Open Letter to Elon Musk

This is an open letter to Elon Musk, whose "hyperloop" idea is the inspiration for this blog.

Hire me!

I've applied to work as "Front End Architect" with SpaceX, the private space launch company founded by Musk that has successfully designed, built and launched their own rocket system, the Falcon 9, "from the ground up".

We happened to be at Kennedy Space Center for a launch last March, a stopover on our cruise to the Bahamas. (The Apollo/Saturn V Center is awesome by the way and worth the trip.) It's the only launch I've ever seen, despite suffering from bouts of space fanaticism, off and on, since watching Disney's "Man in Space" series in the 1950s. (It's on YouTube; search "disneyland man in space". It's still the best educational film on space travel despite being 100% white male and possibly even racist, but that can be a teachable moment too.)

"Tomorrowland" has become "Todayland", but the romanticism of space still infects me. When I got laid off from my job maintaining investment portfolio accounting software, I couldn't help but think of SpaceX.

The space program has always been controversial. From the beginning, serious people questioned whether it's what we ought to be doing with our time and money and focus, and, in general, whether technology is a good thing at all. The Amish may be the happiest people on the planet, but in my heart of hearts, I don't want to be Amish. I want to soar. And it's relative. Most of what we do for a living is not more worthy than space exploration. That's certainly been true in my case.

Is space exploration ethical? Technology can help connect us. Something like a third of U.S. marriages now get started on the Internet. It can also be a kind of escapism that distracts us from what's important. In the end, it's like everything else. It's what we make of it. It's not the answer to everything and it's not the apocalypse. It's just part of the work of humanity. Probably we can't not do it and it's better to focus on how we do it.

SpaceX, from all I can tell, does it well. Their flights are amazingly cheap. Cheaper is almost always better for the environment. If you spend less you're causing less damage to the planet, with some exceptions of course. Money saved going into space can go to other important needs.

But there's another, possibly more important reason that I'm attracted to SpaceX. It seems to me that in the 40s, 50s and 60s we discovered how to manage complex systems, then forgot how to do it, and SpaceX seems to have re-discovered it. It's important that we know how to do that. Probably the happiness of our children and their children and their children's children depends on it. I would like to contribute to that with whatever I have left go give.