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Elon Musk and SpaceX Steven Muegge and Ewan Reid 257). • “Musk's goal is to use manufacturing breakthroughs and launchpad advances to create a drastic drop in the cost of getting things to space” (p. 217). Consistent with the emancipation perspective on entrepreneuring, seeking autonomy was an impetus for action. Musk was driven to action by at least six perceived constraints: (1) space had become boring, (2) profitable tech companies too often address low-impact problems, (3) founder-entrepreneurs give up control of successful companies, (4) launches required Russian launch vehicles, (5) there were no humans on Mars, and no credible plans to send humans there, and (6) shared belief that practices driving massive cost-reductions in other industries would not work in space. He sought escape from these constraints by launching SpaceX—to inspire, to do something that matters, to be in control, to demonstrate that change is possible, and ultimately, to put humans on Mars. Second Core Element: Authoring Authoring refers to taking ownership by defining relationships, arrangements, and rules of engagement, and changing the positions of power. “Authoring does not refer to an outright rejection of all established norms and forms of authority but, rather, designing arrangements that support the change-creating intent of the entrepreneuring individual” (Rindova et al. 2009, p. 484). The authoring entrepreneur positions an entrepreneurial project in a system of resource relationships with resource holders. This contrasts with the opportunity recognition and creation themes prevalent in entrepreneurship research. A first example of authoring was Musk joining the network. Prior to 2001, Musk was an outsider to the space industry. Musk’s 2001 move from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles gave him access to the space industry (p. 97). Musk joined social networks: he donated to the Mars Society and Mars research (p. 100), joined the Mars Society board of directors, announced founding the Life to Mars Foundation (p. 102), discussed investing $20M to $30M in a Mars project (p. 103), and built connections with ambitious engineers (p. 111). A second example was Musk’s (unsuccessful) attempt to buy Russian missiles. Launches required specialized launch vehicles such as Russian Soyuz rockets. In 2002, “Musk intended to buy a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, from the Russians and use that as his launch vehicle” (p. 104). Musk met with Russians twice in Moscow and once in California. He was willing to pay $20M for three ICBMs, but did not reach a deal (pp. 106-107). This was a novel approach that had not previously been attempted. A third example was organizing SpaceX as a Silicon Valley space company. “Musk felt that the space industry had not really evolved in about fifty years. The aerospace companies had little competition and tended to make supremely expensive products that achieved maximum performance. They were building a Ferrari for every launch” (p. 114). When he founded SpaceX in 2002 with US$100M of his own money, he brought with him a Silicon Valley way of thinking. Vance describes how “[Musk] had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be the real breakthroughs we’d been missing” (p. 14). Musk set “insanely ambitious timelines” (p. 114), used open-concept offices where scientists and engineers worked alongside welders and machinists (p 113), hired young overachievers fresh from college for rank-and-file engineers and poached top engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences (p. 120), contracted with suppliers outside of the aerospace sector (p. 132), and “never relented in asking his employees to do more and be better” (p. 131). “The only way to keep up”, explains Vance, “was to do what SpaceX had promised from the beginning: operate in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start- up” (p. 130). A fourth example was utilizing unconventional launch facilities. Launch tests traditionally happened at air force bases, imposing high costs and long wait times. Musk instead procured a former U.S. military missile test site on the Kwajalein Island (Kwaj) between Guam and Hawaii in the Marshall Islands, and adapted it to his needs (p. 135). A fifth example was creating the SpaceX system as an end-to-end modular engineering platform (Baldwin & Clark, 2000; Muegge, 2013; Gawer & Cusumano, 2014) of launch vehicles, capsules, and engines that were all designed, manufactured, assembled, and tested at SpaceX facilities. Components included the Falcon 1, Falcon 5, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and ITS Launch Vehicle, the Dragon and Dragon 2 capsules, and the Merlin, Kestrel, Draco, and SuperDraco engines. (These are the component names used by Vance for the components of the SpaceX system. As of 2019, severalPDF Image | TIM Review 2019
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