Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, gave the University of Michigan College of Engineering spring commencement address. Among other things, he mentioned the power of small engineering teams. Looking into the future he mentioned that...
You might be able to go into orbit. I got interested in this. I joined the board of the X-Prize, which is the thing that sponsored Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne $10 million prize recently. And they're trying to foster competition to get people into space.
And I have a good friend who really wants to go to Mars, and so he decided that he should build a rocket company. And in fact he's been pretty successful about it. And I just sent him an e-mail. I asked him for some stats, and in like 2 hours he sent me back a reply. So, what is the theoretical cost of getting a pound of something into space using a rocket? What's the lowest amount? Well, it's basically the fuel to power the rocket into orbit.
It turns out that the Space Shuttle costs about $10,000 to $20,000 for every pound that it carries up. What do you think the theoretical limit is to low earth orbit? It's actually about $10 to $20 a pound and you can move something into orbit. You think about that, that's for you or your body, that's probably the price of an expensive airplane ticket, right? Just in fuel, the basic fuel costs. Now do you think someday we might figure out how to get close to that? I think we could. And that would change things a lot and might get us to Mars or many other interesting places.
Sounds like a lot of sunk R&D and high-value personal effort to get to that point, but it doesn't violate any laws of physics nor in my opinion the limits of private company organizational behavior.
Comments