Last night, Elon Musk’s SpaceX achieved a spectacular milestone in the history of space travel: its Falcon 9 rocket launched 11 satellites into orbit, performed a spin and landed back on earth, six miles from where it launched. Why is this ultimate recycling feat so consequential?
Quite simply, this could revolutionize space travel as we know it today.
During our in-depth 2013 interview, an emotional Elon Musk told me of his disappointment at the progress of space exploration and his ultimate goal: to make human life multi-planetary. He explained that if he could “show the way” by making rockets as reusable as airplanes, this would:
1. dramatically reduce the cost of space travel
2. re-energize support for NASA’s mission
3. increase NASA’s budget
and “then we could resume the journey”…to Mars and beyond. Watch the interview, starting at 35:00
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The back story of SpaceX
“I always thought that we’d make much more progress in space…and it just didn’t happen…it was really disappointing, so I was really quite bothered by it. So when we went to the moon, we were supposed to have a base on the moon, we were supposed to send people to Mars and that stuff just didn’t happen. We went backwards. I thought, well maybe it’s a question of there not being enough intention or ‘will’ to do this. This was a wrong assumption. That’s the reason for the greenhouse idea…if there could be a small philanthropic mission to Mars…a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrients, you’d have this great shot of a little greenhouse with little green plants on a red background. I thought that would get people excited…you have to imagine the money shot. I thought this would result in a bigger budget for NASA and then we could resume the journey…”
On negotiations with the Russian military to buy two ICBMs
“They just thought I was crazy…I had three quite interesting trips to Russia to try to negotiate purchase of two Russian ICBMs…minus the nukes…I slightly got the feeling that was on the table, which was very alarming. Those were very weird meetings with the Russian military…’remarkably capitalist’ was my impression (of the Russians).”
Why he chose to create his own rocket company, SpaceX
“I came to the conclusion that my initial premise was wrong that in fact that there’s a great deal of will, there’s not such a shortage. But people don’t think there’s a way. And if people thought there was a way or something that wouldn’t break the federal budget, then people would support it. The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. People came here from other places…people need to believe that it’s possible, so I thought it’s a question of showing people that there’s a way…There wasn’t really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive. If one could make them reusable, like airplanes then the cost of rocketry (and space travel) would drop dramatically.”
Last Thursday, I joined a special BBC World Service program hosted by Fergus Nicoll in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We began by discussing the large community of Vietnamese in Silicon Valley and its connection to Vietnam’s growing tech hub. Listen to the BBC podcast (at 21:00 re. Silicon Valley-Vietnam, and at 31:00 re. The Tech Awards)
We discussed my latest interviews in Silicon Valley on the BBC Business Mattersprogram. Here’s a transcript of our dialogue, edited for length and clarity:
Fergus Nicoll: Alison, you’ve been talking to some of the winners of the Tech Awards in Silicon Valley. What kinds of things are they coming up with and what could Vietnamese developers seek to emulate?
Alison van Diggelen: I spoke with three young entrepreneurs who’re doing incredible things: Tricia Compas-Markman is founder of DayOne Response. What they’ve built is a 10 liter backpack – it’s very low-tech in fact. It provides clean drinking water on day one in a natural disaster. They’ve deployed it in places like Nepal after the earthquake; and what they want to do is pre-position it in places like the Philippines that are subject to natural disasters. It’s a wonderful way for families and individuals to collect and treat and get clean drinking water in disaster areas…
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Fergus Nicoll: We were in the Philippines last week…we could maybe put them in touch with Senator Loren Legarda or the Red Cross in the Philippines? They would be very keen to hear about that kind of initiative. What else have you been hearing about?
Alison van Diggelen: Let’s do that for sure! The other winner is called Open Pediatrics and it’s an online community for pediatricians. It’s almost like a Khan Academy for pediatricians: an online learning community connecting the cutting edge technology of first rate hospitals like Boston’s Children’s Hospital with rural clinics in developing countries, so they get the same expertise. It’s a wonderful, simple idea and there are some top people involved in that. I talked with Traci Wolbrink, one of the key people (pictured at the podium, above).
And the last one I want to mention is a very simple app…It’s called BeeLine Reader, founded by Nick Lum, a corporate lawyer who’s become a tech humanitarian. This BeeLine Reader allows people to read on screens much more easily. If you’re suffering from dyslexia, or vision problems, you can read using a color gradient. So if you can imagine reading a line, and the color of the script changes from blue to red to black but it wraps around, it guides your eye so you can read faster or more clearly. This is available for either a dollar a month or $5 to buy the app.
Alison van Diggelen: All these entrepreneurs were given a good load of money to take it to the next level. It was very inspiring to see that not all techies are out to make a buck. Some of them want to change the world…make the world a better place.
Fergus Nicoll: Brilliant. That sounds fantastic.
Find out more at Fresh Dialogues
What is Tech Award winner Jeff Skoll doing to change the world and make it greener?
Ever since Elon Musk released a white paper outlining the sci-fi Hyperloop, excitement among the tech community has been immense. This futurist ultra-high speed form of transport has inspired hundreds of university teams and two fiercely competitive LA companies: Hyperloop Technologies, and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). I went to LA to find out what progress has been made.
HTT’s CEO, Dirk Ahlborn wasn’t ready to open the doors to the HTT studio to reveal the sights and sounds of progress. He and his small team were only available for phone interviews. One of his crew told me that all I could record, anyway, was the sound of fingers on keyboards at this point. A crowdsourcing experiment harnessing a reported 400 part-time global contributors, the HTT effort has produced some fancy looking Hyperloop station and capsule scale models, but the hard engineering appears to be happening only at Hyperloop Technologies. It was there I arrived September 16th with my trusty audio recorder to capture the sound of the Hyperloop potentially becoming a reality.
I’m at the Hyperloop Technologies Headquarters in downtown LA to find out if this sci-fi project is for real. In 2013 Tesla’s Elon Musk published a white paper, describing what he called a “5th Mode of Transport.” He describes it like:
“A cross between a concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table.” Elon Musk
A “hyperloop” comprises passenger or freight pods that are shot down a near-vacuum tube from one city to another, at over 700mph.
The prospect of traveling on land between SF and LA in 30 minutes has some people salivating, and skeptics shaking their heads in disbelief.
“Elon absolutely inspired us…his fingerprints are all over this. The system architecture that Elon came up with is what inspired this whole team to get together and go after this bold project.” BamBrogan
BamBrogan and his cofounder, Shervin Pishevar, have assembled over $10M in funding, and a 50-strong team of expert engineers. They’re creating what they call an “energy elegant” transport solution, with a potential freight market of 150 Trillion dollars over the next 20 years.
Here’s venture capitalist, Pishevar:
“The idea itself can have a deeply transformative effect on our planet, and on our lives. It brings the world closer together. Think about the impact of the Wright Brothers’ invention of flight, and their Kitty Hawk moment, what a pivotal moment that was.” Pishevar
Hyperbole for the Hyperloop? Maybe. But like Elon Musk, Pishevar has a record of proving naysayers wrong.
Hyperloop’s test engineer Cassandra Mercury explains:
Ambi – atmos of air whooshing, rotor spinning.
Cassandra Mercury: We have this rotor moving….running at 10,000 rpm, it’s a linear speed of about 750 miles an hour. We’re testing the levitation possibilities at the speed we’d be using on the actual hyperloop.
van Diggelen: Elon Musk described it as like an air hockey table. Is that accurate?
Mercury: That’s a really good analogy. It’s just some air and a light gap between the air bearing and the track.
van Diggelen: So the idea is: the pods of people and freight will levitate like a puck on an air hockey table?
Mercury: Exactly!
The team is targeting global freight as well as passenger transport. Numerous opportunities exist to connect high-traffic city pairs like LA and SF, that are less than 900 miles apart.
Here’s Hyperloop Technologies’ Director of Operations, Erin Kearns:
“We definitely see the benefits of transporting cargo…ports being too small…ships are sitting offshore 5 miles…we want to streamline the process, make it a lot more elegant, a lot cleaner for the environment.” Erin Kearns
I ask Mark Jacobson: what could derail the Hyperloop? He’s a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
He starts with comparisons to California’s High Speed Rail project, which has already broken ground…
Jacobson: I’m sure the Hyperloop is much more expensive… Like any large construction project, issues of zoning, trying to get rights of way… There’s always going to be a political fight for trying to site something like this…
And then he lists the technical challenges…heat build up, leakage from the vacuum tube, keeping a uniform distance between the pods and the tube.
“You’re gliding along at 700 mph and hit the bottom of the tube…I wouldn’t want to be the first person to ride in the train!” Jacobson
BamBrogan has this response to naysayers:
Brogan: I say: Wait a year, we’ll have a working prototype.
I ask him how they’re going to avoid the political nightmares that’ve slowed California’s high speed rail. Brogan smiles and says they’ll route their LA to SF hyperloop in the ocean.
BamBrogan is channeling Elon Musk in driving his Hyperloop team forward and he’s bullish about securing $80M more in venture capital, and overseas commercial contracts very soon.
“The team is trying to operate on a timescale that is of Elon Musk ilk…By 2017/18, we’ll have shovels in the ground in a couple of locations,” BamBrogan
Meanwhile, rival company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (or HTT) boasts it will start work on a 5-mile demo track in California next year. Despite partnerships with UCLA and key industry partners; this rival team of 400 –mostly part timers – is not yet funded.
Back with BamBrogan’s team, they’re hiring aggressively.
“We’re aiming for the end of 2016 to have our Kitty Hawk moment: a full scale, full speed system that’s operating,” Bambrogan
Coming soon at Fresh Dialogues: an interview with HTT’s Dirk Ahlborn. Why does he insist that crowdsourcing the Hyperloop is the better approach?
Hear the word drone and you’ll likely think of military predator drones: forces of death and destruction. But what about drones as a force for restoration: emergency relief, education or even saving the planet?
I explored the future of drones at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, on assignment for the BBC World Service; and spoke with drone experts from GoogleX, OpenROV and even….R2D2. The latter was one of my toughest interviews ever. Next time, I’ll bring a droid translator.
R2D2 sets the scene (translations welcome via Twitter)
van Diggelen: I’m here at the SF Bay Area Maker Faire, a “show and tell” gathering of tech enthusiasts, hobbyists, artists and engineers. You could say I’m here to meet my maker… to explore drones designed not for destruction but to make the world a safer, more egalitarian, greener place. Here’s Adem Rudin, who works at GoogleX.
Rudin: This is Project Wing. We’re doing drones for delivery and our end goal is to deliver anything to anyone, anywhere and do it quickly.
We’re trying to build a platform that people can use in whatever way they can dream up…In 2014, we went to the Outback, near Brisbane and met up with a couple of farmers out there, operated for about a week, delivering bottled water, food, two-way radios…
van Diggelen: Does it have some kind of attachment you can put things in?
Rudin: The package is on the underside and when we want to deliver, we bring the aircraft into a hover and actually winch the package down to the customer waiting on the ground.
van Diggelen: It looks a bit like a stingray…
Rudin: We tried to make it look friendly…unobtrusive and it also is fairly quiet up in the air…
van Diggelen: When you see what’s going on in Nepal…do you see that being a future potential application for this drone?
Rudin: Yes … It would be a very quick, very low cost way to get out, take aerial photographs of disaster areas and deliver emergency supplies directly to people.
van Diggelen: Since this is one of the secretive GoogleX projects, Rudin was unable to give me a timeline for when we might see these Google drones filling our skies.
Audio: sound of bubbles, submarine drone reaching surface, diving down again
van Diggelen: The beauty of Maker Faire is discovering what’s just round the corner. I found Zack Johnson standing by a huge paddling pool operating a submarine drone – about the size of a shoebox.
Johnson: It goes down to about 75 meters and films live video that goes back to the shore and you control it either with an Xbox controller or a USB joystick or with a laptop.
There’s basically two things stopping people becoming Jacques Cousteau. One is price… The other one is know-how.
van Diggelen: Johnson’s DIY kit sells for $900 to a global market. The company supports an international community of users who share their expeditions online.
Johnson: We call it Open Explorer: it’s a web platform for sharing expeditions. There are people who’re using ROVs to look for sunken tombs, buried treasure, marine archaeology, water sampling, coral reef monitoring…
There are some academic applications. Especially regarding coral reefs. That is a big focal point for the environmental movement right now because it’s a great litmus for the health of the ocean.
van Diggelen: So drones will be used in the fight against climate change, to help save endangered species, to deliver emergency supplies and even bring the Internet to remote places in the world. The future of drones is as vast as the open sky. Its only limit? Our imagination.
Want to explore more BBC reports and commentary? Click here for archives on everything from sexism in Silicon Valley to tech solutions to the California drought.
Technology has the potential to bring us a mind-blowing world of innovation, from self-driving cars to re-engineered food, and even colonies on Mars. Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson are two of tech’s most influential minds. Here’s my BBC World Business Report on their vision of the future. Spoiler alert: It isn’t all good news.
The report aired today (May 6, 2015) on the BBC World Service. Listen to the podcast from 11:00
BBC Presenter, Mike Johnson: Colonies on Mars, self driving electric cars, re-engineered food… How will technology change our lives in the decades ahead? It’s certainly bringing us an extraordinary world of innovation. It’s known in the jargon these days as “future shock.” Many worry about the consequences, especially the toll that increased use of robots will take on jobs. Alison van Diggelen, creator and host of the Fresh Dialogues interview series reports from California
Audio: [Sound of Tesla Factory welding, metal on metal, robot sounds…]
van Diggelen: It was here in Silicon Valley, in 2012, the first Model S rolled off the production line at the Tesla Factory.
Tesla’s Gilbert Passin: See the robot is bringing the flat panel into the press…they are in slow motion …[factory sounds]
van Diggelen: The pioneering carmaker, Tesla Motors, has now produced over 70,000 all-electric cars and is gearing up for the release of the new Model X, a futuristic SUV with falcon wing doors. This summer, it will also start shipping Tesla Energy storage batteries for homes, businesses and utilities. Gilbert Passin leads the Tesla manufacturing team and is proud of the numerous red robots at the factory.
Passin: What we do here is really kick-ass. I mean, look around…. does it look to you like a boring old-fashioned car factory?
van Diggelen: Absolutely not.
Passin: We’re using the latest and greatest and even in some cases innovate in manufacturing techniques.
van Diggelen: The Tesla production team is so fond of its heavy lifting robots, they’re named after action heroes like Wolverine, Vulcan and Colossus.
Venture Capitalist, Steve Jurvetson drives the first Model S to come off Tesla’s production line. He has a reputation for putting his money where his mouth is and backing successful startups like Hotmail, SpaceX, and PlanetLabs. He’s a self-described “raging techno optimist” and has a front row seat on the future of innovation. I asked him what we should expect in the next 50 years…
Steve Jurvetson: (If you look far enough in the future) All vehicles will be electric. We’ll have a Mars colony. We will have to grow more food than since the beginning of agriculture. That will be largely driven by GMOs and a variety of roboticized forms of farming…and moving off meat production in the way we think of it: killing animals. We will “grow” meat in different ways within 50 years and that will have pretty profound effects on Greenhouse Gases to… everything. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, are changing the world. In that 50 year horizon, the world’s going to look markedly different than today. Future shock is a perpetually occurring phenomenon.
van Diggelen: As well as being CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk leads SpaceX, the aerospace company that recently launched its 6th mission to resupply the International Space Station.
Ambi: [SpaceX rocket countdown and blast off]
Tesla announcer: 5,4,3,2,1…and lift off…the Falcon soars from its perch to the international space station. [Rocket blasting….]
He envisioned a philanthropic mission to Mars to install a greenhouse…and jumpstart the space race. Here’s Musk:
Musk: You’d have this great shot of a little greenhouse with little green plants on a red background. I thought that would get people excited…you have to imagine “the money shot.” So this would be the furthest that life’s ever travelled, the first life on Mars and I thought maybe that would result in a bigger budget for NASA and then we could resume the journey…
van Diggelen: Of course, in order to get to Mars, Musk and his team would have to invent a low cost space rocket. Enter, SpaceX.
Jurvetson: Being a multi planetary species, (having a colony on Mars and probably the moon) is one of those “greatest hits” in human evolution, up there with the opposable thumb…the neuron, multi-cellular beings.
van Diggelen: These grand visions are all very well, but what will life be like here on planet earth in 50 years?
For now, the tech economy is bringing manufacturing back to the US and Europe, but in the long run robots will take our jobs. This has huge implications for the world economy, business and public policy. Jurvetson admits he’s deeply worried about the growing rich-poor divide that tech innovation is exacerbating. He doesn’t pull his punches…
Jurvetson: Imagine the robots of the future… It’s inevitable the jobs will go away…and we need to prepare for that future…talk about it now so that the transition isn’t violent and horrible….40% unemployment, 80% unemployment…we’re gonna get there.
LinkedIn Cofounder and tech investor extraordinaire, Reid Hoffman delivered some compelling entrepreneurial insights to an intimate group in Silicon Valley last week. It earned him a few more stars for his “visionary” reputation; however his insights on the drive to get more women in tech fell far short of expectations. See below…
The gathering was an elegant SVForum affair, led by CEO Adiba Barney.
Here’s some of Hoffman’s valuable wisdom for entrepreneurs:
1. Don’t keep your big idea a secret
According to Hoffman, if you don’t share your startup idea with people who can help you, it’s “a massive recipe for failure.”
2. Mine your network
As Hoffman emphasizes in his latest book The Alliance, “An externally networked workforce is critical to an innovative company.” What he means by this is:
a. nurture your wider network (give and take advice) and be active on social media
b. encourage your employees to do likewise
c. seek wisdom from the smartest people you know outside your company
Hoffman underlined that IPOs aren’t the holy grail they once were, thanks to late stage investors with large cash infusions. IPOs must make sense strategically for your startup.
“The key question for any company is how an IPO can help you build your company into something that may be around for decades or hundreds of years and help to transform the industry they are in,” says Hoffman.
This fits with what Elon Musk told me when I asked him about a SpaceX IPO. He pointed out that there are major disadvantages to going public, especially if your business has very long term goals (like going to Mars!)
Since Hoffman prides himself as a public intellectual, I asked him what LinkedIn is doing to increase the number of women in tech; and what the academic case is for doing so. Frankly, I thought he’d cite one of the many studies which show the positive correlation between the number of women executives and company success.
Here’s his response:
“Women on average are much more diligent than men and much more capable of learning a set of different things, so having them deeply engaged in technology, creating the future is important. And then there’s obviously the full ramp of sensibilities for how products should work…how those human ecosystems should work. So I think it behooves…the world is much better off… with having an industry that isn’t – as it’s historically been – very balanced on the male side, but to be trending toward a more evenly balanced industry. There are various initiatives – the Lean In one is just the most recent.” Reid Hoffman
That’s it.
He’s referring to the announcement on February 8th that LeanIn.org, Facebook, LinkedIn and the Anita Borg Institute have created a partnership to expand Lean In Circles on college campuses. Reid Hoffman and the LinkedIn team deserve some praise for their involvement, but that’s it? I didn’t get the feeling that this topic is high on Hoffman’s agenda, or that he cares that much about it.
Here’s my vision: I’d like to see Mr Hoffman use his profound intellect and growing visionary platform to inspire more action and help get more women into the tech field.
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And the last one I want to mention is a very simple app…It’s called 
I’m at the 
BamBrogan and his cofounder, Shervin Pishevar, have assembled over $10M in funding, and a 50-strong team of expert engineers. They’re creating what they call an “energy elegant” transport solution, with a potential freight market of 150 Trillion dollars over the next 20 years. 
Hyperloop’s test engineer Cassandra Mercury explains:
Mercury: That’s a really good analogy. It’s just some air and a light gap between the air bearing and the track.
I ask Mark Jacobson: what could derail the Hyperloop? He’s a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
I ask him how they’re going to avoid the political nightmares that’ve slowed California’s high speed rail. Brogan smiles and says they’ll route their LA to SF hyperloop in the ocean.
van Diggelen: Does it have some kind of attachment you can put things in?
Johnson: It goes down to about 75 meters and films live video that goes back to the shore and you control it either with an Xbox controller or a USB joystick or with a laptop.
Steve Jurvetson: (If you look far enough in the future) All vehicles will be electric. We’ll have a Mars colony. We will have to grow more food than since the beginning of agriculture. That will be largely driven by GMOs and a variety of roboticized forms of farming…and moving off meat production in the way we think of it: killing animals. We will “grow” meat in different ways within 50 years and that will have pretty profound effects on Greenhouse Gases to… everything. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, are changing the world. In that 50 year horizon, the world’s going to look markedly different than today. Future shock is a perpetually occurring phenomenon.
2. Mine your network
And now on to the subject of the dismally 
