Your heads-up set me off finding out about this guy, partly because I live in SA) and also because he echoes fictional entrepreneur J K Lee in the novel Voyage by Stephen Baxter.
Lee's goal was in fact a manned expedition to Mars, and he essentially came in with the lowest tender, based on a slingshot idea that would help cut fuel costs to the bare bones (his operation was bare-bones in every respect).

Imagine my surprise when I discovered a manned Mars landing appears to be Musk's big thing too and he has already proposed developing a cheap lander ($20m of his own money). (www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Spacefaring/1-9%20Elon%20Musk.htm).

I wonder if the low-earth orbit SpaceX rocket is not perhaps either a spinoff from the work he's been doing on a cost-effective Mars expedition (pretty typical of his entrepreneurial approach, which is the antithesis of the corporate bureacratic structure), or at least a step along the way. I also wonder if he hasn't perhaps read Baxter's movel ...
He is South African by birth, but apparently left at the age of 17.

Thanks for a fascinating diversion.

I wonder why this wasn't thought up by an EU engineer in Brussels?

Kevin

South Africa seems to be turning out quite a few exceptional people in the aerospace entrepreneurial segment. There's also Shuttleworth who also made money in IT and besides going to the ISS also is looking at commercial ventures; and a bit closer to earth is of course Thunder City, the Premier place on earth for fast jet lovers.

Indeed, my first thought was, take that, Mark Shuttleworth ... who has become quite a bore on the subject of his great adventure round here.

As for Thunder City, I assume you must have visited it. I cannot be tempted into one of those monsters. I can't afford it either.

No, never been there. I just drool over the photos in Aeroplane and Flypast and wish I had the wherewithall to get an hour in one of those supersonic mothers.