Last month, both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos made history by traveling to space on
their own private vehicles.
Many have argued that these two didn’t actually reach “real space” as they didn’t reach
orbit or even travel very far into space.
Though their achievements are extremely impressive in their own right, I can see why many wouldn’t
exactly consider them astronauts.
Elon Musk, however, is easily capable of ticking off all the boxes of being an astronaut.
He’s easily capable of using Falcon 9 to not only cross the Karman line but reach the
ISS, stay at the ISS for several months, and then return safely.
Despite this though, Elon has yet to make the journey.
So, here’s why Elon refuses to go to space.
Before we jump into the video, I wanted to address that Elon will likely go to space
eventually.
Whether that’s next month or 10 years from now, I don’t know, but it is likely an eventuality.
So, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not saying that Elon will never go to space.
Rather, I simply wanted to take a look at why he has refused the opportunity thus far
despite having the technology for years.
With that being said, let’s jump into the first and most obvious reason which is death.
Space travel is not the safest journey to embark on, and each space flight carries significant
risk for straight up death.
Even with a Falcon 9, which has proven to be one of the most reliable rockets of all
time, the risk of death is not negligible.
Nasa estimates that there's a 1 in 60 chance that a Falcon 9 mission fails but doesn’t
lead to a fatality.
And a 1 in 276 chance that a Falcon 9 mission fails and leads to a fatality.
That’s about the same chance as having twins.
Elon Musk already has twins and triplets, so maybe that’s a sign that he shouldn’t
take the trip.
But, putting cosmic signs aside, death itself is not the real challenge for Elon.
The real challenge would be the consequences that follow his death.
SpaceX and Tesla are by no means mature companies.
Tesla has recently made strides forward, and is likely at a point where it can survive
and even thrive without Elon.
But just 3 years ago, Tesla was within single digit weeks of bankruptcy, and Tesla may have
gotten wiped out without Elon.
Similarly, SpaceX doesn’t really have a successor lined up.
Gwynne Shotwell is amazing, and could probably run the company as well as Elon, but Gwynne
is actually older than Elon at 57, so she’s not really a long term successor.
Considering the current states of SpaceX and Tesla, it doesn’t make sense for Elon to
risk the futures of these companies, which is basically his life's work, on a joyride
to space.
But wait a minute, if SpaceX itself is not a mature company, there’s no way that Blue
Origin and Virgin Galactic are mature companies.
So, why were Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson willing to risk the futures of their space
companies?
Well, the answer is to play catch up.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has only had a total of 4 space flights throughout
its lifetime and Richard Branson rode on the fourth launch.
Fortunately, all of these space flights have been successful, but with only 4 total flights,
you wouldn’t exactly describe SpaceShipTwo as having a stellar track history.
Blue Origin does have a lot more data as they launched New Shepard a total of 15 times before
Jeff took his flight.
Throughout the 15 launches, New Shepard had 14 successful flights and 1 partially successful
flight.
Even in the partially successful flight, Blue Origin was able to recover the capsule successfully,
so New Shepard has a pretty strong safety record.
But even that holds no water in comparison to Falcon 9.
The Demo 2 mission we saw last year with Bob and Doug was literally the 85th launch of
the Falcon 9.
It would take years for Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin to rival SpaceX’s track record.
At Blue Origin’s current pace of about 1 launch every three months, it would take them
17.5 years to complete 85 launches.
Even if Blue Origin sped up to SpaceX’s pace and did a launch every other week with
New Shepard, it would take Blue Origin another 2.5 years to complete 85 launches.
So, clearly, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin needed to catch up in terms of reliability,
and one of the boldest ways to vouch for the reliability of your spacecraft is to ride
it yourself.
And that’s precisely what they did.
As for Elon, he doesn’t need to vouch for the reliability of Falcon 9 and he doesn’t
need to catch up to anyone.
So, Elon riding on Falcon 9 would do little for SpaceX's future or track record.
Something else we have to consider is that SpaceX has a completely different customer
base than Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
SpaceX doesn’t really care about the space tourism market.
Everytime I say this, I get comments asking me if I’ve ever heard about SpaceX’s dearMoon
project or the upcoming Axiom trip in 2022.
The answer is yes, I have heard about these missions and SpaceX does do tourism trips
here and there.
But this is by no means their focus.
The dearMoon project is basically just a fundraiser for Starship.
And with the Axiom trip to the ISS, Axiom is the one that’s handling the tourism side
of the business.
For SpaceX, it’s just another crew mission to the ISS.
They’re not spending time or effort in advertising the service and selling tickets; they’re
just the vehicle provider.
SpaceX really only deals with commercial customers and 95% of their missions are business or
science related.
So, I think it’s safe to say that SpaceX does not focus on space tourism.
For Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, however, space tourism is a focal point.
They don’t really have many commercial customers, and they expect to make the vast majority
of their money by selling tickets to space.
Blue Origin, for instance, has apparently already sold nearly $100 million worth of
space tickets.
This vastly different customer base leads to vastly different expectations.
Neither NASA nor the US military give a crap about whether Elon rode on Falcon 9.
They each have thousands of scientists working for them, and they’ll perform their own
risk analysis of Falcon 9 to determine whether they want to contract out a job to SpaceX
or not.
Similarly, when companies decide on whether to use a SpaceX rocket, they only care about
three things: payload capacity, price, and the risk of failure.
Again they don’t give a crap about Elon riding a rocket.
The space tourism customer base, however, values this much more.
Here’s the thing, let’s say you’re a multi millionaire worth about $5 million and
you’re considering buying a $250,000 ticket to space with either Blue Origin or Virgin
Galactic.
You can look at the track record of New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, but you don’t actually
know the physics behind each spacecraft and the safety of the two seem pretty similar.
Now, let’s say Richard Branson rides SpaceShipTwo to space but Jeff Bezos doesn’t ride New
Shepard.
I don’t know about you, but if I was in this position, I would definitely choose Virgin
Galactic over Blue Origin.
The reasoning is that Richard Branson is much more important than me, and if he’s willing
to trust his life on SpaceShipTwo, then he’s probably pretty darn confident in its safety.
As you can see, founder’s riding their rocket holds much more weight within the space tourism
industry than the commercial space industry.
And this just further disincentivizes Elon from making the trip.
Moving on, another factor hindering Elon is likely the time commitment.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic’s offerings are specifically designed to be as easy to
use as possible.
This means minimal training, minimal learning, and just overall minimal effort.
And this makes sense considering that the entire trip is only a couple of minutes.
If Elon were to ride Falcon 9 though, the training would be much more extensive as in
many months.
The Axiom 1 crew, for instance, will undergo 15 weeks of training before traveling to the
ISS.
In the businessworld, 15 weeks is more than an entire fiscal quarter.
Imagine if Elon stepped back from Tesla for a full quarter to go train for a Falcon 9
flight.
I don’t think Tesla investors, especially institutional investors and Wall Street would
be very happy.
And finally, the last reason that Elon is hesitant in taking a trip to space is that
maybe he’s saving the journey for something much larger.
As Jeff Bezos said, it’s not like any of these guys are actually the first people to
go to space.
At this point, people have been traveling to space for over 50 years.
And though less than a thousand people have traveled to space in that time period, would
people even care about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk going to space if it wasn’t for their
popularity.
I mean just look at SpaceX’s own crewed missions.
Everyone knows that Bob and Doug were the first ones to ride Falcon 9 to the ISS.
But, do you know the astronauts that were part of Crew 1 or Crew 2?
Considering this, would an Elon trip actually be a massive achievement or would it just
be a big thing cause Elon is involved.
I think it's more of the latter.
So maybe, Elon doesn’t want to go to space until the trip itself is historic whether
that’s a trip around the moon or a trip to mars.
Speaking of a trip around the moon, a reporter actually asked Elon if he would be willing
to join the japanese billionaire on the dearMoon project.
And this is how he responded.
As you can see, Elon was super hesitant in answering the question and he basically just
avoided the question and talked about how Yusaku restored his faith in humanity.
Elon would eventually answer the question though and
he said.
As you can see, Elon didn’t technically refuse to go, but his hestitance makes it
seem like it’s quite unlikely due to all the reasons we already outlined in this video.
With that being said though, Elon has also stated that he would be down to die
on Mars.
So, maybe that’s been his master plan all along.
How do you guys think Elon’s first space trip will look like?
Comment that down below.
Also, drop a like if you can’t wait for space to become affordable for us mortals.
And of course, consider joining our discord community to suggest future video ideas and
consider subscribing to see more questions logically answered.