Does sending a manned expedition into space even make any sense? The benefits of such a mission are always kept vague and the improbability of success is elided.
Then why does NASA talk so intently about such a mission?
Perhaps ... Elon Musk.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is putting competitors out of business, so NASA needs to present itself as relevant. The Russian space program seems in decline, obsolete and doomed because SpaceX is driving down the cost of rocket launches. NASA might fear that NASA will come to be perceived as irrelevant in the eyes of the American public, so it revives the idea of space exploration.
In the mid-1960s, NASA's budget made up to 4.5% of the federal budget. Up to 90% of NASA's research budget at the time supposedly went to developing rocket technology, which was used for nuclear missiles. So the mission to the moon was largely a disguised adjunct to the Cold War. But there is no evidence that a manned mission to Mars would promote American technology, whether or not it is for the military-industrial complex or not. And there does not seem to be great interest among the general population for such a mission.
SpaceX might be an example of "disruptive innovation", in which a cheaper, inferior technology finds a niche, improves, and then dominates the market. The space shuttle was designed as a reusable vehicle, but it was ultra-sophisticated, expensive and perhaps fragile. SpaceX uses old-fashioned rocket technology, but recycles the first stage of the rockets. Thus, NASA's grand concept of reusable space vehicles was reborn utilizing an older, simpler technology.
Are Musk's other companies engaged in disruptive innovation?
Tesla makes luxury electric sports cars, which is the opposite of disruptive innovation ("sustaining innovation"). This has made (some) Electric Vehicles cool and hip, but this is a niche product. In terms of EVs, electric buses might better represent disruptive innovation. In terms of the classic model of disruptive innovation, Tesla is a high-end product that can never own the future of EVs. That honor will probably go to the likes of Ford and Chevy when they manufacture boring, inexpensive EVs.
SolarCity does not seem to exist anymore. Again, Musk created a high-end, highly visible product that made an otherwise dull product, rooftop solar, hip and cool. But in the world of selling and installing solar panels, economies of scale do not apply, so large scale corporations with big budgets are at a disadvantage in relation to local businesses that operate on a shoe-string budget (e.g., relying on word of mouth for advertising). Anyone with a truck and a ladder can do this nowadays. So while SolarCity helped to grow an industry, it is small business that represents the future of rooftop solar PV. That's disruptive innovation.
Hyperloop is a transportation system concept in which pods traveling though vacuum tubes would be powered by both maglev and compressed air. Musk claims that this will be the cheapest form of transport. That's an odd claim because the system would not only be extremely sophisticated, but it would be built from scratch, theoretically and physically. Notably, how many people want to be strapped to a chair in a small pod, traveling within a tube at 1,200 kilometers an hour? This might be something that some people might want to do just once in their lives, like bungee jumping. Yet conceivably, Hyperloop might still constitute a form of disruptive innovation in terms of transporting packages for FedEx or Amazon. One can conceive of packages being transported from provincial warehouses to major cities without touching human hands, or even needing a truck driver. This just might drive down the costs of shipping. (Also, the system would be less vulnerable to being targeted for a terrorist attack if it were used for transporting goods and not people. That would mean reduced security costs and concerns.) If used for transporting things, Hyperloop might represent a form of disruptive innovation if it is cheaper and simpler than, say, FedEx.
The Boring Company is a tunnel construction company that would presumably build tunnels for the Hyperloop. It is currently building a tunneling machine that is planned to be ten times faster than conventional tunneling machines. That kind of sophistication does not sound like disruptive innovation. Also, in any kind of construction, the greatest costs are incurred in moving earth or water. However, if the tunnels were used to build underground communities, then this just might represent disruptive innovation, because an underground urban infrastructure would not be subject to the elements, and therefore it would last longer, need fewer repairs, and consume much less energy. Of course, most people don't want to live underground, but disruptive innovation implies a cheaper, inferior technology gaining a foothold, improving and dominating the mainstream.
And that seems to be what Elon Musk is really up to.
Elon Musk's real agenda is to colonize Mars. All his other efforts serve that goal.
His brother Kimbal Musk is a pioneer of urban gardening (indoor, hydroponic) and might share Elon Musk's space-colonization agenda.
This brings us back to the initial assertion above: a mission to Mars does not really make sense.
How could the concept of disruptive innovation be applied to revising space exploration?
1. The scope of exploration would be greatly limited (and cheaper). Exploration and colonization would be limited to the moon and asteroids (although this would include the asteroid belt slightly beyond Mars, especially Ceres).
2. These expeditions would have to pay for themselves, perhaps though asteroid mining operations (at least, that is the conventional concept of how to make a profit in space).
3. This exploration and the mining would be conducted not by humans, but by robots.
The infrastructure that human will live in would have been been built by robots long before the arrival of humans. These robots would not be the advanced humanoid robots of Hollywood, but cheaper, simpler robots.
So that would be the next venture for Elon Musk if he models himself after Niander Wallace of "Blade Runner 2049". But the robots would be less like advanced humanoids and more like Disney's WALL-E.
Musk's model is to apply the tech startup model to established fields. He seems to be doing this at the school that he founded, Ad Astra, where instruction is based around projects requiring problem-solving.
This, and all of Musk's other ventures, reflect the Silicon Valley conception of disruption, in which the current way of doing something is challenged in the most radical possible fashion.
Unfortunately, this way of doing business is often completely uninformed. For example, Musk had tried to automate production at Tesla, with disappointing results; Detroit had tried to do the same thing decades earlier with the same disheartening consequences. Silicon Valley does not do its homework in terms of historical learning.
This is also evident in Mark Zuckerberg, the brilliant Harvard dropout. From the beginning of Facebook's founding, Zuckerberg would stress that the point of Facebook is not to make money but to change the world, because social media represents democracy. After Facebook got in trouble because it served as a tool for Russian interference in the 2016 election, Barack Obama gave Zuckerberg a long lecture. Reportedly, Zuckerberg was simply confused by Obama. This is perhaps because Zuckerberg, as a college dropout with little background in the humanities, might not understand that historically democracy has not been an unalloyed good. Zuckerberg is not historically conscious, and his overall worldview is too innocent.
Another example of how Silicon Valley might be disconnected from basic knowledge is its seeming disregard of the idea of "disruptive innovation" as it was conceived by Clayton Christensen. In the case of Elon Musk's projects, only SpaceX (so far) seems to fit the model of disruptive innovation -- although Musk's other initiatives might later conform to the classic model (as discussed above). For example, Musk's school Ad Astra ("to the stars", in Latin) limits enrollment to his own kids and to kids who are gifted and talented. This is not disruptive innovation in terms of an inferior product finding a niche, improving over time and dominating (the mid-range of) the market. But if this model were re-purposed for ordinary kids, then it begins to look a lot like ... old-fashion vocational training oriented around work projects (wood shop, auto shop). The problem is that historically vocational programs were expensive compared to sitting in a classroom, and school districts cut them back under the rationale that students can get this at a community college later on, and that they can and should focus on academic subjects first. But this rationale, with its stress on academic learning over vocational training, was simply a post-facto justification of budget cuts. If practical projects can be done inexpensively, then Musk's model of project-oriented learning would become a form of disruptive innovation for ordinary students, and this could conceivably transform education.
Perhaps the idea of disruptive innovation needs to be refined. It could be that disruptive innovation only happens at the mid-range of the market. Even when Silicon Valley is attuned to Clayton Christensen's proper meaning of disruptive innovation, it nevertheless misunderstands that the top range does not always get disrupted. For example, the smartphone represents advancement in telephony, but is an inferior, cheaper computer; the smartphone thus represents sustaining innovation in one sector and disruptive innovation in another. But the smartphone challenges neither the upper range of the market in telephony nor in computers, which is the domain of satellite phones and supercomputers.
The venture capitalist Peter Thiel's notion of disruption in education is that college is obsolete. That sounds like a radical downsizing of educational expenses, and thus might exemplify Christensen's concept of "disruptive innovation". But it turns out that Thiel's advice only applies to students like Mark Zuckerberg, the very cream of the cream -- and only in the tech sector. Meaning: Thiel's intriguing proposal would only apply to future tech billionaires, the very high-end niche of the education market. That is a bit like a Tesla roadster or a supercomputer.
The world is enthralled with Silicon Valley, but perhaps a touch of realism might give us a better perspective. BBC News did a profile of an American businessman who said that he spent the first ten years of his worklife making products for which there is no real market, that nobody would ever want what he was making. He then said that half the startups in Silicon Valley are likewise making products that nobody will ever want to buy. It is a sobering thought.
It's also a shocking thought that if something like the Boring Company were to conform to the idea of disruptive innovation and create low-cost underground cities, then the colonization and terraforming of Mars would become an afterthought to the development of cities in the deserts of the southwestern United States. Musk's bold ideas would be even more transformative than he envisions.
