The rich guys have ‘right stuff’
Space visionaries increasingly suspect that they’ll have to make a go of it on their own. There are countless entrepreneurs who, like the early pioneers of the West, aren’t going to wait for government permission to explore the wilderness.
Last fall, the first privately funded spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, blasted into suborbital space and came safely home, earning designer Burt Rutan the $10 million Ansari X Prize. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen backed Rutan’s venture. Robert Bigelow, billionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, has poured millions into a plan to launch an inflatable orbital hotel. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos is getting into the launch business.
Critics say NASA has become just another self-perpetuating government bureaucracy.
“NASA, 25, 30 years ago, when Apollo was over, became a jobs program. I call it a self-licking ice cream cone,” said Simon Worden, a University of Arizona astrophysicist and retired Air Force general. “The guys who have the right stuff are these billionaires who do it themselves.”
One day recently a young man named Elon Musk spoke at a space symposium about his plans to help humankind become a spacefaring civilization. Musk, 33, is a South African and an Internet tycoon, having co-founded PayPal, which he sold recently for a handsome sum. He now runs a small rocketry company called SpaceX, which already has four contracts to launch payloads into orbit.
He said that if he tries three times and the rockets blow up every time or fail to reach orbit, he’ll quit. He’s spending a lot of money. “I was trying to find the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one,” he said. “I thought the rocket business was perfect.”
We spoke in a hotel lobby and discussed the fate of civilization. Musk would like to go to Mars. He thinks life on Mars would be like Canada in winter. He said it’d be a bit like living in the hotel lobby. You’d be indoors, he said, but you could look outside.
“Do you want us to be forever Earthbound, or do you want us to be a civilization that explores the stars?” he asked.