<i>'If he dies there, what should be engraved on his tombstone? Musk frowns a moment, then grins. "Holy shit, I'm on Mars, can you believe it?"'</i><p>Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now.<p>Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars.<p>NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars</a>
The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that.<p>The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it.<p>It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
"SpaceX's focus on reusable technology has slashed costs – the company says it can get an astronaut to the space station for $20m, versus $70m charged by Russia for a seat on a Soyuz rocket.
SpaceX is testing reusable prototype rockets that can return to Earth intact, rather than burn up in the atmosphere.
If successful, rockets could be reused like aeroplanes, cutting the price of a space mission to just $200,000, for fuel."<p>This is amazing.
<i>In order to get support they compromised and agreed to pay for essentially anti-environmental ads for a couple of key conservative senators. And that was not right. You should fight on the merits of the cause, not play some Machiavellian game where you agree to support things that are bad in order to get some things that are good passed.</i><p>Says a lot about integrity of our beloved Internet giants. Among the key supporters of FWD.us initiative, apart from Facebook, are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. And also, HN's own PG :)
An old argument for going to Mars is that spreading beyond Earth is necessary for survival in the very long term. It makes sense, but it always seems like there are so many other causes, more urgent, to spend our resources on. Musk's answer to that:<p>"The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."<p>I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...
Here's my input on the subject: <a href="http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-could-cut-travel-time-to-mars-from-6-months-to-under-30-days/" rel="nofollow">http://www.michaelraven.me/nasas-new-fusion-driven-rocket-co...</a>
We can not survive in outer space in our current form. Human body requires too much resources, is sensitive to radiation and needs gravity. But this may change in near future :-)