Typical Day on the Lunar Elevator

First, I want to say “Thank You!” for all the supportive comments I received yesterday. It is so very easy to get caught up in navel-gazing and analysis-paralysis when things aren’t going well. Your enthusiasm is greatly appreciated! Sometimes, the only reason I keep going is because of you. All I can say is this: Hope is contagious. I feed off your excitement when I’m deep in a rut. Seriously, thank you.
No, I’m stuck on the robot, for the time being, so I’m not working on that.

Yes, slowly, I am still sending out rewards, but I can only do that on a very very limited basis.

So what am I working on these days? When I say that I work on this Elevator “every single day”, what does that look like?

Well, there is a never-ending flood of calls, text, email, and messages from every social media platform – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many others. Rarely are these particularly interesting. This week, there was a VC firm from China asking if the tech is “anything other than science fiction”, and the week before it was an 8th grade student writing a paper on the project. So those are pretty fun to respond to. 

I invest the time to react to students; they are a higher priority to me than the venture capitalists. Typically, the VCs are interested in having something clever to say at the next board meetings, whereas the students are sincerely curious about how this technology – space / robotics / communications / energy / lunar settlement / bioscience / materials – might impact their own lives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to chat with the VCs, however, none of them have ever been interested in the actual down to Earth business of this project. Whereas, working with students almost always generates tangible results. The one is very satisfying, the other is less so. 

Beyond correspondence (which is sometimes over 1000 messages/day; 85% is spam; it never takes less than 2 hours to wade through it… and I often skip many messages because it is overwhelming), what else do I do? 

This week, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on two things: PowerPoints for a lecture series I’m giving, and working through aspects of our business plan. But I’m also juggling calls about our planned Technical Advisory Council, a radio show/podcast we are developing and there’s a set of books that will launch in the fall. 

I’ll talk more about these later, but I don’t want to chat about them now… you’ve heard enough about what I’m ‘gonna do’, and not enough about what I’ve done. 

Some days are pretty mundane. This one was. I’ve got an interesting appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know how that goes. 

​Take care, mjl