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

by Eric Berger

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.

“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.”

As Altan turned toward the rocket, his eyes swept the scene. A line of SpaceX engineers, faces white as ghosts, watched as their last chance to save the company imploded. The structure of the rocket caved in, one loud ping after another, as if some giant were slowly squeezing a beer can.

The Falcon 1 rocket was designed for transport by truck and barge at sea level. The first stage had various breathers, vents, and ports, but most of these were closed for the flight to Kwajalein. In this transport mode, the large liquid oxygen fuel tank had only a small opening, a one-quarter-inch fuel line that went through a desiccant so that no moisture got into the rocket. Following takeoff, as the C-17 ascended, the ambient pressure in the cargo bay dropped. This posed no problem for the Falcon 1, as it was designed to be pressurized relative to its surroundings, like during a launch. During several hours of flight, the fuel tank’s interior slowly equalized to the cruising altitude pressure. But as the aircraft began its descent toward Honolulu, there simply wasn’t time for the pressures to equalize.

The problem was that the manual provided by the Air Force had outdated information, and the descent and depressurization rates for the C-17 on the charter flight were significantly more aggressive than the figures provided in the manual. As the C-17 lost altitude, the LOX tank suffocated.

“Hey, the rocket is crumpling, we have to go back up again,” he shouted to the pilots. Here, the pilots had a decision to make. They had a $200 million aircraft and two dozen lives to worry about. They were thinking it would be safer to simply open the plane’s large rear door, and jettison the unstable rocket into the ocean below. And in fact, had no one from SpaceX been on board the aircraft, they would have done just that. But instead, they followed Altan’s instruction. One of them replied “OK, boss,” and the C-17 immediately began to climb.

Before he entered, Dunn turned to his friend standing by his side, Mike Sheehan. If the rocket starts to blow, pull me out, he earnestly told his friend. To reach the pressurization port leading into the LOX tank, Dunn had to crawl all the way into the interstage. Darkness enveloped him as he moved deeper inside, along the wall. Only Sheehan’s hands, holding on to his ankles, tethered Dunn to any semblance of safety. As he went, sharp components lining the exterior structure scraped his back. And all the while, the tank continued to pop and ping ominously.

The rocket hissed as it repressurized, and just in time, as the ten minutes allotted for dealing with the rocket had passed. As the C-17 began to descend again into Hickam Air Force Base, the SpaceX team could only return to their jump seats and catch their collective breaths, the stunned silence broken only by more bangs and pings, similar to those heard minutes earlier. Before their eyes, the metal stage began popping back into its cylindrical form. They could not know what it meant. The aluminum skin had not been intended to flex like this, as a rocket should never be exposed to higher external pressure.