The SpaceX (and Tesla) masterplan (Part 1)

SpaceX will be the ISP for the globe and Tesla will be their first customer.

(This is a followup post to (now) four earlier posts on forecasting.

• The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon);
• The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months
• The third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs.
• The fourth was yesterday on SpaceX telecoms plans. This is the expanded version.
• I try to get it mostly right but I mainly love the idle speculation).

In the mode of Elon, I propose to outline what I think SpaceX will do over the next decade, how that intersects with Tesla’s strategy of building a sustainable energy future (combined with sustainable transport) and ultimately how that fits in with making humanity a multi-planetary species.

There are a number of moving pieces to this strategy and I can’t cover them all in one blog post, but I will try to distill it down to three distinct parts.

1. Create a space company to reduce the cost of orbital delivery
2. Deploy an orbital ISP and get billions of customers (The X in SpaceX?)
3. Use meta-material…