Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

Maybe Elon remembered his grandfather Joshua’s tragic aircraft accident when he in 2005 decided to sell his fighter jet. “Sadly, I don’t pilot myself anymore,” he said. “I have to work when I fly and have too many thoughts in my head to pay the necessary attention to the plane – I can be absentminded at times, which is a really bad habit for a pilot.” 399

A manned voyage to Mars will probably be a collaboration between SpaceX and NASA. “If we do SpaceX right, NASA will use it for human exploration of space, and that is the ultimate goal,” Elon said. 60In comparison, about half of the financing for Christopher Columbus voyage came from private investors, while the other part came from an almost broke Spanish government.

Columbus had to convince his financiers he would bring back treasure from India to get the ships needed to travel west. SpaceX, however, will not try to bring back treasure from Mars. It will always be far cheaper to mine on Earth compared with first mining on Mars and then transport the commodities to Earth. “There are a couple of things I think are pretty bogus,” Elon said. “One is space mining, another is space solar power. If you calculate how much it cost to bring either the photons from space solar power back to Earth, or the raw material back to Earth, the economics don’t make sense.” 364He added that mining asteroids could make sense, but a mission to Mars will not be dependent on the ability to mine asteroids. 356

A company believing in the idea to mine asteroids is Planetary Resources. The company argued that 1500 asteroids are as “easy” to reach as the Moon. These asteroids are filled with precious resources, everything from water to platinum. “We expect to mine water out of C-type asteroids for the first product,” an engineer from Planetary Resources said. “Water gets used for everything in space – drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, radiation shielding… and is very expensive in space given launch costs. Structural materials would likely be second – bulk material is expensive in space. After that, we would look into mining materials that are scarce on Earth. Those have industrial uses that are likely to grow as world’s economy grows.” 377

One of the advisers to Planetary Resources is the film director James Cameron. When Elon founded SpaceX, he held seminars at the Mars Society together with Cameron, who has directed movies like Titanic and Terminator . 60Cameron would like to visit Mars and he believes we humans have to begin living on other planets if we want to survive. “If we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid on an impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward with a dumb look on our faces,” he said. “We need to evolve beyond the dinosaurs.” 415

To increase our interest in space, Cameron believes the space industry should contact Hollywood to make the space more visually dramatic. He compared it with his movie Titanic . The images we see from space today are similar to if we had watched the Titanic movie through Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes. It wouldn’t have been a good movie. 415

Cameron has a movie script ready for a new movie about Mars. This time a more realistic movie compared with the earlier movies with a Mars theme. “The Mars movies have been so bad,” Elon said. “I mean, honestly. And it’s going to be tricky getting funding for another Mars movie after John Carter. It was a good comic book, and they totally screwed up the movie.” 316

When we tried to reach the Moon in the 1960s, some argued that landing on the Moon would be the noblest expression of the century, while other argued it would be the high mark of the fundamental insanity of the time. You can today hear the same reasoning regarding a manned mission to Mars. “Since 1989, when a study estimated that a manned mission [to Mars] would cost $500 billion, the subject has been toxic,” Elon said. 305

Traveling to space is expensive. Elon argued it’s worth the same amount of money we put on lipsticks or cosmetics each year, but less than what we spend on health care. 350The former US President John F. Kennedy made a similar comparison. “This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined,” he said. “That budget now stands at $5400 million a year – a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” 19

“Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars,” Elon said. “It’s about getting the basic fundamentals in place. That was true of the English colonies [in America]; it took a significant expense to get things started.” 313But after things got started, the infrastructure in America improved each year, and it became cheaper and faster to travel across the Atlantic Ocean. The reason Titanic collided with an iceberg was that the owner demanded that their ship should be the fastest across the Atlantic Ocean. In a similar way, future spaceships will compete in who can travel the fastest from Earth to Mars, hopefully without colliding with an asteroid.

Several old ideas on how to travel to Mars are collected in the book Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning . Wernher von Braun wrote the novel The Mars Project about an expedition to Mars. His idea was to build ten spaceships in space in a similar way as when the International Space Station was constructed. 950 rockets had to be launched from Earth to get the parts and fuel up to space. Von Braun found inspiration for this project from the large Antarctic expeditions. Between 1946 and 1947, an army of 4700 men, 13 ships, and 23 airplanes participated in the expedition Operation High Jump. No satellites were available at the time, so the Antarctic explorers were isolated from the world in a similar way as the Mars explorers would be.

These earlier attempts to reach Mars remained at the project stage. What the visionaries would have needed was capital and experience from large technological enterprises. Elon may have experience from large technological enterprises, but lacks the capital. But as SpaceX’s rockets improve, they will make more money by launching cargo, satellites, astronauts, and tourists, so in the end there will be a mission to Mars.

The organization Mars One has the vision to establish a permanent human colony on Mars. To help them get the material and astronauts to Mars, they say they will use rockets from SpaceX. Their idea is to launch the first rocket with supplies in 2016, and then will more rockets launch with supplies until the first humans arrive in 2023. In 2033, the colony will have 20 settlers. The money needed to pay for this mission will come from sponsors and a reality television series. As of 2013, more than 100 000 people have applied to be a part of this mission. 390

When people have begun living on Mars, SpaceX will build a large cruiser that will travel between Earth and Mars, most likely called the Mars Colonial Transporter. The cruiser will never land on any plant, so to get to the surface, a smaller craft will come and pick you up from the cruiser. “It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost,” Elon said. “Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly.” 278In comparison, it took a sailing ship more than nine weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, but it took the Concorde only three hours in the 21st century. 13

When both the price and the time of the journey to Mars decreased, more volunteers will be motivated to emigrate from Earth. Elon argued that if you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California, or around half a million dollars, then enough people would buy a ticket and immigrate to Mars. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure,” Elon said. “But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there will be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still 8000 people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.” 288