Building SpaceX
Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable.
It would have happened without me.
But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.577
I’ve always been optimistic. If I wasn’t optimistic, I wouldn’t be attempting all these crazy things. I must be pathologically optimistic, I suppose.578
The origin of SpaceX was trying to figure out why we had not sent anyone to Mars. The obvious next step after Apollo was to send people to Mars.579
Every year I’d look at the NASA website, and there didn’t seem to be a date for it. We were able to go to the moon in 1969. Our last mission to the moon was in 1972. Now here we are half a century later and we still have not gone back to the moon. It would be extremely tragic if Apollo was the high-water mark for humanity, if the moon was as far as we got.580
The space shuttle could only take people to low earth orbit. Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. The trend was dwindling down to nothing. Does this mean we’ve peaked as a civilization?581
If you had asked people in 1969 what the world would look like in fifty years, they would have expected a base on the moon and some people visiting Mars. Maybe even a base on Mars. They would expect orbiting space hotels and other awesome stuff.582
If you told them, “Well, we have a device smaller than a deck of cards with access to all the world’s information, and you can talk to anyone instantly on planet Earth. But the United States will not be able to send anyone to orbit,” they would have called bullshit. “You have all of that, and nothing is happening in space?!” After we sold PayPal in 2001, I was trying to figure out why.583
The original idea for SpaceX wasn’t to create a company. It was to figure out why we hadn’t sent people to Mars. I thought maybe we’d lost the will to explore. I thought we had to create the will to explore. But that was wrong.
We have not lost the will to explore; people just did not think there was a way forward. If people don’t think there’s a way, then they won’t continuously bash their head against the wall for progress.584
There must be things to inspire us—that make you proud to be a member of humanity.585
The Apollo moon landing was an example of that. Only a handful of people went to the moon—and yet actually we all went to the moon. We went with them vicariously. We shared in that adventure. No one would say that was a bad idea—that Apollo wasn’t great. We need more of those.586
The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. It’s fundamental to the psyche.
Once people realized, “There is a way to do this,” we got a lot of support.587