mainefarmsforthefuture.com

As millions of students labor over college applications this month, they and their parents are pondering just how big a tuition bill they want to pay.

Students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college degree; the proportion who are willing to borrow money for college if necessary has fallen to 53% from 67% in the past year, based on a survey of 800 college students by Sallie Mae, Reston, Va.

Parents are thinking harder, too, about why they sign big tuition checks, based on a steady stream of email I have received since writing about the college cost-to-value equation a few months ago. Here is a look at a few perspectives on the issue:

• A path to a better-paying job: College graduates in general earn at least 60% more than high-school grads on average, both annually and over their lifetimes, and the income gap has been growing over time, says a 2007 report by the College Board, New York.

Beyond that, students who major in science- or math-related fields tend to earn more right out of college, compared with other majors, research shows. Phillip Hamilton, a St. Louis stockbroker, values the earning potential of a degree from a top professional school for his son, a high-school junior, over any prestige or network a degree from an elite liberal arts college might confer. “Is a degree in sociology, English or communications from a ‘door-opening’ school really going to help with that landscaping job that awaits you?” he asks rhetorically. He hopes his son, 17, chooses a college based on the quality of its engineering, food science or accounting program, and majors in one of those subjects. “Then if you decide to work at a surf shop after graduation, you can still snap out of it at 27 and get a real job,” he says.

Christian Hansen for The Wall Street Journal

Tailwaiters provides snacks and a grill for pre-game partiers.

For parents who want to refine the cost-to-income analysis, a new tool is available that predicts how much money a student is likely to make after graduating. The online calculator, HumanCapitalScore.com, will generate a 10-year range of students’ likely postgraduation income based on their test scores, high school and college attended, grades and major.

Developed by People Capital, New York, a peer-lending concern, as a tool to predict students’ creditworthiness, the calculator can also be used to compare the likely outcome of various possible choices of colleges and majors. It makes projections based on data sets from more than a half-dozen government and private-sector sources, encompassing hundreds of thousands of actual grads. Prices start at $19.95 to compare two scenarios.

I tested the calculator by entering information on six actual college graduates who voluntarily shared their data, and comparing the HumanCapitalScore.com projections to the grads’ actual earnings. The grads’ pay fell within the range projected by the calculator in five of six cases. The exception was a young entrepreneur who chalked up a mediocre record at a little-known college but blossomed later, when working for himself. The projections are based on what “an individual with certain attributes can reasonably expect to earn,” says Alan Samuels, People Capital’s chief product officer. “Clearly, some will do better than expected, while others will do worse;” the projections are likely to be accurate about 80% of the time, he says.

HumanCapitalScore.com’s projections can also help a student figure out how much money to borrow for college. Many experts say total student loans shouldn’t exceed a grad’s first-year income after graduation.

More information on postgraduation pay can be found at Payscale.com/best-colleges, which offers general information on median salaries of actual grads by college, type of college, major and job.

• Preparing for a rich, well-rounded life: To Megan DeLamar Schroeder, Texarkana, Texas, planning the college experience based entirely on future income demeans its true value. “The intangible benefits … cannot be reduced to some kind of short-term cost benefit-analysis, as though one is purchasing a piece of property or an expensive sports car,” she says.

She borrowed $40,000 to earn an economics degree from Stanford University in the 1980s, which landed her only an entry-level job at a bank upon graduation. She spent 10 years paying off her student loans. But the experience was worth every penny, she says. The opportunity “to ‘marinate’ for four years in an amazing environment” served as a “springboard to lifelong learning and inquisitiveness,” she says. She will encourage her 10-year-old twin daughters to hew to similar values when they start their college search, she says.

Research supports Ms. Schroeder’s viewpoint. College grads generally show higher rates of civic participation, engaging in volunteer work and donating blood at more than twice the rate of high-school graduates, says the College Board study. They are less likely to smoke and more likely to exercise daily. College grads also have a much higher likelihood of being happy, says a 2005 survey of 3,014 adults by the Pew Research Center; 42% of college grads reported being very happy, compared with 30% of those who only finished high school or less.

• Finding work you love: James Landon, Apache Junction, Ariz., says this is a good reason to attend college, and he sees big public universities as the best and most cost-effective place to conduct such a search. Four of his five children attended big public universities. Two of them had no idea as freshmen what they wanted to do, Mr. Landon says, and the universities’ broad offerings of programs, majors and facilities helped them figure it out. One wound up in finance and is a successful real-estate broker; the other majored in psychology and political science and is now pursuing a foreign-service career in graduate school.

College degrees can guide students’ career choices in subtler ways. Jason Wotman, 24, loves his work as a co-founder of Tailwaiters, a Great Neck, N.Y., startup that runs tailgate parties for clients at sporting events and concerts. “It’s mine, it’s my baby. Every step, every ounce of progress, feels good,” he says.

His degree in human and organizational development from Vanderbilt University helped launch him as an entrepreneur, he says. His courses in marketing, human-resource management and leadership equipped him well to size up opportunities and run a startup. “Taking it from an idea to an actual business, I felt like I had the tools,” he says.

• Gaining an influential network: Many graduates of elite colleges swear by the value of their network of campus buddies in opening doors after graduation, and say striving to gain admission to such schools is worth the effort. However, a long-term study of 6,335 college grads published in 1999 by the National Bureau of Economic Research found graduating from a college where entering students have higher SAT scores—a sign of exclusivity—didn’t pay off in higher post-graduation income.

What matters more, it seems, is graduates’ personal drive. In a surprising twist, a stronger predictor of income is the caliber of the schools that reject you. Researchers found students who applied to several elite schools but didn’t attend them—presumably because many were rejected—are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools. In a summary of the findings, the Bureau says that “evidently, students’ motivation, ambition and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success than average academic ability of their classmates.”

—Email sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

David Plunkett

Clockwise from top left: Spreadsheet Superhero; Graphics Guru; Meeting Maven; Programming Pro, Level iV

What if employers didn’t care whether applicants held a college diploma but instead asked what educational “badges” they had collected? Like Boy Scout merit badges for professionals, these marks of achievement would show competence in specific skills, and they could be granted by any number of institutions.

This is the vision of a growing number of education reformers who feel that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market. The Mozilla Foundation, the group that develops the popular Firefox Web browser, is designing a framework to let anyone with a Web page—colleges, companies, even individuals—issue forgery-proof digital badges that will give potential employers details about an applicant’s training at the click of a mouse. In September, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $2 million grant program, run in coordination with Mozilla, to encourage organizations to try the badge system. More than 300 groups have applied.

Even elite universities are experimenting with the approach. Last month the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced plans to issue badges to students who complete a new set of free online courses, as part of a self-learning project called MITx. (University officials call them certificates instead of badges.) MIT would charge a “modest fee” for the new credentials, but the price will surely be a bargain compared to the school’s annual tuition, which tops $40,000.

Such unorthodox notions are getting a serious hearing as more observers point to problems in American higher education. Tuition is rising far faster than family incomes, employers argue that graduates don’t show up ready for today’s jobs, and academic disciplines seem increasingly insular.

Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, was one of the first to use the word “bubble” to describe the current higher-education market. Last year he became a lightning rod for debate when he announced a scholarship that pays selected students $100,000 not to go to college. He challenged each recipient to start a company instead of sitting in a lecture hall.

Mr. Thiel himself boasts degrees from Stanford University and its law school. But that was 20-odd years ago, the ice age of computer history. Today, the Internet provides universal access to books and lectures and a fluid social network that lets any 19-year-old with an idea find rich investors or flash a resume to potential employers.

Consider an upstart called P2P University. The name stands for peer-to-peer university, and anyone can be a student or an instructor on the website. It was among the first to use badges, offering one for “Webcraft.”

One recipient of the badge, Brylie Oxley, is now trying to revamp his resume to highlight the accomplishment. “I don’t have a lot of formal educational background,” says the 30-year-old resident of Nevada City, Calif. He is working through a computer systems program at local community college and says that his online classes at P2P University compare well to his in-person courses.

“MIT plans to offer badges to students who complete a new set of online courses for a ‘modest fee.’”

Some see more potential for badges in K-12 education than at colleges, as an incentive similar to the frequent “power-ups” and accolades that videogames offer. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a “Great Listener” badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short lectures.

Even supporters of the badge idea concede that it could lead to problems. Dale Doherty, editor of Make Magazine, likes the approach, but he worries that there “will be sites that just dispense badges like candy, and that doesn’t help create any kind of credential or meaning around them.”

Critics fear that job applicants would falsely claim badges, though the technology is being designed to prevent that. And traditional scholars worry that a badge economy would put too much emphasis on job training rather than the search for new ideas.

Employers will ultimately determine whether badges are practical, and much will depend on how easy they are to use. Hiring managers who have trouble sorting through traditional resumes might need even more time to decode a patchwork of online badges.

But the new credentials could transform hiring. “When the first software developer gets a job from Google with a badge from Mozilla,” says Philipp Schmidt, executive director of P2P University, “the flood doors are going to open.”

—Mr. Young is the senior editor for technology coverage at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By ROBIN WRIGHT

David Degner for The Wall Street Journal

Ghada Shahbender participates in a demonstration Thursday called “Kazeboon,” or liars, against Egypt’s military government.

As Egypt’s tumultuous uprising has deteriorated over the last year, Ghada Shahbender, a former soccer mom, has adopted a grim vocation.

“It’s hospital after hospital, morgue after morgue,” the divorced mother of four told me. “I started back in February, about the time that the camel drivers attacked us in Tahrir Square. I was trying to get a body count, but I was chased out. The government didn’t want us to know how many people really died.”

As clashes between protesters and security forces escalated in the fall, Ms. Shahbender and other volunteers learned to reach coroners quickly to prevent them from lying on death certificates under government pressure.

“There’s often an awful battle over writing a report about what really happened—like when a body arrives with a gunshot wound in the forehead and a coroner tries to make it a car accident,” said Ms. Shahbender, a secular voter (and former screenwriter) who sees the country’s Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) as the key remaining obstacle to democracy.

On Jan. 25, Egypt marks the one-year anniversary of epic protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in a mere 18 days. The Arab world’s most populous country has just wrapped up the freest election in its 5,000-year history. By June, a committee from the new parliament is supposed to write a constitution, and then Egypt will elect a president.

Yet across teeming Cairo, there’s a sense now that the revolution has only begun—and that the last body has yet to be counted. Egyptians increasingly frame the next five months as a third phase of their rebellion. The first was the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. The second played out in sporadic clashes from October to December. The third phase will be shaped as elected officials struggle to dismantle Egypt’s military empire. Many here fear it could take years—and prove harder than ousting Mr. Mubarak.

Underneath its autocratic surface, modern Egypt was effectively a military state. Since the Free Officers Movement toppled the monarchy in 1952, all of the country’s presidents have been military men. The SCAF, which holds power now, abandoned Mr. Mubarak partly because it wanted another general, not Mr. Mubarak’s son, to succeed him, Egyptian analysts contend.

The military has long influenced everything from legislation to the media and foreign policy. And, according to reports, it may control up to 30% of the economy, including vast tracts of land.

The generals want four controversial guarantees before ceding power, according to Amr Hamzawy, who won a parliamentary seat as an independent. They seek immunity from prosecution for human rights violations, including hundreds of deaths, since taking over on Feb. 11 last year. They want to preserve their political leverage, including an effective veto over legislation. They want to retain their business interests. And they seek control over the military budget, which under Mr. Mubarak was kept secret even from parliament.

“These are not issues that will be decided once and for all in June,” Mr. Hamzawy said. “Does that mean they will not hand over power? It means they will hand it over constitutionally and on paper. And the new parliament will draft limits and checks and balances that then will take time to enact.”

“The dead actually may be in a better place,’ she said. ‘I can only pray that these generals pay.”

“I don’t know whether we will be successful,” he added.

Meantime, the disparate array of protesters is demanding that SCAF allow elected civilians to rule Egypt for the first time. At Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the yearlong uprising, graffiti that once carried anti-Mubarak slogans now target the generals. “Death to the rule of the military,” declares one.

Tensions between protesters and SCAF have deepened particularly since a four-day crackdown in December killed dozens more activists. Over the past year, according to Human Rights Watch, more than 12,000 civilians have been tried by military courts, some simply for insulting the military.

Rival anniversary commemorations reflect the rising tensions. Protesters have called for massive demonstrations against SCAF on Jan. 25. SCAF responded by calling on Egyptians to turn out to honor the military’s role in ousting Mr. Mubarak. The Islamist parties, on the eve of gaining power after winning almost 70% of the seats in the new parliament, want to avoid new turmoil, but they are also savvy about street sentiment. They have called on the public to turn out to celebrate “martyrs” who died in the uprising.

Whether or not the competing passions of Jan. 25 spark confrontations, Ms. Shahbender and her daughter Nazly Hussein, 28, are preparing to count more bodies. Ms. Hussein takes a video camera along to document death and injuries for the new group Mosireen, Arabic for “the determined,” which posts them on the Web.

“I’ve been to the morgues so many times I lost count,” Ms. Shahbender said. The hardest deaths to document, she said, were the bodies crushed by military vehicles.

Over the past year, Ms. Shahbender, 49, whose latest film was abruptly deferred after the uprising, has become a leading activist—a reflection of the fact that Egypt’s protest leaders are not just young people. She smuggled supplies into Tahrir Square, created networks of activists and became a popular voice on Twitter. During the recent elections, she exposed thousands of discarded ballots in a Cairo district and forced a revote.

“This can’t all have been for nothing,” she told me while navigating Cairo’s chaotic traffic en route to an open-air rally for Kazeboon, a group formed last month to counter the military’s propaganda against the protesters. (Kazeboon means “liars.”) On a frigid night, the demonstration packed Union Square with protesters to honor the “Eyes of Tahrir,” the more than 1,500 activists who lost an eye from beatings or from pellet guns, according to human rights activists and doctors.

Among them was Ahmed Harara, a young dentist who lost an eye on Jan. 28 last year, the day protesters pushed security forces from Lovers’ Bridge and occupied Tahrir Square. He lost his other eye during protests on Nov. 19. Ms. Shahbender is documenting his and other cases for the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights. At the rally, an ophthalmologist showed gruesome slides of bloodied corneas on a screen made from sheets.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiac surgeon who tended to the injured at a makeshift clinic at Tahrir Square during the uprising’s first phase. He has gained fame since March as the Jon Stewart of Egypt after he launched a satirical news show. Mr. Youssef has now started ridiculing SCAF.

“It’s not just how many tanks they own,” he reflected after a recent taping. “How do you build a highway here? You go to the military as it has the resources. So the idea of turning over control—I just don’t see it happening. After Mubarak stepped down, he went on trial. Will the generals go on trial? I don’t think so.” He started the show, he said, to expose “the hypocrisy and lying.”

After a year of unrest, Ms. Shahbender says that she is inured to fear. “I can’t get over the sight of the one-eyed and the blind. The more I look at the paraplegics who were shot in the back, the more I want justice. The dead actually may be in a better place,” she said. “I can only pray that these generals pay the prices of these grievances with their own health.”

—Ms. Wright, a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World.”

Dow Jones Newswires

BEIJING (EFE Dow Jones)–El Producto Interior Bruto de China creció un 8,9% en el cuarto trimestre respecto al mismo periodo del año anterior, por debajo de la expansión del 9,1% registrada en el trimestre anterior, informó el martes la oficina nacional de estadísticas.

El crecimiento fue superior a la subida del 8,6% prevista de media por los 12 economistas consultados por Dow Jones Newswires.

La economía se expandió un 2% respecto al trimestre anterior en términos ajustados a efectos de calendario, según la oficina.

Durante el año 2011 en conjunto, el PIB de China creció un 9,2%, frente al 10,4% registrado en 2010.

By GEORGE MELLOAN

The Federal Reserve policy of holding interest rates low to minimize the cost of federal profligacy is giving managers of pension funds a multi-billion-dollar headache. The return-on-investment targets of 7% to 8% that are structured into pension plans are beyond reach in today’s artificial environment. To redeem their promises to retiring teachers, firemen and the like, managers are risking more money with hedge funds in hope of yields higher than those on safer investments.

But that may not be a good answer. Simon Lack, who managed a hedge fund “seeding” operation for J.P. Morgan from 2001 to 2006, certainly doesn’t think so. In “The Hedge Fund Mirage,” he asserts what he calls—with some justification—an “amazing” finding: “If all the money that’s ever been invested in hedge funds had been put in Treasury bills instead, the results would have been twice as good.” In other words, don’t count on hedge funds to save those pensions.

The author’s facility with numbers no doubt served him well when he was scouting for hedge-fund managers who could make money for themselves and J.P. Morgan. He provides plenty of numbers to back up his central thesis that hedge funds have been highly overrated in public discourse, mainly because a few operators like George Soros have built famously huge fortunes. The reason that operators sometimes get filthy rich, he writes, is that they reserve for themselves the lion’s share of the profits. He asks that sardonic Wall Street question, “Where are the customers’ yachts?”

There is nothing illegal or even immoral about the deal that the hedge-fund operators offer. Hedge funds are open only to professional investors with at least $1 million or so to hazard. So those wanting to ride with a hotshot stock picker know that the fare will be high.

Because this high-stakes game is exempt from SEC reporting requirements, it isn’t easy to find out how well hedge funds have performed. Some operators report their results only when they are seeking investors and naturally only when they have racked up a good score. Mr. Lack endeavors to lift the veil with his own research augmented by the HFR Global Hedge Fund Index, published by Hedge Fund Research in Chicago.

He finds that, despite the Long-Term Capital Management debacle in 1998, the hedge-fund industry has expanded enormously. His numbers show that, in 2010, it had $1,694 billion in assets under management, compared with $143 billion in 1998. It would have a lot more today had it not been for the 2008 crash, the seeds for which were planted by federal housing policies that polluted the market with toxic mortgage-backed securities. “In 2008 the hedge fund industry lost more money than all the profits it had generated during the prior 10 years,” Mr. Lack asserts.

Alfred Winslow Jones is widely credited with founding the first hedge fund, in 1949. The word “hedge” derives from the strategy of betting both directions, up and down, in search of abnormal profits. The operator buys stocks he thinks will rise and “shorts” those he thinks will fall. Shorting has a higher risk. It’s the practice of selling a borrowed stock expecting to buy it back later at a lower price. If the stock rises instead of falling, there’s no limit on how high it might go and how much you might lose. There’s an old Wall Street cautionary rhyme: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to prison.”

Mr. Lack doesn’t say that short selling is the major source of hedge-fund risk. Rather, the risk comes from the difficulty of finding good investments when the money from investors starts rolling in. But he does cite a poignant case of an anonymous San Francisco hedge-fund manager who had gone short on Sanchez Computer when other funds were going long. The stock did finally collapse, but not before the manager had lost everything.

Long-Term Capital Management was the most dramatic example of a hedge fund going belly up. Its Nobel laureates had gone from the old long-short play into more sophisticated ventures, like finely tuned arbitrage—the practice of buying the same security simultaneously in different markets to profit from minute spreads. More momentously, LTCM made the mistake of going long on Russian bonds right before Russia defaulted. Their bad gambles piled up a loss of $4.6 billion. Since most of LTCM’s money came from big Wall Street banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank organized a rescue operation. Yet investors concluded that LTCM’s failure was merely a case of “very smart people with oversized egos” and continued putting money into hedge funds, fueling the industry’s rapid post-1998 growth.

Mr. Lack has a special perspective on the business because he was, in essence, a talent scout for J.P. Morgan, looking for those rare individuals with the Midas touch. He and his Morgan colleagues knew that the safest way to make money was to own a piece of the management company and thus share in the high fees that investors were charged. They also knew that your chances are much better if you are in at the beginning. That’s because hedge funds do better early on, when they are small, than later, when they have to find places to put a lot more money and are more likely to make bad guesses.

This can be a highly personalized game, involving a bet of millions of dollars on the stock-picking ability of an individual. There is always the danger of latching onto a fraudster like Bernie Madoff. To avoid this hazard, Mr. Lack hired an investigator he refers to as “Magnum” to run background checks. Magnum seemed to have an uncanny ability to lay his hands on personnel files.

A healthy streak of paranoia, Mr. Lack notes, can be important when you are picking hedge-fund managers. That sounds like good advice for the pension-fund directors seeking an escape from their current predicaments.

Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is author of “The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism” (2009).

Por EMESE BARTHA,ART PATNAUDE y NICK CAWLEY

LONDRES— Con todas las miradas sobre ellos, los países europeos ofrecieron una serie de subastas positivas el martes, desestimando el efecto de las recientes rebajas de calificación de deuda por parte de Standard & Poor’s Corp.

Un mejor ambiente en el mercado, producido por una lectura mejor a la esperada del Producto Interno Bruto de China y un aumento en el índice ZEW de percepción de los inversionistas alemanes , contribuyó a elevar las subastas.

Las emisiones de deuda española y griega fueron opacadas por la del fondo temporal de rescate europeo, el Fondos Europeo de Estabilidad Financiera, el cual salió al mercado el día después que S&P le quitara su calificación triple A.

El FEEF recibió una sólida demanda en su subasta de bonos a seis meses, mostrando una confianza a corto plazo en el proyecto de rescate, pese a haber perdido una de sus calificaciones. El FEEF aún tiene calificación triple A de las otras dos grandes firmas calificadoras, aunque Fitch Rating también a advertido de una posible rebaja.

El costo de los bonos a seis meses del FEEF también fue un factor positivo. Un rendimiento promedio de 0,2664% estuvo cerca de el de los bonos franceses con el mismo vencimiento.

El FEEF está respaldado por las garantías de los países de la euro zona por un total de 780.000 millones (US$988.000 millones) dándole al fondo una capacidad de préstamo de 440.000 millones de euros. Un comunicado del euro grupo emitido después del anuncio de S&P indicó que la decisión no reducirá esa capacidad, mientras que el presidente ejecutivo del fondo, Klaus Regling dijo que la rebaja probablemente tendrá un impacto limitado en los costos de préstamo de la agencia.

El presidente del Banco Central Europeo, Mario Draghi, le dijo al parlamento europeo el lunes que el fondo de rescate podría tener que prestar menos o recibir contribuciones adicionales de los países garantes que aún tienen calificaciones triple A. De otra forma, podría enfrentar costos más altos, dijo.

Antes de la subasta del FEEF, España vendió 4.880 millones de euros en bonos a 12 y 18 meses, cerca de la parte alta de su objetivo, con rendimientos sustancialmente menores que en su última subasta.

Grecia vendió 1.625 millones de euros, incluyendo una de bonos del tesoro a 13 semanas.

“Un grupo muy positivo de subastas de bonos españoles, principalmente por su significativa caída de rendimientos”, dijo Richard McGuire, estratega de renta fija de Rabobank. Las ofertas por los bonos españoles sumaron más de tres veces la cantidad vendida.

Los corredores también señalaron el efecto positivo del llamado “Intercambio Sarkozy”, en el que los bancos usan dinero obtenido en una reciente operación de financiamiento del Banco Central Europeo para apuntalar los mercados domésticos de deuda a corto plazo.

Aunque las subastas del martes pueden considerarse como un voto de confianza a corto plazo, aún se vislumbra un camino peligroso para Europa, ya que sus gobiernos enfrentan un calendario con muchas subastas. TD Securities señaló en una nota a sus clientes que “no hay preocupaciones de momento, auque las ventas futuras de deuda a largo plazo podrían ser más tenues”.

By CARL HOFFMAN

Photograph by Ralph Gibson

“Humanity will be confined to Earth unless someone invents a reusable rocket.” — Elon Musk

Elon Musk whipped into work this morn-ing in a cherry-red sports car and now he’s lounging in his cubicle in a blue T-shirt and jeans talking about protecting humanity by colonizing Mars and making us a multiplanetary species.

He sounds ridiculous.

The entrance to his office building is sleek white minimalist—”Iron Man” come to life. But walk through the huge glass doors and you enter a place where a boy’s comic-book dreams meet reality. It’s one thing to imagine a spaceship, another to see, a few steps away from Musk’s desk, the Dragon capsule scorched from its fiery descent from space. His company, SpaceX, built the Dragon and it blasted off on its first try in December 2010, orbited the earth and plopped down into the Pacific Ocean, and now here it is.

Around the Dragon, in this cavernous former Boeing 747 factory in Hawthorne, California, 1,500 young engineers and techs are building four more Falcon 9s. Musk has contracts for over 30 more launches worth $3 billion—including $1.6 billion from NASA. If all goes according to plan, in late December his third F9 launch will dock with the International Space Station. This 40-year-old is dreaming the stuff of nations.

And that sports car? It’s a Tesla and he’s the company’s CEO and co-founder. It’s electric, goes from zero to 60 mph in a neck-snapping 3.7 seconds, travels 245 miles on a single charge and there are now 1,850 of them silently cruising the streets. Next summer his new version, an all-electric sedan that seats seven, should hit showrooms. For extra credit, Musk is also the largest investor and chairman of SolarCity, a solar-panel provider.

WSJ Magazine’s “Innovator of the Year Awards” gives this year’s technology prize to entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Elon Musk doesn’t do anything small. In explaining the goals of his companies, he says, “Tesla and SolarCity are about trying to solve the world’s most important terrestrial problem, which is sustainable energy, and SpaceX is solving the problem of the millennium, which is making life multiplanetary.”

A native of South Africa, Musk graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in business and physics and then enrolled in a doctorate program at Stanford in applied materials science. Two days later he dropped out and, with his brother, created a software company called Zip2, which was later sold to Compaq, a $300 million transaction that made him rich. Instead of sunning on a yacht off the south of France for the rest of his life, however, he decided to try to save the world.

When he heard that NASA had no plans to send astronauts to Mars, it boggled his mind. The financial problem seemed straightforward, if not simple: Existing rockets employed old technology, used once. “Imagine,” he says, “if you built a new 747 for every flight.”

Musk launched SpaceX in 2002 and built and designed his own engines from scratch. “I’m head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO, so I don’t have to cave to some money guy,” he says. He launched his rocket with a team of eight in the control room, instead of dozens. The result: He’s offering to send a 10,000-pound payload to geosynchronous orbit for $60 million (compared to an industry standard many tens of millions higher). And if he can figure out how to recover the first stage of his F9, he’ll have done what no one has ever done before—created a fully reusable rocket which costs only $200,000 per flight for propellant. “Humanity will be confined to Earth unless someone invents a reusable rocket,” he says. “That is the pivotal innovation to make life multiplanetary. I’ve been pacing around the house at 3 a.m. trying to figure out how to make the F9 reusable,” he adds, pacing around his cube. “And I think I have.”

Musk isn’t the only rich guy gazing at the stars. There’s also Richard Branson—but his vehicle travels a mere 62 miles high and doesn’t go orbital. There’s Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—but his secretive company’s first small prototype blew up in early September. And there’s a slew of others, including United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin—but they use updated versions of Atlas and Delta rockets, old-tech workhorses that aren’t going to change anything. Of all the new companies trying to develop rockets, Musk alone has lofted a wholly new one into orbit.

As for electric cars, the biggest auto companies in the world remain miles behind Tesla’s performance: The Chevrolet Volt travels all of 35 miles by battery power before a gasoline-fueled generator kicks in. Tesla’s forthcoming sedan, with no internal combustion engine, will get you 160 to 300 miles, depending on the battery pack you buy. Last year Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla, which purchased an old Toyota-GM plant in Fremont, California, to begin manufacturing its next model.

To put it simply, Musk is dreaming bigger and further into the future than anyone else out there, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Just three years ago his first three rockets had failed and Tesla was nearly bankrupt. Instead of retrenching, he fired Tesla’s CEO, took on the role himself and poured his remaining cash—some $75 million in all—into the company. Today SpaceX is profitable, and SolarCity, he says, is “cash positive.” (He says Tesla will be too, once the new model is out.)

Musk’s grandest dream is to make a trip to Mars cost “about as much as a middle-class house in California.” Then, he says excitedly, we can begin terraforming Mars. “It would be the most difficult thing humanity has ever done, but also the most interesting and inspiring. Do you want a future where you’re confined or reaching toward the stars? I can’t wait to go.”

Por NATASHA BRERETON-FUKUI y MARTIN VAUGHAN

SINGAPUR (EFE Dow Jones)–El máximo responsable del fondo europeo de rescate dijo el martes que es más optimista que al cierre de 2011 respecto a que se pueda evitar una ruptura de la euro zona, con una clara mejora de los mercados en las últimas semanas.

En una entrevista, Klaus Regling, consejero delegado del Fondo Europeo de Estabilidad Financiera, dijo que el riesgo de que un país abandone la euro zona es “bajo” y que se tendría que producir un desastre para que ese escenario tuviera lugar.

Los costes de financiación del FEEF subieron ligeramente a primera hora del martes, un día después de que Standard & Poor’s rebajara la calificación de su deuda a largo plazo a AA+ desde AAA, tras haber actuado de forma similar con Francia y Austria.

La calificación crediticia del Mecanismo Europeo de Estabilidad Financiera, que comenzará a funcionar en julio, será menos importante que la de su predecesor, el FEEF, dijo Regling, aunque añadió que tener la máxima calificación crediticia claramente es importante para atraer a un mayor número de inversores.

Añadió que las perspectivas para Italia y España son “mucho mejores” que hace seis meses, con los nuevos gobiernos reformistas. Regling dijo que las perspectivas para ambos países han mejorado, aunque señaló que sigue habiendo riesgos.

El nuevo Gobierno de España fue elegido con una amplia mayoría y con el mandato de llevar a cabo reformas y “lo han comenzado a hacer de manera muy alentadora”.

En cuanto al primer ministro de Italia, Mario Monti, Regling dijo que el político italiano sabe exactamente lo que se necesita hacer.