Elon Musk

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“There’s More To A Vehicle’s Environmental Impact Than What Comes Out Of The Tailpipe”

September 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There were reports earlier this year questioning the greenness of electric vehicles. As Tesla Motors becomes more popular, winning hearts and minds, Will Oremus of Slate looks into the environmental impact of Elon Musk’s car brand. The opening of “How Green Is a Tesla, Really?“:

“The knock on electric cars has always been the same: They’re great for the environment, but they’re pokey and impractical, and nobody wants to buy one. The stunning success story of the Tesla Model S has, improbably, flipped that equation. It’s blazingly fast, surprisingly practical, and everyone wants to buy one. But now some critics are asking: How green is it, really?

The quick answer: If current trends hold, it could be pretty darn green in the long run. But as of today, the calculation isn’t as straightforward as you might think. Depending on whom you ask, what assumptions you make, and how you quantify environmental impact, the answer could range from ‘greener than a Prius’ to ‘as dirty as an SUV.’ And where the Tesla falls on that spectrum depends to a surprising extent on where you live and how much you drive it.

Electric cars are squeaky clean, of course, in the sense that they don’t burn gas. With no engine, no gas tank, and no exhaust, they’re considered to be zero-emissions vehicles. But there’s more to a vehicle’s environmental impact than what comes out of the tailpipe. The Tesla doesn’t run on air. It runs on electricity, which in turn is generated from a range of different sources, from nuclear fission to natural gas to the darkest, dirtiest fossil fuel of them all: coal.”

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“It Doesn’t Know What The Rules Of The Car Industry Are, And Has No Desire To Follow Them”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It appears that Elon Musk has succeeded where John DeLorean failed, in creating a successful automobile company from scratch. I suspect others will likewise blaze those trails as 3D printing power becomes more profound. But what about a large if young company like Google? Can it compete with the traditional automakers in the autonomous sector? From a post by Brad Templeton, who it should be noted is a consultant to Google:

“While I don’t comment on Google’s plans, I do believe it has one big advantage in this race. It doesn’t know what the rules of the car industry are, and has no desire to follow them. The car companies have huge resources, and better expertise on cars, but their internal rules and practices, honed over a century, are sure to hobble them. They won’t take the risks that non-car companies will take, won’t want to damage existing business lines, and will face attacks within the companies from the ‘company immune system’ which seeks to attack disruptive ideas within big companies.

Google’s main impediment is that it is also a big company, though an unusual one. But this business is so hard to enter that we have yet to see a start-up make a play.”

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“This Is A Fun Way To Interface With What Is A Very Complex Model”

September 6, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A SpaceX video modestly called “The Future of Design,” in which Elon Musk, sans stylus and mouse, relies on Tony Stark-style gestures.

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“No One Knows If The Thing Would Actually Work”

August 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tad Friend, the excellent California correspondent for the New Yorker, mercifully liberated from having to profile Ben Stiller’s narcissism, provides his two cents on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop plans. Here’s the glass-half-empty part:

“The bad news is that there’s no conceivable way that the system would cost just six billion dollars, or that one-way tickets would cost twenty dollars. Overpromise disease is endemic to Silicon Valley, but Musk has an aggravated case. When I wrote a profile of him, in 2009, he told me that a third-generation Tesla would be selling for less than thirty thousand dollars in 2014, the same year that he expected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to begin ferrying tourists around the moon. Well, no and hell no. More worrisomely, he promised that you could start driving the Model S in western California ‘at breakfast and be halfway across the country by dinnertime.’ Musk is a lot better at math than I am, but he eventually acknowledged that by ‘dinnertime’ he really meant ‘the following morning’s breakfast’—if, again, you didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.

 Additional bad news is that California’s politicians are skeptical of the Hyperloop, as they’ve already committed to their own relatively slow high-speed rail system, now projected to be finished in 2029. And that no community in San Francisco or Los Angeles would want giant tubes running through it. And that, from the evidence of Musk’s own route map, he hasn’t figured out how to get the Hyperloop across the San Francisco Bay or any closer to downtown Los Angeles than about an hour north of it—which kind of kills the whole point. Also, earthquakes! The suggested route more or less parallels the San Andreas Fault. (Musk says that his flexible tube joints and dampered pylons would enable the system to absorb seismic shocks. But the worst place to be in an earthquake would be ripping along at barely-subsonic speeds twenty feet above the ground—in a system attached to it. Disaster-film auteurs are surely already storyboarding the money shot of Hyperloop pods disgorging onto a teeming freeway at seven hundred miles an hour.)

Finally, of course, no one knows if the thing would actually work.”

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“Musk Deliberately Hopes His Hyperloop Will Disrupt Current Plans For The $68 Billion Railroad”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Karen Weise’s Businessweek article about the inevitable gamesmanship between Elon Musk (with his Hyperloop) and the California High-Speed Rail Authority (and its bullet train):

“The contrast between Musk’s futuristic option for bridging Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the much-delayed, over-budget, fast train that the state already has in the works, couldn’t have seemed starker or more striking. And that’s the point. Musk deliberately hopes his Hyperloop will disrupt current plans for the $68 billion railroad. ‘I don’t think we should do the high-speed rail thing,’ Musk told reporters. ‘It’s basically going to be California’s Amtrak,’ he said. He didn’t mean that as a compliment.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority was not amused. Chairman Dan Richard told the San Francisco Chronicle that while the Hyperloop sounds ‘great,’ it won’t be competition anytime soon: ‘It’s sort of like me saying, ‘Don’t buy a Tesla, because the Jetsons’ flying car is right around the corner.”

Richard said Musk greatly underestimates the costs of the Hyperloop, not to mention how hard it is to secure funding for mass transit and convince neighbors and environmentalists that such a system won’t be harmful. ‘While we have a lot of respect for his inventiveness, I think we could tell him a few things about the realities of building in California,’ Richard said.

Hyperloop might just be a drawing, and a far-fetched one at that, but as Southern California Public Radio points out, it’s already working in one regard—by reminding residents that California’s existing bullet train plan has plenty of shortfalls.“

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“Tell Traffic Control To Get My Monobile Ready”

August 13, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A Musk-esque Hyperloop via the 1962 British TV series Space Patrol.

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“How Would You Slow Down?”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of the Hyperloop reveal, Elon Musk did an interview today about the transport mode with Businessweek. In the Q&A, he answers an essential question:

“Question:

How would you slow down?

Elon Musk:

When you arrive at the destination, there would be another linear electric motor that absorbs your kinetic energy. As it slows you down, you put that energy back into a battery pack, which then provides the source energy for accelerating the next pod and for storing energy for overnight transport.

The solar panels would be laid on top of the tubes. You would store excess energy in battery packs at each station, so you could run 24-7.”

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“So What Is Hyperloop Anyway?”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Key passages from Elon Musk’s promised reveal about the Hyperloop, his idea for a clean, high-speed fifth mode of transport:

“So What is Hyperloop Anyway?

Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky.

At one extreme of the potential solutions is some enlarged version of the old pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings.

You could, in principle, use very powerful fans to push air at high speed through a tube and propel people-sized pods all the way from LA to San Francisco. However, the friction of a 350 mile long column of air moving at anywhere near sonic velocity against the inside of the tube is so stupendously high that this is impossible for all practical purposes.

Another extreme is the approach, advocated by Rand and ET3, of drawing a hard or near hard vacuum in the tube and then using an electromagnetic suspension. The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day. All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working.

However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level where standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust.

Overcoming the Kantrowitz Limit

Whenever you have a capsule or pod (I am using the words interchangeably) moving at high speed through a tube containing air, there is a minimum tube to pod area ratio below which you will choke the flow. What this means is that if  the walls of the tube and the capsule are too close together, the capsule will behave like a syringe and eventually be forced to push the entire column of air in the system. Not good.

Nature’s top speed law for a given tube to pod area ratio is known as the Kantrowitz limit. This is highly problematic, as it forces you to either go slowly r have a super huge diameter tube. Interestingly, there are usually two solutions to the Kantrowitz limit – one where you go slowly and one where you go really, really fast.

The latter solution sounds mighty appealing at first, until you realize that going several thousand miles per hour means that you can’t tolerate even wide turns without painful g loads. For a journey from San Francisco to LA, you will also experience a rather intense speed up and slow down. And, when you get right down to it, going through transonic buffet in a tube is just fundamentally a dodgy prospect.

Both for trip comfort and safety, it would be best to travel at high subsonic speeds for a 350 mile journey. For much longer journeys, such as LA to NY, it would be worth exploring super high speeds and this is probably technically
feasible, but, as mentioned above, I believe the economics would probably favor a supersonic plane.

The approach that I believe would overcome the Kantrowitz limit is to mount an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel. This is like having a pump
in the head of the syringe actively relieving pressure.

It would also simultaneously solve another problem, which is how to create a low friction suspension system when traveling at over 700 mph. Wheels don’t work very well at that sort of speed, but a cushion of air does. Air bearings,
which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction. In this case, however, it is the pod that is producing the air cushion, rather than the tube, as it is important to make the tube as low cost and simple as possible. That then begs the next question of whether a battery can store enough energy to power a fan for the length of the journey with room to spare. Based on our calculations, this is no problem, so long as the energy used to accelerate the pod is not drawn from the battery pack.

This is where the external linear electric motor comes in, which is simply a round induction motor (like the one in the Tesla Model S) rolled flat. This would accelerate the pod to high subsonic velocity and provide a periodic reboost roughly every 70 miles. The linear electric motor is needed for as little as ~1% of the tube length, so is not particularly costly.”

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“I Believe That Hyperloop Is Merely A Modern Day Version Of The Pneumatic Tubes”

August 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Motherboard, John Gardi guesses at the nature of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, a guess which the Tesla Motors chief says is the best one he’s seen. An excerpt:

“I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building. They’ve been around for over a century, though not so much these days. There is only one in my town that I know of, and it has fallen into disuse. One reason I think Hyperloop is simpler than folks think is that Elon Musk has resurrected another technology from the depths of time, one that was a contender once, too: the electric car!

The main focus of this document will be to show how we might accomplish Elon Musk’s claim that his Hyperloop concept could be built for a 10th of the cost of California’s proposed high speed rail. Using technology no more complicated than warehouse building, I’ll discuss how the Hyperloop’s main line between Los Angeles and San Francisco might be constructed well within Musk’s estimates. 

I’ll describe an overall design as well as construction techniques—since the main line will comprise the bulk of Hyperloop’s hardware, this will be where cost reduction matters the most.

With what clues we all know now, I do believe I can make a pretty good (self) educated guess about how Hyperloop’s main line could be built and why it could be done cost effectively. There’s a lot we can extrapolate without having to augur down into the nuts and bolts of Hyperloop’s specific technologies.

I’ll leave that part to Elon Musk himself on August 12th.”

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“The Goal Of Tesla Is To Accelerate The Advent Of Sustainable Transport”

August 4, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Elon Musk at the recent Teslive town-hall event, discussing Tesla Motors’ future.

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“How In The World Is This Thing Going To Work?”

July 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ahead of Elon Musk’s August announcement about the particulars of the Hyperloop, Russell Brandon at the Verge guesses at what the technologist will reveal. An excerpt:

“The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he’s likely to face. Based on simple math, we know it will have to travel an average of more than 600 mph. And it will have to do so almost frictionlessly, allowing for the low-power travel Musk envisions. It’s a big promise, and one that would have major consequences for the transportation industry and for society at large. For the technically minded, it raises the obvious question: how in the world is this thing going to work?

So far, the closest we’ve got is Japan’s superconducting maglev train — best known as the ‘bullet train.’ Its official top speed is 361mph, although it usually travels closer to 300 mph. Jim Powell, co-inventor of the bullet train and current director of Maglev 2000, thinks that’s as fast as open-air rail lines will ever go. ‘Air drag becomes too much of a problem after 300 mph, just from a power point of view,’ Powell says. ‘And then that air drag starts to generate noise. You wouldn’t want an airplane flying past your house at 600 mph.'”

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“Critical Feedback For Improvements Would Be Much Appreciated”

July 15, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We are going to get the blueprint for the Hyperloop. my greatest tech obsession, on August 12, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter account.

Elon Musk ‏@elonmusk6h

Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated.

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“To Me, You Know, It’s Not Horrible”

June 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Wozniak made some buzzed-about, revisionist comments about Apple at the “Go Further with Ford” conference last week, which no doubt contained a lot of truth, though as an outsider I can’t agree with it all. He pointed out Jobs’ flaws as a leader in his first go-around at the company and gave more credit to the vilified John Sculley and the forgotten Gil Amelio (who hired ace designer Jonathan Ive). All that’s good.

But I think his diminution of the MacIntosh isn’t particularly fair on some levels. I understand it wasn’t an immediate commercial success nor a perfect machine, but it was, more than any other, the computer that made the general public embrace the coming Digital Age and forget the horrors of working on Honeywells and the like. It showed what was possible even if it didn’t realize all the potential itself. 

Another topic the Woz addressed was Tesla’s electric Model S, which he passed on purchasing at last moment, much to the consternation of Elon Musk. An excerpt from the Verge:

“Question:

So give me thoughts on the Model S…specifically, I’m wondering about your thoughts on the center console.

Steve Wozniak:

Yes. To me, you know, it’s not horrible. If you take it into account, you can use it. I’m good for it. But for most people, I have so much trouble in a car, driving with touchscreens, that I worry about people trying to access the screen while they’re driving. I worry about that a lot, and I don’t think it’s that attractive. It’s not unattractive — not totally ugly at least — but the controls in the Mercedes are so ergonomic, they fit your hand, you never have to look at them, you can feel where your hand is. So I do have a reservation about that, but not enough to turn me off. I think it’s a great car, I think it’s the first electric car that was worth anything. I look at it as, all the electric cars so far have been very tiny so they get better mileage on smaller batteries, you know, they can go 30 miles… or they were sports cars. Well, this is the first one, it’s a luxury car, a big sedan that fits five people comfortably. Well, my gosh, those are the people that are going out and buying $100,000 Mercedes already, so a $100,000 car… money doesn’t matter. The fact that $40,000 is batteries, they don’t see it as much.

So I think they found the right market niche that might be permanent, might be enough to keep a company sustained. And the next step is to bring it to a lower-priced market. And the idea of the replaceable batteries means you buy your battery per mile. You lease the battery, you don’t own it. You only buy the car. That’s a step that’ll appease the other crowd. Luxury guys, I think, really want to own their own battery and don’t even want to swap it with somebody else’s — they want to know what they got.

But it is a problem because you do have to pay now for the battery, and you have to pay for the electricity. As opposed to, you know, just gasoline. So it’s going to probably be more expensive per mile that way, and the economic factor might come into play. But that makes me think, you know, just driving into this building, we passed Ford’s fuel cell research division and I thought, oh my gosh! The words we heard last night from [Ford CEO Alan Mulally] … he mentioned fuel cells, he mentioned electric vehicles. Well, those two go together perfectly. You have to lose energy if you know physics, but it transfers so efficiently to the wheels, that’s why it can still make sense economically. And then you don’t have to carry this huge weight of batteries and the huge cost of the batteries. There are different problems with that one, though.

You know, we keep trying to find the way to clean energy … I’m not smarter than all the people who work on it and research it and the scientists and the people and the laboratories, so it’s not like one person can have this beautiful vision nobody else has. It’s been a struggle my entire life to make better batteries, and all we ever really came up with was lithium ion. That was about it.”

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“The Hyperloop Would Be ‘A Cross Between A Concorde, A Rail Gun, And An Air Hockey Table'”

May 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s going to be an announcement of some sort in June regarding Elon Musk’s Hyperloop high-speed transportation system, my favorite thing which is not yet a thing. From the Verge:

“Following his announcement of Tesla’s dramatic Supercharger station expansion, CEO Elon Musk touched on another pet project: Hyperloop. The rapid transit system would connect downtown Los Angeles with San Francisco, 380 miles away. Musk told the crowd that more details for the project would be available on June 20th.

Musk denigrated California’s current high speed rail plans, pointing out that the bullet train currently under consideration will be both the slowest in the world and most expensive per mile — ‘not the superlatives you’re looking for.’ In contrast, the Hyperloop would be ‘a cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table.’ Musk joked, ‘even if I’m wrong about the economic assumptions, it would be a really fun ride.'”

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“There’s A Single, Towering Problem In The Electric Car Business: A Lack Of Infrastructure”

May 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Farhood Manjoo’s new Slate piece about Elon Musk’s underlying strategy in developing electric-car infrastructure in America:

“Tesla wants to be just like Apple. That’s not a bad goal—Apple has done quite well for itself. But what few in the tech press have noticed is that Musk seems to have another tech titan in mind: Google. Musk knows that there’s a single, towering problem in the electric car business: a lack of infrastructure. Batteries aren’t good enough, charging stations are too far apart, and there aren’t enough mechanics and dealers. Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

That’s exactly what Tesla has started doing. “

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“I Like The Word Autopilot More Than I Like The Word Self-Driving”

May 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I suppose it was just a matter of time until a technologist as guided by the future as Elon Musk would want to add driverless-car technology to his his Tesla Motors line, though he does object to the jargon that currently attends the function. An excerpt from Bloomberg:

“Elon Musk, the California billionaire who leads Tesla Motors, said the electric-car maker is considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles and discussing the prospects for such systems with Google. Bloomberg’s Alan Ohnsman reports on Bloomberg Televisions’ Bloomberg West.

Musk, 41, said technologies that can take over for drivers are a logical step in the evolution of cars. He has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system.

‘I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self- driving,’ Musk said in an interview. ‘Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.’”

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“Any Remaining Balance That’s There At The End Of 2017 We’ll Pay Off As A Balloon Payment”

March 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

During the first Presidential debate last year, the one where Mitt Romney was supposedly so brilliant, he asserted that half of the clean-tech companies President Obama had invested stimulus money in had gone belly up. Not even close. Tesla Motors was one of the businesses he was talking about. They’ve just announced they’re expediting their loan-repayment schedule. From Alan Ohnsman at Bloomberg:

“Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), which received $465 million in U.S. Energy Department loans to develop and build electric cars, will repay the funds five years ahead of schedule in a plan approved by the government.

The carmaker said in its annual report yesterday that the department approved amended terms of the loan agreements that enable it to complete repayment by December 2017. Starting in 2015, the Palo Alto, California-based company will make accelerated payments from excess free cash flow, Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja said in a telephone interview.

‘Any remaining balance that’s there at the end of 2017 we’ll pay off as a balloon payment,’ Ahuja said yesterday.

The maker of battery-powered Model S sedans, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has a goal of becoming profitable this quarter, with deliveries of the vehicle forecast to rise to a record 20,000 units in 2013. Production snags in last year’s second half boosted operating expenses and triggered a wider fourth-quarter loss for Tesla than analysts anticipated.

The original terms required repayment of the loans by 2022, 10 years after the funds were drawn down. Tesla said on Sept. 25 that it was working with the Energy Department on a modified repayment schedule. Amended terms of the loan agreements were registered on Dec. 20 and March 1, the company said yesterday.”

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“It Would Be Immune To Weather, Incapable Of Crashing”

March 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One more post about Elon Musk’s SXSW appearance, this one a passage from a Los Angeles Times’ report, which touches on his plans for the hyperloop:

“Saturday’s hour-long keynote at the Austin Convention Center covered a wide variety of topics, including Musk’s thoughts on solar panels and higher education, battery cells, his role models (Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Nikola Tesla) and his idea for a new mode of high-speed transportation dubbed the ‘hyperloop.’

‘It would be something that would be twice as fast as a plane, at least, in terms of total transit time,’ Musk said. ‘It would be immune to weather, incapable of crashing pretty much unless it was a terrorist attack, and the ticket price would be half of a plane.’

As for whether the hyperloop would run underground or above ground, Musk said, ‘it could be either.'”

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“Launches Could Happen Within Two To Three Years”

March 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk, who’s currently trying to do bigger, bolder things than any other technologist or industrialist on the planet, is planning on soon building a launch site for SpaceX, most likely in Texas. From a TechCrunch report on his SXSW appearance:

“Part of the reason he is here in Texas is to meet with Texas legislature to talk about launch facilities. Elon detailed that SpaceX really needs a third launch site besides Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg; they need a commercial launch facility and they need to be able to launch Eastward and near the equator. As a state, Texas is the leading candidate, but other states are being considered. They have some things to work through like making sure beaches can be closed. If everything works out though, in the best case, SpaceX could  be start starting construction next year on a facility in Texas. Launches could happen within two to three years.”

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“You Can Get The Cost Down To Half A Million Dollars For Someone To Move To Mars”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk, who dreams big, believes he can create a Mars community of 80,000 during his lifetime. An excerpt from Discovery piece by Rob Coppinger about the proposed space colony:

“He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.

The United States’ GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

‘Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It’s about getting the basic fundamentals in place,’ Musk said. ‘That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.'”

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“He’s Not In La-La Land”

November 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A one-paragraph portrait of technologist Elon Musk as a child in South Africa, from a new Smithsonian profile by Carl Hoffman:

“As a child growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, his mother thought he might have hearing problems. ‘We called Elon ‘genius boy,’ says his mother, Maye. ‘His brain was just ahead of everyone else’s and we thought he was deaf, so we took him to the doctor. But he was just in his own world.’ Musk shrugs when I tell him that story. ‘They took my adenoids out, but it didn’t change anything. It’s just when I’m concentrating on something I tune everything else out.’ He was bullied by other kids. He hated going to school. He was obsessed with facts and reading. ‘If someone said the Moon is, like, a million miles away,’ says Maye, ‘he’d say, ‘No, it’s 238,855 miles from the Earth, depending on when you view it.’ Kids would just go ‘Huh?’ He’s just curious about everything and never stops reading and remembers everything he reads. He’s not in la-la land; he just sees everything as a problem that can be fixed.'”

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“The Ultimate Destiny Of The Futuristic System Would Be To Shift Aging Tech Entrepreneurs Around Their Retirement Communities On Mars”

November 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m fairly consumed by Elon Musk’s proposal for the Hyperloop, a high-speed and futuristic transportation which can whisk passengers via tubes across states without leaving a carbon imprint. Some new details from the Register:

“Elon Musk dropped a few further hints about his Hyperloops transit plan in London last night, saying it is ‘a cross between a Concorde and a rail gun” whose biggest hurdles included ‘right-of-way’ issues.

And it seems that the ultimate destiny of the futuristic system would be to shift aging tech entrepreneurs around their retirement communities on Mars.

The sometime net-payments kingpin turned car designer turned rocketman told an audience at theEconomist‘s Innovation Awards that he hoped to publish some actual details of the project before the end of the year.”

See also:

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“You Could Argue That Much Of Our Government Spaceflight Has Been Tourism”

October 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Chris Anderson’s new Wired interview with the SpaceX founder, a discussion about the goals driving the technologist’s privately held space program:

“Anderson: 

Let’s talk about where all this is headed. You’ve brought the cost of rocket launches down by a factor of 10. Suppose you can bring it down even more. How does that change the game? It seems like when you radically reduce the price, you can discover a whole new market. It’s a form of exploration in itself.

Musk: 

Right.

Anderson: 

What glimpses of that new market have you seen?

Musk: 

A huge one is satellites. There are a lot of applications for satellites that suddenly begin to make sense if the transportation costs are low: more telecommunications, more broadcast, better weather mapping, more science experiments.

Anderson: 

So traditional satellite markets—but more of them, and cheaper.

Musk: 

There’s also likely to be a lot more private spaceflight.

Anderson: 

By that you mean tourism.

Musk: 

Yeah, but I think tourism is too pejorative a word. You could argue that much of our government spaceflight has been tourism. But the main thing—the goal I still believe in for the long term—is to make life multi-planetary.”

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“We Expect Tesla To Become Cash Flow Positive At The End Of Next Month”

October 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

For a guy who grew up in Michigan, Mitt Romney sure hates auto manufacturers. He would have killed off Detroit, and now he uses Elon’s Musk’s Tesla Motors as a curse word. Anyone who is rooting against Tesla for political or other reasons–an American company that provides really good jobs and a cleaner future–is dead wrong. I assumed Musk would push back after last night’s debate and recent negative news stories about his electric car company. From his new release:

“Most importantly, what did not come across well was that we raised the funds simply for risk reduction. Barring any disasters internally or with suppliers, Tesla is actually on the verge of becoming cash flow positive and will not have to spend any of the money raised, at least until we embark upon a major new vehicle program. In the public call with investors, I tried to make this point, but perhaps should have emphasized it more: we expect Tesla to become cash flow positive at the end of next month.

However, given that we do have a global supply chain and that floods, fires, hurricanes or earthquakes can cause supply chain interruptions and halt production, we thought it would make sense to raise capital to protect against such an event. In fact, an important consideration in doing this financing round was that we went through just such a crisis recently with a supplier that had a flood in their factory. This caused a shortfall in shipments and delayed production until we could find another solution.

As for the reduced vehicle delivery guidance in Q3 and Q4 of this year, it is unfortunate that we are at the steepest portion of our production ramp. This gives the appearance of being much further behind than we actually are. Our production rate in the last week of September was roughly 100 vehicles, four times greater than our production in the first week of September as we overcame supply constraints. If the calendar were simply shifted a few weeks to the right, Tesla would have exceeded the 500 vehicle delivery target for the third quarter. In fact, I am pleased to report that we completed production of 359 vehicles last quarter (delivering over 250 of those to customers) and have already made our 500th vehicle body. While we are indeed a few weeks later than we would like, this is perhaps not a terrible outcome for a product as advanced and complex as the Model S, particularly given that Tesla is doing manufacturing of full vehicles for the first time with a new team and new suppliers.”

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“They Have Themselves Taken Over The Role Of Hero From Yuri Gagarin And John Glenn And Neil Armstrong And Sally Ride”

September 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t agree with the premise of Ian Bogost’s new Atlantic article which argues that private industrialists and technologists exploring and colonizing space alongside government efforts will somehow debase our ambitions. It will mean something different and pose new questions, sure, but we need to be confronting such challenges from every angle. Regardless, it’s a well-considered piece. An excerpt:

“[Elon] Musk is a hero of the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who have themselves taken over the role of hero from Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. He’s also perhaps the closest real-world counterpart to Tony Stark, the fictional playboy and industrialist who becomes Iron Man in Stan Lee’s comic books. Musk started SpaceX shortly before selling PayPal in 2002. Like Stark he’s a modest man, taking only the titles of CEO and CTO at SpaceX, in addition to his role as Chairman and CEO at Tesla Motors, the electric car manufacturer he founded a year later. SpaceX’s contract under the NASA COTS program is worth up to $3.1 billion, more than twice what Ebay shelled out for PayPal.

Musk is in the space freight business, hauling materials and equipment from earth to sky, a kind of twenty-first century Cornelius Vanderbilt in the making. Elsewhere, rich men lust jealously for space now that Earth’s challenges have proven tiresome. John Carmack, the co-founder of iD software and co-creator of Doom started Armadillo Aerospace in 2000, eyeing space tourism via a sub-orbital commercial craft. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos helped found another private spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in the same year. And of course, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson established Virgin Galactic in 2004, to provide sub-orbital space tourism as well as orbital satellite launch. In 2008, Richard Garriott, the role-playing game creator and son of American Skylab astronaut Owen K. Garriott, paid Space Adventures a reported $30 million to be flown via Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS. Just four years later, Branson’s Virgin Galactic was selling tickets for sub-orbital rides on SpaceshipTwo for a mere $200,000. Ashton Kutcher and Katy Perry have already signed up. TMZ Galactic can’t be far behind.”

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