Elon Musk, SpaceX and Martian Blood
Image by Duncan.Hull - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86942193
If I was to describe an entrepreneur, driven engineer and technologist, interested in AIs and building a company to send people to Mars, who would you think of? I’m guessing Elon Musk (above), head of SpaceX and Telsa.
In Martian Blood there is also an entrepreneur, driven engineer and technologist, interested in AIs and building a company to send people to Mars, but his name is Artur Kasparov, head of the Transworld Aerospace Corp. So is Elon the template for Artur?
In a word no, for the first draft of Martian Blood was finished well before Elon had launched a single satellite into orbit, but it must be admitted there are similarities and coincidences.
One of these coincidences is the surname of Tom, the boy in Martian Blood who was born on Mars, which is Telsa. However Tom was given his name many years before I knew of a connection between the space enthusiast and the electric car company. But like Elon, I was fascinated by the engineer and inventor, Nikola Tesla and wanted to connect to his big-science and tech image.
However there are some real people out there who inspired Artur Kasparov. The surname is a clue to one, the chess player, plotting and planning ahead. Others are not so well known.
One of my sources of characters and names are the international meetings I go to - or at least, used to, before Covid-19. Located in Geneva is the International Telecommunication Union, one of the places where regulations are created to manage satellite systems such as SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation.
And at these meeting there are people from all round the world, government officials, space agencies, satellite companies, consultants, engineers, lawyers and lobbyists. There are some that could be best be described as “operators” and Artur is an amalgam of at least two.
One of the tasks at these meetings is to rewrite an international treaty called the Radio Regulations. This occurs at World Radiocommunication Conferences (WRCs), which are held about every 4 years and involves between 3000 - 4000 people working non-stop for 4 weeks. They are very hard work but also very exciting, as how often do you get a chance to re-write an international treaty in ways that could make or break satellite networks like Starlink (or indeed OneWeb?)?
Mostly they are held in Geneva, but not always and the previous one was in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt. Before that the last WRC outside Geneva was in Istanbul in the year 2000:
A photo I took on a film camera during WRC-2000 of one of the ferries crossing the Bosporus
Now Istanbul isn’t that far from where Justinian will be built and a World Radiocommunication Conference is not that dissimilar to a Global Council meeting.
So while Artur, Tom, Sophia and co do have their roots in the “real world”, Elon Musk isn’t one of them.
However he is opening a path to space and Mars in ways that I’m sure Artur Kasparov would approve!
