THE SKY'S THE LIMIT
May 29TH, 2003
The Economist

A new way to escape the gloom of the IT industry. Go into space

OWNING a yacht is passé. For those in the information-technology industry lucky enough to have made a fortune during the boom years, there is now a far sexier alternative: owning a rocket. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is financing an attempt to build a low-cost reusable spacecraft that can carry people into space. John Carmack, the programming genius behind such computer games as “Doom” and “Quake”, is paying for a similar venture. But most ambitious of all is Elon Musk, who founded two dotcoms—Zip2 and PayPal—and sold them for $307m and $1.5 billion respectively. His goal is Mars.

Mr Musk's original plan, conceived in the months after the sale of PayPal, was to launch a small unmanned probe, costing around $20m, that would have landed on Mars and sent back pictures of a few plants growing inside a sealed environment. By capitalising on the ensuing media coverage, Mr Musk hoped to win support and money for America's space agency, NASA, to mount a manned mission to Mars. But he soon discovered that launching his probe would cost a minimum of $30m, and that started him thinking.

Unlike computing, where costs have been driven steadily down and performance continuously increases, the rocket-launching business has made little progress since the 1960s. Despite several failed attempts by other firms, Mr Musk sensed an opportunity, and set up a new firm, SpaceX, with the goal of building a low-cost launcher. The resulting machine, called Falcon, is not technically complex. However, it combines a number of innovations, including the use of modern materials and a reusable first stage, to reduce costs to a mere $6m per launch—the first of which is due later this year.

Mr Musk outlined his plans at "The Future in Review", a wide-ranging conference on technology that was held recently in San Diego. His presentation ended a day during which luminaries of the computer industry--including Michael Dell, Craig Mundie of Microsoft and Patrick Gelsinger of Intel--discussed the future of computing. In contrast to the heady days of the internet boom, it is difficult to get excited about grid computing or identity management. Computers have become a commodity, sales are stagnating, the industry is maturing, and there is talk of a "post-technology era" in which innovation takes a back seat to improvements in business processes and supply-chain management. None of which sounds terribly thrilling. Hence the interest in space. What better way to escape the malaise of the computer business than to jump into a rocket?

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