The organization Mars One has the vision to establish a permanent human colony on Mars. To help them get the material and astronauts to Mars, they say they will use rockets from SpaceX. Their idea is to launch the first rocket with supplies in 2016, and then will more rockets launch with supplies until the first humans arrive in 2023. In 2033, the colony will have 20 settlers. The money needed to pay for this mission will come from sponsors and a reality television series. As of 2013, more than 100 000 people have applied to be a part of this mission.390
When people have begun living on Mars, SpaceX will build a large cruiser that will travel between Earth and Mars, most likely called the Mars Colonial Transporter. The cruiser will never land on any plant, so to get to the surface, a smaller craft will come and pick you up from the cruiser. “It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost,” Elon said. “Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly.”278 In comparison, it took a sailing ship more than nine weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, but it took the Concorde only three hours in the 21st century.13
When both the price and the time of the journey to Mars decreased, more volunteers will be motivated to emigrate from Earth. Elon argued that if you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California, or around half a million dollars, then enough people would buy a ticket and immigrate to Mars. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure,” Elon said. “But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there will be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still 8000 people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.”288
To help mankind become multi-planetary, the first step is to colonize Mars, but Elon has larger plans. “Having a base on Mars, where there is a lot of travel to and from Earth, will create a powerful incentive for developing technology that will enable us to travel to other star systems,” Elon said. “With a nuclear thermal rocket you could definitely reach a tenth of the speed of light. There are some interesting things I’ve seen lately about warp drives. You can’t exceed the speed of light but you can warp space and effectively travel many times the speed of light. That’s kind of exciting.”314
Idea Overload
Now this is not the end. It is only the end of the beginning. “I think that it is possible to solve any of the problems that are before us. I don’t think we are doomed on Earth,” Elon said. Therefore, he will continue to come up with new ideas as long as he can. “The goal is to retire right before senility,” he said.328
But what does Elon do to find a problem to solve? There are a number of methods you can use to find new ideas. Walt Disney used to go through trashcans to find out what people threw away, and he tried to find new ideas from the garbage.30 Thomas Edison found several ideas when he was almost asleep. To wake up just after falling asleep, he held steel balls in his hand. When he fell asleep, his hand relaxed and released the steel balls. They hit the floor, and he woke up again from the noise. He immediately wrote down his thoughts.31
A British survey with 500 entrepreneurs showed that 49 percent found new ideas while in their bed, 72 percent found new ideas while at work, 57 percent found new ideas while talking to friends, and 41 percent found new ideas while at the toilet. “I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought,” an entrepreneur said. “I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”32
Elon has found some ideas when he took a shower, some ideas late at night when he couldn’t sleep, and some ideas when he attended Burning Man. “It’s something of a cliche, but a lot of my ideas nowadays come to me when I’m in the shower,” Elon said. “It’s because I’ve been thinking about them, the mind processing them subconsciously while I’m sleeping, and what’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? You take a shower.”128
Almost all the larger ideas originates from when Elon read articles about a topic he thought was sad. “I thought it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the high water mark of space exploration,” Elon said. “It was not something I was able to witness in real time, because I was -2 when they landed.”339 So he founded SpaceX to not be sad anymore. “You want to have a future where are you expecting things to be better, not one where you are expecting things to be worse,” Elon said. It would have been sad to have a future where we didn’t have any cars because we have used up all our oil wells. That’s why Tesla designed Model S.124 “What we were really aiming to achieve with the Model S is to create a car – an electric car – that was the best car. Not the best car among the electric genre, but the best car overall,” Elon said.193
When Elon read an article about the decommissioning of the Concorde, he felt sad because we traveled slower. To solve the problem, he came up with an electric aircraft. It had to be electric because of peak oil. “Boeing just took $20 billion and ten years to improve the efficiency of their planes by ten percent,” Elon said. “That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.”51
After some engineering calculations, he realized the new aircraft should fly at an extreme altitude because the density of the air drops as higher you fly. The performance of the electric aircraft will thus improve. While an electric aircraft should fly at an altitude of 80 000 feet [24 km], the optimal altitude for a combustion aircraft is 40 000 feet. “In order to go fast, you need to be at high altitude where the air drops exponentially, as air at sea level becomes as thick as molasses as you approach sonic velocity,” Elon said.401 Like a helicopter, this new aircraft will takeoff and land vertically.328
While commuting in Los Angeles, Elon found another sad problem. Some highways in Los Angeles have ten traffic lanes, but the traffic situation is still horrible. Elon explained that it’s easier to launch rockets into orbit than to commute between his home in Bel Air and SpaceX in Hawthorne – a distance of 15 miles [24 km] as the crow flies. “The 405 varies from bad to horrendous,” Elon said. “It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this. I don’t know why they aren’t marching in the streets.”
A double-decker-highway is Elon’s solution to his commuting problem. The second deck will consist of a cheap metal construction dropped on the top of the original highway. It will increase the capacity with 100 percent. To speed up the idea, Elon contributed with $50 000 to a group seeking to hasten the development and repair of infrastructure in the US. “If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I’ve super had it,” Elon said.184
While SpaceX is in Los Angeles, Tesla is in San Francisco. Because Elon only owns a house in Los Angeles, and it takes too long time to fly home when he has worked at Tesla, he often sleeps over at one of his friends. “We play video games together and eat some food,” Bill Lee said, who was an early investor in both SpaceX and Tesla.51