“An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last sixty years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball— or go extinct.” - Elon Musk As a child, I remember fantasising about becoming the richest person in the world and thinking about what I would do with all that cash. I can only imagine that at the time I would have entertained visions of creating a vast undersea base, with an entire room given over to walnut whips. Jetpacks would probably have featured heavily and I should imagine there would also have been some kind of flying car that could also travel underwater… it would also have been equipped with plenty of missiles. Any vehicle is always improved by the addition of missiles. Over the years real life has eroded some of these ambitions and whilst I have not given up on my dreams, I have been forced to compromise. Don’t get me wrong - I’m delighted with my terraced house and I’m the proud owner of a clapped out Ford Focus Estate that coughs up a cloud of blue smoke when you turn the ignition key. Entrepreneur Elon Musk however represents everything that the six year old me imagined it would be like to be an adult and live in ‘the future’. And what’s nice is that he’s not let boring old real life get in the way. After making shedloads of cash with software firm Zip2 and online payment company PayPal, Elon decided that he might as well start looking at ways of saving the human race… by helping to establish a human colony on Mars. 
Obviously he was initially met with scepticism from potential backers - and it is at that point that lesser mortals would have taken a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and agreed that they were probably going through a mid-life crisis. Not so Elon, nope, he ploughed on with a raft of incredible innovations - inventing a rocket that is able to land itself back on its launchpad, creating the first privately funded vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit and with the SpaceX dragon vehicle the first privately backed vehicle to transport cargo to the International Space Station. Most recently, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy - the fourth most powerful rocket ever built - to launch a Tesla Roadster into orbit as a dummy payload - complete with a dummy driver and Bowie’s Space Oddity playing on the car stereo. Perhaps these can be dismissed as publicitcy stunts - but what can be said of Elon Musk is that he has demonstrated that space exploration is possible in an era when government funding has stalled through lack of interest. He has shown that such projects can be privately funded, commercially viable and safe. He is also responsible for breathing new life into a jaded and risk averse space program; re-lighting the spirit of exploration and colonisation at a time when the risks of human extinction - through natural disaster, human engineered climate change or nucular war - are far greater than ever.
