Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I believe he is entitled the Chief Engineer. Yeah. I think I've heard NASA directly refers to him as the Chief Engineer of SpaceX, Elon Musk. He was a sponge. He would go find resources on rockets and just go suck all of the information out of physics textbooks and physics professors. Exactly what you just pointed out, rocket manuals. I don't want my question from a moment ago to linger too long feeling like I'm mischaracterizing him. Elon is absolutely not an eccentric billionaire who now decided to get into space because there's nothing else to do. This is sort of the plan all along and online payments where this brief exit from the highway before he got back on to go and really run this big problem. It was a way to get all of these resources. When he lands down in LA, he gets hooked up with a nonprofit organization called The Mars Society. Elon has been percolating on Mars. When he first started to think about this he goes to the NASA website. He's expecting on the NASA website to find all sorts of great plans about the future, exploring space, and then particularly Mars. It makes sense that people should go explore Mars. We've been to the moon and there's nothing there. He gets really disillusioned. He's like I've got some resources. I want to make a grand gesture. He's not thinking about a company. He's not thinking about a business. He's thinking about something to inspire people to get back into space exploration. The Mars Society, this is their charter, so he makes a $100,000 donation to The Mars Society. He joins the board and he starts meeting all of these aerospace people in LA. Not just in LA, of course back up in Silicon Valley there's NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Mountain View. Elon's mostly down in LA but he's going back and forth. He starts organizing these “Saturday salons,” he calls them, where he's just getting together industry leaders in aerospace and at JPL, both in LA and Palo Alto. There's no agenda, but he lets it be known to all of them that he's got some resources. He's a dot-com-rich guy and he wants to make a gesture. What could be done on the order of $10–$20 million. They start to coalesce the group on this idea of building a “Mars Oasis” and the idea behind a Mars Oasis is that they're going to buy a rocket, and they're going to put a plant on it, and they're also going to put a robot on it, and they're going to shoot this rocket to mars. I can't remember if the Mars Rover had landed at this point. I think so.…

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