Elon Musk, SpaceX, launch of Falcon Heavy live on youtube

[Art Blade]

 

It's not only Elon Musk and his company Space X. There are a surprising lot of other private "space" companies but I don't know how far beyond "commercial" their interests reach. Space X is a commercial company, too, by the way, but Elon's ultimate goal of colonising planets, that might not be everyone else's ultimate goal. Although he definitely isn't the only one thinking in that direction. At least he puts his own money on the table. He estimates the Falcon Heavy development cost more than half a billion dollar, likely more, and he said so himself, more than he likes to admit.

I think he's brilliant. Invented (programmed) pay-pal, which ebay thought was so good they paid him 165 million dollar for it. Buys into and later takes over Tesla which has a now a higher stock value than Ford despite low sales. Starts up Space X while still running Tesla. And now pulls off one of the greatest PR-stunts I've ever seen. Advertising himself, and both companies and their products at the same time, and thanks to launching his car into space, the whole world's news shows and papers covered it -- because it was so outlandish and unique they couldn't afford not to. The live stream of the Falcon Heavy launch made it YouTube's second most watched live stream in their history with 2.3m people watching simultaneously (Red Bull once hit 8m) That guy is worth around 21 billion dollar..

But well, not going to compose a biography here

I admire him, plain and simple.

[mandru]

Hero or not only time will tell of Elon Musk's standing in future history books but I'm currently cheering him on.

A long time ago on the old forum I'd expressed my opinion that we would be a lot better off if private industry made the move to explore space with an eye on mining the wealth of the asteroids and developing Zero G solar powered smelters and forges so that habitats could be more easily created to promote further space exploration and development.

What we get when governments (leaches spending their population's money without a care) try to develop and expand into controlling new fields of interest is $640 plastic toilet seats to be installed in military aircraft and over $680K to study shrimp on a treadmill.