Tag Archives: Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s Superpower: Urgency

I believe Elon Musk’s superpower is urgency.

His dreams, such as landing on Mars and having a civilisation powered by renewable energy, are arguably shared by many other people, but the difference is that he is deeply committed to making it happen NOW.

That’s why he thinks he can get man to Mars and can do it in a time frame that allows him to blow away the competition.

His urgency creates a creative edge and causes his famously mad work ethic.

Tony Robbins says urgency is a result of creating the vision of a compelling future. Elon Musk has this technique nailed.

This old article calculated that Elon on average achieves in 1 year what it takes most people to do several years. In the article, it also focuses on his desire to build things that have an order of magnitude better performance (for example, increasing the speed of the Boring Company’s tunnel boring machines by 14x compared to the standard speed).

However, now some shareholders and analysts are sarcastically referring to his several delays and missed deadlines at Tesla as “Elon Time”.

Part of this is caused by his dedication to redesigning everything from first principles, even down to the details of the production line and the bespoke software tools used at Tesla.

People are speculating whether he can turn things around before Tesla runs out of the ability to continually raise capital. I think that his relentless dedication to urgency will win out.

Hyperloop Alpha project concept

In 2012, Elon Musk and SpaceX published this project concept document for Hyperloop Alpha, a radical new method of intercity transportation.

The document is a 58-page proposed solution with rigorous calculations on all socio-techno-commercial aspects of the idea.

Hyperloop Alpha concept sketch (Source: original Hyperloop Alpha concept document)

How does it work?

Hyperloop Alpha is a public transport system that sends people in pods at high speeds through a tube kept at low pressure to reduce air resistance.

By using an electric fan at the front, you can mitigate the Kantrowitz Limit (think of the maximum speed limit of a liquid pushing through a tube such as a syringe). It also has the unique benefit of creating a low-pressure air cushion for the pod to ride on – known as an air bearing.

The design envisages using linear accelerators on the bottom of each pod to achieve a target speed of 760mph (1,2220 kph or Mach 0.99 at 20°C), albeit lower at points where there is a curve in the journey so that the g-forces experienced by passengers are lower.

On the topic of renewable energy, Elon mentions that the installation could be self-powered using solar panels installed on top of the tube. He also mentions that LightSail could provide energy storage, but this shows the age of the document as in late 2017 they all but went bankrupt. Perhaps Elon could consider Highview Power’s Liquid Air Energy Storage technology now!

Future of Hyperloop

SpaceX hosted a 1-mile long test track to help incubate Hyperloop technologies around the world. Now there are several organisations developing Hyperloop solutions, including Virgin’s Hyperloop One and a team from MIT.

Inspiration for me

The Hyperloop Alpha project concept was actually one of the main inspirations for me to create and write this blog, along with a previous thought of mine about Leonardo Da Vinci.

By publishing open source project concepts like this one, Elon found a neat solution to one thing that has always bothered me about Da Vinci’s notebooks.

The ever-creative Da Vinci noted down his abundance of ideas in personal sketchbooks that were way ahead of his time. However, as he didn’t always have the time or resources to follow them up and connect them with the right people that needed them, many of them represent lost opportunities for technology to advance.

Publishing an idea in an open source format, allowing access for others that are better placed to work on it, ensures that technology moves forward in a way that benefits humanity (even though the ideator as an individual may not benefit directly).

I am not assuming that anything I put on this modest site will be anywhere near the same league as those guys, but given that good ideas can come from anywhere it is a possibility that something I put up in my Ideas section may be useful to somebody, somewhere.

The Hyperloop Alpha concept document is more detailed than any of mine, but Elon Musk does have a big team of world-class engineers to draw from as needed!

Elon Musk: Making Life Multiplanetary 2017

Below is the keynote speech at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) from none other than Elon Musk of SpaceX.

Elon outlines his plan to build the “BFR” rocket which can be used to launch over 150 tonnes of payload into orbit at the lowest marginal cost per launch of any rocket in history. Key to that is the vertical propulsive landing approach, which is becoming so precise that the future versions of their rockets won’t even have legs to stabilise the landing. It is a beast of a rocket at 160m tall and 9m in diameter.

The BFR project has already commenced, with the tooling ordered and construction of the facilities underway.

Elon’s targets are:

  • Landing so precise that risk tends to zero and compares to commercial airlines
  • Establishing a Moon base (no propellant plant needed as they can be refuelled in upper Earth orbit and have enough to launch and land on Earth)
  • BFR able to dock with the International Space Station (ISS)
  • BFR able to refuel in space by docking with another BFR upper module and “sloshing” the fuel over using control thrusters to apply milli-g acceleration
  • 2022 for the first cargo mission to Mars (to scout for resources like H²0)
  • 2024 for the first cargo and crew mission to Mars (to build the propellant plant among other things)
  • BFR upper module able to fly from surface of Mars back to Earth as Martian gravity is weak enough to allow for a booster-free launch
  • Use of BFR between cities on Planet Earth could massively reduce journey times (e.g. 25 mins from LA to NYC)

Oh and here is my favourite little nugget of wisdom from Elon’s talk:

“On Mars, sunrise and sunset are blue and the day is red. It’s the opposite of Earth.”