar cells. Lately SolarCity has begun offering batteries built by Tesla. These extend the times that homeowners can operate on green power. SolarCity, thus, is one of the companies advancing the acceptance of carbon-free power.
Vehicles driven by electricity are not a new thing. Indeed, they preceded cars driven by the internal combustion engine. But in the modern era, the IC engine had become king despite its greater complexity, lower efficiency, and higher cost of maintenance. A great deal of progress has been made in improving its reliability and raising its efficiency. It nonetheless cannot match the electric car in these areas, because of the laws of physics. Also, its exhaust products have long been problematical. First was the emission of lead, due to antiknock additives; additives containing lead were banned in order to avoid health problems. Next came catalytic converters to reduce emissions inherent to the combustion process itself: unburned hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen that led to smog in large cities. Finally there is carbon dioxide, implicated in global warming. Removing lead from gasoline, and adding the catalytic converter, increased the complexity and cost of IC-engine cars. There is no practical way to stop them emitting carbon dioxide — other than removing the IC engine completely.
Electric cars had been curiosities built by hobbyists, or at most a small part of automakers' offerings. General Motors developed an electric car in the 1990s, and then killed it when management apparently decided it would threaten their traditional vehicles. They were right, but scrapping their electric was not the solution. Which is where Musk comes in. His company Tesla bids fair to make the electric car the mainstream choice of consumers.
The purpose of SpaceX is embodied in its formal name: The Space Exploration Company. It is Musk's most outrageous enterprise — and his most courageous effort. SpaceX is the means by which Musk intends to assure the long-term survival of humanity. He means to make us a multi-planet species. Confined to a single planet, Earth, we are vulnerable to extinction due to a number of possible events. If self-sustaining human outposts were established on other planets, the number of ways we could all be wiped out in one fell swoop is greatly reduced. Mars is the least inhospitable planet where such an outpost might be established, and so that is Musk's ultimate goal.
The immediate obstacle to Musk's plan is the high cost of lofting anything into space. And here some background is in order.
Most everyone remembers the space race, even if only from watching historical footage of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. These NASA programs were part of a successful effort, motivated by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in October 1957, to put a man on the Moon and thereby show the world the superiority of America and its capitalist system. It was indeed a race, and the scope of the Soviet effort was not widely understood at the time because it was mostly kept secret. America did win the race, and it was a momentous achievement. But once a race is won, you don't keep running it.
There were at the time reasons other than showing up a rival nation for going into space. All those other reasons remain worthwhile, and quite a few of them have proved their worth. We now rely on weather forecasts, worldwide communications, geographic locators, and environmental monitoring all thanks to satellites. These benefits, viewed as pipe dreams a generation ago, are now taken for granted. In addition we have learned a great deal about the solar system by means of robotic probes. The one benefit we have not obtained from space is greater than all the others: the ability of humans to travel the solar system.
The high bar preventing us from venturing out into the solar system is the high cost of that first step: getting from Earth's surface to Earth orbit. Yes, there are physical challenges. Humans in space must carry along the air, water, and other necessities to maintain life. They are subject to lethal radiation, and will be weakened by the effects of low gravity. But these challenges would be overcome if the cost of reaching Earth orbit came down. Elon Musk is bringing it down. It remains to be seen if he will bring it down sufficiently to open the gates of the solar system to human exploration. But it has long been clear that NASA's cost was far from the minimum; indeed, objective analysis shows it to be artificially inflated.
At the core of what makes Elon Musk unique is that he sees the big picture and is driven to do something to change it. His drive springs from what Vance calls "the unified field theory of Elon Musk." This has a business side and a social side. The business side is that Musk understands how to achieve synergy among his various businesses. Tesla provides the impetus to improve batteries, which then enhance SolarCity's prospects by letting its customers expand the operating times of their solar array systems. On the social side, both businesses buttress our ability to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and lessen the impacts of climate change.
SpaceX demonstrates similar synergies, although their benefits will take longer to realize. Undercutting the cost of existing launchers makes it easier to capture launch business, for which there is pent-up demand. It also speed the day when solar system travel becomes routine. This is a social benefit because it can ease many current problems. For one thing, lowering the cost of access to space improves the chances of putting solar power satellites up, thereby making possible the beaming to Earth of constant carbon-free power. Over the longer term, opening up the solar system to human exploration makes the survival of human civilization more likely.
The naysayers will, as they do with all innovators, persist in proclaiming Musk will fail in his bold ventures — especially SpaceX. Their gloom-song is one I've heard too many times before. I'll simply quote what I wrote in reviewing Paula Berinstein's 2002 book Making Space Happen:
No, the biggest barriers to getting into space today are not technical ones; they are political and economic ones. This is why business sense is the important asset. Good businessmen with an interest in space — space entrepreneurs — are not so common as the techies; but they do exist. Jim Benson is one example. He took a look at NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission, with its $250 million price tag, and decided that it could be done a lot cheaper by the private sector. A feasibility study done in 1997 by industry experts confirmed that $25 million would do it. An order-of-magnitude cost reduction is not bad. (And note that this is with the existing stable of launch vehicles — themselves much more expensive than they might be.)
The truth is that launches provided by NASA cost far more than they need to, and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon. (I'll happily provide more support for this contention.) The space agency has other problems as well. It needs to return to its roots and let the upstart startups — SpaceX and others — get us into LEO (low Earth orbit.)
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