What kind of man should you trust to take you into space?
According to Tom Yager, a former physics professor with over three decades in the technology industry, the best man for the job may be Elon Musk. Standing before a packed room of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute students at Yavapai College Verde Valley Campus Thursday, April 14, Yager made a compelling argument for including Musk among the century’s most influential people.
“He’s not really an inventor,” Yager said of Musk. “He’s a guy who can take concepts and make them real.”
Perhaps most famously known as the product architect of the Tesla Motors electric automobile, the expatriated South African Musk is also the founder and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, as it is popularly known. The aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company is hard at work creating methods to lift cargo and people into space.
As Yager pointed out, Musk’s career as an innovator — either as a co-founder of PayPal, an electric car designer or the head of the world’s most visible private space exploration effort — has not been without its setbacks. Prior to the first successful return and vertical landing of the first stage of an orbital rocket in December, Musk and company failed three times, losing costly orbital rockets in flight.
By his own admittance, a fourth failure would have spelled the end of SpaceX: Despite having invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX, the resources were drying up too quickly to continue going.
“I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or incapacitated,” Musk stated in a 2016 episode of 60 Minutes before outlining his next goal: Providing a ticket to Mars for $500,000.
“You get a return ticket with that, too,” Musk added with a smile.
Yager credits much of Musk’s success to the man’s intense work ethic — an insistence on pushing himself and his employees to the point of nearly breaking. Tales abound of the way Musk manages his employees, wringing the maximum potential out of each individual. Musk tends to throw every resource available at a problem, risking failure for a better result.
“That’s what he expects of all his employees: Total commitment,” Yager said, adding that the perception of Musk as intense and even foolhardy reflects a type of innovative thinker. “It takes guys who are creative and willing to risk everything they own …. The people who work for him probably didn’t believe they could do what had them set out to do.”
Yager appeared as part of Yavapai College’s OLLI Brown Bag Brain Buzz lecture series. Visit the “OLLI Sedona/Verde Valley” page on Facebook for more information.
