Elon Musk, the 21st Century Industrialist - Businessweek:
Steve Jurvetson, a SpaceX board member and early investor in everything from Tesla to HotMail to Synthetic Genomics, says Musk has unusual intuition about what will work in space. Jurvetson builds and fires rockets as a hobby and has an office full of space memorabilia—much of which he bought directly from former astronauts. “You can’t finesse your way around this stuff,” he says. “There’s not a lot of room for artistry because the physics will bite you in the ass.” Musk has come up with modular designs for mixing and matching engine configurations depending on the payload, says Jurvetson. He thinks Musk has built the safest, most cost-effective spacecraft yet, which is why SpaceX has ended up as America’s only real answer to date for sending goods and people to and from the space station and perhaps beyond. “We’re not Moon people,” says Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, “but we’re definitely Mars people.”