“The Moon We Left Behind”
During a recent lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences, titled “Don’t Panic: Adventures in High-Tech Startups,” Elon Musk was asked about “the perception that entrepreneurship is dominated by luck, and if you create a very successful company, it’s more about the external environment rather than any skill the entrepreneur has.” Musk’s deadpan response: “I’m just very lucky.”
Clearly, Musk’s record of creating visionary and successful companies required some luck. Basically the idea is just to keep improving the cost of the rockets, improving the reliability, and making as much progress as possible towards that ultimate goal of helping extend life beyond earth.”
Musk is CEO, chief technology officer and chief designer at SpaceX, which has its offices and manufacturing operation in a cavernous 500,000-square-foot building — where Boeing 747 engines were once produced — in Hawthorne, Calif. In December, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA contract to build unmanned vehicles to carry cargo to the International Space Station.
“It’s worth knowing that after the space shuttles retire, around the end of next year [2010], it will be SpaceX or nothing for five or six years — well, SpaceX or [the Russian] Soyuz,” Musk said. Meanwhile, SpaceX is working on a space capsule, called Dragon, for humans.
Musk described his work at trailblazing Tesla Motors — where he is CEO, chairman and a hands-on product designer — as “my other job.” Tesla’s curvy, head-turning $109,000 Roadster, which was unveiled as a prototype in 2006 and went into limited production in 2008, is an all-electric, plug-into-the-wall sports car (not a gasoline hybrid) that made Tesla the only production automaker selling highway-capable electric vehicles in North America or Europe.
The lander went on to detect water vapor in a sample it collected and analyzed,