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and has ended up the twelfth most senior person still at the company. He turned thirty-five in 2014. Davis did his tour of duty on Kwaj and considered it the greatest time of his life. “Every night, you could either sleep by the rocket in this tent shelter where the geckos crawled all over you or take this one-hour boat ride that made you seasick back to the main island,” he said. “Every night, you had to pick the pain that you remembered least. You got so hot and exhausted. It was just amazing.” After working on the Falcon 1, Davis moved to the Falcon 9 and then Dragon. The Dragon capsule took SpaceX four years to design. It’s likely the fastest project of its ilk done in the history of the aerospace industry. The project started with Musk and a handful of engineers, most of them under thirty years old, and peaked at one hundred people.* They cribbed from past capsule work and read over every paper published by NASA and other aeronautics bodies around projects like Gemini and Apollo. “If you go search for something like Apollo’s reentry guidance algorithm, there are these great databases that will just spit out the answer,” Davis said. The engineers at SpaceX then had to figure out how to advance these past efforts and bring the capsule into the modern age. Some of the areas of improvement were obvious and easily accomplished, while others required more ingenuity. Saturn 5 and Apollo had colossal computing bays that produced only a fraction of the computer horsepower that can be achieved today on, say, an iPad. The SpaceX engineers knew they could save a lot of room by cutting out some of the computers while also adding capabilities with their more powerful equipment. The engineers decided that while Dragon would look a lot like Apollo, it would have steeper wall angles, to clear space for gear and for the astronauts that the company hoped to fly. SpaceX also got the recipe for its heat shield material, called PICA, through a deal with NASA. The SpaceX engineers found out how to make the PICA material less expensively and improved the underlying recipe so that Dragon—from day one—could withstand the heat of a reentry coming back from Mars.* The total cost for Dragon came in at $300 million, which would be on the order of 10 to 30 times less than capsule projects built by other companies. “The metal comes in, we roll it out, weld it, and make things,” Davis said. “We build almost everything in-house. That is why the costs have come down.” Davis, like Brogan and plenty of other SpaceX engineers, has had Musk ask for the seemingly impossible. His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send, Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.” The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space. “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”PDF Image | SpaceX and the Quest
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