SpaceX and the Quest

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SpaceX and the Quest ( spacex-and-quest )

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SpaceX wants by using the SuperDraco engines and thrusters to come to a gentle stop on the ground. No more landings at sea. No more throwing spaceships away. “That is how a twenty-first-century spaceship should land,” Musk said. “You can just reload propellant and fly again. So long as we continue to throw away rockets and spacecraft, we will never have true access to space.” The Dragon 2 is just one of the machines that SpaceX continues to develop in parallel. One of the company’s next milestones will be the first flight of the Falcon Heavy, which is designed to be the world’s most powerful rocket.* SpaceX has found a way to combine three Falcon 9s into a single craft with 27 of the Merlin engines and the ability to carry more than 53 metric tons of stuff into orbit. Part of the genius of Musk and Mueller’s designs is that SpaceX can reuse the same engine in different configurations—from the Falcon 1 up to the Falcon Heavy—saving on cost and time. “We make our main combustion chambers, turbo pump, gas generators, injectors, and main valves,” Mueller said. “We have complete control. We have our own test site, while most of the other guys use government test sites. The labor hours are cut in half and so is the work around the materials. Four years ago, we could make two rockets a year and now we can make twenty a year.” SpaceX boasts that the Falcon Heavy can take up twice the payload of the nearest competitor—the Delta IV Heavy from Boeing/ULA—at one-third the cost. SpaceX is also busy building a spaceport from the ground up. The goal is to be able to launch many rockets an hour from this facility located in Brownsville, Texas, by automating the processes needed to stand a rocket up on the pad, fuel it, and send it off. Just as it did in the early days, SpaceX continues to experiment with these new vehicles during actual launches in ways that other companies would dare not do. SpaceX will often announce that it’s trying out a new engine or its landing legs and place the emphasis on that one upgrade in the marketing material leading up to a launch. It’s common, though, for SpaceX to test out a dozen other objectives in secret during a mission. Musk essentially asks employees to do the impossible on top of the impossible. One former SpaceX executive described the working atmosphere as a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope. “It’s like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas,” this executive said. “They will work on the car for a year and test all of its parts. Then, when they set off for New York after that year, all of the vice presidents think privately that the car will be lucky to get to Las Vegas. What ends up happening is that the car gets to New Mexico—twice as far as they ever expected—and Elon is still mad. He gets twice as much as anyone else out of people.” There’s a degree to which it’s just never enough for Musk, no matter what it is. Case in point: the December 2010 launch in which SpaceX got the Dragon capsule to orbit Earth and return successfully. This had been one of the company’s great achievements, and people had worked tirelessly for months, if not years. The launch had taken place on December 8, and SpaceX had a Christmas party on December 16. About ninety minutes before the party started, Musk had called his top executives to SpaceX for a meeting. Six of them, including Mueller, were decked out in party attire and ready to celebrate the holidays and SpaceX’s historic achievement around Dragon. Musk laid into them for about an hour because the truss structure for a future rocket was running behind schedule. “Their wives were sitting three cubes over waiting for the berating to end,” Brogan said. Other examples of similar behavior have cropped up from time to time. Musk, for example, rewarded a group of thirty employees who had pulled off a tough project for NASA with bonuses that consisted of additional stock option grants. Many of the employees, seeking instant, more tangible gratification, demanded cash. “He chided us for not valuing the stock,” Drew Eldeen, a former engineer, said. “He

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