How Elon Started SpaceX
Summary
TLDRSpaceX's early years were fraught with challenges, from failed test launches to financial brinks. Elon Musk's vision for Mars colonization led to the creation of 'Mars Oasis' and the pursuit of affordable rocketry. Despite setbacks, including a disastrous trip to Russia for rocket procurement, Musk's perseverance paid off. The successful launch of Falcon 1 marked a turning point, securing a $1.6 billion NASA contract and propelling SpaceX to become a leader in space exploration and innovation.
Takeaways
- 🚀 SpaceX's early days were marked by significant challenges, including failed test launches and financial struggles, highlighting the importance of perseverance.
- 💡 Elon Musk's interest in space travel was the driving force behind SpaceX, which began as a pursuit to reinvigorate interest in Mars colonization.
- 🌱 The 'Mars Oasis' concept aimed to demonstrate the possibility of life on Mars by sending a greenhouse to grow plants, an idea that was part of Musk's broader vision for space exploration.
- 🔍 Musk's initial search for a cost-effective rocket involved various challenges, including a difficult negotiation with Russian suppliers and the realization that inefficiencies in the industry could be addressed.
- 📈 Musk's discovery that only 3% of a rocket's cost came from raw materials led to a new business model for SpaceX, focusing on in-house production and cost reduction.
- 🛰 The development of the Falcon 1 was a bootstrapped effort, with a small team and a limited budget, yet it aimed to deliver small payloads to orbit, a niche in the market that was growing due to smaller telecommunications satellites.
- 🔧 The hiring strategy at SpaceX included a mix of experienced industry veterans and young engineering students, reflecting Musk's approach to innovation and cost-effectiveness.
- 🏭 SpaceX's approach to rocket construction was unique, opting for horizontal assembly and in-house manufacturing of critical parts to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
- 🔥 The first three Falcon 1 launches ended in failure, demonstrating the high-risk nature of space exploration and the technical hurdles SpaceX had to overcome.
- 🎉 The successful fourth launch of Falcon 1 was a turning point for SpaceX, securing the company's position in the aerospace industry and leading to a $1.6 billion NASA contract.
- 🌟 The story of SpaceX is one of resilience and innovation, showing how a combination of vision, risk-taking, and persistence can lead to groundbreaking achievements in space exploration.
Q & A
How old is SpaceX as of the script's reference time?
-SpaceX is 20 years old as of the script's reference time.
What significant event in Elon Musk's life was happening in Sydney, Australia in October 2000?
-Elon Musk was in Sydney, Australia to watch the Olympic Games with his girlfriend while PayPal was in turmoil back in the U.S.
What was the 'Mars Oasis' project that Elon Musk proposed?
-The 'Mars Oasis' project was Elon Musk's idea to send a small greenhouse to Mars to grow plants in Martian soil, aiming to show that life was possible on the red planet and reinvigorate interest in space exploration.
What was the initial reaction of Jim Cantrell when Elon Musk first approached him about SpaceX?
-Jim Cantrell initially thought Elon Musk was crazy and was very wary to meet him in person due to Elon's claim of being a billionaire who wanted to save humanity by sending rockets to Mars.
Why did Elon Musk and his team travel to Russia to find a rocket?
-They traveled to Russia because after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were thousands of decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could potentially be repurposed as orbital launch vehicles at a lower cost.
What was the outcome of SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 rocket launches?
-The first launch ended in an explosion 33 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded bolt. The second launch failed to reach proper orbit due to the rocket wobbling. The third launch also failed when the first stage accelerated into the second stage after separation.
What was the turning point for SpaceX that allowed them to secure the NASA contract?
-The turning point was the successful launch of the fourth Falcon 1 rocket, which demonstrated SpaceX's capability to design, build, and launch a liquid-fueled rocket to orbit.
What was the significance of the $1.6 billion NASA contract for SpaceX?
-The $1.6 billion NASA contract for 12 supply runs to the International Space Station provided SpaceX with predictable cash flow, allowed them to attract investors and employees, and enabled them to work on bigger projects like the Falcon 9, Dragon capsule, and Starship.
How did Elon Musk's strategy of hiring inexperienced engineering students benefit SpaceX?
-Hiring inexperienced engineering students allowed Elon Musk to keep costs low and fostered a culture of innovation without being constrained by traditional industry practices.
What was Elon Musk's approach to dealing with the inefficiencies in the rocket construction process?
-Elon Musk aimed to streamline the entire rocket construction process by cutting out inefficient subcontractors and building more in-house, which he discovered could significantly reduce costs.
What was the role of Tom Mueller in the early days of SpaceX?
-Tom Mueller joined SpaceX as the first official employee and VP of Propulsion. He was responsible for developing the rocket engines, starting with the Merlin engine, which was crucial for the Falcon 1 rocket.
Outlines
🚀 The Early Struggles of SpaceX
SpaceX's first two decades were marked by significant challenges. Elon Musk, who had been involved with PayPal, turned his attention to space travel after being ousted from the company. He was inspired by the Mars Society and envisioned 'Mars Oasis,' a greenhouse project on Mars. Musk assembled a team to find a rocket for his ambitions but faced high costs and skepticism. A trip to Russia for a cheaper rocket ended in a vodka-fueled fiasco, with Musk even being spat on during tense negotiations. Despite these setbacks, Musk's vision for a cost-effective rocket persisted.
🛠 Building SpaceX from the Ground Up
After unsuccessful attempts to purchase a cost-effective rocket, Elon Musk realized he could build rockets more efficiently by streamlining the construction process and cutting out unnecessary subcontractors. He recruited a team of experts, including Tom Mueller, an experienced rocket engineer, and Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer from Boeing. With a focus on in-house production and a shoestring budget, they began developing the Falcon 1 rocket, designed to carry small payloads to orbit. PayPal's IPO provided additional funding, enabling the租赁 of a large warehouse and further hiring, with an emphasis on fresh engineering talent.
🌌 The Trials and Tribulations of Launching Falcon 1
SpaceX faced numerous hurdles in finding a launch site and conducting successful tests. Initially considering Vandenberg Air Force Base, delays forced them to refurbish facilities on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The first launch of Falcon 1 ended in a fire and explosion due to an overlooked corroded bolt. Subsequent launches also failed, with issues such as wobbling and stage separation problems. Despite these failures, the team remained resilient, and their perseverance was evident in their continued efforts and celebrations of each attempt.
🎉 The Turning Point for SpaceX
The fourth launch of Falcon 1 was a make-or-break moment for SpaceX. With the company on the brink of bankruptcy, the successful launch not only saved SpaceX but also secured a $1.6 billion NASA contract for resupply missions to the International Space Station. This contract provided the financial stability and credibility needed for SpaceX to pursue larger projects, such as the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. The story of SpaceX is a testament to perseverance, as Musk and his team overcame repeated failures and financial challenges to revolutionize the space industry.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡SpaceX
💡Elon Musk
💡Perseverance
💡Bankruptcy
💡Mars Oasis
💡ICBMs
💡Falcon 1
💡Inefficiencies
💡Merlin Engine
💡Kwajalein Atoll
💡NASA Contract
Highlights
SpaceX's early days were marked by numerous challenges including failed test launches and financial struggles.
Elon Musk's interest in space travel and his vision for Mars colonization began with the 'Mars Oasis' idea.
Elon Musk's initial attempts to purchase a rocket involved meetings with French and Russian aerospace companies.
The realization that only 3% of rocket costs came from raw materials led to the decision to build rockets in-house.
SpaceX's innovative approach included building rockets horizontally to reduce costs.
The first official SpaceX employee, Tom Mueller, brought valuable expertise in developing advanced liquid rocket engines.
SpaceX's strategy of hiring young engineering students allowed for cost-effective talent acquisition.
The first three launches of Falcon 1 ended in failure, demonstrating the high-risk nature of space exploration.
A critical moment for SpaceX's survival was the successful fourth launch of Falcon 1, which secured a $1.6 billion NASA contract.
Elon Musk's hands-on approach in recruiting top talent from universities was key to SpaceX's growth.
SpaceX's decision to build a welding workshop for in-house production of rocket parts reflects their commitment to efficiency.
The company's perseverance through multiple launch failures exemplifies the resilience required in the space industry.
The investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was crucial for SpaceX to continue its operations during a financially challenging period.
NASA's openness to awarding a contract to a startup like SpaceX underscores the importance of innovation in the space industry.
The story of SpaceX serves as a powerful lesson in perseverance and the pursuit of ambitious goals.
Transcripts
SpaceX turns 20 years old in a few months, and Elon has certainly made a lot of progress in
that time, but big things have small beginnings. The early days were incredibly difficult for the
company: test launches kept failing, suppliers weren’t delivering, and bankruptcy was always just
around the corner. There was even a group of drunk Russians who almost ruined everything, but we’ll
get to that story in a minute. The early history of SpaceX is a powerful lesson in the importance
of perseverance, so let’s go back to the year two thousand and the very beginning of SpaceX.
It was October, and Elon Musk, who was serving as the CEO of PayPal at the time,
was in Sydney, Australia to watch the Olympic Games with his girlfriend. This wasn’t great
timing though. PayPal was in turmoil as executives and investors argued over which direction to take
the company. This battle came to a head while he was still 7 thousand miles away from the office,
and by the time he made it back to Palo Alto, he was out of a job. Getting fired from PayPal was
definitely not part of Elon’s plan, but there was a silver lining. He had always been interested in
space travel and now that he wasn’t in charge of a growing company, he could spend as much time
as he wanted exploring his true passions. It was a bit of a blessing in disguise, since what he would
go on to build at SpaceX would be dramatically more ambitious than PayPal, but it would require
a ton of work, so he started studying. First, he joined a space-advocacy non-profit called
the Mars Society. The organization was filled with tons of scientists and researchers who were
obsessed with space travel and the colonization of Mars in particular. Elon didn’t want to just
talk about space exploration though, he actually wanted to do it. So he started pitching an idea
he called the “Mars Oasis.” His plan was to send a small greenhouse to Mars that would grow plants
in Martian soil. Elon believed that if people saw concrete evidence that life was possible on
the red planet, it would reinvigorate interest in space exploration. After we landed a man on
the moon, and the space race came to a close, NASA funding fell significantly, and no one was
seriously working on Mars colonization. So Elon got to work. He needed a rocket, and not just any
rocket, a big one. So he assembled a crack team of experts to help him find the ideal rocket. First,
he called Adeo Ressi, who was one of his friends from UPenn back in his college days, but Adeo
didn’t have any space experience, so Elon called Jim Cantrell. Cantrell had worked on various
joint missile defense programs conducted between America and Russia and was perfect for this job,
there was only one problem: he thought Elon was crazy. See, when Cantrell first picked up the
phone, Elon told him that he was a billionaire, which he wasn’t yet, who wanted to save humanity
by sending rockets to Mars. It sounded like the ravings of a madman, so Cantrell was very wary to
meet Elon in person. Just to be safe, he insisted that they meet at the Denver Airport behind the
security checkpoint, so he could guarantee that Elon wouldn’t have any weapons on him.
Fortunately, once they sat down and had a chance to talk through Elon’s full vision,
Cantrell was convinced and agreed to help out. So the three of them flew to Paris,
where they met with a French aerospace company to discuss the purchase of a rocket.
But the only rockets available cost over a hundred million dollars each. Even though Elon was rich,
he wasn’t that rich yet. He only had about $30 million dollars which he had made from the sale of
his first company Zip2, so he had to find another option. The team then flew from Paris to Moscow
in hopes of finding a cheaper rocket. After the fall of the Soviet Union, demilitarization
treaties required that Russia decommission thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles,
or ICBMs. These were well designed rockets, and after you removed the nuclear warhead from them,
they could definitely be used as orbital launch vehicles. While they were in Russia,
Elon and his team scheduled meetings with two separate Russian space organizations.
They thought it would be easy to buy an old ICBM, since they were basically just sitting around
useless at this point, but negotiation with the Russians turned out to be close to impossible. I
really enjoyed Adeo’s account of the whole fiasco, he said: “Then we started having meetings with
the Russian space program, which is basically fueled by vodka. We'd all go into this little
room and every single person had his own bottle in front of him. They'd toast every two minutes,
which means twenty or thirty toasts an hour. 'To space!' 'To America!' 'To America in space!'
I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out
myself.” It seemed like a dead-end, but Elon was willing to do anything to get a deal done.
He spent hours talking to the Russians just in order to get them to open up a bit about what they
actually had in stock. And they weren’t exactly friendly to his inquiries. During one particularly
heated exchange, one of the Russians actually spit on Elon in disgust. But even all those ridiculous
events in Russia didn’t end negotiations entirely. For the next meeting, the Russians flew to Los
Angeles to meet with Elon on his home turf, but they seemed more interested in partying than doing
business. They reportedly called him and asked for $5,000 in cash to go clubbing for the night. Now,
it’s not exactly easy to withdraw 5 grand from a bank on a weekend, and ATMs have limits. But
Elon’s friend Adeo knew someone who worked at the Mondrian in West Hollywood and kept lots of cash
on-hand. It must have been a ridiculous favor to ask someone to borrow thousands of dollars
from the hotel safe, but it worked. The Russians were appeased and spent the night partying. For
their third meeting, Elon was more determined than ever. It was February of 2002 and at this point,
Elon had been trying to find a rocket for over a year with no luck. So he flew to Russia, but
this time, he brought Mike Griffin. This guy was a space industry veteran and actually went on to
lead all of NASA in 2005. Griffin brought a level of seriousness to the discussions that helped
move negotiations forward and Elon was finally able to get a quote. There was only one problem,
it was still too high. The Russians wanted $8 million dollars for a single rocket. Elon was
willing to pay the $8 million dollars, but for that price, he wanted two rockets. The Russians
held firm to their original pricing and wouldn’t cut a deal with Elon, so he stormed out of the
meeting into the freezing Moscow air outside and took a cab back to the airport. On the flight back
to America, Elon’s team ordered a round of drinks to celebrate getting out of Russia alive. But Elon
wasn’t celebrating, he had his laptop open and was already thinking about his next step. He started
building an Excel model for rocket construction costs, and he found something incredible. Only
3 percent of the cost of a rocket came from raw materials like aluminium and copper. There
were a ton of inefficiencies, most of which could be eliminated with careful planning. Historically,
the space industry has operated using a cost-plus model, which means that the rocket manufacturer
will total up their costs and then add a profit margin on top. This leads to perverse incentives
though, since the higher your costs are, the higher your profits will be. And governments are
notoriously bad at demanding lower costs. On that flight, Elon discovered that if he streamlined the
entire rocket construction process and cut out the inefficient subcontractors, he could get
to orbit for a fraction of the industry-standard cost. Even though Elon started by planning to go
straight to Mars, realistically, he had to start smaller. So he settled on a small-payload rocket
where he could prove out his ideas before going bigger. He’d been tracking the industry for years
and found that, until the 1990s, the vast majority of launches were transporting large satellites,
usually for government agencies. Elon couldn’t afford to build a rocket big enough to compete
for these types of contracts, at least initially, but satellites were getting smaller. Increasingly,
smaller telecommunications satellites were providing critical connectivity to private
sector companies and Elon believed that for around $100 million, he could build a rocket that could
get those satellites to orbit. That still wasn’t a ton of money, and a good portion of that was
going to need to go toward designing the rocket engine. Luckily, Elon found the perfect partner.
His name was Tom Mueller, and he’d been obsessed with building model rockets since his childhood.
After graduating from the University of Idaho with a degree in mechanical engineering,
Mueller moved to California and was hired by TRW. While there, Mueller developed several advanced
liquid rocket engines, most notably the TR-106, which generated 650 thousand pounds of thrust.
It was a huge achievement, but after 15 years climbing the corporate ladder,
he was ready for a change. Mueller wanted to move faster and try out new ideas,
but TRW employed over 100 thousand people and was hesitant to take big risks. So Mueller joined a
group of amature rocket enthusiasts called the Reaction Research Society. Everyone had a real
hacker mindset and would drive out to the Mojave Desert to launch rockets they’d build in their own
garages. While Mueller was at one of these events, he met a man named John Garvey. The two hit it off
immediately and started working together on nights and weekends on a completely new idea. They called
the BFR, which, if you follow SpaceX at all, you probably know what that stands for already. Now we
don’t know for sure, but rumor has it that the BFR was the largest amature rocket engine ever built.
It could generate 12 thousand pounds of thrust, and it was enough to impress Elon when he saw
it in person in early 2002. It wasn’t quite strong enough, but it was close. Elon wanted to deliver a
half-ton payload to orbit, and needed 80 thousand pounds of thrust to do it, but he could tell that
Mueller could deliver if he just had a little more budget. So Elon made both Mueller and Garvey
job offers to join SpaceX. Garvey declined, but Mueller signed on as the first official employee
and VP of Propulsion. The team wasn’t complete yet though, Elon would definitely need more talented
engineers to make his dream a reality, so he started recruiting an aerospace engineer named
Chris Thompson to work on the body and structure of the rocket. Thompson had worked at Boeing
and was the perfect person for the job, so he joined SpaceX as employee number 2. This new team
immediately started planning what would become the Falcon 1. The design criteria were pretty simple.
The rocket needed to deliver a half-ton satellite to orbit and not much else. All the reusability
stuff you hear about now-a-days was still a long way away. Just getting off the launchpad in one
piece would be a big enough challenge, and the Falcon 1 had to do it on a shoestring budget. This
was a blessing and a curse though. Obviously it’s tough to build a big rocket without a big budget,
even basic materials are extremely expensive after all. But the SpaceX team was working from
a blank slate, so they didn’t have any legacy technology weighing them down and they could
design completely from first principles. They still needed a bit more money though.
Elon’s $30 million wasn’t quite enough. Luckily, PayPal was just about to go public and Elon
had held on to a huge stake in the company. In February of 2002, the IPO went off flawlessly, and
Elon suddenly had an extra $165 million dollars to play with, and he wasn’t about to just sit on
all that cash. He immediately went out and rented a 30 thousand square foot warehouse in El Segundo,
California to use as a factory. Hiring was also top of mind for Elon, so he hired Hans Koenigsmann
as his VP of Avionics. Before joining SpaceX, Koenigsmann had worked at Microcosm developing
low-cost rockets and knew what it took to deliver quickly without sacrificing on quality. The pieces
were finally coming together, so Elon registered SpaceX as a real company on May 6th of 2002.
To celebrate the occasion, Elon threw a party with a Mariachi band in what looks like a
completely unfurnished office. I guess people don’t need office chairs if they’re dancing.
With most of the leadership team in place, Elon began hiring more engineers to help with the
more technical aspects of rocket development. And his strategy here was really brilliant,
he already had some solid industry veterans in place, so he focused on engineering students with
zero work experience. And he took a very hands on approach here, personally calling universities to
get in contact with the top performing students. It’s hilarious to imagine getting a personal phone
call from Elon Musk while you’re sitting in your dorm room nowadays, but back then, he was
a complete no-name in the aerospace industry. Taking chances on young engineering students
allowed Elon to keep costs low and he extended this thinking to his entire business. He knew that
the space industry had been plagued by complex networks of contractors and subcontractors.
If SpaceX was going to succeed, they would need to do things differently. And Elon really didn’t hold
back when it came to doing things differently. Nearly all rockets are manufactured vertically.
But SpaceX actually found that it would be cheaper to build the entire rocket horizontally instead.
Now, there was some precedent for this, the Russians did it this way, but it definitely
challenged common knowledge here in the States. But that’s the type of creative thinking you need
to employ if you’re going to build a rocket with 200 employees instead of 20 thousand. When you’re
understaffed, the natural reaction is to try and outsource more of the work to third-party
contractors, but Elon really tried to do the opposite. He was constantly trying to bring
any expensive or time-consuming activity in house as soon as possible. SpaceX even spent $10 million
dollars building a welding workshop, just so they could make more critical rocket parts in-house.
This strategy served them well, and by early 2003, the first Merlin engine was ready for testing,
but they couldn’t just turn it on in the El Segundo warehouse. There’s always a risk of
an engine exploding, so you need a big open space to run a safe test. And you know what they say,
everything’s bigger in Texas. So SpaceX headed to McGregor, Texas and set up shop in a defunct
rocket testing facility. The site was pretty well equipped and even had a massive concrete tripod
for mounting rocket engines. The only problem was that McGregor was 1,400 miles from Los Angeles,
so every time the SpaceX engineers wanted to run a test, they had to rent a Hummer and tow the engine
for days to get there. It wasn’t easy, but it got the job done. At least most of the time.
One test was cut short by the United States Secret Service. They pulled up just as the SpaceX
team was about to turn on the engine and stopped the test. It turned out that the Merlin engine,
which had been mounted on the tripod, was pointing directly at President Bush’s ranch,
which wasn’t far from McGregor. They must have had some pretty good intel to pick up the engine,
but the incident led the SpaceX team to make sure to inform the local community before each
test fire. Even though SpaceX now had a viable engine testing facility, they still needed a place
to actually launch the rockets. They initially looked at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California,
which would have been great because it’s so close to the main SpaceX headquarters. But like always,
there was a problem. A Titan 4 rocket with a $1 billion dollar spy satellite on-board was sitting
on the launch pad just waiting to get launched. The schedule for this satellite was constantly
shifting and until it took off, SpaceX couldn’t do anything. The Air Force was worried that if SpaceX
failed, debris from the explosion could damage the billion-dollar satellite. Elon and his team spent
six months waiting for the Air Force to clear the launch site, but eventually they got frustrated
and started looking for a new option. They had already scouted a few potential launchpads out
in the Pacific, and one location stood out in particular. It was the Kwajalein Atoll in the
Marshall Islands and it satisfied a lot of key criteria. It had already been used as a Missile
Defense Test Site and was close to the equator. So SpaceX started refurbishing the facilities in
late 2005 and began to prepare for the launch of Falcon 1. At this point SpaceX was already a few
years behind schedule. The original plan was to launch the first rocket by October of 2003, but
that didn’t matter to Elon, he was still moving incredibly fast by industry standards. In early
2006, the SpaceX team packed up the Falcon 1 and shipped it to Kwajalein by boat. Once it arrived,
the engineers completed the final assembly and were ready to launch. Elon gathered with his team
on the nearby island of Kwajalein to watch the launch, and at first, everything went smoothly.
The first stage Merlin engine ignited and the rocket lifted off, but just 33 seconds later,
the engine caught on fire and exploded. Even though this was the first flight ever, Elon was so
confident that it would work he had loaded the rocket with a fully-functioning satellite,
which crashed through the roof of a storage shed on the island. After digging through the wreckage,
engineers found the culprit responsible for the explosion. It was a single corroded bolt,
which had been overlooked during inspections. Even though this launch was a failure, the SpaceX
team still went out for drinks to celebrate the milestone. They got back to work pretty quickly
and just a few weeks later, the team was ready for launch number two. But traveling to Kwaj
is not easy. The trip from Los Angeles required a five hour flight to Hawaii, an overnight layover,
another flight to the Marshall Islands, and then a military transport ferry to get to the actual
atoll. And island life on this tiny military outpost doesn’t quite compare to Los Angeles.
Since it’s a military site, there aren’t any tourists and the island basically only has
two hotels. The rooms are run down and the TV only shows military channels. There are
two bars on the island and I’m sure that after a few weeks the SpaceX employees basically
knew everyone on a first-name basis. But what the island lacks in entertainment, it more than makes
up for with its beautiful nature. SpaceX employees would spend their free time going scuba diving and
exploring the coral reefs. During World War 2, a German cruiser ship had sunk in the lagoon
and became a beautiful artificial reef, perfect for curious SpaceX divers to explore.
On March 21st, 2007, SpaceX launched their second Falcon 1 rocket. This time, they were a bit more
realistic about their odds of success and used a dummy payload instead of a customer satellite. The
first and second stages both fired successfully this time, but about 4 minutes into the flight,
the rocket started to wobble. The Merlin engine kept working for another 3 minutes, but ultimately
failed to push the rocket into a proper orbit. One year later, SpaceX tried for a third time,
and again they failed to deliver the rocket to orbit. The first stage was working perfectly,
but after it separated from the second stage, it kept accelerating, which caused it to smash
into the back of the second stage. This must have been a crushing defeat for the entire
SpaceX team. They had been working for years on this project and just couldn’t get it to work.
Even worse, the company was now about to run out of money. Elon knew he was close though,
and really wanted to get one more launch together, so he called up his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel
and got him to invest $20 million dollars in the company. Now this might sound like a
lot of money for most startups, but at SpaceX, it would only cover a few months of expenses,
so they had to work quickly. There was a glimmer of hope on the horizon though… NASA was about to
award a massive $1.6 billion dollar contract for 12 supply runs to the International Space Station.
All the usual big names would be competing for the contract, but NASA was open to giving a
startup like SpaceX a real shot. This was the chance that Elon needed to save the company,
but there was no way he could win the contract without a successful launch under his belt. There
was no time to build an entirely new Falcon 1 from scratch, but SpaceX did have a spare rocket in the
LA factory. So the team packed up the rocket and rented a military cargo plane to fly the rocket to
the launch site. A small group of SpaceX employees rode in the plane with the rocket, and it’s good
that they did. As the plane started to descend, they noticed that dents were starting to form in
the rocket’s body. The pressure levels inside the rocket were destabilizing and it could implode at
any minute. So one of the engineers stepped up to fix the problem, and in doing so, probably saved
the entire company. He climbed inside the rocket and used a wrench to open a valve that equalized
the pressure. The plane landed safely and the rocket was still in one piece, so after a few
minor repairs, SpaceX was ready to launch. This time around, everything worked perfectly. This
was Elon’s last chance to keep SpaceX alive and he’d done it. SpaceX had just become the first
commercial company in history to design, build, and launch a liquid-fueled rocket to orbit.
That fourth launch marked a turning point for SpaceX. Just a few months later, Elon and his
brother Kimbal were on a family trip to Disneyland when Elon received a call. It was NASA. SpaceX
had just won the $1.6 billion dollar contract. This changed everything for SpaceX. Even though
they wouldn’t receive all the money upfront, it provided predictable cash flow and allowed them to
attract investors and employees. SpaceX was now a real space company and they could start working on
bigger projects like the Falcon 9, Dragon capsule, and Starship. I love the story of SpaceX because
it’s all about perseverance. Watching a rocket that you spent years designing and building go up
in flames just a few minutes after launch has to be crushing. But Elon never let that get him down.
He always found a way to get one more chance, because he knew what he was building was worth
fighting for. If you want to learn more about SpaceX, just drop your email at johncoogan.com
and please check out this recommended video, the YouTube algorithm thinks you’ll really like it.
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