Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

Due to his interest in rockets, Carmack became a member of a new group of entrepreneurs called the thrillionaires. A member of the group believes it’s no longer good enough to have a slow private jet. What you need is a rocket. 121

Another member of the group is Paul Allen who at age twelve tried to build a rocket. Using the ingredients needed from his chemistry set, he filled an aluminum armchair leg with the fuel mixture. The formula was correct, but he had not looked up the melting point of aluminum. “It made a great noise, and then melted into place,” he said. While growing up, he co-founded Microsoft. As Microsoft became a rather large company, he used his new wealth to invest in the company Scaled Composites that designed SpaceShipOne. It was the rocket that won the Ansari X Prize competition. 121He then co-founded Stratolaunch Systems that originally had SpaceX as customer before SpaceX decided to focus on their own rockets. 21

The thrillionaire Jeff Bezos was five years old when he watched how astronauts landed on the Moon. “NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds,” he said. 296Bezos wanted to become an astronaut. While dreaming about how he one day would travel between the stars, he read books by Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. 411

Bezos never became an astronaut. Instead, he founded the world’s largest online retailer Amazon. But he’s still dreaming about going to space. “It’s always been one of his goals,” an investor in Amazon said. “It’s why he started working out every morning. He’s been ridiculously disciplined about it.” 411

Like Elon, Bezos believes that we have all our eggs in one basket so we need to begin living on other planets. To fulfill the belief, he founded Blue Origin with the goal of dramatically lower the cost of rockets and increase the safety of technology that can get humans into space. The company’s motto is Gradatim Ferociter , which is Latin for “Step-by-Step, Ferociously.” 411

Blue Origin came to the same conclusion as SpaceX: reusable rockets is the key to success in space. Named after Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel into space and the fifth man on the Moon, Blue Origin’s rocket is called New Shepard. In a similar way as SpaceX’s Grasshopper system, the New Shepard can land and takeoff vertically. 411

In 2012, Bezos announced that his company had found the engines from the Saturn V rocket that launched Neil Armstrong together with his crew to space. While the capsule continued to the Moon, the rocket landed in the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 14 000 feet [4300 m]. Bezos wanted to recover the remaining pieces. 296“We’ve seen an underwater wonderland, an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program,” Bezos said. “We photographed many beautiful objects in site and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.” 295After a three-week expedition, the engines were once again above the surface of the ocean. “Every time I see Jeff, I ask him why he’s not doing more in space,” Elon said. 67

The type of competition between the companies founded by the thrillionaires can be defined as a friendly rivalry. They focus on developing inexpensive access to space, rather than wasting resources on trying to ruin each other. “Our competitors are not Paul Allen and Richard Branson, but Boeing, Lockheed, and the big aerospace companies,” Elon said. “I’m really glad to see all the activity in entrepreneurial space and hopefully this heralds a new era of space exploration with price and quality improvements similar to other technology arenas. I do think people will learn a lot from the suborbital RLVs [Reusable Launch Vehicle]. Of all the suborbital RLVs, I like John Carmack’s approach the best, as it has the clearest upgrade path to orbital capability.” 53,285

Another competitor in the modern space race is Copenhagen Suborbitals. The 22-employee strong space venture from Denmark developed a rocket with the goal to launch themselves into space. They wanted to show the world that human space flight is possible without any major government budgets and administration. In 2011, they launched a rocket with a full-scale human model inside of the spacecraft Tycho Brahe, named after the Danish astronomer. But the rocket began to veer off course and had to be aborted 21 seconds after the launch. 398

Elon’s long-term goal with SpaceX is to help, not only trained astronauts, but also ordinary humans to begin living on Mars. “The goal of SpaceX has been to advance technology to create a self-sustaining colony on Mars,” Elon said. “We have a long way to go and this is really hard work. It’s the most difficult thing humanity has ever done, but also the most interesting and inspiring.” 50

To always be reminded of this goal, there’s a large photo of the red planet in the entrance to the SpaceX factory. There’s also a picture of how Mars will look like when the planet is colonized and transformed to be more Earth-like. “Over time you could terraform the planet and make it like Earth,” Elon said. “You heat the planet up by emitting green house gazes, kind of what we are doing on Earth. It will warm the planet up, thicken the atmosphere. The atmosphere on Mars is carbon dioxide, so as you grow plants, we convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen.” 4

But why is Elon so fascinated by Mars? Except for Jupiter’s moons and the Moon, Mars is the only realistic object in space humans can land on. The other objects realistically close enough have a too hostile environment making it impossible for astronauts to land. As Jupiter’s moons are further away than Mars, the choices today are between the Moon and Mars.

Elon’s vision is that we should begin living on other planets. From that perspective is Mars superior compared with the Moon. “On the Moon, you are missing a bunch of elements,” Elon said. “Mars has the minerals and a tremendous amount of water in permafrost. If you could raise the temperature on Mars about 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, it would be under water. On the Moon, water is almost completely absent. Also gravity on Mars is closer to that on Earth.” 60

You can compare the difference between the Moon and Mars with the difference between the North Pole and America. The North Pole is closer to Europe than what America is, so why did we colonize America and not the North Pole? “Even though America was far away and it was a dangerous journey across the Atlantic, it still made much more sense to create a new Amsterdam in New York,” Elon said. 446

The temperature on Mars varies – a common temperature is minus 55 degrees Celsius [minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit] – so the first inhabitants have to endure extreme conditions. Elon compared it with living in a hotel lobby in Canada during the winter. 415“It’s true it’s just rocks and gas, but we can make it nice,” he said. “You’d have large domed living areas, where you could create parks with trees. You’re at a higher level of radiation exposure, so there would be some increased risk of cancer. I mean it’s way more difficult than living on Earth. But we have to do it.” 4

“I think we could potentially send someone to Mars as soon as ten years, and I’d be disappointed if it took us longer than twenty,” Elon said in an interview from 2011. Elon himself will not be one of them. “I used to do quite dangerous things, like flying a fighter jet at low altitude,” he said. “Then I had kids and companies and I want to see them grow up, so I’ve curtailed my dangerous activities. I’d like to go up, but I won’t be the first.” 314