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Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
My favourite tweet of all time is from Musk.
'No near term plans to IPO @SpaceX. Only possible in very long term when Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.'
Ooh, the mob is at it again, this time they want to dump a body on mars.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
He's building his framework of companies to support a colony there.
SpaceX to get there and then Tesla electric propulsion charged via better efficient solar panels from Solar City, needed due to the dimmer sun further out in the solar system.
Just needs a building system using Martian resources next (concrete based on martian dust)
Because unfortunately, an IPO for the general public means that unfortunate things happen.
You lose signifcant control of your company - possibly totally.
Musk developed Falcon Heavy - with essentially no market.
The Raptor engine currently in development has no market.
The requirement for reusability is reasonable from a long-term perspective.
You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their
to get pension funds and hedge funds and
portfolios.
These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but
to make next years dividend larger.
There was a story last week about how extroverts would be the worst possible people to have along on a multi-month trip to mars in a very small spaceship. That is something that introverts are better suited for doing.
Extroverts Don't Belong on Mars
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Most of Earth is underwater. Mars has only slightly smaller land area than Earth.
Of course it would be pretty awesome to be able to colonize Mars, but we're not there yet and putting a human being there unless there is a real reason to do so is wasteful and a safety risk.
You're right that there needs to be a 'real reason', but we can say the same thing about, say, Australia. Why do we make so many wasteful and potentially dangerous trips there every day? Because there is a thriving colony of humans there.
It's a bootstrapping problem. Visiting/emmigrating to a martian colony would be a 'real reason' to go to Mars; so that's what we need to build.
When does he plan to get the first person from Mars back to Earth?
Too bad Maris is toxic as fuck : http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
Anybody remember the Long Run Foundation from "Time for the Stars"? Because it sounds like that's what Elon needs.
This is part of the reason why every IPO files a prospectus with the SEC. SpaceX is what I would call "high risk" from an investment perspective. It could multiply my stock investment a thousand-fold, I could lose everything. This is not the sort of stock that most mutual and other funds would invest in. I believe the risk of going public is the stock market can be very fickle at times, especially with high risk, unproven technology: which describes SpaceX.
Staying private for now while the risk is higher means more stability for SpaceX. Elon Musk can still acquire capital and can still sell shares of the company, just not on a public market. Example: he could sell 25% of his company to a VC in return for a bucket of money, then pay it back in stock or cash after the IPO. But the company will not be subject to some of the market forces that govern publicly-traded corporations, which is a good thing in the short-term.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I would be pretty pissed off if I were to find myself on Mars all of a sudden with no explanation.
Maybe but I'd rather have someone say let's shoot for the moon (or Mars) rather than just making a ton of profit using patents on old technology.
What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers?
Because they are the ones that have the money. I'm not saying that to be snide, I just don't think you truly appreciate how cash flows on that sort of scale work. If the project isn't going to be government funded then you are going to have to get the money from large investors. Hedge fund investors would be a significant part of any such discussion since they own big stakes in most of the companies that would be involved in the engineering and financing of such a project.
Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it!
I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars. (that's roughly $500 for every person in America or ~$20 for every person on Earth) The chances of successfully crowd funding that via small investors is remote at best. I think you are greatly overestimating people's willingness and ability to fund such a risky endeavor, especially given that it is quite unclear whether a human could even survive the trip. With all due respect to Mr Musk I think the notion that we will have boots on Mars within 10-15 years is absurd unless one or more large nation states are enthusiastically behind the project and willing to fund it.
So that's why it's called the Red Planet!
Releasing the patents on his charging tech wasn't exactly done for altruistic reasons. He needs that to become the standard so Tesla doesn't have to build all of its own charging stations.
Rest assured that he makes plenty of money off all the other patents that Tesla keeps.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Doing anything useful in space requires long-term thinking. Wall Street doesn't do that, so keeping the operation private is not just the best way to go - it's the only way.
I admire Elon Musk. But he's dead wrong. Neil Degrasse Tyson is right.
As others have pointed out, taking your company public means surrendering a significant amount of control over the long term. Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.
NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.
You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.
Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.
Elon is overreaching with this.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going to get pension funds and hedge funds and ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their
portfolios.
These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but
to make next years dividend larger.
It's not quite that bad. It is possible to retain control; it just requires doing two things:
1. Retain voting majority. This has been done for well over a century by media companies (newspapers, originally) going public, and is what Google and Facebook did. You issue two classes of shares, one of which has dramatically more voting power than the other. The insiders keep the high-voting shares, the public buys the weaker ones. Set the numbers to ensure that the insiders retain a voting majority. Google has recently taken a further step to split it's low-power shares into low-power and no-power shares (actually a dividend paid out in a class of new shares), so that it can continue issuing new shares of the non-voting sort without further diluting the founders' majority. This is well-traveled ground.
2. Specify non-financial corporate goals in the prospectus and IPO materials, to make clear that accomplishing things like going to Mars are a higher priority than increasing shareholder value. This is necessary because otherwise it's assumed that the board and C-level execs have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and can be sued for failing to do so. It's always hard to make such a suit work, because it requires proving that an alternative course of action was clearly and obviously better, but as long as the company is following the goals stated up front to prospective buyers of the stock they can have no case at all. They knew they were buying a space exploration company that might generate some profits, rather than a profit-generating company that might explore the solar system.
Non-profit corporate goals for a for-profit company is also well-traveled ground. Google's IPO made clear that search result integrity and nebulous forms of technological advancement in the area of information organization, as well as being a good corporate citizen, were as high a priority as profit. This allows the founders to exercise control without fear of lawsuits accusing them of not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities, since they can just say "Well, we told you money wasn't our only goal." There are lots of other examples. One very much on point is Tesla's prospectus, which made clear that advancing EV technology and helping to improve the environment are corporate goals, so Musk clearly knows exactly how this works.
However, going public does add all sorts of complications and overheads, even if you structure it to avoid giving away control. If SpaceX really needed the influx of capital they could get from an IPO, it would make sense to jump through the hoops. But they don't, so it doesn't.
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