PDF Publication Title:
Text from PDF Page: 076
spend the night on Omelek rather than make the journey through rough waters back to the main island. “Some of the offices were turned into bedrooms with mattresses and cots,” Hollman said. “Then we shipped over a very nice refrigerator and a good grill and plumbed in a shower. We tried to make it less like camping and more like living.” The sun rose at 7 A.M. each day, and that’s when the SpaceX team got to work. A series of meetings would take place with people listing what needed to get done, and debating solutions to lingering problems. As the large structures arrived, the workers placed the body of the rocket horizontally in a makeshift hangar and spent hours melding together all of its parts. “There was always something to do,” Hollman said. “If the engine wasn’t a problem, then there was an avionics problem or a software problem.” By 7 P.M., the engineers wound down their work. “One or two people would decide it was their night to cook, and they would make steak and potatoes and pasta,” Hollman said. “We had a bunch of movies and a DVD player, and some of us did a lot of fishing off the docks.” For many of the engineers, this was both a torturous and magical experience. “At Boeing you could be comfortable, but that wasn’t going to happen at SpaceX,” said Walter Sims, a SpaceX tech expert who found time to get certified to dive while on Kwaj. “Every person on that island was a fucking star, and they were always holding seminars on radios or the engine. It was such an invigorating place.” The engineers were constantly baffled by what Musk would fund and what he wouldn’t. Back at headquarters, someone would ask to buy a $200,000 machine or a pricey part that they deemed essential to Falcon 1’s success, and Musk would deny the request. And yet he was totally comfortable paying a similar amount to put a shiny surface on the factory floor to make it look nice. On Omelek, the workers wanted to pave a two-hundred-yard pathway between the hangar and the launchpad to make it easier to transport the rocket. Musk refused. This left the engineers moving the rocket and its wheeled support structure in the fashion of the ancient Egyptians. They laid down a series of wooden planks and rolled the rocket across them, grabbing the last piece of wood from the back and running it forward in a continuous cycle. The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a handful of the SpaceX team had any idea how to make a launch happen. Time and again, the rocket would get marched out to the launchpad and hoisted vertical for a couple of days, while technical and safety checks would reveal a litany of new problems. The engineers worked on the rocket for as long as they could before laying it horizontal and marching it back to the hangar to avoid damage from the salty air. Teams that had worked separately for months back at the SpaceX factory—propulsion, avionics, software—were thrust together on the island and forced to become an interdisciplinary whole. The sum total was an extreme learning and bonding exercise that played like a comedy of errors. “It was like Gilligan’s Island except with rockets,” Hollman said. In November 2005, about six months after they had first gotten to the island, the SpaceX team felt ready to give launching a shot. Musk flew in with his brother, Kimbal, and joined the majority of the SpaceX team in the barracks on Kwaj. On November 26, a handful of people woke up at 3 A.M. and filled the rocket with liquid oxygen. They then scampered off to an island about three miles away for protection, while the rest of the SpaceX team monitored the launch systems from a control room twenty-six miles away on Kwaj. The military gave SpaceX a six-hour launch window. Everyone was hoping to see the first stage take off and reach about 6,850 miles per hour before giving way to thePDF Image | SpaceX and the Quest
PDF Search Title:
SpaceX and the QuestOriginal File Name Searched:
ashlee-vance-elon-musk-tesla-spacex-and-the-quest.pdfDIY PDF Search: Google It | Yahoo | Bing
NFT (Non Fungible Token): Buy our tech, design, development or system NFT and become part of our tech NFT network... More Info
IT XR Project Redstone NFT Available for Sale: NFT for high tech turbine design with one part 3D printed counter-rotating energy turbine. Be part of the future with this NFT. Can be bought and sold but only one design NFT exists. Royalties go to the developer (Infinity) to keep enhancing design and applications... More Info
Infinity Turbine IT XR Project Redstone Design: NFT for sale... NFT for high tech turbine design with one part 3D printed counter-rotating energy turbine. Includes all rights to this turbine design, including license for Fluid Handling Block I and II for the turbine assembly and housing. The NFT includes the blueprints (cad/cam), revenue streams, and all future development of the IT XR Project Redstone... More Info
Infinity Turbine ROT Radial Outflow Turbine 24 Design and Worldwide Rights: NFT for sale... NFT for the ROT 24 energy turbine. Be part of the future with this NFT. This design can be bought and sold but only one design NFT exists. You may manufacture the unit, or get the revenues from its sale from Infinity Turbine. Royalties go to the developer (Infinity) to keep enhancing design and applications... More Info
Infinity Supercritical CO2 10 Liter Extractor Design and Worldwide Rights: The Infinity Supercritical 10L CO2 extractor is for botanical oil extraction, which is rich in terpenes and can produce shelf ready full spectrum oil. With over 5 years of development, this industry leader mature extractor machine has been sold since 2015 and is part of many profitable businesses. The process can also be used for electrowinning, e-waste recycling, and lithium battery recycling, gold mining electronic wastes, precious metals. CO2 can also be used in a reverse fuel cell with nafion to make a gas-to-liquids fuel, such as methanol, ethanol and butanol or ethylene. Supercritical CO2 has also been used for treating nafion to make it more effective catalyst. This NFT is for the purchase of worldwide rights which includes the design. More Info
NFT (Non Fungible Token): Buy our tech, design, development or system NFT and become part of our tech NFT network... More Info
Infinity Turbine Products: Special for this month, any plans are $10,000 for complete Cad/Cam blueprints. License is for one build. Try before you buy a production license. May pay by Bitcoin or other Crypto. Products Page... More Info
| CONTACT TEL: 608-238-6001 Email: greg@infinityturbine.com | RSS | AMP |