I Don’t Need These Russians 133
Mars base if we can afford it. Launching a rocket is easy
compared with how to do it cheaply. You can compare
SpaceX with Henry Ford who didn’t invent the car - he
just made it available to the public by designing the cheap
and reliable T-Ford.
A rocket with a capsule can be more expensive than
a Space Shuttle. After the Space Shuttle accident in 2003,
whenColumbiadisintegrated during re-entry into the Earth’s
atmosphere, the US government ordered the development
of the Ares I rocket. “As is not unusual with large govern-
ment programs, the schedule slipped and costs ballooned
by tens of billions,” Elon said. President Barack Obama
canceled the new rocket because it didn’t make sense
anymore. To finish the rocket, the program would have
needed another $50 billion and the cost per flight would
have been $1.5 billion. The cost per flight with the Space
Shuttle was $1 billion. This is despite the fact that Ares
I could carry only four astronauts and the Space Shuttle
could carry at least seven.^277
To come up with the answer why rockets were expen-
sive, Elon used his engineering skills. “I tend to approach
things from a physics framework,” Elon said. “And physics
teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by
analogy. So I said, OK, let’s look at the first principles.
What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum
alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And
then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the
commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost
of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price –