Billionaire Barack Obama fundraiser Elon Musk has baffled observers with his behavior over the past few weeks. Something’s gotten into him, and it might have come from Mars.
NASA, in late July delivered a blow to one of Musk’s big plans. “Mars terraforming not possible using present-day Technology,” the space agency said.
Musk, as recently as last year, said he was “fairly confident” that he could send cargo ships to Mars by 2022, people there by 2024, and his plan included “over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.”
Musk argued that Mars had enough CO2 in the soil that, when liberated, it could create a pleasant greenhouse effect. That’s when NASA felt the need to rope in the leading scientists on Mars’s atmosphere, to politely correct Musk.
This wasn’t the only disagreement between NASA and Musk this year. In May, NASA scientists objected to Musk’s idea that his aerospace company, SpaceX, could pack more fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket by keeping it at supercold temperatures.
While Musk has found a paying customer for his planned commercial trip to the moon next decade, much of the past year has been a letdown for the rocket man regularly heralded as the hero of a new space age.
Musk, just a few short years ago, was cool—Obama cool. When Obama visited Cape Canaveral in 2010, he strolled around the tarmac with Musk. Musk was the big-name speaker at the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank under Obama, and a top donor.
Conservatives showered Musk with love as well, because he was supposed to privatize space travel and create new frontiers in innovation.
A piece earlier this year by my friend, conservative Matt Continetti, exalted Musk’s ability to “quicken the pulse or exhilarate the imagination” with his “vision of the human future in space.”
And the savvy, pro-business, moderate establishment felt the same way. After President Trump was elected, New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a piece headlined “Want to bring back jobs, Mr. President-elect? Call Elon Musk.” Sorkin called Musk a “real-life Tony Stark,” and wrote of Musk’s businesses “This is the future of manufacturing.”
Sorkin scoffed at those who criticized the subsidy dependence of SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City, saying Musk really is “a prime example of everything we want our business leaders to be.
But Musk has hit a rough patch this year.
Tesla in February announced a $675 million quarterly loss. In March, Moody’s downgraded the company’s debt. In July, Musk bizarrely called a British cave diver a pedophile on Twitter. The diver, who rescued Thai youth soccer players trapped in a cave, has since sued Musk.
By mid-August, Musk was having a public emotional breakdown, with stories in the New York Times talking about his emotional fraying. Around the same time, he issued conflicting and bizarre stories about taking Tesla private — comments that have earned him a Justice Department investigation.
Musk meanwhile managed to enrage the press with Trump-like tweets attacking the media, before smoking a joint on a podcast that was being filmed.
Once a hero for plenty of folks in the press, on the Left, on the Right, and in the savvy futuristic middle, Musk runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock.
To some extent, SpaceX has trimmed its own sails as well. Musk’s schedules for space flight, Mars terraforming, and moon landings have repeatedly been pushed back. His boldest visions seem to be, one by one, fading away.
Increasingly, SpaceX — which was supposed to revolutionize space travel — is looking like a more modest “disruptor.” It’s mostly a lower-price contractor for NASA, providing a little bit of competition for Boeing and Lockheed.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Boeing and Lockheed (and their joint space venture United Launch Alliance) need some competition. (A fun fact for the layman: If you read an op-ed attacking Musk and SpaceX, there’s a decent chance one of these aerospace giants is somehow behind it.)
It’s just that “low-cost federal procurement option” doesn’t exactly “quicken the pulse or exhilarate the imagination,” to borrow a phrase.
Musk obviously isn’t done. Far from it. And he may really be shooting a billionaire to the moon in 2023, in which case he really will be that space visionary. But as of Autumn, 2018, this “real life Tony Stark” has fallen back to Earth.
