What is it about this guy that allows him to make such claims and not be laughed out of the room? It's an amazing an useful talent that, oddly, I first witnessed as a young engineer on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope project.
The head of the servicing missions was a boisterous, outrageous, personality (some told me it was what held him from higher positions within NASA). He was the kind of guy who brought in a sales guy for a rapid prototyping machine (a 3D printer starting at $1 million), walked in half way through the presentation, and then promptly kicked the salesman out for not having a $200k offering.
He was also the kind of guy who demanded composite structures yielding 10X the mechanical properties of the current state of the art materials. But with no research projects, development, or anything even close to it. Just "get it done".
Of course, we didn't get it done (because it was impossible), but what we did get done was a major leap forward. We used materials without, gasp, flight heritage. We used the absolute state of the art in some cases. We got it done, it's just that it wasn't what was asked for, at least not directly.
This smells of the same thing. But don't underestimate the shear force of personality it takes to make such outrageous claims, and still have people follow you to something remarkable, yet more realistic.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I think personalities like Musk are behind the above quotation. A dreamer with demands, and the demands are concrete in the respect that they may be technically possible while still being dreams - be they Mars at 500K or yielding 10x the mechanical properties. I think people are drawn to such personalities because it seems to be the most encouraging way you can possibly frame a dream.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
That quote sounds pretty awesome. However, in the real world that's not how most ships are built. There's a lot more "giving orders" than "teaching to yearn". It's not like the shipbuilding industry is famed for the dreamy yearning of its laborers.
I would say that he's got a fair amount of credibility now because he made his own space program. When you've made good on enough implausible claims, the criteria for "implausible" change.
This reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, when the entire community is against the stars for the book building the Rail Road. They don't believe it possible.
I would actually say, don't underestimate perseverance. Might sound like he is an optimist, but I think you have to be with anything to do with spaceflight. At least at this day an age. I would also consider him an expert in the subject, and what are you?
I think it's pretty cool that not only is he the obvious owner of the entire enterprise, but he is the chief technology officer because he is a self taught aeronautical engineer for lack of a better descriptor in this case. One of his degrees is in physics, sure, but one of his real ambitions in this instance is reading everything and talking to every expert he could in this field.
The point of the matter is that this kid did his homework and deserves everything he will earn in this endeavor.
There a couple of things that allow him to make these claims without being "laughed out of the room," as you say, but they don't have to do with his personality in the sense in which I take your meaning.
First, there is the rocket equation. That little gem tells us the amount of fuel it takes to achieve a given change in velocity for a given energy density of fuel. Then there are some results from orbital mechanics and aerodynamics that tell us what that change in velocity is. For the curious, escape velocity is just sqrt(2) times the circular speed at any given altitude.
I've laid this out before, but here it goes again. To put a pound of anything into orbit has a fuel cost of a little over $20. "Incredible!," you say, "It costs $10k/lb on the Space Shuttle! How can that be?!" Like so. Typical mass fractions are on the order of 2%. That is, 2% of the stuff on the pad, fuel, structure, payload, everything, actually ends up in orbit. About 12% of that mass is structure, things like tanks and engines and the like. That leaves 86% of the thing as fuel. 86:2 is 43:1. 43 lbs of fuel for every pound of payload. Assuming that propellant is roughly as dense as water and roughly the price of milk, both easily verified, that's under 6 gallons of propellant for every pound of payload, which will run you $21 at $3.50/gallon.
Multiply sqrt(2) by $21/lb and you have something like $30/lb. If you and your capsule weigh 2,000 lbs, That's $60,000 for a one way ticket. A little over 8 times that price may be a reasonable number. So, what makes up the difference in cost for current launch systems, or even for antiquated and clunky systems like the Shuttle? Low safety margins and their concomitant need for enormous administrative costs for each part, disposable launch systems where that administration cost burns up in the atmosphere or splashes down in the Pacific, and enormous system complexity driven by a lowest-flight-weight-results-in-the-cheapest-vehicle mentality.
We can begin to address, based on SpaceX's design philosophy and planned vehicle, how they may be able to make these claims without deserving to be "laughed out of the room."
First, SpaceX has reduced engineering and integration costs by reusing common components and simplifying designs at every step. they were (and I think, still are) using a pintle injector which is much less susceptible to catastrophic combustion oscillations than the more typical injector-face solution, at a cost of some performance. The tanks for all of their stages are the same diameter, allowing them to engineer and build one capital-intensive jig rather than two or three, and they get more experience with that hardware since all their work is done on it. They're using a pneumatic stage sep mechanism rather than a pyrotechnic one to eliminate material-handling, static, and other safery concerns related to pyrotechnics. Rather than relying on one or a few very large engines to power the first stage, they've chosen to use 9 smaller engines on the first stage and isolate each one in its own cato-proof container, again allowing them to gain more experience with a single system, prove its reliability, and leverage that experience and track record to perform a larger job.
Second, they have plans for full reusability of the launch system based on incremental changes to their existing systems. Yes, there is a fuel and performance penalty for going this route, but the savvy armchair aerospace critic will note that those penalties are expressed in tens of dollars per pound, whereas 100% disposal is measured in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per pound. That is to say, even if reusability results in a 10-fold increase in fuel cost but allows vehicle cost to be amortized to negligibility, we're still approaching Musk's $500k/flight number. As to his actual plan, the fuel cost to land a booster segment is tiny compared to the cost of launching a vehicle. The first stage will simply reenter without having to retro-burn, and the second stage will need to retro-burn just enough to enter the atmosphere to achieve the rest of the braking. After that, the delta-v required is on the order of 100m/s, hardkly the 10km/s needed for orbit. You seem to know what you're doing, so I leave the derivation of that penalty, using the rocket equation, to you.
tl;dr: You're absolutely wrong in the most irrelevant way, and had you addressed SpaceX's achievements and plans in anything like a rigorous way, you could easily have answered your own question.
EDIT: The fuel cost for escape will not be sqrt(2) times the cost for circular speed. The real factor will be something more like 2 or 3, not 1.414... Still, we're in the range of $60/lb, not $6,000/lb.
So I was going to call bullshit on your price for rocket fuel given that regular gasoline is more expensive than this, but I looked up the price [http://www.desc.dla.mil/DCM/DCMPage.asp?PageID=722] and it turns out that's pretty close to the current price for JP-5. The most expensive fuel the DOD uses, JTS, is only $6/gallon.
Amortizing away the development and other fixed cost is cheating a little, no? I mean, we don't even know how to keep someone alive for the trip yet.
Reasonable people can disagree, but I wouldn't bet on Musk being alive to see the first successful round trip to Mars. But I also wouldn't bet against something truly amazing coming out of his activities.
He created a company from scratch that builds rocketships. A company that has launched a pressurized capsule into orbit. If his company was a country there would have been a human in that capsule and it would have made a lot more news than it did, as it was it still stands as an impressive achievement. And achievements give you a lot of credibility.
Impressive, but not sufficient to explain the power of his personality - which is enormous. For example, Orbital, a public company that builds rocketships, was also started from scratch by one man with a vision (and without the resources of Musk, I might add). And yet you've likely never heard of them.
There are lots of experienced, credible people who cannot do what Musk does with his outrageous dreams (and they are outrageous - to Mars and back for the cost of a upper middle class home in the US - think about that). To dismiss his impact as the consequence of success is to miss the true source, I suspect.
The head of the servicing missions was a boisterous, outrageous, personality (some told me it was what held him from higher positions within NASA). He was the kind of guy who brought in a sales guy for a rapid prototyping machine (a 3D printer starting at $1 million), walked in half way through the presentation, and then promptly kicked the salesman out for not having a $200k offering.
He was also the kind of guy who demanded composite structures yielding 10X the mechanical properties of the current state of the art materials. But with no research projects, development, or anything even close to it. Just "get it done".
Of course, we didn't get it done (because it was impossible), but what we did get done was a major leap forward. We used materials without, gasp, flight heritage. We used the absolute state of the art in some cases. We got it done, it's just that it wasn't what was asked for, at least not directly.
This smells of the same thing. But don't underestimate the shear force of personality it takes to make such outrageous claims, and still have people follow you to something remarkable, yet more realistic.