“Can you believe that thing, or something like it, is going to take people to another planet for the first time in 4.5 billion years? I mean, probably. It may not work. But it probably will.”
Elon
This is the second Biography about Elon I’ve read, the first being Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance. This book tells the early story of SpaceX. I always love to read about the very beginnings of great adventures and companies.
Here are some of my favorite highlights.
The Beginning of SpaceX
The story of SpaceX begins toward the end of the year 2000, on the other side of the United States. Elon Musk was driving on the Long Island Expressway with a friend and fellow entrepreneur named Adeo Ressi, shortly after PayPal’s board of directors had ousted Musk as chief executive. Not yet even thirty years old, Musk had come a long way in a short while. Since arriving in the United States less than a decade earlier, he had earned Ivy League degrees in economics and physics, and founded two wildly successful companies. So what, Ressi wanted to know, did he plan to do next?
“I told Adeo I had always been interested in space, but I didn’t think that was something a private individual could do anything about,” Musk said. Three decades had passed since Apollo’s heyday. Surely, he thought, NASA must be well on its way to Mars. Later that day, Musk, still thinking about the conversation, checked out NASA’s website. To his surprise, he could not find any plans for sending humans to Mars. Perhaps, he thought, the site was just poorly designed.
But no: NASA had no such plans, as Musk soon discovered when he began attending space conferences back in California. Private groups were beginning to do some interesting things, however. He got involved with ventures like the Planetary Society’s first project to develop a solar sail. The member-funded organization was building a reflective sail that would unfurl in space and be propelled by momentum from solar photons. Musk also supported the XPRIZE Foundation, which offered $10 million to the first group to build a private spaceship that could take people on short, suborbital flights. Later in 2001, Musk devised a private space plan of his own to inspire public support for NASA and the exploration of Mars. Musk sought to build a small biosphere and launch it to the red planet. He called it Mars Oasis.
“The idea was to grab some Martian soil, and bring that into the growth chamber,” said Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer for Boeing who helped Musk with concepts for the small Martian lander. “We would mix it with some soil from Earth, drop some seeds in, and have a webcam broadcast the plant growth back to Earth.”
As Thompson and a few other engineers worked on the payload side of the biosphere project, Musk and his advisors twice traveled to Russia to try and buy a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile for the mission. The Russians had no respect for Musk, seeing him as a dilettante, and so they offered him outrageously high prices for their old boosters. And Musk feared that if he agreed to their price, they would only raise it after he wrote the initial check. “The last trip from Russia, I was like, man, the price just keeps going up, it doesn’t feel like this project is going to be successful,” Musk said. “I wondered what it would take to build our own rocket.”
One of his advisors, an engineer and aspiring businessman named Jim Cantrell, urged him to think seriously about doing just that. So Musk began to meet with rocket scientists in the Los Angeles community, a hub for aerospace engineers. Soon, he picked up other advisors for his fledgling effort, including John Garvey, who had worked with Thompson at Boeing, and later a rising star in rocket engines, Tom Mueller. Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them.
In February 2002, Garvey arranged for Musk to visit the launch site for the Reaction Research Society, a famed rocketry club in Southern California. The millionaire had come ill prepared for the brisk winds and chilly temperatures of the Mojave high desert. “I think at the time it was probably eighteen degrees out,” Thompson said. “And he shows up in slacks and Neiman Marcus shoes and a skinny leather jacket.” But Musk asked good questions and listened intently. He had been reading everything he could get his hands on about rockets, from old Soviet technical manuals to John Drury Clark’s iconic book on propellants, Ignition!
As he learned more about rockets, Musk also gained a deeper understanding of the deficiencies of the U.S. launch industry. His vision for Mars Oasis had been to inspire the public, leading to greater funding for NASA, and ultimately extending humanity’s reach to the Moon and Mars by continuing the legacy of Apollo. He saw the problems with NASA and the global launch industry were more systemic than mere funding. Even if Mars Oasis succeeded, and NASA’s budget doubled, he realized it would probably only lead to more flags-and-footprints missions. Musk wanted nothing less than human expansion into the Solar System, and the settlement of its worlds.
“I began to understand why things were so expensive,” he said. “I looked at the horses that NASA had in the stable. And with horses like Boeing and Lockheed, you’re screwed. Those horses are lame. I knew Mars Oasis would not be enough.”
The first step toward solving the multiplanetary problem, then, was bringing down the cost of the launch. If NASA and private companies spent less money getting satellites and people into space, they could do more things in space. And more commerce would open still more opportunities. This awakening galvanized Musk into action.
That spring Musk called a meeting of about fifteen or twenty prominent aerospace engineers at the Renaissance Hotel at the Los Angeles airport. Many had come at the behest of Mike Griffin, a leader in the community who would become NASA’s administrator three years later, and whom Musk had relied upon for advice. Garvey, Mueller, and Thompson also had seats at the table.
“In typical Elon fashion, he kind of showed up a little bit late, which clearly annoyed a lot of the older-guard aerospace executives that were in the room,” Thompson said. “He walks in and basically announces that he wants to start his own rocket company. And I do remember a lot of chuckling, some laughter, people saying things like, ‘Save your money kid, and go sit on the beach.’”
The kid was not amused. If anything, the doubts expressed at this meeting, and by some of his confidants, energized him more. Several friends had already tried to dissuade Musk from this venture. Ressi created an hourlong video compilation of rocket failures and forced Musk to sit down and watch it. Peter Diamandis, an engineer, told Musk of all the other entrepreneurs who had tried, and failed. “He talked my ear off, and said I would lose all my money,” Musk said.
As he looked around the table during the meeting at the Renaissance Hotel, therefore, Musk searched among the doubters to find the few believers. Musk wanted people who embraced a challenge rather than shrank from it, optimists rather than pessimists. In April, Musk offered five people the opportunity to be a member of the company’s “founding team.” He had cleared about $180 million from PayPal, and figured he could risk half of that on a rocket company, and still have plenty left over. Musk brought the cash, and wanted his early employees to invest in sweat equity.
Only two of the five accepted. Offered the title of chief engineer, Griffin said he preferred to stay on the East Coast near Washington, D.C., where he was an important player in national space policy. Musk nixed the idea of a cross-country commute, and this was probably for the best. Though brilliant, Griffin possessed a headstrong personality similar to Musk, and they would have clashed. Musk continued hunting for the right person, but, he said, “Nobody who seemed to be good would join, and there was no point in hiring somebody who wasn’t good.” Elon Musk assumed the role of chief engineer himself.
He also liked Cantrell, thinking the smooth-talking engineer could serve as the chief of business development for SpaceX. But Cantrell did not want to relocate, either. To move from Utah, he asked for a large salary and all sorts of guarantees. “He ultimately decided not to join,” Musk said. “He was only ever a consultant for a brief period of time.”
A third no came from John Garvey, something of a surprise given that the rocket scientist had been an enthusiastic supporter of the venture. Garvey thought Musk’s concept for a rocket that could lift one thousand pounds into space might be too ambitious and preferred a lighter design. He also wanted Musk to buy out his small aerospace company, Garvey Spacecraft Corporation. And, Musk said, Garvey wanted a lofty title—chief financial officer. This baffled Musk, as Garvey had no background in finance.
After three rejections, Musk had just two people left on his list. Mueller had seen rocket entrepreneurs with good plans and no money before, and bad plans and plenty of money. In Musk, he found someone both with ideas he liked and with enough capital to see the venture through the difficult design-and-development phase. Above all else, Mueller relished the challenge of building a new rocket engine all his own. When Musk offered him the chance to do that, along with shares in the company, Mueller talked it over with his wife. He had a stable job at a large aerospace company. But his wife knew he would rue passing on this opportunity. She encouraged him to take the job. Mueller did. As the first to sign, Mueller became employee number one on SpaceX’s payroll.
Thompson, with a young family, shared the same hesitation about leaving a comfortable position in the aerospace industry. During a phone call in late April, Musk sought to allay those concerns. Musk recognized what Thompson and Mueller were walking away from, so he put two years’ worth of salary for both engineers into an escrow account. That way, if Musk decided to prematurely pull the plug on the venture, they would still have a guaranteed income. This helped Thompson convince his wife he should take the job. His only regret? That he mulled it over long enough to get tagged as employee number two.
On May 6, 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies. Originally, he, Mueller, and Thompson referred to the company as S.E.T. After a few months, Musk came up with a catchier nickname—SpaceX.
Initially, the trio continued to meet in airport hotels. Mueller would report on his efforts to design a new rocket engine for the booster, which Musk would soon christen the Falcon 1. The name came from the iconic spaceship in Star Wars, and because the rocket would have a single main engine. As vice president of propulsion, Mueller had to develop this engine, the rocket’s fuel tanks, and the plumbing that carried chilled liquid propellants throughout. Thompson, vice president of “structures,” would design the lightest possible frame made of aluminum alloy, and the mechanisms by which the rocket separated during flight.
The company still needed someone to oversee avionics, the Falcon 1’s onboard computer and software. Had Garvey hired on, this job probably would have fallen to him. In his place, Thompson recommended a German engineer named Hans Koenigsmann, who worked at a small southern California aerospace firm named Microcosm. Musk had previously met Koenigsmann on that cold day in Mojave a few months earlier, and the German engineer immediately bought into Musk’s plan for building a low-cost rocket with a small team.
“Here’s the thing,” Koenigsmann said. “I didn’t want to be an astronaut. That’s not my thing. But what did intrigue me was trying to build a rocket with two hundred people instead of twenty thousand. To almost build this in a garage. Can I use a computer I can buy for $500, versus one I can buy for $5 million? It seemed to me that’s what he wanted to do.”
This was precisely what Musk wanted to do. Because they were spending his money, Musk gave employees an incentive to be frugal with it. Although Musk retained a majority of shares, early hires received large chunks of stock. When an employee saved the company $100,000 by building a part in-house instead of ordering one from a traditional supplier, everyone benefited.
With his core team in place, Musk moved his company into a large, white building at 1310 East Grand Avenue in El Segundo. The thirty-thousand-square-foot facility seemed cavernous at the time, with fewer than a dozen employees seated in a central office area, and an empty factory out back. Over time, the company would fill it up, expanding like kudzu into surrounding office buildings. But in those earliest years, SpaceX had only a few cubicles, a few computers, and almost no organization.
After his staid government job at NASA, Bjelde felt the culture shock immediately upon starting work. Before he could log on to a computer at NASA, Bjelde had undergone a detailed security screening process and multiple orientations. To operate machines that would steer electron beams, Bjelde had sat through days of training courses.
“At SpaceX back then, there was none of that,” Bjelde said of his first day on the job. “You show up. The door is not locked. There’s no one at the front desk. I met Hans, and he gave me a packet that had some materials about benefits and things like that. And then he told me what I needed to do.” Orientation done.
In the folder, Bjelde also found a few rudimentary documents someone had cobbled together about the Falcon 1’s flight termination system. Every rocket launching from U.S. soil must have a mechanism that allows the operator of a launch range, typically the U.S. Air Force or Army, to radio a destruct signal to a booster if it veers off course after liftoff. This system must be fail-safe, because an errant rocket might potentially threaten populated areas. Numerous government agencies had to sign off on its design. So first, Bjelde had to learn how to build the system. Then he had to design it, and obtain all the necessary paperwork from the government, before finally building and testing it. And he had to hurry because Musk wanted to launch in a year.
They spent their long and often intense days together in close confines. Musk kept a mostly laissez faire attitude toward his workplace. He offered just a few hard and fast rules: no strong smells, no flickering lights, and no loud noises in the cubicle farm they all shared. Often, they worked until well after midnight. Bjelde, slumped under his desk, recalls being kicked awake on more than one occasion to help finish writing a proposal.
Their close and nearly continual proximity led to easy collaboration. The team was so small that everybody knew everybody, and each employee pitched in as needed with other departments.
“Everybody was expected to carry their own weight, and then a bunch more,” Thompson said. “If Mueller needed help with something, I would stop, drop, and roll and help Tom. If help was needed designing a test stand, I would step up. Or if I needed help, someone would just jump right in. It was definitely multiple hats, up to and including janitor.”
Indeed, during the early years of SpaceX the company had no real support staff beyond Musk’s all-star assistant, Mary Beth Brown. This included a lack of custodial staff. After she hired on in August 2002 as head of sales, Gwynne Shotwell remembers organizing a meeting with government customers for a potential satellite launch. She checked in on the company’s upstairs conference room to make sure it was suitable for the military brass. “They were going to be there in an hour, and it was a mess,” she said. “So I got out the vacuum. The vice president of sales vacuuming, and then trying to figure out coffee.”
Each employee took his or her turn on Friday ice cream runs, too. After a Cold Stone Creamery opened less than a mile away, an office tradition quickly developed. An email would go around with an order sheet, and each employee would write their name or nickname, and their flavor of choice. “Rat Chicken”—Bjelde—might order Birthday Cake ice cream. Then someone, a new hire this week or a vice president the next, would take the only SpaceX company credit card down to the store, place the orders, and return to the company’s offices.
“No job was beneath us,” Bjelde said.
The growing team also bonded over computer games. Following a long day of work, most of the employees in the office would put the phones on their desks into conference mode. The office would come alive with banter and bravado as the SpaceX employees loaded the computer game Quake III Arena, a first-person shooter that allowed multiple players to join, and battle one another in death matches. Each participant would choose a playable character and a weapon, and look for targets on the virtual playing field.
“There were days where we played that game until three o’clock in the morning,” Thompson said. “We’d be screaming and yelling at each other like a bunch of lunatics. And Elon was right there in the thick of it with us.”
Not everyone played late into the night. Asked about the Quake parties, Shotwell, one of the few women in the office at the time, responded with a laugh. “No, I was never part of that,” she said. “It was good work time for me.” Sometimes, Shotwell said, she and Mary Beth Brown would joke that maybe they should get a game of My Little Pony going.
In truth, the hard-working team needed the escapism of computer games. It felt cathartic to frag the boss, who so often demanded the impossible over the course of eighty-hour weeks. “We sometimes joke that SpaceX is like dog years,” Bjelde said. “You get like seven years in one. And it’s true.”
Creating a rocket company involved a lot of travel. SpaceX needed to find a test site for its engines and fuel tanks, and then a location to launch from. Musk had to meet with potential customers. And he and his vice presidents had to find suppliers for key parts of the Falcon 1 that could not be built in-house. Although Musk wanted to develop the rocket’s engine at SpaceX, he was willing to buy pressurized tanks from suppliers. Tanks are not simple, as they must both be lightweight as well as capable of storing extremely cold and combustible fuels at high pressure.
In late 2002 Musk arranged a meeting with a tank manufacturing company in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He and a handful of engineers arrived the night before, staying at a Holiday Inn Express. Chris Thompson and another early employee named Steve Johnson, seeking to impress Musk, woke early so they would already be eating at the small breakfast buffet when the boss arrived.
“Elon comes down, and he walks over to the breakfast bar and he picks up a package of Pop-Tarts,” Thompson said. “And the funniest thing to me was the fact that most of us take Pop-Tarts for granted. He was transfixed. This was like a scene out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the apes examine the monolith. It was clearly the most fascinating thing he had seen that morning.”
Eventually, Musk realized that Pop-Tarts were best enjoyed toasted. So he opened a package and put two of them into the toaster, Thompson said. Only Musk made the rookie mistake of inserting the pastries horizontally, rather than vertically. When they popped back up, he had to stick his fingers into the toaster to grab his breakfast. This was a problem, and at about six in the morning Musk proceeded to scream, at full volume, “Fuck, it burns! Fuck, it burns!” Two older ladies at the front desk, nearby, watched in mortified silence.
It worked out in the end. The Green Bay company they met with could not help SpaceX, but it suggested Spincraft, another manufacturer near Milwaukee. SpaceX had found its fuel tank supplier.
These kinds of trips, of which there were many, helped Musk bond with his senior leaders. He could be difficult to work for, certainly. But his early hires could immediately see the benefits of working for someone who wanted to get things done and often made decisions on the spot. When Musk decided that Spincraft could make good tanks for a fair price, that was it. No committees. No reports. Just, done.
This decisive style carried over into meetings back at the office in El Segundo. Musk would convene his different teams in a small conference room, be it his engineers working on propulsion, or structures, or avionics, and run down the major issues. If an engineer faced an intractable problem, Musk wanted a chance to solve it. He would suggest ideas and give his teams a day or two to troubleshoot, then report back to him. In the interim, if they needed guidance, they were told to email Musk directly, day or night. He typically responded within minutes. Over the course of a single meeting Musk could be, at turns, hilarious, deadly serious, penetrating, harsh, reflective, and a stickler for the finest details of rocket science. But most of all, he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.
The engineers sitting in those seats around the conference table had to possess a certain amount of mania, too. First they had to accept Musk’s ambitious, if not all-but-impossible vision. But it takes a rarer breed still who can sprint through thickets of technical problems as someone urges them on, faster and faster. One of Musk’s most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit this mold. His people had to be brilliant. They had to be hardworking. And there could be no nonsense.
“There are a ton of phonies out there, and not many who are the real deal,” Musk said of his approach to interviewing engineers. “I can usually tell within fifteen minutes, and I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them.” Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first three thousand employees. It required late nights and weekends, but he felt it important to get the right people for his company.
Take Phil Kassouf. Only weeks after Koenigsmann joined SpaceX, he needed to hire an electrical engineer to help design and fabricate printed circuit boards for the Falcon 1’s onboard computer. The German had known Kassouf from his internship earlier that year at Microcosm. Not much fazed Kassouf, a precocious twenty-one-year-old used to hardship. He had grown up in war-torn Lebanon and left his family to come to the United States for college. He had brains, but little money. Lacking the means to attend MIT or Harvard, Kassouf took a full ride offered by U.S.C. He was not yet finished with his undergraduate studies when Koenigsmann urged him to visit the company’s new offices in El Segundo.
Not long into his tour, Kassouf found himself sitting across from the entrepreneur with an intense stare and a penchant for throwing interview subjects off their game. As part of his interview process, Musk wanted not to test a person’s knowledge but rather his or her ability to think. Musk’s first question to Kassouf was therefore an engineering riddle.
“You’re somewhere on Earth,” Musk said. “You’ve got a flag and a compass. You plant the flag in the ground. You take a look at the compass, and you see it points south. So you walk a mile south. Then you turn, and you walk a mile east. Then you turn, and you walk a mile north. To your surprise, you’re right back at the flag. Where are you?”
Kassouf thought it through. He could not be at the equator, because he’d walk a square. It could not be the South Pole, either, because of the compass reading. It must therefore be the North Pole, as the ninety-degree turns there end up forming three sides of a triangle at the top of the sphere. That was the correct answer. Musk began to move on to his next question, but Kassouf cut him off. “Wait, there’s another place you could be.”
Now Musk was interested.
“If you’re north of the South Pole,” Kassouf continued, “there’s a place where the circumference of the Earth is exactly a mile. If you start a mile north of that, and go south one mile, go all the way around the Earth, and come back up a mile, you’re in the same spot.”
That was true, Musk acknowledged. Then he stopped asking Kassouf riddles and began discussing what Koenigsmann needed help with. It did not matter that Kassouf was just twenty-one, or that he lacked a college degree. He could do the job.
When Musk identified someone he wanted to hire, he could be relentless. In the spring of 2004, Bulent Altan had nearly finished a master’s degree in aeronautics at Stanford. He planned to find work in the Bay Area where his wife, Rachel Searles, had already taken a desirable job at Google. However, a couple of Altan’s engineering friends from graduate school had recently moved to Los Angeles to work at SpaceX. One of them, Steve Davis, texted Altan to say he would love the company and should come for a visit.
A native of Turkey who speaks with a distinct accent, Altan had moved to the United States only two years earlier. After studying computer science in Germany, he had found northern California to his liking. The thought of relocating so soon, especially to crowded, smoggy Los Angeles, held little appeal. So he made the trip intending just to see Davis and his other friends. Yet when he visited them at the El Segundo factory, Altan soon was swept up in SpaceX’s mystique, as the company raced to complete its first flight-ready version of the Falcon 1 rocket. By the time he met with Musk, Altan realized he wanted to work there. But what of those Bay Area plans?
Davis had anticipated his friend’s issue. Having convinced Musk they needed to bring the brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board, it became a matter of solving the problem. His wife had a job in San Francisco? She would need one in Los Angeles? “These were solvable problems, and Elon’s better at solving problems than almost anyone else,” Davis said.
Musk therefore came into his job interview with Altan prepared. About halfway through, Musk told Altan, “So I heard you don’t want to move to L.A., and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google. Well, I just talked to Larry, and they’re going to transfer your wife down to L.A. So what are you going to do now?”
To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the cofounder of Google. Altan sat in stunned silence for a moment. But then he replied, given all of that, he supposed he would come work for SpaceX.
The next day Searles went into her job at Google, and her manager said the oddest thing had just happened. Larry Page had called to say she could now work from the company’s Los Angeles office if she wanted.
Relative to other aerospace companies, Musk had a lot to offer prospective employees. Florence Li had interned at both Boeing and NASA before interviewing for a full-time job at SpaceX. Musk made a compelling pitch for his vision of spaceflight. But more than that, he empowered his engineers. At SpaceX, new hires could rapidly grow their skills and take on new responsibilities. There was almost no management then, and everyone worked on the rocket. “A big thing was really having to learn to think, since nobody gave you a cookie-cutter job and told you what you do,” Li said. “That really made us all much better engineers.”
Kassouf sometimes called former classmates who had taken jobs in places like Austin, Texas, or Tucson, Arizona, and they would compare notes. One friend at Lockheed Martin worked on F-35 stealth aircraft, a lucrative program for the company. Eventually, the Air Force would buy more than two thousand units at a cost of $85 million each. It may sound like glamorous work, but it was not. Kassouf’s friend had just a single job, finding a supplier for a bolt on the aircraft’s landing gear and ensuring that it met all quality specifications. That single bolt was the totality of his employment. Although his friend did admit to boredom at work, he liked his house and his lifestyle away from the job. SpaceX offered the opposite experience. Work was thrilling and all encompassing. “It is hard to describe any one hat I wore at SpaceX, because they were switching on and off so fast it didn’t seem like there were any hats,” Kassouf said.
As Musk drove his employees to work long hours, he created an environment where they would want to be, day and night. The company served lattes and then meals. And each department got a food budget. As the avionics department expanded under Koenigsmann, it moved a block away into 211 Nevada, and received $250 from Musk each week for Costco snack runs. The task rotated among the department’s employees. One test engineer named Juan Carlos Lopez made elaborate meals like carne asada. Others opted for the simpler, calorically dense chips and sweets.
Thus, when the avionics crew took a break from working on printed circuit boards, testing hardware, or writing flight software, they could have snacks while they played Ping-Pong.
“You just really needed something to break up the constant push to be doing things a lot faster than what we were doing,” Altan said. “If you didn’t have that lighthearted outlook at SpaceX, it would have been a really tough time to survive in the early years.”
* * *
Musk differed from his competitors in another, important way—failure was an option. At most other aerospace companies, no employee wanted to make a mistake, lest it reflect badly on an annual performance review. Musk, by contrast, urged his team to move fast, build things, and break things. At some government labs and large aerospace firms, an engineer may devote a career to creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware. The engineers designing the Falcon 1 rocket spent much of their time on the factory floor, testing ideas, rather than debating them. Talk less, do more.
There are basically two approaches to building complex systems like rockets: linear and iterative design. The linear method begins with an initial goal, and moves through developing requirements to meet that goal, followed by numerous qualification tests of subsystems before assembling them into the major pieces of the rocket, such as its structures, propulsion, and avionics. With linear design, years are spent engineering a project before development begins. This is because it is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to modify a design and requirements after beginning to build hardware.
The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX engineers and technicians did on the factory floor in El Segundo, and it allowed them to capture basic flaws with early prototypes, fix their designs, and build successively more “finished” iterations.
An independent company like SpaceX can afford the latter approach, said planetary scientist Phil Metzger. He cofounded the Swamp Works project at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in 2012 to push the space agency toward leaner, more rapid development projects, but ultimately could not break through the government bureaucracy.
“We were always fighting for the recursive, nonlinear approach, which is best early in a program,” Metzger said of his NASA experience. “To adopt this method, you have to let people see you fail, and you have to push back when the critics use your early failures as an excuse to shut you down. This is why it is hard for national space agencies to adopt it. The geopolitics and domestic politics are brutal.”
Failure was an option at SpaceX, partly because the boss often asked the impossible of his team. In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd. When they protested that it was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, “What would it take?”
If Musk asked Kassouf to jump a fifty-foot fence, he did not want to hear it was impossible. He wanted Kassouf to ask for a pogo stick with a certain kind of a spring on it, or maybe a jetpack, and get on with it. Musk pushed his engineers to try new approaches to difficult problems. If they had good ideas, he would back them with resources.
After Musk hired a few experienced hands to lead his propulsion, structures, and avionics departments—Thompson, Mueller, and Koenigsmann—he mostly brought on recent college graduates. Most had no significant others pulling on their time, asking when they’d be home for dinner. They lived in apartments, not houses with lawns to mow. They had no children to look after. So they worked long, hard hours as Musk squeezed everything out of them that they had to give. And most were more than willing to give SpaceX the best years of their lives. Musk was a siren, calling brilliant young minds to SpaceX with an irresistible song. He offered an intoxicating brew of vision, charisma, audacious goals, resources, and free lattes and Cokes. When they needed something, he wrote the check. In meetings, he helped solve their most challenging technical problems. When the hour was late, he could often be found right there, beside them, working away. And when they needed a kick in the ass, he deployed his stare, or a few sharp words.
Through it all, Musk kept their focus on launch. Originally, he wanted SpaceX to launch by the end of 2003. He had schedules posted above the urinals in the men’s room. The company failed to make this date, but by the second half of 2003, the glossy factory floor began to fill up with rocket parts. Just two years later, in late December 2005, SpaceX had a rocket on a launchpad, half a world away, counting down to launch. This mad, frantic rush toward orbit began with Musk instilling his workplace culture at the building in El Segundo. He did so by getting his own hands dirty, holding long, technical meetings where ideas flowed freely, and in late-night gaming sessions. Some did not make it. You either fit in and accepted the demanding culture, or you left.
The last thing Musk ever wanted to hear from an employee was “But that’s how it’s always been done.” The members of the growing SpaceX team, both seasoned and green, had all come from somewhere. Those not hired directly from college, especially the technicians, came from big aerospace companies like Boeing or Lockheed, with their own cultures. These big contractors largely subsisted off of government business, with a certain way of doing things to maximize profits while also satisfying the customer’s needs. This often involved stretching out contracts, since Uncle Sam was paying for their time. During one early meeting at El Segundo, some former Boeing and Lockheed workers began bantering back and forth about their old companies, and the merits of how things had been done.
Musk raised his voice to end the discussion. “You work at SpaceX now,” he sternly reminded them. “You bring that up one more time, and we’re going to have serious problems.”
The message was clear. Wherever they had come from, whatever they had learned at those places, they were now part of the SpaceX team. Musk had hired them all, personally, to change the world. They had a job to do. A very hard one.
2. Merlin
“I think that’s why Elon liked me, because I was very optimistic,” Mueller said. “And my dad was really a pessimist, so I don’t know where I got the optimism, but I’m just like, ‘No, I’m going to go get a job and build rockets. I’m going, I’m doing it. Nothing’s stopping me.’”
3. Kwaj
Satellites lifting off due east from the equator begin with a 1,000-m.p.h. head start on the way to orbit. Effectively, this means a rocket launching from a low latitude can lift more mass than the same rocket from a higher latitude.
4. Flight One
The interview lasted for about two hours : one man born in South Africa, the other in Germany, sitting together in an American living room talking about space. “It’s ingenious, actually,” Koenigsmann said. “If you really want to find out about somebody, how they are, see them at their house. Check the kitchen and the bookshelf.
In truth, this was just Musk being Musk, multitasking to the nth degree. Even in the middle of a critical countdown, he had the ability to simultaneously think about the company’s needs six months or a year into the future. The last thing on Thompson’s mind were shipping dates and aluminum costs. He had a rocket to launch. The company’s very first rocket, in fact. Many of the things they were doing that day were new, and uncertain . But Musk’s gaze looked far beyond the day’s launch.
While Kimbal played video games, his older brother spent much of the flight poring over books written about early rocket scientists and their efforts, such as the U.S. program under Wernher von Braun and the Soviet program under Sergei Korolev. Musk seemed intent to understand the mistakes they had made and learn from them. “I’m not surprised he has been successful,”Lawrence said. “He was clearly dedicated.”
“Having experienced first-hand how hard it is to reach orbit, I have a lot of respect for those that persevered to produce the vehicles that are mainstays of space launch today,” he wrote. “SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.”
5. Selling Rockets
“I was like, oh, OK, this is refreshing. I don’t have to write up a damn plan,” Shotwell recalled. Here was her first real taste of Musk’s management style. Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.
“These are government customers, so even though they wanted to move quickly, things changing as rapidly as they did still did not provide a lot of comfort. That was one of the hardest things I’ve had to work on for almost my entire career at SpaceX.”
—Musk said he spends 80 to 90 percent of his time on engineering questions. This includes making design decisions, and optimizing the process by which SpaceX acquires parts from suppliers and builds its engines, rockets, and spacecraft. During meetings, Musk will make snap decisions. This is one of the keys that enables SpaceX to move so quickly. “I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head,”he said. “Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Whereas I’m making the engineering decisions and spending decisions. So I know, already, that my brain trusts itself.”
“Each of Kistler Aerospace’s contractors is a leader in its respective field of the aerospace industry and has significant experience in the construction of similar components,” the guide stated. Among the contractors were Lockheed Martin (LOX tanks), Northrop Grumman (structures ), Aerojet (engines), Draper (avionics), and so on. After seeking to integrate all these high-priced components, it is small wonder that Kistler found its financial situation dire by 2003.
One way SpaceX differentiated itself, Shotwell said, is by pushing for fixed -price contracts, which incentivize a firm to get its work done. It also encourages the customer to keep the baseline request the same, and not make costly change orders to the design of a rocket or spacecraft.
This sort of transparency was pretty radical at the time . “It opened a curtain into a dark little corner,” said Chad Anderson, who runs an investment group, Space Angels, that closely tracks public and private investment in spaceflight. “Before this there were a handful of companies serving the government and commercial launch needs, and it was more of a cartel situation.” SpaceX changed expectations with its low prices and transparency.
“Early customers don’t hire maverick companies if they don’t feel some kinship with the philosophy.”
6. Flight Two
“As far as working with Elon, I think Tom and Hans and I were able to walk that middle line.” The middle line being that Musk listened to ideas. He encouraged debate. He empowered his senior employees funding and authority. But always, he had the final say.
“I like to say Delaware made me a dreamer, because it was so boring,” she said.
So Musk fought to reduce weight. If he gave awards for rocket design, they would go to engineers who undesign things, those who remove mass. All too often, engineers want to add a part or a component just in case it might be needed during a contingency. Pretty soon, a rocket becomes fettered with widgets.
7. Texas
But the filthy and exhausted engineers and technicians working with him all night did not begrudge Musk for keeping them at a task that proved fruitless. Rather, his willingness to jump into the fray, and get his hands dirty by their sides, won him admiration as a leader.
“You guys are fucking me and it doesn’t fucking feel good,” Musk bellowed. “And I don’t like getting fucked.” The entire manufacturing facility ground to a stop. “You could hear a pin drop when he screamed that out. I mean, people stopped dead in their tracks, including all of us,” Thompson said.
8. Flight Three
Among Musk’s talents as the leader of SpaceX was finding different ways to motivate his employees. Steve Davis said Musk would often visit his desk to ask detailed questions about his computer simulations for controlling the rocket in flight. And then they would make bets on some aspect of the rocket and its avionics system. Almost invariably, Musk would win. But ahead of one systems test in 2007, Davis said Musk raised the stakes. Davis bet twenty dollars he could complete some aspect of the test by a certain date. In return, Musk bet a frozen yogurt machine that Davis could not make the deadline. “The second we had a bet like that, where there was a chance of getting a yogurt machine, there was a zero percent chance I was not getting that done,” Davis said.
10. Flight Four
Buzza, Koenigsmann, and the other engineers locked down the small control room, and then most of the launch team headed toward the dock. They rode their bikes madly beneath the tropical sun, out of their minds with joy. And as they pedaled, they called out a single word. Orbit.
11. Always Go to Eleven
“That was before SpaceX was successful,” said Zurbuchen, who in 2016 became the chief of science exploration at NASA. “So I interviewed these former students and asked, ‘Why did you go there?’ They went there because they believed. Many of them took pay cuts. But they believed in the mission.”
In his article for the aerospace publication, Zurbuchen wrote about how SpaceX had succeeded in the battle for talent with an inspiring goal. “I was a little bit nervous about betting on the immediate success of Falcon 9,” he wrote. “But in the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.” Too often in the modern aerospace world, he added, bureaucracy, rules, and a morbid fear of failure “poisoned” the workplace.
“We were very naive at the time, but the expectation was that we would throw a parachute on this thing and recover it,” Musk said. “We were huge idiots.”
To control the Falcon 9 rocket and slow it down, SpaceX had to relight the rocket’s engines high in the atmosphere when the booster is traveling at Mach 10.
If the goal was to rapidly turn a booster around and fly it again, dropping it into the ocean was probably not a good idea. The company had learned its lesson about saltwater corrosion with Flight One.
Only it’s rather hard to land a rocket on a boat that is bobbing up and down in the ocean. It requires some damn good computer programming to make the rocket and autonomous drone ship line up just right , and no one had ever done it before. Until it happened.
Today it is normal for SpaceX to launch rockets, catch them on land and at sea, and fly them again a couple of months later. In fewer than three years, the paradigm has shifted entirely. Whereas it once seemed novel to reuse a rocket, now it seems almost wasteful to throw them away.
SpaceX grabbed about two-thirds of the world’s commercial satellite launch business by the end of the decade.