It's Time to Build
Something historic happened last week. SpaceX flew a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Two American astronauts were lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in the Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 Rocket.
Though it’s nothing new for astronauts to travel to the ISS - and a lot of countries have done it in the past - the reason this particular event is a special one is that this is the first time a private company has launched astronauts into the orbit.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, started it in 2002 with nothing but a dream to someday send a man to Mars. The story goes that he went to Russia to buy a rocket but the Russians didn’t take him seriously and didn’t sell him the rocket, so he went ahead and built his own rocket.
Not only did he built a rocket that could fly into space, but he also did so by building it at about a third of the cost that NASA itself would have taken to build. And in the process, he ended up bettering several rocket technologies.
Here is one such example. Before SpaceX, the common practice when launching a space mission was that the first stage of the rocket, also known as the booster, would be discarded after it had propelled the payload to the next stage. It would fall into the ocean and become trash just after one use. This meant that a new rocket would be needed for every new mission which would be very costly (it costs around $60M to build a rocket).
SpaceX was the first to build a rocket that could deposit the satellite into orbit and then land the booster back vertically on a ship or a base station. This would make the rocket reusable for more trips in the future thereby reducing the costs significantly. It’s a big leap forward in the evolution of space travel technology (just imagine how costly would transportation be if your bike or car could only be used for only one trip)
There are countless such advancements that SpaceX has brought along thanks to which, the dream of sending a man to Mars might someday become a reality.
It reminds me of a really good article I read a few weeks back - It’s Time to Build
It’s written by Marc Andreessen. The guy who, back in the days, built the first web browser for the internet and now runs one of the most successful and respected VC funds in America.
In his article, Marc talks about how a lot of focus in the past decade has been on building software (Remember the famous Peter Thiel quote - We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters) and instead the new focus should be on building physical things (Where are the supersonic jets? Where are the high-speed trains?)
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.
Building isn’t easy, or we’d already be doing all this. We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.
If there is one person who has taken Marc Andreessen’s advice to heart, its Elon Musk. Better yet, he has shown the world - How to Build? Even in the current times. Take a look at SpaceX’s launch schedule for the next few months, he is sending more rockets to space this month than the number of products shipped by most product startups.
In Elon’s world, as should be in ours - It’s time to build.
Best,
Kaddy
PS - If you want to read more about Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, and more, here is a fantastic 4-part series by Tim Urban on this blog WaitButWhy. The book on Elon Musk by Ashley Vans is also really good.
May be some day, we should do an ROTW live on the Godness of Elon Musk. It would certainly make for a fun conversation :)