Elon Musk seems a strange kinda guy, who generates love and hate in equal measure. For myself, it’s a bit of both, depending on what part of Musk’s empire we’re talking about.
I despise the fact that most of his money has come courtesy of the taxpayer. Tesla is his big money-spinner, but it’s a company that would have failed long ago if governments hadn’t endlessly pumped billions of taxpayer’s dollars into it.
On the other hand, SpaceX is revolutionising space travel. Thanks to Musk’s company, the cost of getting a payload into space has, in just a few years, been slashed for the first time in decades, demolishing the inertia of government-operated space travel. And the cost just keeps falling.
But Musk is also prone to announcing projects that are almost certainly fantasies, such as his claim to send a manned mission to Mars within the next four years.
His newest announcement sounds similarly far-fetched, but, who knows?
Billionaire Elon Musk is pushing ahead with an attempt to utilise emissions contributing to climate change, tweeting that his rocket company will launch a program to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to power spacecraft.
The chairman and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies, Musk announced the project on December 13, shortly after being named Person of the Year by Time magazine.
“SpaceX is starting a program to take CO2 out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel,” he tweeted. Using carbon dioxide to power space travel “will also be important for Mars,” he added in a subsequent missive.
Sounds impressive, but how, exactly, are they going to do it?
The new initiative to make rocket fuel would rely on a type of technology, direct air capture (DAC), still in its early stages of development. The world’s largest DAC plant, a facility in Iceland, began operation in September and will take 4,000 tonnes annually from the air, about double the world’s previous DAC capacity.
DAC works by chemically removing CO? from the ambient air: that is, the air all around us, rather than at “point sources”, such as at a coal or cement plant. Some DAC methods used fans to pump the air into the solvent, but new technology, the MechanicalTree (an idea promoted by physicist Freeman Dyson), simply stands in the wind and passively collects CO2.
The MechanicalTree greatly reduces the energy requirement of DAC, but energy is still required to strip the CO2 from the chemical solvent. Some proponents have suggested that small, modular nuclear reactors could be used to power DAC plants.
There are several commercial DAC plants already in operation in Europe.
Musk has used his Twitter account before for statements that appear on first glance to be impulsive or trolling. He announced via a tweet last week that he was considering giving up his jobs and “becoming an influencer full-time.”
Last month, he taunted Senator Bernie Sanders, 80, after the Vermont independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats reiterated his call for the wealthy to pay more in taxes.
“I keep forgetting that you’re alive,” the billionaire tweeted at the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Sydney Morning Herald
There is little doubt that Musk is a bit of a Mad Bugger, but, then, sometimes the world needs Mad Buggers to shake things up. Tesla himself was a Mad Bugger, and so was Howard Hughes. If Mad Elon can convert atmospheric CO2 to rocket fuel, well, good on him.
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