马斯克一手造梦想一手造时势
To follow Elon Musk’s Twitter feed on Tuesday as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket blasted off from its launch pad was to enter into the zany, geeky, mettlesome, and inspirational world of the South African-born tech entrepreneur. All through the day SpaceX’s founder kept his 19m followers updated on the flight profile of the company’s huge rocket and the delays to the countdown caused by excessive high-altitude winds. Then, soon after the 27-engine rocket roared into space, he tweeted near-surreal footage of one of his red Tesla Roadster cars with a dummy astronaut strapped onboard orbiting the Earth. This brazen cross-promotion for the car company Mr Musk also founded was variously interpreted as one of the most expensive, or cheapest, mass advertising campaigns in history. “We’re doing OK for a bunch of monkeys. Humanity rocks!” Mr Musk tweeted. Adopting a more restrained tone in response to President Donald Trump, who was quick to send a congratulatory tweet, Mr Musk replied: “Thank you on behalf of SpaceX. An exciting future lies ahead!” Behind all the quirky bravado stands a stunning technological achievement. The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket to be launched since the Saturn V programme took astronauts to the Moon. The dramatic and safe return of two of the Falcon Heavy’s three boosters was also a noteworthy feat, promising to cut the cost of future launches. The success opens the way for a manned mission around the Moon by two paying astronauts, although SpaceX appears to be tiptoeing away from its original timetable that this would take place before the end of the year. It also marks a significant step towards Mr Musk’s ultimate ambition: to land on Mars. That mission, though, will depend on the success of SpaceX’s next rocket design, known with frat-boy humour as the BFR (or Big F***ing Rocket), due to be launched in the mid-2020s. The US space establishment was initially wary of tech billionaires such as Mr Musk and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, when they first declared their ambitions to run their own private space programmes. But Nasa quickly came to admire the highly innovative and hard-charging attitude that these entrepreneurs have brought to the business. Such has been Nasa’s faith in Mr Musk that it has even granted SpaceX a licence to operate from the hallowed ground of Launchpad 39A, the site from which Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins blasted off to the Moon in 1969. So many people have now bought into Mr Musk’s extraordinary vision that it might be sensible to apply a discount to his accomplishments. Certainly, the $57bn stock market value of Tesla Motors, his lossmaking car company that delivered just over 100,000 vehicles last year, would appear to defy financial gravity. And the failed deployment of a spy satellite following its launch on a Falcon 9 rocket on January 7 also highlighted the periodic fallibility of the SpaceX programme, although the company has said its rocket functioned perfectly. It used to be said of Steve Jobs that Apple’s monomaniacal founder conjured up his own “reality distortion field”, in whose thrall people suspended their disbelief. Much the same can be said of Mr Musk. But whatever the occasional distortions, the underlying reality behind both entrepreneurs’ achievements is impressive and indisputable. |