Making the Impossible Possible: The Legend of Elon Musk and SpaceX

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. I'm your host, Qiao Yulan.

Last time we talked about how whether the plan to settle Mars succeeds depends largely on terraforming the whole planet. And no matter what the future holds, one company will almost certainly take nearly the entire share of interplanetary transport: this episode's star, SpaceX.

We'll talk not only about this company, but also about how Musk pulled off one comeback after another against impossible odds, growing a private rocket company into something that can compete with national space powers.

The story starts with Musk's childhood dreams. Many people watched plenty of sci-fi movies as kids, and Musk was no exception.

Somewhere along the way, maybe because of the scenes of devastation in Star Wars, Musk came to believe that "humans living only on Earth is far too risky." Most people finish a movie and just laugh it off. But Musk never seemed willing to die on Earth. He was determined to make the interstellar journey within his own lifetime.

In 1991 he entered the University of Pennsylvania and earned two degrees, in economics and physics. During this period his horizons widened, and he began to think about how to combine technology with business to make his Mars dream real.

But he was also a very practical realist. In the 1990s, launching a rocket company right out of university was pure fantasy. A fresh graduate with no money and no connections, in an era when phones and computers weren't as common as they are now, and computing power was limited. The timing and the place were both against him.

Still, Musk was a talented programmer. In 1995 he and his brother founded Zip2, a company that handled the compressed archive files common on computers. Within just four years, it was acquired by a bigger tech company, and Musk made $22 million.

The same year, he started X.com, an online payment company that would later become PayPal. It's said that this company's product was also the inspiration for, and a model for, Alipay.

Musk did not let himself get lost in the early glory of becoming a billionaire while still young. Instead, he chose to step back at the height of the boom, selling both companies for good prices, and earned his first pot of gold. Money was only one part of it. These two deals also gave him experience in investment, fundraising and M&A, laying a solid financial and legal foundation for his continued entrepreneurship.

In 2002 Musk was on top of the world. After selling PayPal, he held at least $165 million in cash, and had built up plenty of connections in the investment world. He had never forgotten his rocket dream, but he had never seen a real rocket. So, accompanied by two close friends, he flew to Moscow.

It wasn't until they landed and met the Russians that the two friends understood what Musk actually wanted to buy: intercontinental ballistic missiles! After a few rounds of drinks and toasts, the Russians gave their final price: $8 million each. Musk countered: $8 million for two, please. The Russian looked at him and said, "Alright, kid, stop messing around," and then mocked Musk for not having the money.

Musk was thoroughly provoked. Not only did the Russian look down on him, he was also trying to jack up the price. After the talks fell apart, Musk sat on the plane, sulking with his laptop. His two friends breathed a sigh of relief: "I knew Old Musk wasn't really going to buy a rocket." But just as they were nearing the US, he suddenly blurted out: "Bro, I think we could build our own rockets." Then he used an Excel spreadsheet to show his friends the cost data for building a rocket.

No matter what friends and family told him, he stayed convinced that building it himself was the only way out. After that unforgettable trip to Moscow, a young man who had just become a billionaire, without looking back, splashed tens of millions of dollars to found SpaceX, determined to show all his fellow Americans a real rocket.

But this road was bound to be full of hardship. Before Musk, many billionaires had tried to enter the space industry. But it's a sector with high investment, high risk and a long payoff cycle, and it demands far more from scientific research and the engineering of applications than any other industry. So there's a joke going around the industry: in space, what's the fastest way to become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire.

Because space exploration is not purely a technical problem.

Space projects were once a market 100% monopolized by NASA. Such a high degree of national monopoly came with its own problems. With the end of the Cold War, its biggest rival no longer existed. Space exploration was an extremely expensive project that didn't win much favor: the rocks and data it collected could only be used for scientific research. On top of that, there was the Challenger disaster of the 1980s, when Americans watched on live TV as the spacecraft broke apart in an explosion. More and more people felt that space was no longer an important cause. Talent and funding were no longer as readily available as before, and an aging bureaucracy didn't help. American space technology barely moved forward for nearly 40 years.

As a newcomer, you not only needed technology, you also had to sort out your relationship with Washington. Faced with NASA's preference for big companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing when it came to contracts, Musk didn't play the game of quietly currying favor. Instead, he chose to take on the Senate head-on. At a hearing in 2004, he had his lawyers raise questions about the unfairness of NASA's bidding process for rocket projects, accusing the national space agency of colluding with big companies, leaving small companies no chance to develop.

In the end, SpaceX prevailed. It forced its way out of a rigid bureaucratic system and won the right to take its seat at the table, and from then on it could take part in market competition in a way that looked "fair." After all, NASA was almost the only buyer of rocket launches in the entire United States. Only a steady stream of orders could let SpaceX establish itself in the market.

With the monopoly barriers on orders cleared, SpaceX also poached plenty of staff with solid rocket-building experience from NASA. In 2006 it finally built its first Falcon rocket and began launch tests. By 2008, SpaceX had run three rocket tests, and God did not favor Musk or the young SpaceX. All three failed without exception, nearly burning through every penny Musk had saved from his earlier ventures.

The media didn't want to pass up this great story: a lucky man who came to America empty-handed, became a billionaire, then poured his heart into aerospace, only to be on the brink of bankruptcy.

But Musk never considered giving up. He sold every asset he could sell, raised resources again, and prepared the fourth launch for September 28. In the ten seconds before liftoff, Musk paced nervously back and forth in the control room, not even daring to look at the launch screen.

At last, the launch succeeded. After this launch, NASA saw what SpaceX could do and placed orders worth $1.6 billion. That money let SpaceX keep developing its rockets. And SpaceX began, following Musk's vision, to steadily bring down the cost of transporting cargo to orbit.

In the next Cold-Knowledge Blind Box, let's keep exploring how SpaceX invented reusable rocket technology, and the grand business model behind Starlink. How did it play the "snake swallowing an elephant" role and step by step take over the global rocket transport market!

The hardcore tech behind the Moon landing ends here. If there's any other trivia you'd like to hear, open the NIO app, go to the Friends tab, find the NIO Radio Shenzhen city channel in the community, and share the trivia you love with us.

NASA had less and less government funding to work with. Meanwhile, the International Space Station, which had been launched earlier, ran into problems that needed repairs, and the astronauts aboard needed supplies to keep operating. NASA had no choice but to seek help from its old rival, the Russian space agency, and buy seats on Russian rockets to carry cargo, so that space research could keep going. As the only supplier on the market, Russia finally found a chance to fleece the Americans, and made a fortune.

There was no way around it. Aerospace is an extremely expensive undertaking, after all. NASA no longer had the money to extravagantly build new cargo rockets, so it had to buy from the Russians.

So when Musk founded SpaceX, NASA was overjoyed. Not only did it provide many important guiding data for space exploration, more importantly it booked seats on rocket cargo flights. That amounted to giving the startup a firm order guarantee: as long as you meet my requirements, I will pay you a handsome fee, and it will be a long-term partnership.

Musk, of course, also knew the enormous business value in this. But he'd never built a rocket himself, after all.

It also gave his technology commercialization an endless stream of

SpaceX, Musk's rocket company, has gone through countless failures since its founding, but it has never given up. Whether it's developing reusable rockets or building the Starlink satellite network, it is using its own methods to push humanity toward the goal of the stars and the sea.

Thanks to SpaceX's efforts, humanity's plans for interstellar travel are no longer a distant dream. Its Dragon spacecraft has successfully carried astronauts to the International Space Station, and it also completed a successful landing on the way back to Earth. Achievements like these have undoubtedly given enormous encouragement to everyone who longs for interstellar travel.

Musk's goal is to make humanity a multi-planetary species within this century. And his Mars settlement plan is undoubtedly the greatest obstacle to achieving that goal. Yet Musk and his SpaceX team are using their wisdom and courage to get closer to it, one step at a time.

Today, we stand at a new historical juncture, facing the unknown universe, full of anticipation and curiosity. And Musk and his SpaceX have shown us that as long as you have a dream, courage and perseverance, the stars and the sea are right there in front of us.

Perhaps in the near future, we'll see with our own eyes the first colony humanity builds on Mars, celebrating a new milestone for our species. On that day, we will feel tremendous pride, because we succeeded in leaving Earth and heading for the stars and the sea.

The only one able to arm-wrestle national space powers

Paid with bitter hardship

In the 1960s, when computer memory was still a few kilobytes, humanity still found a way to carry out the seemingly impossible Moon landing. So in today's world, with all its powerful technology and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, could we also witness humanity migrating to Mars in our lifetime?

This episode, let's talk about the plan to settle Mars. Let's let our minds run free and enjoy the future the way we did as children. Let's look at what effort it would take to settle Mars under this grand goal, and what the right direction is to make it happen.

Wait, hold on. Why do we have to go to Mars? In the simplest terms: don't put all your eggs in one basket. If every species on Earth went extinct, a backup base on Mars could help carry Earth's species forward.

So why does Mars come to mind first whenever space settlement comes up? The Sun is the one place we can't go, but surely the other planets aren't all off-limits? Well, yes, actually, they are. First, a planet for settlement has to be habitable. That means it can't be too close to the Sun, or it would be scorching hot, and it can't be too far, or it would be freezing.

Earth's position is just right, neither too far nor too close. The two planets nearest to us are Venus and Mars. Venus has a harsh environment: its air pressure is 92 times Earth's, its air is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and it's covered in clouds of dilute sulfuric acid. Its surface temperature stays around 460°C year-round. Even surviving a probe landing is very hard, and life is out of the question.

By comparison, Mars's basic conditions are much better. Mars looks red because its surface is almost entirely iron oxide rock, very similar to basalt on Earth.

Mars's gravity is about 38% of Earth's, and a day on Mars lasts 24.3 hours, matching the day-night rhythm humans and most life on Earth follow. Mars's axis is tilted a little, so it has seasons too, though each season lasts about two years. So one year is summer, and the next is winter.

But Mars's atmosphere is extremely thin: its air pressure is only one percent of Earth's, and it has no oxygen. This means Mars has no real atmosphere to block cosmic rays from outer space, and the ultraviolet light is very strong. The day-night temperature swing is also large. On the Martian equator, it can drop to minus 70 degrees at night and climb back to 20 degrees during the day.

And even at its closest, Mars is 55 million kilometers away. Sending astronauts there takes at least six months, unlike the Moon, which takes just 8 days and 3 hours. So if we just rushed humans to Mars for a day of sightseeing, snapped a photo and came back, the trip would be more symbolic than practical.

If humans really land on Mars, they should do it the way Antarctic research stations are built: set up a permanent settlement on Mars in advance. Then, when the next group arrives, they swap places. That's a more reasonable way to explore Mars.

So the first step in the Mars settlement plan must be to change Mars's atmosphere. At the very least, we should first build houses on Mars, then try growing plants indoors. Mars has carbon dioxide and ultraviolet light, enough for plants to photosynthesize. This is how we can first fill the forward base with oxygen.

So the first step is to send all kinds of robots over. Based on this idea, NASA launched a challenge in 2015: use 3D printing technology to build houses out of basalt, which means building with Mars's own local materials. After all, airdropping bricks from Earth to build houses is far too extravagant.

After four years of competition, a company called AI Space Factory took the crown. Its technology can turn basalt into a liquid that works like cement, then stack it layer by layer, like building with LEGO bricks, until it prints a house on Mars.

Once there are plenty of oxygen-filled houses, humans can gradually send all kinds of seeds and eggs, or other fertilized eggs, to Mars and officially begin trying to nurture life there.

But this approach can only sustain a small number of people, basically a handful of researchers. If we want large-scale interplanetary migration, we'll have to thoroughly transform Mars's environment, such as by rebuilding its atmosphere.

As a passionate fan of Mars migration, when someone asked Musk how we could completely transform Mars's atmosphere, he came up with a striking idea: why not just use nuclear bombs on Mars's north and south poles, turning the ice there directly into water vapor? And there's dry ice in there too, which is solid carbon dioxide. Once large amounts of carbon dioxide are released into the air, a Martian atmosphere could form. With water vapor, rain and rivers on Mars wouldn't be hard to come by.

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