Elon Musk is launching a giant rocket into
outer space. Hopefully. Unless it explodes.
He wants to start sending people to Mars soon
after the year 2020, and get enough people
there - probably about a million - so that
it becomes a self-sustaining human colony.
If he wants to establish a colony on Mars,
he needs to fund the project, and that's
what this is all about - it's creating a
business and it is going to be a unique business.
This will essentially give them a monopoly
on bringing heavy loads into space, at least
for the next couple years. Things like maybe
their Dragon spacecraft that they're working
on, which Elon wants to use to send paying customers around the moon.
If he figures out a way to launch really heavy
things into space for a lot less than it costs,
then we'll probably launch a lot more heavy
things into space, like people to Mars, like
space miners to asteroids, like probes to
other parts of the solar system. There's
a lot more opportunities for this, and I think
Elon is looking for "if you make it cheaper
you'll do more of it."
One big reason is just kind of exploration
for exploration's sake. This idea that really
the next big step that humans need to do is
go out into space - we're never going to
have Star Trek without that.
This level of Silicon Valley entrepreneur
- all of them started out as kids reading
science fiction about space. This is something
they've been thinking about since they were
in the single digits. Now they're in a position
to do something about it.
