How to Craft a Space Odyssey

THE GIANT CRANE waited with patience as the huge rocket booster burning at one end hurtled down the sky and then as if cold water had been thrown on it, calmed down and allowed itself to be the engulfed into the mechanical arms. With that Elon Musk and his company Space X wrote another chapter that changed space travel. It was done on camera, a sword that can cut both ways—failure would also be a talking point, except that by now Space X had shown itself to be relentless in achieving its objectives.

The booster was returning after thrusting Space X’s largest vessel, the Starship, into space around a testing orbital journey that culminated in coming down at another part of the globe and exploding on ocean waters. Musk claims that the Starship will start going to Mars from the year after next, first unmanned, and then with humans in them, and eventually, to settle a colony there. It is wild ambition but he is already one-third of the way. By catching the boosters on air and docking them, Space X hopes to both make Starship launches less expensive and more frequent. Musk says even his own engineers thought it was crazy when he suggested this air manoeuvre. They had already achieved getting the rockets to dock on platforms on the ground and sea, something that now makes spaceships almost akin to planes in how they take off and come back repeatedly. This is now an upgraded avatar of the same idea.

Musk is known to exaggerate and amplify his ambitions and achieve­ments but he then leaves his detractors perplexed by pulling something aston­ishing like what happened this week. He sets what looks like impossible targets for his employees but then they achieve them and credit Musk for it. In that, he is similar to Steve Jobs, who shaped Apple in his image and made it the world’s most valuable company. But Jobs still limited his genius to one line of products at a time. Musk has Space X, the electric vehicle manufac­turing company Tesla, the social media platform X. He has ventures that bore underground for a new form of trans­port and another that puts implants into the brain to make human beings function better. He is also now actively getting into politics and should Donald Trump win the US presidential election, will be heading a role to reduce government bloat and inefficiencies.

Many revile him for his political views and lack of empathy. But would a nicer, more decent version of Musk have been able to match his achieve­ments? Probably not. Great generals in wars have had no compunction in sacrificing soldiers while pursuing a strategy. If people have to be goaded to achieve what they believe is impos­sible, it is usually only through force of personality, often abrasive, that those like Musk and Jobs seem to have. It doesn’t make them very good or kind as human beings but that is not what they are aspiring for.

A Space OdysseyElon Muskspace explorationSpace XTesla CEO