Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

“To America!”

“To America in space!”

“I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out myself.” 278

The Russians also visited them in Los Angeles. “We can’t continue unless you give us $5000 in cash,” the Russians demanded. Elon and Ressi heard this on a Saturday because the Russians needed money for a wild night out. But how do you come up with $5000 in Los Angeles on a Saturday? Fortunately, Ressi knew the manager of a hotel, and he told the manager they needed all the cash the hotel had. 278

Before the last visit to Russia, Ressi had become tired of the Russians and remained home. Elon traveled on his own with $21 million to buy three rockets. When he arrived, the Russians had changed their mind. Now they wanted to sell only one rocket for $21 million. Elon argued with them. “Oh, little boy, you don’t have the money?” one Russian replied, and Elon thought it was time to begin looking elsewhere for rockets. 278

These trips to Russia affected Elon in a traumatic way. “I would pay 20 million dollars not to spend six months in Russia,” Elon replied when asked if he wanted to travel to space as a space tourist with a Russian rocket.

It was perhaps just as well the deal with the Russians didn’t happen. Elon realized a deal would be too risky since it involved several parties across different countries. The Russians owned the rocket, but they had to ship it to Ukraine for refurbishment and conversion to launch vehicle. Then they had to ship it back to Russia and towards Kazakhstan where the launch took place. 365Kazakhstan used to be a part of the Soviet Union and is the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome base where all the Russian historical rockets launched. When the Soviet Union dissolved, it was too expensive to move the base to Russia, so the Russian government leases it until 2050.

If one of these parties was delayed, the entire mission had to be postponed 26 months. When you launch a rocket to Mars, you want the shortest possible travel distance from Earth to Mars. The distance to Mars from Earth is constantly changing because Mars and Earth orbit the sun at different speeds. Earth is closer to the Sun and gets around the Sun more quickly than Mars, and both planets have elliptical orbits. Because of these factors, you have a launch window of one month every 26 months. 365,395

“I think we can build a rocket ourselves,” Ressi said. 278Elon had thought this thought before. He wondered why they had to buy rockets from Russia when we don’t buy anything else from Russia – except Vodka. “If you look at Russian rocketry, since the fall of the Soviet Union, there’s really been no significant developments,” Elon said. “The technology has barely progressed.” 351Why were the Russian rockets so cheap? Elon did some engineering calculations. 364“I looked at it and said, I’ll be damned – that’s why he’s been borrowing all my books,” Cantrell said. “He’d been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, ‘I read books.’ Well, it’s true.” 278

They realized that the only reason why the Russian rockets were less expensive compared with the US rockets was that the Russians had already manufactured them. If they needed more rockets, the Russians had to build new rockets where each one became more expensive compared with those already manufactured. “I don’t need these Russians,” Elon said.

The problem wasn’t that mankind didn’t want to go to space – the real problem was that it was too expensive. And without an existing threat, we didn’t want to spend the money. “I came to the conclusion that my initial impression was wrong about not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base,” Elon said. “That was wrong. There’s plenty of will, particularly in the United States. Because United States is the nation of explorers, people came here from other parts of the world. The United States is a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. If people think it’s impossible and it’s going to break the budget, they’re not going to do it.” 63,278

Elon wasn’t the first to understand that the major problem with space was the costs involved. To attack this problem by finding cheaper solutions, the X Prize Foundation established numerous competitions.

Google Lunar X Prize is one of these competitions, but the most well-known was the Ansari X Prize. If you were a non-government organization and could launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, you would get a $10 million reward. The name Ansari originates from Amir Ansari and Anousheh Ansari who donated a larger sum to the competition. Other donors included Elon himself. Anousheh became the first self-funded woman to visit the International Space Station as a “spaceflight participant” – not a “space tourist” as she explained. SpaceShipOne won the price in 2004.

PayPal became a public company in February 2002. After the first day, the stock had increased by almost 55 percent. Elon, who was one of the largest shareholders, had now more financial resources, so Space Exploration Technologies [SpaceX] could be founded in June 2002. The idea behind SpaceX was to manufacture cheap rockets with the ultimate goal to colonize Mars. While the Concorde commercial said, “The world is now a smaller place;” the SpaceX commercial will say, “The universe is now a smaller place.”

There’s a saying in the rocket industry that the easiest way to become a millionaire is to start with a billion. “I was trying to find the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one,” Elon said. “I thought the rocket business was perfect.” 415

To discourage Elon to found SpaceX, one of his friends compiled a video tape with failed rocket launches he made Elon watch. “Elon, you cannot start a launch company. This is stupid,” everyone told him. “I’m going to do it. Thanks,” Elon replied. SpaceX had a controversial business idea, thus it’s not strange his friends were negative. History is filled with similar examples. 29

“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

“The wireless music box [radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”

“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible – commercially and financially it is an impossibility.”

“Sorry Steve [Jobs], here’s why Apple Stores won’t work.”

Also Elon can be negative to new business ideas. When Twitter wasn’t as big as it is today, Elon didn’t believe in the 140-character-messages. His wife was a Twitter addict. When he wandered by and looked at the stream of tweets on her screen, he said, “I don’t really get it.” 144Elon would later join Twitter and has now around 740 000 followers. His first tweet to the world was “Please ignore prior tweets, as that was someone pretending to be me :) This is actually me.”

Despite the negative thoughts from everyone around him, Elon knew the world needed a company like SpaceX. Perhaps he remembered a quote by his role model Walt Disney who said, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” Disney knew what he talked about – when he decided to build Disneyland, everyone thought it would end up as closed and forgotten within the first year. “My rationale there was that it was an important enough cause – at least to me – that it was worth putting funds at risk and possibly losing them,” Elon said. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough. The reason I’m doing SpaceX is not because I think this is the highest return on investment. I think starting a rocket company is an unusual thing to do and pretty risky. But I’m a big believer in us becoming a space exploring civilization.” He never asked what his wife thought of the idea to start a rocket company. 128,278,354,410