by Ashlee Vance
Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had emerged from this meditative process with the realization that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the Russians were offering. Forget the mice. Forget the plant with its own video feed growing—or possibly dying—on Mars. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to explore space.
As word traveled around the space community about Musk’s plans, there was a collective ho-hum. People like Zubrin had seen this show many times before. “There was a string of zillionaires that got sold a good story by an engineer,” Zubrin said. “Combine my brains and your money, and we can build a rocket ship that will be profitable and open up the space frontier. The techies usually ended up spending the rich guy’s money for two years, and then the rich guy gets bored and shuts the thing down. With Elon, everyone gave a sigh and said, ‘Oh well. He could have spent ten million dollars to send up the mice, but instead he’ll spend hundreds of millions and probably fail like all the others that proceeded him.’”
While well aware of the risks tied to starting a rocket company, Musk had at least one reason to think he might succeed where others had failed. That reason’s name was Tom Mueller.
Mueller grew up the son of a logger in the tidy Idaho town of St. Maries, where he developed a reputation as an oddball. While the rest of the kids were outside exploring the woods in winter, Mueller stayed warm in the library reading books or watching Star Trek at his house. He also tinkered. Walking to grade school one day, Mueller discovered a smashed clock in an alley and turned it into a pet project. Each day, he fixed some part of the clock—a gear, a spring—until he got it working. A similar thing happened with the family’s lawn mower, which Mueller disassembled one afternoon on the front lawn for fun. “My dad came home and was so mad because he thought he’d have to buy a new mower,” Mueller said. “But I put it back together, and it ran.” Mueller then got stuck on rockets. He started buying mail order kits and following the instructions to build small rockets. Rather quickly, Mueller graduated to constructing his own devices. At the age of twelve, he crafted a mock-up space shuttle that could be attached to a rocket, sent up into the air, and then glide back to the ground. For a science project a couple of years later, Mueller borrowed his dad’s oxyacetylene welding equipment to make a rocket engine prototype. Mueller cooled the device by placing it upside down in a coffee can full of water—“I could run it like that all day long”—and invented equally creative ways to measure its performance. The machine was good enough for Mueller to win a couple of regional science fair competitions and end up at an international event. “That’s where I promptly got my ass kicked,” Mueller said.
Tall, lanky, and with a rectangular face, Mueller is an easygoing sort who muddled through college for a bit, teaching his friends how to make smoke bombs, and then eventually settled down and did well as a mechanical engineering student. Fresh out of college, he worked for Hughes Aircraft on satellites—“It wasn’t rockets, but it was close”—and then went to TRW Space & Electronics. It was the latter half of the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program had the space gearheads dreaming about kinetic weapons and all sorts of mayhem. At TRW, Mueller experimented with crazy types of propellants and oversaw the development of the company’s TR-106 engine, a giant machine fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. As a hobby, Mueller hung out with a couple hundred amateur rocketry buffs in the Reaction Research Society, a group formed in 1943 to encourage the building and firing of rockets. On the weekends, Mueller traveled out to the Mojave Desert with the other RRS members to push the limits of amateur machines. Mueller was one of the club’s standouts, able to build things that actually worked, and could experiment with some of the more radical concepts that were quashed by his conservative bosses at TRW. His crowning achievement was an eighty-pound engine that could produce thirteen thousand pounds of thrust and earned accolades as the world’s largest liquid-fuel rocket engine built by an amateur. “I still keep the rockets hanging in my garage,” Mueller said.
In January 2002, Mueller was hanging out in the workshop of John Garvey, who had left a job at the aerospace company McDonnell Douglas to start building his own rockets. Garvey’s facility was in Huntington Beach, where he rented an industrial space about the size of a six-car garage. The two men were fiddling around with the eighty-pound engine when Garvey mentioned that a guy named Elon Musk might be stopping by. The amateur rocketry scene is tight, and it was Cantrell who recommended that Musk check out Garvey’s workshop and see Mueller’s designs. On a Sunday, Musk arrived with a pregnant Justine, wearing a stylish black leather trench coat and looking like a high-paid assassin. Mueller had the eighty-pound engine on his shoulder and was trying to bolt it to a support structure when Musk began peppering him with questions. “He asked me how much thrust it had,” Mueller said. “He wanted to know if I had ever worked on anything bigger. I told him that yeah, I’d worked on a 650,000-pound thrust engine at TRW and knew every part of it.” Mueller set the engine down and tried to keep up with Musk’s interrogation. “How much would that big engine cost?” Musk asked. Mueller told him TRW built it for about $12 million. Musk shot back, “Yeah, but how much could you really do it for?”
Mueller ended up chatting with Musk for hours. The next weekend, Mueller invited Musk to his house to continue their discussion. Musk knew he had found someone who really knew the ins and outs of making rockets. After that, Musk introduced Mueller to the rest of his roundtable of space experts and their stealthy meetings. The caliber of the people impressed Mueller, who had turned down past job offers from Beal and other budding space magnates because of their borderline insane ideas. Musk, by contrast, seemed to know what he was doing, weeding out the naysayers meeting by meeting and forming a crew of bright, committed engineers.
Mueller had helped Musk fill out that spreadsheet around the performance and cost metrics of a new, low-cost rocket, and, along with the rest of Team Musk, had subsequently refined the idea. The rocket would not carry truck-sized satellites like some of the monster rockets flown by Boeing, Lockheed, the Russians, and others countries. Instead, Musk’s rocket would be aimed at the lower end of the satellite market, and it could end up as ideal for an emerging class of smaller payloads that capitalized on the massive advances that had taken place in recent years in computing and electronics technology. The rocket would cater directly to a theory in the space industry that a whole new market might open for both commercial and research payloads if a company could drastically lower the price per launch and perform launches on a regular schedule. Musk relished the idea of being at the forefront of this trend and developing the workhorse of a new era in space. Of course, all of this was theoretical—and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. PayPal had gone public in February with its shares shooting up 55 percent, and Musk knew that eBay wanted to buy the company as well. While noodling on the rocket idea, Musk’s net worth had increased from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. In April 2002, Musk fully abandoned the publicity-stunt idea and committed to building a commercial space venture. He pulled aside Cantrell, Griffin, Mueller, and Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer at Boeing, and told the group, “I want to do this company. If you guys are in, let’s do it.” (Griffin wanted to join but ended up declining when Musk rebuffed his request to live on the East Coast, and Cantrell only stuck around for a few months after this meeting, seeing the venture as too risky.)
Founded in June 2002, Space Exploration Technologies came to life in humble settings. Musk acquired an old warehouse at 1310 East Grand Avenue in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles humming with the activity of the aerospace industry. The previous tenant of the 75,000-square-foot building had done l
ots of shipping and had used the south side of the facility as a logistics depot, outfitting it with several receiving bays for delivery trucks. This allowed Musk to drive his silver McLaren right into the building. Beyond that the surroundings were sparse—just a dusty floor and a forty-foot-high ceiling with its wooden beams and insulation exposed and which curved at the top to give the place a hangarlike feel. The north side of the building was an office space with cubicles and room for about fifty people. During the first week of SpaceX’s operations, delivery trucks showed up packed full of Dell laptops and printers and folding tables that would serve as the first desks. Musk walked over to one of the loading docks, rolled up the door, and off-loaded the equipment himself.
Musk had soon transformed the SpaceX office with what has become his signature factory aesthetic: a glossy epoxy coating applied over concrete on the floors, and a fresh coat of white paint slathered onto the walls. The white color scheme was intended to make the factory look clean and feel cheerful. Desks were interspersed around the factory so that Ivy League computer scientists and engineers designing the machines could sit with the welders and machinists building the hardware. This approach stood as SpaceX’s first major break with traditional aerospace companies that prefer to cordon different engineering groups off from each other and typically separate engineers and machinists by thousands of miles by placing their factories in locations where real estate and labor run cheap.
As the first dozen or so employees came to the offices, they were told that SpaceX’s mission would be to emerge as the “Southwest Airlines of Space.” SpaceX would build its own engines and then contract with suppliers for the other components of the rocket. The company would gain an edge over the competition by building a better, cheaper engine and by fine-tuning the assembly process to make rockets faster and cheaper than anyone else. This vision included the construction of a type of mobile launch vehicle that could travel to various sites, take the rocket from a horizontal to vertical position, and send it off to space—no muss, no fuss. SpaceX was meant to get so good at this process that it could do multiple launches a month, make money off each one, and never need to become a huge contractor dependent on government funds.
SpaceX was to be America’s attempt at a clean slate in the rocket business, a modernized reset. 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, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick. Musk, by contrast, would apply some of the start-up techniques he’d learned in Silicon Valley to run SpaceX lean and fast and capitalize on the huge advances in computing power and materials that had taken place over the past couple of decades. As a private company, SpaceX would also avoid the waste and cost overruns associated with government contractors. Musk declared that SpaceX’s first rocket would be called the Falcon 1, a nod to Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon and his role as the architect of an exciting future. At a time when the cost of sending a 550-pound payload started at $30 million, he promised that the Falcon 1 would be able to carry a 1,400-pound payload for $6.9 million.
Bowing to his nature, Musk set an insanely ambitious timeline for all of this. One of the earliest SpaceX presentations suggested that the company would complete its first engine in May 2003, a second engine in June, the body of the rocket in July, and have everything assembled in August. A launchpad would then be prepared by September, and the first launch would take place in November 2003, or about fifteen months after the company started. A trip to Mars was naturally slated for somewhere near the end of the decade. This was Musk the logical, naïve optimist tabulating how long it should take people physically to perform all of this work. It’s the baseline he expects of himself and one that his employees, with their human foibles, are in a never-ending struggle to match.
As space enthusiasts started to learn about the new company, they didn’t really obsess over whether Musk’s delivery schedule sounded realistic or not. They were just thrilled that someone had decided to take the cheap and fast approach. Some members of the military had already been promoting the idea of giving the armed forces more aggressive space capabilities, or what they called “responsive space.” If a conflict broke out, the military wanted the ability to respond with purpose-built satellites for that mission. This would mean moving away from a model where it takes ten years to build and deploy a satellite for a specific job. Instead, the military desired cheaper, smaller satellites that could be reconfigured through software and sent up on short notice, almost like disposable satellites. “If we could pull that off, it would be really game-changing,” said Pete Worden, a retired air force general, who met with Musk while serving as a consultant to the Defense Department. “It could make our response in space similar to what we do on land, sea and in the air.” Worden’s job required him to look at radical technologies. While many of the people he encountered came off as eccentric dreamers, Musk seemed grounded, knowledgeable, and capable. “I talked to people building ray guns and things in their garages. It was clear that Elon was different. He was a visionary who really understood the rocket technology, and I was impressed with him.”
Like the military, scientists wanted cheap, quick access to space and the ability to send up experiments and get data back on a regular basis. Some companies in the medical and consumer-goods industries were also interested in rides to space to study how a lack of gravity affected the properties of their products.
As good as a cheap launch vehicle sounded, the odds of a private citizen building one that worked were beyond remote. A quick search on YouTube for “rocket explosions” turns up thousands of compilation videos documenting U.S. and Soviet launch disasters that have occurred over the decades. From 1957 to 1966, the United States alone tried to blast more than 400 rockets into orbit and about 100 of them crashed and burned.5 The rockets used to transport things to space are mostly modified missiles developed through all of this trial and error and funded by billions upon billions of government dollars. SpaceX had the advantage of being able to learn from this past work and having a few people on staff that had overseen rocket projects at companies like Boeing and TRW. That said, the start-up did not have a budget that could support a string of explosions. At best, SpaceX would have three or four shots at making the Falcon 1 work. “People thought we were just crazy,” Mueller said. “At TRW, I had an army of people and government funding. Now we were going to make a low-cost rocket from scratch with a small team. People just didn’t think it could be done.”
In July 2002, Musk was gripped by the excitement of this daring enterprise, and eBay made its aggressive move to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion. This deal gave Musk some liquidity and supplied him with more than $100 million to throw at SpaceX. With such a massive up-front investment, no one would be able to wrestle control of SpaceX away from Musk as they had done at Zip2 and PayPal. For the employees who had agreed to accompany Musk on this seemingly impossible journey, the windfall provided at least a couple of years of job security. The acquisition also upped Musk’s profile and celebrity, which he could leverage to score meetings with top government officials and to sway suppliers.
And then all of a sudden none of this seemed to matter. Justine had given birth to a son—Nevada Alexander Musk. He was ten weeks old when, just as the eBay deal was announced, he died. The Musks had tucked Nevada in for a nap and placed the boy on his back as parents are taught to do. When they returned to check on him, he was no longer breathing and had suffered from what the doctors would term a sudden infant death syndrome–related incident. “By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead,” Justine wrote in her article for Marie Claire. “He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died. Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk abo
ut Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as ‘emotionally manipulative.’ I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets.” Later, Justine chalked up Musk’s reaction to a defense mechanism that he’d learned from years of suffering as a kid. “He doesn’t do well in dark places,” she told Esquire magazine. “He’s forward-moving, and I think it’s a survival thing with him.”
Musk did open up to a couple of close friends and expressed the depth of his misery. But for the most part, Justine read her husband right. He didn’t see the value in grieving publicly. “It made me extremely sad to talk about it,” Musk said. “I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future. If you’ve got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you. I’m not sure what should be done in such situations.”
Following Nevada’s death, Musk threw himself at SpaceX and rapidly expanded the company’s goals. His conversations with aerospace contractors around possible work for SpaceX left Musk disenchanted. It sounded like they all charged a lot of money and worked slowly. The plan to integrate components made by these types of companies gave way to the decision to make as much as practical right at SpaceX. “While drawing upon the ideas of many prior launch vehicle programs from Apollo to the X-34/Fastrac, SpaceX is privately developing the entire Falcon rocket from the ground up, including both engines, the turbo-pump, the cryogenic tank structure and the guidance system,” the company announced on its website. “A ground up internal development increases difficulty and the required investment, but no other path will achieve the needed improvement in the cost of access to space.”