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

by Eric Berger

The hyperobservant Musk, never one much for pleasantries, moved straight into questions. “Do you dye your hair?” Musk asked. Somewhat flustered, Bjelde replied that he did not. One of Musk’s common tactics during an interview involves throwing a person off-kilter, to see how a potential employee reacts.

He had a comfortable government job, a promising academic career, and an active social life. SpaceX would strip all of that away.

Musk called a meeting of about fifteen or twenty prominent aerospace engineers at the Renaissance Hotel at the Los Angeles airport. Many had come at the behest of Mike Griffin, a leader in the community who would become NASA’s administrator three years later,

In truth, the hard-working team needed the escapism of computer games. It felt cathartic to frag the boss, who so often demanded the impossible over the course of eighty-hour weeks.

About halfway through, Musk told Altan, “So I heard you don’t want to move to L.A., and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google. Well, I just talked to Larry, and they’re going to transfer your wife down to L.A. So what are you going to do now?” To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the cofounder of Google.

At some government labs and large aerospace firms, an engineer may devote a career to creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware. 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.

“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.”

Mueller grew up in St. Maries, Idaho. In this small town about one hundred miles below the Canadian border,

he pulled logged trees out of the forest, a process known as skidding.

Hence the term, "skid row," in towns which had a logging history.

he took the first step down a path that would lead him to a job designing rocket engines for a large company, TRW, and then SpaceX. Ultimately, in 2020, the first astronauts to reach orbit from American soil in nearly a decade would do so sitting on top of the rocket engines he designed.

Mueller made friends with like-minded enthusiasts, including John Garvey. The pair bonded and eventually codeveloped what may be the world’s most powerful amateur rocket engine,

“I listened to his pitch for two minutes, and then hung up on him,” Mango said. “I thought he was nuts.” After the call, Mango decided to Google Musk. He found a photo of him with his hand resting on his McLaren F1

As Chinnery put it, “There was not a whole lot of scrutiny early on. They just never really believed in it until, suddenly, the static fire happened, and they woke up.” The Air Force had good reason to doubt the promises of start-up rocket companies,

While the Falcon 1 waited its turn, no one would compensate SpaceX for its expenses. The company got paid when it launched. By contrast, when the military awarded a national security launch contract to an Atlas or a Delta rocket, Lockheed and Boeing signed cost-plus agreements, where any delays were billed to the government, plus a fee.

They bought massive, four-hundred-kilovolt-amp generators in California and shipped them to Kwaj for power.

kW?

More than one hundred people, mostly civilians working for the Army on the island, had gathered there. Kwajalein island’s total population is only about one thousand people. These people weren’t bound for Meck Island, but rather had come to show their support for the small rocket company. They wanted to jump-start the investigation by helping to pick up pieces of the Falcon 1.

“Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday,” Ride said. “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

‘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. “You’ve just changed his mind,” Shotwell thought about Teets, and the effect of his words on Musk. “He’s going to make sure you regret the moment you said that.”

“True, a product may already exist,” Bjelde said. “But is it optimized for your solution? Is it from a good supplier? And what about their tier two or tier three suppliers? And if you need more of them faster, will they meet your needs? If you want to change something, are they going to be willing to change it? And if you improve that product, will they then sell it to your competitors?”

concerned it might lose access to the Delta line of rockets, including the Delta IV Heavy, the U.S. Air Force stepped in. To end the legal hostilities the Department of Defense brokered a deal in which Lockheed and Boeing would merge their rocket building ventures into one company. Each parent retained a 50 percent stake in United Launch Alliance,

“In terms of our maturity and discipline, we were a completely different company coming out for Flight Two,” Anne Chinnery said. “That failure helped us.”

“That’s the thing about Elon, he was willing to spend money to try things,” Kassouf said. “And that’s so different. Go to Boeing, and you spend money to try and figure out what your liabilities are going to be before you try anything. But Elon is like, sure, try it. If it doesn’t work we can either sell it back, or it goes into our lessons-learned pile.”

liquid oxygen in the upper-stage tank had begun sloshing around several minutes after launch, inducing a fatal oscillation. The problem they had known about, discussed in detail, and ultimately dismissed as the eleventh highest avionics risk took down their rocket. “Now,” Musk says, “I ask for the eleven top risks. Always go to eleven.” It’s true. The company now does lists of the top eleven risks ahead of launches. That is one legacy of the second failure of the Falcon 1 rocket.

Spincraft in Wisconsin,

Dunn had begun experimenting with rockets a decade earlier, in the rural, rolling hills of eastern Tennessee. He started with model rockets, but Homer Hickam’s classic memoir Rocket Boys sparked a deeper interest in 1998.

Blue Origin informed Dunn, the company would call. “I told the recruiter on the phone, ‘Just let me come out and work for you for a month,’” Dunn said. “You don’t have to pay me anything, and if at the end of the month I don’t work harder than every other intern, I’ll just go home. It will be cool, and I will have appreciated the experience. But if I do come in and do an amazing job, and work harder than everyone else, then just pay me for the rest of the summer.” The recruiter rejected the suggestion. No one from the company ever called him again.

“Everything was fantastic luxury, compared to the first flight, so we loved it on Omelek,” Altan said. “After the really, really crazy days everyone gathered around at dinnertime and really enjoyed just sitting down, and relaxing. We would always watch the same movies over and over again, like Starship Troopers. The most important thing is that the camaraderie was great.”

“I never missed that boat, ever,” Buzza said. “But sometimes, teammates would. The Army is very punctual, and would not deviate. Except for one time, they did come back to the dock for Elon.”

the pilots never flew very high above the water. During one flight, Buzza asked why they didn’t fly higher. “I only fly as high as I can jump,” the pilot replied.

Davis bet twenty dollars he could complete some aspect of the test by a certain date. In return, Musk bet a frozen yogurt machine that Davis could not make the deadline. “The second we had a bet like that, where there was a chance of getting a yogurt machine, there was a zero percent chance I was not getting that done,” Davis said. “And if you go to SpaceX today in Hawthorne, you will see that he honored the bet, and we have a frozen yogurt machine sitting in the middle of the cafeteria, which still gives away free yogurt.

The rocket continued to implode. All hell was breaking loose inside the aircraft. Amid the tumult and danger, Zach Dunn stepped forward to save his first stage. A few years earlier, Dunn had feared missing out on his chance to make a difference at SpaceX. Now he would climb inside a collapsing rocket, thousands of feet above the Pacific Ocean. He held a wrench—and the fate of SpaceX—in his hands.

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.

The pleasantries, such as they were, had ended. Musk asked a single question: Who were the other five students? “I realized that was what the whole meeting was about,” Zurbuchen said. “The meeting was not about me. He wanted to recruit them. He wanted the other five.”

“I didn’t go to school just to go to meetings, and sit in a cubicle to try and perfect a single screw,” he said. “This was a company that wanted people to just get stuff done. I wanted to get my hands dirty, and no other company was really going to offer that besides SpaceX.”

On his very first day on the job, Altan designed a printed circuit board and sent it to manufacturing. He mused, at the time, that at most other companies he probably would not even have had an IT account set up by the end of the first day.

His Turkish goulash proved so popular that he wrote down the recipe, as if it were a launch procedure, and shared it with his colleagues.

How could the author not put it in this book?

Relativity is the spiritual successor to SpaceX in terms of boldness. It seeks to 3D-print the entirety of its rockets to speed development and bring down costs.

Will SpaceX get there? Maybe not. But for the adventurous it sure beats pushing a pencil at a government job where things move slowly, and working large exploration programs subject to cancellation every time a new president moves into the White House.

HANS KOENIGSMANN, Vice President of Avionics Of the very earliest employees Musk hired to work at SpaceX, only Koenigsmann remains.

Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash “MAKE THIS DISH ANYWHERE A DELICIOUS DINNER IS NECESSARY.”

He DID get it!!!