Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

by Eric Berger

Musk laughed when told about Jeff Bezos’s timeline for engine development. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank,” he said. “So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And then I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I’m generally supergood at engineering, personally. Most of the design decisions are mine, good or bad.” Boastful? Maybe. But SpaceX built and tested its first rocket engine in less than three years with Musk leading the way.

This would become one secret to SpaceX’s eventual dominance of the global launch market. Mueller said the original pump from Barber-Nichols weighed 150 pounds, with an output of about 3,000 horsepower. Over the next fifteen years, SpaceX engineers continued to iterate, changing the design and upgrading its parts. The turbopump in the modern-day Falcon 9 rocket’s Merlin engine still weighs 150 pounds, but produces 12,000 horsepower.

Here was her first real taste of Musk’s management style. Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.

“I remember him putting his hand on Elon’s back, almost hugging him, and saying, ‘Son, this is much harder than you think it is. It’s never going to work,’” Shotwell said. At this remark, Musk’s back straightened, and he got this look in his eye that Shotwell could easily read. If Musk had harbored doubts about completing the Falcon 1 project before the meeting, Teets’s paternalistic gesture had hardened his resolve.

To light its Falcon rockets, SpaceX first used hydrogen igniters, and later switched to a volatile chemical mixture known as TEA-TEB to ignite the Merlin engine. This is a combination of triethylaluminum (TEA) and triethylborane (TEB), which are essentially two different metal elements each linked to three hydrocarbon atoms. These molecules are held together by rather tenuous bonds that will break easily.

In fact, when TEA-TEB comes into contact with oxygen, it spontaneously combusts, producing a green flame. So to start a rocket engine, oxygen is pumped into the chamber to meet up with TEA-TEB.

“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.

“He looks at a problem and his reaction isn’t Oh, that’s a shame. His reaction is to go fix it. He’s extraordinary,” she said. “I’ve never understood his detractors, the cynics who say he’s just in it for the government money. It’s such bullshit. He started with Mars Oasis. He wanted to do Mars Oasis because he wanted people to see that life on Mars was doable, and we needed to go there.”