What’s your life mission? Here’s how to achieve your life mission the Elon Musk way…

Today Elon Musk tweeted a photo of the first 60 Starlink satellites he’s shooting into space this week, packed into a Falcon 9 rocket. These will be the first of 12,000 satellites that make up the Starlink Megaconstellation - Elon’s vision of global internet access via space.

It’s also Step 5 in his life mission: Setting up a colony on Mars:

STEP ONE - BEGIN WITH THE DREAM

In 1984, when Elon was 12 years old, he wrote his first computer game, Blastar. As he explained it at the time: “In this game you have to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines.” He sold the game to a PC magazine for $500, and began working for Rocket Science Games as a coder. Long before he had started any of his own companies, he was already dreaming of space and travelling to Mars.

STEP TWO - CHOOSE YOUR MISSION

In 2001, while in the process of Paypal’s IPO, 30-year-old Elon decided to pursue his idea of going to Mars seriously. He announced his project “Mars Oasis”. Knowing nothing about space travel, he connected with Robert Zubrin, the founder of the Mars Society, who put him in touch with Jim Cantrell, an expert in Russian rockets.

Jim remembers Elon’s first call: “I had the top down on my car, so all I could make out was that some guy named Ian Musk was saying that he was an Internet billionaire and needed to talk to me. I’m pretty sure he used that phrase, ‘Internet billionaire.” Elon ended up convincing Jim to join him, and SpaceX launched the next year.

STEP THREE - FIND OUT WHAT NOT TO DO

How to get to Mars? The SpaceX team began by trying to buy Russian rockets.

Elon, Jim and Elon's friend Adeo Ressi began by flying to Russia to try and buy their rockets. As Adeo recalls: “We started having meetings with the Russian space program, which is basically fuelled by vodka. We’d all go in this little room and every single person would have their own bottle in front of them. They’d toast every two minutes, which means twenty or thirty toasts an hour. ‘To space!’ ‘To America!’ ‘To America in space!’ I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out myself.”

After failing to strike a deal with the Russians, but learning everything they needed to know about how they were building their rockets, it was on the flight back to the US that Elon worked out the price of all the rocket parts on a spreadsheet and then said to the other two “I think we can build a rocket ourselves.”

STEP FOUR - CREATE CASH FLOW

How could Elon create enough cash to build and test rockets? He began by using his own money to build SpaceX’s rocket ships, which then ran out in 2008. He says “I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch - that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or that would have been it for SpaceX.”

The lack of cash got Elon thinking of how to make each SpaceX launch cash positive. Over the next 10 years he captured 45% of the space launch market, launching satellites for others, as well as shipping space cargo for NASA and the ISS. SpaceX has now had over 100 launches that have generated over $12 billion, and the company is profitable.

STEP FIVE - CREATE A CASH MACHINE

When asked what’s the biggest thing needed to set up a Mars colony, Elon says “What’s needed to create a city on Mars? Well one thing’s for sure: a lot of money. So we need things that will generate a lot of money.” So Elon’s Plan is moving from cash-generating launches to cash-generating satellites with his own satellites - where the ongoing cash flow is higher.

Raising $500 million in December for Starlink at a $30 billion valuation of SpaceX, Elon said of Starlink, “This is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. We want to revolutionize the satellite side of things just as we’ve done with the rocket side of things.”

“The focus is going to be on creating a global communication system. In the long term, it will be like rebuilding the Internet, in space.”

After Step Five, Step Six is the first manned trip to Mars, and Step Seven is setting up the Mars Colony. Elon puts those time frames at 2024 for Step Six and 2030 for Step Seven.

That means it will be almost 50 years since a 12 year old boy created a space game to achieving his life mission.

Do you have a big enough life mission to endure 50 years of patience and perseverance?

Bill Gates says “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Imagine what you could achieve in 50 years…

What’s comes after Elon achieves his life mission?

As he said at SXSW “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”