It took four years for Elon Musk to turn his first start-up, Zip2, into a $307 million cash sale. It took four years for Musk to make PayPal the largest online payment provider in the world, only for eBay to make it the site’s primary payment engine to the tune of a $1.5 billion. It’s been four years since Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, came into being in El Segundo, Calif., and it has yet to launch a rocket. But if past success is any indication, he will. In a big way.
“I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,” Musk mused to widespread applause last night in Burruss Hall, the second speaker in the Engineering Excellence in the 21st Century Lecture Series. “But the ultimate goal is to make life multi-planetary.”
Musk, a native of South Africa that immigrated to Canada at age 17, unveiled a pure inventiveness characteristic of all of his business pursuits: the motto of his 175-member current company is “keep it simple.” Vertical integration, more engineering (“signal”) and less management (“noise”), and simplicity in design that Musk was shocked hadn’t been employed before are all hallmarks of a company that professes to be able to launch rockets for 25 percent of the cost of space big-boys Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Despite Musk’s even demeanor, being a small company hasn’t been easy on SpaceX. The company filed a lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed on Oct. 18, 2005, saying that the union of the two would be tantamount to conspiracy to stifle contracts, specifically those from the Air Force, through 2011.
“If you’ve got a great rocket and the Air Force can’t buy it from you,” you have a problem, Musk said. “They can’t compete with us on a level playing field . . . If I were them, I would be trying to tilt the playing field. The jury is out on whether that will happen.”
While admittedly far into the future, making expanding humanity’s universal footprint is a stated goal.
“As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders,” to expand life to places where none has been detected, Musk said.
The SpaceX website specifically cites universities as beneficiaries of what the patron of the Lecture Series, Pat Artis from the class of ‘72 called the company’s effort to “change the economics of space flight.”
Charles Hill, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, said the university had a $1 million spacecraft that was mothballed after the Columbia explosion.
The talk was attended heavily by engineering faculty, but former engineering dean Hassan Aref noted that it was “a pity that there were so few students this year,” saying that last year’s talk attracted greater numbers.
But Musk’s entrepreneurial spirit was encapsulated best by the fact that the owner of a Porsche Turbo, not to mention a McLauren F-1, will soon be leaving his beloved roadster for an electric car created by a Musk-funded company.
“It actually has better performance than the Porsche,” Musk said.
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