The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport

They had been in that panic mode before. In late 2010, on the eve of the Falcon 9’s second launch, and the first test flight of the Dragon spacecraft, a last-minute inspection of the rocket revealed a crack in the nozzle, or skirt, of the second-stage engine. That was not good. “You’re not going to fly with a crack,” Davis said. “We’re like, ‘What do we do?’” The normal thing would be to take the rocket apart, replace the engine skirt, reinspect it, and then “you’re up and launching in a month,” he said. No one wanted to lose that much time. Instead, Musk had a wild idea that he put to his team: “What if we just cut the skirt? Like, literally cut around it?” That is, what if they trimmed off the bottom as if it were a fingernail? “He went person by person and said, ‘Would this have any adverse effect on you?’” Davis said that because the skirt would be shorter, they’d get less performance from the engine. “But we had so much margin built into it, it didn’t matter.” Everyone else concurred, and “literally within thirty minutes, the decision was made.” The company flew a technician from California to Cape Canaveral; armed with a pair of shears, like the kind used to trim hedges, he cut around the crack. “And we flew the next day successfully,” Davis said. “That could have been the dumbest thing we ever did, but it was amazing.” That was not how NASA would have handled it. But its officials agreed with SpaceX that there wasn’t any reason why it wouldn’t work, and approved the...