Silicon Valley Venture Iron Man: Hope to die on Mars

Recently, according to foreign media reports, the Guardian newspaper columnist Lori-Carroll (Rory Carroll), a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, U.S. electric vehicle company Tesla CEO Allen-Maersk (Elon Musk) conducted an exclusive interview. During the visit, Musk talked about the many expectations of his company, and told us about his inner differences with Tony Stark, the Iron Man, and even said he wanted to "die on Mars".

The following are the main contents of the article:

In recent years, famous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, U.S. electric vehicle company Tesla CEO Alan Elon Musk in the media has been the bombing of their own value to a higher level, people even have to think about when the horse will fall from heaven again the issue.

Indeed, today's Musk have been branded with too many rings: investors, entrepreneurs, billionaires, space pioneers, and real-world Iron Man. Moreover, Musk, who has achieved great success in his career, has not stopped, and he is still trying to expand the limits of human science and business in his own power, most of which are "impossible tasks" in the eyes of others. So, in some ways, Musk will fail sooner or later.

Musk, 41, already has high-end clients such as NASA who are lined up to collaborate further with their private space company SpaceX, while another company, Tesla, is doing well. For most business giants, the achievement alone is enough to get them out of the way, but for Musk, these achievements are merely stepping stones to achieving their ultimate goal, because he hopes to help colonize Mars in his lifetime and to minimize the impact of climate on human life.

The outside world has long described Matt as a "thorn in the head," but as far as I am in the experience of meeting him at SpaceX headquarters in western Los Angeles, he is actually a very friendly, talkative person who is passionate about space exploration, climate change research and Hollywood pictures.

Space Dream

"The most important thing for me is to develop a technology that can transport a large number of people and goods to Mars, which is really amazing," says Musk. "Moreover, Musk hopes that human beings can realize the dream of migrating 80,000 people to Mars in 15 years."

"Of course, this dream is not free, which means we need to first meet the needs of key customers such as NASA, to build commercial radio satellites, GPS satellites, graphics, and organize scientific experiments." Although human beings are unlikely to experience extinction in the short term, we did experience a number of devastating events. It's like you're buying a car and you're buying insurance, and you're not buying insurance because you think you're going to have a rainy day tomorrow, just because it's possible. ”

In terms of personal attire and temperament, Musk does not have the typical rich accent, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and sitting behind a desk overlooking the parking lot. More than 40 meters from his Open-plan office can reach SpaceX's factory, and the busy engineers and technicians are studying rocket structures, propulsion systems and satellite orbits in an acre-wide factory. Above the factory gate was the first commercial carrier "Dragon", which was successfully docked with the International Space Station last year. Now, SpaceX's next goal is to bring humans into space by "Dragon" in 2015-2017.

In fact, it was Musk's dream to enter space. Musk was born in South Africa with a Canadian mother and a South African father. He began to learn from childhood programming and software design, a geek's wisdom and business mind in one, Musk 12 years old when he successfully designed and sold their own research and development of the first video game "Blastar". He then traveled to Canada and the United States to study finance and physics, and then took root in Silicon Valley. Now, Musk's work focuses on three areas: the Internet, clean energy and space.

As one of the co-founder of PayPal, Musk successfully changed the mode of operation of traditional business through this platform. In 2002, he sold the company to ebay at a price of 1.5 billion dollars and musk. After that, he began to enter the field of space research and development without hesitation. In this regard, many analysts believe that Musk is crazy, because this area has always been a national research projects, the general companies and government departments can not afford to undertake huge research and development funds.

"This is like a future version of the history of the decline of the Roman Empire (Fall of the Roman Empire). For example, you are now on the top of the Roman Empire, so what actions will you take to avoid your own decline? Marty asked.

I thought about it for a while and then joked, "Poison in the water of those savages." Musk smiled and shook his head, then said: "History tells us that human civilization is an iterative process, from the historical process we can find this, Babylon, Sumerian, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, China is the case." It is clear that we are now in the ascendant stage of human civilization and hope that this situation can be maintained. But things are likely to be different from what we think, because many events can lead to a stagnation in technological development. Given the fact that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years that humans have been able to extend their tentacles beyond the earth, we think we need to seize this opportunity and hope that we can have more time. ”

Achievements

SpaceX, a clean, bright, quiet factory with 3,000 employees, the factory technicians dressed very casually, t-shirts, jeans, slippers everywhere. With NASA already retired from its own space shuttle, the agency is increasingly reliant on its companies to take on part of the space mission. SpaceX has signed a 1.6 billion-dollar cooperation agreement with the United States Aerospace Agency (NASA). Under the agreement, SpaceX will be responsible for transporting the goods to the space station. Moreover, Musk said he needed only 20 million dollars to deliver an astronaut to the International Space Station, a price much lower than the 70 million-dollar charge for a Russian Soyuz rocket.

In addition, SpaceX is currently developing a space vehicle that is similar to the previous space shuttle and not burned in the atmosphere. If successful, SpaceX will only need to spend 200,000 of billions of dollars in fuel costs per mission.

Of course, providing NASA, commercial customers with low-cost, reliable space transportation, satellite delivery services are only musk for the realization of the people sent to Mars dream of part of it. He believes it is entirely possible to achieve the dream of sending humans to Mars in 10 years, while also giving them the opportunity to migrate to Mars in the final days of their lives.

"It's a cool thing to die on Mars (not to be killed on landing, of course)," he said. "said Matt.

In addition to SpaceX, some private companies are also trying to fill some space projects that have had to run aground because of government budget problems, but Musk does not seem to be worried about the threat of such rivals. In his view, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin company, which is developing a reusable launch vehicle and a low orbital spacecraft, is still "relatively slow". Virgin Galactic, who is expected to embark on a business trip later this year, seems to have been less at heart.

"We are not in the same field," says Musk, "Richard Branson, president of the British Virgin Group, is actually offering a five-minute space experience at the satellite orbital level." It's understandable that he wants to provide a stimulating entertainment experience, but I don't think we are a competitive relationship. ”

Traffic map

On the other hand, Tesla, a decade-old American electric car company, has also developed smoothly, with its Model S models selling well, bringing huge profits to the company and pushing prices up to more than $100 per share. Last month, the consumer report, published by the independent nonprofit group the American Consumer Union (Consumers Union), made 99 points for the model (100) and said it exceeded all other models it had tested, including traditional and electric vehicles.

Tesla is currently planning to cover the country's network of high-speed super charging stations throughout the year, allowing owners of Tesla electric cars to fully rely on batteries from the U.S. West Coast city of Los Angeles to the east coast city of New York. In addition, the company will build a super charging station speed of one-fold, by next year will have more than 100 super charging stations, and by 2015 will have twice times the super charging station. It should be said that the firm's commitment to developing a profitable, zero-emission electronic vehicle is commendable, and he hopes to realize his dream of driving Tesla electric cars from Los Angeles to New York within the year.

In addition, Musk is an initiative to reduce the use of fossil fuel environmentalists, he is also headquartered in Foster City, Calif., the development of home photovoltaic project SolarCity Company chairman. Just this week, Musk also unveiled what could be one of the most ambitious and commercially promising projects ever made: Hyperloop.

Hyperloop is a new ultra-high-speed transportation system, which uses a series of air duct tubes for up to 800 miles per hour and can transport passengers sitting in capsules along the air to their destinations. Once the Hyperloop transportation system is built, the shortest time from the U.S. West Coast to the U.S. East Coast will be shortened from nearly 6 hours to 45 minutes, and the cost of construction would only be one-tenth of the high-speed rail. Musk said the alpha design of the project would be announced on August 12. Now it seems that, in addition to the iconic Goat Hu, Matt has become the real world of Tony Stark Stark.

Iron Man Dialogue "Iron Man."

Asked about the distinction between himself and stark, Musk, who had divorced two times, said: "I think it's cool." But obviously, there are still a lot of differences between Tony Stark and me, as I have five kids and I spend more time in Disney World than at the party, and I feel as if I'm more like Stark's dad. Of course, I also like the party very much. ”

Although he himself starred in "Iron Man 2", he seemed to prefer the latest Iron Man 3. At the same time, he says there seems to be no outstanding Martian theme Film (Arnold Schwarzenegger's total Recall, although interesting, but somewhat absurd). In this respect, he himself has encouraged the well-known director James Cameron to take a film on the theme of Mars.

Environmental awareness

"Do we really need a" Avatar 3 "? I think what is needed now is a good film about building a base on Mars. We can also shoot some films about the effects of climate change, because most people aren't really aware of the dangers of the problem, but the danger of melting glaciers is real. The temperature of our planet is rising, which is like burning a pot of boiling water. I think the most important way to solve this problem is to tax carbon dioxide emissions. Musk said.

Clearly, such an approach would certainly benefit Musk's SolarCity company, but he did not admit that the purpose of his proposal was to consider his own interests.

"We're proposing a carbon tax because it's the right decision and it's something that even schoolchildren know." ”

Musk said the existing government has not achieved much in this regard, but he did not blame President Obama himself too much. This may be because Tesla, who produced the Model S model, received a 465 million-dollar low-interest loan from the US Department of Energy. Musk has previously said the company plans to pay off the 465 million-dollar federal loan by the end of 2017 (5 years ahead of schedule), and that the program has been approved by the federal government. On the other hand, Musk has also given financial support to some environmental groups, and the outside world has been speculating about when he will set up his own environmental agency.

"I may indeed need to." Musk replied.

Musk's cautious stance on the issue may be related to his own experience in establishing a political lobby with the leaders of Facebook, Google (Weibo) and other tech giants FWD.us. FWD.us's intention was to make the U.S. economy more prosperous by relaxing technology immigration policies, attracting more local entrepreneurs to stay in the United States, and improving education. Musk joined the group, but soon withdrew. Industry insiders believe this may be due to clashes between FWD.us-assisted U.S. senators supporting Alaska's pipeline construction and oil exploration activities and Musk's environmental philosophy.

"In order to get support, they made a compromise, and even decided to invest some ' anti-environmental protection ' ads to cater to a few conservative senators, which is by no means the right thing to do." You should argue in this direction rather than play with political means, and should not, in order to gain support, turn to the wrong views. ”

At the end of this interview, I found myself standing behind a group of SpaceX managers who were waiting to speak to their boss, and Musk's big dream depended on them to make it happen. If all goes well, Musk will voluntarily take this flight, which will travel 33.9 million miles across the planet. Finally, I asked him, "If you die there, what should you write on your tombstone?" ”

Musk eyebrows A wrinkle, then grinned and said: "God, I went to Mars, you can believe it?" ”