Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Trillion-Dollar Space Race
by Christian Davenport · 6 Sep 2025 · 441pp · 127,950 words
in the presidential race. FEBRUARY 2021: The White House announces that Artemis will continue under President Biden. APRIL 2021: SpaceX wins the moon lander contract over Blue Origin. MAY 2021: SpaceX lands its Starship SN15 prototype. MAY 2021: China lands a spacecraft on Mars. JUNE 2021: China launches the first crew to inhabit
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. NOVEMBER 2022: NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launches the un-crewed Orion spacecraft around the moon in the Artemis I mission. APRIL 2023: SpaceX launches the Starship Super Heavy booster and spacecraft for the first time. MAY 2023: Blue Origin wins a NASA contract to build a lunar lander. SEPTEMBER 2023
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at sea or designated landing pads with such frequency that it was considered routine. This was different. On this day, October 13, 2024, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket would instead attempt to fly back to its launch pad, where it would be caught with a pair of mechanical chopstick-like arms
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taking humans farther into space than ever before. As it sought to compete with SpaceX, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin wanted to know whether Starship could indeed become a next-generation vehicle that might lead to SpaceX further dominating the space industry, or was a delusion that only Musk could see
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in Boca Chica and wouldn’t have gone if he had been. All this attention on Starship was distracting from what should be SpaceX’s top priority, he felt: NASA’s Commercial Crew program to launch American astronauts from American soil. The president had said in his State of
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continued. In fact, most of the company’s resources were dedicated to that mission, not to Starship. “You have no right to do this,” he said. Bridenstine stood his ground and reminded Musk of how SpaceX’s Dragon capsule had just exploded. “Elon, you told me when we met in Hawthorne that
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well, keeping its proposal alive for the final round. While Blue Origin and Dynetics were developing landers that resembled the ones used during Apollo, SpaceX’s Starship was entirely different. It was massive and massively complicated, a fully reusable system that would require multiple refuelings in Earth orbit before going to the
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launched Behnken and Hurley to the International Space Station. When Bridenstine had publicly chastised Musk for spending too much attention on Starship and not enough on Dragon, Musk had argued that SpaceX could focus on both simultaneously. It appeared Musk was right. Despite Bridenstine’s public castigation and the subsequent meeting at
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sped up. On a Saturday less than a week after Hurley and Behnken successfully lifted off—but before SpaceX had flown them home safely— SpaceX employees received an email from Musk. “We need to accelerate Starship progress,” he wrote, adding that it needed to happen “dramatically and immediately.” He urged employees working at
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wanted white cones, so the security teams used those instead, especially when they knew the boss was going to be around. SPACEX’S URGENCY WAS not just about making Starship a viable candidate for NASA’s Artemis program. There was an election coming up, and there were no assurances that, if
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spacecraft. Its design still seemed to mimic the architecture of agriculture more than aerospace. “No, This Isn’t a Flying Grain Silo. It’s SpaceX’s Starship Prototype,” was CNN’s headline. However seemingly unfit to leave terra firma as it may have been, the silo did fly. It was only a
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tweeted. Even Trump noticed. Although NASA had nothing to do with the test, he took credit for SpaceX’s success. Trump retweeted NASAspaceflight.com, a group of SpaceX and space enthusiasts who had been diligently chronicling Starship’s progression, perhaps confusing the account with NASA’s official Twitter handle. “NASA was Closed & Dead
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my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.” The ad soon came down. WHILE SPACEX HAD been publicly showing off its Starship testing campaign—fireballs and all—Blue Origin was keeping a lower profile. Despite the size of the “national team,” the companies worked
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brief. The protest also irritated Musk, who took Blue Origin’s criticism of NASA as criticism of SpaceX. His company’s victory wasn’t some sort of fluke. SpaceX had been making real progress with Starship, flying the prototypes in Texas one after the other. Blue had done almost nothing by comparison. Its
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people and property on the ground. In December 2020, with Musk pushing his engineers to work ever faster, SpaceX planned to launch a Starship prototype. The FAA had not signed off on the flight, but SpaceX launched anyway—a short hop, several miles high, that ended in a crash landing and fireball. No
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that same night, after 1:00 A.M., he demanded: “Anyone who is not working on obviously critical path projects at SpaceX should shift immediately to work on the first Starship orbit. Please fly, drive, or get here by any means possible.” Were Blue Origin’s employees working in shifts around the
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the first round of the contracts, Bezos wrote, and since then the company had developed a spacecraft “that could achieve a human landing in 2024.” SpaceX’s Starship, by contrast, was a far riskier bet because it would be refueled in Earth orbit, requiring a fleet of tanker spacecraft. That approach “locks
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pushing to get the White House’s budget office to give the agency the resources it needed to fund a second lander. As impressive as SpaceX was, Starship was a risky, unproven rocket, and Nelson disagreed with the decision to award it a solo contract. He wanted another option in case it
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fly back and forth between the Earth and moon. The key to the entire system was the ability to store propellant in space, something SpaceX would need for Starship as well. As Bezos told me later, the design was “completely different” than the one in its previous bid. “There’s no
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longer, flying back and forth between destinations, like the Earth and the moon, or even Mars. Now, with Starship and Blue Moon, two companies were working on it. Having already won a contract, SpaceX was ineligible to bid, meaning Blue’s only competition was Dynetics, which had finished third in the previous
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mission that recalled the early, swash-buckling days of space exploration. At the same time, SpaceX’s army in South Texas was continuing to develop Starship, pushing it through an intense test campaign that encapsulated the force SpaceX had become: explosions and fiery failures mixed with seemingly impossible triumphs, all while Musk continued
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they went. With a newly installed water deluge system, the following flights didn’t blow up the pad, and SpaceX continued to make progress until it felt it could finally try to land the Starship booster. Unlike the Falcon 9, which touched down on a ship at sea or on landing pads
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a Goliathan projectile, laden with millions of gallons of combustible propellant, the FAA had diverted all air traffic well to the north and south of SpaceX’s Starship launch site, like an invisible dam disrupting the flow of a river. In the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard had been
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and proclaimed, “The Eagle has landed.” In the darkness over the Indian Ocean, a camera that SpaceX had positioned on a buoy at the spacecraft’s intended landing site captured the final moments of Starship’s descent. The ship flipped itself to vertical and, firing its engines to slow itself to a
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first attempt! @jeffbezos” he wrote on X, his social media platform. “Thank you,” Bezos responded, adding an emoji of gratitude. Musk and SpaceX were preparing for the next Starship test flight, scheduled for later that day. Now it was Bezos’s turn to demonstrate goodwill on Musk’s X. “Good luck today
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NASA needed “an off-ramp for reliance” on SLS. If SLS was no longer NASA’s main heavy-lift rocket, that would directly benefit SpaceX with its Starship rocket. And now that New Glenn had flown, it could help Blue Origin as well. Bezos had been quick to appease the Trump White
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seemed that success—and keeping pace with Musk—would come not just through engineering but politics as well. In the months to follow, SpaceX would continue to sprint forward. Starship, already the largest rocket in the world, would grow taller and able to hold even more propellant, making it even more powerful
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would she plant, and what would be her name? NOTES INTRODUCTION 2 China has paid SpaceX: Andrew Jones, “China Unveils Fully Reusable Starship-Like Rocket Concept,” SpaceNews, November 14, 2024, https://spacenews.com/china-unveils-fully-reusable-starship-like-rocket-concept/. 3 Assembling the International Space Station: NASA, “Station Facts,” https://www.
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april/. 182 Steel could handle both: Ryan D’Agostino, “Elon Musk: Why I’m Building the Starship Out of Stainless Steel,” Popular Mechanics, January 22, 2019, https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a25953663/elon-musk-spacex-bfr-stainless-steel/. 182 Starlink satellites: Caleb Henry, “Musk: We’re Not Spinning Off Starlink,” Space
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a Year,” CNN, September 29, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2019/09/29/elon-musk-starship-interview-orig.cnn. 188 “drogue parachutes”: Anna C. Heiney, “Top 10 Things to Know For NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 Return,” NASA, July 24, 2020, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/top-10
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Proposal,” Spaceflight Now, May 1, 2020, https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/05/01/nasa-identifies-risks-in-spacexs-starship-lunar-lander-proposal/. 221 It burst: Jeff Foust, “SpaceX Starship Suffers Testing Setback,” SpaceNews, November 20, 2019, https://spacenews.com/spacex-starship-suffers-testing-setback/. 221 “It will definitely get fancier”: Dave Mosher, “Inside the ‘Awkward,’ ‘Tense,’ and
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‘Heated’ Private Meeting Between Elon Musk and Texans Whom SpaceX Is Trying to Buy Out to Fully Realize
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Its Vision to Reach Mars,” Business Insider, October 15, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex
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-than-getting-space/. 223 The first, SN-1: Tariq Malik, “SpaceX’s Starship SN1 Prototype Appears to Burst During Pressure Test,” Space.com, March 1, 2020, https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-sn1-prototype-bursts-videos.html. 223 SN-3 collapsed: Jeff Foust, “Third Starship Prototype Destroyed in Tanking Test,” SpaceNews, April 3, 2020, https
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://spacenews.com/third-starship-prototype-destroyed-in-tanking-test/. 223 “We need to accelerate”: Michael Sheetz, “Elon
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June 7, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/07/elon-musk-email-to-spacex-employees-starship-is-the-top-priority.html#:~:text=%22We%20need%20to%20accelerate%20Starship,SpaceX%20unveiled%20the%20latest%20prototype. 225 more than $30 billion: Michael Sheetz, “SpaceX Valuation Rises to $33.3 Billion as Investors Look to Satellite Opportunity,” CNBC
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/2023/11/15/media/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-people/index.html. 254 “exceed the maximum”: Jeff Foust, “SpaceX Violated Launch License in Starship SN8 Launch,” SpaceNews, February 2, 2021, https://spacenews.com/spacex-violated-launch-license-in-starship-sn8-launch/. 255 “You did an awesome job”: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023),
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https://www.engadget.com/amazon-elon-musk-rules-are-for-other-people-fcc-filing-084518762.html. 256 Finally, in May: Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Lands Starship Spacecraft in First Full Successful Test Flight,” The Washington Post, May 5, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/elon-musks
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-spacex-lands-starship-spacecraft-first-time/. 257 “I think we’re close”: Christian Davenport, “2021 Was a Huge Year for Space Exploration. 2022 Could Be Even Bigger,” The
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Crisis Is Creating a ‘Risk of Bankruptcy,’ ” CNBC, November 30, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-to-spacex-starships-raptor-engine-crisis-risks-bankruptcy.html#:~:text=%22The%20Raptor%20production%20crisis%20is,every%20two%20weeks%20next%20year.%22. 289 “Physics does not care”: Walter Isaacson,
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-dawn-spacewalk-astronauts/. 304 “could turn out to be”: Mike Wall, “Why Did SpaceX’s Starship Debut Launch Cause So Much Damage to the Pad?,” Space.com, April 24, 2023, https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-damage-starbase-launch-pad. 305 “the pressure that was built”: B. Dotson, P. Metzger, J. Hafner, A. Shackelford
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lnms/LNM0840g2024.pdf. 306 “thousands of distinct”: Will Robinson-Smith, “Live Updates: SpaceX to Attempt First Booster Catch During the Starship 5 Mission,” October 13, 2024, https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/13/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-5th-flight-test-of-starship-from-starbase-in-southern-texas/. 306 “We’re only going to attempt
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”: Starship’s Fifth Flight Test, SpaceX, October 13, 2024, https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-5. 307 “Vehicle is pitching downrange”: Starship: Fifth Flight Test, SpaceX, November 6, 2024, https
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI9HQfCAw64. 310 SpaceX won them all: Stephen Clark, “SpaceX Prevails over ULA, Wins Military
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Built Exploded Over a Populated Island. Residents Are Still Dealing with the Fallout,” CNN, February 1, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/science/spacex-starship-explosion-debris-turks-caicos/index.html. EPILOGUE 319 In late 2024: Jeff Foust, “NASA Further Delays Next Artemis Missions,” Space-News, December 5, 2024, https
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space exploration focus of, 5–6, 250–51, 286–88, 315 (See also Blue Origin) space travel by, 265–69, 271, 274–78, 286 on SpaceX’s Starship, 4, 5 on Trump, 21–22, 162–63 Trump administration (2024) ingratiation by, 313, 314–15, 316 vision for space, 7, 11–13, 25
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160–61, 162–63, 164–65, 247, 248, 251 leadership duties, 68–69, 81–82, 216 leadership style, 279–83, 303 on SpaceX’s developments, 4–5 on Starship by Space X, 4–5 successes at Blue Origin, 300 Washington Post ad, 218–19 Space Corps, 77, 93 Space Council. See National
Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age
by Eric Berger · 23 Sep 2024 · 375pp · 113,230 words
life, ready to burst into the sky above and noisily proclaim a new era of spaceflight. This was Starship. After two decades of relentless toil, Elon Musk had pushed and cajoled and bullied and single-mindedly driven SpaceX to the precipice of history. His company had launched hundreds of rockets. But
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Starship was its first that might, one day, make good on Musk’s fever dream of sending humans to Mars
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the ocean and empty space. Only the cramped Apollo crew compartment came home, and these capsules went into museums after each flight. With Starship, Musk and his company SpaceX sought to build an entirely reusable rocket. The first stage of the rocket, named Super Heavy, would fly back to the launch
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site and hover, to be plucked from the air by large robotic arms and refueled for another flight soon after. The Starship upper stage would
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then fly again and again. That was the vision, at least. This first Starship, which triggered Musk’s anxiety, was merely a full-sized prototype. Things could go wrong. Things probably would. SpaceX had invested billions of dollars into the launch facility, building a massive spaceport in a remote corner of
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to wobble, and this triggered its self-destruct mechanism. As big things often do, the Starship era began with a bang. A few days later Musk expressed appreciation for his employees. “I thought the SpaceX team did amazing work,” he said. “And this is really one of the hardest technical projects
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did it. To know where SpaceX is going, and why they just might get there, it is critical to understand how its people built the future. This is their story. It is also the story of Elon Musk and his outsized spaceflight ambitions. Moments after Starship broke apart in the sky,
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. Musk was a fraud, had always been a fraud, and finally the world was finding out. But with equal energy, defenders pointed out that Starship was an experimental rocket, and that SpaceX was willing to fail in order to go fast. So what is the truth? It is this: Musk founded
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’s vison for traveling to Mars, as well. It is no coincidence that Diez ended up leading Starship engineering. During these years, in company-wide gatherings, Musk would deliver his usual spiel about founding SpaceX to make life multiplanetary, to settle Mars, and so on. Justin Richeson, who was helping to
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ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable.” The challenge of building thousands of Starships, and the difficulty of refueling them on Mars, reveals something fundamental about how Musk and SpaceX see their path to the stars. NASA explores. During Apollo, it sent a pair of astronauts
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expectations. Altan returned to the company just after the AMOS-6 failure and ahead of Musk’s Starship presentation in Mexico. SpaceX had its hands full with returning the Falcon 9 to flight and designing Starship. Now they were supposed to become the world’s largest satellite operator, by a factor of
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more than ten? “Elon made it clear that Starlink had to work,” Altan said. “It was going to be the moneymaker for SpaceX, and fund everything we were
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options.” To pay for Mars, then, Musk made a huge bet in the mid-2010s. SpaceX initiated not one but two massive projects, Starship and Starlink, simultaneously. Neither project had any precedent in history. Starship would be bigger and more powerful than NASA’s mighty Saturn V rocket and needed to be
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reusable many times over. Starlink was far larger and more ambitious than any satellite constellation in history. Both projects were likely to fail. “Here’s how Elon thinks about this,” Altan explained. “If SpaceX
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towns and cities with abundant restaurants, hotels, and amenities. Walt Disney World is less than an hour away. By contrast, the land SpaceX acquired for its Starship launch site in South Texas is probably the most remote beachfront property in the United States on the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico
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. In early 2019 the South Texas team began fabricating a miniature Starship prototype nicknamed Starhopper. After this stubby vehicle made short test flights in July and August 2019, SpaceX retired it. A few months later, Muratore took a break from SpaceX, and Rench found himself in the role of site director, reporting
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wrongly, there are no committees. He is a committee of one. This is a key reason why SpaceX moves so quickly. “That same weekend he asked me what we really needed to build the Starship factory,” Rench said. “So I basically started pointing at all the land around Boca Chica, and
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Crew Dragon. Three years after the Guadalajara speech, these tensions boiled over again. It was September 2019, and SpaceX employees were working feverishly to complete the very first full-size prototype of Starship, named Mk1. They faced a deadline of September 28, when Musk had scheduled a showy public unveiling in
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your brewery might have its fucking thing two weeks late but consider one versus the other.” Musk was focusing the totality of SpaceX’s effort on completing the Starship prototype for an event planned on a starry Saturday night in South Texas later that month. He was willing to spend lavishly
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that would never launch, for an arbitrary deadline and a glitzy showcase. This frantic focus on Starship rankled the NASA administrator at the time, a former fighter pilot and congressman named Jim Bridenstine. SpaceX and Boeing were two years behind their original schedules, and each still faced serious challenges before flying
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help but give vent to his emotions. On the day before Musk’s ballyhooed Starship unveiling, Bridenstine tweeted some words that reflected his frustration with what he viewed as SpaceX’s misplaced priorities. “I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow,” Bridenstine said. “In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind
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propulsion tanks had been complex, Starship would aspire to simplicity in its design. Over and over again in meetings Musk would say, “The best part is no part.” Touchscreens, space tuxedos, and other Crew Dragon concerns Powered landings were not the only sticking point in SpaceX’s contract with NASA for
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Musk’s prioritization of Starship—when Dragon was so close to being ready to fly, and the country so desperately needed its capability to break NASA’s dependence on Russia for crew transport to the space station—pushed Jim Bridenstine to tweet about it being time for SpaceX to deliver. He was
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frustrated and angry, and he wanted to get Musk’s attention. I spoke with Musk in the immediate aftermath of the tweet. He’d staged the Starship event that had sparked Bridenstine’s ire, revealing the
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he and Bridenstine reached a detente. A day or two after the Starship event, Musk called Bridenstine. Despite the ruffled feathers, the chief of NASA and the leader of SpaceX worked through their frustrations. Two weeks later Bridenstine visited the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, and Musk updated him on the company’s efforts
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light bulb went off,” she said. There have always been competing priorities at SpaceX. A decade earlier Cargo Dragon competed with the Falcon 9 rocket for resources. Then came the Grasshopper and recovery programs, followed by Starlink and Starship. There were only so many engineers, programmers, and technicians to go around,
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most valuable payloads into orbit. The Falcon Heavy had a still more profound effect on SpaceX employees, while inspiring the young engineers who would come to work on the Starship project. It marked the culmination of everything SpaceX had done during its first decade and a half. The company built a rocket
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with one engine, then nine, and now three times that. During just the previous year, SpaceX roared back from its second failure
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with eighteen successful launches. It proved that landings worked and that a private company could build the world’s largest rocket. The flawless liftoff and dual booster landing hinted that the audacious Starship project might be possible after all
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. It marked the end of the beginning for SpaceX, and the beginning of what would come next. “Nothing felt unachievable at that point,” Hansen said. What
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headquarters in Hawthorne. A Japanese businessman, Yusaku Maezawa, revealed that he had signed up to fly a sortie around the Moon on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. “I’ll tell you, it’s done a lot to restore my faith in humanity,” Musk said, seated in front of the end
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and help fund this new project that’s risky, might not succeed, and is dangerous.” Maezawa was Starship’s first paying customer, but Smith was not impressed. He viewed Starship as a distraction from SpaceX’s core business, the Falcon 9 rocket. And so Smith emailed his company the following: From: Bob
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Smith Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 7:30 AM Given the SpaceX announcement and our benchmarking of their best practices, there
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’s a lot to be inspired by here and opportunities for us to catch up and surpass them as they get distracted by BFR and Starlink. -RHS- The “BFR” mentioned is what Starship was then known as
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. Everywhere else, it simply meant Big Fucking Rocket, because that’s what it was. Smith believed Musk’s fixation on Starship and Starlink would give Blue Origin time to surpass SpaceX in the launch business. Bezos’s own large rocket, named New Glenn, was due to make its debut in 2020.
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Smith could not have been more wrong. In the first five years after Smith sent the email, SpaceX launched more than 175 additional orbital rockets, including Starship. Blue Origin has yet to launch any. Its New Glenn rocket should finally fly in 2024. Smith also fundamentally misjudged
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the commitment Musk and SpaceX made to Starship and Starlink. This backfired badly when, in April 2021, SpaceX won the much-coveted contract to land humans on the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis Program to
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return astronauts there. The next humans to walk on the gray and dusty lunar surface almost certainly will do so by stepping off Starship. Bezos and Smith were
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incensed and sued NASA for a second chance. As for Starlink, by the end of 2023 it started to turn a profit for SpaceX. Smith, who was finally fired in September 2023, is far
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the launcher market paradigm as we know it,” he wrote in a commentary. “With the dependable reliability of Falcon 9 and the captivating prospects of Starship, SpaceX continues to totally redefine the world’s access to space, pushing the boundaries of possibility as they go along. Europe, on the other hand, finds
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into orbit as the human spaceflight programs in Russia and China combined. Then there is Starship, the largest and most powerful, and potentially most disruptive, rocket ever built. SpaceX has lapped the world in spaceflight, and with Starship, the steamroller is coming around for another pass. A few weeks after remarking on
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hit send on a companywide email. Though Dragon had barely been lifted from the water, it was time to pivot. “Please consider the top SpaceX priority to be Starship,” Musk wrote. The company needed to “dramatically and immediately” accelerate progress. He urged employees to seriously consider relocating to South Texas to work
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truly sustainable deep space exploration possible. Artemis will go as far as Starship goes. And if Artemis is a success, it opens the pathway to Mars for NASA and SpaceX, and the red planet’s eventual settlement. The future is right there for the taking, and we dare not miss this
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is building a fully reusable lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Program. (It’s years behind Starship.) That effort is being led by a familiar face, John Couluris, who led the C2 mission for SpaceX in 2012. I hope he crushes it. Bezos also has a Starlink competitor called Project Kuiper
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doing business with his companies. This seems highly unlikely, at least in the near term. The Falcon rockets, Dragon spacecraft, Starlink satellite constellation, and Starship vehicle are essential to major U.S. civil and military initiatives. But decision-makers and political leaders are watching Musk and his actions, and they
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force. It is important for SpaceX and the Mars vision that this continues. The Falcon 9 is the most reliable, advanced, and cost-effective rocket in the world. And yet Musk is pushing his engineering teams every day to obsolete it as rapidly as possible with Starship. An established company does
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rockets’ horizontal velocity and Rose on rules and regulations and SES-9 launch and Shotwell and SLC-40 site and spacesuits SpaceX founded by and SpaceX philosophy and Starlink and Starship success of at Tesla on test tripod and Thompson and transporter erector Twitter acquisition by and ULA creation vision of and webcasts
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, Vladimir Python, Monty Quayle, Dan Ramamurthy, Bala Reisman, Garrett Relativity Space Rench, Phillip reusable rockets. see also Starship Delta Clipper densification needed for Falcon 9 (see Falcon 9) as goal of SpaceX hydraulic systems for maintenance on NASA’s attempts at recovery of Russia’s view of Richeson, Justin Ridings, Holly
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of United Launch Alliance rivalry with unorthodox philosophy of work culture of SR-71 “Blackbird,” Stafford, Thomas stage separation system stage telemetry Starhopper Starliner Starlink Starship Star Wars program Stewart, Cory Stoke Space Strategic Defense Initiative Stults, Sam Suffredini, Mike SuperDraco thrusters Taylor, Mike TEA-TEB flow Tenenbaum, Jason Tesla
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
by Eric Berger · 2 Mar 2021 · 304pp · 89,879 words
5. Selling Rockets 6. Flight Two 7. Texas 8. Flight Three 9. Eight Weeks 10. Flight Four 11. Always Go to Eleven Epilogue Acknowledgments Key SpaceX Employees from 2002 to 2008 Timeline Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Prologue September 14, 2019
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the first prototype of his Mars rocket, nicknamed Starhopper. Musk traveled to his South Texas rocket factory in mid-September 2019 to track progress of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, the culmination of nearly two decades of effort to move humans from Earth to Mars. Weeks earlier, Starhopper soared into the clear skies
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settlement, Musk thinks he probably needs to ship 1 million tons to Mars. This is why he is building the massive, reusable Starship vehicle in Texas. In many ways, SpaceX is vastly different today from the company Musk started long ago. But in important ways, it remains exactly the same. With the
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Starship project, SpaceX has returned to its earliest, scrappy days when it strove to build the Falcon 1 rocket against all odds. Then, as now, Musk pushed his
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innovate, to test, and to fly. The DNA of the earliest days, of the Falcon 1 rocket, lives on in South Texas today at the Starship factory. And a huge photo of a Falcon 1 launch hangs on the wall of Musk’s personal conference room at the company’s headquarters
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hours touring his rocket shipyard in South Texas. Through the night, as a full moon rose, employees banged and welded and hefted a full-sized Starship prototype from rolls of stainless steel. The hour had reached near midnight when he and his boys emerged from a construction trailer. As his kids
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tumbled into the waiting black SUV, Musk paused to look up at the towering Starship under construction. It appeared as much a skyscraper as a spaceship. Taking it all in, a childlike smile broke out over his face. “Hey,”
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Segundo, and it allowed them to capture basic flaws with early prototypes, fix their designs, and build successively more “finished” iterations. An independent company like SpaceX can afford the latter approach, said planetary scientist Phil Metzger. He cofounded the Swamp Works project at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in 2012 to
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returned to my hotel, preparing to fly back to Houston, when the assistant called back that evening. Musk had decided to visit the company’s Starship build site in South Texas that weekend and wanted to know if I cared to tag along. We could do the interview during the flight
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rocket. And then they were ready. In the spring of 2005, the company trucked its first complete rocket to Vandenberg. From the beginning, Musk understood SpaceX could not become a sustainable, profitable business from government launch contracts alone. Although the prospect of a low-cost, launch-on-demand rocket appealed to
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Mango said. A month or so later, discussions continued during meetings at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in northern Alabama. Musk and a few other SpaceXers flew into Huntsville, and Mango reciprocated the dinner invitation. Huntsville could not match the sophistication of Southern California’s restaurant scene, but it did have
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that day, conferencing with engineers back in California, plotting logistics, or working with Army officials to secure the necessary permissions to launch a rocket. Some SpaceXers, like Chinnery, essentially moved to the atoll and spent almost the entire second half of 2005 on Kwajalein and Omelek. Others, like Koenigsmann, with his
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dithering about stuff. If they knew they needed to ship stuff, they just shipped stuff.” When possible during the development of their Omelek launch site, SpaceX took the quick-and-dirty approach, sacrificing polish and sophistication for expediency. For example, the engineers decided they did not need a fancy “transporter” to
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program sputtered. Koenigsmann thought he might have found a solution for this problem after he first met Musk in early 2002, before the creation of SpaceX. An investment from the multimillionaire might invigorate Microcosm’s rocket program. Eager to introduce Musk to Wertz, Koenigsmann arranged a meeting to discuss Scorpius and
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million dollars each for design studies. While some awards went to established companies such as Lockheed Martin, the majority were given to smaller firms like SpaceX. Ultimately, SpaceX and AirLaunch, which aimed to drop its rocket from a C-17 aircraft, emerged as finalists. AirLaunch never reached space. D.A.R.P
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in spaceflight. “Before this there were a handful of companies serving the government and commercial launch needs, and it was more of a cartel situation.” SpaceX changed expectations with its low prices and transparency. Shotwell signed her first launch contract in 2003, to orbit a small experimental satellite named TacSat for
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his work, at times, did not meet the exacting standards needed for successful rocket flight.” Musk also expressed goodwill toward Thomas, who remained with SpaceX for about a decade afterward. “I was at his retirement party and expressed my appreciation for his contributions in the strongest possible terms,” Musk said
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take the time needed, as nearly a full year passed between the first and second flights of the rocket. Gradually, throughout the rest of 2006, SpaceX began adopting more traditional aerospace practices. During a conventional rocket assembly process, someone meticulously records the serial number of every component or part added during
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decades of Boeing aerospace heritage, Maser did indeed bring gravitas, and he helped institute some of the inventory control and quality inspection measures that spurred SpaceX’s maturation between its first and second flights. But some employees, such as Koenigsmann, interpreted Maser’s attitude as arrogance. To them, the new
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boss acted like he knew more about rockets than anyone at SpaceX. Koenigsmann had reasons for his frustrations. Maser was hard on the avionics chief, imposing rigorous qualification tests for the Falcon 1 computers that exceeded real
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the engineers would perform the prelaunch static fire test. All of this testing required copious amounts of LOX. To supply liquid oxygen to the rocket, SpaceX ordered five-thousand-gallon containers shipped from the mainland. During the monthlong transit across mostly tropical waters, about one third of each super-chilled tank
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early 1990s, in an effort to become more efficient and businesslike, NASA adopted a “Faster, Better, Cheaper” approach to space science missions. By the time SpaceX was founded, however, several high-profile NASA missions had employed this philosophy and failed. For any aerospace project, the joke became that you could never
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why we fight for mass, and we fight for every fraction of a second of ISP,” said Musk, who now wages this war with the Starship launch system, which he hopes will fulfill his goal of settling Mars. This ambitious spaceship sounds like science fiction. The monstrous first stage rocket has
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twenty-eight large Raptor engines. The second stage, Starship, may one day carry dozens of people to Mars and is designed to be reusable. Because of this it must set aside mass, already at
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but Secret Service agents remained resident at the ranch throughout his presidency. The agents asked a lot of pointed questions, and were not happy. Although SpaceX could not reorient the test stands, the company did gradually begin to get better about warning the surrounding community about future tests. Mueller’s team
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a different new space company that summer, Blue Origin, after graduating from Duke University. Although Bezos’s space company was far more secretive than SpaceX, it shared the same basic philosophy—disrupting the aerospace industry by radically reducing the cost of getting people and stuff into orbit. Following a series
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The impact threw Dunn over the cart’s steering wheel, but he walked away from the accident. The employees on the boat laughed uproariously. Some SpaceXers who stayed overnight fished the coral reefs surrounding Omelek, though they released anything they caught. Small organisms that grow on tropical coral reefs produce ciguatoxin
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everyone gathered around at dinnertime and really enjoyed just sitting down, and relaxing. We would always watch the same movies over and over again, like Starship Troopers. The most important thing is that the camaraderie was great.” The overnighters also built a wooden deck attached to the trailer. From there, they
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climbing toward a cruising altitude above thirty thousand feet. Inside, the cargo compartment took on something of a party atmosphere. Wearing jeans and jackets, the SpaceXers relaxed and soaked up the moment. Steve Cameron, a propulsion technician, broke out an acoustic guitar. They were having the time of their lives.
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the station. The backup plan moved to the front burner. As a result, NASA accelerated the process of awarding contracts for actual supply missions. Although SpaceX, with Dragon, and Orbital Sciences, with its Cygnus vehicle, won COTS development contracts, NASA had no requirement to pick them for the operational phase
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conclusion. When he spoke with engineering peers at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the University of Southern California, he heard similar things. SpaceX had juice with their students, too: the freedom to innovate and resources to go fast summoned the best engineers in the land. Competitors began to
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also won cargo and crew contracts from NASA, and now has its eyes on deep space. From these profits SpaceX has been able to invest in Musk’s ambitious Starship program, which he believes is critical to sending enough people and cargo to Mars to establish a self-sustaining settlement. The
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so. Now his company, with Musk’s constant urging and the accumulated knowledge of the last twenty years, is building the Starship vehicle to one day carry settlers to Mars. SpaceX has undeniably come a long way from its scrappy beginnings in El Segundo, and the desperation of trying to launch from
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entice Firefly to launch from Vandenberg, Air Force officials have eagerly helped, and proactively found solutions to problems. “There is just no question that without SpaceX it would not have happened,” she said. “They convinced everybody else that commercial space is a real thing. And when they did that, the
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in terms of price and performance, Musk pushed for rapid reuse, and then the Falcon Heavy, and a Starlink internet constellation as well as the Starship and Super Heavy Launch System. This incredible pressure wore down his employees, but for someone like Musk who sees only a narrow window to execute
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the bleeding edge of the possible, be it through landing rockets on boats or building interplanetary Starships. SpaceX wants to go to Mars, after all, something no company, space agency, or country has ever done. Will SpaceX get there? Maybe not. But for the adventurous it sure beats pushing a pencil at a
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company, helping to channel the talents of its mostly younger workforce. While many of the brightest engineers have turned their starry-eyed countenances on the Starship program, as vice president of mission assurance, Koenigsmann remains focused on the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. It is important to get those core
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talk with me at length about their experiences. Elon himself made plenty of time, generously inviting me to sit in on his technical meetings for Starship, Starlink, Raptor, and other projects at the company’s factory in Hawthorne. This helped me understand his leadership style. He also opened the doors
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to his factory-beneath-tents in Boca Chica where a new generation of engineers are building Starship, much in the iterative, fast-paced style of the Falcon 1 days. I interviewed many dozens of people for this book, and what surprised
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OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT David Giger, Flight One mission manager BOB REAGAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF MACHINING OPERATIONS BRANDEN SPIKES, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Timeline 2002 MAY 6 SpaceX founded by Elon Musk OCTOBER 31 First gas generator full-duration test-firing (Mojave, California) 2003 MARCH 11 First Merlin engine thrust chamber firing (McGregor
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, Texas) MAY 31 SpaceX employees visit Kwajalein for the first time JULY 2 First Merlin engine turbopump test (Mojave) DECEMBER 4 Falcon 1 displayed outside National Air and Space
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fire attempt from Kwajalein (Omelek Island) DECEMBER 20 First Falcon 1 launch attempt (Omelek Island) 2006 MARCH 24 Falcon 1, Flight One (Omelek) AUGUST 18 SpaceX wins COTS award from NASA 2007 MARCH 21 Falcon 1, Flight Two (Omelek) 2008 AUGUST 3 Falcon 1, Flight Three (Omelek) SEPTEMBER 3 C-17
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five-hundred-foot test flight (Boca Chica, Texas) 2020 MAY 30 First astronauts launch aboard Crew Dragon (Kennedy Space Center) AUGUST 4 First full-sized Starship prototype makes five-hundred-foot test flight (Boca Chica, Texas) Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash “MAKE THIS DISH ANYWHERE A DELICIOUS DINNER IS NECESSARY.” 2
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–95 International Science and Engineering Fair (1978), 30 International Space and Development Conference (1989), 63 International Space Station, 203, 217 Kistler contract, 109, 110, 114 SpaceX and Dragon, 217, 219–20, 221, 230 Iowa State University, 40 Iraq war, 145, 185 Iterative design, 24, 104 Jabwi (Marshallese native), 133 James
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Space Shuttle Atlantis, 90 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 65, 101 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 90, 107 Space Shuttle Discovery, 70–71, 102 SpaceX Dragon. See Dragon SpaceX Kestrel. See Kestrel engine SpaceX Merlin. See Merlin engine Spikes, Branden, 262 Spincraft, 19, 151 Stanford University, 21, 129, 152, 155, 160 Starhopper, 1–2,
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4, 265 Starship, 1, 3, 4, 35, 140, 235, 237, 247 Starship Troopers (movie), 168 Star Trek (TV show), 164, 176 Stock options, 15 Strategic
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whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Cover design by Owen Corrigan Cover photograph © SpaceX Photos from Shutterstock by Dima Zel and ixpert FIRST EDITION Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-297999-5 Version 12212020 Print ISBN: 978
The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin · 30 Apr 2019 · 452pp · 126,310 words
several human generations since Apollo, yet nation-states have retreated from their once-bold path beyond our planet. With the amazing private efforts such as SpaceX now bearing fruit, a revolution is upon us such that space exploration is becoming the domain of private companies and citizens. Zubrin paints the picture
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Ann Zubrin, without whose patience, love, and constant support this book never could have been written. Great things are happening. On February 6, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket took flight, demonstrating a capacity to lift sixty tons to low Earth orbit and playfully sending a Tesla Roadster on a trajectory
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three-quarters reusable. This is a revolution. The moon is now within reach. Mars is now within reach. And it's just the beginning. SpaceX is developing the means to allow refueling the booster second stage after it reaches orbit. Once this technology is in hand, the Falcon's interplanetary
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giving it a capability greater than that of the mighty Saturn V rockets that sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s. SpaceX's fully reusable 150-ton-to-orbit Starship launcher, now under development, will multiply that capability nearly three times over again. With such a system, the entire inner solar
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in less than an hour. For comparison, a Boeing 737 has an empty weight of 45 tons. If the Falcon Heavy or its successor, the Starship two-stage launch system, can be made fully reusable, then an entirely new market for space launch can be created, one involving not a hundred
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the Falcon Heavy—competing to take their share of a market that will soon explode in size. They will soon have plenty of company. SpaceX has shown that it is possible for lean, hard-driving entrepreneurial ventures to do—better—what it previously was thought only the governments of major
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line, is quite large, cutting costs to less than a third of the conventional system. This is where the Falcon 9 is right now. SpaceX could advance this technology by making the Falcon 9 upper stage reusable, but since this stage is small, only a modest additional reduction in launch
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company and rents, dominate. What to do? One approach is to go to a larger launch vehicle, such as the fully reusable heavy-lift Starship launcher that SpaceX has under development. By simply increasing the payload, a lower cost per kilogram can be achieved. Indeed, the Falcon Heavy, with sixty-ton-to
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of a company planning to offer suborbital five-minute zero-gravity rides to space tourists, which would not have made it a serious competitor to SpaceX or the aerospace majors. But in September 2016, Blue Origin announced its plan to create the New Glenn, a reusable two-stage Earth-to
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the 1960s, it can punch out launches at somewhat lower costs—if significantly lower reliability—than the American aerospace majors. But Russia has nothing like SpaceX—yet. I am aware of groups over there who would like to start such an enterprise. It's possible they could pull it off.
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Launch, Firefly, and Rocket Lab. Vector Launch was founded by Jim Cantrell, the crack engineer I hooked up with Elon Musk to help him launch SpaceX. After getting that venture underway, Cantrell and his friend Jim Garvey split off to start their own outfit, focusing on the microsatellite market, which is
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$70 million in investment. First launch is expected in 2020. Firefly was founded by Tom Markusic, a veteran of NASA, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. Designed to deliver one thousand kilograms to orbit, Firefly Alpha is a two-stage booster combining traditional LOX/kerosene propulsion with innovative carbon structure technology
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and others, are at least that much again, the total gross annual bill for running the company must exceed $1.2 billion. Now, during 2018, SpaceX performed twenty-one launches. This was an incredible feat because not only were they successful every time, but the number of launches constituted 20 percent
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stage based at the destination. This is precisely the sort of system that is now emerging from the two-stage reusable booster development programs of SpaceX and Blue Origin. The reason a two-stage system is necessary is a result of the basic equations of rocketry. To obtain global reach,
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are all assumed to have a ground liftoff mass of 2,500 tons, roughly the takeoff mass of the Saturn V, space shuttle, or SpaceX's Starship booster system design, and employ methane/oxygen rockets for propulsion.1 (Methane/oxygen is the best propellant combination for rocket planes because it offers high
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constellation consisting of 4,600 satellites, orbiting at 1,557 kilometers altitude.8 Not to be outdone, in May 2017, Elon Musk announced that his SpaceX company would be fielding its own constellation, named Starlink, consisting of 4,425 small satellites orbiting at 1,200 kilometers, operating in eighty-three orbital
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sending forty tons to lunar orbit or trans-Mars injection is beyond the current capability of the Falcon Heavy or any other existing launch vehicle. SpaceX is working on creating such power, which can be obtained by refueling the Falcon Heavy second stage on orbit or by building a bigger booster
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, such as the planned Starship. But we don't have it yet. It could also be done by the NASA SLS, albeit at considerable expense (about $1 billion per
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program has continued to creep forward and now is approaching ignition is little short of remarkable. But now, in large part as a result of SpaceX's demonstration that it is possible for a hard-driving entrepreneurial organization to achieve things that previously it was believed only the governments of major
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However, Musk's plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. As described by Musk, the SpaceX ITS would consist of a very large two-stage fully reusable launch system, powered by methane/oxygen chemical bipropellant. The suborbital first stage would have
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locally produced methane/oxygen propellant, and solved the problem of landing large payloads on Mars by employing the same breakthrough supersonic retro-propulsion technique that SpaceX has demonstrated on its Falcon rockets. On the weak side, the system was way too big, and flying such a giant rocket all the
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renamed the BFR) by a factor of almost four to a much more manageable 150 tons to orbit.8 Furthermore, the new BFR (later renamed “Starship”) had a “cargo variant” allowing it to carry payloads to LEO or TLI, which could then complete missions to the moon or Mars on their
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settlers riding the freight. But best of all, now it's not just talk. As these lines are being written, the parts of the first Starship are being made. We are on our way. Exploring Mars requires no miraculous new technologies, no orbiting spaceports, and no gigantic interplanetary space cruisers. We
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building a “Mini BFR” based on the upper stage of a Falcon 9 to use as a test article to support the BFR (subsequently renamed “Starship”) development program. I was struck by the potential of such a system, so I wrote him the following memo. Elon; I saw that you are
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. That's great. I hope you take it further and make it an operational system. This would offer many advantages. 1. It would give SpaceX a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle, the first in history, which could be a very profitable workhorse for the company. 2. It would provide
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to begin the world anew. —Thomas Paine, 1776 The question of colonizing Mars is not fundamentally one of transportation. If we were to use the Starship or a comparable vehicle to launch habitats carrying settlers to Mars on one-way trips, firing them off at the same rate we launched the
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9 with a Dragon, a Spartan two-person human mission to a near-Earth asteroid in interplanetary space could be readily accomplished. However, once the SpaceX Starship is available, it could be used to fly a crew of twenty or more to a near-Earth asteroid in style. The mission would be
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off for the two-year round-trip voyage to the asteroid, with plenty of room and company aboard to enjoy the trip. (See plate 9.) Starship is not an artificial gravity spacecraft, but if two were flown, they could tether off each other nose to nose. If the tether were five
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artificial gravity enabled by tethering off a counterweight brought along for the purpose. Whether done in a small current technology hab module or a luxurious Starship cruiser, Gaiashield would be a terrific asteroid science mission, but it would be more: it would be an icebreaker mission. Two things have kept
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technical community to become cynical. “Fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be” became a common quip. But then a breakthrough happened. SpaceX demonstrated that it is possible for a well-run, lean, and creative entrepreneurial organization to achieve things—and do so much more quickly—that were
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bear fruit. A PROGRAM FOR ACTION In the beginning, there was the word. There are those who think that because the entrepreneurial space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving ahead so nicely, we no longer need NASA or other government-led efforts. They could not be more mistaken. There
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5. Mars Direct surface base. Habitation module is at left, energy recovery ventilator at right. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 6. Once SpaceX implements its plans to refuel upper stages on orbit, the nowoperational Falcon Heavy will have greater trans-Mars throw capability than a Saturn V rocket
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vision for colonizing Mars. The ITS was subsequently renamed the Big Falcon Rocket or BFR, then Starship. Image courtesy of SpaceX. Plate 8. In the course of things, children will be born and families will be raised on Mars, the first true colonists of a new
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branch of human civilization. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 9. SpaceX illustration of its proposed 2023 artists’ cruise around the moon. Provided the musicians are up to it, voyages to near-Earth asteroids could be next
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. Image courtesy of SpaceX. Plate 10. Jupiter's moon Europa is an ocean world entirely covered by sea ice. The subsurface ocean is kept liquid by heating due to
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“bar.” bipropellant: A rocket propellant combination including both a fuel and oxidizer. Examples include methane/oxygen, hydrogen/oxygen, kerosene/hydrogen peroxide, and so on. BFR: SpaceX's concept for a reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle with a payload capacity of about 150 tons to low Earth orbit. The “Big
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in judging a rocket engine's performance. Frequently abbreviated “Isp.” SSTO: Single-stage-to-orbit. Starship: A fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle with a payload capacity of 150 tons being developed by the SpaceX company. Formerly known as the BFR. telerobotic operation: Remote control of some device, such as
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rockets), 36 Ariane V (heavy-lift rocket), 107 Arrhenius, Svante, 255 artificial gravity. See gravity artificial greenhouse gases. See terraforming artist cruise around moon (2023 SpaceX plan), plate 9 Artsutanov, Y. N., 93, 94, 95 ASAT (antisatellite systems), 63–64 Ash, Robert, 147 asteroids, 125–50 claiming of, 138–40
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53 Bezos, Jeff, 12, 34–35, 57, 176, 327 BFR (“Big F…ing Rocket”) (SpaceX), plate 7, 110, 339 also known as Starship, 110, 334, 344 Mini BFR, 110–12 See also Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX); Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) bioengineering, 213, 219, 223, 230–37 bipropellant. See propellants and propulsion black holes, 252, 262
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, 265–69, 268 vision of extraterrestrials in the year 3000, 323–24 See also intelligence, search for; life, search for fairing, 340 Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX), 340 comparison of space launch systems, 36 Falcon Heavy, plate 1, plate 3, 27–28, 33, 35 as a heavy-lift booster, 11–12, 107
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Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions, 130 heavy-lift rockets, 11–12, 69–70, 102, 103, 107. See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); New Glenn booster (Blue Origin); Saturn V (rocket); Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) heliocentric orbit, 341 Helion Energy, 179 helium-3 (He3), 143 moon as a source of, 83–91, 317 outer solar system
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29 International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX), plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) interstellar communications, 257–58 use of bacteria, 258–60 interstellar travel, 181–214, 214 as indication of extraterrestrial intelligence
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329, 330 ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Itokawa (asteroid), 130 ITS. See Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX) Janhunen, Pekka, 204 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 197 Jarboe, Tom, 180 Jefferson, Thomas, 125, 128 Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), 99, 129, 130, 147, 153, 332
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system to reduce costs, 39–45 lower costs allowing for orbital industries, 49–50 See also commercial benefits of spaceflight Elon Musk and development of SpaceX, 30–37 impact of cost-plus contracts, 22–24, 330–31 need for reusable spacecraft, 21–23 rise of microlaunchers, 37–38 skyhook as
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–37 heavy-lift rockets, 107 Interplanetary Transport System plan, plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) planned 2023 artists’ cruise around, plate 9 sending Tesla Roadster past Mars, 11 size of, 39–40 Starlink satellites, 53 and two-stage systems, 41,
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45 See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); Musk, Elon SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, 177 specific impulse (Isp), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341,
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Sridhar, K. R., 147 SR-71 (Boeing), 277 ST (spherical tokamak), 175–76, 176, 180 Stapledon, Olaf, 238 Starlink (SpaceX), 53 Star Maker (Stapeldon), 238 stars, travel to. See interstellar travel Starship (rocket) (SpaceX), 11, 12, 27–28, 28, 41, 77, 112, 134–35, 344 originally known as BFR, 110, 334, 344 reducing
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launch costs of, 27 See also Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX) Star Trek (television series), 323 Steins (asteroid), 130 stellarators,
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reactor propulsion, 143 of fusion reactor propulsion, 160, 161, 168, 179 use of high thrust FRC rockets to depart Jupiter, 179 of Interplanetary Transport System (SpaceX), 108 and magnetic sails, 202, 203, 204 and Noah's Ark Eggs (seed spaceships), 210 and Nuclear Electric Propulsion systems, 343 and nuclear thermal rockets
The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee · 14 Nov 2023 · 381pp · 113,173 words
to generate lots of models (via modularity) and lots of generations (via fast iteration) is a great way to maximize learning and improvement. Tesla and SpaceX, two companies associated with Elon Musk, are leaders in the great geek norm of speed. Their achievements are impressive. As we saw earlier in this
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testing, said, “To see something updated that quickly is quite remarkable. We’ve never seen a manufacturer do this in the course of a week.” SpaceX also stands out from the competition. It’s the world’s only maker of commercially viable reusable rockets, and now carries about two-thirds of
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all the payload that leaves Earth for space. One of the main reasons SpaceX’s market share is so high is that its costs are so low. A 2018 NASA report found that compared to the Ariane 5 rocket
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developed and launched by France’s Arianespace, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was 80 percent cheaper at putting a kilogram of payload into low-Earth orbit.11 The company’s adherence to the great
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geek norm of speed is visible throughout the development of its newest and biggest rocket, called Starship. This vessel’s mission is to take humans to the moon and beyond. Along the way it will also put a lot of communications satellites
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and other payload into orbit around the Earth. But SpaceX didn’t work on Starship by creating a thorough overall plan and then sticking to it. Instead, the company worked like kindergartners in the marshmallow challenge: it started
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building things, getting feedback on them, and making changes. The initial plan was for the main body of the Starship spaceship to be made out of a carbon fiber composite, which has an excellent strength-to-weight ratio. In a presentation Musk gave in September
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of these parts: a thin-walled hollow black cylinder, thirty feet in diameter, made out of carbon fiber. Just four months later, however, SpaceX announced that the Starship spaceship would be made out of stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. The company had learned from its experiments with carbon fiber that although
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to be scrapped. So the idea of a carbon fiber body was abandoned. Rather than seeing this switch as evidence of a flawed development process, SpaceX viewed it as proof that its process was working just as intended: the company was iterating quickly and incorporating lessons learned, even if these lessons
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were expensive. As “space enthusiast” Florian Kordina put it on the Everyday Astronaut website in May of 2020, Everything for Starship is still on the table at this moment. I mean, we are literally seeing them build a factory around a rocket instead of vice versa
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is an option here, if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” Kordina was right about future hardware failures and explosions. The eighth Starship spaceship built, labeled SN8, launched successfully but crashed and burned on its attempted landing (there was no loss of life; all SN missions were uncrewed
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never made it to the launchpad, but SN15 finally completed a successful soft landing (although with a small fire that was extinguished within twenty minutes). SpaceX felt that it had learned what it needed to from these experiments, and announced that its next test flight would be an uncrewed orbital trip
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around the Earth, featuring all of Starship’s main elements: the spaceship itself, a huge booster rocket, and a total of thirty-nine newly developed Raptor engines to propel them. By the
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spring of 2021, NASA was impressed enough with progress on Starship and other programs to award SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to land astronauts on the moon. The company will have some competition in this arena from NASA
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itself. Since 2011, the space agency has been at work on its own large rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS). Compared to SpaceX, NASA has developed the SLS in a way that’s heavy on up-front planning and low on iteration and experimentation. For example, there have
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like $8 billion. Meanwhile rocket engineer Ian Vorbach, who writes a newsletter about space startups, estimates that early Starship launches will cost $150 to $250 million each. The vast differences between NASA and SpaceX are well summarized by Musk: “I have this mantra. It’s called, ‘If a schedule is long, it
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, this apartment will quadruple in value.” 11 Compared to the US Space Shuttle, which was retired in 2011 after a second fatal in-flight accident, SpaceX was 95 percent cheaper at getting a kilogram into low-Earth orbit, and 75 percent cheaper at getting cargo and crew to the International Space
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work, we’ll be great with that.” In chapter 6 we learned that as SpaceX develops its novel rockets, it emphasizes learning rapidly instead of getting the design right from the start. Several versions of its Starship rocket exploded as they attempted to land. Elon Musk and his colleagues would have preferred
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them to alight flawlessly, but when they didn’t, SpaceX didn’t change its approach.10 Nor did the company stick to its
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original plan to make the Starship rocket out of carbon fiber. When experience showed that this manufacturing method was too unreliable and
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expensive, SpaceX simply walked away from it. Amazon draws a distinction between “one-way doors,” or decisions that
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company use the waterfall approach to developing software to write the code for its next car, or the head of a rocket development program at SpaceX who insisted that the team stick with the first design it came up with no matter what testing revealed. Both of those hypotheticals would be
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30, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/tesla-consumer-reports.html. 64 two-thirds of all the payload: Kate Duffy, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Aiming to Launch Its Most-Used Rocket Once a Week on Average This Year,” Business Insider, February 4, 2022, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk
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-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-every-week-payload-2022-2. 65 2018 NASA report: Harry Jones, “The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost,” 48th International
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Conference on Environmental Systems, 2018. 66 presentation Musk gave: Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Just Gave the Most Revealing Look Yet at the Rocket Ship SpaceX Is Building to Fly to the Moon and Mars,” Business Insider, September 22, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk
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-spacex-pictures-big-falcon-rocket-spaceship-2018-9. 67 made out of stainless steel: Ryan Whitwam, “Elon Musk Explains Why the Starship Will Be Stainless Steel,” ExtremeTech, January 24, 2019, www.extremetech.com/extreme/284346-elon-musk
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-explains-why-the-starship-will-be-stainless-steel. 68 “Everything for Starship”: Florian Kordina, “SLS vs. Starship: Why Do Both Programs Exist?,” Everyday Astronaut, May 1, 2020, https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/. 69 Kordina was right: “List of SpaceX Starship Flight Tests,” Wikipedia, February 5, 2023, https://en.wikipedia
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.org/wiki/List_of_SpaceX_Starship_flight_tests. 70 $2.9 billion
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contract: Kenneth Chang, “SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander,” New
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York Times, April 16, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html. 71 maiden flight was originally scheduled
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like $8 billion: Berger, “Finally, We Know Production Costs.” 76 $150 to $250 million: Ian Vorbach, “Is Starship Really Going to Revolutionize Launch Costs?,” SpaceDotBiz, May 19, 2022, https://newsletter.spacedotbiz.com/p/starship-really-going-revolutionize-launch-costs. 77 “‘If a schedule is long, it’s wrong’”: Elon Musk, Wikiquote, Wikimedia
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac · 17 Sep 2024
as an entrepreneur and executive, Musk had thin skin and wanted to know everything about how the public perceived himself and his companies—Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. That morning, however, he focused on his primary addiction: Twitter. Musk had amassed more than 22 million followers on
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heavens before exploding into flaming heaps of discarded ideas. Before eBay had even completed its acquisition of PayPal, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in May 2002. He committed $100 million of his PayPal windfall to space, with the goal of getting to Mars and making humans a multiplanetary
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fired Eberhard and took on the chief executive role himself. The company soldiered on toward building a luxury sedan, losing millions of dollars a year. SpaceX also struggled, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy after three failed launches. In 2008, its Falcon 1 rocket finally reached orbit, leading the company to
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public relations staff, sometimes emailing them well past midnight, to correct the record. Reporters who constantly questioned him or wrote too critically of Tesla or SpaceX were personally blacklisted by Musk. His craving for narrative control led him to Twitter. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher had joined the 140
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AI at speaking engagements and on Twitter. It was all nonsense, Zuckerberg believed. Musk, enraged, refused to back down. Despite Musk’s disagreement with Zuckerberg, SpaceX did not turn down Facebook’s business. It needed the money and attention. The company loaded the Facebook satellite onto a Falcon 9 rocket at
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find out what had happened, when Zuckerberg posted to his Facebook page. “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” the Facebook chief wrote
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solved hard problems like building rockets and electric cars. But Musk held his fire, letting his grudge against Zuckerberg build inside him. * * * >>> At Tesla and SpaceX, Musk refused to take advice from anyone about his posts, and when one executive dared to point out that his tweets about deadlines made life
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Musk had emerged victorious in his “pedo guy” tweet lawsuit only a few weeks earlier. Over the video call, Musk, seated behind his desk at SpaceX’s headquarters, was unlike his online persona. He was reserved and sometimes barely audible, lacking the spikiness or juvenile humor that permeated his tweets. Dorsey
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knew where he stood on extraterrestrial life. * * * >>> As Musk talked with his future employees, he was also working to put down a small rebellion at SpaceX. The previous month, Business Insider had dropped a bombshell story, reporting on the existence of a settlement between Musk’s rocket company and a former
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toxic, male-dominated culture, led by a chief executive who tweeted about sex acts and starting a university with the acronym TITS. Months earlier, female SpaceX employees had already spoken up about stories of sexual harassment and discrimination, which the company brushed aside. Even after the Insider story published, Musk continued
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reflect our work, our mission, or our values.” By the following day, five of the letter’s organizers were rounded up and fired for what SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell labeled “overreaching activism.” Others were brought into meetings with managers, who had clearly been told to discipline their subordinates. In
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sometimes lionize the changemakers of the human race. Isaacson was shadowing Musk for his next project, an authorized biography of the genius behind Tesla and SpaceX. Isaacson asked Crawford for her contact information and shot her a toothy grin. “I can tell you’ll be important,” he said. Crawford eventually
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blue badges carried by employees, and instead held red visitor or green vendor keycards. Most of them were men. Some of them sported Tesla- or SpaceX-stamped apparel. To the Twitter employees, these outsiders could not be trusted, and they came up with a nickname for the intruders: “the goons.” * * * >>>
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chief executive. He said he was angry at Sundar Pichai, Google’s leader, for not putting antennas into Android phones that could connect with Starlink, SpaceX’s proprietary satellite internet service. Then Musk, riffing off his own story, offered up something else he had heard to impress the executive even more
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and other employees began to understand that Musk’s expertise in other areas didn’t necessarily translate into running or understanding Twitter. At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing challenge. But Twitter was a social and psychological problem. Beyond the engineering challenges of keeping one of
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to Austin to brood. Musk’s growing paranoia was palpable over that weekend. Led by Christopher Stanley, an information security engineer who had come from SpaceX, workers examined a spreadsheet that had been created soon after the deal and listed the names of high-skilled or long-tenured employees to determine
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accounts that were set to private, meaning that no one except their followers should have been able to see their posts. HR executives imported from SpaceX stepped in to handle some firings, fueling the paranoia among employees that Musk’s people were snooping on them. These episodes made employees fearful about
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a.m. in San Francisco, some undecided employees received invitations to meetings hosted by some combination of Musk, his advisers, and executives from Tesla or SpaceX. The meetings were a last-minute sales pitch intended to convince employees to stay. In one gathering with the corporate finance team led by Birchall
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ordered Twitter’s human resources team to start drafting a separation agreement for Baker so that Musk could fire him. Birchall claimed that workers from SpaceX’s legal and government relations teams were conducting an internal investigation into Baker’s conduct, and the result of their investigation would determine whether or
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was marked by Musk’s online harassment. * * * >>> With Spiro’s departure from Twitter, Musk needed new deputies. He imported a new raft of employees from SpaceX to fill the void, including Chris Cardaci, the company’s vice president of legal, and Tim Hughes, its senior vice president for global business and
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the congressman ammunition for his House select subcommittee on “the weaponization of the federal government.” Musk later invited staffers from Jordan’s office to visit SpaceX’s facilities in Texas. He also found a sympathetic ear in the FTC’s lone Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson. In February, he secured a
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moved for moments like this. As the sun rose over the Gulf of Mexico, the SpaceX chief watched as massive plumes of white smoke and an earth-shaking bellow emanated from the thirty-three engines on Starship. This was the rocket he promised would one day bring humans to Mars, and on
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its second test launch, SpaceX was hoping to prove its vehicle could reach orbit. With the countdown finished, the 397
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eventually reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles in its eight-minute flight, before exploding. The SpaceX engineers in the control room went berserk. The test was largely a success, showing that Starship could viably take off and separate from its booster engine. They were one step closer to Mars. While
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Musk celebrated with his family at the SpaceX facility, something else remained in the back of his mind. Within an
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hour and a half of the Starship test, Musk was already back on his phone and on X. He replied to a fan
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erupted. His supporters tweeted that McCormick was a Biden lackey and politically motivated to take down their hero. The billionaire reincorporated Neuralink in Nevada and SpaceX in Texas, pulling them out of Delaware’s jurisdiction, and called on other companies to follow suit. Some of Twitter’s former employees took extended
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who wanted to push him out. Musk and then-girlfriend Claire Boucher, better known as the singer Grimes, pose together during a 2018 event at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Elon Musk and Steve Davis, the chief executive of the Boring Company, at an event for the tunneling start-up in
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we navigated the world of book publishing. We’re also particularly grateful for Dai Wakabayashi’s mentorship, steady spirit, and searing comebacks. Reporting on Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and the wider world of Musk can be a trying endeavor. No single journalist or publication can handle it all. We’re thankful for
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on conversations and interviews totaling more than 150 hours with nearly 100 people. Those people included current and former employees for Twitter, X, Tesla, and SpaceX; lawyers, bankers, and other associates who worked for both sides during Elon Musk’s negotiations to buy Twitter; as well as friends and acquaintances of
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Workers They’re More Likely to Die in a Car Crash Than from Coronavirus.” BuzzFeed News, March 13, 2020. buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-spacex-employees-car-crash-coronavirus. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT labeled some 300,000 tweets: Fung, Brian. “Twitter Says It Labeled 300,000 Tweets around
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Shopping Spree He had a reputation for using drugs: Glazer, Emily, and Kirsten Grind. “Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX.” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2024, www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e1. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “as collateral to secure
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06/16/technology/elon-musk-twitter-employees-meeting.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Business Insider had dropped a bombshell story: McHugh, Rich. “A SpaceX Flight Attendant Said Elon Musk Exposed Himself and Propositioned Her for Sex, Documents Show. The Company Paid $250,000 for Her Silence.” Business Insider, May
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19, 2022. businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Elon is seen as
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February 8, 2023, sec. World. nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/turkey-earthquake-twitter-blocked.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk, whose SpaceX was pushing to launch its Starlink: Fernholz, Tim. “How Turkey Is Using Starlink to Win a Tesla Factory.” Quartz, September 18, 2023. qz.com/turkey
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-erdogan-elon-musk-starlink-spacex-tesla-1850849958. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Twitter had faced immense pressure from Narendra: Lyons, Kim. “Police in India Raid Twitter Offices in Probe
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I did the Twitter acquisition was not because”: Alfar, Gail. “Elon Musk’s Talk at Morgan Stanley TMT 2023 on Twitter, X.com, Tesla and Starship.” What’s up Tesla, March 13, 2023. whatsuptesla.com/2023/03/12/x-4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Three weeks later, Twitter’s
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html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 45: Tell It to Earth At 7:03 in the morning on Saturday, November 18: Chang, Kenneth. “SpaceX Starship Launch: Highlights from the 2nd Flight of Elon Musk’s Moon and Mars Rocket.” New York Times, November 19, 2023. nytimes.com/live/2023/11
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/18/science/spacex-starship-launch-elon-musk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk stood with his palms pressed together as if in prayer: Musk, Kimbal. “Focused.” Twitter,
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/wsyXJQJr3v.” Twitter, November 18, 2023. twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725926972423852296. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT With the countdown finished, the 397-foot rocket: Chang, “SpaceX Starship Launch.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This is the richest man in the world”: Kaplan, Alex. “Far-Right Figures and White Nationalists Celebrate Elon
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views and, 406, 423–29 revenue from, 294, 320, 325, 330, 339, 340, 354, 357, 365, 380, 381, 388, 401, 403, 409, 417, 419 for SpaceX, 340 Yaccarino and, 417–18 Ukraine war and, 97, 152, 325 Upfronts presentation and, 408 Africa, 35–36, 44, 45, 79 Afshar, Omead, 115, 134
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Berlin, 109 bodyguards of, 7 businesses of Boring Company, 23, 37, 134, 179, 239, 241, 267, 268, 314 Neuralink, 23, 38, 179, 205, 250, 434 SpaceX, see SpaceX Tesla, see Tesla Motors X.com (bank), 29–31, 415 Zip2, 29, 207 see also Twitter under Elon Musk; X Chappelle show incident, 375
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124, 211 Solomon, Sasha, 347, 348 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 427–30 Soros, George, 406, 408 South by Southwest, 15 Soviet Union, 37, 184, 193, 364 SpaceX, 1, 23, 24, 31–36, 47, 96, 101, 115, 137, 165, 167, 175, 181, 208, 241, 250, 256, 290, 291, 299, 316, 317, 320, 322
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loan from, 253 sexual harassment at, 200–201 Starbase facility of, 78–79 Starlink service of, 102, 103, 244–45, 280, 332, 363, 374, 400 Starship test launch of, 423–25 tunnel project of, 314 Twitter advertising of, 340 Spears, Britney, 290 special purpose vehicles (SPVs), 178 Spiegel, Evan, 199
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views and, 406, 423–29 revenue from, 294, 320, 325, 330, 339, 340, 354, 357, 365, 380, 381, 388, 401, 403, 409, 417, 419 for SpaceX, 340 Yaccarino and, 417–18 Apple App store and, 317–19, 333, 365–66 Blue subscription service of, 285, 295, 297, 306, 310–19, 323
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
by Adam Becker · 14 Jun 2025 · 381pp · 119,533 words
humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come. The carbon footprint of Amazon’s shipping network or SpaceX’s rocket fleet can’t possibly matter as much as hastening the glorious immortal future of humanity in space. And if that future never comes
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close match for my philosophy” and claims that he is simply taking the actions he must take to preserve humanity.50 “Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” says Tom Moline, a
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former SpaceX engineer. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.” Moline was fired after making
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complaints about the workplace at SpaceX. A 2023 Reuters report uncovered over six hundred workplace injuries, including amputations, head wounds, and one death. Most were never reported to OSHA. According to
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Reuters, SpaceX’s “lax safety culture, more than a dozen current and former employees said, stems in part from Musk’s disdain for perceived bureaucracy and a
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belief inside SpaceX that it’s leading an urgent quest to create a refuge in space from a dying Earth.”51 Such monomania makes things simple. Rather than
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put aside questions about how exactly traveling light-years from star to star or galaxy to galaxy would work without technology straight off of the starship Enterprise. There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would
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lot, with the ultimate plan of sending a million people there by 2050.62 As of this writing, he says he plans to land a SpaceX rocket on Mars by 2029.63 While taking Musk seriously is increasingly difficult—it seems likely that he’ll say and do many bizarre or
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hurtful things in the months between the writing and publishing of this book—he still has enormous power and influence, and SpaceX is certainly a serious company, at least for now. It is the sole provider of crewed launches on US soil for NASA (as of 2024
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Starlink system is one of the few options for cell service in many truly remote areas, and future versions of SpaceX’s existing Starship launch vehicles could, theoretically, go to Mars. A SpaceX rocket even launched a Tesla out past Mars’s orbit in 2018. Musk’s timeline for Mars is probably too
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optimistic—over the years he’s given many other dates for boots on Mars and uncrewed landings, and missed them all—but a SpaceX rocket landing on Mars at some point in the next few decades seems like a reasonable possibility.64 The problem is everything else in Musk
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, meaning that everything would be far more expensive than on a remote island on Earth. All of those shipments would be coming from one supplier: SpaceX, which would have a more complete monopoly than any corporation ever enjoyed in a company town on Earth. Even the air the Mars residents breathe
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.86 Nor is an arms race the only kind of international crisis that could be precipitated by an attempt to colonize space. In 2020, Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, made headlines with a clause buried in their user agreement that stated, in part, that “the parties recognize Mars as a
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, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1011083630301536256; see also, Nick Lucchesi, “Elon Musk Calls on the Public to ‘Preserve Human Consciousness’ with Starship,” Inverse, September 28, 2019, www.inverse.com/article/59676-spacex-starship-presentation. 42 Richard Fuisz et al., “New World: Interstellar,” February 22, 2019, in Anatomy of Next, podcast, Founders Fund, foundersfund
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) saying things to this effect. 50 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (now X), August 1, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1554335028313718784. 51 Marisa Taylor, “At SpaceX, Worker Injuries Soar in Elon Musk’s Rush to Mars,” Reuters, November 10, 2023, www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report
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/spacex-musk-safety/. 52 Leonard David, “Jeff Bezos’ Vision: ‘A Trillion Humans in the Solar System,’” Space.com, July 21, 2017, www.space.com/37572-jeff-
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://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1011083630301536256. See also, Nick Lucchesi, “Elon Musk Calls on the Public to ‘Preserve Human Consciousness’ with Starship,” Inverse, September 28, 2019, www.inverse.com/article/59676-spacex-starship-presentation. 62 George Dvorsky, “Elon Musk’s Plan to Send a Million Colonists to Mars by 2050 Is Pure Delusion,” Gizmodo
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-delusion-1848839584. 63 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (now X), March 15, 2024, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1768810190718009446. 64 Kenneth Chang, “Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship’s Ambitious Launch Timeline,” New York Times, September 28, 2019, updated May 5, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk
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-spacex-starship.html. 65 Mrigakshi Dixit, “How Space Radiation Threatens Lunar Exploration,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 18, 2023, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-space-radiation-threatens-lunar-
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Earth,’” CNBC, March 9, 2020, updated January 12, 2021, www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/spacex-plans-how-elon-musk-see-life-on-mars.html; Eric Berger, “Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Build One Starship a Week—and Settle Mars,” Ars Technica, March 5, 2020, https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03
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/inside-elon-musks-plan-to-build-one-starship-a-week-and-settle-mars/; Mike Brown, “SpaceX Mars City: Elon Musk Details 1 Test Its Success Depends On,” Inverse, October 19, 2020, updated February 20, 2024, www.inverse
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.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-test. 69 Paul Krugman, “Elon Musk, Mars and the Modern Economy,” New York Times, June 7, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/
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escape velocity would reach after falling from the Moon’s orbit down to Earth’s atmosphere—just as the Apollo missions did. 87 Mike Brown, “SpaceX Mars City: Legal Experts Respond to ‘Gibberish’ Free Planet Claim,” Inverse, November 3, 2020, updated February 20, 2024, www.inverse.com/innovation
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/spacex-mars-city-legal. 88 Ibid. 89 For much, much more on the ways developing space technology can make the world less safe, see Deudney’s
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer · 13 Feb 2024 · 343pp · 92,693 words
, no one else tried to challenge Musk’s reality. Musk’s fraught takeover of Twitter had captivated the country for months. The genius behind Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink had grandly declared that his next mission was to restore free speech to the public town square. “This is a
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him a way to talk to his audience, circumventing traditional media outlets. Now, if Musk wanted to hype the accomplishments of his visionary rocket company SpaceX, or his pioneering electric vehicle company Tesla, he wouldn’t need to do it through a gatekeeping journalist. He could just pull out his phone
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was really interesting, that’s substantive. He could’ve done a lot of other things, and he didn’t.” Just ten years after its founding, SpaceX had made great progress. “Splashdown successful!! Sending fast boat to Dragon lat/long provided by P3 tracking planes #Dragon,” Musk tweeted on May 31, 2012
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. Behind the jargon was a historic announcement: SpaceX had successfully delivered cargo to the International Space Station, making it the first private company to ever do so. The post garnered only 340 retweets
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. * * * — The electric car manufacturer Tesla is so strongly associated with Elon Musk that it’s easy to forget that he didn’t start it. Like SpaceX, it was an ambitious company, attempting to combat climate change—save the planet, and thus, the human race—by shifting the world from its reliance
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sued and settled with Musk. But the drama didn’t matter. This time, Musk was the ouster, not the ousted. If people were curious about SpaceX, they were rabid about Tesla. And the best place to stay up-to-date on the company? The CEO’s Twitter feed. By 2018, eight
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-19 pandemic (“The coronavirus panic is dumb”), and shared transphobic beliefs (“Pronouns suck”), cultivating fandoms on right-wing corners of the internet. The successes of SpaceX and Tesla buoyed his reputation. Sure, he was posting in a manner that would get most other CEOs ousted, but his companies were innovative—and
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Tesla’s share price continued to reflect that. SpaceX was pushing the United States forward in an industry known for groundbreaking science and technology; Tesla had made electric cars a commercial reality. This brilliant
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told me, essentially, that if his companies didn’t make it, humanity was fucked.” Through Tesla, he was pushing the world toward clean energy. Through SpaceX, he was ensuring the human race’s survival even if Tesla failed to save Earth. Now, through Twitter, he believed he had a chance to
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leader. Twitter had seventy-five hundred employees. The sink tweet got 1.4 million Likes. Musk arrived with an entourage. Dozens of engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company were seen around the office in the days to come, along with a host of advisers: Jason Calacanis and Antonio
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for creators and anticipated Musk would be a receptive audience. “I saw [Musk] as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company,” she later said. She told Musk she wanted to
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, the notion of opening Twitter’s API was directly at odds with how Musk ran his other companies. Part of his playbook at Tesla and SpaceX involved owning nearly every aspect of the supply chain. If he could hire engineers to build a product in-house, why outsource it to another
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asked. Then he pinged a few higher-ups to see what he should do. They told him that Stanley, who worked in Information Security at SpaceX, was part of Musk’s inner circle. “If he says we have to do this, we have to do this,” one explained. Doherty did as
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a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable.” To some extent, employees had expected this announcement. Remote work wasn’t allowed at Tesla and SpaceX. But the severity and speed of the new policy made it seem like a loyalty test. For the last two years under Dorsey and Agrawal
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, and yes, the recent firings had sucked. But those who remained had a chance to make history, building a super app alongside the CEO of SpaceX. It was worth it. Then, on November 16, Lin woke up to see a new email from Musk with the subject line, “A Fork in
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was struck by the man’s bravery. But Musk brushed it off, launching into a monologue about the success he’d had at Tesla and SpaceX. “If you want to win, stick with me,” he said. No one said anything after that. The group got up and walked out of the
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nervously sweating for hours. It smelled musty. Lin steered clear of the anxious tweeps and sat down next to a group of employees from Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. James Musk, Elon’s cousin, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “It was exciting,” Lin said. These engineers understood what it meant
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in Slack moments after Trump’s account was supposed to go live. “What happened here?” asked Christopher Stanley, one of Musk’s trusted lieutenants from SpaceX. It turned out the reinstatement hadn’t worked. The team tried again. Success. Then they realized the “follow” button on Trump’s account wasn’t
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that Twitter would only pay rent over [his] dead body,” the lawsuit alleged. Steve Davis complained that Twitter had a fraction of the employees of SpaceX but paid five times the annual rent. (No one mentioned that Twitter had employed more than twice as many people when it acquired its various
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to join her in Miami for MMA Global’s POSSIBLE conference in April, a major event in the advertising industry. Initially, Musk agreed. Then SpaceX decided to launch Starship, its Mars rocket, around the time of the event. “He was going to blow it off, obviously,” Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, tells
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me. At the last minute, SpaceX postponed the launch due to a technical problem, freeing up Musk’s schedule to attend the conference. He decided to
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, it hit one million subscribers in two months.) In the days following the advertising conference, Musk was distracted by the SpaceX launch, which had been rescheduled to April 20. (The Starship rocket exploded shortly after launch, spewing rubble over miles of land.) Yaccarino grew nervous that Musk wasn’t returning her calls
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rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg, who’d been feuding on and off for seven years. Musk, who’d been cash-poor while building Tesla and SpaceX, “brooded” about how easily Zuckerberg had made money in software, while Zuckerberg longed for the entrepreneurial esteem that Musk garnered in Silicon Valley, according to
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, 2010, 2:31 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15434727182. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT His father, Errol Musk: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2017), 62. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I’ve got a million-dollar car
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Musk,” PandoDaily, July 17, 2012, YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=uegOUmgKB4E. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT partially orchestrated by Thiel: Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Tesla’s original founders, Martin Eberhard: Jay Yarow, “Tesla Settles Lawsuit—Everyone
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/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I really like computer games”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “accelerant to creating X”: Dan Milmo and Amy Hawkins, “ ‘The Everything App
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H,” Elon Musk text exhibits (Twitter v. Musk). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I came very close to dying”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I am offering to buy”: Schdule 13D, Twitter, Inc., United States Securities
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: Marina Koren, “The Messy Reality of Elon Musk’s Space City,” The Atlantic, April 27, 2023, theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/spacex-starship-explosion-dust-debris-texas/673881. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Excited to announce”: Hannah Murphy, “Why Linda Yaccarino Took on the Wildest Job in
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 6 Nov 2023 · 490pp · 132,502 words
don’t blame you—the public discourse around space settlement is full of myths, fantasies, and outright misunderstanding of basic facts. In 2020, for example, SpaceX’s internet service provider, Starlink, released a Terms of Service agreement that declared that “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities
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mass in orbit for decades. That was the state of play until the 2010s when, largely as a result of a US policy shift and SpaceX in particular, the cost of putting stuff in space began to fall dramatically again. This doesn’t just mean more rocket launches, it means more
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fourteen hundred active satellites. As of 2021, there were about five thousand; and as of October 2022, around three thousand working satellites are controlled by SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink. Space tourism, long promised but rarely delivered on, appears to actually be happening. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin
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regularly sends people on 100-kilometer-high hops, and SpaceX has contracted to send tourists around the Moon. Where once there were only a few government agencies doing space launch, there is now a growing
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space-station settlements of the type advocated for by O’Neill. When Elon Musk first got rich off the sale of PayPal, before he created SpaceX, he looked into sending a mouse colony or a small greenhouse to Mars. There is no money to be made doing this sort of thing
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; Musk wanted people to see his vision for space during a time when space activity was lackluster. In our experience, a lot of people think SpaceX in particular is some kind of scam, using old government-created space technology for personal enrichment, or somehow hiding the true costs of space launch
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we can say is that it’s so contrary to the plain facts as to verge on a conspiracy theory. However you feel about Musk, SpaceX has genuinely revolutionized space launch, and every space agency on Earth, including NASA, has failed to duplicate their technology. In fairness, Musk’s
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SpaceX, Bezos’s Blue Origin, and other rocket launch companies have gotten plenty of government contracts, but that’s been the standard way space has been
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done in the United States since the early days of space flight. The revolution in pricing only arrived with SpaceX. Both Bezos and Musk overhype things, yes, but the evidence is that they actually believe in a space-settlement future. What concerns us is not
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Bezos’s Blue Origin is interested in Shackleton crater’s water, sunlight, and minerals. NASA is teaming up with SpaceX in the hope that their “Starship” can take astronauts to the Moon, and SpaceX also has a private contract to send tourists on a lunar-orbit vacation. One day, if the Moon is
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portion of metabolic waste,” only for it to turn up two weeks later in “a small gap near the return air filter.” As recently as SpaceX’s 2021 “Inspiration4” mission, which sent four intrepid private astronauts on an orbital voyage in especially cool space suits, one major problem was the busted
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and more isolated. Strangest of all, the most commonly launched rocket of 2022 is not one built by a nation, but by the private corporation SpaceX.[*] But while space launch and communication have become modern market-based enterprises, the OST remains the product of that brief moment of rivalry between nuclear
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that far away. The issue of where air ends and space begins may seem like a legalistic quibble, but it could have real consequences. Suppose SpaceX follows through on a proposal for rocket travel between, let’s say, Kiev and Tokyo. The rocket could start in airspace, but then be in
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then we will address it.’ ” This was meant as a warning, not advice, but we could certainly give it a try. We could wait for SpaceX to declare Martian freedom, or for President Gingrich to welcome the state of Moonsylvania[*] into the US fold, and suddenly many of the crazy ideas
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days of space-travel theory, when Hermann Oberth proposed a giant mirror in space, for combination agricultural and death-beam purposes. The latest example is SpaceX’s thousands of Starlink satellites. Launched originally for the purpose of transmitting internet stuff, they became integral to the Ukrainian resistance against Russian invasion after
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Books, 2018), 240. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2020, for example: Antonino Salmeri, “No, Mars Is Not a Free Planet, No Matter What SpaceX Says,” SpaceNews, December 5, 2020, https://spacenews.com/op-ed-no-mars-is-not-a-free-planet-no-matter-what
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-spacex-says/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Consider the 2015 Newsweek: Kevin Maney, “ ‘Star Wars’ Class Wars: Is Mars the Escape Hatch for the 1
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ISS: Tim Peake, Ask an Astronaut (London: Arrow Books, 2018), 90. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT details are scarce: Scott Gleeson, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Inspiration4 Crew Had ‘Challenges’ with Toilet,” USA Today, September 23, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2021/09/23/elon-musk-says
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-spacex-inspiration-4-crew-had-challenges-toilet/5825068001/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Tang sucks.”: Mark Memmott, “Now He Tells Us: ‘Tang Sucks,’ Says Apollo
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of going into space is to create new nations. That can best be done on Mars,” Reddit, September 25, 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/pv91cs/comment/he8xy4w/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Note Bene: Violence in Antarctica, or, Happy Endings to Stabby Starts So Kelly wrote: Theodore
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Space Law,” 1–9. International Astronautical Federation, 2020. https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/44630. ———. “No, Mars Is Not a Free Planet, No Matter What SpaceX Says.” SpaceNews, December 5, 2020. https://spacenews.com/op-ed-no-mars-is-not-a-free-planet-no-matter-what
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-spacex-says/. Salotti, Jean-Marc. “Minimum Number of Settlers for Survival on Another Planet.” Scientific Reports 10 (2020): 9700. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-
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-trillion-in-30-years-bank-of-america-predicts.html. ———. “Space Tourism Pioneer Dennis Tito Books Private Moon Trip on SpaceX’s Starship.” CNBC, October 12, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/12/spacex-starship-seats-space-tourism-pioneer-dennis-tito-books-private-moon-trip.html. Shelhamer, Mark. “Enabling and Enhancing Human Health and
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of Biomedical Research at the Antarctic Concordia Station.” Experimental Physiology 106 (2021): 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1113/EP088352. Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Avon Books, 2016. Vasquez, John A. The War Puzzle Revisited. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge
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Could Be Dangerous and Ridiculously Expensive. Elon Musk Wants to Do It Anyway.” CNN, September 8, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/tech/spacex-mars-profit-scn/index.html. Weeden, Brian, and Victoria Samson, eds. Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment. Broomfield, CO: Secure World Foundation, 2022. https
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International Publishing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90303-3_12. ———. “Mars Direct 2.0: How to Send Humans to Mars Using Starships.” Presentation at the 70th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Washington, D.C., October 20–26, 2019. Zubrin, Robert, and Richard Wagner. The Case for Mars: The
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, 347 and scientific research, 385 on self-sustaining Mars, 356–57 on settling Mars, 9, 11, 17, 95, 243, 307 space-states and, 326 on SpaceX’s toilet, 175 Texas city of, 335 and war in Ukraine, 362 N NASA, 18, 45, 63, 184, 269 “2020 Artemis Plan” of, 135 and
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habitat design of, 206, 207 lunar regolith sold to, 250–51 scientists, 53 SMACs list of, 77–78 and spacecraft food, 174 teams up with SpaceX, 135 and women astronauts, 213–16 See also astronauts; specific missions National Academy of Sciences, 59 National Radiation Council, 59 National Science Foundation, 329 National
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of, 322–27 territorial integrity and, 315–16, 319–20, 322 “wait-and-go-big” approach to, 326–27 spacewalks, 48–49, 99, 104, 168 SpaceX, 6 busted toilet on, 175 creation of, 17–18 and definition of space, 239 “Inspiration4” mission of, 175 and sovereignty over Mars, 1–2, 308
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson · 11 Sep 2023 · 562pp · 201,502 words
on Twitter. “Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite,” he wrote. He was now able to tweet on an internet that he owned. 53 Starship SpaceX, 2018–2019 Musk’s living room and backyard in Boca Chica; Bill Riley and Mark Juncosa Big F Rocket If Musk’s goal had been
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and most powerful ever built. He code-named the big rocket the BFR. A year later, he sent out a tweet: “Renaming BFR to Starship.” The Starship system would have a first-stage booster and a second-stage spacecraft that together stacked to be 390 feet high, 50 percent taller than the
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with the Nevada and Fremont Tesla factories, Musk found time each week to look at the renderings of the type of amenities and accommodations that Starship would have for passengers on a nine-month trip to Mars. Stainless steel, again From his childhood days hanging around his father’s engineering office
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Wars I and II—and material science. One day in late 2018, they were visiting the Starship production facility, which was then located near the Port of Los Angeles about fifteen miles south of the SpaceX factory and headquarters. Riley explained that they were having problems with the carbon fiber material they
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the team. “Run the numbers.” When they did so, they determined that steel could, in fact, turn out to be lighter in the conditions that Starship would face. At very cold temperatures, the strength of stainless steel increases by 50 percent, which meant it would be stronger when holding the supercooled
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liquid oxygen and nitrogen fuel. In addition, the high melting point of stainless steel would eliminate the need for a heat shield on Starship’s space-facing side, reducing the overall weight of the rocket. A final advantage was that it was simple to weld together pieces of stainless
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be reused. By July 2019, it was doing eighty-foot-high test hops. Musk was so pleased with the concept of Starship that one afternoon, during a meeting in the SpaceX conference room, he impulsively decided to deploy his burn-the-boats strategy. Cancel the Falcon Heavy, he ordered. The executives in
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as a backup to Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, but it mainly gathered dust until 2018, when Musk decided to make it a dedicated base for Starship. Because Starship was so big, it did not make sense to build it in Los Angeles and transport it to Boca Chica. So Musk decided they
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should build a rocket manufacturing area about two miles from the launchpad amid Boca Chica’s sun-parched scrubland and mosquito-infested wetlands. The SpaceX team
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erected three massive hangar-like tents for the assembly lines and three “high bays” made of corrugated metal that could accommodate the Starships vertically. An old building on the property was retrofitted with office cubicles, a
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-day trip orbiting Earth. Blue Origin has launched a single suborbital mission to space that lasted just over 10 minutes.” 59 Starship Surge SpaceX, July 2021 Andy Krebs Lucas Hughes A Starship being stacked by the Mechazilla arms Mechazilla X, then fifteen months old, toddled on top of the white Starbase conference table
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be distracted by him. The story of the chopsticks had begun eight months earlier, at the end of 2020, when the SpaceX team was discussing the landing legs being planned for Starship. Musk’s guiding principle was rapid reusability, which he often declared was “the holy grail for making humans a space
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his priority. Shortly after 1 a.m., Musk sent out an email titled “Starship Surge” to all SpaceX employees. “Anyone who is not working on other obviously critical path projects at SpaceX should shift immediately to work on the first Starship orbit,” he wrote. “Please fly, drive, or get here by any means
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that evening. Another storm had passed. Raptor costs A few weeks after the surge, Musk turned his attention to Raptor, the engine that would power Starship. Fueled by supercooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen, it had more than twice the thrust of the Falcon 9’s Merlin engine. This meant that
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about the future. Sitting in the control room next to Kiko Dontchev, who was trying to focus on the countdown, he asked questions about the Starship system being built in Boca Chica and how to convince engineers to move there from Florida. Hans Koenigsmann was attending his last launch. After working
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would aim at going to an even higher orbit and doing a spacewalk in a new suit designed by SpaceX. He also asked for the right to be the first private customer on Starship when it was ready. Other potential customers also tried to reserve flights. One of them, a promoter of
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the engineers. “I had someone else cut the back.” Over the previous weeks, Musk had been cycling through periods of despair and fury about the Starship’s Raptor engine. It had become complex, expensive, and difficult to manufacture. “When I see a tube that cost twenty thousand dollars, I want
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knew my name,” McKenzie says. That indeed may have been the case, but Musk knew his work was succeeding. McKenzie’s team had successfully improved Starship’s flap actuators, one of the many projects that Musk dove into personally. Just after midnight one night in September 2021, Musk texted McKenzie, “Are
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almost like they were cars on an assembly line. By Thanksgiving 2022, they were making more than one a day, creating a stockpile for future Starship launches. 64 Optimus Is Born Tesla, August 2021 An actress dressed as the proposed Optimus robot The friendly robot Musk’s interest in creating a
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the Tesla team virtually from Boca Chica. That day also included a meeting with the Texas Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office to get support for Starship launches, a Tesla finance meeting, a discussion of solar roof finances, a meeting about future launches of civilians, a contentious walk through the tents
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stress.” The following day, Damian cooked pasta for everyone and played classical music on the piano. But Musk decided to focus on the problems of Starship’s Raptor engines. After briefly walking through the dining room looking stressed, he spent most of the day on conference calls. Then, abruptly, he
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at such moments of unnerving success, Musk manufactures a drama. He launches a surge, scrambles the jets, announces an unrealistic and unnecessary deadline. Autonomy Day, Starship stacking, solar roof installations, car production hell—he yanks the alarm chain and forces a fire drill. “Normally, he would go into one of his
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. “It’s more an art project than a house,” he explained. He put off building it. 76 Starbase Shake-up SpaceX, 2022 Inspecting the Raptor engines under a Starship booster Showing off Starship Always vigilant against complacency, Musk decided in early 2022 that it was time for another surge in Boca Chica. It
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is to challenge authority.” Later that night, a crowd of a few hundred workers, reporters, government officials, and locals gathered in front of the stacked Starship, lit by spotlights. “There have to be things that inspire you, that move your heart,” Musk said in his speech. “Being a space-faring
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are bullshit, a mega fail,” he explained. “Like, no fucking way these should take so long.” He decreed that they would start having meetings on Starship every night, seven days a week. “We are going to go through the first-principles algorithm every night, questioning requirements and deleting,” he said. “That
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the dozen or so at the table was Shana Diez, an MIT aeronautics engineer who had worked at SpaceX for fourteen years and, having impressed Musk with her plainspoken competence, was now director of Starship engineering. Filling out the table were the other members of the team—Bill Riley, Joe Petrzelka, Andy
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to figure out the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” 95 The Starship Launch SpaceX, April 2023 Musk, Juncosa, and McKenzie atop a high bay in Boca Chica Watching the Starship launch from the control room With Griffin and X in the control room With Grimes and Tau
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gathered at the Tiki Bar at Starbase for a semi-celebratory party featuring slow-roasted suckling pig and dancing. Behind the bandstand were some older Starships, their stainless steel reflecting the lights from the party, with Mars, bright and red, rising as if on cue in the night sky just
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with fire,” he recalled. “So I took a box of matches behind a tree and started lighting them.” “Molded out of faults” The explosion of Starship was emblematic of Musk, a fitting metaphor for his compulsion to aim high, act impulsively, take wild risks, and accomplish amazing things—but also to
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friend. Nick Kalayjian. Former VP of engineering, Tesla. Ro Khanna. California Democratic congressman. Hans Koenigsmann. Longtime engineer, SpaceX. Milan Kovac. Director of Autopilot software engineering, Tesla. Andy Krebs. Former director of Starship civil engineering, SpaceX. Joe Kuhn. Mechanical engineer, The Boring Company and Tesla. Bill Lee. Venture capitalist and Musk friend. Max Levchin
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. Cofounder of PayPal. Jacob McKenzie. Senior director Raptor engineering, SpaceX. Jon McNeill. Former president of Tesla. Lars Moravy. VP of
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Scotiabank and Musk mentor. Ross Nordeen. Software engineer at Tesla and musketeer at Twitter. Luke Nosek. Investor and friend of Musk. Sam Patel. Director of Starship operations, SpaceX. Chris Payne. Autopilot software engineer, Tesla. Janet Petro. Director of the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral. Joe Petrzelka. VP
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Starship engineering, SpaceX. Henrik Pfister. Automobile designer. Yoni Ramon. Director of security, Tesla. Robin Ren. Close friend of Musk at Penn and former China head, Tesla. Adeo Ressi.
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, Tesla. Marc Tarpenning. Cofounder of Tesla. Sam Teller. Former chief of staff to Musk. Peter Thiel. Cofounder of PayPal and investor. Jim Vo. Manager of Starship build, SpaceX. Franz von Holzhausen. Design chief, Tesla. Tim Watkins. Partner of Antonio Gracias and Tesla SWAT team leader. Bari Weiss. Journalist, Free Press. Rodney Westmoreland
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Reality,” PC Magazine, Oct. 18, 2013. 52. Starlink: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mark Juncosa, Bill Riley, Sam Teller, Elissa Butterfield, Bill Gates. 53. Starship: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Bill Riley, Sam Patel, Joe Petrzelka, Peter Nicholson, Elissa Butterfield, Jim Vo. Ryan d’Agostino, “Elon Musk: Why I
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’m Building the Starship out of Stainless Steel,” Popular Mechanics, Jan. 22, 2019. 54. Autonomy Day: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, James Musk, Sam Teller, Franz von Holzhausen
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“Interview with FT’s Person of the Year,” Financial Times, Dec. 15, 2021; Kara Swisher interview with Elon Musk, Code Conference, Sept. 28, 2021. 59. Starship Surge: Author’s interviews with Bill Riley, Kiko Dontchev, Elon Musk, Sam Patel, Joe Petrzelka, Mark Juncosa, Gwynne Shotwell, Lucas Hughes, Sam Patel, Andy Krebs
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Matt Taibbi, “Meet the Censored: Me?,” Racket, Apr. 12, 2023; Tucker Carlson, interview with Elon Musk, Fox News, Apr. 17 and 18, 2023. 95. The Starship Launch: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Mark Juncosa, Bill Riley, Shana Diez, Mark Soltys, Antonio Gracias, Jason Calacanis, Gwynne
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launch attempts and, 151, 154, 175 Inspiration4 mission and, 384 Kwajalein Island launch site and, 144, 147, 149 safety and, 351–52 Shotwell and, 120 Starship system and, 611–12 Kovac, Milan, 333, 396, 495, 497, 499, 500 Krebs, Andy, 358, 361, 366, 367–68, 475, 476, 478, 480 Kuehmann,
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496 irony and, 80–81 management of Twitter and, 549 Mechazilla and, 360 naming and, 257 Optimus and, 485, 498 Roadster space launch, 299–300 Starship launch and, 609 Teller’s management of, 230 Tesla automation/de-automation and, 282 Tesla Chinese manufacturing and, 313 Tesla fart app, 303 Twitter acquisition
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deadlines and below —MARS MISSION: college years, 51 Gates on, 436–37 Mars Society inspiration for, 92 Optimus and, 485 SpaceX founding and, 92–94, 100, 321 Starlink founding and, 321 Starship system and, 326, 362, 391, 604–5, 608, 611 unrealistic deadlines and, 391 vision/hype mixing and, 230, 604 —
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overview, 284–86 questioning requirements and, 113, 272, 284–85, 286, 351, 370–71, 401–2 SolarCity and, 370–72, 373 SpaceX and, 113, 152 Starlink and, 322, 323–24 Starship system and, 328, 365, 378, 477–78 Tesla and, 274, 278–81 X.com and, 76 —RISK ATTRACTION, 613–14 childhood
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, 481, 612 parties and, 237 PayPal and, 77, 86 public criticism of, 293 Tesla and, 86, 613 See also SpaceX, risk and —UNREALISTIC DEADLINES AND: PayPal, 101 SpaceX, 101, 113–14, 177, 184 Starship system, 360–61, 362, 391, 477 Tesla, 165, 269, 319, 333 Tesla server move, 590 X.com, 75 —WEALTH
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Optimus and, 395, 495, 497 Person of the Year ceremony and, 416 server move and, 584 SolarCity and, 371 stalking and, 574, 576 Starship launch and, 607, 609 Starship system and, 359, 475, 478, 481 visit to Grimes’s family, 454 Musk, Xavier (EM’s son). See Wilson, Vivian Jenna Musk,
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600–601 NASA Biden and, 422 Constellation program, 206–7 Falcon 1 rocket prototype and, 121–22 Mike Griffin and, 98, 101 regulations and, 113 Starship system and, 475 See also International Space Station; Space Shuttle National Air and Space Museum, 121 National Labor Relations Board, 421 NATO, 434 Navteq, 62
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, 365, 366 Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 152 Kistler NASA contract and, 122 Malaysia contract, 145 on Patel, 477 as SpaceX president, 188–89 Starlink for Ukraine and, 428, 432–33, 434 Starship system and, 328–29, 362, 363, 364, 478–79, 611 working relationship with EM, 119, 121, 328–29,
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rescue and, 288 Twitter server move and, 585 unrealistic deadlines and, 101, 113–14, 177, 184, 330 See also Falcon 1 launch attempts; SpaceX, risk and; Starlink; Starship system SpaceX, risk and Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 153, 154, 186 Falcon 1 rocket and, 110 Falcon 9 successes and, 232–33 founding and
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, 100 Inspiration4 mission and, 383–85 iterative design approach and, 115 Starship system and, 608–9, 610–11 testing and, 116 Thiel on, 86 SpaceX test stand, 111 Spiro, Alex, 488 EM’s impulsive tweets and, 294 EM’s management of Twitter and, 521
The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 28 Jan 2020 · 501pp · 114,888 words
transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry. In BOLD, we explored his first two forays: SpaceX, his rocket company, and Tesla, his electric car company. SpaceX helped revitalize aerospace commercial launches, turning a fantasy into a billion-dollar industry. Tesla’s rapid rise to prominence, meanwhile
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train in history. Musk was outraged. The cost was too high, the train too sluggish. Teaming up with a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, he published a fifty-eight-page concept paper for “The Hyperloop,” a high-speed transportation network that used magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down
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was just getting started. The Boring Company Elon Musk’s main residence in Los Angeles is located in Bel Air, a seventeen-mile trek from SpaceX’s Hawthorne-based offices. On the best of days, his commute takes thirty-five minutes—but December 17, 2016 (coincidentally the anniversary of the first
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this promise at the end of an hour-long keynote to five thousand aerospace executives and government officials. The presentation was primarily an update about SpaceX’s megarocket, Starship, which was designed to take humans to Mars. The fact that Musk now wanted to use his interplanetary
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delivery was the transportation industry equivalent of Steve Jobs’s famous line that (almost) ended his demos: “Wait, wait… There’s one more thing.” The Starship travels at 17,500 mph. It’s an order of magnitude faster than the Concorde. Think about what this actually means: New York to Shanghai
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. London to Dubai in twenty-nine minutes. Hong Kong to Singapore in twenty-two minutes. What’s not to like? So how real is the Starship? “We could probably demonstrate this [technology] in three years,” Musk explained, “but it’s going to take a while to get the safety right. It
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to retire his current rocket fleet, both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and replace them with the Starships in the 2020s. Less than a year later, LA mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted that SpaceX was planning to break ground on an eighteen-acre rocket production facility near the port of LA. And
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bringing 5G download speeds to everyone. Despite the radical network upgrade of OneWeb, Wyler’s a David compared to the financial Goliaths of Amazon and SpaceX. In early 2019, Amazon joined this satellite competition, announcing Project Kuiper, a constellation of 3,236 satellites designed to provide high-speed broadband to the
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world. SpaceX, with a four-year head start on Amazon, topped this in 2019, when the company began to deploy a monster constellation of over 12,000
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time we’d seen robotic home delivery. It won’t be the last. A dozen or so different delivery bots are currently entering the market. Starship Technologies, for example, a startup created by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, has a general-purpose home delivery robot. Right now, the system
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and GPS sensors, but soon models will include microphones, speakers, and the ability—via AI-driven natural language processing—to communicate with customers. Since 2016, Starship has carried out fifty thousand deliveries in over one hundred cities in twenty countries. Along similar lines, Nuro, the company cofounded by Jiajun Zhu, one
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used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy. Check out video: bit.ly/OpyW5N @elonmusk, Nov. 24, 2015: Not quite “rarest.” SpaceX Grasshopper did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around. We’ll start with Bezos, whose passion for space began in high school. Both
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the available launch options were way too primitive and expensive to ever facilitate a human colonization of the stars. To solve these problems, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. In June 2008, after several spectacular failures and a close brush with bankruptcy, Falcon 1 got off the ground and into orbit. This
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on the planet, which, in early 2018, launched Musk’s cherry-red Tesla roadster past Mars and on a trajectory toward the asteroid belt. Finally, SpaceX announced they would soon stop production of the Falcon vehicles—which lacked the oomph to send humans to Mars—and instead began work on
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views the establishment of a Mars colony as a contingency plan for humanity and a problem to be solved this decade. Starship test flights are already under way and his stated goal is to have humans on the planet’s surface before 2030, with a full city
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up and running by 2050. To achieve this, SpaceX has scheduled ten major launches between 2027 and 2050, one every twenty-two to twenty-four months, when the distance between the Earth and Mars
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is at its shortest. The current plan goes like this: A Starship gets launched into orbit around Earth, then several tanker Starships would launch as well, meeting up with the first one to top up its fuel. From there, these rockets would
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urban planning: Eran Ben-Joseph, ReThinking a Lot (MIT Press, 2012), pp. xi–xix. Hyperloop is the brainchild: For the original whitepaper: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf. Robert Goddard: Malcolm Browne, “New Funds Fuel Magnet Power for Trains,” New York Times, March 3, 1992. RAND corporation: Robert
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: For the full address, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdUX3ypDVwI. Musk announced his intentions to retire his current rocket fleet: Darrell Etherington, “SpaceX aims to Replace Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon with One Spaceship,” Techcrunch, September 28. 2017. See: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/28
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/spacex-aims-to-replace-falcon-9-falcon-heavy-and-dragon-with-one-spaceship/. LA mayor Eric Garcetti: See: https://twitter.com/mayorofla. the very first test
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flights: See: https://spacenews.com/spacex-begins-starship-hopper-testing/. Sears was worth $14.3 billion: Each of the data points (company, year, and market cap) was taken from https://www.macrotrends
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from Orbit,” GeekWire, April 4, 2019. See: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-project-kuiper-broadband-satellite/. SpaceX: For the FCC’s original press release, see: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-spacex-provide-broadband-satellite-services. In 2014, at an infectious disease lab in Finland: Author interview with Oura CEO
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: Mariella Moon, “Domino’s Delivery Robots Are Invading Europe,” Engadget, March 30, 2017. A dozen or so different delivery bots are currently entering the market. Starship Technologies: Kayla Mathews, “5 Ways Retail Robots Are Disrupting the Industry,” Robotics Business Review, August 2, 2018. See: https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/retail-hospitality/retail
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-robots-disrupt-industry/. Starship has carried out fifty thousand deliveries in over one hundred cities in twenty countries: Luke Dormehl, “The Rise and Reign of Starship, the World’s First Robotic Delivery Provider,” Digital Trends, May 22, 2019. See: https
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://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/how-starship-technologies-created-delivery-robots/. Along similar lines, Nuro, the company cofounded by Jiajun Zhu: Mark Harris, “Softbank’s $940 Million Smaller Robots Could Leap from
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Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, September 21, 2012. See: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002: Michael Sheetz, “The Rise of Spacex and the Future Of Elon Musk’s Mars Dream,” CNBC, March 20, 2019. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20
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/spacex-rise-elon-musk-mars-dream.html. See also: Tim Fernholz, “The Complete Visual History of Spacex’s Single-Minded Pursuit of Rocket Reusability,” Quartz, July 1, 2017, https://qz.com/1016072/a-multimedia-history
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-of-every-single-one-of-spacexs-attempts-to-land-its-booster-rocket-back-on-earth/. began work on “Starship”: Mike Wall, “Big Leap by SpaceX’s Starship Prototype Pushed to Next Week,” Space, August 16, 2019. See: https://www.space.com
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/spacex-starhopper-big-test-flight-target-date.html. a problem to be solved this decade: Matt Williams, “Musk Gives an
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.universetoday.com/140071/musk-gives-an-update-on-when-a-mars-colony-could-be-built/. Musk thinks about $500,000: Amanda Kooser, “Elon Musk Expects Spacex Ticket to Mars Will Cost $500,000,” CNET, February 11, 2019. See: https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-expects
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-spacex-ticket-to-mars-will-cost-500000/. Meta-Intelligence: Into the Borg In 2015, Harvard chemist Charles Lieber: Jung Min Lee, “Nanoenabled Direct Contact Interfacing of
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race and, 73 space, colonization of, 249–53 space race, 73 Bezos vs. Musk, 250–51 US vs. Soviet Union, 249 Space Studies Institute, 250 SpaceX, 16–17, 20, 40, 252–53 spare parts, 3–D printing and, 110 Spatial Web, advertising and, 118–20 “Special Report on Global Warming” (UN
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–22 Sputnik I, 73 staff-on-demand, 84 Stanford University, 90, 148, 178 Staples, 110 STAR (Soft Tissue Autonomous Robot), 161 Starbucks, 112 Starship (SpaceX rocket), 20, 253 Starship Technologies, 106 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV show), 133 stem cell exhaustion, 164, 171 stem cells, 154, 163–64, 176 cultured meat from
Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words
be primarily the domain of governments—low Earth orbit (commonly abbreviated as LEO) and beyond—is being accessed with increasing frequency by companies such as SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and a growing range of international entities. Although these projects are still being funded to a large extent by government, within
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that commercial spaceflight partnerships have been consistently underfunded, and the contractors that will be providing astronaut transportation to the ISS—Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX—have been running behind schedule. While nobody can say how the Constellation program would have turned out, the US has suffered a significant gap
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political considerations.3 At the same time, NASA funding for private sector efforts has fallen short of its own stated goals most years since 2010. SpaceX, Boeing, and other commercial space providers continue to vie for increased government funding for commercial spaceflight capability. NASA’s overarching plan is for the
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policy makers, cabinet-level government officials, and the NASA administrator. It is advised by a selection of aerospace professionals from companies old and new. SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsule should begin ferrying astronauts to the ISS in 2019. Image credit: NASA The council has created recommendations for how NASA can
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themselves to improve these services for increasingly lower costs. The two companies currently developing a contracted capability to deliver astronauts to the ISS are SpaceX and Boeing. SpaceX is building and flying the Falcon 9 rocket, which is already running regular cargo supply missions to the ISS and is poised to begin
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to the ISS. These traditional aerospace companies know that they must adapt or die in this new environment and are working hard to compete with SpaceX. Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, scheduled to begin crew-delivery service to the International Space Station in 2019. Image credit: NASA Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems
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hired American aerospace contractors to build its spacecraft, funds are now being directed to innovative fixed-price contracts with high-tech start-ups such as SpaceX, that will allow us to avoid future spending on Russian launches to the ISS. These expenditures are reinvigorating our national economy via traditional contracts
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the safety protocols? How much risk of debilitation from extended weightlessness or radiation exposure should a private citizen in space, flying with a company like SpaceX, for example, be allowed to assume? These questions will need to be addressed soon, as private entities begin sending paying passengers to places like
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Systems Vector Space Systems, a relative newcomer, was founded in 2016 by Jim Cantrell and other aerospace and software industry veterans. Cantrell was associated with SpaceX early on. Located in Tucson, Arizona, the company made quick progress, launching its first test vehicle in 2017. It plans to launch out of
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do so with increasing frequency, allowing for record-sized private payloads to be delivered to space. Musk formed Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, in 2002 and the company successfully launched its first Falcon 1 in 2008, after three failed attempts. The Falcon 9 came next in 2010,
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has netted him NASA contracts worth billions, as well as launches for the US Air Force and private satellite companies. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX. Image credit: SpaceX SpaceX, like Blue Origin and a select few other companies in Space 2.0, is largely personality-driven. It’s a big-vision company, directed
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of boosters and engines. NASA has sprawling but aging facilities, working with quiet exactitude to assemble mostly one-off spaceflight components in dust-free environments; SpaceX headquarters is one vast interconnected shop, with squadrons of mostly young engineers, machinists, technicians, and office workers laboring side by side to build rockets—lots
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competition exists in the launch business and rockets are being repurposed for commercial use, cost has to be considered and controlled When designing the Falcon, SpaceX looked at mass reduction with fresh eyes. Their lead engineers studied how NASA, their contractors, and even the Russians built their rockets. What they
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time to Mars for about $250,000 each. Over time, use of the rockets should pay for their cost—and generate a profit. Image credit: SpaceX SpaceX’s view of the future is a grand vision, one involving a lot of new technology and elaborate space infrastructure. To better understand Musk’s
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produce more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V. The spacecraft atop it (the BFS or “Big Falcon Spaceship,” which Musk also renamed as “Starship,” is a large, crewed structure that has a pressurized (and habitable) volume equivalent to the Airbus A380 jumbo jet. Besides being Mars capable, the Super
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Heavy/Starship will be employed by SpaceX to fly payloads to the moon. SpaceX is also developing technology to enable the rocket’s use as point-to-point transportation on Earth. In this configuration
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well. The Falcon Heavy prepares to launch on its maiden flight on February 6, 2018, from Florida. Image credit: SpaceX The Super Heavy/Starship is currently under construction a few miles from SpaceX’s main factory. The company has leased a large tract of land in Los Angeles’s harbor, which will allow
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it to build the spacecraft there and then transport it to Florida via barge. How will the company pay for all this? SpaceX
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has already secured its first contract for the Starship—a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, who will loop the moon with six to eight artists, and an astronaut or two,
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as his crew. Shotwell thinks that further partnership with NASA is likely. SpaceX already has two such agreements in place—the space agency
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Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, or ULA. Falcon 9 carrying CASSIOPE preparing for liftoff at Vandenberg Air Force Base, December 2015. Image credit: SpaceX CHAPTER 9 A NEW SPACE RACE Image credit: James Vaughan Precious few competitors exist in the human spaceflight launch industry—the resources required to shuttle
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Launching humans into space is much more difficult. The technology is more complex, and the needs for protection and life support more demanding. But with SpaceX and others leading the way, it is clear that space entrepreneurs are capable of addressing these complex challenges. With companies such as Boeing entering the
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who were touting everything from railgun launchers to space tourism, he simply did not see a business model that made sense to him . . . until SpaceX. “Prior to SpaceX, not a single company, in my judgment, warranted bringing to my partnership,” he says. The companies he reviewed either wanted too much investment or
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Falcon 1 rocket for launch in 2007. The company was almost out of funds as it struggled to launch the rocket in 2008. Image credit: SpaceX “But SpaceX was different altogether,” he continues, “though when we first invested they’d had three Falcon 1 failures in a row. I didn’t realize
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internationally. There have always been individuals around the globe investing in aerospace, but to date no international billionaires have stepped up to create a foreign SpaceX or Blue Origin. Plenty of private capital exists in places like China, India, and Russia. With some changes in regulation, proper government incentives, and
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By aligning public and private strategic goals, dramatic financial leverage can be developed. A 2011 analysis of the development cost of the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon 9 launch vehicle that was developed for the NASA COTS program was conducted by the office of the NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy
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some of its technology. This has resulted in a savings to the taxpayer of up to 90 percent over traditional aerospace contracting. Image credit: SpaceX Next up was the value of NASA’s commitment to private space companies when it comes to securing investment. Another key government initiative supporting commercialization
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showed images of a possible moon base. His message was clear: Access to, and possibly the development of the moon is on SpaceX’s agenda. His massive Super Heavy/Starship will be at the core of these plans. The first modules of NASA’s Gateway are planned to fly in the same
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general time frame as Musk’s new rocket, and given the likelihood of time slips in both programs, they may well be operating in cislunar space concurrently. If SpaceX
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keeps to its overall development plan for the Super Heavy/Starship, we can expect to see a consolidation of efforts. And let’s not forget that Blue Origin should be operating
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its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander by the early 2020s. The competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin will augment the
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Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn are competing on cost and efficiency. By 2022, SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship completes testing and begins selected flights. The net effect: Costs of space access, for both human and nonhuman payloads, drop dramatically. Russia expedites plans to
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significant number of landers and rovers, from multiple nations, join NASA’s machines on Mars, working in coordination with an international fleet of orbiting spacecraft. SpaceX lands an unmanned Starship on Mars in 2022 in order to test flight and landing technologies and in-situ resource extraction. By 2026
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, SpaceX sends another Starship uncrewed to Mars, carrying a heavy payload of outpost infrastructure. This provides an opportunity to pre-position in-situ resource extraction technologies, with equipment provided
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lands the first astronauts on Mars with the SLS/Orion system, augmented by a habitation/transit module. Or, SpaceX and NASA race to Mars. Or, SpaceX delays its ambitious plans for the Super Heavy/Starship and NASA lands humans on Mars in the 2030s. No sure bets on this goal, but it will
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the National Space Council was reactivated, and a dozen new promising, well-financed space start-ups appeared. Large private space efforts, such as those from SpaceX and Blue Origin, matured and evolved over the same period. New spacecraft flew, notable among them being the Falcon Heavy, which launched successfully in February
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Mitchell, April 8, 1974. 19Interview with the author, November 2016. 20Interview with the author, March 2017. 21Interview with the author, November 2016. 22Wolf, Nicky. “SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Plans to Get Humans to Mars in Six Years.” The Guardian, September 28, 2016. Reporting on remarks made by Musk during the
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in Space: NASA Unveils Winners of the Space Poop Challenge.” Space.com, February 15, 2017. CHAPTER 8: SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES COR P. 50Masunaga, Samantha. “SpaceX track record ‘right in the ballpark’ with 93% success rate.” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2016. 51Sam Altman interview with Elon Musk for Y Combinator
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Amazon-like delivery for ‘future human settlement’ of the moon.” Washington Post, March 2, 2017. 75Ibid. 76SpaceX launch costs are published on their website: www.spacex.com/about/capabilities. Accessed April 26, 2018. ULA does not publicly disclose launch fees. 77Interview with the author, October 2016. 78Ray, Justin. “ULA Gets
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115For more information on the Shuguang project, see Encyclopedia Astronautica, www.astronautix.com/s/shuguang1. Accessed September 10, 2017. 116Nowakowski, Tomasz. “In the Footsteps of SpaceX: A Chinese company eyes the development of a reusable launch vehicle.” Astrowatch, September 2017. 117Stone, Christopher. “US cooperation with China in space: Some thoughts to
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Virtual Institute. sservi.nasa.gov/articles/lava-tube-lunar-base. Accessed October 20, 2017. 1562017 International Astronautical Conference in Adelaide, Australia. Details at the SpaceX website: www.spacex.com/mars. Accessed May 1, 2018. 157The National Space Society has its own, more detailed Space Settlement Roadmap online at space.nss.org/space
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granted a series of contracts to deliver cargo to the International Space Station on private rockets and spacecraft. The first CRS contract was awarded to SpaceX in 2016. ESA: The European Space Agency, an organization of European nations that undertakes their collective spaceflight ventures. Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: Rockets
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built by SpaceX that provide commercial and government launch services. Gateway: New name for the Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway (see entry below). GCR: Galactic Cosmic Radiation, also known
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146 first launch of, 129, 255–257, 256, 258–261, 261 for interplanetary travel, 128 New Glenn and, 136, 137, 245 reusability of, 259 and SpaceX, 11 as US rocket, 55 Farshchi, Shahin, 161 FCC (Federal Communications Commission), 131 feathering system, 98–99 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 99, 131, 220 Federal
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of, 158, 218, 234, 247 storing mined, 88 utilizing, for space settlements, 234, 235 retrorockets, 18, 18 reusability Blue Origin and, 197 defined, 291 SpaceX and, 39, 119–121, 125, 126–128, 204, 259 United Launch Alliance and, 143–145 Richter scale, 227 robotic landings, 247 robotic probes, 64 Rocket
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George Whitesides, 97, 98, 100–102 space exploration, 25–36, 234 Space Exploration, Development, and Settlement Act (2016), 238–239 Space Exploration Technologies Corp. see SpaceX spaceflight destinations for, 59–60 (see also specific destinations, e.g.: Mars) government, 246 and human factors, 44–48 Indian crewed flights, 177–178 investors
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Stanford Torus, 241 Starbucks, 29 star cluster, 83 Starliner, 11, 12, 50, 50, 55, 185 “Starman,” 260, 261 stars, as source of radiation, 83–84 “Starship.” see Big Falcon Spaceship Star Trek (television), 80, 233 STEAM activities, 266 STEM activities, 266 Stern, Alan, 132 storage depots, 208, 221 storm shelters, 90
Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World
by Anna Crowley Redding · 1 Jul 2019 · 190pp · 46,977 words
-caliber team to help him with the next step. In June 2002, to the sound of a celebratory mariachi band, Elon launched Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX for short, with the mission “to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”78 Soon the spoils
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from PayPal would fund this multistep mission. First, SpaceX had to build a rocket, then use the rocket to launch paying customers’ satellites into space. That revenue would fund more research and development, with
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other performance variables. Analyzing the data, they pinpointed what needed to be retooled back in California, and the engines would be tested again in Texas. SpaceX was working on the Merlin engine for the booster, which provides the power to lift the rocket off the launchpad, and the Kestrel engine, which
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the fairing, or a thin metal shell. During orbit the shell opens, separates from the spacecraft, and falls away. Close-up of Merlin engines (© SpaceX). As SpaceX worked on manufacturing a fairing, fuel tanks, and the rest of the rocket, that ambitious launch date sailed on past without an actual launch. In
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1, a rocket named after Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. The follow-up to his big trip was an even bigger announcement. SpaceX would begin work on a second, more powerful rocket. Meet the Musks Justine Musk. (Photo by PatrickMcMullan/Contributor/Getty Images.) NAME: Justine Musk (née Wilson
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engineers experimented in a blast area maintained by the fire department. As Team Tesla chased down nothing less than the complete reimagining of electric cars, SpaceX was ready to launch the Falcon 1. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Elon? Elon’s approach to problem-solving comes from his reading
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energy. And he was determined to make a difference—through sheer force of will. Gwynne Shotwell. (Photo by NASA/Kim Shiflett.) NAME: Gwynne Shotwell, president, SpaceX As a little girl, Gwynne Shotwell was full of questions such as, how does a car work? Gwynne’s artist mom couldn’t answer her
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control room. Everything was going exactly as planned … until it wasn’t. The rocket suddenly broke apart and exploded. The launch was a failure. Again SpaceX employees dissected the problem, found the cause, and worked under incredible pressure to correct it. That said, even with as much money as Elon brought
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of Love, hit bookshelves in 2016, and she is working on another. THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM, RIGHT? Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, August 2, 2008— The SpaceX island team gathered again for a third attempt to launch Falcon 1. LINGO ALERT! A spacecraft may have cargo or passengers aboard. Both are referred
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not. ORBIT Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, September 28, 2008— Falcon 1 was ready for launch. The webcast began streaming. According to one employee, many of the SpaceX employees back at headquarters were trying not to vomit as the countdown approached liftoff. Elon watched from the control room. His brother was on hand
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as well. Elon Musk watches the liftoff of the Falcon 1 spacecraft. (Photo by Alex Coester/AP Images.) Kimbal had been an early investor in SpaceX, which gave him a unique perspective. Years later when he and Elon gave an onstage interview together, he said, “The failures were spectacular. Seeing giant
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stage ignition? Check! Fairing release? Check! And finally, like a dream, the Falcon 1 reached orbit. Mission accomplished! Successful launch of Falcon 1, September 2008. (© SpaceX.) “When the launch was successful,” Kimbal said, “everyone burst into tears. It was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve had.”110 Elon walked
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Tesla. And Tesla’s very survival seemed like little more than a minute-by-minute gamble. Elon’s answer to dodging a planetary catastrophe was SpaceX. That, too, was in doubt. Nearly everything that Elon cared about was in jeopardy. “This wasn’t Elon facing adversity,” Kimbal explained to Esquire. “Personal
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order to produce a “good product.” Translation, they were shooting for nothing less than perfect. In spring 2009, the press and invited guests walked into SpaceX headquarters. With a factory backdrop worthy of Tony Stark, the Model S was on proud display. It was the first luxury all-electric sedan. The
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of Gravitas, also inspired by the Culture series. STICK THE LANDING MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2015 8:29 p.m. (EST) Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX Cape Canaveral Launch Control. (© SpaceX.) T minus twenty seconds. Under a clear night sky at Launch Complex 40, the control room’s countdown commands blared from loudspeakers. Elon
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, here they were again. FALCON 9 SPECS ROCKET STAGES: Two HEIGHT: 229 feet DIAMETER: 12 feet ENGINES: 9 Merlin engines Six. Five. “Go for launch.” SpaceX was seconds away from trying to make rocket history. The goal? Launch a rocket into orbit, deploy satellites, and then land the rocket booster back
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great plan, but there was no other choice. Need to know everything about Falcon 9? Fear not, it has a user’s guide: www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/falcon_9_users_guide_rev_2.0.pdf The technology for a reusable orbital rocket did not exist. Until now … hopefully. Across the
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country at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a crowd gathered. They suddenly fell silent, watching every move in Cape Canaveral on a giant screen. Four. Three. Two. One
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crowd back in California stood quiet with clasped hands. Some covered their mouths. Tortured looks spread across many of their faces. Employees watch launch from SpaceX headquarters. (© SpaceX.) Then, above Cape Canaveral, a sonic boom filled the sky. The rocket was on its way back to Earth. FALCON 9 DISTANCE TO ORBIT
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on their air-conditioning during a heat wave. CHAPTER 10 IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL As Thanksgiving approached in 2017, a crowd gathered at SpaceX. Cameras flashed. iPhones were held high to capture what was coming … a truck. A freight-hauling, fully electric truck that looked as if it materialized
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took off,”137 he said, in near disbelief. He ran outside; everyone around him screamed or laughed out loud in utter amazement. Falcon Heavy launch. (© SpaceX.) Hand on his head, Elon smiled from ear to ear. The side boosters, fitted with cameras that were live streaming, had separated from the spacecraft
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to transmit the signal. The image made most front pages around the world the next day. Starman and the Tesla Roadster in space. (© SpaceX.) SEE FOR YOURSELF! SpaceX keeps the video of Starman on its YouTube channel. Just as Elon originally intended to do with his green leaves on red Martian soil
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working on “the way.” Imaginations captured, technology developing, everyday people began talking about when humans would get to Mars. The U.S. Air Force awarded SpaceX a $130 million military contract for the Falcon Heavy to deliver a satellite into orbit. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020. But, shhh
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how to handle any emergencies. Dragon’s first crew will be NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, Bob Behnken, and Doug Hurley. Dragon leaving SpaceX headquarters. (© SpaceX.) This program became all the more critical in the fall of 2018 when a Russian Soyuz spacecraft experienced a rocket failure, 119 seconds after launch
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booster and parachute back to Earth, then use reverse thrust to slowly land. So far, tests on the escape system have been successful. Dragon splashdown. (© SpaceX.) The first U.S. astronauts who will fly on American-made commercial spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, from left to right: Suni
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a city, and ultimately a civilization that sustains itself. That is Elon’s dream, and he has a plan to achieve it. Concept art of Starship and Mars colony. (© SpaceX.) The plan calls for a new type of spaceship originally called the Big Falcon Rocket. It has since been renamed
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Starship. Construction of Starship is underway. The rocket will consist of a booster and a ship that can carry one to two hundred people on board. But long before Starship attempts to
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take the first colonists to Mars, unmanned supply missions will drop off those critical necessities. The goal is to deliver cargo to Mars by 2022. Starship will get a new name when the spaceship heads to Mars: Heart of Gold, which is the name of Elon’s favorite spacecraft from The
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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Concept art of sending Dragon to Mars. (© SpaceX.) After launching the ship carrying the colonists into orbit, the Starship’s booster would quickly return to Earth, load up on fuel, and rejoin the colonists in space, resupplying the ship
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with enough fuel to make it to Mars. The trip would take about eighty days. SpaceX says the target date for crewed missions to
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to Mars, but carry out a number of other jobs, like launching satellites for governments and businesses and providing transportation from Earth to the moon. Starship would more than double the power of the Falcon Heavy, which dramatically increases the type of payloads the spacecraft can carry and where those payloads
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took a while, but in 2018 Elon finally won approval from the Federal Communications Commission for his plan to build a global broadband network using SpaceX satellites. Elon has approval to launch a whopping 4,425 satellites to create his Starlink network. When Elon first announced the project, he made his
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’s machine will use Tesla battery packs. On top of that, the project has been getting support from top engineering talent from both Tesla and SpaceX. The Boring Machine. (© The Boring Company.) While attempting to solve the traffic problem through the Boring Company’s tunnel-transport quest, Elon has stumbled on
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mach problems. We aren’t creating massive sonic booms because we evacuated the air,”161 Elon said. “We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. And it actually ends up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after
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first year, 2015, over a thousand universities worldwide entered the competition. The proposals were narrowed down to twenty, and the students tested their designs at SpaceX. The fastest pod that can stop without crashing wins. In 2017, the winning pod clocked 201 mph! In December 2018, the Boring Company unveiled a
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person people turn to with their impossible dreams. At yet another big press event, while Elon updated the crowd on the Big Falcon Rocket (aka Starship) and gushed about what the engineering team accomplished in building its engine, another billionaire stood offstage. His name was Yusaku Maezawa, but he likes to
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be called MZ. Elon Musk, left, and Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. (Photo by Chris Carlson/AP Photo.) MZ approached Elon years ago with his greatest wish: to see the moon. Not just
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. “Boring Company Chicago O’Hare Announcement.” News conference with Elon Musk in Chicago, 14 June 2018. YouTube video, 28:09. youtu.be/CnobWh5iloE. Erwin, Sandra. “SpaceX Wins $130 Million Military Launch Contract for Falcon Heavy Rocket.” Space.com, 24 June 2018. shar.es/a1NCjP. Etherington, Darrell. “Tesla Officially Acquires SolarCity.” TechCrunch
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. givingpledge.org. Hahm, Melody. “Elon Musk is Losing the Confidence of Employees, Survey Says.” Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo!, 5 Mar. 2019. finance.yahoo.com/news/Teslas-spacex-blind-survey-211329818.html. Harris, Mark. “First Space, Then Auto—Now Elon Musk Quietly Tinkers with Education.” Ars Technica, 25 June 2018. arstechnica.com/science
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. Audio, 50:25. www.startalkradio.net/show/the-future-of-humanity-with-elon-musk/. _____. Interview by Sal Khan. “Elon Musk—CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.” Khan Academy, 17 April 2013. Video, 48:41. www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/khan-academy-living-room-chats/v/elon-musk. _____. Interview by Sarah
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-tesla-loser/. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “EV1 Electric Car, 1997.” America on the Move exhibition. americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1293145. SpaceX. www.spacex.com. _____. “The Falcon Has Landed.” Falcon 9 launch and landing, 21 Dec. 2015. Posted 12 Jan. 2016. YouTube video, 3:37. youtu.be/ANv5UfZsvZQ
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. “The Elon Musk Post Series.” Wait but Why, 28 March 2017. waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html. Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015. Vital, Anna. “How Elon Musk Started.” Infographic. Adioma (blog), 23 Feb. 2016. blog.adioma
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-infographic/. von Holzhausen, Franz. “More Than Electric.” Keynote presentation. Autodesk University Conference, 8 Dec. 2010. YouTube video, 8:52. youtu.be/AyQ4SOCHAYA. Wall, Mike. “Wow! SpaceX Lands Orbital Rocket Successfully in Historic First.” Space.com, 21 Dec. 2015. shar.es/a1LvfE. Wang, Christine. “Tesla Voluntarily Recalls 123,000 Model S Cars
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Starter Wife.” 100. Vance, p. 186. 101. Kanellos, “Electric Sports Car Packs a Punch.” 102. Musgrove, “An Electric Car with Juice.” 103. Shotwell, “SpaceX’s Plan.” 104. Shotwell, “SpaceX’s Plan.” 105. Vance, p. 173. 106. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 107. Vance, p. 193. 108. Musk and Musk, interview by
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Million.” 128. Bloomberg, “Elon Musk.” 129. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 130. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 131. D’Angelo, “SpaceX Makes History.” 132. Campbell, “SpaceX’s Successful Landing.” 133. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 134. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 135. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 136. Tarpenning, “Tesla’s High Speed Innovation.” 137
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. National Geographic, “Exclusive: Watch Elon Musk.” 138. Chang, “First Private Craft.” 139. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 140. Shotwell, “SpaceX’s Plan to Fly.” 141. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. 142. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. 143. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. 144. Shotwell, interview
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taking Tesla.” 182. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 183. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 184. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 185. SpaceX, “First Private Passenger.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I first dug into the details of Elon’s life, one story stood out in particular—the time school bullies
Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich · 6 Nov 2023 · 279pp · 85,453 words
, Elon is one of the most complex characters I’ve ever encountered: one of the richest men on Earth, the brilliant entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, and at the same time, the most outspoken “troll” on the internet, a man who seemed as comfortable baiting the Securities and Exchange Commission with
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the most successful men on Earth, the genius who had revolutionized the auto industry with Tesla and was changing the face of space exploration with SpaceX—where he was presumably calling in from, by the looks of the office behind him. Mark gazed at the billionaire’s vaguely cubic features, his
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. CHAPTER TWO March 25, 2022 A little after 1:30 a.m. Elon Musk, CEO and techno-king of Tesla, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, founder of Neuralink and the Boring Company, soon to be the richest man in the world, lay on his back in an alcove tucked into
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than its predecessor—the Raptor 1—and ten times as much thrust as the engines that carried the Falcon rockets that Elon’s private company, SpaceX, had been sending into space for more than a decade. The Raptor 2’s internal MCC pressure was far beyond anything that NASA, Russia, or
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by a particularly unique fuel, a mix of cryogenic liquid methane and oxygen. In many ways, the Raptor 2 was the key to everything that SpaceX was working toward, and represented as great a leap forward, perhaps, as Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps onto the pockmarked surface of the Moon
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could feel the cell phones and cameras trained on him; although there were guards at the entrance to Starbase—the kitschy name he’d given SpaceX’s main campus when he’d purchased the land back in 2002—and plenty of fences, the work the brilliant men and women of
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SpaceX were doing was not meant to be secret. Quite the contrary, in fact. Humanity had evolved, kicking and screaming, on a single, dangerous bit of
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civilization was facing constant, existential threats. In Elon’s point of view, because of this, humanity had but one choice to ensure survival: become interplanetary. SpaceX existed because Elon believed that for the first time in human history, humanity had achieved a level of economic security and technological advancement that made
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no way of knowing how long that window would remain open. Already, what Elon and his engineers at SpaceX had achieved in pushing humankind toward the stars was nothing short of incredible. SpaceX was the first company to privately develop a liquid-propellant rocket that could reach orbit; the first to send
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Station; the first to land a booster vertically, then reuse that booster in a later spaceflight; and SpaceX was the first private company to send astronauts into orbit, then to the ISS. In 2018, SpaceX had debuted the world’s first reusable rocket capable of making orbit, the Falcon Heavy, for its
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was adorned with a sign on its exterior imploring: “Don’t Panic!” But the Falcon Heavy had only been an appetizer, the first step toward SpaceX’s eventual goal. For humanity to extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, you had to do more than get people to orbit: you needed to cross
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space, land them on a suitable planet, and keep them alive long enough to build a self-sustaining colony. Already, Elon and his engineers at SpaceX had calculated what that would mean. Not one rocket, but a thousand rockets, carrying tens of thousands of colonists, machinery, and raw materials. In the
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at least a million tons of cargo to build a self-sustainable Mars colony. For such an endeavor to be economically possible, let alone practical, SpaceX had needed to solve for the holy grail of rocketry—a rocket that was both powerful enough to reach Mars, and wholly reusable. Elon’s
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orbit, hurl it 33.9 million miles across the darkness of space, and then back again, to be reused over and over. That was why SpaceX was already pumping out Raptor 2s at a breakneck pace: one a day, seven days a week. Elon would have passed through the shadows of
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a pair of huge satellite dishes. These were components of the Starlink system, an offshoot of SpaceX’s mission to colonize the solar system: a network of low-orbit satellites that could provide seamless internet to anyone on Earth. He approached a
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glistening behemoths would have put Babel to shame, and yet Elon knew, this was only the beginning. He could close his eyes and imagine the SpaceX compound bristling with the magnificent constructs, row after row after row, like a gleaming field of high-tech terra-cotta soldiers. To him, these objects
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, paired with the Raptor 2, smoldering on the test platform behind him, represented hope, and the future, not just of SpaceX—but humanity’s future. They represented two decades of his life, and much of his mental bandwidth, a dream, coming to fruition right in front
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billionaire taking the reins of the company. There was also an undercurrent of disbelief. Didn’t Elon have enough on his plate with Tesla and SpaceX? Did he really want to step into Twitter, a social media company that seemed to lurch from one controversy to the next? Meanwhile, Mark’s
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Leslie tried to steer the conversation toward whether Elon himself would step into the role of CEO at Twitter, as he had with Tesla and SpaceX, the billionaire launched into what could almost be described as a monologue, and as he spoke, Mark realized that what he’d first interpreted as
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all tin can: a twenty-by-twenty prefab one-bedroom, portable home that had been towed into place, parked in a quiet corner of the SpaceX compound, erected in under six hours. Basically, a studio apartment that could be dropped anywhere and divided into four equal spaces: a bedroom, a kitchen
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that he was sacrificing Tesla in his bid to go after Twitter. Not only was he diverting his attention from his core companies—Tesla and SpaceX—but many of his investors believed, correctly, that he’d soon need to sell more Tesla shares if his $44 billion purchase were to go
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past decade he’d developed an almost untouchable reputation—the genius who had lifted Tesla out of near bankruptcy more than once, who had built SpaceX with his bare hands, who had dedicated his life to saving humanity—and for the first time, he was facing intense criticism from those who
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, Elon had reportedly brought along two of his cousins, Andrew and James; his younger brother Kimbal; and numerous engineers and product people from Tesla and SpaceX, many of whom had filled the parking lot outside with Model 3s, Model Ss, and Model Xs. Though Jessica couldn’t know for sure how
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them, print out “50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days,” to be shown to Musk and his own Tesla and SpaceX engineers—in person. A frantic scramble had erupted across the company, as engineers—imagining American Idol–style judging sessions in front of the billionaire and
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reassure advertisers that the new face of Twitter wasn’t the guy who tweeted conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, but the guy who had built SpaceX and Tesla into billion—and trillion—dollar companies. And from all accounts Jessica had heard, Elon had performed exceptionally well, saying all the right things
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with his trolling or his politics—This is an Elon Project had them head down and fingers coding. This was how Elon had built Tesla, SpaceX, and his reputation. People, deep down, wanted to be part of an Elon Project. From then on, Esther was given free rein of the second
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in after the Twitter Blue launch and the loss of high-level managers and advertiser favorites, like Roth and Robin Wheeler (all while running Tesla, SpaceX, and all of their derivatives), but navigating the media firestorm that had engulfed him over the past forty-eight hours. Yet he had only himself
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. He’d been working round the clock, still sleeping at the San Francisco office when he wasn’t on his plane or at Tesla or SpaceX. But he was also clearly feeling the effects of the constant barrage of bad mojo that was being hurled at him. His onstage treatment at
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’t think of him as a billionaire, or as some sort of demanding, whimsical, sometimes tyrannical boss, or even as the genius behind Tesla and SpaceX. She thought of Elon as she’d last seen him, as she’d so often seen him. Alone in Caracara, with his phone, at that
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, trembling and pulsing and goddamn throbbing, the biggest fucking rocket in the history of the world. Elon’s four-hundred-foot-tall glittery stainless-steel Starship, sitting atop its heavy booster, and it was utterly spectacular, the most beautiful sight Elon had ever seen, the most beautiful thing anyone had ever
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gasped, as the rocket cleared the top of the tower and pierced that aquamarine sky, swallowed by the infinite pixels of the simulation, and then Starship was rising even higher, and faster, and higher. For twenty-seven wonderful seconds, higher and faster and higher—until someone signaled that communication had been
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, while behind them their exploding rocket lingered on the flat-screens and across the infinitely pixelated canvas of the aquamarine sky—but Elon knew better. Starship had cleared the launchpad and the tower. The biggest rocket in history, the most powerful rocket ever built, the rocket that would one day carry
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, DC, and Hollywood newsreels playing in every movie theater in the country. Yes, the rocket had exploded—or, as SpaceX would describe the controlled termination in a tweet a short time later, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.” But the incident, though slightly disappointing, was hardly unexpected. Elon himself had publicly cautioned
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his engineers, to see the launch as anything other than a success. The rocket had gotten extremely close to stage separation, the phase when the Starship itself would separate from the heavy booster to continue its journey to orbit, and the launch was always intended to end in some level of
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destruction. In its first flight, Starship wasn’t going to gently land back on the pad. At best it was going to crash down in water, to be recovered and pored
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that would soon dominate mass media. AP News would breathlessly report: “SpaceX giant rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas.” CNBC would shout: “Starship rocket launches in historic test but explodes mid-flight.” The New York Times would tweet: “SpaceX’s Starship rocket launched but fell short of its most ambitious goals when it
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exploded minutes into its flight.” The Washington Post would exclaim: “Four minutes till failure: Watch SpaceX’s Starship come apart in flight.” And the BBC would report: “Musk
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’s SpaceX big rocket explodes on test flight.” All the headlines would be factually correct, but there were facts, and then
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his moment. This was, after all, the Elon the world wanted, the Elon the world had formerly, nearly universally, loved. The Elon of Tesla and SpaceX, of electric cars and interplanetary dreams. The genius who made rocket ships and dug tunnels beneath cities. But he must have known, now, since Chappelle
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for them, while a rarified circle of celebs, some handpicked by Elon himself, received them for free. This wasn’t the Elon of Tesla, of SpaceX, of electric cars and giant rockets. This was the Elon of Twitter. The Elon whose ideology might have seemed sound: a Level Playing Field, Free
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had bought Twitter for the same reason he had just launched a massive rocket into the sky: to save the world. But Twitter wasn’t SpaceX, and the Twitter platform wasn’t some rocket you could toy with, tinker with, maybe blow up. Twitter was built around people. Elon had tinkered
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and his character. Soon he would take steps to try to salve those self-inflicted wounds. On May 12, less than a month after the Starship launch, he’d announce that he would indeed finally acquiesce to the poll he’d sent to his followers five months before; he had found
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simulation wasn’t rendered in black and white; it was drawn with all the colors that made up light itself. Sitting in his chair at SpaceX, watching the last tendrils of smoke spiraling down in that Texas sky, Elon now had a choice. Which Elon was he going to be? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey · 12 Apr 2015 · 370pp · 97,138 words
has the personal wealth to fuel his dreams. The pace of Musk’s activities is breathtaking. In the consecutive years beginning in 2002, he started SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and SolarCity. The latter is the largest provider of solar power systems in the United States, riding a market that has grown by
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can take on giants in the “green” car market like Toyota, which sold more than 600,000 hybrids in 2012. Musk also commutes to the SpaceX facility, where visitors are greeted by a life-size statue of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit. Here the company develops and manufactures the
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Dragon spacecraft (Figure 21). An entrepreneur’s life can be an extreme roller coaster. Late in 2008, Musk was close to despair. The first three SpaceX launches had failed, financing for Tesla Motors fell through, the bank behind SolarCity reneged on an agreement, and he’d just suffered a publicly acrimonious
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divorce. But the next day, NASA called with a billion-dollar contract offer to service the International Space Station. In 2009, SpaceX became the first privately funded company to put a satellite in Earth orbit, and in 2012 it became the first commercial company to dock with
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the ISS. SpaceX has a backlog of $3 billion of orders through 2017. Musk’s life, however, continues to be a white-knuckle ride. In late 2013, his
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it is with the aviation industry. Figure 22. The first commercially developed spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon capsule approached the station and was grabbed by a robotic arm. The first high-profile success for the private sector came in May 2012
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Pettit reached out 10 meters with the robot arms and grabbed it, as wild cheers erupted at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston and the SpaceX control center in California. “We’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” said Pettit. When he went through the air lock the next day
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to ferry supplies to the station, valued at $1.9 billion.3 On the same day that Orbital was ferrying candy into low Earth orbit, SpaceX made a bold move with the first launch of a beefy version of its Falcon 9 rocket. After it successfully carried up a Canadian weather
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helicopter. Other active players have promising prototypes about to emerge from skunkworks projects, so Elon Musk needs to keep innovating. He’s said that when SpaceX covers its costs with satellite launches and supply runs to the Space Station, he will turn his attention to Mars. Virgin Galactic has competition for
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slightly deflated. NASA was impressed enough to order a unit for the Space Station, to be delivered in 2015 by a SpaceX Dragon rocket. He also plans to work with SpaceX to put a capacious 330-cubic-meter bubble in orbit. That could hold six people in relative comfort. For the smaller
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in 2000, but its existence was only revealed in 2003, when Bezos started rapidly aggregating land in Texas under a set of shell companies. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will use a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rocket that’s fully reusable. After being named valedictorian of his high school class, the
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cost of rocket materials represents about 2 percent of the cost of the final rocket. That compares to 20 to 25 percent for a car. SpaceX has innovated in ways to save on materials costs, such as making welds without riveting. They fabricate most of their components in-house, rather than
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components among their launch systems. And they don’t file patents, since Musk says the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.19 SpaceX is building a Toyota Corolla, not a Ferrari. The other private space companies are following similar strategies. It’s too early to tell how far
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Galactic’s price tag of $250,000 per person works out to $3,000 per kilo for an average adult, but that’s only suborbital. SpaceX aims to go one better. It claims its new Falcon Heavy rocket will lower the cost to low Earth orbit to $2,200 per kilo
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space tourist in 2001. Tito plans to keep costs down by not landing. His billion-dollar flyby plans to use an upgraded version of the SpaceX Dragon capsule. With a cleverly designed trajectory, he can get there with a single burn of the engine. The return is challenging, however. The capsule
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. The project is aiming for a launch in 2021.19 Mars One is run by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, who also plans to use a SpaceX capsule. He will keep costs down by leaving his four passengers on Mars. If they survive the trip, they will build a habitat from their
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this project, and on gathering together the hard-science experts and science fiction visionaries to brainstorm the future of interstellar travel.17 The 100 Year Starship project is funded by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2012, a million-dollar grant was awarded to former astronaut Mae
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physicists is that a warp drive is not possible under the known laws of physics, but the idea got some attention at the 100 Year Starship Symposium at the Johnson Space Center in 2012. What about teleportation? Imagine this situation. You’re about to step into a device that will deconstruct
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long view now, so let’s assume that we eventually master the art of suspended animation. This finesses the obstacle of long travel times—these starship Rip Van Winkles would wake up and continue with their new lives, oblivious to the centuries it took to get to their destination. Suspended animation
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brought to term in an artificial womb, and reared to self-sufficiency by robotic nannies, all to be part of a new human colony. The starship would also carry frozen cells of useful livestock and crops, serving as a miniaturized Noah’s ark. Living in the Multiverse We leave a tiny
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for the film’s opening. Decades later, he was given a nod in the Star Trek films and TV series, which named a class of starships after him. 14. “Hermann Oberth: Father of Space Travel,” online at http://www.kiosek.com/oberth/. 15. The Autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, Father of
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Orbital Sciences exploded seconds after launch on October 28, 2014. The rocket was on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. 4. Quoted in “SpaceX Successfully Launches Its Next Generation Rocket” by A. Knapp. Forbes magazine, online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/09/30
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/spacex-successfully-launches-its-next-generation-rocket/. 5. Paris Hilton, quoted in Britain’s Daily Express, online at http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/
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to develop America’s capacity to resupply the International Space Station. The program ran from January 2006 to September 2013 and awarded $500 million to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation. This is less than the cost of a single Space Shuttle flight, so NASA considers the program a great success. See
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and Interstellar Travel” by D. G. Andrews and R. Zubrin 1988. Paper presented at a meeting of the International Aeronautics Federation, IAF-88-553. 16. “Starship Sails Propelled by Cost-Optimized Directed Energy” by J. Benford 2011, posted on the arXiv preprint server at http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3016. 17
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. Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, ed. by G. Benford and J. Benford 2013. Lucky Bat Books. This book represents the proceedings of a conference by
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Kress. 18. Frontiers of Propulsion Science by M. Millis and E. Davis 2009. Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 19. The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) project was started in 2012 by NASA and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The website is http://100yss.org/. 20. “Light
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Chris Impey. Figure 18 Wikimedia Commons and Kelvin Case. Figure 19 “Countdown Continues on Commercial Flight,” Albuquerque Journal. Figure 20 NASA/Regan Geeseman. Figure 21 SpaceX. Figure 22 NASA. Figure 23 U.S. Government/FAA. Figure 24 Wikimedia Commons and Nasa.apollo. Figure 25 NASA/Kennedy Space Center. Figure 26 Andrew
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: acidification of, 195 sealed ecosystem proposed for, 197 Oculus Rift, 176 Ohio, astronauts from, 74 Okuda, Michael, 228 Olsen, Ken, 213 100 Year Starship project, 224 100 Year Starship Symposium, 229 101955 Bennu (asteroid), 156 O’Neill, Gerard, 196, 251–52 Opportunity rover, 165 optical SETI, 190, 243 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 100
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of, 76–80, 133, 213–32, 248–52 suborbital, 84 telescopic observation vs., 49–50 visionaries of, 26–39, 80, 94, 109 SpaceX, 96, 97, 100–103, 113–14, 275 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, 96, 100, 100, 102, 170 special theory of relativity, 228, 231 specific impulse, 220 spectroscopy, 127, 165, 176 spectrum
The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees · 18 Apr 2022 · 192pp · 63,813 words
improvements in modern rocketry, both technological and economic, have come more from private projects than from governmental efforts, and in particular from Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation, which has developed the capability of recovering the massive casing of a rocket’s first stage for reuse
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. SpaceX currently charges the United States government $1,250 per pound to send cargo to the International Space Station.7 Though this price may not reflect the true cost, since SpaceX seeks to secure government contracts for the future, it represents
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a good number to bear in mind. SpaceX’s success with its Falcon rockets contrasts markedly with NASA’s repeated problems with its next-generation
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platform to the International Space Station. For two months, controllers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama supervised the platform’s operation remotely. A SpaceX Dragon then brought it home with the first optical fibers made in space. This single example shows that space manufacturing already exists and can proceed
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of bankruptcy until the rising public demand for electric cars made Musk one of the wealthiest US citizens, along with Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. SpaceX, established by Musk in 2002 to manufacture launch vehicles, has produced the Dragon and Falcon spacecraft, workhorses for NASA’s missions to send supplies, and
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to send and return astronauts, to the International Space Station. Musk’s new, super-heavy Starship launch system aims for Mars, where, he has said, he would like to die, “just not on impact.” Steve Jurvetson, Musk’s longtime friend and
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will clearly cost much less and offer much less than voyages to the moon on Bezos’s Blue Origin or to Mars on Musk’s Starship. They could, however, introduce comparatively large numbers of would-be adventurers to the basic experience of space travel: weightlessness for a few minutes, accompanied by
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globe with a resolution sufficient to reveal road traffic, building sites, land use, and related information. Even greater advances lie in the near future, as SpaceX envisages that its Starlink project will place up to 40,000 satellites in orbit to create a network for enhanced global broadband communication.14 Other
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that will take them to and from the lunar surface. The Dragon XL spacecraft, created by Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation to resupply the Gateway orbiter in a manner similar to how SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket resupplies the International Space Station. A Human Landing System (HLS), to carry astronauts from the
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Gateway orbiter to the lunar surface and return them to the Gateway. In April 2021, SpaceX won the competition with its rivals Blue Origin and the Dynetics Corporation to use its Starship rocket for an uncrewed landing and then for the first crewed landing, with later landings subject to further
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competition. SpaceX’s Starship rocket also competes with the SLS, for which the Boeing corporation is the lead contractor, to provide the best new heavy-lift vehicle. Both rocket
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designs use liquid fuel (liquid hydrogen for the SLS, liquid methane for Starship), which combines with liquid oxygen upon ignition. SLS’s lower stage has four rockets similar to the three on the space shuttle, along with twin
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has been the case with previous NASA programs, the SLS is several years behind schedule and several billion dollars over budget. SpaceX’s more advanced approach envisions an upper stage for Starship that will be a fully operational, long-duration spacecraft eventually capable of traveling to Mars and back, and of landing
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vertically on Earth for comparatively easy refueling and reuse. Like the SLS, Starship should prove capable of lifting more than a hundred tons into near-Earth orbit and more than forty tons to the Gateway lunar orbiter
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. SpaceX has achieved remarkable success in reducing the cost of sending payloads into Earth orbit, and it may eventually succeed in bringing its approach not only
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have often been described as carrying a price tag of $10,000 per pound, a figure easy to remember. During the past few years, however, SpaceX has successfully aimed to reduce this number significantly. In 2020, NASA contracted with the company to pay $2.4 billion for six missions to the
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International Space Station, including both astronauts and cargo. Since SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has a cargo capacity of 50,000 pounds, this implies a launch cost per pound—more precisely, the price charged per
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with, for example, preparing the rocket to launch humans rather than cargo, and a pure cargo launch would almost certainly be considerably less expensive. Indeed, SpaceX projects future costs of $2,500 per pound or less. To estimate the costs of maintaining astronauts into orbit, a task for which per-pound
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program in 2011 and October 2020, Soviet rockets offered the only means of carrying humans to and from the International Space Station. The creation of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, capable of launching astronauts into near-Earth orbit, has produced a situation in which only Russian astronauts depart from the Baikonur launch
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govern how different state and individual actors may or should execute their plans. The extensive projects of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others, along with SpaceX’s demonstrated superiority to the US government in rocket manufacturing, raise issues about the proper role of nongovernmental actors in space. We may well ask
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, May 16, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130516-four-decades-of-living-in-space. 7. “How SpaceX Lowered Costs and Reduced Barriers to Space,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/how-spacex-lowered-costs-and-reduced-barriers-to-space-112586/ 8. Emilee Speck, “NASA Might Not Repeat Test of Moon Rocket
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deaths resulted from accidents; the comparable figure among Russian cosmonauts was only 17 percent. 14. Adam Mann, “Starlink: SpaceX’s Satellite Internet Project,” Space.com, May 28, 2021, https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html. 15. Christian Davenport, “Thousands More Satellites Could Soon Be Launched into Space. Can the Federal Government
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, 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-space-colony-plan-makes-no-sense-2019-05-23; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5. Nicky Woolf, “SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Plans to Get Humans to Mars in Six Years,” The Guardian, September 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/27
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/elon-musk-spacex-mars-colony. 6. Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 210–211. 7
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, 16–21, 30, 32, 76, 83, 92, 94, 102, 104, 106, 128, 147 SpaceX, 34, 37, 38, 45, 120, 122, 123, 128, 131 Spergel, David, 8, 103 Spirit rover, 18, 82, 116 Spudis, Paul, 117 Sputnik, 3 Starship, 39, 120 sterilization, 77, 88 Stonehenge, 30 Surveyor, 52 Swanson, Steve, 82 tardigrades, 70
Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean · 18 May 2015 · 338pp · 112,127 words
standard-issue Charles Bolden talk about how commercial ventures will be up and running by 2016—17. I am as skeptical as always about whether SpaceX or any of the other space startups can achieve human spaceflight on anything like the time frame we are being promised. Yet I have to
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Space Center squats an all-night gas station, its outdoor sodium lights pitched at such a brightness and angle it seems to be an alien starship just landed. The lights lure me in, as surely they are meant to, and I stop for coffee. Inside, the place is overrun, the coffee
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us start to answer simultaneously. “There’s a system called Constellation—” “The launches to the space station will be contracted out to private companies like SpaceX—” “A system called SLS, for Space Launch System I think, it looks like the Saturn V—” “Wait, I thought Constellation was canceled—” “But wasn’t
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difference between “the end of American spaceflight as we know it” and “the end of American spaceflight”? Does the former conjure up images of the SpaceX Dragon or the Space Launch System? Having spoken to many people on these topics, I have to say I doubt it. Either way, I disagree
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León and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida CHAPTER 9. The Future Discovery Day, Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, April 19, 2012 SpaceX Dragon launch attempt, May 19, 2012 When I flip through all the notebooks I’ve been carrying back and forth to Florida over the past
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the first time since we met that this is true. In the car on my way home from DC, I hear a new pop song, “Starships.” It’s a generic dance hit, an attempt to build on the popularity of the “baby, you’re a firework” song, which is still getting
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radio play. I hear “Starships” enough times that I start to learn the words: “Starships were meant to fly. / Hands up and touch the sky. / Let’s do this one last time.” As with “Firework
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’d described so cruelly…. Suddenly it was my home. I’m here to see the first launch from Cape Canaveral operated by a private company, SpaceX. Today SpaceX will attempt to launch its own spacecraft, the Dragon, to dock with the International Space Station and deliver supplies. This would be a first
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, and it would make SpaceX the front-runner to become the contractor NASA hires to get people and cargo up and down to the International Space Station. Even if today
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to notice how many of my space friends—people I would have thought would be NASA-only snobs like me—were getting excited about the SpaceX launch, were posting updates about it online and making plans to come out for the launch. The NASASocial (the new, more inclusive name for NASATweetup
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) organized around this launch seemed to engender more chatter than many of them in the past. SpaceX has established a significant launch operation here in Florida but isn’t hiring many ex-NASA people. The rumor is that the company doesn’t
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help but cynically suspect, the relatively high wages, solid job security, and generous benefits of government contractors). If Omar were somehow to get hired at SpaceX in spite of this bias, it would likely be with a cut in pay and certainly a cut in benefits. I found myself wondering what
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and growing, which is lost on neither my husband nor me. Today’s launch is scheduled for 4:55 a.m. Unlike the shuttle, the SpaceX Dragon has an “instantaneous launch window,” a phrase whose implications I don’t care for. Whereas the shuttle had a ten-minute window in which
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doing their traditional fine job of getting us the information we need and answering our questions. They are handing out packets of material with the SpaceX logo on them in exactly the same way they used to hand out packets bearing the mission patch corresponding to each space shuttle launch. On
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the closed-circuit TVs, the SpaceX Falcon (the rocket that carries Dragon, the spacecraft) is steaming nicely on the launchpad. So much of the answer to the question of what the
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to the American public. This means that everything—images, films, discoveries, transcripts of crew chatter—belongs to all of us. Not so with SpaceX. As a private company, SpaceX can keep private whatever they want, and they do. Some of my online space friends have been indignant to learn that they can
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’t download specs and diagrams for Dragon and Falcon, as we have always been able to do for shuttle and other NASA spacecraft—the SpaceX designs are industry secrets. NASA makes moon rocks available to scientists all over the world for the asking, and they have let scientists send experiments
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to space on their spacecraft for very negotiable fees, often negotiated down to nothing. SpaceX is under no obligation to do anything of the kind, and I don’t expect they will. But maybe the privatization proponents are right that
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Center rather than stumbling around out here getting bitten by mosquitoes. I walk all the way down to the lip of the Turn Basin. The SpaceX launchpad is not dead center ahead of us, as the Apollo and shuttle launchpads were, but off to the right, almost hidden behind the foliage
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this countdown, a strong conviction that they are using the wrong language, are doing everything wrong. When the flight director (or whatever SpaceX calls her) polls the room (or whatever SpaceX calls it), one of the managers in the sequence doesn’t answer when called on for a “go” or “no go
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rocket boosters couldn’t be shut down, so if you saw a light, you could be sure you were going to space today. But the SpaceX Falcon is powered by liquid fuel, which means it can shut itself down. And did, at the first sign of a problem. We all look
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bottom of the screen reads “Endeavour launch scrubbed.” I blink at it a couple of times. Then those words disappear and are quickly replaced with “SpaceX/Falcon 9 launch scrubbed.” I poke around the News Center a bit, and against one wall I find a floor-to-ceiling shelf offering material
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, and whenever I see it I remember that day, that sense of possibility even as we knew this would be Discovery’s last flight. The SpaceX press conference is pretty much what you would expect—a lot of reminders that this is a new rocket, that spaceflight is an untested business
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for a few days because of a scheduled Soyuz docking that takes precedence. I get my first good look at Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX. She is whip smart in that put-together way you would expect in the president of an experimental tech company. But she is also intense
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what they are about to say for possible controversy—but a real love for what she does shines through. I came here planning to dislike SpaceX, and while Gwynne Shotwell doesn’t exactly defy my every expectation, I still find myself liking her in spite of myself. In part, I know
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a sucker for women involved in spaceflight, for women in jobs traditionally closed to them, and I can’t help but suspect that Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, had this appeal in mind when he chose her to run his space company. I’m at a postlaunch party, my second official
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, Omar asks if I’d like to set off a model rocket with him in the morning. He’s bought a scale model of the SpaceX Falcon, and he offers it as a sort of consolation because I didn’t get to see the real one go off. I answer immediately
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in this rocket launch? When I watch the video, I can’t quite remember. Something about a success after yesterday’s scrub, a joke about SpaceX or about my scrubless record, but when I watch the little video in my phone I feel only the weird spaceport homesickness, that Florida nostalgia
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fell and foreclosures increased. There have been signs of hope, however. More aerospace companies have established sites in central Florida than had been anticipated, including SpaceX, Boeing, Embraer, and XCOR, taking advantage of a skilled workforce and tax incentives. The unemployment rate in Brevard County remains higher than state and national
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day Omar worked at the Kennedy Space Center for the last time and turned in his badge, March 1, 2013, was also the day a SpaceX Dragon successfully docked with the International Space Station for the first time. My Twitter feed was filled with descriptions of, and celebrations of, the
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SpaceX launch and, simultaneously, a long stream of condolences for Omar. In May 2013, Omar accepted a job at the badging office at the Orlando airport.
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Andy Scheer, the pad technician I met after the SpaceX attempt, left NASA and started work at SpaceX in a similar position in March 2013. Andy and his wife, Jen, the former orbital maneuvering system technician, welcomed their first
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on the Space Coast in the coming decades, both her parents still immersed in spaceflight? This too gives me some hope. After ten months at SpaceX, Andy left in frustration. He had enjoyed being back at work on a launchpad, he says, but despite his years of experience, he had been
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show no signs of stopping. NASA continues to plan for and educate the public about SLS and Orion, but their fate is far from certain. SpaceX continues to develop its Dragon V2 spacecraft for transporting crews to the International Space Station. The company continues to promise crewed flights on a short
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for those dreams to be funded are as uncertain as they have ever been since before NASA started. The progress made by private companies like SpaceX has been impressive. But the space programs I love most are the ones that are so ambitiously expensive only the federal budget of a superpower
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016
unconditionally—stayed in contact with Dick and Jeana around the clock. Burt and Mike spent their days flight-testing their newest business plane, the Beechcraft Starship. Burt was on call to talk to his brother, or to give him space—whatever he needed. Mike spent nights tracking the Voyager’s journey
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Microspace. Gregg felt that his role in the business was to be the steady force, the constant source of calm. If International Microspace was the starship Enterprise, Peter was the Captain Kirk, and Gregg was his Mr. Spock. More and more, Gregg was becoming concerned about his younger friend, who put
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after I push the throttle? Mike narrowly averted disaster many times, including the day a mechanic left a wrench inside a wing of the prototype Starship, flown in 1983. The controls jammed midflight. Mike tried everything he could think of before grabbing the stick and putting all of his weight on
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’t do it.” Musk responded, “I’m going to do it.” In June 2002, around his thirty-first birthday, Musk started his own company called SpaceX. His dealings with the Russians had convinced him that he should build his own engines, rocket structures, and capsules. His first launch vehicle would be
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handle and release the spaceship. Two chase planes were ready on the runway: a high-altitude Alpha jet owned by Paul Allen, and a Beechcraft Starship, one of Burt’s early designs. The White Knight began its roll down the runway. As the craft taxied, Stinemetze peered out the side windows
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their models and share some of what they were doing. The visit included a field trip to El Segundo, California, where Elon Musk had started SpaceX in an empty 75,000-square-foot hangar. One of Bennett’s favorite moments was on the bus ride to
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SpaceX, when he overheard Rutan talking on his phone in a low tone about who was attending the event. Bennett smiled when he heard Rutan say, “
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would pilot the chase plane today that would guide Brian toward his landing, said, “Meet you at fifteen thousand feet.” Robert Scherer, who owned the Starship chase plane, said solemnly to Brian, “The world is with you. The heavens are with you.” Jeff Johnson, who knew of Brian’s determination and
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system. The New Shepard is achieving reusable and relatively low-cost spaceflight. Bezos is starting with suborbital on his way to orbit. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, founded in an old hangar in El Segundo, California, and given little chance of succeeding, has repeatedly made history. Starting with a team of thirty
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, SpaceX now has more than four thousand employees and some of the most advanced rockets and engines in the world. After three highly publicized rocket failures
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early on—a fourth would have put Musk into bankruptcy—SpaceX succeeded and went on to become the first private company to send a rocket to orbit, the first private company to deliver cargo to the
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International Space Station, and the first private company to land an orbital booster back on the launchpad. SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to fly cargo resupply missions to the ISS and to carry crew. NASA has contracted with
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SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Both companies say they are on track for manned launches in 2017. Afterword: Space, Here
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Bantam Books, 210 Baran, Paul, 115n Barbie Dream House, 18 Beale Air Force Base, 197 Bede Aircraft, 53–54, 156, 323 Beechcraft Bonanza, 264 Beechcraft Starship, 58–59, 342 Bee venom, 146 Behavioral conditioning, 87–88 Bell, Art, 390 Bell P-59 Airacomet, 376 Bell X-1 (XS-1), 139 Bennett
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, Philip, 31 Mother Teresa, 88–89 Mount Everest, 261 Mount Rainier, 78–85 Murphy, Diane, 234, 298, 375 Musk, Elon Diamandis and XPRIZE, 238–44 SpaceX, 318–19, 371, 392, 412 MVL (Man Vehicle Laboratory), 39–40, 47–49, 68, 69–74 Nanotechnology, 41, 121 Napoleon Bonaparte, 125 NASA (National Aeronautics
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, 312–13, 313n, 319 Space sickness, 39–40, 47–49 Space Studies Institute, 41, 104, 105 Space tourism, 170, 174–75, 200, 299, 413–15 SpaceX, 318–19, 371, 392, 412 Spear, Tony, 225–26 Spielberg, Steven, 225, 228 Spirit of St. Louis (sculpture), 220, 222–23, 260–61 Spirit of
When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance · 8 May 2023 · 558pp · 175,965 words
inescapable sunshine, and salty spray welcome during a tropical holiday but abhorred while doing manual labor and toiling with machinery. A couple members of the SpaceX team paid their first visit to Kwajalein in 2003, hoping to find a place where they could go about their wild rocketry experiments without too
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being that all the good stuff—the equipment, housing, stores, eateries, and bars—was located on Kwajalein Island, the largest of the islands. Meanwhile, SpaceX had been banished to Omelek Island, an eight-acre lump of land with an infrastructure that consisted of a couple boat docks, a helicopter landing
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pad, four storage sheds, and about a hundred palm trees. It was there that SpaceX would receive rocket parts being sent from its operations in California and Texas and assemble them before testing and eventually launching an entire rocket. In
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a do-it-yourself basis, and meals consisted of prepackaged sandwiches or whatever they could haul out of the ocean. Despite the difficult conditions, the SpaceX crew worked at an astonishing speed, particularly for the aerospace industry, which tends to measure delays not in weeks or months but in years.
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got stuck and triggered a failure before reaching orbit. “Falcon 1 blows it again,” wrote one reporter covering the launch. By that point, Team SpaceX was beyond frazzled. Life on Kwajalein had long transitioned from amusingly exotic to torturous. Late-night drinking sessions at the Snake Pit bar were no
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the plane. Their quick actions worked to prevent any further damage, but the rocket arrived in anything but ideal shape. The mood of Team SpaceX dipped even lower after this debacle. Some members of the island crew thought it borderline impossible to bring the battered rocket back to working condition
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. It was an engineering milestone and an accomplishment many people in the aerospace industry had dreamed about for decades. In more symbolic terms, the SpaceX engineers shattered the natural order of things. While not at all clear back in 2008, that first launch into orbit would emerge as an inciting
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incident. Like Roger Bannister besting the four-minute mile, SpaceX made people recalibrate their sense of limitation when it came to getting to space. The imaginations and passions of engineers and dreamers all around the
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that a driven individual aided by a company full of bright, hardworking people could match, and maybe one day best, entire countries. More broadly, SpaceX had rejected many of the “truths” held evident by the old, government-backed aerospace industry. It demonstrated that a novel approach to rocketry could work
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of rockets could be modernized and made more efficient. New things were possible. Much of the existing aerospace community rejected those revelations. They still viewed SpaceX as an oddity, a minor-league player. The Falcon 1 could carry a thousand pounds of cargo into orbit, whereas the old guard’s
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States’ ability to put humans into space for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Meanwhile, in south Texas, SpaceX is busy building Starship, a vehicle meant to fulfill Musk’s ultimate ambition of forming a human colony on Mars. The traditional aerospace players opted not to alter
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their businesses in dramatic ways as a result of SpaceX’s presence. Their inaction, however, did not stop the impact of the Falcon 1
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from rippling well beyond Musk’s empire and changing humanity’s relationship with space. Engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors saw what SpaceX had accomplished and began to have their own wild visions of what they might achieve. They, too, could ride the wave of ever-progressing
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, they would set several major milestones. A start-up would emerge as the operator of the most satellites orbiting Earth, allowing Planet to join SpaceX as the next New Space maverick of consequence. The company would also confirm that small, cheap satellites working together could equal or best the large
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meditated and prayed. Planet had been particularly unlucky during previous launches, when its satellites had been destroyed after first an Antares rocket and then a SpaceX rocket had exploded. In a weird way, the explosions validated Planet’s approach to satellite making. Since it produced lots of small, cheap devices,
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Worden wanted Ames to build some, if not all, of the probes. He proposed applying some of the low-cost development techniques being pioneered by SpaceX and others to build the cheapest robotic machines in NASA’s history. Right away, though, the bureaucracy of Old Space and government cronyism derailed
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, but so, too, were President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Lori Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA, who had been a major advocate of SpaceX and private space exploration. Fueled by the document, the FBI kicked off an investigation that ended up taking four years and dragged Ames through the
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fresh satellites would have the latest computing and electronics components, so the constellation of imaging machines would keep getting better all the time. Just as SpaceX had changed the economics of rocket launches, Marshall and Boshuizen hoped to change the economics of satellites. Launching one would no longer be an all
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of forming relationships with rocket companies around the globe and negotiating contracts. Planet became the ultimate rocket vagabond, sending its devices to Russia, India, and SpaceX in the United States. Planet also began courting some rocket start-ups that were starting to appear on the scene. These companies had yet to
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100 billion, and the vast majority of that figure is premised on Starlink creating a major revenue stream. Even for a company as efficient as SpaceX, there are not huge profits in rocket launches. It’s much better to be a worldwide telecommunications company with subscribers paying monthly fees. The politics
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of space internet systems come with plenty of ambiguity, too. SpaceX and others must apply for licenses to provide their services in most countries. Countries such as China and Russia that control what sorts of information
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In 2008, companies still made large satellites that required large rockets. Devices like those built by Planet Labs were several years away from becoming mainstream. SpaceX might have crafted a perfectly fine small rocket, but no one needed it at the time. Founded in 2006, Rocket Lab had bounced around for
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excess cargo on other companies’ rockets. Their machines were tucked into spare nooks and crannies around the larger satellites that were the primary concern. SpaceX, for example, would fly a large satellite to its desired orbit first as the main payload and then let the small satellites trickle out into
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shipping service to low Earth orbit. And by 2016, it certainly looked as though the world might need exactly such a thing. Companies like SpaceX and Samsung were revealing plans to fly thousands upon thousands of satellites into orbit to power new space-based internet systems. Numerous other companies both
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out. Tradition had dictated that new rocket programs required the efforts of thousands of the brightest scientists and engineers and billions of dollars in funding. SpaceX had altered those long-held assumptions by lowering the cost of rocket production and recruiting young, inexperienced engineers. Much of its most important technology, though
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and perfecting a new skill. Even though the company had fallen behind Beck’s optimistic schedule, its efforts were impressing outsiders. Potential investors watched as SpaceX launched more and more rockets, and Rocket Lab’s rivals such as Virgin Orbit and Firefly were reporting some early successes with their programs. All
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Dozens of satellite start-ups had sprung up to mimic Planet Labs, and they all wanted cheap, quick rides to space. Huge companies such as SpaceX, Samsung, and Facebook were talking about sending up tens of thousands of satellites to build their grand space internet constellations. The world would soon have
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industry, however, marveled at Rocket Lab. Electron was considered to be perhaps the most perfectly engineered small rocket that had ever been made. Whereas SpaceX’s first three launches had ended in flames, Rocket Lab’s first three had been just about perfect. Only a software mishap outside the company
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to them and usually outworked everyone else at any company he went to. He recognized that Ventions’ facilities were disheartening compared to the grandeur of SpaceX, but he saw something authentic and inspiring in London. “Ventions had everything that was good about Masten,” Judson said. “The passion. The small team.
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to go from horizontal to upright. Anyone paying attention would see a missile poking out above the Orion Street building fence. Chris Thompson, the old SpaceX hand, had officially joined Astra as one of its top executives and brought with him experience, a hardened demeanor, and hopefully some much-needed
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option for their vehicles, and with good reason. The main US rocket-launching hubs in California and Florida were dominated by the military, NASA, and SpaceX, and their rockets took precedence over those of young, unproven companies. Kodiak provided a similar infrastructure, and the people running it were more willing to
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Adam London and Chris Thompson were there, along with surly Ben Brockert and rocket-worshipping Mike Judson. So, too, were Roger Carlson, a veteran of SpaceX, and Jessy Kate Schingler, who had joined Astra to write software for the rocket. Raised in Toronto, Jessy Kate had earned an astrophysics degree from
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commercial space projects will do so much better.” When the pandemic first engulfed the world, it looked as though the entire New Space gang, excluding SpaceX, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab, might disappear. The rocket-making start-ups had all been struggling. The satellite start-ups were plowing through cash
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appeared almost like magic and rescued the company. He even let Markusic return as CEO. Markusic boasts serious space credentials. He’s worked at NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic and has done pioneering research into futuristic areas of rocket propulsion. Though not a Texan by birth, Markusic has
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decades following, the land had been used off and on by chemical and munitions manufacturers and aerospace companies testing their hardware. The tenant right before SpaceX had been Beal Aerospace, a private company founded by the billionaire Andrew Beal that had managed to churn through many millions of dollars in three
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of success reached far away places, offerings of praise and congratulations were dispatched from the corners of the world. And it was good. Many SpaceX employees have a love-hate relationship with Musk. They admire Musk’s drive and all the opportunities that the man’s unmatched vision and relentless
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complex parts that had been perfected over decades and could be transferred to Texas. “We will bring this Ukrainian heritage to the USA just like SpaceX used some of NASA’s heritage,”* Polyakov said. “We have good materials. Precise ballistics and guidance systems. Heritage should be reused.” The Ukrainian engineers
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combustion chamber. Though straightforward to build in theory, good turbopumps have proved notoriously difficult to make and have slowed down many a rocket program, including SpaceX’s Falcon 1. Workers at Firefly’s Ukraine factory had designed the turbopumps that go into the company’s rockets and taught engineers in the
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all of the stuff all of the time. The images produced by the LeoLabs tracking system and software were startling. You could see thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites arranged in a mathematical grid pattern around Earth. Hundreds more satellites from OneWeb and Planet Labs were tucked into the matrix.
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that this will be the state commercial space will inhabit for quite some time—a position somewhere between exciting and harrowing. It’s clear that SpaceX has emerged as the dominant presence looming over the commercial space industry. It has the most impressive rocket fleet, and it builds and launches
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was going on in the war. No other conflict had ever been documented this way. When the Russians attempted to destroy Ukraine’s communications infrastructure, SpaceX sent Ukraine thousands of Starlink antennas. The space internet enabled Ukraine’s military to keep operating in a fashion that would have been impossible a
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and, 476 lunar landers and, 56 Markusic and, 413–415, 417 OpenStack and, 251–253 robotics program of, 53–54 Rocket Lab and, 231, 234 SpaceX and, 435 Vandenberg Air Force Base and, 462 National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 475 National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, 244 National Photographic Interpretation Center, 117
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Generation Advisory Council, 49, 62, 84n Space Launch Complex 2, 461 Space Race, 145 space shuttle, 43, 53 Space Warfare Center, 48 spaceplanes, 426 SpaceX attention given to, 33 Carlson and, 327 delays and, 224 as dominant presence, 483 Falcon 1 and, 2–12, 132 Falcon 9 and, 395 Firefly
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and, 127–130 Planet Labs and, 29 progress of, 214 Rocket Lab and, 138, 141, 188, 242–243 Russian invasion of Ukraine and, 487–488 Starship and, 13 Worden and, 38–40 SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies), 385–390 special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), 385–390 “spiral of doom,” 189 Spire
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440 Stachowski Farm, 409–410 Stalin, Josef, 440 Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative; SDI), 43, 45–48, 55 Starlink internet system, 128–130, 487–488 Starship, 13 static fire tests, 314–318 Stealth Space Company employees of, 265, 286–293 engine tests at, 281–283, 287–288 funding and, 260 goals
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New York Times, the Economist, and the Register. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Ashlee Vance Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Geek Silicon Valley: The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San
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1986 with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. “It was my major contribution to ending the Cold War,” he said. * For example, he was one of SpaceX’s main detractors in Congress. * His sisters tried to stop the proceedings by calling the police and telling them that Weston intended to commit suicide
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He paid the family back several years later. * At the time of this writing, the litigation was ongoing. * This is very true. Throughout its history, SpaceX had partnered with NASA on technology that the space agency had developed over the decades. * For anyone interested in the backstory of Dnipro, I recommend
Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words
. Even Elon Musk, who styles himself as a self-made entrepreneur, had benefited from $4.9 billion in government subsidies to support Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX by 2015—and they have received much more since then. When the infrastructure of the internet was privatized in 1995, it did not result in
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that same trickery was at the center of what came to be called the Boring Company. By 2017, Musk was building a test tunnel on SpaceX’s property in Hawthorne, an area in southwest Los Angeles, and he was already pumping up the expectations for how his tunnel-boring company and
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a public event, nine people spoke up in favor of the plan, but afterward journalists discovered that at least three of them had ties to SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company. The project did not move forward. In Las Vegas, Musk finally got his chance. Instead of the city-wide transport system
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same one that Los Angeles had widened to try to reduce traffic congestion—from an area near Musk’s then-residence in Bel Air to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne where he usually worked. It was a tunnel to allow him to evade traffic on his daily commute that he built a
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sidewalks around the world, other start-ups were looking to those stretches of concrete as a public infrastructure that could enable their ventures. In 2018, Starship Technologies began making deliveries in Milton Keynes, not far outside London, with autonomous robots designed to roll along the sidewalks. The following year, it expanded
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Marble co-founder, was quoted by the Guardian in 2017 as saying, “the sidewalk is an infrastructure that is barely used.”16 A spokesperson for Starship Technologies similarly told Mercury News in 2016 that they envisioned “thousands and thousands of robots in thousands of cities around the world doing on-demand
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student Emily Ackerman described her harrowing experience after encountering one of them. Ackerman uses a wheelchair, and as she was crossing at an intersection a Starship delivery robot was waiting on the other side. It positioned itself directly in the middle of the curb cut that Ackerman needed to use to
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all sidewalks when it was passed in 1990. Six months after Ackerman’s experience, Haben Girma, a deaf-blind person with full mobility, encountered a Starship robot with her guide dog. While her life was not endangered by the robot, it still blocked her way and did not move to allow
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.”20 In truth, its definition is much narrower than that. Once again, despite claims that delivery services would benefit disabled people, Girma found that the Starship app did not work with VoiceOver, the gesture-based screen reader on iPhones designed for people who cannot see the screen, making it inaccessible to
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are using, and for those areas not to have high levels of traffic so the robots’ paths are not frequently interrupted. That is precisely why Starship has been establishing itself at universities because the paths and roads are usually well-maintained, campuses have less internal vehicle traffic, and outside peak times
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at the customer’s door with the order, how long will they let the robot sit outside before they retrieve it? Ars Technica found the Starship robot would not move until its lid was fully closed,24 showing that people will need to be taught how to properly use them. There
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Matthew A. Turner, “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities,” American Economic Association 101:6, 2011. 6 Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, HarperCollins, 2015. 7 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company, December 19, 2018, YouTube.com. 8 Ibid
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, 209 social media, 61–2 SolarCity, 55, 143, 188 solar panels, Musk on, 188–9 Southern State Parkway, 26 Soviet Union, 39 space program, 48 SpaceX, 55, 144, 148, 150–1 speed limiter referendum, 19–20 speed limits, 18–20 Sputnik I satellite, 39, 45 standardized containers, increasing use of, 49
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California, 21 Stanford Industrial Park, 40 Stanford Research Institute, 54–5 Stanford University, 39–40, 55, 120 Stark, Tony, 70 Starley, John Kemp, 160, 162 Starship Technologies, 172, 173–5, 176–7 Stop de Kindermoord, 205 streetcars, 12–3, 15, 21, 92, 160 “subscriber city,” 197 suburbanization, 23 suburbs, 12–3
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone · 10 May 2021 · 569pp · 156,139 words
. An even more ambitious project to take tourists and cargo into orbit on a much bulkier rocket, New Glenn, was years away from completion. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the private space company that Tesla cofounder Elon Musk founded two years after Blue Origin, was making significant headway as well as history. Its steadfast
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its history: a CEO. Susan Harker, Amazon’s vice president of recruiting, led the search for Bezos. The process included an entreaty to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s dynamic chief operating officer and president, who quickly rebuffed it, saying that it “wouldn’t look right,” according to a person privy to the
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seen as not devotional enough. In the mid-2000s, Bezos’s interests in space attracted the attention of another prominent devotee: Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the same goal of making more economical, reusable rockets and opening the space frontier. Bezos and Musk met privately twice to discuss
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warehouse office, which a colleague recalled he had curiously cleared ahead of time of employees and any revealing indications of their work. In many ways, SpaceX back then was the antithesis of Blue Origin. Financed with seed investments by Musk and an array of venture capitalists, it desperately pursued profitability from
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the company to stay lean, for example, and operate “step by step.” Blue was still largely focused on New Shepard, and so decided to pass. SpaceX won the contract, along with Boeing, and earned an initial haul of $440 million. Years later, after the Office of Inspector General published an audit
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of the program that revealed SpaceX had ended up receiving a total of $7.7 billion for the project, Bezos would forget those early conversations and wonder aloud, according to a
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, Blue said Bezos never questioned the decision not to bid. As a result of these divergent approaches, SpaceX quickly grew much larger and faster. By the time Blue hired its 250th employee in 2013, SpaceX had 2,750 workers and was already sending unmanned spacecraft to the International Space Station. Blue was
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consumed with New Shepard, but SpaceX had entirely skipped the intermediate stage of building suborbital rockets to take tourists to space, which Bezos felt was necessary in part to acclimate people
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within several generations, leading to a society of stasis. “We go to space to save the Earth,” he declared on Twitter. Nevertheless, Blue Origin and SpaceX were, inevitably, headed for conflict. They would end up competing not just for government contracts, talent, and resources but for the adulation and attention of
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a budding rivalry between two successful, strong-willed, and egotistical entrepreneurs. That September, in a transparent attempt to slow down its rival, Blue Origin protested SpaceX’s plan to lease NASA’s historic 39A launch complex at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the original home of the Apollo program. Responding
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2014, the companies also dueled over a flimsy Blue Origin patent for landing a rocket on a sea barge. SpaceX challenged the patent in court and prevailed. But Bezos was studying SpaceX and the reasons for its mounting success. Musk’s company was funding its rapid growth by selling its launch services
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it was developing for the New Glenn orbital booster. ULA’s parent organizations wanted to be sure they weren’t helping a future rival, like SpaceX, that would end up competing for lucrative satellite launches. Bezos got on the phone with executives from both companies and was apparently persuasive. Competing against
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civilization. I think what we have done today is going to be remembered for thousands of years and you should be so proud of yourselves.” SpaceX, meanwhile, had started with an expendable low-tech system and backed into reusability. When it landed its own reusable booster for the first time a
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their attentions mainly focused on New Shepard, along with some long-term planning for the fledgling New Glenn program and the BE-4 engine. Meanwhile, SpaceX had 4,500 employees and was growing quickly, with a sole focus on orbital missions. Blue was reliant on funding from Bezos, while Uncle Sam
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, taxpayers, and other customers were paying most of SpaceX’s bills. In other words, this wasn’t a fable: the tortoise was racing an actual hare, and not surprisingly, the hare was winning. * * * Despite
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pressure suit worn by Soyuz astronauts, and a heat shield tile from a space shuttle. In a second-floor atrium was the model of the Starship Enterprise used in the original Star Trek films. Next to it was a two-story replica of the steampunk spacecraft depicted in the Jules Verne
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internal battles, the yawning gap between their resources and ambitions and the pummeling now being administered on a regular basis to their collective dignity by SpaceX. That’s when Bezos started inviting executives one by one to his Amazon office for lunch. * * * As Blue Origin initiated its search for a CEO
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strategies if Blue was ever going to start winning commercial and government contracts to fund its own growth and catch up with Elon Musk and SpaceX. For more than a decade, Blue’s attention had been fixed on giving paying customers an eleven-minute thrill ride to the edge of space
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the end of the decade—a goal it would fail to meet. Designs for New Glenn showed that it would have more boosting capacity than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and its bulkier twin, the Falcon Heavy. It was also equipped to take payloads like commercial and military satellites into a high
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employees came from Musk’s company, and the damning refrain in the industry—that “Blue was the country club you go to after toiling at SpaceX”—would have infuriated Bezos if he heard it. Blue Origin also broke ground on rocket production facilities in Cape Canaveral and Huntsville, Alabama. It would
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and professionalize the company. Smith hired veteran executives from Raytheon, the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other legacy companies. SpaceX executives were openly contemptuous of such firms, viewing them as complicit in decades of stagnation in space innovation. But no such compunction existed at the
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. “I have a lot of respect for anyone who has flown a rocket to orbit,” Musk said at the unveiling of SpaceX’s next generation rocket prototype, the fifty-meter-tall Starship, in September 2019, taking a subtle dig at Blue. At an interview at a financial conference a few weeks later
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many players in this human endeavor to go to space to benefit Earth.” Yet the contrast between the two companies was never starker. In 2020, SpaceX would fly its one hundredth mission, bring humans to the International Space Station, and establish itself as the world’s dominant rocket company. Musk, who
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he had created. Still, the entertaining exchange of barbs between the tycoons continued—about their plans for the moon, for Mars, whether Amazon was copying SpaceX with its plans to launch a constellation of low Earth satellites in space, and over Amazon’s purchase of Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company that
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-speed internet connectivity to people around the world. Amazon’s $10 billion project directly challenged the Starlink satellite system already deployed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two companies battled before regulators over portions of the radio spectrum and lower Earth altitudes where signals are strongest; once again, it pitted two
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launched and landed both a crew capsule and its reusable booster rocket, a historic feat. “Welcome to the club,” Bezos tweeted at Elon Musk when SpaceX did it one month later. But Blue’s advantage wouldn’t last. Blue Origin/ZUMA Press After the National Enquirer made their relationship public, Bezos
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Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). the firm landed a Falcon 9 booster: Loren Grush, “SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket on a Floating Drone Ship for the First Time,” The Verge, April 8, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/8
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/11392138/spacex-landing-success-falcon-9-rocket-barge-at-sea (January 24, 2021). “a club more than a company”: Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to
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.blueorigin.com/news/successful-short-hop-setback-and-next-vehicle (January 24, 2021). SpaceX won the contract: Jeff Fouse, “NASA Selects Boeing and SpaceX for Commercial Crew Contracts,” SpaceNews, September 16, 2014, https://spacenews.com/41891nasa-selects-boeing-and-spacex-for-commercial-crew-contracts/ (January 24, 2021). $7.7 billion for the project
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. IG-18-016, April 26, 2018, pg. 4, https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-18-016.pdf (January 24, 2021). sending unmanned spacecraft: Jonathan Amos, “SpaceX Lifts Off with ISS cargo,” BBC, October 8, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19867358 (January 24, 2021). “multi-planetary species”: Elon Musk
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Earth”: Jeff Bezos, Tweet, February 3, 2018, 9:30 a.m., https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/959796196247142400?lang=en (January 24, 2021). Blue Origin protested SpaceX’s plan: Alan Boyle, “Bezos’ Blue Origin Space Venture Loses Protest over NASA’s Launch Pad,” NBC News, December 12, 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com
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://spacenews.com/37389musk-calls-out-blue-origin-ula-for-phony-blocking-tactic-on-shuttle-pad/ (January 24, 2021). SpaceX challenged the patent: Todd Bishop, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Dealt Setback in Patent Dispute with SpaceX over Rocket Landings,” GeekWire, March 5, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-dealt
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-setback-in-patent-dispute-with-spacex-over-rocket-landings/ (January 24, 2021); Todd Bishop, “Blue Origin’s Rocket-Landing Patent
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Canceled in Victory for SpaceX,” GeekWire, September 1, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/blue-origins-rocket-landing-patent-canceled-in
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-victory-for-spacex/ (January 24, 2021). the United Launch Alliance (ULA): Armin Rosen, “Elon Musk’s Aerospace Argument Just
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, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/ula-wont-buy-rocket-engines-from-russia-anymore-2014-6 (January 24, 2021). landed its own reusable booster: Loren Grush, “Spacex Successfully Landed Its Falcon 9 Rocket After Launching It to Space,” The Verge, December 21, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10640306
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/spacex-elon-musk-rocket-landing-success (January 24, 2021). Bezos tweeted: Jeff Bezos, Tweet, December 21, 2015, 8:49 p.m., https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/
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-interview-axel-springer-ceo-amazon-trump-blue-origin-family-regulation-washington-post-2018-4 (January 20, 2021). “They’re two years… every year”: Michael Sheetz, “SpaceX President Knocks Bezos’ Blue Origin: ‘They Have a Billion Dollars of Free Money Every Year,’ ” CNBC, October 25, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10
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/25/spacex-shotwell-calls-out-blue-origin-boeing-lockheed-martin-oneweb.html (January 24, 2021). CHAPTER 12: LICENSE TO OPERATE Millions of people around the world owned
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, 252 Souq.com, 343–44 Sowers, George, 279 So You Think You Can Dance, 326 Space Flight Award, 277 SpaceNews, 272 Space Symposium, 278, 279 SpaceX, 264–65, 268–69, 270–74, 277, 278, 280, 282–83, 404 Falcon rockets of, 264–65, 278 Spacey, Kevin, 153 Spain, 71, 80, 81
Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker · 1 Jun 2011 · 376pp · 110,796 words
Ryan Kobrick Jeff Manber Gregg Maryniak Doug Messier Anita Miller John Moltzan John Oelerich Robert Pearlman Carol Perry Fell Peters Dan Slater Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dean Truax Scott Truax Virgin Galactic Per Wimmer X PRIZE Foundation Special thanks to Eric Dahlstrom, whose interviewing, writing, and editing skills, along with his
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, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 35. Above: Eton Musk in front of Falcon 9 engines at the SpaceX launch site, Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, 8 January 2009. Courtesy of SpaceX. 36. Above: Spaceport America concept design for a new spaceport being developed for Virgin Galactic in Las
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, kit built aircraft, had made him a hero among experimental aircraft fliers. He had established a reputation for innovation in executive aircraft (Beech Aircraft's Starship), unmanned aircraft for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Raptor), and rocket fuselages (McDonnell Douglas DC-X). He had also developed a revolutionary rigid sail that Dennis
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subset of attendees included big-money investors and would-be space travelers who had the interest and resources to pursue their dreams. Elon Musk of SpaceX and Titanic director James Cameron talked to the press about their plans. Space Adventures brought in a busload of its aspiring suborbital and orbital clients
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, Virginia) and Vandenberg Air Force Base (Santa Barbara County, California), have each developed their nonfederal counterparts to attract commercial tenants. Spaceport Florida signed agreements with SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, and PlanetSpace and is in the process of licensing more launchpads for commercial operations. On the other hand, individual state facilities, such as
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for its own needs. Zero-G Corporation, owned by Space Adventures, now flies all NASA parabolic flights out of Johnson Space Center. NASA has awarded SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation contracts for the development of iss cargo resupply and is looking into commercial RLV development applications for scientific purposes. It is
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anticipated that NASA will contract out development of a new commercial crew transportation system for the iss to commercial companies such as SpaceX. Globally, other nations are beginning to take an interest in the private spaceflight business. In the United Kingdom a few small private companies emerged in
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largest installers of solar panels. But currently his primary job is running Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, as founder, CEO, and chief technology officer. As bold as any of Musk's past entrepreneurial endeavors, SpaceX is attempting to simultaneously improve the reliability and reduce the cost of space access-both by a
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factor of ten. Musk has already invested more than $ too million of his own money to seed SpaceX's development. Musk doesn't shy away from big ideas. He conveys the impression that he cannot be fazed by anything. For a man who
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tediousness of the exercise. In an interview with one of the authors of this book at the zoo8 National Space Society conference, he explained how SpaceX's continued milestone goals and development could one day lead to interplanetary travel. He used a von Braun quote-"Hydrogen is the reason you can
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it be done within the next twenty years? Yes, I say highly likely within the next twenty years." Then he adds, with a smile, "Provided SpaceX is still around." Unlike other key figures in the development of private space, Musk had no youthful infatuation with the cosmos. "This is not a
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a passing grade of ioo percent. It is rocket science." He confessed that "six years ago, I didn't know anything about rockets." Back then SpaceX's strategy was to make small rockets, learn from them, and make bigger versions of their prototypes. He admits that was something less than a
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brilliant strategy. "The first two years of its [SpaceX's] existence should be discounted on the basis of idiocy." Along with the idiocy came the challenges. For instance, in order to significantly reduce the
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Pacific. His first three unsuccessful launch attempts were beset with technical problems that prevented the rocket from achieving Earth orbit. Finally, on z8 September 2008, SpaceX's Falcon i successfully launched to low Earth orbit on its fourth attempt. The launch vehicle is capable of lifting 926 pounds of payload to
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orbit and is partially reusable. SpaceX has signed on nearly $ z billion worth of payload launch business and has been cash positive since 2007. Falcon i successfully launched its first commercial
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payload, Malaysia's RazakSAT, into orbit on 13 July 2009. Setbacks aside, SpaceX has achieved milestones only a few governments and big aerospace companies have previously achieved, and has done so in less time than one would expect
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modest budget. With the new NASA directive to retire and replace the aging shut tle fleet by zoio, SpaceX is under contract with the agency to provide cargo transport to the iss. SpaceX plans to have its heavier lift Falcon 9 ready to launch by the end of zoio. Capable of lifting
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about $49.5 million a launch, it will usher in bigger and better possibilities for cheaper launch access to space. Falcon 9 will also carry SpaceX's Dragon, a reusable spacecraft capable of transporting cargo and crew to the iss. The first demonstration mission for both Dragon and Falcon 9 is
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grandfather, who had been a radioman on the Apollo program. He remembers his grandfather's basement as being a "cross between the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and Frankenstein's lair." While in law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Gold became a law clerk for NASA's Langley in 1996
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't take any great stretch of the imagination to conjure visions of communities living and working in space, or to see a reliable, safe, inexpensive SpaceX transport system ferrying humans back and forth to these bases. According to the forecasts of Gerard O'Neill, we are already behind the development curve
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on a more even footing with NASA. If current schedules stand, in 2010 NASA is expected to retire its three space shuttles and rely on SpaceX's Falcon 9 for access to the iss. Although its life may be extended, current plans are to deorbit the iss in zo16, when Bigelow
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America. Web site. http://www.spaceportamerica.com. Space Tourism Market Study: Orbital Space Travel cr Destinations with Suborbital Space Travel. Futron, October 2002. SpaceX. Web site. http://www.spacex.com. Starchaser Industries. Web site. http://www.starchaser.co.uk. State Support for Commercial Space Activities. Washington Dc: Federal Aviation Administration, zoo9. TGV
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper · 15 Jan 2020 · 285pp · 86,858 words
of publicity, especially when they get launched into orbit round the Sun as part of a tie-in with a sibling company (as happened when SpaceX launched Tesla), but currently make up only a tiny proportion of the 1.2 billion personal vehicles in use. While we start to get petrol
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bold and sensational goal, one that would inspire the public: the mission to walk, for the first time, on another planet. In Elon Musk’s SpaceX rhetoric, we would become a multi-planet species. Mars is almost habitable. It has an atmosphere – a thin one, granted – but it still has one
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, barren and mostly dry Mars into a wet, warm and habitable version of Earth. This is a vision that is explicitly presented in Musk’s SpaceX imagery and promotional materials. We have the chance to begin again, to be our better selves. Neil Armstrong, it is said, is the only person
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it was a huge indulgence to look to space when there were enough problems on the ground. Nothing much has changed. In 2018, Musk’s SpaceX company launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This is an impressive rocket, the most powerful built since the massive Saturn-Vs that
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and patriarchal imagery and the same old middle-aged, rich, white, male-dominated agenda. The CEO of SpaceX is a woman, Gwynne Shotwell, but it didn’t help that the crowds cheering in the SpaceX launch control centre were almost entirely white men. Nor does it help that Musk likes to talk
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, or delusional, or deliberately misleading. I can’t see how anyone is going to make money from investing in a Moon base any time soon. SpaceX is well paid from NASA delivery contracts to the International Space Station, and it is looking to make money from orphans of Apollo and other
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between private space firms and nation states. We could combine all our expertise and build towards a goal where all countries had a stake. SpaceX is developing Starship, the successor rocket to the Falcon Heavy, which is due to fly around the Moon by 2023 and which has been referred to in
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. We can work out the details later and the amount of funding each member of the TA receives, but something like $50 billion each for SpaceX and Blue Origin, and $100 billion each to NASA and China, seems like a good starting point. We should also invest $50 billion in the
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up. Since the Space Shuttle programme ended, NASA has relied on Russia and its Soyuz rockets to get its astronauts to the space station. But SpaceX was awarded a contract by NASA to deliver astronauts to space, and successfully launched its Dragon capsule, with people aboard, in June 2020. The Commercial
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from all our transmissions and TV shows and mobile phones, but then there are the soon-to-be-thousands of new satellites going into orbit. SpaceX is building the Starlink satellite constellation, a network of tens of thousands of small satellites launched into low orbit to provide internet access from space
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a lot of useful spin-off information. Finally, if a miniature spacecraft travelling at relativistic speed is ambitious, far more so is the 100 Year Starship. This is a project initiated by NASA and led by Mae Jemison, a chemical engineer and former astronaut (she was the first black woman to
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport · 20 Mar 2018 · 390pp · 108,171 words
| ISBN 9781610398305 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Space industrialization—United States. | Industrialists—United States—Biography. | Aerospace engineers—United States—Biography. | Bezos, Jeffrey. | Musk, Elon. | Blue Origen (Firm) | SpaceX (Firm) | Aerospace industries—United States. | Outer space—Civilian use. Classification: LCC TL789.85.A1 D38 2018 | DDC 338.7/6294092273 [B]—dc23 LC record available
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engine suddenly appeared like a streetlight in the distance, a shimmering, ethereal beacon lowering through the clouds. As they watched on television screens, the SpaceX employees who had gathered at the company’s headquarters outside Los Angeles on this evening just before Christmas 2015 cheered it just as their rivals
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. December 2011 Paul Allen announces plans to build Stratolaunch, the largest plane ever built, which would be used to “air launch” rockets. May 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft becomes first commercial vehicle to reach the International Space Station. March 2013 Bezos’s deep-sea expedition recovers the F-1 engines
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AFTER MUSK paraded his rocket down Independence Avenue, Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, had a twenty-one-page report on his desk, detailing SpaceX’s capabilities and prospects. “Contains company private data,” the title page of the January 29, 2004, document began. “Eyes only. Do not distribute.” Of
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O’Keefe, he predicted that “Falcon 1 will be successful with initial launch series”—though not on its first launch. And he concluded that “SpaceX presents good products and solid potential—NASA investment in this venture is well warranted.” But inside the agency headquarters, there were more skeptics than believers
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companies they are supervising, a Pentagon official told the Wall Street Journal. The arrangement was tenuous at best. In January 2004, Gwynne Shotwell, then SpaceX’s head of business development, was concerned that the Northrop team was using its access to benefit Northrop. She burst into a meeting and demanded
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Northrop alleged he had brought over inside knowledge about its programs. Northrop also alleged that its rival had many of its internal documents, stamped “proprietary.” SpaceX denied the charge, and fired back a month later with its own lawsuit. It accused Northrop of abusing its supervisory position as part of a
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the merger and then hand it exclusive contracts that have “destroyed any pretense of competition in the sale of [rocket launches] to the government.” “SpaceX poses a significant threat to Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s dominant position,” the suit stated. “It has developed new technologies and a new business model
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the grave and give them the space program they wanted, maybe they were, themselves, the people they’d been waiting for. THEY WERE AT SpaceX’s headquarters to officially band together and call themselves the “Personal Spaceflight Federation.” They wanted their movement to catch fire and spread, and thought that
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humidity, and salt spray.” There were, however, some upsides. While the range, known as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site, was a government facility, SpaceX and DARPA had almost free rein with limited interference. Surrounded by turquoise water, sandy beaches, and palm trees on an island known as Kwajalein Atoll
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from their early days at PayPal.. The challenge “was really keeping the company going financially while we were struggling. That was my contribution primarily,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell recalled. “I didn’t get to do as much engineering as I would have liked to, but continually convincing customers to invest
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, say, a hook from suddenly dropping too fast. But modern technology had rendered many of those requirements, some decades old, unnecessary. Mosdell and the SpaceX team lobbied the air force officials at Cape Canaveral, ultimately convincing them to strip out many of the old regulations that were driving up the
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rocket carrying a highly classified payload. The National Security Council wouldn’t hear of it. So, the White House scrambled. Instead, Obama would visit SpaceX, a high-profile event the company gleefully welcomed. After years of their fighting uphill against the entrenched contractors, a presidential visit would represent a public
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there themselves. “A dramatic launch failure could further undercut an already faltering campaign by the White House to persuade Congress to spend billions to help SpaceX—and perhaps two other rivals to develop commercial replacements for NASA’s retiring space shuttle fleet,” a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote.
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saying that the launch was “to a significant degree a vindication of what the president has proposed.” It was also a vindication for Musk and SpaceX, one that justified the curious design of the Dragon spacecraft, the spacecraft that ultimately would ferry supplies to the International Space Station. Musk had insisted
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as NASA faced another potential crisis, they were just talking softly between themselves. Standing nearby, Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, could barely contain herself. SpaceX’s Dragon was in trouble—deep trouble, it seemed. If it didn’t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, the critics would
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well beyond Silicon Valley. With Tesla and Solar City, the solar energy company, he had set out to transform American transportation and energy use. SpaceX was an improbable success story that was not only disrupting the industry but singlehandedly reigniting interest in space. CBS’s 60 Minutes declared that Musk
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former NASA astronaut, who flew on two space shuttle missions and spent three months on the International Space Station. SIX MONTHS LATER, they filed into SpaceX’s headquarters around dawn on a Sunday, ready to party again, ready to celebrate yet another milestone. They packed in several deep around mission
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space station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted that he had watched the launch from the station. “Sadly, failed Space is hard.” The crowd at SpaceX headquarters went silent, some with their hands over their mouth. The National Geographic team kept the cameras rolling, capturing the devastating silence in what was
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tears. Those gathered at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, just outside of Los Angeles, cheered wildly. “History in the making,” one of SpaceX’s commentators said on the livestream broadcast. Musk watched from the causeway, and could hear and feel what the others at the headquarters could not
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Tesla, with a space company that had attracted a cultlike following that clicked on the company’s launch and landing YouTube videos by the millions. SpaceX had transcended corporate America the way NASA had once transcended government bureaucracy, becoming an institution of hope and inspiration. Now Elon—always the one
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to beam the Internet to developing nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The explosion was bad enough. But in an effort to save time, SpaceX had loaded the multimillion-dollar satellite on the rocket ahead of the test fire, a decision that in retrospect looked foolish and needlessly risky. Standard
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rockets grounded, investigators probing, skeptics tsk-tsking, competitors pouncing—was precisely the time to unveil the most audacious plan of all. Cancel the speech? Never. SPACEX HAD RECENTLY designed retro-style travel posters showing Jetsons-like tourists on Mars, meandering through Valles Marineris with a jet pack, taking a tram to
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University, applications for the undergraduate aerospace engineering program jumped 50 percent. “The demand for our program has increased dramatically because of companies like Virgin and SpaceX and Blue,” said Stephen Heister, a professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “We can only absorb so many people. We have to
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memorabilia that was more like an eccentric museum collection than a corporate lobby. In the center of the hardwood floor was a model of the Starship Enterprise used in the original Star Trek motion picture. There was a Russian spacesuit on display, a proposed space station that was never built,
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a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.” AS IT RECOVERED from its explosion and moved through 2017, SpaceX screamed ahead, full force, racing through its backlog of seventy missions, worth some $10 billion. With six thousand employees, it at one point flew
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2004, winning the Ansari X Prize. Copyright © Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC; courtesy of Scaled Composites. Elon Musk gives President Barack Obama a tour of SpaceX launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 2010. Courtesy of NASA/Bill Ingalls. Paul Allen speaks as SpaceShipOne goes on display at the National Air
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have dedicated staffs of immensely patient communications professions, who withstood my queries with grace. Thank you to John Taylor, James Gleeson, and Sean Pitt at SpaceX; to Drew Herdener at Amazon; to Caitlin Dietrich at Blue Origin; to Christine Choi and Will Pommerantz at Virgin Galactic; to Steve Lombardi and
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ve never heard”: Renae Merle, “U.S. Strips Boeing of Launches; $1 Billion Sanction over Data Stolen from Rival,” Washington Post, July 25, 2003. So, SpaceX filed suit: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation v. The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, US District Court, Central District of California, case number CV05-7533
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A. Dolan, “How to Raise a Billionaire: An Interview with Elon Musk’s Father, Errol Musk,” Forbes, July 12, 2015. His maternal grandparents: “Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Industrial Empire,” Segment Extra, “Elon Musk on His Family History,” 60 Minutes, March 30, 2014. “There is something particularly”: Fay Goldie,
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Gates and the DARPA media staff, DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap (Washington, DC: Faircount LLC, 2008). The launch was supposed to: Leonard David, “SpaceX Private Rocket Shifts to Island Launch,” Space.com, August 12, 2005. “It’s like you build”: Ibid. “Commercial enterprises”: NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History
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. “DEPENDABLE OR A LITTLE NUTS?” Musk was thrilled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=CUmnzaDGifo. When the company was told: Irene Klotz, “SpaceX Secret? Bash Bureaucracy, Simplify Technology,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 15, 2009. When it was building Falcon 1: Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast
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s avionics: Ibid. Instead of using the straps: John Couluris, NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, Commercial Crew & Program Office, January 15, 2003. At “SpaceX, we weren’t”: Ibid. “The biggest challenge”: Gwynne Shotwell, NASA Oral History, January 15, 2003. “When we talked to them”: Michael Horkachuck, NASA Oral
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, December 13, 2013. Musk even put a price tag: Jonathan Amos, “Mars for the ‘Average Person,’” BBC News, March 20, 2012. At SpaceX’s headquarters: Brian Vastag, “SpaceX Dragon Capsule Docks with International Space Station,” Washington Post, May 25, 2012. “This is, I think”: Kenneth Chang, “First Private Craft Docks with
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“Jeff is trying to get people”: https://archive.org/details/ECAD 2014720_201502. 12. “SPACE IS HARD” And it was only a test: Christian Davenport, “SpaceX Rocket Blows Up over Texas,” Washington Post, August 25, 2014. The Atlantic canonized him: Nicole Allan, “Who Will Tomorrow’s Historians Consider Today’s Greatest
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Mind Blowing’ Mission to Mars,” Washington Post, June 10, 2016. “So,” he said, “how do we figure out”: “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” http://www.spacex.com/mars. “The priorities of all of our customers”: “United Launch Alliance Announces Rapid Launch, the Industry’s Fastest Order to Launch Service,” September 13
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247–248 oversight and regulation of the commercial space industry, 124–126 SLS/Orion program, 244–245 Conrad, Joseph, 120 Conrad, Pete, 275 conspiracy theories: SpaceX explosion, 240 Constellation program, 139–140, 156–161, 244, 246 contracts, government Blue Origin’s bid, 179–180 COTS award winners, 137–140 Defense satellite
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launch contracts, 52–54 Falcon program, 130–134 funding Blue Origin’s Goddard rocket, 167–168 Northrop Grumman-SpaceX rivalry, 51–52 Cooper, L. Gordon, 173 Corporation, 28–29 costcutting measures, 149–150, 153–154 Couluris, John, 155 Culbertson, Frank, 210 Cunningham, Walter,
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–218 federal certification of, 247–248 first launch, 164–166 ISS delivery, 175–176 launch facility, 149 NASA’s commercial crew program, 209 Obama’s SpaceX visit, 163–164 perfect landing, 270–271 recycling old materials, 153 return to service, 225–230 Falcon Heavy, 174 Farini, Guillermo, 122–123 fatalities,
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137 Goddard, Robert, 145–146 Goddard rocket (Blue Origin), 5, 145–146, 166–168 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 107 Government Accountability Office (GAO), 48, 50 Grasshopper rocket (SpaceX), 224 Great Inversion, 258–260 Grey Goose vodka, 211–212 grid fins, 227 Griffin, Michael, 39–40, 133, 138, 140, 160 Grissom, Gus, 121 Grush
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182–183 Lembeck, Michael, 40 Letterman, David, 157 libertarianism, 118 Lindbergh, Charles, 116 Lindstrand, Per, 101–104 liquid nitrogen tank, 149–150 litigation Alliance blocking SpaceX launches, 205–206 Bezos’s patent for rocket recovery, 199–200 Musk’s suit of NASA over contract bids, 48–49 Lockheed Martin, 52–53
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Poore, Steve, 192 Princeton University, 67–71 prison break (New Mexico), 11, 16–17 private space programs, 32–33. See also Beal Aerospace; Blue Origin; SpaceX; United Launch Alliance; Virgin Galactic Propulsion Module 2, 168–169 Purdue University, 249–250 railgun technology, 23 rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD), 203 Rather, Dan, 68
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vehicles (RLVs), 199–200 reusable rockets Blue Origin’s successful launch and landing, 222–224 developing spaceplanes and shuttles, 268–269 fueling private funding for SpaceX, 249 history of, 25 importance of, 24 landings, 3 launch technology, 270–271 Saturn V rocket recovery, 190–191 Reynolds, Alastair, 76 risk as
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Defense satellite launch contracts, 52–54 launching infrastructure and technology, 268–269 national security responsibilities, 52–53 shrinking size and increasing affordability of satellites, 249 SpaceX explosion destroying satellite cargo, 239–241 Sputnik launch, 59–60 surveillance, 267–268 tracking asteroid collisions, 36–37 Saturn V rocket, 66, 129, 172,
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movement competition, 4 Musk as cult figure, 237–238 Musk on ‘space versus ‘orbit,’ 224 Musk supporters defending, 229–230 Musk-Bezos conflict, 233–234 SpaceX explosion, 240 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 39 United Launch Alliance, 234 Blue Origin partnership, 182, 208 competition over Launch Pad 39A, 181–184 creation of,
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53–54 monopoly on federal contracts, 205–208, 235 Mosdell and, 150 national security launches, 247–248 Obama’s visit, 163 poaching SpaceX customers, 241 SpaceX competition for launch contracts, 204–206 United States Patent Office, 199 Valentine’s Day conference, 115–119 Van Horn Advocate, 20–21, 25 Vandenberg
The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton · 5 Nov 2016 · 321pp · 89,109 words
may not be who you think they are. The new operatives in the commercial space game are organizations such as Google, Facebook, and the Tesla-SpaceX complex (within the empire of Elon Musk). Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of
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, there'll be a base on the Moon and on Mars, and you would need a million people to be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets…to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars…people to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment
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than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just—there. No oil.”(Elon Musk, president of SpaceX and Tesla.) On his space business, Virgin Galactic: We'll go into orbit. We'll go to the Moon. This business has no limits. (Richard
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Mars.” The New Space Billionaires Peter Diamandis is not alone in his thinking. From the list of “visionaries” quoted earlier, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX; Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic; and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and the man who financed SpaceShipOne, the world’s
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workers in the New Space industry are busy designing solar power satellites that can bring us clean and abundant energy from outer space. Others at SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, British Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, Orbital Sciences ATK, Kelly Space and Technology, Swiss Spaceplane Systems, Reaction Engines
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Only Phase One The key to all this is new commercial transportation systems offering lower and lower costs for access to space. Elon Musk at SpaceX, Sir Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic and Paul Allen, providing the backing to build the first spaceplane and the giant Stratolauncher, are just three examples
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company called WorldVu. This company, now known as OneWeb Ltd ., has managed to receive backing from the Virgin Group, Intelsat, Qualcomm, Air Bus, HNS and SpaceX to create a network of some 700 small satellite s—including spares—to be deployed in low Earth orbit. The idea is to create a
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out these small satellites like video cassette recorders or television sets and then quickly launch them at low cost via Virgin Galactic (Launcher One) and SpaceX (Falcon 9) launchers. These are the new commercial launcher systems backed by space billionaires Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Who knows where this all
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Space” systems as one of the new ways to change the world. Disruptive technologies are ones that disrupt and replace established technologies. Currently Google, Facebook, SpaceX and Amazon.com have all indicated various plans or concepts for new commercial space businesses focused on creating an Internet in the skies. These initiatives
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the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.</SimplePara> References 1. Issie Lapowsky, “The Start Up That Could Beat SpaceX to Building a Second Internet in Space,” Wired, January 22, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2015/01/greg-wyler-oneweb/. Last accessed May 21, 2016
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to those in the space business, the names that are out there today were unfamiliar in the year 2000. The New Space transportation revolutionaries include SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Launcher One, Sierra Nevada, XCOR, Rocket Lab, S-3, Reaction Engines, Blue Origin and quite a few more. These radical new companies
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you get a sense that new commercial space is shaking up the status quo. Just the latest headlines are that Elon Musk and his company SpaceX are planning to send his Falcon 9 Heavy and a Red Dragon capsule to Mars. Not to be outdone billionaire Robert Bigelow, head of Budget
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onto the New Space ventures bandwagon and offered competitions with prize money to develop new launcher technology. They have also awarded massive development contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to build new commercial launch systems to get astronauts to the International Space Station and back. When new entry Sierra Nevada formally protested
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gold rush. The New Players in Space Transportation As we have already explained New Space transportation capabilities are sprouting up everywhere. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) , Virgin Galactic, and now Blue Origin are all headed by space billionaires . These New Space titans draw a flock of news reporters like honey attracts
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a greedy Pooh Bear. Their exploits, however, generate ink for headlines for good reason. Elon Musk, head of SpaceX; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galatic; and Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon.com and the innovative Blue Origin rocket company in West Texas are
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Orbital ATK are intent on re-inventing themselves to be able to produce New Space technology that is better, faster and lower in cost. Currently SpaceX and Boeing are competing head to head to produce proven crew-rated launcher systems to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS
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experience sound safer than it is likely to be for years to come [2]. Then in July 2015, after 18 previous successful launches of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle , this new commercially designed launcher also failed (see Fig. 4.2). Fig. 4.2The spectacular crash of the Falcon 9 after
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18 successful previous launches (Image courtesy of SpaceX.) These three failures by commercial New Space launch systems (the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, the Antares launcher and the Falcon 9) clearly demonstrate that commercial launchers are
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that ruptured the fuel tank that led to the failure, and this system will be redesigned to avoid similar future failures [3]. Since the crash SpaceX has developed the Falcon 9 Heavy vehicle , which is equivalent to the largest of the U. S. rocket launchers. Most recently Musk has announced plans
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fact the latest question that surfaced is, why does NASA need to spend billions to design and build the new Space Launcher System (SLS) if SpaceX’s new heavy lift launcher can go to Mars? [4] The exploits of Elon Musk have frequently dominated headlines, but he is far from alone
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Launch Capabilities The most significant launcher development in terms of larger scale space missions by any New Space entity is undoubtedly that of SpaceX. In the past decade SpaceX has developed in rapid succession: the Falcon I, the Falcon 9, and now the Falcon 9 Heavy. Elon Musk and his team in
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the Falcon 9 on June 28, 2015, due to the breakage of a support strut that secured a helium tank clearly has set back the SpaceX launcher development program and adversely affected the schedule for resupply of the International Space Station, plus had a key impact in the delayed deployment of
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the Iridium NEXT mobile satellite communications systems. Even so there is no doubt that SpaceX is now seen as a world-class supplier of launch services. The latest innovation that has come from SpaceX is its ability to re-land its Falcon 9 launcher both on the ground and on
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a sea-based platform. This is seen as the first step to providing reusable rocket launch services. SpaceX has indeed indicated that the process of developing reusable vehicles could reduce cost by on the order of 30 %. It stated that its objective is
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demands for the money in their annual budgets, but private aerospace companies and especially start-up ventures such as Rocket Lab, Firefly, XCOR, and even SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Orbital ATK, External Engines and Bristol Space Planes often have to depend on space agency funding or very far-sighted angel investors such
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remain confident despite accidents,” Space News, Nov. 3, 2014. http://spacenews.com/42412commercial-space-advocates-remain-confident-despite-accidents/#sthash.t9xJPU1a.dpuf. 3. Chris Berin, “SpaceX Falcon 9 failure investigation focuses on COPV strut,” NASA Spaceflight.com, July 20, 2015. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/07
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to debut Red Dragon with 2018 Mars mission,” NASA Spaceflight.com, April 27, 2016. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/04/spacex-debut-red-dragon-2018-mars-mission/. 5. Peter Selding, “Thales Alenia Space Wins Initial Funding for High Altitude Platform, Plans 2018 Demo (April 26, 2016).
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systems that can lift satellites reliably and at significantly lower cost. New Space billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson have given us SpaceX and the Falcon 9 Heavy, Blue Origin and the New Shepherd launch system and Virgin Galactic the Launcher One, and these are just a few
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one of the most important measures seeking to enforce debris mitigation. Plans by OneWeb to deploy some 800 low Earth orbit satellites and rumors that SpaceX might deploy a 4000 low Earth orbit constellation have occasioned even greater concern recently that the Kessler Syndrome could materialize sooner rather than later . You
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fiction movies. Perhaps you have seen movie classics that range from the sexy and garish worlds portrayed to us in Barbarella, A Clockwork Orange, and Starship Troopers to the more ethereal and philosophically challenging futures that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick visualized for us in 2001: A Space Odyssey. These
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that are not trying to imagine a future world in space but rather trying to invent it. Enterprises such as Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources, SpaceX or Bigelow Aerospace are actually intent on developing the technology to create a new off world reality and invent space habitats in which people can
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at the space station in 2015 for a 2-year technology demonstration. The module was completed and ready for launch on time, for the eighth SpaceX cargo resupply mission to the station, just as contracted with NASA. This launch, however, was delayed due to the July 20, 2015, launch failure of
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the Falcon 9. The BEAM unit measures just 2.4 m (8 ft) wide in its packed configuration aboard SpaceX's robotic Dragon resupply spacecraft. Once it is deployed and inflated, it will add an additional 565 ft3 (16 m3) of volume—about the size
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printers economic and technical challenges hypersonic jets legal challenges low cost launchers on-orbit robotics protospace regulatory challenges space elevators space tourism spaceplanes SpaceX SeeSpace exploration technologies corporation (SpaceX) Stratolaunch Commercial transportation systems Communications satellite See alsoMilitary and governmental communications satellites Communications satellite industry business entities categories of DABS Conventional communications satellite
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Space commercialization Space debris IADC mitigation and removal remediation and environmental oversight Space elevators/mag-lev systems Space enterprises Space entrepreneurs Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) Falcon 9 Heavy vehicle launcher development Rutherford engine Space governance Global Governance of Outer Space conference international regulation issues legal interpretations, space treaties model laws
Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul
by Kurt Wagner · 20 Feb 2024 · 332pp · 127,754 words
it private. Musk was adding Twitter to his growing collection of world-changing businesses, which already included the electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. As the world’s richest man, he claimed he didn’t care about Twitter’s finances; his goal was to make Twitter “maximally trusted and
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,” a bastion of free speech that would help preserve civilization in much the same way Tesla would by eliminating the need for fossil fuels, or SpaceX would by transforming humans into an interplanetary species. “Civilizational risk is decreased,” Musk said, “the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a
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biggest focus was Bluesky, still a nascent project that wasn’t even technically part of the company. In August, Dorsey visited Musk at Starbase, the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico. He brought along his good friend, the music producer Rick Rubin. Earlier that morning
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, SpaceX had launched a rocket from Florida on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. “Grateful for @elonmusk & @SpaceX ,” Dorsey tweeted. In October, Dorsey was back in Paris for Fashion Week again, attending a party
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users for years, but he officially became a Twitter shareholder on the final day of January in 2022. Musk was antsy. Things at Tesla and SpaceX were going well. Almost too well, in fact. His net worth had ballooned to more than $330 billion during the pandemic after Tesla stock grew
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another planet. So Musk moved to Los Angeles, and around the same time that PayPal sold to eBay, he started Space Exploration Technologies, known as “SpaceX,” with his own money. He hoped the commercial space venture would not only build rockets, but eventually colonize Mars. Two years later Musk invested another
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, and demanded the impossible from his employees. Musk had a habit of setting audacious and completely unrealistic goals at both companies. He originally thought that SpaceX’s first rocket would take off just fifteen months after the company’s founding, and that the first flight to Mars would take place by
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the end of the decade. SpaceX’s first launch, which was unsuccessful, didn’t happen for almost four years; its first successful launch took six years. As of December 2023
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, SpaceX still hadn’t sent a rocket to Mars. At Tesla, Musk and his team thought they would deliver their first car, a shiny red sports
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Tesla on Christmas Eve just hours before the company would have otherwise gone bankrupt. The pain and stress and drama would all be worth it. SpaceX had its first successful rocket launch in 2008 and quickly became the global leader in the commercial space industry. By early 2022
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, SpaceX not only sent rockets carrying satellites and other payloads into outer space regularly, but the company mastered technology that allowed those rockets to return to
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one of his favorite movies, Spaceballs. A joke from another comedy, The Dictator, featuring Sacha Baron Cohen, was inspiration for Musk’s decision to make SpaceX’s Starship rocket “more pointy.” He loved making sex jokes (69!) and weed jokes (420!) and spent a decent amount of time each day posting memes
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he smoked weed with the podcaster Joe Rogan during a taping in 2018, Musk and most of his SpaceX employees were rewarded with a year of random drug tests by the U.S. government since SpaceX had federal contracts. The situation was both hilarious and terrible. “The consequences for me and for
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SpaceX were actually not good,” Musk later admitted, though he still laughed about it. Musk’s favorite place to get
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most illustrious venture capital firms, was in for $800 million; the firm had already invested in several of Musk’s other ventures, including X.com, SpaceX, and even The Boring Company. Andreessen Horowitz, another prominent VC firm, was in for $400 million. Musk had rounded up a total of $7.1
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month of May kept getting weirder for Twitter employees. On May 19, Business Insider published a story detailing sexual harassment allegations against Musk. In 2018, SpaceX had paid $250,000 to settle a sexual misconduct claim after a former flight attendant was allegedly sexually harassed by Musk on the company’s
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to raise their hands if they actually believed spam bots were less than 5 percent of Twitter’s user base. Mostly, though, Musk spoke about SpaceX and his eventual hope to put humans on Mars, which he referred to as a “civilian life insurance.” While he spoke, Agrawal, Segal, and Taylor
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months fighting Twitter in court. Antonio Gracias, another venture capitalist who’d been on the board of directors at both Tesla and SpaceX, quickly became a powerful presence. Dozens of SpaceX and Tesla engineers, led by Musk’s cousins James and Andrew, also showed up to meet with Twitter engineers and review
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start ranking employees on their teams in preparation for cuts. Complicating the process was that, unbeknownst to them, Musk had also asked the Tesla and SpaceX engineers, led by his cousins James and Andrew, to oversee a similar ranking exercise with Twitter’s engineering teams. They had spent the first twenty
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.” If the possibility of bankruptcy spooked Twitter employees, it was nothing new to Musk. He’d been dangerously close to bankruptcy at both Tesla and SpaceX over the years, hustling to make payroll and keep the companies alive by any means necessary. Openly discussing bankruptcy had become part of Musk’s
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better left as somebody else’s problem? Many employees were leaning toward the latter. As the deadline loomed, Musk and his cadre of Tesla and SpaceX engineers scrambled to meet with some of Twitter’s most talented engineers to try to convince them to stay at Twitter 2.0. (The Tesla
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and other “rich guy stuff,” like visiting the pope or attending the Super Bowl. It wasn’t uncommon for Musk to make multiple trips between SpaceX’s headquarters near Los Angeles, and Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas in the same week. Musk was routinely in the Bay Area, too, since Tesla
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it.” It had already been assumed that Musk would eventually hand over the reins at Twitter. He was, after all, still running both Tesla and SpaceX, companies significantly more valuable than Twitter had ever been. But no one thought Musk would step aside this soon, and certainly not based on the
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money to help keep the lights on if absolutely necessary. Plus, Musk had a strong stomach. He’d been close to bankruptcy before at both SpaceX and Tesla and had a track record of riding a company to the brink of disaster before somehow reversing course. Musk once said that there
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was a time he thought that both SpaceX and Tesla had less than a 10 percent chance of survival; both companies not only survived, but far exceeded everybody’s expectations. As 2022 came
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; he was no longer using Twitter. It’s possible that Musk will still turn everything around. He did it at Tesla, he did it at SpaceX, and he certainly has the money to do it again at X. Year one was a disaster, but Musk doesn’t operate on one-year
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.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwx_7XAJ3p0&t=518s. Dorsey visited Musk at Starbase: Jack Dorsey (@jack), “Grateful for @elonmusk & @SpaceX.” Twitter, August 29, 2021, 5:24 p.m., https://twitter.com/jack/status/1432137059666378755. SpaceX had launched a rocket from Florida on a resupply mission to the International Space Station: Stephen Clark
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, “SpaceX Launches Resupply Mission to International Space Station,” Spaceflight Now, August 29, 2021, https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/08/29/spacex-launches-resupply-mission-to-international-space-station/. attending a party where Diplo deejayed and the club
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, 2022, 8:13 p.m., https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201. CHAPTER 13: @ELONMUSK He raced dirt bikes… undeniably brilliant: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015), 33–39. He had a photographic memory… question thrown his way: Vance, Elon Musk
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: Vance, Elon Musk, 86. Musk learned… Musk made $250 million: Vance, Elon Musk, 87–89. Musk invested… was also the CEO: Vance, Elon Musk, 154. SpaceX’s first rocket would take off just fifteen months after the company’s founding: Vance, Elon Musk, 115. it didn’t arrive until mid-2008
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, Spaceballs: Joe Rogan, “Joe Rogan Experience #1169—Elon Musk,” YouTube, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI. “The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good”: Full Send Podcast, “Elon Musk Reveals His Knowledge on Aliens, Challenges Putin to UFC, and Predicts WW3,” YouTube, 2022, https://www
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].” Twitter, May 16, 2022, 10:03 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1526246899606601730. he even “offered to buy her a horse”: Rich McHugh, “A SpaceX Flight Attendant Said Elon Musk Exposed Himself and Propositioned Her for Sex, Documents Show. The Company Paid $250,000 for Her Silence,” Business Insider, May
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19, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5. called the allegations “utterly untrue”: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “No, it
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the World Trade Center”: Johnna Crider, “Tesla’s Twitter Impersonator Tells Tiktok Followers He Wanted to Create an Account for SpaceX,” Teslarati, November 11, 2022, https://www.teslarati.com/teslas-twitter-impersonator-spacex/. posted that he “missed killing Iraqis”: Lee Moran, “Verified Bush and Blair Profiles Work to Make Musk’s Twitter
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-security-concerns?sref=dZ65CIng. “The giant elephant in the room was that he was acting like a fucking idiot”: Isaacson, Elon Musk, 580–86. both SpaceX and Tesla had less than a 10 percent chance of survival: Rory Cellan-Jones, “Tesla Chief Elon Musk Says Apple Is Making an Electric Car
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of, 162, 171–72, 182, 194, 213, 247–48 sexual harassment allegations against, 193–95 sink stunt of, 213, 218, 220, 251, 280, 282, 283 SpaceX company of, 2, 142, 151, 169–72, 186, 193, 200, 217, 226, 257, 260, 264, 266, 278, 281–82, 288 stalker and, 274–75 Taylor
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, 277 social networking protocol, 136–37 SoFi, 80 Solomon, Sasha, 262 Sotheby’s, 201 South Africa, 86, 87 South by Southwest, 18 Space Balls, 171 SpaceX, 2, 142, 151, 169–72, 186, 193, 200, 217, 226, 257, 260, 264, 266, 278, 281–82, 288 Spark Capital, 19 Spencer Stuart, 23–24
The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton · 1 May 2019 · 319pp · 100,984 words
tracks, in the hills above Stanford, was the home of Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who had been an early backer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and nurtured his own plans for the Moon. It was at a meeting in that house that the moonbase-siting study I was reading had
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a cultural vigour he thinks was lost with the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and, as I write, probably the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, sees Mars as a hedge against existential all-eggs-in-the-same-basket
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TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary
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were not part of the plan. As a provider of practical services to industry and government, SpaceX has succeeded beyond almost all expectation. In the ten years since September 2008, when, at its fourth attempt, SpaceX finally launched its first satellite, the company has gone from triumph to triumph. It has more
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with new ambitions, new technology and new agility, developing its know-how in-house at breakneck speed, takes on the incumbents and beats them hollow. SpaceX used the best technologies it could find or imagine rather than the ones others had made do with before; it tried to continuously improve what
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new government spacecraft for the purpose, the agency would encourage the development of commercial crew-transport services which it would then be able to buy. SpaceX was one beneficiary of this approach; another was Orbital Sciences, now part of Northrop Grumman, which developed a spacecraft called Cygnus for the purpose. The
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new departure for NASA—was a tremendous success. NASA invested a bit under $400m in the Falcon 9 and Dragon, paid out in increments as SpaceX crossed 40 separate “milestones”. According to an internal estimate, for NASA to have developed the rocket itself in the way it has in the past
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this anchor tenancy has already put them on a firmer footing. If Washington wanted to procure human missions to the Moon in the same way, SpaceX could, in principle, provide surface-to-surface service in a few years with relatively little extra hardware. An architecture sketched by Robert Zubrin requires just
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Musk’s agenda nor NASA’s. Having developed a commercially viable system for reaching low Earth orbit, Mr Musk is on the road to Mars. SpaceX plans no further upgrades to its Falcon 9s or Dragons; the Falcon Heavy may fly only a couple of times. Instead, the company is concentrating
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until late 2018 known with a mix of foul-mouthed fancy and technical accuracy as the BFR.1 The BFR is now officially called the Starship, but I suspect that many will continue to think of it as the BFR for quite some time. Developing this new rocket is much more
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2016, it has been refined in such a way as to make its capabilities almost identical to those of the fully developed SLS, suggests that SpaceX is quite aware of this. But the implicit offer of something better and cheaper than what the government is building for itself is one that
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, I believe, in national security circles—see Mr Musk as something of a flake. It took a long time for the Defense Department to give SpaceX access to the lucrative market for launching spy satellites which is the purview of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and
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disturbing to some policymakers, even though a super-heavy-lift capability has no obvious national security applications. Without government support of the sort that helped SpaceX in the past, the development of the BFR, which Mr Musk sees as an outlay of about $5bn, seems too much for the company’s
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business is, it is unlikely to provide that big a cash flow, and its market does not have that much near-term room for growth. SpaceX has ambitious plans for a huge new constellation of communication satellites that may one day deliver many billions of dollars. But at the moment this
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something with more immediate charm than one day making up for the absence of the moonbase someone else should have taken care of. It offers SpaceX a way to get some development money for the BFR, an early version of which will send him and his artists on their way. Mr
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on the SLS to date. No one should bet on #dearMoon actually taking off in 2023. But even a slower-than-promised Moon programme from SpaceX would probably bring about the Return before a programme based on the SLS, and before the Chinese, too. AND
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SPACEX IS NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. JEFF BEZOS, THE founder of Amazon, one of the world’s first trillion-dollar companies, is at the
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plans something in the super-heavy-lift category. The company calls it New Armstrong. Blue Origin’s accomplishments to date lag far behind those of SpaceX. It has launched nothing into orbit; it has made more or less no money. But it is clearly technically competent—the New Shepard has flown
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go. Not just robots and humans paid for by governments or patrons of the arts. Private people, private robots, with private plans. The success of SpaceX, the promise of Blue Origin and the boom in innovative small satellite companies supported by the sort of venture capital that built Silicon Valley’s
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being undertaken. Elon Musk has led the most successful spacecraft development programme since Apollo; as “Chief Designer” he is said to have mastered much of SpaceX’s engineering detail himself and has kept its technological developments in line with well-articulated long-term aims; he has put together a team that
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, philanthropist” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, might make you cringe—Mr Musk’s almost endearingly stilted cameo in “Iron Man 2”, partly filmed at the SpaceX factory, certainly will—but it is not all that much of a stretch. He does not have superpowers. But his technology has superempowered him to
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’t change. * * * 1 In polite company, the F is held to still stand for “Falcon”. 2 It is when such fripperies have been compared to SpaceX that Mr Musk’s animus on the subject has been most clearly expressed. 3 As well as, obviously, to journalists like me. - VII - ON THE
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. Tumlinson, Rick N., with Medlicott, Erin R. (eds.). (2005). Return to the Moon. Apogee Books. Vance, Ashlee. (2015). Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future. Virgin Books. Varley, John. (1992). Steel Beach. Ace Books. Verne, Jules. (1865). De la Terre a la Lune. ———. (1870
A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
by Adrian Hon · 5 Oct 2020 · 340pp · 101,675 words
economic pressures. NASA and ESA turned their efforts toward Earth observation and robotic exploration, leaving the development of launch systems to private companies such as SpaceX, who built on NASA’s previous work and moved aggressively to reduce costs. This is where Kevin Wing stepped in. In 2020, Wing formed a
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consortium with two other billionaires, plus NASA and SpaceX, to build the Nautilus-1. The Nautilus-1 was a deep-space exploration craft, the first ever capable of traveling to Mars and back—although
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necessary docking maneuvers was Yinghuo-7, a Chinese spaceship built along the same framework as the Nautilus-1, the product of recent CNSA cooperation with SpaceX. Yinghuo-7 was stationed in Earth orbit at L3 undergoing testing, but the Chinese government quickly agreed to mount a rescue mission, spurred on by
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and responsibilities as “first among equals” in the world economy (and it was a good opportunity to distract its increasingly fractious middle-class). NASA and SpaceX launched extra supply and fuel modules for Yinghuo-7 and provided two astronauts who had been training in Jiuquan for a future Chinese/American Tiangong
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, fabricate bomb components, weapons, custom electronics, keys, tools, and complex machinery. Generous government funding funneled into the project under the guise of the 100 Year Starship Study ensured that a prototype was developed within four years. Unfortunately, while the DARPA researchers managed to miniaturize the components required such that the scanner
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Expedition. Nanoscale fabricators were swarming over an improbably small and complex “lighthugger” constructed along the same lines as the Zheng He and the Ericson, two starships sent out last year. An antimatter fuel source had already been delivered from the inner system, along with a new posthuman-designed saddle point propulsion
The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts
by Loren Grush · 11 Sep 2023 · 375pp · 127,360 words
recording her. “Hi, I’m Nichelle Nichols,” she said, smiling into the lens. “But I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura on the Starship Enterprise.” The famous actress’s outfit was unmistakable. She wasn’t wearing the iconic red dress she’d worn throughout her tenure on the hit
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the time. “The Shuttle will be taking scientists and engineers, men and women of all races into space, just like the astronaut crew on the Starship Enterprise,” Nichelle said during the video she filmed for the agency. “So that is why I’m speaking to the whole family of humankind—minorities
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see space in 2021, when she flew on board one of Blue Origin’s rockets to the edge of space and back. Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX—which has become a major NASA partner—are going even further by enabling average citizens to fly all the way to orbit. In September 2021
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, a billionaire-backed trip on one of SpaceX’s vehicles allowed two women, childhood cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux and Professor Sian Proctor, to have the opportunity to lap the Earth for three days
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of safety procedures by, 388–89 Sally’s departure from, 384–85 scheduling delays by, 145–47 self-promotion of, 125 sexism in, 72–73 SpaceX in partnership with, 396 Special Advisory Committee on Life Sciences at, 61–62 test pilots in, 58–59 women accommodated by, 205–6 women astronauts
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in satellite retrieval, 300–303 simulations, 265–66 training for, 267–68, 273–74 unplanned, 317–23 untethered, 285–86, 292, 301 urination in, 265 SpaceX, 396 SPARTAN (Shuttle Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy), 307, 317, 334–35 SPAS satellites, 292, 307, 334 demonstration of, 223–24, 235 Special Advisory
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words
Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia. However, NASA isn’t necessarily looking for domain experts—nobody is an expert in outer space. “Even with SpaceX or a shuttle on its one hundred and twentieth flight, there are still human beings doing something for the first time,” said Sullivan. And Sullivan
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are some exceptions—Elon Musk, for instance, often seems blissfully unaware of his downside risks, although even he believed that he was only one more SpaceX launch failure away from being ruined—for the most part risk-takers are acutely aware of the possibility of failure. Sullivan knew that she was
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because he made an exceptionally aggressive compensation deal with Tesla that the conventional wisdom held “would be impossible to achieve.” “Tesla and this rocket company, SpaceX—they were both extremely risky schemes,” said Thiel, whose firm, Founders Fund, passed on an early investment in Tesla—although it did invest in
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SpaceX. “How would one assess them probabilistically? They probably were not going to work. And the Tesla thing looked like sort of a fake clean tech
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company,” Thiel said. SpaceX was even more risky. The company’s first three rocket launches failed, and Elon had to scrounge to get money for a fourth one. That
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also something more. The most successful founders like Musk succeeded despite what were ostensibly extremely long odds. Thiel, recalling the challenges Musk overcame to build SpaceX, thought that no one obstacle Musk faced made for an insurmountable barrier. But the quants had run the numbers—if you have 10 hurdles to
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more years ahead necessarily attracts a lot of stubborn personalities. It very much isn’t the case that you know the breakout hits right away; SpaceX, for instance, took six years until its first successful rocket launch and more than a decade until it turned a profit. In fact, veteran venture
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buzzword for data science. Attack surface: The number of points of entry or attack, analogous to the topology of a physical object. For instance, the Starship Enterprise with lots of dangling bits has a larger attack surface than the spherical Death Star because there are more vulnerable places to shoot photon
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his native India: Though Khosla told me he thinks this is starting to change in India. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT only one more SpaceX launch: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, Kindle ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), 186. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a compromise approach: Between 2020 and
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Noyce.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT took six years: Mohammed Saeed Al Hasan, PMP, “Is SpaceX Profitable? With $150 Billion Net Worth—$4.6 Billion in Revenue?,” LinkedIn, August 25, 2023, linkedin.com/pulse/spacex-profitable-150-billion-net-worth-46-revenue-al-hasan-pmp-. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The Mission: A True Story
by David W. Brown · 26 Jan 2021
instruction that said Absolutely do not do this suddenly read Go for it buddy—YOLO! and the billion-dollar mission would be lost forever. A starship like JIMO, though, was no mere robot. It was Optimus Prime! It was an electronic Aeneas on a celestial battlefield, radiation but a refreshing breeze
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’t come easy. The White House was ready to delete it, and Lori doubly so. Private sector rocket companies such as Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and Blue Origin were promising to deliver the holy grail of exploration: cheap access to space, with costs falling by tens to hundreds of millions
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when you saw it. Spacecraft feng shui. It wasn’t aesthetics, necessarily—pleasing to behold in the traditional sense: sleek lines and sweeping curves—the starship Enterprise. Science vessels tended often to look ungainly and hodgepodge; parts stuck together. This was because, once in space, they had no need for aerodynamics
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Exploration Survey, 84–86 Soviet Union, 141–143, 411n111, 438n370. See also Cold War Space Agency International Solar Polar Mission, 54 Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), 302 Space Launch System (SLS) budget for, 313 May and, 307–308 planning phase, 308–311 rocket designs, 311–314, 315–316, 342–343 SIP
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, 82, 304–305 funding for, 53–54, 140 purpose of, 80 Space Station Freedom, 138–144, 440n389 Space Transportation System (STS). See space shuttle program SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), 302 Spear, Tony, 246 Spencer, John, 95 Spirit rover, 82 Spitzer, Lyman, 77, 78–79 Squyres, Steve, 253, 257, 260, 265
Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline
by Paul Cooper · 31 Mar 2024 · 583pp · 174,033 words
not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.’9 In April 2023, the SpaceX rocket Starship exploded in the skies above the Gulf of Mexico on its maiden test flight. The company would later attract some mockery by describing this as
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Walls.’ Migration Policy Institute, 15 March 2022, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-proliferation-number-border-walls. Accessed 14 November 2023. Victor, Daniel and Kenneth Chang. ‘Starship Exploded, but SpaceX Had Reason to Pop Champagne Anyway.’ The New York Times, 20 April 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/science/rapid-unscheduled-disassembly
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-starship-rocket.html. Accessed 14 November 2023. Wadhams, Peter. A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017. Weisman, Alan.
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words
’s AlphaFold to predict protein shapes from their amino-acid sequences, one of biology’s most significant challenges; to the successful test launch of a SpaceX rocket intended to ferry humans to Mars; to the staggering advancements in generative AI models such as GPT. It begs the question: Do we really
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energy and the internet, there are myriad examples of how government policies can not only inhibit progress but also result in massive failures. Think of SpaceX and its fight against Department of Defense procurement policies that systematically favor well-connected aerospace and defense incumbents, or ARPA–Energy’s attempts to pick
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in a crisis of meaning and a failure to build a definitive, optimistic vision of the future. In April 2023, as SpaceX prepared the experimental launch of Starship, its flagship rocket, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk lamented the “soul-sucking” process of getting all of the safety reviews and requirements that the dozen or
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’s some project for which working at that organization is the only plausible way to make it happen. This holds true for a company like SpaceX; there just aren’t many groups trying to get humans to Mars. But it doesn’t hold for a private equity firm. If one firm
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support it this time. A few decades later, Elon Musk became known for implementing a similar culture of almost-impossible deadlines for Mars colonization at SpaceX. 202 Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 435. 203 Andrew Chaikin, “Live from the
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, there’s a deeper truth to YOLO. Many innovation-accelerating bubbles ride on civilizational stakes. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan Project or SpaceX or contributing to Bitcoin or OpenAI’s codebases share the existential feeling of YOLO, only for them, it’s not a mortgage or a pension
Moon Rush: The New Space Race
by Leonard David · 6 May 2019
be.” * * * THE APOLLO PROGRAM spawned technology revolutions in automation, computerization, and communications, and those improvements have led to today’s private space organizations. Some call SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace, and many others less well known the “children of Apollo.” This new face of space is sustainable as long
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. Over the past few years since the study was published, the situation has improved, says Miller, pointing to space tech luminaries like Elon Musk with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. Both space entrepreneurs are pushing forward with plans to develop boosters capable of reaching the Moon. “We went to
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for judging deep-space exploration technologies in close proximity to Earth. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk, founder and leader of the California-based firm SpaceX, also has company crosshairs on the Moon. “Having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, which would be the kind of Moon base, and then
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and beyond—that’s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for,” Musk says. On September 17, 2018, SpaceX announced that fashion innovator and globally recognized art curator Yusaku Maezawa will be the company’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon in
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-mannered terms—to make the dream of flying to space accessible to everyone. In late 2018, Musk announced the people-carrying vehicle is now called Starship and its rocket booster is simply called Super Heavy. Explaining his zeal for a Moon trip, Maezawa said he’s taking artists with him on
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” is part of his master plan for Mars colonization. He envisions us as a multiplanetary species in the not-too-distant future, traveling via a SpaceX fleet labeled the Interplanetary Transport System. “We should have a lunar base by now,” Musk recently said, speaking during a meeting of the International Astronautical
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the Apollo era, that anything is possible. In that spirit, Musk is moving forward and building the first interplanetary spacecraft destined for Mars. Based on SpaceX calculations, lunar surface missions can be done with no propellant production on the surface of the Moon. The Musk strategy would have rocket fuel tanks
Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert · 4 Jun 2018 · 244pp · 66,977 words
—a health care IT firm signs a contract with a hospital promising to reduce its patient readmittance rate by a certain percentage, for example, or SpaceX signs an agreement with NASA guaranteeing a particular cabin environment to transport lab rats to the International Space Station—and then compiles the technology and
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those players), and going to conventions. Now let’s say you’re a developer with a big franchise game called Starship Blasters. Every two years you come out with a bigger, better Starship Blasters game, with new characters, crazy new adventures, and (of course) better blasters. But these sequels are getting more
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they’re making less money with every new release. You know that in two years, probably only half the people who bought Starship Blasters III: Still Blastin’ will buy Starship Blasters IV: Blastageddon. And you know the kinds of experiences your player wants to have with their games just don’t align
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the long term. So it’s decided. No more big splashy releases every two years. For just five bucks a month, now your player gets Starship Blasters as a service—constant innovation, rolling updates, continuous engagement. Everybody wins. You slave away on an impressive PowerPoint presentation, the big board meeting happens
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our marginal cost? How much money do we need to give to our distribution channels? How much overhead do we have? In the case of Starship Blasters, your finance team is focused first and foremost on unit sales, with digital services as an important, growing, but ultimately secondary source of revenue
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and keeping the lights on. But what happens when your IT infrastructure is built around customers (or players), not units of sale (or discs of Starship Blasters)? Today the analyst firm Gartner says that “IT is moving away from focusing on systems of records to focusing on systems of innovation.” What
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getting to the sale. To keep subscription customers renewing and re-engaging, you have to provide real value and solve problems.” In the case of Starship Blasters, that imperative puts a premium on making a great game that’s constantly evolving, so maybe you redistribute some of your billboard advertising budget
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris · 19 Feb 2019 · 561pp · 163,916 words
old shoebox beside our TV were more than just games. They were computer simulations. They allowed me to simulate driving a tank or piloting a starship through an asteroid field. One of these games—Adventure—even allowed me to take control of an avatar inside a virtual world. I could navigate
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himself across a table from Kang. And though she was a fierce negotiator, and though her husband clearly had many good options (i.e., Valve, SpaceX), not only was Carmack itching to get back to VR, but he also happened to believe that the future of VR was mobile, and he
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much so that Carmack soon sought to expand his role at Oculus—to formally leave id Software, turn down enticing job offers from Valve and SpaceX and go all-in (albeit remotely) on Oculus and the future of virtual reality. Luckey, Iribe, Mitchell and the rest of Oculus’ exec team could
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company becomes kind of the talent magnet for all these people. This sort of latent body of talent out there. It’s not as if SpaceX and Tesla created all these great space engineers and electrical engineers; they were just sidelined. They just weren’t the protagonists, right? It took these
Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words
do not attempt to turn to military use. —Nikolai Fyodorov, Philosophy of the Common Cause, 1891 To fight the bug, we must understand the bug. —Starship Troopers Prologue Oakland, California It was February 18, 2014, and already dark when I crossed the Bay Bridge from San Francisco and parked my car
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used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection
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ComCom, 66 Sputnik I launch, 15–18 See also Cold War Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, 247 Space Race: Sputnik I launch, 15–18 SpaceX, 180 Sputnik I launch, 15–18, 41 Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 104–107 Stanford Digital Libraries project, 146 Stanford Research Institute Augmentation Research Center, 50
Makers
by Chris Anderson · 1 Oct 2012 · 238pp · 73,824 words
the alchemist’s dream: making anything. “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” When Captain Jean-Luc Picard wants a steaming beverage in his ready room aboard the starship Enterprise, he just utters those words. The ship’s “replicator” then assembles the necessary atoms—including those for the cup—and produces it, ready for
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as possible in-house, and he’s got the experience to know how to do it. This is what he did with his rocket company, SpaceX, which is now leading the private space industry. Its basic rocket technology is not much different from what NASA uses, but its production processes are
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orbit at a fraction of the cost. Unlike the complex (and politicized) network of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors of NASA’s aerospace industry model, SpaceX makes almost everything itself using digital fabrication tools. Technology allows it to vastly simplify the complexity and bureaucracy of manufacturing, cutting costs by as much
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez · 27 Jun 2016 · 559pp · 155,372 words
of contrasting exposed steel and light-colored fabric, and recessed halogen lighting everywhere. The intended effect seemed to be that of the bridge on the starship Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The receptionists were jaw-droppingly hot. I’m talking “got lost on the way to New York Fashion
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Dog Shit Sandwich* Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. —Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX OCTOBER 2010 Adchemy was holding a legal gun to our heads. Fenwick & West provided us with our own gun, but the reality was we couldn
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traits that distinguish successful startup founders at whatever level of the game, from the forgettably minuscule (e.g., AdGrok) to the epoch changing (e.g., SpaceX). First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life. I lived
The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk · 31 Mar 2019 · 315pp · 89,861 words
in our heads, like a dream, there being no objective physical reality. More recently, Elon Musk, world-famous entrepreneur and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has put forth this idea as being very likely. In fact, he estimates the chances that we are in a simulation at a billion to
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of the sophistication and rapid advancement of video games and graphics technology. Speaking at the Code Conference in 2016, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, reflected on how far we had come with video game technology since the creation of Pong some 40 years ago. He conjectured that if video
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points in between. In the original Star Trek television series, teleporting was introduced as a matter of economy. If the crew could start in the starship Enterprise one instant and be on the planet in the next instant, the television production team wouldn’t have to create visual effects of a
Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav · 3 Nov 2020 · 175pp · 45,815 words
policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly “necessary” over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.8 Musk gave his SpaceX drone vessels names like “Of Course I Still Love You” and “Just Read the Instructions,” which he lifted from the names of spaceships in Iain
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people will have to make is how to “balance the goal of bettering oneself against the injunction to better humanity” (as Captain Picard of the starship Enterprise tells a financial mogul, who had been cryogenically frozen in the twenty-first century only to be revived, to his horror, in a post
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, 53 export-processing zones in, 27 income growth in, 34–5 manufacturing employment shares in, 28 robotization in, 28, 107n16 as service-sector economy, 97 SpaceX, 3 Spain out-of-work income maintenance/support in, 119–20n6 universal basic income (UBI) and, 72 Srnicek, Nick on folk politics, 95 Inventing the
Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle · 16 Jan 2024 · 354pp · 109,574 words
of Electric Sheep? as well as its film adaptations, both Blade Runner movies. For good stories about borders, citizenship, and fascism, see Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. For stories about ethics, otherness, and equal rights, see Isaac Asimov, I, Robot. For frank treatment of
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brought home, to tell us all our own story. * * * *55 Elon Musk launched his Tesla into space to demonstrate the launch capability of a new SpaceX rocket, the Falcon Heavy. *56 This is technically called a Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud, and they form when the atmosphere is unstable, such as when the
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to the Moon, and to ourselves. In the early 2020s, private companies are the de facto arbiters of the space surrounding Earth. The rocket company SpaceX controls nearly one-fourth of all space launches, and by 2022 had lofted 3,400 miniature internet-broadcasting satellites into near-Earth orbit. Private companies
Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings · 2 Oct 2013 · 326pp · 97,089 words
they be like Earth? Would they have oceans and mountains, coral reefs and grasslands? Would they have cities and farms, computers and radios, telescopes and starships? Would creatures there live and die as we did, or look up and wonder about life’s purpose? Would they be lonely? Staring at the
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were building rockets and spaceports with an eye toward at last overcoming the crippling paradigm of high launch costs. The companies had names such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and XCOR, and multimillionaire CEOs who had made their fortunes with companies like PayPal, Amazon, and Intel. Seager thought the new companies might
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of finding any plausible future planetary home for humanity. He thought that the pale blue dot approximated the view of Earth as seen from a starship arriving after a long interstellar voyage. He did not mention that it also replicated how our planet would appear through a first-generation TPF-style
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson · 6 Jul 2020 · 400pp · 99,489 words
ads featuring Mars in magazines. There were illustrations from novels, maps drawn by Lowell, photographs from orbit, and a plaque from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There were live recordings of mission control during the Viking landings. There was the 1940 recording of H. G. Wells meeting Orson Welles, talking
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was beating like a galloping horse. The center of my existence seemed to shift as well, from back behind my eyes—the helm of the starship—to somewhere deep in my abdomen. I told my family about the pregnancy when they arrived in Boston for Christmas. My parents nearly broke into
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, now is the time. One day, potentially one day soon, there will not only be rovers and robots, there will be people exploring the planet. SpaceX is already calling for a million passengers, sent on a thousand spaceships. But unlike rovers, which we can bake and clean, humans will shed life
People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams
by Jono Bacon · 12 Nov 2019 · 302pp · 73,946 words
; the first XPRIZE was a $10 million competition challenging engineers of the world to build a reusable, commercially viable spacecraft back in 2004 (long before SpaceX and Virgin Galactic). A significant reason this first XPRIZE succeeded was because Diamandis painted a powerful vision of an ambitious new age of commercial space
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for many such fans.4 This thriving online fan forum brings together more than twenty-seven-thousand Trekkies, where they discuss every element of the Starship Enterprise, Klingons, and . . . er . . . other Star Trek things. While twenty-seven thousand is a more-than-respectable number of members, even more astonishing is that
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell · 14 Oct 2019 · 350pp · 98,077 words
full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”7 In the same year, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla and SpaceX companies, said that artificial intelligence is probably “our biggest existential threat” and that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”8 Microsoft’s cofounder
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. COMPUTER: Accessing. (A list of names is displayed.) —Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 2, episode 4: “The Outrageous Okona”1 The computer on the starship Enterprise—with its vast store of knowledge and seamless understanding of the questions put to it—has long been a lodestar for human-computer interaction
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen · 14 Sep 2015 · 558pp · 164,627 words
traditional military decor. The Information Dominance Center had been designed by Academy Award–winning Hollywood set designer Bran Ferren to simulate the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, from the Star Trek television and film series. There were ovoid-shaped chairs, computer stations inside highly polished chrome panels, even doors that slid
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of us to join his group for Chinese food. Thank you Fred Hareland for taking me to China Lake, Damon Northrop for showing me around SpaceX, and Robert Lowell for the visit to JPL. Thank you Dr. Steve Bein for your generosity with the introductions. I thank Finn Aaserud for compiling
The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
by Jim Bell · 24 Feb 2015 · 310pp · 89,653 words
. It seems inevitable, and I can imagine many possible scenarios for that encounter. Imagine, for example, that 50,000 years from now an enormous generational starship, launched by a consortium of privately funded gajillionaires seeking new adventures and new opportunities, heads off for the solar system around the star Gliese 445
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the future of space exploration unfold? Will NASA and other government space agencies always lead the way? Will upstart private space-related companies (such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Sierra Nevada, and dozens of others) dive into the robotic space-exploration game, and if so, why? For mineral resources? For fame and
Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission
by Eileen M. Collins and Jonathan H. Ward · 13 Sep 2021 · 394pp · 107,778 words
help you think about facing life’s challenges with a greater sense of strength and determination. She is an inspiration.” —Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO, SpaceX “This book is endlessly inspiring! Eileen Collins is a trailblazer not only of space but of life. Her story of overcoming adversity to achieve her
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I was back. Yahoo! News ran a story that some people at NASA were referring to me as “Janeway,” after Captain Katherine Janeway of the starship Voyager in the Star Trek TV series. (Another strong woman of Irish descent!) They intended it as a compliment for the “cool manner” in which