Co-founder of Paypal and currently best known as CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, has big dreams, he wants to colonize Mars to make a backup of humans on another planet. It's a story of a single entrepreneur who not only takes it up against big car manufacturers, but on its way to Mars also successfully competes with enormous companies as Boeing and Lockheed and hopes to add Comcast and Time Warner to that list as well.
Tim Urban from WaitButWhy has written an extensive explanation why Musk is doing what he is doing and how he foresees the future. He already successfully made going to space several factors cheaper and now aims to make it even cheaper by reusing rockets. He explains that if airlines worked like space companies, they had to buy a new airplane after each trip, making it way too expensive for anyone to fly. And according to Musk, this is also what's currently holding back people from going to Mars, it's too expensive.
Therefore Musk's first steps have been creating a small team that made it's own rocket engine, that is more powerful and cheaper to run than any other competing engine. He was also the first to successfully demonstrate that it's possible to have rockets get back to earth and reuse them. His last rocket successfully landed on a platform on the sea and after some refurbishment it can go back in space again.
So far Musk's ideas have been big but he has made the right steps in the right direction.
Tim Urban didn't only write an extensive story on Musk's ideas to colonize the red planet, there is also an audio book version, a nearly 4 hour long listen that explains everything. It's also available in smaller parts. Even if you think we'll never make it to Mars, the story is great to learn more about space technology and to learn how to think big.
Oh and if you wonder how he wants to compete with Comcast and Time Warner? Because he can send stuff cheaper and cheaper into space, and because he argues that new technology could make satellites much cheaper, he wants to send 4000 satellites into space and become a world covering internet provider.
