[0:00:00] So now, come to the main event, as it were. This is an award. This is the very first Mars Pioneer Award that this society has given. And it's to an extremely unique talent. And it's going, of course, to go for Elon Musk. Now, I want to say, you know, everybody has,
[0:00:32] Read in the news the various accomplishments of the SpaceX. One thing after another, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon, so forth. And of course, they just won a major contract from NASA of $440 million, which I think is a reward for work well done. So congratulations for that. But I want to make some personal observations about Elon Musk. By the way, is Frank McNamara here?
[0:01:02] Frank McNamara. Does anybody know where Frank McNamara is? Does anyone know who Frank McNamara is? Well, okay, forget it. All right. I first met Elon Musk at a Mar Society fundraiser that was held in the Bay Area in 2001. And it may seem strange to you, but in fact, prior to that event, I had not heard of Elon Musk.
[0:01:33] Despite the fact that he was already at that time a very significant figure in Silicon Valley in that world, but I didn't live in that world and I didn't know about him. But, you know, he came there and he...
[0:01:50] Made a significant donation and then we talked and he came over to my place and we talked a lot more and he made a much larger donation to the Mars Society and I must say one that allowed us to launch the Mars Desert Research Station program which since that time there has been over 700 people have been able to participate as crew members in that station. And which is now self-funding.
[0:02:21] But then he went off to do his thing. And when I first heard that what he was going to try to do was build a rocket company and accomplish cheap access to orbit on his own money, I and a number of us who'd been around the block on this thing were frankly dismayed because we had heard the story before.
[0:02:49] There had been a succession of wealthy individuals who had made similar declarations and launched companies. Two of the most recent examples was the Beale Company, there was the Walt Anderson and the Rotary Rocket Company, before them there were Conestoga people, there was Kistler, and every single one of them had failed. In fact, none of them ever cleared the tower.
[0:03:16] This seemed to be another one of those things. But then a few years went by and I had a chance to go on and visit Elon in his...
[0:03:29] The initial factory out in the L.A. area, not the same one he has now, this was considerably smaller, but he had gotten started. And it was apparent there were some things going on here that were very different from Walt Anderson or Beale. In the first place, by 2005 or so, which whenever this visit occurred, Elon knew a lot about rocketry.
[0:03:56] In fact, he knew everything about rocketry. In 2001, he had known nothing about rocketry. And by the way, this really matters because what these other fellows had done is throw a chunk of their discretionary change at this and said, let's see if something happens. Nothing happened, I guess I'll give up. He didn't just throw his money into it, he threw himself into it.
[0:04:17] He learned the trade, he put his mind into it, he put his talent into it, he put his heart and soul into it, and he was working on it. And it was at that point that it became clear to me that this could go in a significantly different way than the previous story. And then, of course, he actually started succeeding. Well, first with launches that didn't succeed, but at least they were launches, and then with launches that did succeed. And I must say also the fact,
[0:04:45] That he persisted after several failures, several obviously very expensive and daunting failures. And by the way, I've got to tell you, because I build and test things, and you put a great deal of effort, and you put your resources into it, and you work on this, work on this, work on this, and then it's finally time for the test, and the thing blows up, and boy, it's not a nice day. But then you have to try again. You've got to stay in the game. You've got to push on.
[0:05:13] These other people were quitters. He pushed on through the several failures to finally make the thing work. And then went and launched the Falcon 9, which was a serious launch vehicle. And I did a calculation of my own at that time. I did not have any inside knowledge about SpaceX. But I looked at the thing. I looked at what I knew about the size of his payroll and how long he'd been working. And he calculated that he had done this for a few hundred million dollars. And this was a program that...
[0:05:43] In a conventional aerospace environment, it would have cost a couple of billion dollars. And I wrote an op-ed in SpaceX, the new Sputnik, you know, basically telling the aerospace industry, hey guys, you're being Sputnik here. And an analysis from SAIC wrote and says, no, you can't be right. They couldn't have done this for a couple of hundred million dollars. It's absolutely impossible. This must have cost at least two billion dollars. And then SpaceX corrected them.
[0:06:13] But that's the thing. I mean, to create this system, and then I went and visited him in his new place.
[0:06:20] And I saw this incredible company, and I saw how dynamic it was, and the kind of workforce that he created, and the team he had created. He told me certain things, and some of the stuff I believed, and some of the stuff I didn't, but I just had to look at the people and look what was going on in that place to know that he had put together a winning team, and these guys were winners, and these guys were serious, and this is extraordinary. And it's totally extraordinary what has gone on here. And there is something new under the sun here.
[0:06:50] And then finally one more thing, well two more things I have to say. This guy, he is living disproof of the materialist view of history. That is that all major things that happen are driven by economics, by greed.
[0:07:19] He may well make money in SpaceX, because this guy could make money doing anything. I mean, he's even making money with electric cars, which is just astonishing. But he's not...
[0:07:31] Doing this to make money. Don't believe that for a minute. If he wanted to make money, he could have set up a dozen dot-coms and stuff between 2001 and now that all of which would have made incredible amounts of money without him knocking his brains out trying to build rockets which sometimes blow up and really leave you feeling very unhappy and really going out in a lurch. And of course, you know...
[0:07:53] He's doing well right now, but this is still a very risky business. He's exposed to technical failure. He's exposed to the political shifts that are beyond his control, to economic shifts. And to be right out there right now is doing that. This is not being motivated by profit. It will need to be sustained by profit in order for it to happen, but it's being motivated by an idea. And I'm sure we're going to hear from him, his view on that.
[0:08:22] I only know Elon a little bit from the outside. I've met him on several occasions, talked to him at some length a few times, but I think I know him on the inside because I think I know what motivates him, and it's the same thing that motivates me, and I think the same thing that motivates most of us. He really wants to make something truly grand and necessary happen and is willing to put himself on the line for that purpose. So it's my great honor to present
[0:08:52] The Mars Pioneer Award to Elon Musk. And before he comes up, I would like to show you the trophy. So the symbolism here, I hope, is apparent. Okay. We have the planet Mars and upon it a possibly recognizable spacecraft, the Dragon.
[0:09:51] That's the vision, and here is the man who is very much in this world, but not of it, Elon Musk. And the inscription reads, The Mars Pioneer Award presented to Elon Musk by the chapters and members of the Mars Society, the 15th International Mars Society Convention, held in Pasadena, California, USA, August 3rd through 5th, 2012.
[0:10:55] for outstanding achievement in furthering the goal of the human exploration and settlement of Mars. Well, thank you very much for the award. It's great to be before so many people who believe strongly in the establishment of life on Mars. I think my reasons for being interested in Mars and doing SpaceX really come down to basically just
[0:11:39] Two things. One, which the prior speaker was articulating, which is there's the defensive reason in that if we are on more than one planet, the probable lifespan of human civilization and the light of consciousness as we know it is going to be far greater than if we are on one planet. So there's that defensive reason, that life insurance reason. And I think that that's obviously a very important thing.
[0:12:09] Earth's been around for four billion years and civilization about 10,000 years. And it's only now that we have this little window has just cracked open where it's possible for life to extend beyond Earth. And so I think it sort of seems sensible to take advantage of that window while it's open. Hopefully it will be open for a long time, but it could be open for a short time. And so we should take action. And that's sort of the...
[0:12:39] The defensive reason. It's not actually the reason that gets me most fired up about Mars. The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it's the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It's the most exciting thing. I couldn't think of anything more exciting and more fun and more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars.
[0:13:08] And it will be incredibly difficult, and probably lots of people will die, and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States. But it will be one of those things that is incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world. Life cannot just be about solving, you know.
[0:13:34] This problem or that problem, there must be things that when you wake up in the morning, you're glad to be alive. And that, I think, is for me the most important reason why we should pursue the establishment of life on Mars. Now, of course, I'm preaching to the converted here. You know, I expect to hear a few objections from this audience.
[0:14:05] What matters is finding a way to do it. In fact, I'll give you a little bit of background on my genesis of how I got into space. When I was in college, there were three areas that I thought would most affect the future of humanity. And space exploration, the extension of life beyond Earth, was one of those things.
[0:14:32] And I didn't ever expect to be involved in it because I thought it was the province of governments and besides which it sort of seemed at least 21, 22 years ago that it was likely to occur because we went to the moon and then of course people would go to Mars and we'd be establishing a base on the moon and eventually a base on Mars and that sort of seemed like the natural progression of things. And then amazingly it didn't happen. I kept thinking, well, it's about to happen.
[0:15:00] And again, it just didn't happen. There's a Monty Python skit about this. Suddenly, nothing happened. Before you know it, nothing happened. So, in fact, in approximately 2001, I was with a good friend of mine in college, my college housemate actually, in New York, and he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal, and I said, well,
[0:15:31] You know, I've always been interested in space, but of course there's nothing that I as an individual could do about that. But the question that got me curious is to sort of find out, okay, when are we sending people to Mars? So after I got back to my hotel room, I went to the NASA website to sort of look up the schedule. Because of course there had to be a schedule. And I couldn't find it. I thought the problem was me.
[0:16:03] Because it must be here somewhere on this website. It's just well hidden. And it turned out it wasn't on the website at all. Which was shocking. So then I thought, well, perhaps the reason is that the American people have lost the will to explore. If we got people more interested in the subject, then they would be inclined to
[0:16:34] I want to do it. This turned out to be a false premise, by the way. But that was my initial thought. It was a mistake. So at first I thought, well, perhaps if we do a small philanthropic mission to Mars, something that would get the public excited, then that would result in a bigger budget for NASA. And then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again. And that's about the time that I started talking to Robert Zubrin and a few other people.
[0:17:05] And so initially, the thought was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seasoned dehydrated nutrient gel. They're hydrated upon landing. And then you'd have this little greenhouse on the surface of Mars. And the public tends to be, as they should, interested in things that are precedents and superlatives. So this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled, the first life on Mars. And then you'd have this great money shot of green plants in a red background.
[0:17:36] I thought, okay, that could get people pretty excited. And so I started investigating what that would take. And I was able to get the cost of the spacecraft down to low single digit millions and the cost of communications down and all. And I was able to get everything compressed except for the cost of the rocket. And so the US rockets were way too expensive.
[0:18:06] Something like a Delta II would have cost $60 million. And I figured I needed to do two parallel missions, two identical missions, in case there was an equipment failure, because then it could be counterproductive. It's like, look at that fool. He did that Mars mission and it didn't work, and now we definitely shouldn't do Mars. So I figured we had to have redundant missions. And I just didn't actually have enough money from the sale of PayPal to actually do that.
[0:18:35] I just didn't have enough money. So I went to Russia in late 2001, early 2002, to try to buy ICBMs. And that's as crazy as it sounds. So I guess about 30 years old, internet guy arrives in Moscow, wants to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian rocket fleet. I said, I don't need the nuke, just need the rocket.
[0:19:10] And they thought I was crazy, but then they also thought, well, he's got money, so that's... So I was able to actually negotiate a deal to buy a couple of Denefers. Now, at the end of all that, I decided not to conclude the deal. So I negotiated a price, but decided not to conclude the deal, because after my third trip to Russia, that's about the time that I realized that my original premise was wrong.
[0:19:43] We do not lack for will, particularly in the United States, perhaps the world as a whole, but particularly not the United States. It does not lack the will to explore, not in the least. In fact, the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. Almost everyone came here from somewhere else. So you couldn't ask for a group of people that are more interested in exploring the frontier.
[0:20:13] But if people do not think that there is any way to do it, if they don't think there's a means, then it's somewhat irrelevant. 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. So that's when I decided to start The Rocket Company because it was clear that
[0:20:44] We had not made advancements in rocket technology, and that was the reason that we hadn't made progress. 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 counterintuitive, because we're so used to things in the consumer electronics realm and in everyday life improving, we sort of take it for granted, as though things automatically improve. They do not automatically improve.
[0:21:12] They only improve with lots of effort and resources. You saw the graph or the picture of the pyramids there. Egyptian civilization got to the point where it could create things like the Great Pyramid of Cheops, but then lost that ability and never got back there. And Roman civilization went through a deep dark period. It's not a given that things improve.
[0:21:41] There has to be a forcing function. People have to do it. So anyway, I started SpaceX. And many people tried to convince me not to start the company. They really tried their best. And many of my closest friends, if there was anything they could have done to stop me from starting the rocket company, they would have done it. One good friend of mine compiled footage of
[0:22:12] Rocket failures. And forced me to watch it. I said I'd seen them all. So it was certainly... But I think they perhaps misunderstood the premise because when I started SpaceX, it was not with the expectation of success. I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. But given that the thing I was going to do previously, which was the...
[0:22:43] The Mars greenhouse mission, I expected that would have 100% likelihood of losing all the money associated with it. So if a rocket company had less than 100% chance of losing all the money associated with it, and therefore was actually quite a bit less risky than the thing I've been doing before. And fortunately, I think things went really well
[0:23:12] SpaceX. Not in the beginning, because the first three launches of the Falcon 1 rocket that we did failed. And as I was saying, it's not a good day when the rocket fails. The first rockets failed only, I mean, it impacted 60 seconds after liftoff, not far from the launch site. So me and the rest of the team spent all of that day picking up pieces of the rocket, which is...
[0:23:42] A very sad thing. But we picked them up to sort of see if we could help figure out what went wrong. Fortunately, the fourth launch, we were able to reach orbit. That's a good thing. It's a good thing we were able to do that because I had no more money left. So my wife was there. She witnessed the third and then the fourth launch.
[0:24:13] So stressed out at the fourth launch. I didn't even actually feel elation. I just felt relief. So it was a very, very close call. But fortunately, the fourth launch worked. And since then, all of the launches have worked. I hope they continue to work. And SpaceX has gotten a lot stronger. And we've actually been slightly profitable.
[0:24:43] For the last four years, approximately, and should be again this year. And the rockets now are much bigger. And we've got Falcon 9, which is about a million pound thrust rocket. And we've got an upgraded version of Falcon 9 that's going to launch next year, which will be almost one and a half million pounds of thrust. And then the Falcon Heavy, which will be over four million pounds of thrust, which is about 60% that of Saturn V.
[0:25:12] In fact, with two Falcon Heavy launchers, you could actually send people back to the surface of the moon. Most people probably aren't quite aware of the scale of the rocket that we're building. Falcon Heavy should launch probably around the end of next year, or certainly by early 2014 at the latest. And that, I think, will represent a...
[0:25:38] A significant improvement in rocket technology. And then very importantly, we're also working on reusability. Because if you really boil it down to the crux of why don't we have a base on Mars, as I mentioned, there's rocket technology. But what really needs to be developed, the key invention that's necessary is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket.
[0:26:06] This is a very difficult thing to do on Earth, because Earth's gravity is quite high. It's right on the cusp of impossibility for such a thing for a chemical rocket. So if you take an expendable rocket, even after a lot of smart people are using advanced materials and really approaching the limits of engine efficiency and everything, you'll typically get 2% to 3% of your liftoff mass to orbit.
[0:26:34] That's for expandable rocket. Now, if you say, well, we want to make it reusable. We want to bring it back to the launch site. It's got to survive the rigors of a reentry. All the systems have to be capable of surviving multiple firings and thermal fatigue. It's really, you add a lot of mass when that happens. And previously, when people have tried to make a reusable system, they've found that
[0:27:01] They would get some portion of the way and then conclude that success was not one of the possible outcomes. In government programs, of course, the program would still continue for quite some time. It's funny but true. And so the real trick then is to say, can you create a rocket that is efficient enough that
[0:27:31] In an expandable form, you can push that, what would normally be 2% to 3% of mass to orbit up to maybe 4% of mass to orbit. And then if you can get really good about the reusable elements, maybe that can only cost you two of those four points. So on net, you would still get 2% roughly of your lift-off mass to orbit. That's the thing that needs to happen. In order for that to happen, you have to really get...
[0:28:01] Kind of straight A pluses across the board in all elements of the rocket design. Every little tiny thing. The engine efficiency, thrust to weight, the engine, the tank mass, the pressure mass, the secondary structure, the wiring, even the weight of the computers, everything matters immensely. But if you do all those things right,
[0:28:31] Then it is possible to make this work. And this is what has given me hope recently in the last few years, because I wasn't sure whether it was possible. But in the last few years, I've become convinced that it is possible. Of course, just because something is possible does not mean it will occur. But I think it can occur, which is, like I said, success being one of the possible outcomes is very important.
[0:29:00] That's the breakthrough that SpaceX is really trying to achieve. Because the stuff we've done thus far, I think, is good. I think it's evolutionary. It's not revolutionary. And we really need the revolutionary thing to work. So I think over the next few years, we'll see if we're going to be able to do that rapid and complete reusability thing. But I probably should sound more optimistic than I am.
[0:29:31] I am actually quite optimistic that this will occur. I don't want to leave any doubt in people's minds. I'm quite optimistic it will occur. And then going beyond, that's for Earth orbit, but now to establish life on Mars, I think you really ultimately need to be able to carry millions of people there and millions of tons of cargo. So you really need a fully reusable Mars transportation system, which is yet a...
[0:30:02] A more difficult step than creating a fully reusable Earth system. And then I was really worried that that would not be possible. But last year, I became convinced that it actually is possible, which made me very happy, actually. In fact, I think was there when I was pacing around the bedroom late at night, trying to see if this would work. Yeah, so that's good news. Now, it could be diluted.
[0:30:32] But I'm pretty, unless I'm deluded, I think we've got something in mind which would be a solution that would work. And then it comes to sort of the threshold of what, it really comes down to a cost. What cost does a trip to Mars have to be in order for it to be a self-sustaining reaction?
[0:31:04] And I think you've got to roughly get to the, I think, around half a million dollars. If people could pay half a million dollars to move to Mars, sell all this stuff on Earth, because you don't need it, obviously, and move to Mars, then I think that would work. Because that's basically the net worth of sort of a roughly middle income earning person after about 25 years in the United States is roughly half a million dollars.
[0:31:34] In fact, it's kind of hard to buy a house in Southern California for half a million dollars in a lot of neighborhoods. But I think at roughly that level is where it works. That's where we're going to get to. And my calculations show that it should be possible. In fact, it is possible, according to me. But there's a great deal of work that has to occur to make it a reality.
[0:32:04] I think that should be a really good reason to feel good about the possibility of life on Mars. I think that's probably what I'd like to leave you with. In the ensuing years, we will unveil more and more about what we're going to do. There will probably be some ups and downs along the way.
[0:32:35] But I can finally see a path to that objective. Like I said, as long as I'm not delusional, I haven't made some significant error, then I think that will hopefully come as good news to people in this room. Thank you.