Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and Tesla Motors Inc., speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011. Musk said SpaceX is developing a reusable rocket.
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SpaceX and several other companies leaped at the news. The likes of Richard Branson, Paul Allen and Burt Rutan already had a head start in space-tourism ventures, offering suborbital joyrides to wealthy customers who could afford a six-figure, 20-minute vacation. But COTS would mean playing with the big boys, using real rockets to put real spacecraft into orbit--and perhaps beyond--and doing real work there.
By 2008, NASA had selected two winners in the COTS competition: SpaceX, which would be awarded a $1.6 billion contract to make 12 runs to the ISS from 2012 to 2015, and Orbital Sciences, a Virginia company that would get essentially the same deal. NASA was happy to work with both--but both would first have to prove they could build and fly the promised machines.
Musk staffed up fast, hiring from the industry, engineering schools and NASA itself, quickly filling the first floor of the factory. "I came to SpaceX in March of 2011," says Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut and veteran of two shuttle missions who is now a senior engineer for the company, "and I'm already senior to 20% of the staff in terms of longevity."
Musk gave the SpaceX headquarters a deliberately Silicon Valley feel. The most centrally located spot in the building--with the factory floor to your left, the vast warren of offices to your right and the glassed-in mission control directly in front of you--was chosen as the perfect place to build a frozen-yogurt station. "I like the randomness of it," Musk says. "A frozen-yogurt bar in a rocket factory."
There's whimsy in the booster and spacecraft names too. The Falcon rocket is named after Han Solo's Millennium Falcon; the Dragon is named after Puff, the spacecraft's reportedly magical cousin. "I had planned to call it Magic Dragon," says Musk. The unlikely cargo that flew in 2010 was a tribute to the famed Monty Python sketch about a cheese shop that has no cheese.
The Simplicity Doctrine
Behind all the playfulness, however, is some hardheaded engineering. Musk may or may not emulate Steve Jobs, but he has a Jobsian respect for simplicity. SpaceX builds three different rockets: the Falcon, with one engine, known as the Merlin; the Falcon 9, with nine Merlins; and the still-in-development Falcon Heavy, which will have three side-by-side clusters of the same nine. That tall-grande-venti lineup is a lot easier to manage than NASA's hodgepodge of multiple boosters from multiple suppliers with the dinosaurically strange shuttle atop them all. Reisman speaks fondly--and diplomatically--of his NASA career, but he appreciates the difference in engineering philosophy at his new gig. "People ask how it's possible to be safer but also more cost-effective," he says. "It's possible because complexity is the enemy of both."
SpaceX simplifies things in a lot of ways. The engines, for example, are built with improved cooling systems that let them run at lower temperatures, which allows them to be built of less exotic metals. The manned version of the Dragon will have an emergency system that will allow the crew vehicle to pop free and fly away from a Falcon booster that's about to blow--but the escape rockets will be built around Dragon's bottom, a simpler arrangement than the rocket tower that was bolted atop the old Apollo craft to do the same job.