How SpaceX and the Quest For Mars Almost Sunk Tesla Motors

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 15, 2015 @02:21AM from the rocket-bucks-versus-car-bucks dept.

braindrainbahrain writes: Elon Musk and his rocket company are well known to Slashdottters. This article and book excerpt tell the story of the creation of SpaceX and how it almost sank Musk's other company, Tesla Motors. Musk recalls, "I could either pick SpaceX or Tesla or split the money I had left between them. That was a tough decision. If I split the money, maybe both of them would die. If I gave the money to just one company, the probability of it surviving was greater, but then it would mean certain death for the other company." But then, at the last moment, years of work at SpaceX finally paid off: "[O]n Dec. 23, 2008, SpaceX received a wonderful shock. The company won a $1.6 billion contract for 12 NASA resupply flights to the space station. Then the Tesla deal ended up closing successfully, on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day." Also, it turns out the inspiration for SpaceX was the idea of sending mice to Mars.

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Re:The mice again! by DerekLyons · 2015-05-15 03:00 · Score: 4, Informative

What would be to point of sending mice to Mars?... unless it was about sending the mice to Mars.
When it comes to manned exploration of the Solar system, there's two areas we pretty much have little to no understanding of;
- long term biological effects at other than 1G or 0G.
- long term radiation effects outside the Earth's magnetosphere.
As it turns out, these are the two things we absolutely must have an understanding of to venture long term beyond LEO.