Maybe I should give some preface of what happened before I started SpaceX. In fact, I'll give you a little bit of background of my genesis of how I got into space, and walk you through the basic logic.
The space stuff actually came from a conversation I had with Andeo, a good friend of mine from college, my college housemate actually. I think it was around 2001 or so and we were coming back from Andeo’s parents place in Long Island, and he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal. When I was very young space just seemed really cool. I said well, I've always been pretty interested in space, but of course there's nothing that I as an individual could do about that, because it's the province of government, and usually a large government. I grew up in South Africa, you know, not really much space stuff happening there. I told him there was maybe something philanthropic that could be done in space. To get the public more excited about space travel, and in particular sending people to Mars, but I said I'm sure that NASA has got that covered.
The question got me curious as to sort-of find out when we were going to send someone to Mars. After I got back to my hotel room, I went to the NASA website to look up the schedule, and try to figure out where is the place that tells you that. I couldn't find it, and I thought the problem was me. I was like, either I'm bad at looking at the website, or they have a terrible website, because surely there must be a date.This should be on the front page. Of course, it must be here somewhere on this website, but just well hidden. It turned out it wasn't on the website at all.
This was really disappointing, and I just couldn't understand why there was nothing about people going to Mars, because if you look at the literature in the 70s, it was all about how we went to the Moon, and now we're going to go to Mars. Then I discovered actually that NASA had no plans to send people to Mars, or even really back to the Moon. Which was shocking. I mean think of how incredible the Apollo program was. It was not something I was able to witness in real time, because I was -2 when they landed, but if you ask anyone to name some of humanity's greatest achievements of the twentieth century, the Apollo program - landing on the moon - would be in many, if not most places number One. If in 1969 you would have asked the public to imagine what 2009 would look like, they would have said, there will be a base on the Moon, we would have at least sent some people to Mars, and maybe there'd even be a base on Mars, there’d be like orbiting space hotels all over the Solar System. There’d be all this awesome stuff in space, that’s what people expected. That sort of seemed like the natural progression of things.
I sure kept expecting that the things that were projected in science fiction movies and books would come true, but they unfortunately did not. ..and then amazingly it didn't happen. I kept thinking, well, it's about to happen. ..and again, it just didn't happen. There's a Monty Python skit about this. Suddenly, nothing happened! Before you know it, nothing happened.
What in fact happened was that we sent a few people to the Moon, and then we didn't send anyone after that to the Moon, or Mars, or anything.
I was really quite bothered by it. It just seemed as though that if I thought about the future, one where we were a true spacefaring civilization out there exploring the stars, and making the things real that we read in science fiction books and movies, that seems like a really exciting future. That made me feel good about the future, and one where we are forever confined to Earth made me feel a bit sad. I thought it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the high water mark of human space exploration. There was this incredible dream of exploration that was ignited with Apollo and it seemed - it just felt as though the dream had died. I thought that we had lost the will to explore, that we have lost the will to push the boundaries.This turned out to be a false premise. In retrospect that was actually a very foolish error, but that was my initial thought.
I just thought that it was important that humanity expand beyond Earth, so maybe there was something I could do to spur that on. I thought maybe this is a question of national will. Like how do we get people excited about space again? The roundabout way I thought that might be accomplished was, I thought, well, if NASA's budget was larger then we could do more in space exploration. Particularly, if we could get the public excited about sending people to Mars. That's why I got into space, to make that a reality and not just be forever a fiction.
I thought, well, perhaps that funding can be garnered by really marshaling public support - to reignite the passion for space exploration such that we could go beyond what we did with the Apollo program. One way to get the public excited about space would be to do, maybe, a philanthropic privately funded robotic space mission to Mars. If that could get the public really excited about sending people to Mars, then that would translate into congressional support for a bigger NASA budget, and then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again. That was the goal.
I started getting into this, researching the area, becoming more familiar with space, reading lots of books. That's about the time I started talking to Robert Zubrin and a few other people.
I came up with this idea called Mars Oasis. I thought what would really make a difference is to land a small robotic land rover with a small greenhouse on the surface of Mars, with seeds in dehydrated nutrient gel. You’d hydrate the gel upon landing, and you'd have this great shot of this little miniature greenhouse with little green plants on a red background. You'd have plants growing in Martian radiation and gravity conditions. You’d also be maintaining, essentially, life support systems on the surface of Mars. I thought that would get people really excited about sending life to Mars. This should be interesting to the public, because people tend to get interested and excited to precedents and superlatives. This would be the first life on another planet, It would be the first life on Mars, as far as we know, the furtherest that life has ever traveled, so pretty significant. You would have this great shot of these green plants with a red background, and that would be the money shot essentially. Money shot.. I'm never quite sure if that's the sort of word that you can use or not. I didn't know its origins until someone pointed it out to me. Anyway that was the basic idea, trying to get us back on track of extending life beyond Earth, and resume the dream of Apollo.
We would certainly be able to figure out a lot of engineering insights and data into what it took to maintain planet life on the surface of Mars, and you’d get some engineering data about what does it take to maintain a little habitat on Mars type of thing.
I spent several months on this trying to figure out, OK, well can I afford to build a spacecraft? I had some money as a result of PayPal, but it had to fit within that budget. Coming out of PayPal I was fortunate enough to have about $180 million. I thought wow that is a lot of money, if I assign half of this I still have the other half and I will be fine. My expectation from that project would be 100% loss. Maybe you could make a little bit back on advertising or sponsorship or something, but it would be essentially a complete loss. I figured I was willing to spend half the money with no expectation of return, because I thought this was just something that was pretty important, and worth doing. If that resulted in us going to Mars, that would be a pretty good outcome.
It would have been a small greenhouse, like a meter across, or something like that. Yeah, I hope we've got that somewhere, I mean, I'm sure it looks pretty goofy in retrospect, but that's the idea that we had. I spent several hundred thousand dollars getting the design worked out, and engaging some companies to come up with the design specifications for the subsystems. I figured out how to compress the cost of the spacecraft, and the communications systems, and the payload and so forth. I started investigating what that would take, and I was able to figure out how to get the cost down to a reasonable number - reasonable meaning several million dollars.
I figured we had to do two identical missions, two parallel missions, in case there was an equipment failure, because then it could be counterproductive. It might have the opposite effect - like, look at that fool, he did that Mars mission and it didn't work, now we definitely shouldn’t do Mars. Look how dumb it is to try to send something to Mars. What an idiot.
I was able to get the cost of the spacecraft down to low single-digit millions, and cost of communications down, and I was able to get everything compressed down to a relatively manageable number, except for the cost of the rocket. The thing that I got hung up on was the rocket. Getting there in the first place.
At first I tried to buy just a normal launch vehicle that they use to launch satellites, but the US options from Boeing and Lockheed were simply too expensive, I couldn't afford them. The lowest cost rocket in the US at the time was the Boeing Delta II, and that would have been about $50 million, and you'd still need to have an upper stage for Mars, so probably like $65 million all-in. I wanted to do two of these missions, so two would have been $130 million. I was like, woah that's a bit steep for what we were trying to do, OK, that breaks my budget right there. I tried to negotiate with them, and that was not-- I did not make progress.
I went to Russia in late 2001, early 2002 to try to buy refurbished ICBMs, and that is as crazy as it sounds, but desperate times call for desperate measures. On the range of interesting experiences, going to the Russian military and saying: “I want to buy two of your biggest rockets, but minus the nuke” is pretty far out there. It turns out Russia is quite a capitalist society. I think they thought that I was a bit crazy I guess, this about 30 years old Internet guy arrives in Moscow, wants to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian rocket fleet. They just thought I was crazy, but that's not good either if you're buying ICBMs. Then they read about PayPal so they thought, okay, he's crazy but he's got money, so importantly I could pay them, so, that was okay. Remarkably capitalist, was my impression.
It was a trippy experience. I had some weird meetings at places that I swear looked like sanitariums or something, it was very odd. Seriously, this place had padded walls, I mean like why do you have padded walls? It was weird. Then there was this Russian guy who was missing a front tooth yelling at me, and because he was missing a front tooth there was spit flying at me, in this place with padded walls. It was like really bizarre. Yeah, there was some strange trips that's for sure.
I ended up going to Russia three times to negotiate a purchase of two of the biggest ICBMs in the Russian nuclear fleet, and was actually able to negotiate a deal to buy a couple of Dneprs minus the nukes. I sort of got the feeling that I could have bought the nuke too, I think that would have been a lot more, but I slightly got the feeling that that was on the table. Which was very alarming.. I don't want to go there.
Anyway I did three visits there and at the end of it I was able to negotiate a price actually, to buy two of these things - two of the largest ICBMs in the Russian fleet. It’s gone up a lot since then, but in 2001, it would've been about $10 million each, so two would have been $20 million. Then I thought I could get the rest of the mission down to also around $10 million per. We figured out a mission that would cost about $15 or $20 million, which isn't a lot of money, but it's about a tenth of what a low-cost NASA mission would be. We’d have a dual mission with like two identical launches, two identical spacecraft for roughly $40 million, and so I thought, OK, I can do that.
I did come to terms with the Russians, but the only reason the rockets were lower cost was because of reduction talks, so they were essentially spare rockets. It's kind of a long story, but on my way back from the third trip to Russia I was really fed up of going to Russia, and I was like OK this is kind of silly, because if we launched this on a refurbished ICBM, there's only so many of those and we would run out, so this wouldn't be a long-term solution. One could use those rockets, but once you ran out of the spare rockets of the reduction talks, then you were back at the high price again. It would not result in a long-term benefit. We actually did get to a deal, but there were so many complications associated with the deal, that I wasn't comfortable with the risks associated with it. At the end of all that I decided not to conclude the deal, so negotiated a price but decided not to take the deal.
After my third trip to Russia was also about the time that I realized that my original premise was wrong. That I was actually mistaken that there was a lack of will. In fact, there's not such a shortage, but people don't think there's a way. In retrospect, it was quite silly of me to think that people were not interested in such a thing, or had lost the will to do this. I think that there's a tremendous amount of will, particularly in the United States, perhaps the world as a whole, but particularly the United States does not lack the will to explore, not in the least. Which I think is actually kind of obvious, because the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. Almost everyone came here from somewhere else. There's no nation that is more a nation of explorers than the United States, but people need to believe that it's possible, and they're not going to have to give up something that's important. What people don't want to think is that sending people to Mars is going to be so expensive, that they'll have to give up health care or something. They're not going to do that. In fact, people had really thought that it’s not possible for an amount of money that wouldn’t materially effect their standard of living. It’s got to be that going to Mars is not going to cause some meaningful drop in their standard of living. If people think it's impossible or it's going to break the national budget, they're not going to do it. You know, you're not going to bash your head against a brick wall if you're confident that your head will break before the wall will break. It's just not going to happen. If people thought there was a way, or at least something that wouldn't break the federal budget, then people would support it.
I thought, OK, it's not really going to maybe matter that much if we succeeded in doing this mission, that wouldn't be enough. I came to the conclusion that if we don't make rockets way better, then it won't matter. We can get a budget increase, but then we'd just send one mission to Mars and then maybe never go there again. The last time we went to the moon was 1973 or 74 I believe. We don't just want to have flags and footprints and then never go to Mars again. If we just have one mission that would also be a super inspiring thing, but it's not going to fundamentally change the future of humanity. That would perhaps add a little bit more to the will to do it, but it wouldn't make it clear to people that there was a way. This is the case of sort of almost the opposite, “If you can show people that there is a way, then there is plenty of will." so then I said, OK, well, I need to work on the way.
After that third trip, I had learnt a lot more about rockets at that point, and I held a series of meetings - just sort of brainstorming sessions - with people from the space industry, to try to understand if I was missing something fundamental about the ability to improve rocketry, because year over year, we did not see improvements in rocket technology.
If after we had put people on the moon in 1969 you said: in 2009 which one of the following do you think will be true? There'll be this device that you can fit into your pocket and take anywhere in the world, that's like smaller than a deck of cards, has access to all the world's information, can send megabytes of data, and you can talk to anyone on planet Earth. Even if you're like in some remote village somewhere so long as there's something called the Internet-- they wouldn't know what that means of course—then you would be able to communicate to anyone instantly, and have access to all of humanity's knowledge... or humanity will be on Mars? You would have gotten I don't know hundred to one that humanity will be on Mars, and what is that ridiculous thing you're talking about, that little device that can communicate anywhere in the world and can fit in your pocket, that's nonsense. They would have said like, bullshit, there’s no way that that's going to be true, and yet we all have that, and space is not happening.
In the '60's we went from basically nothing, not being able to put anyone into space to putting people on the Moon. Developing all the technology from scratch to do that, and yet in the '70's and '80's and the '90's we kind of gone side ways. We were even in a situation where we couldn't even put a person into Lower Earth Orbit. That doesn't really gel with all of the other technology sectors out there. The computer that you could have bought in the early '70's would have filled a room, and had less computing power than your cell phone.
Just about every sector of technology has improved, why has this not improved? I started looking into that, trying to figure out like what was the deal here. Essentially trying to figure out why we had not made more progress. The rocket technology was actually going worse. It was costing more and more to send things to space than in the past, so we had a negative technology curve. Which is counter intuitive because we're so used to things in the consumer electronics realm, and in everyday life, improving.
I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they are so friggin' expensive. Where does the $60 million go for the Delta II? and now I think a Delta II is $100 million or something even, some crazy number, and Delta II is a relatively small rocket. If you go to one of the bigger rockets it's nearer to about $200 million to $400 million.
I thought, well, why is it the Russians can build these low cost launch vehicles? I think the US is a pretty competitive place, and we should be able to build a cost efficient launch vehicle. How hard is it really to make a rocket? it's not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances. When was the last time we bought something Russian which wasn't vodka?
This is where I think it is helpful to use the analytical approach in physics, to try boil things down to first principles and reason from there. As opposed to trying to reason by analogy, historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. That’s not true if you say, what is a rocket made of, what are the materials that go into a rocket, how much does each material constituent weigh, what's the cost of that raw material, that's going to set some floor as to the cost of the rocket. That actually turns out to be a relatively small number. Certainly well under 5% of the cost of a rocket and, in some cases closer to 1% or 2%. You can call it maybe, the “magic wand number” If you had piles of raw materials on the floor, and say, OK, it's made of aluminum, titanium, some copper, carbon fiber, if you want to go that direction. You can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components. If you have them stacked on the floor, and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? I was like, wow, OK, it's really small. It's like 2% of what a rocket costs, so clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged. You’ve got to figure out how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and they could be a lot less. Rockets had really not evolved since the 60s.The big aerospace companies just had no interest in radical innovation. All they wanted to do was try to make their old technology slightly better every year. In fact, sometimes it would actually get worse, particularly in rockets, it was pretty bad. It went backwards. We got the Space Shuttle, but the Space Shuttle turned out to be a big mistake, it could only barely go to Low Earth Orbit, whereas a Saturn V could go to the Moon. Then the Space Shuttle was to be retired, and that trend line basically trends to zero. What I was trying to figure out is, how do we reverse that? Like I said, at first it didn't seem like it would be possible to start a space company, because it seemed like the province of governments. I came to the conclusion that if there wasn't some new entrance into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a space-faring civilization, and be out there among the stars. Then as I learned more and more it became clear that unless there was a fundamental improvement in rocket technology, an exciting future in space was not possible. In order for us to be a space-faring civilization and out there among the stars, we need dramatic improvements in rocket technology, and in particular reusable orbital rockets.
I met a bunch of space engineers in the process of trying to figure out the Mars Oasis mission, and we got along pretty well. I gathered the little team that I put together to try to figure out the mission, and I said: "Hey why don't we talk about the feasibility of building a rocket in the US. Is there some fundamental limitation that prevents us from making substantial improvements, like have Boeing and Lockheed really approached some asymptotic optimum or is it possible to do much better?” I put together a feasibility study which consisted of engineers that had been involved with all major launch vehicle developments over the last three decades. I engaged a bunch of consultants, and started to just get familiar with the space industry.
We iterated over a number of Saturdays in the beginning of 2002, to figure out what would be the smartest way to approach this problem of not just launch cost, but also launch reliability. We came up with a default design, and that actually was fortunate timing. That feasibility study finished up right around the time that we agreed to sell PayPal to eBay. Coincident with that sale I moved down to LA, where there's actually the biggest concentration of aerospace industry in the world. It's actually the biggest industry in southern California and much bigger than entertainment or anything else. I was living in Palo Alto for about nine years before that.
I had those series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies. I think sort of in the course of working with them on the philanthropic mission I guess we had gotten a pretty good rapport. Most of them, not all of them, were willing to join and start a company. They were at big aerospace companies and they were like top guys at those companies, so it was a big risk for them. We went through this exercise together of trying to figure out could a rocket be built? We all came to the conclusion that it could, so success was one of the possible outcomes. I just tried to figure out is there some catch here that I'm not appreciating, and I couldn't figure it out. There doesn't seem to be any catch, so I started SpaceX.