The Interlocking Genius of Elon Musk

It's the interlocking part that will make it work if anything can — and the poetry I'll come back to shortly. 

"I want to die on Mars, just not on impact," Musk joked more than a decade ago. Getting there is easy, relatively speaking. Building a colony large and wealthy enough that an elderly man could immigrate there to die there of old age... that's the tricky part.

"Why Mars?" you might ask, and I'll answer that a bit further down. For the moment, it's the HOW? that you'll find most intriguing.

"Getting the cost per ton to the surface of Mars low enough that humanity has the resources to make life multiplanetary requires a roughly 1000X improvement in rocket & spacecraft technology," Musk explained on X last week. A self-sustaining Mars colony "requires at least a million tons of equipment, which would therefore require >$1000 trillion, an obviously impossible number, given that US GDP is only $29T."

"However, if rocket technology can be improved by 1000X, then the cost of becoming sustainably multiplanetary would drop to ~$1T, which could be spread out over 40 or more years, so <$25B/year."

That's where Starship comes in and the first of those interlocking genius moves.

"Starship is designed to achieve a >1000X improvement over existing systems," Musk concluded, "especially after yesterday’s booster catch and precise ocean landing of the ship, I am now convinced that it can work."

What makes Starship work is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and what makes Falcon 9 work, at least in part, is Starlink. Starlink's ever-growing constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) internet satellites (Full Disclosure: I'm a customer), currently launched on Falcon 9, help generate the cash flow that SpaceX invests in Starship to keep SpaceX's lead growing.

It's about as nifty a business model as any of us will see in our lifetimes. 

Not one company or government anywhere in the world has caught up to Falcon 9 on price or reusability. The first successful second flight of a Falcon 9 took place nearly eight years ago — a feat no other rocket has yet to replicate. Every day that passes without Blue Origin or China or anyone else reusing a commercial launch vehicle, SpaceX is an additional day ahead of the competition. 

Today, Musk is 2,764 days ahead of anyone in the world. Tomorrow he'll be 2,765.

Starship's job is to make Falcon 9 obsolete. Corporations and governments that have yet to catch up to what SpaceX did on March 30, 2017, are in no way prepared for what Starship will make possible in 2025 or 2026.

"OK, fine," you say, "Starship will be able to deliver a lot of stuff to Mars. What will anyone do when they get there?" After all, life on Mars is probably impossible, or at least effectively so for anything less than the longest term.

Life in Mars, however, is a different story.

Those hardy Martian pioneers — and they'll have to be far hardier than the Pilgrims ever were; some, maybe many, will die — will have to make their homes underground, safe from solar radiation. Mars's thin atmosphere provides very little protection from the Sun, even as distant as it is. 

Enter stage right, The Boring Company.

The way Musk tells the story, he was stuck in Los Angeles traffic one day in 2016 and suddenly envisioned building more roads in a series of underground tunnels to relieve congestion. "Traffic is driving me nuts," he tweeted — I think from his car. "[I] am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging."

So he did, despite naysayers who responded with tweets like this one: "See ya in about 5 years when you get all the Fed, State, County, and City permits. Then get sued and protested upon startup."

Musk launched The Boring Company in 2017. Just one year later...

The Boring Company's "Prufrock" series of diggers have reduced the cost of tunneling by two orders of magnitude, just like Starship will radically reduce the cost of space launches. 

Further iterations of Prufrock will further speed up boring tunnels with a companion machine that automatically installs the tunnel lining segments and another automated machine to process the excavated rock and dirt — on-site — into bricks that can be used for construction. Musk is gaining the experience and the cost-savings needed to dig habitats under the surface of Mars and automatically create building materials.

Most tunneling machines are diesel-powered, but Prufrock runs on batteries. While that might not be the most efficient power plant to use on Earth, there isn't enough oxygen on Mars to run a traditional internal combustion engine. 

This is the same guy who learned how to mass-produce electric vehicle batteries at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada — another company Musk runs and helped to co-found. 

Charging all those batteries on Mars is another challenge. "I think modern nuclear power plants are safe contrary to what people may think," Musk said in 2021. "I really think it’s possible to make very, extremely safe nuclear."

SpaceX will almost certainly need small nuclear reactors — at least one to start — to keep Mars humming, so don't be surprised if SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) turn out to be one of Musk's next investments. 

Do you believe any of that is an accident on the part of the man who wants to die peacefully on Mars?

It's no accident; it's what I mean by "interlocking genius."

"I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies but to get things done," Musk said on another occasion, and making humanity a multiplanetary species is Job One.

None of this is to say that Musk is always right. In 2008, when Tesla was still a boutique carmaker, he said, "I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric."

Here we are, 20 years later, and even with massive subsidies, regulations, and impending mandates, the EV bubble appears to be deflating. Musk is unable to solve EV vehicles' essential drawbacks, perhaps because there is no solution.

Musk's impulsiveness is another issue. 

In 2022, he likely overpaid for Twitter by $19 billion — almost twice what it was probably worth at the time — due entirely to his big mouth. Musk failed to do due diligence on Twitter's actual worth (and the true number of spam and bot accounts) before agreeing to buy the social media platform for $44 billion. But he and his backers were stuck.

Now let's discuss the WHY? behind Musk's hasty-looking rush to Mars. 

It's one of Musk's more esoteric quotes that I think drives him. "I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side," he said in an interview several years ago. For better context, here's the full quote:

You can look at the history of civilizations, many civilizations, and look at say ancient Egypt where they were able to build these incredible pyramids, and then they basically forgot how to build pyramids. And then even hieroglyphics, they forgot how to read hieroglyphics. Or you look at Rome and how they were able to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing and they forgot how to do all of those things. And there are many such examples in history so I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

Our civilization, Musk implied, might someday forget how to build spaceships. It isn't just Musk's limited lifespan that he's trying to outrace, it's the possibility that there might be a limited window — those 40 years or so he mentioned earlier — to establish self-sustaining outposts on other worlds before civilization on this world comes crashing down. 

I believe civilizational risk, more than any other reason, is why Musk was willing to buy Twitter at any price. "I didn’t do it because it was easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love," he wrote shortly after the acquisition.

The innovative American spirit that made SpaceX possible is itself impossible without free speech. 

“Citizen journalism is essential in a free marketplace of ideas," Musk said at a Donald Trump campaign event last week in Harrisburg, Pa. Whatever his prior political convictions were, Musk recognizes the threat the Left poses to free speech and put down $44 billion to make sure that Twitter (now X) would become a marketplace of ideas — a digital town square, an outlet for citizen journalists — free from cancel culture and the Left's controls.

By buying Twitter, Musk hopes to widen the window of opportunity humanity has to become multiplanetary.

Life on Earth could improve, too.

Musk's obsession with reducing launch costs makes the impossible merely unlikely and turns the unlikely into tomorrow's reality. To give just one example, there's a startup called Aetherflux that wants to do for electrical generation and delivery what Starlink is doing for internet services: stick it in LEO.

Sci-fi fans have long dreamed of massive solar arrays in geostationary orbit, 22,000 miles above the Earth, microwave-beaming cheap and plentiful power to collectors that would take the place of dirty power plants. Physicist Baiju Bhatt, who made a fortune as co-founder of the electronic trading platform Robinhood, envisions a more realistic approach modeled on Starlink.

Aetherflux is a small firm but next year will conduct a proof-of-concept with one small satellite that will transmit solar power — just enough to run a dishwasher, and only for a few minutes as the sat passes overhead — via laser beam to a receiver on Earth.

The test satellite will enter orbit (of course) on a Falcon 9. If it shows promise, someday a constellation of thousands of Aetherflux sats could transmit solar power to places that are either difficult or expensive to run power lines. Imagine not just going off the grid but going where there is no grid — yet still having cheap electricity and high-speed internet.

Right now, Bhatt's orbital experiment looks like a flight of fancy. But if satellite solar power turns out to be feasible, it will be in large part because of doors opened by Musk.

One last thought.

I can't pinpoint when Musk first said this, but it might have been a decade ago or more: "I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future."

It's a beautiful universe we live in, and I hope you've been reading my friend Charlie Martin's VIP "Space Porn" series featuring some of the most gorgeous astronomy pics in the world. Actually, no — Charlie shares the most gorgeous astronomy pics in the entire universe.

As far as we know, humanity is the only living consciousness to be found anywhere in the unimaginable vastness of space. Ours might be the only eyeballs, the only hobbyist astronomers, or the only creators of anything like the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes. Human beings, flawed as we are, are the only creatures anywhere to take in all that beauty. 

What is beauty worth if there is no consciousness to recognize it? That's a question for a poet, not an engineer, but Musk seems to have intuited the answer. 

There's beauty in any complex functioning system, like the one Musk created in the interlocking genius of SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, and The Boring Company. But there's also poetry in his ambition that Carl Sagan would have appreciated and understood.

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