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

by Christian Davenport

Eager to show he could be resourceful, Mosdell and his team became the scavengers of Cape Canaveral, going around looking for leftover hardware as if they were on a treasure hunt. So, the old railcars from the 1960s that had once been used to ferry helium between New Orleans and Cape Canaveral became new storage tanks. “We took off the wheels and basically set them up on fixed pedestals,” Mosdell said. Instead of spending $75,000 on new air-conditioning chillers for the ground equipment building, someone found a deal on eBay for $10,000. In addition to recycling old material, they pushed back on regulations they saw as anachronistic leftovers from an earlier era. When the company was told it would cost $2 million for a pair of cranes to lift the Falcon 9, for example, it questioned the price, wanting to know why it was so expensive. The reason was that the air force required the cranes to meet a series of safety requirements to prevent, say, a hook from suddenly dropping too fast. But modern technology had rendered many of those requirements, some decades old, unnecessary. Mosdell and the SpaceX team lobbied the air force officials at Cape Canaveral, ultimately convincing them to strip out many of the old regulations that were driving up the price. They did, and SpaceX was able to purchase the cranes for $300,000. Then, the air force said that Pad 40’s flame duct needed to be extended with a water system. Bids for a traditional concrete trench to guide the rocket flames ou...