For many years, I've thought and written that if mankind ever moves into space, it would be the private sector that takes us there. Yes, space is a dangerous place, and space travel would be a dangerous enterprise, especially in its infancy. There are problems with radiation, the debilitating effects of being in free fall for extended periods, and the utter catastrophe that could result from losing cabin pressure. It's a daunting prospect.
But is it really any more daunting than crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a late 15th-century galleon? Not so long before that, the ships of most seafaring nations rarely, if ever, went out of sight of land, and with good reason; good navigation tools just didn't exist yet, and if a ship foundered out at sea, well, everyone aboard was dead.
Then as now, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology, and the technology of a hundred years from now may well include things we can't imagine; if I were to go back to 1925 and show my grandfather my smartphone, I would have a hard time explaining to him how it worked, because it would be far outside anything he had ever imagined. Go back to 1492, when Columbus sailed three of those old galleons to the New World, and he and most of his men would likely think that a smartphone was outright magic.
This brings me to today's real-world Tony Stark, tech whiz and DOGE-master Elon Musk. A piece printed Thursday at Fox Business explained what Musk is like as a boss:
A former SpaceX and Starlink manager is revealing how his previous boss, Elon Musk, isn’t afraid to get into the trenches to learn everything about his companies top to bottom, while keeping his priority of being the ultimate problem-solver.
"Working at SpaceX was one of the most, I would say, eye-opening experiences that I've had in my professional career," Vincent Peters, now the CEO of Inheritance AI, said Monday on "The Bottom Line."
"You have someone like Elon Musk who is this... industrialist for this generation," Peters continued, "and he creates an environment where those folks who work for him, he has ultimate trust in them, and he trusts them until he loses trust in their ability to be able to do their jobs."
From what I'm given to understand, the SpaceX operation in particular is the classic example of a skunkworks. Look at the many failures SpaceX suffered: failures at takeoff, failures at booster separation, and failures at landing. But the SpaceX engineers kept on, Musk kept on, failures were identified and re-engineered, and SpaceX followed and is following the classic skunkworks method of engineering until success.
There's an old military saying that applies: "If it's stupid but works, it ain't stupid."
Will SpaceX take us to Mars? From what I've seen of Elon Musk, he's a pretty driven guy. He's set a goal of landing humans on the red planet, and it won't be surprising to see him do it. There are enormous challenges involved, but if we can surpass the bounds of Earth's gravity, we can surmount the problems of life on another world - although, from a biological standpoint, Mars's lower gravity would have second and third-generation Martians looking decidedly odd by Earthly standards. What's more, any such people would likely never be able to return to the home world, where gravity would possibly prove fatal.
Even if Musk's SpaceX doesn't move us into space, I'm inclined to believe another private-sector effort will, and that effort will, in large part, be standing on Musk's shoulders.
Speaking of the DOGE, Vincent Peters said of his former boss:
"I think if you look at Elon's track record at both Tesla, when they were having financial issues, and SpaceX... they went through a bit of restructuring and laid some people off as soon as I got there," Peters pointed out. "I've not seen him back down at Tesla or SpaceX. And I don't expect [him] to back down on this stage, especially when the future of a nation is on the line."
The left, of course, continues to freak out at the mention of anything Musk-adjacent.
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Today's problems. Tomorrow's technology.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic here, although I'm rarely accused of any excess of optimism. Maybe the technical and biological challenges will be too great to surmount. Maybe it just won't be possible to maintain a human outpost on Mars or anywhere else in the solar system. Maybe we'll never reach out to the stars.
But if we do, I'm convinced it won't be the government that gets us there. It will be someone much like Elon Musk.
