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March 22, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:59
Edition 529 - Eric Berger
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much if you've emailed recently, hearing from more and more people who've been listening for years and have just decided to send me an email and let me know.
It's lovely when I get those emails.
Some people who've listened for 10 years, some people who heard my first radio show in 2004 to 2006 and are getting in touch.
Lovely to hear from you.
Please know that I see and react to each and every email that I get, even if they don't all get a personal reply, because that would be very difficult.
If your email requires a response, it will get one.
I do read every single email and take everything that you say on board.
And thank you very much for being there.
A lot of you say that these shows have been important to you during this terrible year.
Let me tell you that doing the shows have been important to me, especially through the last three months or so, where I've found the going really personally very, very difficult.
It seems to get more difficult every day, but I'm sure you can relate to that in your own life if you're affected by lockdown and coronavirus, as indeed we all are.
If you want to email me, please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, and you can send me an email there.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show, which you do.
In increasing numbers at the moment, and I'm very grateful for that.
And don't forget, of course, please check out the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That is, The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Put that into Facebook, and it will take you to my official page.
And you can take a look at what's happening with the show and maybe register your thoughts to the official Facebook page of The Unexplained.
Guest on this edition, Eric Berger, who's chronicled the formative years of SpaceX and Elon Musk.
And I think his book Lift Off, which we'll be talking about, gives us a real insight into the way this man's mind works and how he's a guy won't take no for an answer.
And success tends to be on his side for reasons that you'll hear.
I don't think there is another book that quite does this, so Eric Berger in Texas is going to be an interesting listen.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Thank you for contributing to it in so many ways and for keeping me going, which has been vital for me, especially like I say in the last three months, but certainly over this year.
Before we get to Eric Berger, talk about him and talk about why he's done this research, I want to read you the first words in the book.
They are very evocative.
Here they are.
A fat red sun sank into the Texas horizon as Elon Musk bounded towards a silvery spaceship.
Reaching its concrete launching pad, Musk marveled up at the stainless steel, steam-punk contraption looming above, which shone brilliantly in the dying light.
It's like something out of a Mad Max movie, he gushed, about the first prototype of his Mars rocket, nicknamed Star Hopper.
Just a few very evocative words that tell us an awful lot.
Let's get the man who wrote those words, Eric Berger, on now.
Eric, thank you very much for being so patient while I said all of those words.
I hope that I've summed up what we are about to discuss.
Tell me.
It's my pleasure, Howard.
Yes, you've summed it up very well.
I should have gotten you to narrate the audiobook.
Well, you know, I'm always available, very reasonable rates.
But the reason I don't always do that with authors and books, but that set the stage perfectly for the discussion we are going to have.
So I guess my first question for you is to talk to me a little bit about yourself and ally that with what's the big fascination with Elon Musk?
Yeah, so I think I'm kind of like you, Howard.
I grew up, you know, thinking that space exploration is something that big countries did, that space agencies did.
You know, I have memories from my youth of watching the very first space shuttle launch in 1981.
And I think that, you know, as I grew up, I had some expectation that the future of humans in space would be something pretty grand and not to diminish the International Space Station, but, you know, six astronauts living in orbit, you know, at a time, and that's sort of being the achievement of the last 20 or 30 years of human spaceflight.
It seems like we didn't really go where I thought we would be.
And as someone who's a mere mortal, I look at that and think, well, that's really a shame.
I wish NASA would do more, maybe get more funding.
I wish they could partner with the European Space Agency and Japan and these other places to go further.
What stands out about Elon Musk is that he looks at that problem and he did this analysis about 20 years ago and said, this is not acceptable.
I'm going to do something about it.
And that's really audacious.
But that's really where his story begins with space.
But the idea that somebody from outside the loop, without connections, obvious daily connections to government like NASA and its officials, the idea from somebody outside the loop having this idea 20-some years ago and being able to see it through, if you'd said that to people, then they would have thought, how audacious is that?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
One of the scenes that I described early on in the book before he founded SpaceX was that he convened this meeting at an airport hotel in Los Angeles where he got together some of the leading people in industry and government in space and sort of brought them together and said, here's what I want to do.
I'm going to found this company and sort of was basically trying to solicit their ideas.
And he was basically laughed out of the room.
Someone made the comment that maybe he should take his millions because he cleared about $180 million from the sale of PayPal several months earlier and take his millions and go sit on a beach somewhere.
So that was the basic attitude toward him at the time.
Sure.
What do you think it is about him then?
When you set up PayPal, when you sold it and made a fortune, what's it about him that makes him want to do stuff like he does rather than just taking the suggestion at face value and finding a nice island and simply enjoying the money, lighting your cigars with $10 bills?
Yeah, he's got this inner drive, Howard, where he's not really Satisfied, you know, sitting on a beach, I would say.
I mean, he likes to have fun.
I mean, you can see that if you follow him on Twitter, you know, he sort of shares memes and cracks jokes when he's not insulting federal regulating agencies.
But he wants to accomplish things.
He literally does want to change the world.
And one of his big concerns is that humanity faces these existential crises.
And one of them is that we're all sort of bottled together living on one planet.
And Earth is a great planet.
It's the best planet we know about.
But, you know, we ought to be starting to spread out to other worlds in the solar system and other stars.
And he believed that Mars is the logical first step to take toward that goal.
And he makes headlines virtually every week in this country and in yours with his plans and his thoughts.
And some of them get rubbished by people who read them.
And some people say his aims are too ambitious for the moment.
But Mars is definitely in his sight.
So there are two aspects to this, aren't there?
There is the day-to-day stuff, which is the direction that you and I as boys didn't think space travel would go in.
That's the day-to-day mechanical stuff of ferrying stuff and people up to the International Space Station and doing other workhorse material.
Then there's the exciting stuff on the other hand, which is setting up a base on the moon and going to have people on Mars, which Musk says that he wants to do.
What is it?
I thought about him and I know South Africa really well.
He was born in Pretoria, which is, I think, about 100 miles, 70 miles outside of Johannesburg.
What is it about him from being born and brought up there?
And they have some great business people in South Africa, some of the best in the world, and some people with real entrepreneurial flair.
But what is it about him that makes him want to do the big things?
He has this capacity.
He got these engineering skills from his father, Errol, and they don't have a great relationship.
There's this inner drive.
I think he wakes up every day thinking about how he can do things faster or better.
And it's just in his nature to want to build things.
I mean, he is at his heart an engineer, and engineers identify problems and then they devise solutions.
And in this case, the problem is not, well, my front door is squeaking or my automobile taillight is out.
I need to replace it.
I need to change the oil.
The problems that he sees are this, climate change is a problem.
We should build electric cars and power them with the sun.
Or humans are stuck on Earth.
We've got to be living on other planets.
So let's build the transportation system to go to Mars.
It's just a different way of thinking writ large based upon sort of how he does things.
Because the one thing that would guarantee that you could afford to think out of the box in ways that maybe you and I can't is if you've got a great big pot of cash and you're burning to do something with it, then you can think as laterally and as expansively as you want.
Yeah, that's right.
And as I say, he had about $180 million back in 2001, and that sounds like a lot of money.
But when it comes to the rocket business, you know, and he put $100 million into SpaceX, that's not a lot of money.
I mean, that is a fraction of a payroll of a big space company for one year.
It's not generally enough to build a rocket or launch it or build multiple rockets.
So on one hand, he had money.
On the other hand, it was not like game-changing money.
So he got enough money to spend, but it wasn't such a lot of money that you could just hose it up the wall.
He had to spend it all wisely.
And that's part of his skill.
That's right.
You know, he spent a lot of time making sure he hired the right people because he couldn't hire that many people.
By the time they were launching their first rocket in 2006, the company only had about 160 employees.
And he had hired them all.
And what he did is he basically gave them all equity in the company.
And so if SpaceX ultimately was successful, they would profit very handsomely.
And if it went under, of course, you know, they wouldn't.
And he paid them, you know, less.
The people that were coming to the company were getting less than they were getting at their jobs at Boeing or Lockheed or NASA.
Do you know today, just before we take some commercials here and then we'll tell the story of those early years and the people involved, do you know how many millionaires that SpaceX has made?
I would say dozens, if not hundreds.
I don't have an exact number for you, but I mean, the early employees got, you know, thousands of shares of stock that are worth hundreds of dollars now.
And another thing he has to be good at, and we'll talk about this much more in the next segment, but, you know, got to be good at finding the right people.
And when you find the right people, you have to fire them with the dream that you have and make sure that they come on the journey with you.
Yeah, he was one of his great talents.
And one of the real reasons SpaceX Ultimate was successful where a lot of other companies failed was his ability to identify not just really smart, young, talented engineers, but then those engineers who would go to the mat, who would work 70, 80, or 90 hours a week, not complain about it.
And basically, you know, their whole life for a certain period of time would be surrounded, you know, focused on SpaceX.
And does he inspire, you know, I mean, we've got Sir Richard Branson over here in the UK, known throughout the world, you know, a man who inspires a certain amount of loyalty from the people who work around him.
Is he somebody who is, you know, iconic for people like that?
Iconic is probably not the right word, but is charismatic in that way for the people who work for him and with him?
Yeah, he's definitely charismatic.
I think it's a certain mixture of awe and fear and inspiration, but there's no question that the people that come to work for SpaceX, by and large, believe in the mission.
And the mission is a couple of things.
First of all, it's building better ways to get into space and to fly through space and to do that in different ways that the industry hasn't really seen before.
And then secondly, the bigger goal, which has been there from day one, was literally sending humans To Mars to settle there, to ultimately build cities on Mars.
And so they come there because they believe in that mission.
He obviously has the ability to inspire people, even though sometimes you see him and he seems to be remarkably understated.
The guy's definitely got something obviously as his achievements clearly attest.
Eric Berger in the United States in Houston, near Houston, is talking with us about Elon Musk.
Liftoff, Eric.
Great title.
Very simple.
Says it all.
It's the story of how the company got off the ground and about the trials and tribulations that they had to go through to get there.
It was, you know, they were originally building just a simple rocket with one first stage engine and a single upper stage engine.
Pretty simple in design, but all rockets are extraordinarily difficult to build.
And so it's the story of them struggling to reach orbit.
And they ultimately, of course, made it.
They did.
I mean, there were, just as NASA had their setbacks, Elon Musk had his too.
We'll talk about those.
So was the aim at the beginning, the day-to-day mechanical stuff going up and down to the ISS?
Because we knew at that stage, what, 20 odd years ago, that eventually America wouldn't be able to use the shuttle for that anymore.
So there'd have to be an all-American solution found to that.
And this was the solution.
Was it all about that at the beginning, or did he always have his eyes on the prize of Mars?
So he always had his eyes on the prize of Mars.
And, you know, he was disillusioned in 2001 and 2002 with NASA's overall plans because at the time, the space agency really wasn't looking toward Mars.
And he recognized that the companies that NASA was using to launch at the time, so there was the space shuttle, of course, but then there were private companies that NASA relied on, Lockheed and Boeing, for its science payload to get to orbit.
He looked at all that and saw that launch infrastructure is just being way too expensive.
And he figured that if you're ever going to have any kind of a sustainable settlement on the moon or Mars or even in space, you had to really bring down the cost of launching there.
And so his eyes were always focused on the prize of Mars.
But he saw the essential first step of making that a reality as building rockets that just cost a lot less than the existing vehicles.
I mean, he was frustrated because he looked at the rockets that NASA was using two decades ago, and they were based on very old technology that dated back to the Apollo era or shortly thereafter.
And the price of going to space was not coming down.
It was going up.
And so he saw that and said the first step is to try to build a rocket in a different way.
And by a different way, I mean, instead of like outsourcing your engines to one company, your structures to another company, your tanks to another company, he wanted to see if he could build as much as that in-house with as few people as possible.
And so he would hire people.
He would say, what's the cheapest you could build this for or that for?
And sort of was pretty relentless about price and cost cutting from the beginning.
Was he under the radar at all?
I mean, I'm trying to think back, and I can't remember much being said about him, but maybe I just wasn't reading the right newspapers.
You know, was he going for publicity at that point?
I mean, I think he was always going to go for publicity at that point, but he wasn't getting much because he hadn't achieved anything in the space industry.
They ended up launching from Kwadraleen, which is a small atoll in the Pacific Ocean, not close to any land masses at all.
And there was an Army base there.
And so you asked if he was known at all.
So the commander of that base basically was stationed in the United States in Alabama, a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Tim Mango.
And Mango said he remembered when Musk called him in 2003 about using the Army base in Kwajalein.
And Musk called him up with his South African accent, said, I've founded PayPal.
I've started a rocket company and I'm looking for a launch site.
And Mango said after about two minutes of listening to this, he hung up because he thought he was crazy.
So there's the answer to your question.
But of course, money talks.
And I guess if he'd done a little bit of research, he would have seen that this man actually had a track record of getting things right.
So yeah, that's right.
So Mango then said after he got off the phone with Musk, he went to Google and searched Elon Musk's name and saw that he had founded a rocket company and saw a picture of him and so forth in some store on CNN or somewhere.
And so he called the number back.
So then he went to the SpaceX website and called the number and Musk picked up the phone and Mango started talking and Musk said, hey, did you just hang up on me?
So the relationship then went from there.
Okay.
Well, obviously then, unlike some business people with money that I've encountered in my life, he has the capacity for understanding and forgiveness.
I think so.
Not always.
But yeah.
Okay.
Now, you know, the idea of building a rocket, that's a big deal.
And testing a rocket, that's an even bigger deal.
You know, it was difficult, wasn't it, at the start?
Because the first Falcon rocket failed.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, no company, no private company had ever come along and used essentially their own money to build a rocket launched from the ground, fueled with liquid propellants, and putting it into orbit.
That had never happened before.
Other people had tried.
At least half a dozen companies had come along with similar visions and failed.
And so Musk was facing a lot of failures when he started SpaceX.
And he himself failed.
As you say, the first launch in March of 2006, it took them less than four years to get from basically starting out with nothing to having a rocket ready to go.
And that's really quick.
But it did fail.
The engine caught fire even before it took off and it rose for about 30 seconds and then crashed back into the island.
But if we look back at the history of NASA, you've only got to look at some of those test films from the 50s and the 60s, even the 70s.
a lot of those things ended up in flames.
So there must have been a part of him that realized this was going to be a difficult road.
It wouldn't be instant success.
Yeah, that's right.
When he found his SpaceX, he basically gave himself three attempts to get to orbit.
And he figured that, you know, well, if we can't get to orbit on three different after three flights, then we're probably, it's probably not worth keeping the company around because we're not that good.
So, you know, some failure was accepted or understood to occur.
I mean, these are complex systems.
And again, it was pretty unheard of at the time for them to be assembling this rocket on this small island.
It's the size of four city blocks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you know, out there exposed to the ocean and sea salt spray.
Well, that was one of the problems, wasn't it, when they had the, and he was very big and it's still, whenever something goes wrong, you know, he says very quickly, it's all about learning lessons.
We'll learn lessons for next time.
That's exactly what he said here.
And one of the things, and in your book, you say perhaps the most egregious failure of the launch team left the rocket fully exposed on the launch pad on that island, which obviously had, you know, ocean air, moist ocean air, for weeks at a time.
At the end of 2005, going into 2006, they basically had a choice of catching the last flight home to spend Christmas with their friends and family members or spending a couple more days to roll the rocket back into the hangar and missing the entire holiday season.
And they thought they would be back within about 10 days and it wouldn't be that big of a deal.
But for various reasons, they didn't return to the island for almost a month.
And so the engine on that first stage basically sat outside and that corroded one of the bolts that led to the fuel leak that then led to the engine fire that caused the failure.
So it was a learning curve for him.
And space exploration has shown us over the years that sometimes it's the little omissions that end up causing you the big problems.
Oh, absolutely.
And it was the tiniest failures too on the second and the third flight.
On the third launch, you know, it was a single line of code in the flight software that caused the problem.
They had left one second between the time the first engine shut off and then from when it separated from the upper stage of the rocket.
And that caused some issues because then the first and second stages collided and that scuttled the mission, obviously.
And if they had just used five seconds instead of one second, it wouldn't have been a problem.
So yes, that's very useful things.
Yeah, that's how you learn.
Yeah, that's how you learn it.
And that's the thing with rockets, that a hundred things have to go right for you to get that thing into space.
And just one thing, be it a corroded bolt or a line of code, can be enough to bring the whole thing crashing back down.
Elon Musk has got tremendous fortitude.
So, you know, he was able to take that on the chin.
I'm sure it hurt at the time, but he's got great fortitude and he always comes back.
But you have to make sure that everybody else around you and all of those people he'd recruited and all of those people he got to share the dream, he had to make sure that all of those people, plus all of the people who'd be only too pleased to see him fail, he had to bring everybody along after that.
Yeah, that was enormously challenging.
If you look back at that third failure, it was in August of 2008.
And now imagine that you're Elon Musk in this time period.
You've spent six years trying to build a rocket company, get the respect of NASA.
You've been fighting Lockheed and Boeing and all these competitors and talking about all these things you're going to do in space, and you can't even get a simple dinky rocket into orbit.
So your rocket company's out of money.
You started Tesla a couple of years after SpaceX, and it's in this enormous cash crunch.
You haven't been able to deliver your first cars to market yet, and that's hemorrhaging money, and you're getting a divorce.
Your wife, your former wife, is out there in the press, sort of dragging you down.
There's a website called Tesla Deathwatch that's sort of, you know, looking for anything to say negative about the company.
Oh, I mean, people have been writing Tesla off for years, but it's still there.
Yeah, yeah.
And then finally, you know, that was the beginning of this economic recession in the United States that would spread around the globe.
And so you couldn't really go to the private companies to get capital.
So there's all of these pressures on him in that summer and early fall of 2008.
I mean, it would have crushed almost anyone, you'd think, but sort of somehow he persevered through that.
Maintaining drive and loyalty.
I made some notes before on the book, and this is something that I just copied down here.
Quotes, Elon Musk recognized the extraordinary demands he placed on SpaceX's early hires.
He therefore decided to reward employees who spent the majority of 2004 traveling to Texas for engine tests and elsewhere.
Anybody who spent 200 days away from home in 04 received an extra two weeks of time off in 2005.
So even though he was dealing with, you know, rolling with the punches, as we say, he was still thinking about the people.
Yeah, I mean, he recognized that he'd hired some brilliant people.
And after a few years at SpaceX, they had the opportunities to go elsewhere.
And they not only got two weeks off, Howard.
He told them just to go see his assistant, and she would book a trip for them wherever they wanted to go.
And, you know, it was first class.
That's the kind of boss I want.
I'll have to dream on, I think.
Okay, so how did things unfold from there then?
You know, the first launch, the third launch problems.
How did the company develop from there?
Because it became a very different organization, didn't it?
Yeah, so they had eight weeks basically after that third failure in August of 2008.
There was no more money to pay payroll after that point.
And they had the parts for one more rocket.
And Elon basically got his team together and said, you know, look, we've only got this amount of time and you've got to go out and we're going to try to launch this last rocket.
And the fate of the company was riding on that.
And they did in this, you know, this really remarkable Period where they almost lost that rocket when they were trying to transport it to the launch site and just a number of other things that they went through.
They did ultimately reach orbit, spoiler, in September of 2008.
And then just a few months later, they got their first big operational contract from NASA worth more than a billion dollars to start delivering cargo to the International Space Station.
And I know it seems pretty mundane just to launch a cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station, but for a private company, again, that had never been done before like that.
And SpaceX's spacecraft was different because it didn't send Dragon up to the station and then it didn't burn up in the atmosphere as it came back.
It tried to land it in the ocean like an Apollo spacecraft did, and they succeeded.
And so all of a sudden, researchers could get their cargo back from the space station within a few hours of it leaving.
And so they grew from a few hundred employees pretty quickly to a few thousand employees, and that set them on the stage of this decade that they've had.
And people started paying attention.
That's when I really caught on to what he was doing and realized this guy was going to do the things that he said he was going to do and was not a guy to be written off and not a guy to be taken lightly.
But there was, you know, he had a fair wind on his side.
He had luck on his side in that America had an imperative.
America wanted to be able to service the International Space Station, the ISS, without having to use Russian rockets for its people, which is, bearing in mind, it's all about chutzpah, isn't it?
The space race.
That's embarrassing if you have to use Russian rockets.
So we want one of our own.
That's right.
I mean, a big key to their success was the retirement of the U.S. Space Shuttle in 2011 because NASA wanted a replacement for that.
And so it held a competition among private companies.
And SpaceX was well positioned because they just launched their Falcon 9 rocket and Cargo Dragon.
And so they said, well, look, we can modify Dragon to carry people to the space station.
And so there was this really heated competition.
And ultimately, in 2014, they emerged alongside Boeing to develop two different systems to get astronauts.
And of course, SpaceX did deliver on that last year with the first crew dragon flight to the space station.
But yeah, NASA has been, it's been right time, right place for SpaceX in terms of NASA and getting those contracts that have helped them to grow.
Because if you think about it, all of the really cool things that we've seen them do over the last decade, particularly the rocket reuse, the landing at sea.
I mean, that to me looks like really a futuristic thing when I see a rocket come down from space and land on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it's all like pre-programmed.
All of that stuff happens because they have these operational flights to the space station where they're allowed to test their reuse and re-entry technologies and sort of make the mistakes that ultimately lead to the success that they had.
The shuttle wasn't entirely reusable.
Obviously, large parts of the space shuttle had to be created from the ground up for every launch, and that was expensive.
As you said, it was a very expensive vehicle coming to the end of its life.
Do you think that Elon Musk is the man who changed our thought processes about the idea of going into space and stopped us thinking that everything has to be designed and built bespoke?
And that actually you can start to create things that you can put on the shelf and you can mix and match them for your future.
I think that's right.
I mean, Hans Konigsman, who was the fourth employee at the company and features prominently the book, of course, told me that one of their goals was to make launch boring.
And you watch a rocket launch and it's hard to imagine that being boring.
But, you know, they're kind of doing that because they're launching rockets now this year, you know, every nine days from Florida.
And it does seem much more routine than it was in the past.
And that's an important step to take if you're actually going to turn space from a place where, you know, you can put a few astronauts up there every year, but that's about it, to a place where, you know, you're putting millions of tons into orbit and that facilitates human settlements on the moon or Mars or elsewhere.
And so we are, I think we're at the beginning of that change.
And yeah, it absolutely comes down to Musk pushing for this rapid reuse.
I mean, the space shuttle was reusable.
The orbiter, you could fly multiple times.
The external tank was thrown away, but the boosters were recovered and refurbished.
But it was not reusable rapidly.
Like it took months and months to turn those vehicles around, and it was still extremely expensive.
It was like the shuttle per flight costs over its lifetime were about 1.5 billion US dollars per flight.
You know, it costs $30 million to fly a Falcon 9 rocket to orbit.
And of course, quietly, and we haven't mentioned this yet, we should just note it here.
Quietly, all through this year and during last year, those Starlink satellites have been going up there and bringing internet to people who would have found it very difficult to get internet before they were there.
Yeah, that's right.
The Falcon 9 being reusable has enabled SpaceX to get its Internet constellation into space before all of its competitors.
I mean, they're years ahead of OneWeb and Project Kuiper by Amazon and all the others.
And it's massively important, just as we conclude this segment.
I read a piece earlier this week.
I think it was from the CBC in Canada, talking about a guy in the far.
I love the idea of the far frozen north of Canada, especially at this time of year.
It's fast.
I'd love to go there.
But this guy was a business person, and the slowness of his internet connection was, you know, was hampering his business, was making it really hard for him.
And suddenly, he gets internet that comes out of the sky.
And fast internet, you know, costs him a fair amount to do it, but he's got it.
So this is Elon Musk making a difference.
Yeah, bad internet can certainly be debilitating.
And they've done similar things.
I mean, you've had, you know, you've had lockdown, of course, and you've talked a lot about this on your show, Howard.
But, you know, when students have to learn remotely, it's awfully hard to do that if you can't have a reliable internet connection.
So Starlink has also been delivering services to Eskimos in Alaska and elsewhere, and they're hoping to spread this service around the world.
You know, there's positives and there's negatives about Starlink in terms of astronomers worry about the night sky and it raises the cost of collisions, but there's no doubt that this is for the first time really delivering on the promise of global internet from space.
I want to talk for the rest of this out.
It's okay with you, Eric Berger, about the mission, the idea, the thought of Mars, because this is an obsession with Elon Musk, isn't it?
It's absolutely an obsession.
It was an obsession from the beginning of SpaceX.
He talked with his earliest employees about this.
Gwen Shotwell, who has gone on to become the president of the company and probably the company's most important employee, said that in her very first interview with Elon, he started talking about Mars.
And she said he was compelling, scary, but compelling.
So yeah, it's totally been an obsession for him.
And while he was doing all of those other things in the 2000s, in the first decade of the 2000s, how was he furthering his dream of going to Mars?
So if you're going to talk about going to Mars, you've got to have a transportation system, right?
That's the essential first step.
And if you're going to have a transportation system, you've got to have really big rockets.
But a small startup company can't just rock up and build a big rocket, right?
You need to start somewhere.
And so in the 2000s, he was showing that, hey, we're a private company and we can do something that no one's ever done before.
We can build our own orbital rocket.
And once they did that, once they finally succeeded with the Falcon 1 after so many failures, that opened the door to going to the Falcon 9, which was basically like the Falcon 1, but with nine engines instead of one.
And then they went to the Falcon Heavy, which was 27 engines.
And so all of a sudden, he's built the biggest rock, most powerful rocket in the world with the Falcon Heavy.
And then that makes you sound, then when you start talking about Mars, you sound a little bit less crazy because you've done it, right?
You've taken this first step.
And so now that opens the door to this becoming a little bit more realistic of a proposition.
It does.
But he's gone and put dates on this, you know, and those dates are sooner than a lot of people think he can achieve them.
I would include myself in that.
I think his current date for sending humans to Mars is 2026.
That seems...
Yeah, that seems outlandish to me because NASA is spending billions of dollars of years to try to get to the moon.
And I don't think NASA can send people to the moon by 2026.
And let's be honest here, Howard, the Apollo program in the 1960s was a tremendous achievement.
But sending humans to the moon for basically a week-long mission to a world right next door is a lot easier than sending people to Mars for what is a multi-year mission where just lots of more things can go wrong.
I mean, it's just, it's a whole order of magnitude more difficult.
So, you know, it's not easy to send humans to Mars.
And what NASA has done over the last 50 years really is just a small step toward that larger goal.
Is he cooperating with NASA on this?
Because let's make no mistake.
I mean, it goes without saying, really, is a massive undertaking.
Right.
So Musk has worked pretty well with NASA.
They have extremely different cultures.
NASA is much more risk-averse.
They like to go slowly.
SpaceX wants nothing more than to move fast, and they're willing to take risks during their development programs to move fast.
So there's a culture clash, but the NASA of today is not the nimble agency it was during the Apollo program.
It's much more sort of calcified, I guess.
It just moves more slowly.
It's a much bigger bureaucracy.
So having a SpaceX come along and shake things up has been good for SpaceX, been good for NASA.
And NASA, frankly, has been good for SpaceX both in terms of funding and giving it prestige.
They're not currently working together on any kind of a Mars program.
But ultimately, if NASA and the U.S. Congress decide humans want to go to Mars, they're going to realize that SpaceX has the best transportation system, the best rockets, and they're going to have to.
And SpaceX, to get humans to Mars, I mean, it's not just launching people there and saying goodbye.
You know, you've got to protect them from radiation during the flight.
You've got to have somewhere for them to live on the surface of Mars.
You've got to have power on the surface of Mars.
You've got to figure out how to survive in microgravity for years.
And is SpaceX doing all of that work or are they subcontracting that?
They're not.
They're building their, they have this Starship rocket that they're building in South Texas.
That is the transportation system.
But all that other stuff, you know, that's kind of pushed off into the future.
I mean, they're thinking about it.
They have ideas.
But it's NASA on the International Space Station that's done a lot of that work with its international partners over the last decades.
I mean, when people go up for six-month missions, they're studying health, surviving outside of a gravity well and things like that.
And when, you know, they're also studying closed-loop environmental systems.
So like, how do you recycle water?
How do you turn urine back into water that you can drink?
Those kinds of things.
And so NASA has a lot of know-how that SpaceX will ultimately need to tap into, I think.
But there is cooperation.
I read only yesterday, by the time this is heard on air three days ago, that NASA and SpaceX have tied up an agreement to do, you might have seen this in the news there this week, an agreement about safety, to have a sort of common policy on safety in space.
Right.
So that policy that you're referring to was to make sure that the Starlink satellites we talked about are able to avoid NASA satellites in space, the International Space Station.
But you're right.
Now, they're cooperating on a daily basis.
I mean, NASA and SpaceX are meeting every day to make sure that their cargo and human missions to the space station are safe.
NASA and SpaceX have an agreement that SpaceX may build the human landing system for Their program to send humans to the moon.
I mean, they are intertwined.
Over the last decade, SpaceX has gone from David to Goliath in the global space industry, and they are now NASA's most important contractor.
But there's also an underlying tension.
NASA just yesterday did this big test of the Space Launch System rocket.
And Congress told NASA to build this rocket and has paid billions and billions of dollars for it.
But SpaceX is building Starship in Texas primarily with its own money.
And if that rocket is successful, it's just better than the Space Launch System in every way in terms of cost, reusability, frequency of flight.
So, you know, SpaceX and NASA are cooperating, but they're also competing in some ways.
That's interesting, isn't it?
But your money's on Elon Musk and not NASA to be, you know, the person who wins that prize.
Well, let's put it this way.
Since the space shuttle retired in 2011, and that was a NASA rocket, NASA has launched zero rockets of its own, and SpaceX has launched 100 rockets of its own.
And so the company that in that time has built the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, and now Starship, yeah, those guys are better at building rockets than NASA.
NASA is much better at the human spaceflight stuff and sending robotic missions to Jupiter and to Pluto.
But the private industry in the United States and around the world has caught up to the government space agencies, for sure.
That is a fact around the world.
Nobody quite like Elon Musk, but they certainly have.
2026, we've said, and everybody I speak to says, that's too ambitious an aim.
It's not going to be 2026.
So how does this indefatigable man get closer to 2026 and finesse the news that it's not going to happen in 2026?
In his mind, it's possible.
Like, he has sort of sketched things out in his mind.
He said, okay, if we do this, this, this, and this, and there frankly are a million things that they have to do.
He said we could get to a point where we launched humans to Mars in 2026.
He's always been aggressive on dates in the past.
You know, it's Musk time.
Elon time is a meme, and it's absolutely true.
But he may miss those dates, but he wants his teams to work aggressively toward them.
And so, you know, it's one of the ways in which he motivates the people he works for, that work for him to work quickly.
So it might happen.
I would not bet on it, Howard.
I would say if he got to Mars in the early 2030s, that would be a monumental achievement, the likes of which we had never seen before in space.
You know, by which time he's going to be, what, in his 60s, thereabouts?
Do you think that after getting to Mars, and I don't doubt that he's going to do it, whenever it is, it's just the date that's variable.
Do you think he'll have another rain?
Will he want to go further and do more?
Or will he call it a day at that?
Well, you raise a very interesting point there.
You're right.
He's about 50 years old.
And I think one of the reasons that he's moving so fast is because he realizes that his lifetime is finite.
And if you look at how far he's come in the almost 20 years since he founded SpaceX, he's really come a long way from us, you know, not having really a clue about rockets to just being the global, dominating the global launch industry.
That's pretty impressive in 20 years.
But that is just a step toward getting to Mars.
And so he knows there's a long way to go.
I think they'll get there in his lifetime.
And I think, yeah, I think that's probably going to be enough.
He's basically, you know, in spending some time with him, he's got three main concerns.
Number one, he's concerned about climate change.
And that's really the purpose of Tesla.
Number two, he wants humans to be a multi-planetary species.
That's why he's pushing so hard for Mars.
And number three, he's very concerned about artificial intelligence and harmful AI.
And so he's got a company called Neuralink that's addressing this.
And I think that issue is something that sort of is not close to being solved either.
But yeah, I think if he gets to Mars, I think he probably would consider his life a success at that point.
Of course, he doesn't always put every foot in the right place.
I can remember him talking about nuking Mars to terraform it and people reacting with horror to that suggestion.
So he doesn't always handle the media and his public outpourings as deftly as he might hope.
A polite way to might say is that he's unfiltered on Twitter.
Yeah, he's absolutely gotten in trouble.
I mean, he recently launched a rocket without approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.
He got highly censored by the FCC for stuff he's done at Tesla.
He's gotten in trouble over the last year because he was really nasty to public health officials in California about the COVID-19 crisis.
So he steps on toes.
But, you know, in each of those cases, it was a regulatory agency he felt was holding himself back.
And whether he was right or wrong, ultimately in the court of public opinion or in your eyes or mine, in his eyes or in his mind, he felt like he was being unfairly held back by something and he was trying to push through it.
And that's just how he acts.
Like he will be a bull in a China shop if he thinks that he's being treated unfairly.
Remarkable man.
Remarkable story.
And we've only covered about 2% of it.
The book is called Lift Off.
It's about the early years, the formative years of SpaceX that give you an indication and more of a clue as to where that company and that man is heading in the future.
Eric Berger, thank you very much indeed.
Oh, it's been my pleasure to talk to you.
Eric Berger, and the remarkable story of one man's determination and all of the special people he surrounded himself with.
It is literally a testament to how getting the right people around You and having a dream and seeing that dream through can actually work.
If you can conceive it, you can achieve it, as the brand new Heavies once sang in a song called You Are the Universe.
Great song, by the way.
Play that on the radio one of these days.
Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained.
More great guests in the pipeline here.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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