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| Ravi Speaks:- |
PERSON OF THE YEAR-2021 ELON MUSK.
Musk ducks his gigantic frame under the massive steel ring that holds the tallest, most powerful rocket ever designed and peers up at the dozens of engine nozzles that will power it. His fluffy little gray dog, Marvin, follows close behind the heels of his black cowboy boots, which Musk has paired with a black Tom Ford jacket and black jeans. His excited technical patter suddenly goes quiet; he sees something up in the gnarled mass of metal tubes that displeases him. “If one engine catches fire,” he explains, “we want to ensure that fire does not spread through the entire volume.” There are barriers between the engines for this purpose, but he’s not convinced they’re sufficient.
Musk has a soft handshake and an even voice that expresses exasperation, joy, and breathtaking ambition in the same quiet register. Tesla may be the principal source of his stupendous wealth and fame, as well as his greatest impact on the planet to date. But it is a space that animates his wildest, most extreme ambitions. Musk’s toddler, X Æ A-Xii (pronounced “X”), has recently started saying car, to which his father responds, “Rocket!”
“The goal overall has been to make life multi-planetary and enable humanity to become a spacefaring civilization,” Musk says—not because it would be profitable, but because it would be “exciting,” at least to him. “And the next enormous thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there. Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring over two, though—it’s a little weird if there’s only two.”
How Musk can believe something so improbable is easier to understand when you learn just how unlikely his current spacefaring success has been. Before it was America’s passport to the solar system, SpaceX nearly bankrupted Musk. Its first rocket, the Falcon, failed three times before reaching orbit in 2008. The company created the Falcon 9 and then the Falcon Heavy, which has three clusters of nine engines. Clustering engines was previously considered a bad idea because of the number of moving parts that can go explosively wrong—one of many assumptions Musk upended. “When I first looked at the clustering of engines on the Falcon 9, I had to roll my eyes,” says Scott Pace, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “But that’s why Elon Musk is smarter than me.”
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| A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off on April 23, carrying a crew to the space station-ESA/Eyevine/Redux |
Rockets also weren’t supposed to fly more than once. For decades, spent rocket stages were abandoned to the sea. “No one has ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket of any kind,” Musk says. “We just live on a planet where this is a tough job.” He describes the challenge with a clear relish. “It’s like, if this was a video game, the setting is on maximum, but not impossible.” In the past six years, SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of 90 of its Falcon 9 rockets and reflown 72 of them. Musk has yet to achieve full reusability by reflying to both rocket stages.
Before Musk, America’s space industry was moribund. In 2011, NASA mothballed the last space shuttle, after inking a deal with SpaceX to make uncrewed cargo resupply runs to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX made its first such trip in 2012, two years ahead of the competition, and in 2014, NASA tapped the company and behemoth Boeing to fly crews to the ISS. SpaceX launched its first crew to the ISS aboard a Dragon spacecraft in May 2020. Boeing, delayed by development problems, is not planning even an uncrewed test flight until next year.
For the Dragon, Musk swept away old-school instrument panels and replaced them with three oversize touch screens. There’s no control stick; the spacecraft’s attitude, orbit, and re-entry engines are all governed by the screens. Astronaut Doug-Hurley, commander of the first crewed Dragon flight, worried the screens would delay reaction times, but SpaceX solved this by making Dragon an automated ship. “There are no plans to do any more manual flying, certainly on the NASA missions,” Hurley says, “unless there’s a need for it from a systems failure kind of scenario.”
Success has not dampened Musk’s appetite for risk. After being lofted into space by a Falcon Super Heavy, his next rocket, the Starship, will light out for the moon, land there, take off and return to Earth, with no stages spent on the lunar journey. This so-called single-stage-to-orbit model has been the white whale of rocket designers for generations. In test flights, four prototype Starships exploded on landing before a successful test last May. For NASA and most private aerospace companies, a single crash is a setback that can take years to recover from. SpaceX works more like a Silicon Valley startup, where the goal is to fail quickly and iterate. This gets expensive fast. Over Thanksgiving, Musk emailed employees that Starship’s new Raptor engine was facing a “production crisis” that could bankrupt SpaceX if it did not achieve a “Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.” In a “worst-case situation,” he tells TIME, “bankruptcy is not out of the question, not that it’s likely.” The point, he says, was to remind staff that “we cannot lose our edge or get complacent.”
With its Starlink program, SpaceX hopes to launch a constellation of 42,000 satellites to provide Internet service to the world. But that kind of orbiting swarm wreaks havoc on sky gazing. “Just how much stuff do you want to put up there?” asks Neal Lane, senior fellow in science and technology at Rice University. “The astronomers are appropriately making noise about interfering with their ability to observe.” (Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, tells TIME the company is working on the problem.)
In April, NASA selected SpaceX to build the lunar lander for the Artemis program, thanks in part to a lowball $2.9 billion bid. A bid by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin came in at more than twice that. Bezos sued, accusing Musk of undercutting the competition. Musk rubbed his victory in the world’s face’s second richest man: “If lobbying & lawyers could get u to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto,” he tweeted. In November, the federal claims court ruled in Musk’s favor.
In the next month or two, Musk hopes to launch the Starship into orbit for the first time, powered by 33 engines at the base of an enormous, 230-ft. steel tube containing nearly 7.5 million lb. of super-cooled liquid fuel. “I think we can do a loop around the moon maybe as soon as 2023,” he says, and land on the moon’s surface within three years.
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| Rocket at Starbase, the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas-Mark Mahoney for TIME |
SpaceX is a private company, so whether it’s profitable is not publicly known. (Note: TIME’s co-owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff, have invested in companies connected to space exploration, including SpaceX. They have no involvement in TIME’s editorial decisions.) But that’s not the point, Musk says. One day, he hopes, the rockets will carry 100 people at a time to Mars, where the ships can be refilled with fuel manufactured on the Red Planet and shuttled back to Earth. Asked when he sees this happening, Musk pauses for a long moment, as if calculating all the variables—federal regulations and production schedules, test-flight targets, and bathroom requirements. “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” he finally says.
What will humans do there, and for how long? We have had little use for the moon since landing there 50 years ago. Musk argues that interplanetary life is the next great leap of evolution, like the emergence of multicellular organisms, and also that Mars could provide a home for humanity if Earth becomes uninhabitable. Experts aren’t so sure. “I have genuine doubts about the viability of a large settlement on Mars,” says John Logsdon, founder of Space Policy Institute. “What would people do there to earn a living? What would be the basis of a Mars economy?”
Musk is not deterred. Gamboling around the concrete slab littered with massive machines of his own creation, Musk acknowledges his latest rocket could go the way of his first three. “I wouldn’t say that our odds of getting to orbit the first time are high,” he says. “I would say optimistically it’s 50%.” The dark surface of the Gulf stretches over his shoulder; cell phones here pick up signals from Mexico, a stone’s throw away. How does it feel to think about the most powerful- rocket ever built exploding in a billion-dollar fireball? “Pretty scary!” he says, grinning. “So, excitement guaranteed on launch day!”
Then the tour is over. Musk turns, whistles to Marvin and strides briskly to his waiting Tesla.—-contd. Part-III.