Monthly Archives: May 2017

Elon Musk produces electric cars and solar roof panels for the mass market, makes rockets to launch satellites and re-supply the International Space Station, and seeks to build a machine that can read human thoughts. So is he spread too thin as chief of several groundbreaking companies?

That question comes up periodically about Musk, a serial entrepreneur and polymath, especially when his empire achieves yet another high-water mark. Just recently, his electric automaker, Tesla (TSLA), becamethe largest U.S. car companyby stock market valuation, surpassing General Motors (GM). Now valued at almost $53 billion, Tesla has seen its stock surge more than 50 percent over the past 12 months, despite torrents of red ink: a projected loss of $950 million this year, versus GM's expected profit of $6.3 billion.

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Elon Musk posted a simulation video of his newest project, a high-speed tunnel to help ease traffic in Los Angeles. CBSN's Reena Ninan has the la...

"How can he head three companies?" asked Chicago securities attorney Andrew Stoltmann, a stockholder rights advocate who follows Musk's activities. "Tesla's stock has done well, but what happens when it drops? Shareholders will say he's spread too thin."

The 45-year-old billionaire is also back in the news lately due to his privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. On Monday night, it launched a re-usable Falcon 9 rocket carrying a communications satellite into orbit. SpaceX, which suffered two launchpad explosion in 2015 and 2016, has an ambitious schedule for 2017, aiming to prove it has recovered. Not only that: Musk wants SpaceX some day to lead the colonization of Mars.

Meanwhile, he formed Neuralink, a company that seeks to implant tiny electrodes into people's brains that will transmit their thoughts to computers. In April, he predicted that this endeavor would eventually allow humans to communicate via telepathy.

Musk is always a dervish of activity. Last year, he merged SolarCity, a solar panel maker that also loses money, into Tesla, a controversial move that critics called a bailout. He also is pursuing ideas like the Hyperloop, an ultra-fast, long-distance transportation scheme, propelling passengers through a tube in capsules. Another potential project is to ferry cars around traffic-congested Los Angeles in high-speed underground tunnels. What's more, he runs an active charity.

Musk's businesses are churning out new products at a rapid pace. Later this year, Tesla plans to deliver its newest sedans and SUVs, and Musk says reservations for them are huge. This summer, SolarCity will begin selling solar roof tiles, which could mark a breakthrough for the sunshine-to-electricity industry, replacing ugly roof panels..

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Elon Musk, the California billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, has unveiled plans to turn the planet next door into a tourist attraction. Carter ...

No wonder that skeptics question how he can keep all the plates spinning. Lawyer Stoltmann points to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of both social media website Twitter (TWTR) and mobile payments services provider Square (SQ), which have had rough spells. Their uninspiring performances prompted some analysts to call on Dorsey to choose one or the other. "Like Dorsey, Musk has too much" to keep track of, Stoltmann said.

Last year, software developer Mark Hibben, writing on theSeeking Alphainvestor site, called for Musk to step down from Tesla management. On a quarterly earnings call with analysts, Hibben wrote, Musk "sounded exhausted." Hibben added that he often "wondered how he could possibly serve as CEO of SpaceX, and Tesla and be chairman of SolarCity. Combined with his various avocations such as Mars colonization and Hyperloop, it all seems too much."

In the most recentTesla earnings call, in early May, Brad Erickson of Pacific Crest Securities asked Musk how, given his plethora of activities, he could manage "staying actively in place at Tesla longer into the future"

Musk replied: "I intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life. Hopefully stopping before I get senile."

Often likened to Steve Jobs, and sometimes to Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, Musk is a self-made man who has prospered as an inventor. Actor Robert Downey Jr. turned to him for inspiration when the actor was playing the billionaire Tony Stark, a fictionalized icon of technological innovation, in the "Iron Man" movies.

So how does Musk intend to do it all and keep at it year after year? Musk and his staff would not comment publicly. But he does have an eye for talent, which helps get things done. A person who knows him well said he is ably served by competent lieutenants, particularly J.B. Straubel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tesla, and Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX.

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted that he visited the Pentagon to talk about a flying metal suit.

To be sure, a large part of Musk's success is his seemingly boundless energy, aided by ample dollops of pluck, intelligence and creativity. After all, he taught himself computing at 10 and sold a video game he created at 12 to a computer magazine for $500. South African-born Musk immigrated to Canada at 17 and then came to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two bachelors degrees, in physics and economics.

He made his first fortune by selling an online city guide company called Zip2 to Compaq in 1999, and his second as a co-founder of PayPal, cashing out when eBay (EBAY) bought it in 2002. He ranksNo. 80 on the Forbes World's Billionaires list, with an estimated wealth of $15.3 billion.

Of course, it helps that Musk has assistance from Washington and state and local governments in the form of tax breaks, grants and rebates for his technologically oriented companies, which are dedicated to fighting global warming or pushing America into the cosmos. ALos Angeles Timesarticle contended that Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX will benefit from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support.

By most accounts, Musk thus far has been able to turn in an epic display of multi-tasking because of his:

Non-stop work ethic. This is a man who believes relaxing promotes vulnerability. He once told Business Insider that when "I took a week off, my rocket exploded. The lesson here is don't take a week off." In a TV appearance on Denmark's 21 Sondag program, Musk admitted he's only taken time off twice in 12 years. He typically puts in 90-hour work weeks.

Always intent on keeping a tight schedule, he seems to order his day more by instinct than by regimentation. "I've actually not read any books on time management," Musk told Mashable. At Tesla, he often will inspect vehicles personally as they come off the production line. He has a sleeping bag so he can stay close to the factory floor around the clock.

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Tesla Motors will reach a major milestone Thursday night when it unveils its first electric car intended for mainstream buyers. The base price of...

"My desk has frequently been in the factory," Musk told Business Insider. "I move my desk around to wherever the most important place is in the company at that time."

Attention to detail. Musk doesn't just inspect a sampling of Teslas. He reportedly eyeballs each of them. He also is a one-man guinea pig, requiring his engineers to install every proposed change on his own Tesla before he okays them for customers.

One story about Musk is that he once discovered the wrong kind of screw was used in Tesla sun visors and said, "they felt like daggers in my eyes." Another pictures him obsessing over the design of a key fob, spending weeks over its dimensions and appearance.

Relentless reading gives him many of his ideas. Dolly Singh, a former SpaceX executive, told Quora that "Elon reads voraciously; he taught himself how to design and build the world's most advanced rockets and spacecraft by reading books."

Nevertheless, despite his hard-driving focus, Musk's career has had its share of glitches. After a succession of successful launches, there were the SpaceX rockets that blew up on the pad over the past two years. And last May, a self-driving Tesla car crashed into a tractor trailer on the highway, killing the Tesla driver and pulling Musk into a public argument over how safe the vehicles are (federal auto-safety regulators later found no defects in its autopilot system).

Riding his subordinates.Author Ashlee Vance, in a book about Musk, writes that his employees both revere and fear him, and try to please him by copying his marathon work habits. Vance writes, "They give up their lives for Musk."

Life with Elon is not always orderly or predictable. In an analysis of Musk's management style, theBoothconsulting firm found: "An engineer might spend nine months working 100 hours a week on something because Musk has pushed him to, and then out of nowhere, Musk will change his mind and scrap the project."

"I have OCD on product-related issues,"he told the Wall Street Journal, meaning obsessive-compulsive disorder. "I always see what's wrong ... I never see what's right. It's not a recipe for happiness."

A self-described SpaceX engineer, writing on Quora, noted: "You can always tell when someone's left an Elon meeting. They're defeated." Over the past year, amid rising pressure from the pending rollout of the next car model, high-level executive departures have rocked Tesla. The chief financial officer, the director of hardware engineering and the human resources head have left.

And in what is now Tesla's energy division, SolarCity co-founder Lyndon Rive announced on Monday that he would be leaving in June to start another company and to spend more time with his family. Rive also is Musk's cousin.

Ability to inspire. A devout science fiction enthusiast, Musk has an ability to instill his vision in employees, customers and investors. What he is selling, as he is fond of saying, is the future.

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Billionaire Elon Musk shares his vision of the future of technology at Recode's annual Code Conference. NewYorker.com editor and CBS News contrib...

Whether it will come to pass as he predicts, or with him in the forefront, remains to be seen. Wall Street treats Tesla like a technology stock, viewing it as the best bet to dominate electric cars and battery storage.

"Tesla engenders optimism, freedom, defiance and a host of other emotions that, in our view, other companies cannot replicate," analyst Alexander Potter of Piper Jaffray told Bloomberg News.

On paper, GM (10 million vehicles delivered in 2016) should have the advantage over Tesla (80,000). Tesla lags behind GM in bringing out the next-generation electric car: theChevrolet Bolt, introduced in February with a price and range similar to Musk's next entry, the Model 3 sedan, debuting later this year. Trouble is, GM can't match the enthusiasm surrounding Tesla.

It's fair to ask if Musk can wear so many hats. But Jobs was the head of both Apple (AAPL) and Pixar Animation Studios. And Edison led businesses in electricity generation, movies and batteries. Like them, Musk is a dreamer, and maybe his can all come true.

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Tesla, SpaceX, AI, Mars and more: Is Elon Musk spread too thin? - CBS News

Y oure on a luxury cruise, sipping an ice-cold beer at one of the half-dozen bars scattered throughout the ship and winding down with friends before dinner. You booked a table for the second seating of the evening at the onboard steakhouse, which is rumored to be superb. You hope to meet the captain.

This cruise-ship scenario may seem mundane, but actually isn't -- because you're in space. And this isn't just any old space cruise; this one's taking you and hundreds of other well-heeled passengers on a six-month journey from a dying Earth to Mars, which you'll call home for the rest of your life.

Roll your eyes, but it's not entirely science fiction. Sure, a high-end space cruise to a colonized Mars is still decades, if not centuries, away. The soonest that NASA projects itll be ready to send its best-trained astronauts to the Red Planet is the 2030s, and even that timeline is ambitious, given the enormous engineering challenges involved with safely transporting people in a vehicle capable of traveling nearly 34 million miles away from Earth.

But fans of the possibilities of deep-space travel should be bullish, especially as NASA outlines concrete plans for its Journey to Mars, and space-tourism companies -- namely Elon Musk's Space X and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin -- publicly compete to be the first to send paying customers into space.

We're totally going to get there someday soon... if our brains don't betray us first.

Theres no telling exactly how a human brain might glitch out in deep space since no ones been there yet, but something as simple as a prolonged disrupted sleep pattern could trigger a complete mental breakdown. There's also Earth-out-of-view Phenomenon, a term used to describe the human response to watching our Pale Blue Dot grow so small in the distance that it disappears -- a sight that could set off any number of disturbing behavioral responses, from suicidal thoughts to hallucinations or delusions. (To this day, no astronaut has ever lost complete visual contact with Earth.) More likely, good old-fashioned stir craziness would be the culprit.

The Orion spacecraft, which will take the first NASA crew to Mars, allots astronauts only 300 cubic feet of living space. This means that, for up to two years, the four-to-six people aboard will be eating, sleeping, working, and relieving themselves inside a room roughly the size of a large dumpster. Theyll be literally millions of miles away from the rest of humanity, with the threat of imminent disaster and violent death constantly looming -- no fun. That's why NASA provides its astronauts with the comforts of home. What better way to do that than with familiar food and drink?

According to retired US astronaut Clay Anderson -- who's done two separate stints on the International Space Station, totaling more than 150 days -- a home-cooked meal or another emotional crutch during a particularly vulnerable stretch could be the difference between sanity and hysteria in space. "During all those hours, all those days, with crewmates and activities going on around the clock," he said during a panel at SXSW this year, "I could have used a beer every once in awhile."

For a crew headed to Mars to be able to survive, Anderson suggested, theyd need to have access to a variety of food options. "You have to create, in my mind, that home environment, that planetary environment from Earth," he said. "[That sense of] how do I see my family, how do I have the food that has the smells that remind me of home?" In other words, anything but the aroma-less, flavorless meal-replacement granola bars engineered to deliver the necessary calories and nutrients in the smallest possible package that Anderson and other astronauts know all too well.

I ts no secret that most space food is pretty nasty, that oddly delicious freeze-dried astronaut ice cream you bought on field trips to the science museum notwithstanding. Its undoubtedly come a long way since early astronauts were getting by on tubes of goo, but just one look at the space version of a cheeseburger -- essentially a flour tortilla smeared with Cheez Whiz and haphazardly arranged chunks of mystery meat -- is enough to ruin your appetite. Beyond having a years-long shelf life, the food thats engineered on Earth and schlepped into space has to be incredibly light and compact so as not to dramatically interfere with the weight and spatial requirements for launch, hence the reason nearly every meal and beverage in space comes from a flat pouch.

Finding a way to bring enough food to last a crew literally years is a whole different beast than the average space jaunt, which is why NASA is currently developing a variety of nutrient-dense 700-calorie food bars with multi-year shelf lives for the first Mars mission. To their credit, researchers are also considering how a steady diet of dull food bars would affect morale. Yet, if the ultimate goal is to build a habitat on Mars (and keep people sane and comfortable en route), the goal must not be to develop better, more efficient ways to bring pre-prepared food with us, but to find ways to safely and easily cultivate fresh food and drink inside a spacecraft and, ultimately, on the surface of an alien planet.

Growing food on Mars won't be that tough, right? According to Matt Damon's character Mark Watney in the The Martian, all youve got to do is fertilize some Martian soil with your own poop, wait a few weeks, and poof: potatoes! Thanks Hollywood, but its a hell of a lot more complicated than that.

According to Dr. Ray Wheeler, a lead researcher for the Advanced Life Support Research team at NASA whos spent much of his career exploring how to grow crops in deep-space, the best setup for growing fresh food on a spaceship (or elsewhere outside Earths atmosphere) is a hydroponic vertical farm -- essentially a mini-greenhouse decked out with a system of LED lights and tubes circulating nutrient-enriched water. While it's incredibly resource-efficient, it's also limiting in the types of vegetation you can easily grow (you better really like lettuce).

Farming on the surface of Mars would require a protected greenhouse-like environment that optimizes Mars' limited sunlight (it only gets 43% of what we do on Earth). Youll also be growing things there hydroponically, but that begs the question: Where the hell would one get enough water to sustain crops for an entire colony? In theory, we could just bring a bunch of H20 with us and perpetually recycle it, but tacking on heavy tanks of water to a ship for that kind of journey would be incredibly inefficient and remarkably expensive.

A couple of years ago, however, NASA confirmed evidence of water flows on the Martian surface; evidently, the planet's underground ice deposits hold as much water as Lake Superior. Wheelers team considers these discoveries a promising development, but acknowledges that the water will need to be heavily filtered in order to safely hydrate and nourish the plants we bring along. Depending on the eventual scale of the operation, it may be possible to graduate to growing things in actual Martian soil, but only if we figure out a system to remove a certain variety of salts it's known to contain that are highly toxic to humans.

While Wheelers team vetted the plant-growing system that astronauts utilized to successfully harvest lettuce on the International Space Station, which orbits relatively closely at 250 miles above Earths surface, its still unknown how the conditions of deep space might affect botanic life. To that end, these deep-space growing scenarios would only be tenable provided the intergalactic radiation hitting the spaceship and Mars surface doesnt kill or mutate crops in ways that would make everyone sick.

T hough NASA is meal-planning Mars trips and investigating deep-space food solutions, it's understandably less focused on providing a Mars-bound crew with great food than it is with, well, getting them there in the first place. Its ever-slimming budget will soon be going to actually building the rockets, landers, and technology that will bring humans to the Red Planet. And even the future of the International Space Station -- where critical food and crop research is done -- is uncertain beyond 2024, when NASA plans to quit funding it and fully dedicate its resources to its Journey to Mars. Mostly made up of proving ground missions (orbiting the moon and an attempt to redirect an asteroid, among others), this project is meant to test the viability of a longer-duration mission while still remaining in relative proximity to Earth, where a crew could more easily be rescued should equipment or other issues arise. However, the defunding of the ISS may ultimately not lead to the demise of the quest for decent food in space: The government is banking on the commercial sector stepping in to finance the ISS going forward, and companies like Space X and Blue Origin will exploit the existing infrastructure to test their various vehicles and projects.

The hope is that once a handful of companies realize the value in being futurist pioneers, the opportunity will attract others -- including food and drink brands -- to develop better-tasting food that's equipped for space travel, thus pouring money into game-changing research. This proposal is looking more and more promising in light of the recent news that Jeff Bezos will be investing $1 billion into Blue Origin every year with the ultimate goal of making spaceflight inexpensive enough to unleash a new age of entrepreneurship outside Earths atmosphere.

The agency thats been set up to facilitate the ISS transition -- the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) -- has already provided station access for a wide variety of academic and commercial research (think medical trials and hardware tests for the tech industry), and has signaled that it's interested in getting food and drink brands on board, too. In fact, it's recently partnered with Budweiser, which announced an ambitious plan to be the first beer on Mars during this year's SXSW. Its not the first commercial food or drink brand thats teamed up with a space organization to get its product up there (for instance, astronauts tested a Coca-Cola Space Can on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985, and Heinz products have long been a part of the standard condiment kit stocked by the ISS), but Budweisers seemingly unconventional partnership marks a first for a major food or drink brand in that the intent is to better understand how its product can be made in space.

Obviously, brewing beer on Mars isnt a high priority in the scheme of things, but the project embodies the opportunities and challenges involved in figuring out how we can integrate the creature comforts that astronaut Anderson considers supremely important on future missions. For one, its a major consumer brand -- one with an annual revenue of $15 billion -- indicating to other major consumer brands that investing in space food and drink research is worthwhile, despite Martian colonization seeming an intangible feat to most of us at this moment. As Val Toothman, Budweisers VP of Marketing Innovation put it: "When we colonize Mars as a human race, we know that people arent just going to be living the bare-bones existence. Theyll want to be able to come home, watch TV, and drink an ice-cold Bud at the end of the day.

Its also entirely plausible that Budweiser's in-space testing -- or any other big brand that partners with CASIS going forward -- leads to improvement of the product down here on Earth. Coca-Cola figured out how to better its consumer packaging by testing a special system for dispensing carbonated beverages in space. If sending the specific barley malt and yeast used in Budweisers recipe into space -- an experiment that's actively being planned -- helps the company develop more hearty or disease-resistant strains of the stuff to grow here, that would likely set off a trend where the Krafts, Campbells, and General Mills of the world start seeing concrete value in testing their products there, and, way down the line, developing space versions of their most popular items to be enjoyed by astronauts and interplanetary tourists alike.

Ensuring a food item or beverage tastes the same in space as it does on Earth actually poses quite a challenge because the body encounters something known as a fluid shift once it leaves the atmosphere and enters microgravity. This not only affects how ones blood flows and causes things like face puffiness, it also messes with sinuses and changes how and what a person can taste. That can mean heightening flavors so they pop as they would on Earth. As Anderson explained, Sometimes astronauts like to have very spicy food, like shrimp cocktail in red sauce. Or they add Tabasco or spicy things like horseradish to their food to make them more presentable to their palate.

This means brands are tasked with figuring out how to make a Bud taste like a Bud or Campbells Tomato Soup taste like Campbells Tomato Soup, and not a diluted or entirely different version.

These may seem like trivial issues to be considering when we're still in a place where public perception of colonizing a new planet seems outlandish, but why not start now when it's a bridge we'll have to cross eventually? These potential partnerships with the ISS will usher in the next phase in the long slog to get humans on Mars. As Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, our own government (the current White House aside), and many other thought leaders of futurism agree, were at the dawn of a new era, where the hot new entrepreneurial trend will be conducting the R&D for the technology necessary to make those jam-packed space cruises -- filled with men, women, and children sent to colonize our next planet -- feel like home.

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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist whos skeptical space jam could ever be as good as Space Jam.

Originally posted here:
Why Colonizing Mars Depends on Making Food Taste Better in Space - Thrillist

What will the first president of Mars look like? It may not be an alien who wins the inaugural Martian democratic election, but it still could be a person who looks nothing like the humans on Earth.

Although we are still quite a bit away from a full-blown space colony on Mars, not to mention one that becomes an independent nation, space exploration is moving in the colonizationdirection. There are plenty of viable options for a space habitat, including Earths moon and temperate planets in other solar systems, but Mars is usually the main focus of such discussions. And once we are there, its possible the colonists will evolve into a new race of humans, no matter the skin color or other physical characteristics of the pioneers who first settle the Red Planet, scientists say.

Read: Stephen Hawking Says If We Dont Leave Earth Now, Were All Gonna Die

It could take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years for a new species of human to descend from the modern humans we know and love today. But smaller and sometimes superficial changes within the same species, like in the size of a nose, may not take as long to emerge and become dominant. In an interview with International Business Times, John Hawks, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said our species has adapted quickly to the diverse environments throughout the world where we live, and he noted that human skin pigmentations have emerged in the last 20,000 years or so.

On Mars, or in another space colony, with an isolated human society, physical characteristics might change randomly as the settlers procreate. But if they can mate with whom they want, it could be that a cultural preference emerges, Hawks said from South Africa, where he is investigating the fossils of a recently discovered extinct human relative, Homo naledi.

A future human space colony, like one on Mars, would live in such a drastically different environment from what can be found on Earth that the settlers evolve into a new race of people. Photo: NASA

Cultural preferences probably played a role in a lot of the different physical features, like varying face shapes, we see in people today, Hawks said. Given enough generations to make babies, the space colonists could end up looking weird and whether theyre weird [to us] or not is a cultural standard for us.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is leading the way when it comes to humans touching down on Mars and eventually establishing a colony. The company made history and a huge stride toward sustainable space travel when it successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket vertically, allowing it to be reusedon future missions. But space agencies around the world are also doing work toward that goal. NASA, for example, has done experiments on farming in microgravityaboard the International Space Station.

Apart from Mars colonists developing their own culture and standards of physical beauty, the different environment could also play a role in the physical features that become dominant in a colony and possibly lead to a new race of humans. Evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon, a professor at Rice University, told IBT that in theory, any trait giving Mars explorers an edge over their compatriots would spread in such an alien environment.

Evolution would proceed more quickly because natural selection will really favor any advantages that some individuals might have, he said.

Read: China Starts Fake Lunar Space Colony

Skin color is just one example of a trait that could prove beneficial.

Mars has a thin atmosphere, meaning radiation from the sun hits harder than it would on Earth, which is protected by its atmospheric cocoon. Without that first line of defense, the skin pigment that helps us on Earth could be even more important on Mars. Solomon, who has written a book called Future Humans about how Earthlings might evolve, said it'sconceivable that on Mars there would be even stronger selection for darker pigmentation and skin color, or for humans to evolve to use different kinds of pigmentation in their skin for more protection from the suns rays.

The speed with which a new skin color emerges would vary depending on just how advantageous it is to have that pigmentation in a Martian environment. If the difference is huge, Solomon said, in relatively few generations, thats going to become a really common trait.

Evolution could occur quickly because the radiation from the sun on the unprotected Mars surface could exponentially increase the number of genetic mutations of each new generation. Stay tuned for more on the Mars mutants we can expect to create.

Link:
Colonies On Mars: How Human Faces Will Evolve On The Red Planet - International Business Times