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Net Maverick Sets Sights on Space Internet wunderkind Elon Musk -- who last year steered PayPal to one of 2002's few successful tech IPOs before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion -- has been accused of having an ego the size of a heavenly body. Less than a year after wrapping up his involvement in PayPal, the 31-year-old
Musk says he's already well on his way to realizing his next outsized
ambition -- one that is truly celestial in nature. He's on a mission to revolutionize the technology and economics of the space-launch business with his new company, SpaceX, which Musk says is on course to launch its brand-spanking-new Falcon rocket by the end of the year -- with a U.S. military satellite on board. The money on the line is all Musk's. In the wake of selling PayPal to eBay last year, he popped up at No. 23 on Fortune Magazine's September 2002 list of the 40 wealthiest people under 40, with an estimated fortune of $165 million. (He previously started Zip2, which provided online infrastructure to media companies, and sold it to Compaq in 1999 for a cool $300 million.) Musk says he's plowing "several tens of millions" into the venture, although he plans to raise up to another $100 million -- perhaps as soon as next year -- to finance development of an even bigger launch vehicle. By his own admission, Musk is making some grandiose claims -- among them that he will cut the cost of launching up to 1,000 pounds of payload into near-Earth orbit by up to two-thirds, and that he can buck the dismal success rate of space-launch startups. But Musk says that if his Falcon succeeds where others have failed, the
result could re-energize efforts to exploit and explore space -- including
ultimately providing the inspiration, and perhaps the means, for a manned
mission to Mars. The big players in the space-launch business are Boeing and Lockheed in the United States, Europe's Arianespace and the Russian and Chinese governments. The graveyard of defunct or hibernating private companies that have attempted to build launch businesses includes high-profile startups such as Roton, Beal and Kistler. Among the outfits still standing is Orbital Sciences, which can put payloads in orbit with its Pegasus and Taurus rockets, starting at a reported $20 million price tag. Sea Launch is a multinational venture whose key investors include Boeing. It uses Russian-Ukrainian rockets to lift satellites into geosynchronous orbit from seaborne launch platforms near the equator, at prices reportedly starting at about $65 million. Musk is pricing the launch of a one-ton payload aboard the Falcon at the bargain-basement rate of $6 million -- and says that he'll still make a profit. "In each of the recent efforts to produce a vehicle, at least one of three ingredients has been missing," said Musk, a soft-spoken South African, in a telephone interview from his office in Los Angeles. "They've either lacked a critical mass of technical talent, lacked sufficient financing to get to the finishing line or, third, been reliant on a series of technical miracles." Musk, of course, asserts that he is not making any of those mistakes. He has developed his new rocket in an extremely short period of time.
His newly designed and built rocket engines were test-fired last month. "In launch vehicles, for communications you typically have bundles of serial cables that are as thick as someone's arm," Musk said. "We thought that makes no sense, so we put in an Ethernet system." Musk added that his team put cost first and then attacked every area of design and operations -- such as making the airframe a simple aluminum structure that uses an innovative pressure-stabilization system -- to arrive at a rocket that's going to be cheap to make and, as importantly, cheap to put on the pad and launch. But Musk's plans beg the question -- why leap from launching Internet businesses to the even riskier proposition of launching rockets into space? Musk -- who holds degrees in physics and business -- explains that as his involvement with PayPal was winding down last year, he became interested in a philanthropic effort to blast a robotic mission to Mars to stir public interest in manned exploration of the Red Planet. Musk quickly discovered that the principal obstacle to such a mission was the cost of getting the probe off Mother Earth. He's convinced that American options are too expensive -- and other alternatives, such as a converted Russian nuclear missile, are too unreliable. "The fundamental problem is cost of access to space," Musk says, "and we're trying to make real and significant progress on that issue."Of course, the proof of Musk's theory ultimately lies in a series of successful launches, which are by no means a certain bet. Still, while plenty of people are ready to pronounce Musk, well, nuts, he's also attracting admirers, albeit sometimes grudging ones. "I like people who tilt at windmills, whose unorthodoxy bites other people in the ankles," said Keith Cowing, a former NASA payload integration manager who now runs the NASA Watch website. "I wouldn't call (Musk) a friend, but I'm impressed with his lack of pretension. If he's successful, he could really throw a monkey wrench into everyone's way of doing business." Frank Sietzen, president of the Virginia-based Space Transportation Association, is less guarded in his praise for Musk, whom he termed the great hope for an industry in need of reinvention. But he also warned of the potential consequences for the industry should Musk fail. "If this thing works, the ripple effect is going to be powerful, and the big boys are going to be lined up at (Musk's) door to buy him," Sietzen said. "But the mirror of that is that if he goes broke or there's a limit to how much he's willing to pour down the rat hole, it's going to have a powerful negative effect."
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