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Andy Weir On Elon Musk

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Ashlee Vance had a conversation with him:

I love that NASA is working on new technologies and new stuff, but it just seems way more expensive than alternatives. You’re talking about spending $20 billion on a booster to put 150,000kg in orbit. Meanwhile, SpaceX intends to put 53,000kg into space for $100 million per booster. You could buy three of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets for $300 million, then spend $1 billion to assemble whatever heavy thing you wanted to put in space, and keep the other $8 billion. It just seems like this huge discrepancy in expenses. Governments don’t always do the economically viable thing, right? There’s a lot of politics involved.

You don’t say.

6 thoughts on “Andy Weir On Elon Musk”

  1. I read the Martian yesterday in two sittings. It’s still available for free online if you don’t mind reading in PDF format. Aside from some minor quibbles (a 175km/h dust storm on Mars is like a gentle breeze on Earth, he could have gotten water from the soil) this is one of the most accurate hard SF novels I’ve ever read.

    1. Perchlorate-contaminated water, though, no?

      Although that would have fit well into the “fixing one disaster leads to the next” theme of the book, I think. Let Watney discover that his water filtering is imperfect, then his shrinking supplies have to compete with his growing goiter for attention and concern.

        1. Distillation is far safer than burning Hydrogen in an enclosed space. Easy to do, too.

          But any one minor nitpick is just that – minor. The sandstorm wouldn’t act that way, but it was needed for dramatic effect and to set up the situation. A few other things like water are also just minor.

          Usually if I’m reading science fiction I see glaring errors that jar me out of the story. I can’t maintain suspension of disbelief if the science is wrong. Not the Martian, though.

  2. Even looking at this from the government’s perspective, the U.S. has an enormous opportunity to take a long-term lead in space. . .if it will allow the American private sector to operate without much constraint in (cheaply) getting to and exploiting space. Let the rest of the world sit back and watch, trying to run their space operations from the top down, while we let the market do what it does best–provide many alternatives at competitive prices.

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