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Musk differed from his competitors in another, important way—failure was an option.
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.
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.
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?”
Mueller said he and Musk began with a “clean sheet” design. Few of Mueller’s friends in the industry believed building a brand-new, liquid-fueled rocket engine without government backing was possible. “All these guys told me a private company can’t build a booster engine, that takes the government,” Mueller said.
asked if they could have them. Yes, they were told, but SpaceX would have to go through NASA’s procurement program, which could take a year or two. This was too slow for SpaceX, so Musk and Mueller moved on to Barber-Nichols, the contractor that had built the turbopumps.
2003, it still had major problems. This forced Mueller and his small team to begin a crash course in turbopump technology. “The bad news is that we had to change everything,” Mueller said. “The good news is that I learned everything that can go wrong with turbopumps, and really how to fix them.”
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.
SpaceX also paid quickly. Within a day of receiving a purchase order from SpaceX, Reagan would have a check. Initially, Reagan tried to explain to Mary Beth Brown how things typically worked. With other companies, Reagan told Musk’s assistant, he would finish a part, submit an invoice, and receive a check thirty days later. She was unfazed. SpaceX wanted its parts fast. Reagan got the message and began to prioritize Mueller’s orders.
Ten minutes later he returned with a contract. It was Saturday, November 1, at 5 P.M. Musk wanted his new vice president of machining to start work that evening. Soon enough, Reagan had his shop at SpaceX humming. He hired six of Mustang’s machinists, and Musk bought the machines his company was about to liquidate. By bringing Reagan in house, Musk essentially cut much of his manufacturing costs in half.
activated its backup launch site
Plan b
Microcosm in the 1990s provided a counterexample of how companies with less money and less urgency would fail.
He would take some important lessons from this failure when he left for SpaceX.
Koenigsmann learned the value of having enough money to do a proper job.
“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 came to believe customers like Teets needed to see real hardware to believe the company and its booster were legitimate. In the run-up to Thanksgiving that year, Musk pressed his new vice president of machining, Bob Reagan, to complete the company’s first Falcon 1 rocket for public display.
They worked eighteen-hour days to build the full-scale model, finishing on Thanksgiving Eve. The rocket itself was hollow, but from the outside the Merlin engine, and the first and second stages, looked genuine enough.
The Smithsonian stunt was the first forerunner to the “reveals” for which Musk, like Steve Jobs, would one day become known. In the case of the Falcon 1, Musk needed government customers to start placing orders for launches. This was how he believed SpaceX would one day become profitable.
the government had not identified a small satellite launch need, nor had it issued contracts to build one. Rather, Musk anticipated such a need and self-funded development of a rocket to serve both commercial and government customers. He built the rocket on spec.
“When the government is hiring you to design, develop, build, and operate a thing, they’re the customer,” Shotwell said. “They’re paying for it. They get to have their hands in the design. The decisions. They’re covering the whole thing. But no one was paying us for design or development. They were paying us for flights.” This offered an advantage in that SpaceX could build the rocket that Musk and his engineers wanted to...
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As the space agency began looking to the commercial space industry for help, it seemed to Musk that SpaceX had something to offer. But his hopes were misplaced. NASA had other plans, and this would lead to a pivotal clash between Musk and the nation’s space agency. A clash that would ultimately save his rocket company.
“I think the early customers not only needed us to be successful, they wanted us to be successful, so they were going to hang in,” Shotwell said. “Early customers don’t hire maverick companies if they don’t feel some kinship with the philosophy.”
“We had three failures under our belt. So it’s pretty hard to go raise money. The recession is starting to hit. The Tesla financing round that we tried to raise that summer had failed. I got divorced. I didn’t even have a house. My ex-wife had the house. So it was a shitty summer.”
The period that followed would be the most memorable and arguably important period of the company’s history, hardening its DNA and setting the stage for SpaceX to become the most transformative aerospace company in the world.
‘Why did you go there?’ They went there because they believed. Many of them took pay cuts. But they believed in the mission.”
SpaceX had succeeded in the battle for talent with an inspiring goal.
