Why SpaceX Dares to Think Big 🚀 Steve Jurvetson on Elon Musk, Mars & 10x Thinking

Now, space is an interesting one. Just— I'll show some fun visuals just because they're fun to see. Rockets are cool, as Elon would say, and tough, right? The fact that they did so many things that worked the first time is both a testament to the simulation tools and the modular reuse that a software architect would bring to an industry like this. So just having software people think about rockets is kind of astounding because Elon committed to build rockets when all he knew was that the raw materials were 3% of the sales price of a rocket. So aluminum and stuff comes in, and then it gets marked up from 3% to 100%. That ratio was the worst of any industry he could find. He figured, I could cut the cost 10x and still have a 70% gross margin. This is crazy. If I need rockets, I'll just build my own. And with that, he committed the resources to build rockets, not even knowing what the design would look like or how he'd get to the goal. He just knew, this is ridiculous. This can be done better. We can use the same engine for all 10 engines on the rocket instead of having all different kinds of suppliers spread across the United States to create jobs in different districts, which is why the shuttle was such a weird amalgam. And just, there's a lot of efficiencies to be had. To give a sense of how big these things are, a whole bus would fit up in that fairing up there. And they've had quite a bit of success. First time trying to get to the space station, first time— well, actually, I'll show you a picture of the one I like. First time landing on legs. The last launch and the one coming up had these landing legs on them. They're huge. Here you can get a sense of scale, these enormous carbon fiber things with helium hydraulic arms that push them down. And the thing that they've successfully done but isn't widely known because the video wasn't very good, and they're hoping on this next launch to get good video and sort of seeing is believing, is that the way this thing works is the rocket with like 80% of the cost, 9 out of the 10 engines, has this booster that goes up and then the rest of the rocket does the rest of its mission. But every other rocket in the history of liquid fuel rockets, this part falls away and is just thrown away. In this case, they turn around, they light the engines again, go back towards where they came, turn around again, use the engines, light them, and come down over the ocean. The legs are down, hovered for a bit, everything is totally under control, then just sort of came down and tipped over. Had it been on land, it would have worked the first time. And that was a— the amount of supersonic modeling that had to be done is astounding. Every other existing aerospace company said, you know, good luck with that. You just— You're going to crash. You go for it. Spend all your money on this because that will never work. That's just way too tough of an engineering challenge. And it worked the very first time, which says a lot, again, about simulation and just approaching things as a new entrant is often awesome. Now, part of the reason that SpaceX has done so many bizarre breakthroughs no one else thought to do is because they want to colonize Mars. That is the founding vision of the company. It is unabashedly, we're here to colonize Mars, not just send the first person to Mars. But a million people to Mars to live there and have an outpost for humanity, to make us a multiplanetary species. This is a cartoon of what that might look like in the future. But landing propulsively was a pretty important design goal for that mission. And oh, by the way, making it cost-effective so you don't throw away the rocket after each flight. The analogy being if you threw away an airplane after every one-way hop, who would fly? Only weirdos, governments and proto-governments, and billionaires. That's the only person who could afford a one-way plane. They're like, oh, blow up the plane after every flight. Right. It's insane, right? So Elon models that getting to Mars and back should be less than $500,000, and that most people won't want to come back, so cut that in half in the long run. And that flying a rocket around the Earth, enjoying the sights, should cost less than flying an airplane around the Earth for comparable payload. Pretty amazing. Now, why do I bring that up? He's thinking about this incredible distant star that none of the existing incumbents care about. So none of the rocket companies Yes. Dare to think about that. That's something that's even beyond NASA's scope of vision, it seems, these days. And so what they do is iteratively improve what they do. They put satellites into orbit around Earth. That's all they think about. You wouldn't take the risk to build some of these capabilities unless you were dreaming of Mars. The latest version is he's switching from kerosene to methane because that's what you can make on Mars to get back. It turns out, though, we have a ton of cheap methane. It's called fracked natural gas here in the US. So it's actually the cheapest way to launch rockets today. But no one would have taken that effort because Yeah, the marginal improvement today for launching satellites, if no one else does it, why bother, right? But if you want to go to Mars and get back from Mars with local fuel processing, it's the smart way to go. And then, so again, he sort of breaks out of like a gravity well or a local inertia well to say, you know, here's a better way to do things. Let's radically change it.