Last Sunday had all the makings of what songwriter Johnny Nash would call a bright sunshiny day. They could see clearly now, the rain was gone. There were no obstacles in their way. Better yet, it was the 44th birthday of wonder boy Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket was headed off to resupply the International Space Station. How could anything go wrong?
Astronauts Scott Kelly and Terry Virts high-fived one another as the beast left the launch pad, smiling at the bright prospects for dinner. “I’ll be having the Beef Bolognese,” announced Virts, “piled atop the finest linguini, of course.” Kelly nodded his approval. “A fine choice,” he agreed, “but I will go with the Pheasant Under Glass, perhaps served with a robust rustic red from southern France.”
About that time, say 2 1/2 minutes from liftoff, the rocket went KER-BLOOEY, dissolving into tiny pieces and descending into the waiting Atlantic. Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko looked up from the NASA video feed with a glum expression There goes dinner. “It’s another Tequila Sunday,” he sighed.
What’s going on here? This is the third cargo mission to fail in the last eight months, one of them by Russia in April. If this was baseball, they’d be putting these rocketmen on the bench. The Republicans are always telling us private industry does it better but we’re not so sure. Musk advises “There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank,” which caused the problem. Oh. The Russians will try to send their own resupply rocket today or tomorrow. Let’s hope they make it. The crew up there could wind up eating unseasoned quinoa on water biscuits. This is how we wind up with alcoholic astronauts.
Who is this Elon Musk, anyway? Aside from being the new Patron Saint of space investigators and rocket watchers, a deity who does no wrong, Musk is occasionally a human being, warts and all. Born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Reeve Musk also holds citizenship in Canada and the United States, where he lives in Bel Air, L.A. He was educated at Queen’s University in Ontario and the University of Pennsylvania. His net worth is 13.6 billion as of this month. In 2000, he married Canadian author Justine Wilson, divorcing her in 2008 after she produced six sons in seven years, including a set of triplets. After they split, Wilson gave an interview to Marie Claire magazine in which she described herself as a “starter wife.” In 2010, Elon wed English actress Talulah Riley. Two years later, he divorced her. Tululah was not so easy to dispatch, however. The two remarried in 2013. Can’t live with her, can’t live without her. Musk was trying “without” again, redivorcing Tululah in 2014. You can never count out a girl named Tululah, however. The pair were seen together at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and Musk was wearing a wedding ring at this year’s Tesla Motors shareholders’ meeting.
In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with $28,000 from their father, Errol, developing and marketing an Internet “city guide” to the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. In 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million, Musk’s share being $22 million. He promptly founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company with $10 million of his profits from Zip2. One year later, X.com merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal, which eventually became the name of the merged company. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $165 million. As in, ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS! What does a poor country boy from Pretoria do with that kind of money? Jed Clampett moved to Beverly Hills but Elon already lived there. Scrooge McDuck built a huge money bin, dumped in the cash and burrowed through it like a gopher. You can’t do that anymore. The IRS will come and take most of it. You’ll be burrowing through quarters. What to do? In the thoroughbred industry, we have a clever question for the unindoctrinated: “How do you become a millionaire in the horse business?” Answer: “Start with two million.” Elon Musk started thinking about space rockets. You could blow a lot of money quick on space rockets. A hundred sixty-five mil was just chump change.
In June, 2002, Elon took $100 million and founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with a notion of developing and manufacturing space vehicles and advancing the state of rocket technology. In September of 2009, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit. On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon, named for Puff the Magic (really), berthed with the International Space Station, making the company the first commercial outfit to launch and berth a vehicle with the ISS. SpaceX was awarded a contract from NASA in 2006 to develop and test a new launch vehicle, Falcon 9, to transport cargo to the space station, followed by a $1.6 billion NASA contract on December 23, 2008 for 12 flights of the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecrafts to the ISS, replacing the Space Shuttle after it was retired in 2011. SpaceX is now the largest producer of rocket motors in the world. Elon Musk can’t lose for winning. Oh, and when he isn’t busy shooting rockets into space, Musk occupies himself as CEO of Tesla Motors, which manufactures electric cars and power-train systems, and he’s also the largest shareholder in Solar City, the second-largest provider of solar power systems in the United States. All that and Talulah, too.
You,too, can soon rocket into space in a critter like this. Bring a rabbit’s foot. Bring six.
Quotations
Elon Musk is not only a shrewd businessman, he’s a visionary preoccupied with the betterment of The Human Condition. Some of his opinions:
“An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years but in the last sixty years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct.”
“There would not be democracy in the world if it were not for the United States. On three separate occasions in the 20th century, democracy would have fallen—World Wars 1 and 2 and the Cold War.”
“Do I think that there’s some sort of master intelligence architecting all this stuff? I think not because then you have to say: ‘Where does the master intelligence come from?.’ So it sort of begs the question. So I think really you can explain this with the fundamental laws of physics. You know its complex phenomenon from simple events.”
“The absence of any noticeable life (in the Universe) may be an argument in favor of us being in a simulation. Like when you’re playing an adventure game and you can see the stars in the background but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilization that’s just watching how we develop—out of curiosity—like mold in a petri dish. If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilizations….and I mean strange in a bad way….and it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilizations.”
“I like to keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. There have been movies about this, you know, like ‘Terminator’, and there are some scary outcomes. And we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful. I’m inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure we don’t do something very foolish.”
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”
“If something is important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
“We essentially have no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.”
“My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not his personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
“You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.”
“Going from PayPal, I thought, ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?’”
“Everybody around here (Tesla) has slides in their lobbies. I’m actually wondering about putting in a roller coaster—like a functional roller coaster at the factory in Fremont. You’d get in, and it would take you around the factory but also up and down. Who else has a roller coaster? It would probably be really expensive but I like the idea of it.”
From Talulah Riley: “I remember him say that being with him was choosing the hard path. I didn’t quite understand at the time, but I do now. It’s quite hard, quite the crazy ride.”
Before long, Elon Musk will be taking just plain folks into space in his spiffy new rockets. Well….just plain folks with a few hundred thousand to spend. I was discussing this the other day with a friend who was eager to make the trip. I told him that despite Elon Musk’s brilliance….even given a free ticket….I’d be turning the trip down. “Come on, Bill,” he argued, “you’ve always been a risk taker. And you only live once!”
“Precisely,” I told him. “And I’d like to make it last as long as possible.”
Mule Train
For most people, their wedding date is the sun which all else orbits around. For Bill and Siobhan, not so much. The most important date is that on which the Grand Canyon mules will carry us down the Bright Angel Trail to begin our honeymoon at the Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor. You have to make reservations for this caravan one whole YEAR ahead of time and only ten people can go each day. I mean, it’s not the Arizona Hyatt down there, they’ve only got so many cabins. Luckily, we got our first choice. So, it’s now official: Wedding Day—June 25, 2016. Honeymoon Day—June 27. After that, we’ll cruise around Monument Valley, dip down to Sedona and check on our old friends from the Arizona Opry in Apache Junction. When I was making mule reservations, the man on the other end of the line required me to testify to certain criteria. Everyone has to be under 200 pounds, dressed (they weigh you), unafraid of large animals and not intimidated by heights. Oh oh. Sometimes in life, you have to fudge a little so I neglected to mention Siobhan’s utter terror at falling over the trail’s edge. Hopefully, they’ll give her the best balanced mule.
That’s all, folks….
The Flying Pie was finished today around twelve-thirty. An hour later, the Internet is still down, courtesy of our fine provider, Windstream Paleolithic. This is not the first time this has happened. Fact is, things seem to be getting worse by the day. Twenty-four hours seldom passes without some kind of outage. We are thinking of moving to Maracaibo or, perhaps, the Crimea, in search of better service. Or is it like this everywhere?
