The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  Yet more: that announcement about the S has nearly coincided with another, on the blog of Elon's wife, the fantasy novelist Justine Musk, that he has left her and their five boys (four-year-old twins and two-year-old triplets) for a twenty-three-year-old English actress named Talulah Riley. ("By all accounts she is bright and sweet and of course beautiful, and about as personally responsible for the death of my marriage as she is for the dynamic that played out inside it. In other words, not very," Justine wrote. "Also, she is not blonde, and I do find this refreshing.") And about a week after that, a Tesla employee leaked information to a popular Silicon Valley blog about how low morale at Tesla had sunk and revealing the proprietary fact that the company—which has taken more than a thousand deposits from buyers who haven't yet received their Roadsters—was down to its last $9 million in liquid reserves. The same day the blog item appeared, Musk issued a statement confirming the $9-million figure while announcing his intention to bolster Tesla's cash with at least $20 million in additional financing. Then, in search of the leaker, he sent a computer-forensics team to seize and search the computers of various employees. The only redeeming pieces of news about Tesla? Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and George Clooney are all having their Roadsters delivered this week.

  Today, Elon and his SpaceX engineers are takin' it to the von Braun to discuss a fine point of reentry physics, per an exchange in one of the day's earlier meetings.

  Engineer #1: Would you VPPA?

  Engineer #2: [lustily] Naaaaaah, I'd probably go to soft plasma.

  Elon: You always get misplaced diameters with that.

  Engineer #2: What if the heat shield attached to the Dragon's base...

  [A prolonged exchange of glances; a clear consensus that there are sometimes feelings for which there can be no words.]

  Elon: We'll take it to the von Braun.

  [Satisfied nods from all. Exeunt, pursued by a bear.]

  Now Musk sits, his engineers loosely grouped around him, waiting for one of them to begin a PowerPoint presentation. He just misses being extremely handsome, and somehow, by just missing the extreme of handsomeness, he also just misses being merely handsome. Yet Elon Musk draws eyes the way an extremely handsome man does, for two reasons. The first is that he is unusual-looking, in a boyish and pleasant way. The second is that physically, Elon Musk is a very, very still human being, and there is something arresting about that. Or as one Silicon Valley blog recently put it, "The liquored-up consensus at San Francisco watering hole Joey & Eddie's last night: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is actually kind of hot."

  "The economy is shit," he says, apropos of nothing and everything. Though Elon Musk almost never raises his voice and doesn't now, his tone is unmistakably ... chipper. "Do you realize what that's going to do to the value of secondhand machines? They'll be in the toilet! We can get an EB welder on-site!"

  It's the damnedest thing. The world is shit. Elon's world is shit. Yet when Elon asks, "Should we buy a welder?" he seems to be doing so in the same way a ten-year-old asks, "Should we ride the roller coaster now?" Here in the von Braun, everything that comes out of his mouth, whether in the form of a question or comment, is about building, hiring, investing. If and when the present woes of the world are acknowledged—the economy is shit!—the point is to exult in how easy that's going to make things.

  But then the fun time is over and the meeting begins in earnest. The issue at hand involves the physics of reentry on the Falcon 9—the larger and more ambitious successor to the Falcon 1 that SpaceX put into orbit in September. SpaceX is all about making orbital rockets that are both cheap and reusable —in other words, rockets that can survive the hellfires of atmospheric reentry. The adherence to one-time-use technology is the reason space exploration has always been the province of governments and their contractors. (Even the space shuttle is only partly reusable—and still costs $450 million per launch.) The commercial viability of SpaceX is therefore less about getting rockets into Earth orbit than reliably getting them back. Without reusability, there can be no economy of scale, and if there can be no economy of scale, there can be no SpaceX.

  Though SpaceX already has several Falcon 1 contracts lined up with government and private satellite makers, it is the Falcon 9—scheduled to be test-launched from Cape Canaveral this summer—that could transform the aerospace industry. With its single engine, the 70-foot Falcon 1 can send payloads of 1,400 pounds or less into low Earth orbit (up to about 1,200 miles above the planet's surface). The 180-foot F9, with its nine engines and its Dragon capsule, is designed to catapult five tons of cargo 22,000 miles into the sky. What that will cost, at least initially: about $40 million per launch—somewhere between a third and a half of what NASA is accustomed to paying. The F9 is now vying for a contract to resupply the International Space Station. If NASA goes with SpaceX, the Dragon—which is both free-flying and reusable—will be able to supply the station not only with cargo but with people.

  The PowerPoint presenter mentions reentry temperatures and the need for "restoring the pitch moment." All par for the course. But then he says it.

  "So we want to make sure there's room enough for the avionics..."

  "There is shitloads of fucking room there," Elon says quietly. Then, for clarity, he adds, "There is shitloads of fucking room there." He's not angry. This is just what Elon does; as nature hates a vacuum, Elon hates an inaccuracy. Without a trace of defensiveness, the engineer whom Elon has corrected explains the calculations underlying his previous statement. There's some back-and- forth on that. On paper, the language can look a bit violent ("If people do anything that contributes to this [rocket] stage not being recoverable," Elon says at one point, "they will find their work undone"). Spoken, it's a purely informational exchange.

  Will the molten slag cause any problems?

  Nah, it'll all be blowin' off so hard...

  If we think of this as an upside-down Dragon...

  If we need three inches of cork, how the fuck will the inflatable survive?

  And so it goes. It's quite something to see a group of human beings offering themselves up in the service of facts the way these men are. Here in the von Braun, it is possible to comprehend the facts—all those mind-blowing technological facts—as molds into which these men have poured their lives, and not the other way around.

  Something remains to be said about the nature of Elon Musk's ambition, something that makes the man either a sublime or a comic figure. Or perhaps both. Because according to Musk, the point of SpaceX is not to make money. The point is that mission to Mars. And that mission, as well as the Martian colonization to which it leads, still isn't the end-all Elon has in mind. There is a larger imperative.

  According to Elon Musk, there are such things as "epochal moments." As he defines them, epochal moments are not moments "in" human history. They're larger. Rarer. Musk says the first epochal moment in the grand human ascent was "the advent of the single-celled organism. The next was the emergence of multicelled life. Then the differentiation into plants and animals. Then the move onto land. Then mammals. Then consciousness." To Musk, epochal moments are make-or-break moments; either there is a great leap forward or there is extinction. One does not fuck with epochal moments. And now, Elon says, for the first time since we humans began peering at our own reflections and wondering Who?, another epochal moment is upon us: we've got to get off this rock—soon—or face oblivion.

  "I founded SpaceX and put much of my fortune in it because I really believe it is a matter of when and not if, and that when is probably a lot sooner than most of us are comfortable thinking about," Musk says of the end of life—all life, not just human—on Earth. There is a constant motion in his eyes as he says this. Actually, the motion is present even when he's not prophesying the end-time. While his gaze remains fixed, the irises and pupils of his eyes—small, gray, wide-set—never stop moving. Very rapidly, almost imperceptibly, horizontally. Vibrate and even shiver overplay it, make it seem like a leer or tic when it is neither
, and unappealing, which it isn't. When Elon Musk speaks, the colored parts of his eyes shimmer with attentiveness. He seems less like a person who is speaking than one who is listening. "I'm not saying we'll do it, to be sure. The odds are we won't succeed. But if something is important enough, then you should do it anyway.

  "Things have happened quickly," he continues. "It took us millions of years to evolve into what we are, but in the last sixty years, with atomic weaponry, we've created the potential to extinguish ourselves. And if it's not us, it will inevitably be something else. If not a meteorite in the relative short term, then the expansion of the sun's corona. It will happen."

  Yeah, man, the corona. Guy needs to lay off the comic books or go into movies, right? (Oh, wait—he already did that when he and two of his PayPal co-founders were producers on Thank You for Smoking.)

  But he's not done.

  "It's important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity," Musk says of our interplanetary destiny. "We're all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself. People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are—within the context of humanity. But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That's it."

  In other words, while eradicating disease is a worthy pursuit, and would extend the lives of individual human beings, my life's work is extending the life span of life itself.

  How does a person say the kinds of things Elon Musk is fond of saying and not conjure up a man stroking an albino show cat while reclining in the control room of his volcanic lair? Yet he doesn't. This neutral, disarming tone of his has always been part of his gift, his ability to make grandiose pronouncements without coming across as arrogant or show-offy (as an adult) or obnoxious or pre cious (when he was a child). Part of this may be physical. In addition to being soft-voiced, Musk has an unusually small mouth that barely moves, if it moves at all, when he speaks. There's a vaguely ventriloquistic effect. To listen to Elon Musk speak is to encounter words that somehow feel displaced from motive; he never seems to be attempting to prove anything about himself. There is a drawing power in that.

  People follow Elon Musk. Many things about the man amaze, but none so much as the way he gets people to follow him. The pattern is constant: Elon declares his intentions and asks people to join him. Without exception, those intentions are ludicrous; without exception, the people he's wooing are bright, older, and more experienced than he is and safely ensconced in lives they find fulfilling. Yet these people forsake the secure and the known to follow Elon Musk. It has been this way since he was a teenager.

  Only a few months after Musk left South Africa at the age of seventeen, his sister, Tosca, announced to their mother that she intended to join him in Canada. (Elon was unable to immigrate straight to the United States—only to Canada, where his mother had been born and still had citizenship.)

  "Elon is eighteen, you're fifteen," said Maye Musk, pointing out the obvious.

  "Elon will look after me," Tosca told her mother.

  Tosca, it turned out, had absorbed more than a little of what her older brother had told her years before about the absence of light; Maye Musk returned from a trip to find that her fifteen-year-old daughter had not only managed to put their house on the market but had sold it. "I think we must leave now," Tosca explained. Elon was expecting them.

  Nearly a decade earlier, Maye Musk had taken her three children and, as she now puts it, "run away" from her husband. (Elon says he and his father have been in "limited touch" ever since. "Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar.") In the years following her divorce, Maye had built dual careers as a model and a dietitian. If she chose to emigrate, the South African government would freeze all her assets—even the money from the house sale. The choice filled her with panic. Don't worry, Tosca assured her mother, "Elon knows everything." How could Maye argue with that? Elon really did know everything, which meant there was nothing to fear. Which was why Maye Musk packed a bag and, with her two younger children, followed her eldest child across an ocean.

  Twelve years later, when Musk started SpaceX and began recruiting, it was the same. Some of those who came gave up senior, secure, lucrative positions at places like TRW and Boeing to come work at SpaceX with Elon Musk—an Internet entrepreneur with no background in rocket science. "It was a can-do attitude combined with the fact that he knew what he was talking about and was happy to be corrected if he didn't," says Tom Mueller, the man who now oversees all "propulsion" at SpaceX. "You couldn't say no to it." Others left places like Google and Microsoft to come work at SpaceX and, later, at Tesla because Musk liked the way their minds worked and convinced them that like him, they didn't need physics Ph.D.'s to build rockets and cars.

  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Elon Musk's drawing power is that, strange as it may seem, he is not a particularly charming or charismatic person. Charm and charisma require, first, the desire to be charming and charismatic and, second, the ability to execute; both of these require energy. And Elon, a man deeply attuned to the physics of his energy—its caloric and intellectual and financial and historical value—simply isn't interested in using it to light up a room. And yet there is some... thing whereby Elon Musk enters a room and both the space and the other people in it suddenly seem distilled. What is that—and how does it obviate the questions about charm and charisma and even likability?

  Here's how: Elon Musk's leadership, his ability to inspire and motivate the people who work for him, derives completely, and only, from his knowledge. The knowledge—the millions upon millions of facts that he has not forgotten—is itself a form of charisma, that infectious "thing you just can't put your finger on" that we normally expect to see in the form of "star power." Ironic, that the man with the intelligence and the will to take the human species to Mars and beyond would lack star power. And strangely assuring that he doesn't need it. What he needs is to persuade the smartest engineers in the world to come work for him. Star power can't do that. Facts can.

  In the end—although it is patently ridiculous to speak of any kind of "end," seeing as how Elon Musk is still three years shy of forty—all those facts add up to a kind of dazzling mosaic. Of...? Well, that depends on who you are. If you are Elon or one of the people working with him to build his cars and his rockets, it is an image that convinces—an image without metaphysical content: he doesn't have faith that he can do it; he knows. Because Elon knows everything.

  But if you are just ... a citizen, and especially if you are an American citizen weary of soul after eight years of a national leadership not only incurious about but hostile toward science, even if this man fails to midwife the next epochal moment in the great human ascension, or even to deliver an affordable all-electric car that helps kill this country's oil addiction, the mosaic image of Elon Musk's life is one that galvanizes: this guy had to come here to attempt that.

  Brothers, sisters, fellow earthbound humans, if that doesn't wake you up, you're already extinct.

  TOM WOLFE One Giant Leap to Nowhere

  FROM The New York Times

  WELL, LET'S SEE NOW ...That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind, and a real knee in the groin for NASA.

  The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean—OK if I add "godlike"?—quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 P.M. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11's Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the moon.

  It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.

  Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday.
If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong's small step plus mankind's big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy's bucket's got a hole in it.

  Why, putting a man on the moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets ... Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn't stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that ... the galaxies beyond.

  NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned flybys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived. In 1952 he published his Mars Project as a series of graphic articles called "Man Will Conquer Space Soon" in Collier's magazine. It created a sensation. He was front and center in 1961 when NASA undertook Project Empire, which resulted in working plans for a manned Mars mission. Given the epic, the saga, the triumph of Project Apollo, Mars would naturally come next. All NASA and von Braun needed was the president's and Congress's blessings and the great adventure was a Go. Why would they so much as blink before saying the word?