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Elon Musk's giant Starship spacecraft went out of control, tumbled, and broke apart several minutes into a test flight Tuesday night. It was the latest in a series of unsuccessful-but-still-instructive tests of Musk's hugely ambitious rocket program, which is designed to go to Mars. And it is also, at least for now, the heart of the American space program. "Starship is the world's largest and most powerful rocket," the Washington Post reported, "and its test flights are crucial to the future of America's space ambitions."
That, and not a troubled venture into government, is what makes Musk so important. Musk is crucial to America's space ambitions because, for a long time, after one of the greatest achievements in human history, the Apollo exploration of the moon, America seemed not to have any space ambitions at all. Musk changed that.
In a recent interview with the science and technology website Ars Technica, Musk discussed why he believes it is so important to go to Mars. The short version is: If you can get there, good things can happen. "There were very few people in California until the Union Pacific was completed, and then California became the most populous state in the nation," Musk said. "So that's our goal. We want to get people there, and if we can get people there, then there's a literal world of opportunity."
Ars Technica pointed out that NASA, the traditional U.S. space agency, is focused on the moon. "I think its ambitions are too low," Musk said. Then, Ars Technica asked, "Does it matter to you if China gets back to the moon before the United States? Do you care about that?"
"I think the United States should be aiming for Mars," Musk repeated, "because we've already actually been to the moon several times. Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I'm like, OK, sure, but that's something that America did 56 years ago. If you look at the Apollo program, when JFK gave that famous speech, it was about setting a target that's far in excess of what had been done. It wasn't like, let's do what the Russians already did."
The idea, in other words, is to do something that has never before been accomplished. "We should be going 1,000 times farther, and going to Mars is 1,000 times farther than the moon," Musk concluded. "And if we are gonna go to the moon, I think we should do a moon base, or something that's the next level beyond Apollo."
Many people look back in bafflement at the U.S. decision decades ago to downplay, and then abandon, space exploration after the peak moment of Apollo, which first landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. To this day, just 12 people in history have walked on the moon. All are American men. But it was so long ago that just four are still alive — the youngest is 82 years old.
Musk is reviving a spirit of exploration. And he is actually doing things on a big scale. Of course, Starship is just part of what Musk does in space. His Starlink system, made up of thousands of small satellites orbiting the planet, will mean global internet coverage. And of course, when poor performance from NASA and Boeing left two American astronauts stuck in space for months, it was Musk who had the technology to go get them.
Yes, yes, Musk makes cars, too. That is his main source of wealth. But for all Tesla's success, Musk is a hugely important figure for what he is doing in space, not on the roads.
Of course, the one endeavor for which Musk has received the most public attention is the one for which he proved entirely unsuited. The Department of Government Efficiency effort is not over, but Musk's role in it has been greatly diminished. He paid a high price for his work to reduce government spending, finding himself under constant attack from all of President Donald Trump's enemies, which is a pretty large and vocal group. Tesla was attacked. Everything Musk owned was attacked. However cutthroat Musk has found the business world over the years, politics is more so.
Now, he's moving on. "I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics," Musk told Ars Technica. "It's less than people would think, because the media is going to overrepresent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media. It's not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I've reduced that significantly in recent weeks."
That's not a surprise, given Musk's experience. But if it means Musk will spend more time on space, that's good for everyone. Americans owe him a debt of gratitude for almost single-handedly restoring a sense of ambition and purpose to a great field of U.S. achievement.