Risky

(continuing yesterday's thread)

A new biography of Elon Musk authored by Ashlee Vance has just come out and it's summarized in a May 24th Bloomberg article called "Go Fever: The Irrational, Inhuman, Interstellar Odyssey of Elon Musk."

photo: extremetech.com

In 2001 & 2002 he and some friends/partners flew to Moscow to try to purchase rockets - because he had always been interested in making humanity "interplanetary". They wouldn't bargain with him so he stormed out. As the little group were finally relaxing on the plane to go home, he still worked away on his laptop. Turning around to them, he said, "Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves."

So SpaceX was born. He didn't know much about space, but he was *optimistic*. He looked for young overachiever-engineers "with a high tolerance for risk." They must have been inspired by his big goals, because some of those employees work 100 hours per week.

Enormous amounts of work, stress, courage, money and time have been invested into SpaceX and it very nearly failed more than once. It was risky.