Что стоит за огромным оптимизмом космических полетов SpaceX у энтузиастов космонавтики?

[SFN]

Alex_II пишет:
А вдруг вам в глухую тайгу приспичит съездить?

Приспичить может только дураку. Если человек в одиночку собирается в глухую тайгу на Купер кроссовере, то к гадалке не ходи: этот человек - блондинка.

[SFN]

А если на Тесле - то блондин

[Настрел]

sychbird пишет:
И еще свечку под иконку святому угоднику, который числиться защитником от пожара.  

vlad7308 пишет:
по-человечески сделать (врезать в бак штуцер, кран, фильтр, хороший шланг с хомутом и тд) - не проблема
но кто ж это будет делать, когда электричества УЖЕ нет?    

Теоретики... Когда надо и машина от баклажки едет вместо бака. А вам бы лучше сидеть в поле в 3 часа ночи за 50 км от дома, и нудеть про пожары и то, как надо сделать по-хорошему. Руки просто надо было с детства применять по назначению, чтобы к 18-ти годам так на уровне жопы и не остались. И не будет никаких пожаров.
 
Тарахтелка ставится не в спальне, а на улице, и в яме. Пожар грозит только самой тарахтелке, и только если у хозяина руки, как я уже сказал, где.
 

[vlad7308]

Коттеджная резервная тарахтелка ставится в гараже или цоколе. Угадайте почему.
Похоже теоретик тут Вы
Насчет рукожопия... Не великий умелец, да. Но стеллаж в гараже в эти выхи варить буду сам. А в следующие - тумбу под новый фрезер.

[Настрел]

vlad7308 пишет:
Коттеджная резервная тарахтелка ставится в гараже или цоколе. Угадайте почему.

Потому что хозяин НЕ подумал что:
- Тарахтение будет раздражать.
- Будет вонять выхлопными газами.
- Будет вонять соляркой.
- В случае пожара будет источником легковоспламенющейся жидкости.
- Канистры с солярой в гараже могут перепутаться с канистрами с бензином.
А подумал что:
- Она ему никогда не пригодится.
- Так дешевле.
 
Что-нибудь еще забыл?
 

vlad7308 пишет:
Насчет рукожопия... Не великий умелец, да. Но стеллаж в гараже в эти выхи варить буду сам. А в следующие - тумбу под новый фрезер.

Значит и с куском шланга, при необходимости, совладете без пожаров и прочих ужасов.

[Alex_II]

SFN пишет:
Если человек в одиночку собирается в глухую тайгу на Купер кроссовере, то к гадалке не ходи: этот человек - блондинка.

Блондинка? В одиночку? Не, не верю - все одно прихватит с собой хотя бы блондина... А вот "Запорожец" на зимнике за 150 километров от жилья мне видеть случалось - еще и из сугроба вытаскивать помогал. Наверное от удивления...

Sellin пишет:
Теоретики... Когда надо и машина от баклажки едет вместо бака. А вам бы лучше сидеть в поле в 3 часа ночи за 50 км от дома, и нудеть про пожары и то, как надо сделать по-хорошему. Руки просто надо было с детства применять по назначению, чтобы к 18-ти годам так на уровне жопы и не остались. И не будет никаких пожаров.

Да умеем мы всю эту шнягу давным-давно... Просто не надо думать что это нормальное положение вещей. Так можно сделать, когда край. А если постоянно такими времянками пользоваться - будут вам и пожары и прочие удовольствия... На постоянку надо делать нормально.

[vlad7308]

Sellin пишет:

vlad7308 пишет:
Коттеджная резервная тарахтелка ставится в гараже или цоколе. Угадайте почему.

Потому что хозяин НЕ подумал что:
- Тарахтение будет раздражать.
- Будет вонять выхлопными газами.
- Будет вонять соляркой.
- В случае пожара будет источником легковоспламенющейся жидкости.
- Канистры с солярой в гараже могут перепутаться с канистрами с бензином.
А подумал что:
- Она ему никогда не пригодится.
- Так дешевле.
 
Что-нибудь еще забыл?

конечно забыли
- без крыши - нельзя, бывает дождь и снег
- с крышей, но в неотапливаемом помещении - нельзя, может не завестись в самый нужный момент
- выхлопными газами в гараже не воняет, ибо выхлоп отводится в специальную трубу
- так действительно дешевле - для резервного генератора, предназначенного для использования в среднем несколько часов в году. а раз в десять лет - несколько дней  а постоянно действующую электростанцию конечно никто не будет ставить в гараж и оснащать десятилитровым бачком  

Sellin пишет:  

vlad7308 пишет:
Насчет рукожопия... Не великий умелец, да. Но стеллаж в гараже в эти выхи варить буду сам. А в следующие - тумбу под новый фрезер.

Значит и с куском шланга, при необходимости, совладете без пожаров и прочих ужасов.

конечно, совладаю.
но без крайней нужды - постараюсь этого избежать.
и постараюсь не оставлять без присмотра.
мне кажется, это разумная острожность

ЗЫ да - я еще и с болгаркой никогда без маски не работаю
и фрирайд в одиночку не катаю
трусоват, наверно

[SFN]

vlad7308 пишет:
конечно, совладаю.

Дальше уже обсуждалось: берем будильник, заводим на 4-40, просыпаемся по звонку будильника, доливаем бензин в бачок, идем дальше спать в маске  кабы чего не вышло.

[benderr]

весело у вас тут!
батарейки-дааа,пока проблемно. сам злюсь на батарейки когда галакси сдыхает за 3-4 часа навигации..  :oops:
а на счет резервных батарей с панелями (БСП) супротив диз.генераторов(ДГ) есть вопросы к участникам.
 если  на полную замену эл.сети:
через сколько лет панели деградируют до неприемлемости?
а батареи?
а им не нужна крыша?
а они могут «не завестись» от переохлаждения\перегрева?
а они не горючи?
а что устойчивей к ураганам ДГ или  (БСП)?

а если как резервный ИП-о чем дискуссия?

vlad7308 пишет:
 .....для использования в среднем несколько часов в году. а раз в десять лет - несколько дней.....

ДГ по любому и дешевле и надежнее.
просто не распрыскивайте по всей хате соляру и ни вони ни пожара вам не грозит.

[Not]

Sellin пишет:

vlad7308 пишет:
Коттеджная резервная тарахтелка ставится в гараже или цоколе. Угадайте почему.

Потому что хозяин НЕ подумал что:
- Тарахтение будет раздражать.
- Будет вонять выхлопными газами.
- Будет вонять соляркой.
- В случае пожара будет источником легковоспламенющейся жидкости.
- Канистры с солярой в гараже могут перепутаться с канистрами с бензином.
А подумал что:
- Она ему никогда не пригодится.
- Так дешевле.
 

В случае пожара батарея будет гореть так, что мало не покажется. Возьмите смеха ради заряженную литиевую батарейу и киньте в огонь. Или просто проткните, тогда в огонь можно будет кидать все что под рукой, но один хрен не потушить, поскольку эта дрянь горит без доступа воздуха.

[Alex_II]

Not пишет:
В случае пожара батарея будет гореть так, что мало не покажется.

Оно так. Но сама она вряд ли может привести к пожару - в отличие от дизеля, особенно если к нему, как тут советуют, открытую канистру с солярой, стоящую на кирпичах, шлангом подключить...

[snek]

Может в ЧД сделать тему "все что касается деятельности Маска кроме спейсикс"?

[Искандер]

Powerwall:
- Stores solar energy for use when the sun isn't shining.
- Powers your home when rates are high.

[Настоящий Искандер]

Not пишет:
В случае пожара батарея будет гореть так, что мало не покажется. Возьмите смеха ради заряженную литиевую батарейу и киньте в огонь. Или просто проткните, тогда в огонь можно будет кидать все что под рукой, но один хрен не потушить, поскольку эта дрянь горит без доступа воздуха.

А как Вам в качестве накопителей энергии маховики? Они не горят. Если с катушек слетят, все снесут на своем пути.

[Kap]

Not пишет:
В случае пожара батарея будет гореть так, что мало не покажется. Возьмите смеха ради заряженную литиевую батарейу и киньте в огонь. Или просто проткните, тогда в огонь можно будет кидать все что под рукой, но один хрен не потушить, поскольку эта дрянь горит без доступа воздуха.

С литий-полимерными такое уже не получится вроде как. Протыкать точно бесполезно в смысле взрывов.

[sychbird]

Alex_II пишет:
Но сама она вряд ли может привести к пожару

Скажите это менеджерам Боинга 787

[Alex_II]

sychbird пишет:
Скажите это менеджерам Боинга 787  

Сдается мне, там несколько другие условия работы батареи...

[svmich]

На днях (19 мая) собирается выйти книжка "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future".

Вот фрагмент (1 из 4):

Elon Musk's Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla

SpaceX started with a plan to send mice to Mars. It got crazier from there.


In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile. He brought along Jim Cantrell, a kind of international aerospace supplies fixer, and Adeo Ressi, his best friend from Penn. Although Musk had tens of millions in the bank, he was trying to get a rocket on the cheap. They flew coach, and they were planning to buy a refurbished missile, not a new one. Musk figured it would be a good vehicle for sending a plant or some mice to Mars.

Ressi, a gangly eccentric, had been thinking a lot about whether his best friend had started to lose his mind, and he'd been doing his best to discourage the project. He peppered Musk with links to video montages of Russian, European, and American rockets exploding. He staged interventions, bringing Musk's friends together to talk him out of wasting his money. None of it worked. Musk remained committed to funding a grand, inspirational spectacle in space and would spend all of his fortune to do it. And so Ressi went to Russia to contain Musk as best as he could. "Adeo would call me to the side and say, 'What Elon is doing is insane. A philanthropic gesture? That's crazy,'" said Cantrell. "He was seriously worried."



The group set up a few meetings with companies such as NPO Lavochkin, which had made probes intended for Mars and Venus for the Russian Federal Space Agency, and Kosmotras, a commercial rocket launcher based in Moscow. The appointments all seemed to go the same way, following Russian decorum. The Russians, who often skip breakfast, would ask to meet around 11 a.m. at their offices for an early lunch. Then there would be small talk for an hour or more as the meeting attendees picked over a spread of sandwiches, sausages, and, of course, vodka. After lunch came a lengthy smoking and coffee drinking period. Once all of the tables were cleared, the Russian in charge would turn to Musk and ask, "What is it you're interested in buying?" The big windup may not have bothered Musk as much if the Russians had taken him more seriously. They viewed Musk as a novice when it came to space and did not appreciate his bravado. "One of their chief designers spit on me and Elon because he thought we were full of s---," Cantrell said. Team Musk returned empty-handed.

In February 2002 the group returned to Russia, this time bringing Mike Griffin, who had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and was just leaving Orbital Sciences, a maker of satellites and spacecraft. Musk was now looking for not one but three missiles and had a briefcase full of cash, too. They met with Kosmotras officials in an ornate, neglected, prerevolutionary building near downtown Moscow. The vodka shots started—"To space!" "To America!"—and, a little buzzed, Musk asked point-blank how much a missile would cost. Eight million dollars each, they said. Musk countered, offering $8 million for two. "They sat there and looked at him," Cantrell said. "And said something like, 'Young boy. No.' They also intimated that he didn't have the money." At this point, Musk had decided the Russians were either not serious about doing business or were just determined to part a dot-com millionaire from as much of his money as possible. He stormed out of the meeting.

The team went out into the snow and dreck of the Moscow winter, hailed a cab, and drove straight to the airport. The Russians were the only ones with rockets that could possibly fit within Musk's budget, and they were too difficult to deal with. "It was a long drive," Cantrell said. "We sat there in silence looking at the Russian peasants shopping in the snow." The somber mood lingered all the way to the plane, until the drink cart arrived. "You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow," Cantrell said. "It's like, 'My God. I made it.' So, Griffin and I got drinks and clinked our glasses." Musk sat in the row in front of them, typing on his computer. "We're thinking, 'F---ing nerd: What can he be doing now?' " At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he'd created.

"Hey, guys," he said, "I think we can build this rocket ourselves."

SpaceX made history on Sept. 28, 2008, when its Falcon 1 became the first privately developed, liquid-fueled rocket to orbit earth.
Source: NASA

Just a few months before, in June 2001, Musk had turned 30. "I'm no longer a child prodigy," he told his college sweetheart and new wife, Justine, only half joking. Musk had emigrated from South Africa in 1988 and had made millions off two Internet companies, Zip2 and PayPal. Now, he was expected to act like a stereotypical dot-com rich guy and start some other Web service. Musk, though, wanted more. As a child, he had dreamed of rocket ships and space travel, devouring Heinlein, Asimov, and Douglas Adams. For most people, a triumph in Silicon Valley would be the goal. For Musk, it was a stepping stone.

The changes in his attitude and thinking were obvious to friends, including a group of PayPal executives who gathered in Las Vegas one weekend to celebrate the recent sale. "We're all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on EBay," said Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor. "He was studying it and talking openly about space travel and changing the world."

Elon and Justine decided to move south to begin their family and the next chapter of their lives in Los Angeles. Unlike many Southern California transplants, they were drawn by the technology. The mild, consistent weather made it ideal for the aeronautics industry, which had been there since the 1920s, when Lockheed Aircraft set up shop in Hollywood. Howard Hughes, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Boeing, and a mosaic of support industries followed suit. While Musk's space plans were vague at the time, he felt confident that he could recruit some of the world's top aeronautics thinkers and get them to join his next venture.



Illustrations by Paul Faassen; Photo: Courtesy Maye Musk

Musk started by crashing the Mars Society, an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet. They were holding a fund-raiser in mid-2001, a $500-per-plate event at the house of one of the well-off Mars Society members. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting. "He gave us a check for $5,000," Zubrin said. "That made everyone take notice." Zubrin invited Musk for coffee ahead of the dinner and told him about the research center the society had built in the Arctic to mimic the tough conditions of Mars and the experiments they had been running for something called the Translife Mission, in which there would be a capsule orbiting earth carrying a crew of mice. It would spin to give them one-third gravity—the same as Mars—and they would live there and make babies.

When it was time for dinner, Zubrin placed Musk at the VIP table next to himself, the director and space buff James Cameron, and Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist for NASA. Musk loved it. "He was much more intense than some of the other millionaires," Zubrin said. "He didn't know a lot about space, but he had a scientific mind. He wanted to know exactly what was being planned in regards to Mars and what the significance would be." Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated an additional $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert.

Musk's friends were not entirely sure what to make of his mental state at that time. He'd caught malaria while on vacation in Africa and lost a tremendous amount of weight fighting it off. Musk stands 6-foot-1 but usually seems much bigger than that. He's broad-shouldered, sturdy, and thick. This version of Musk, though, looked emaciated and with little prompting would start expounding on his desire to do something meaningful with his life. "He said, 'The logical thing to happen next is solar, but I can't figure out how to make any money out of it,' " said George Zachary, an investor and close friend of Musk's, recalling a lunch date at the time. "He started talking about space, and I thought he meant office space like a real estate play." Musk had already started thinking beyond the Mars Society's goals. Rather than send a few mice into earth's orbit, Musk wanted to send them to Mars.

"He asked if I thought that was crazy," Zachary said. "I asked, 'Do the mice come back? Because, if they don't, yeah, most people will think that's crazy.' " Musk said that the mice were not only meant to go to Mars and come back but they also would come home with the baby mice, too.

Musk built a network of space experts and brought the best of them together at a series of salons—sometimes at the Renaissance hotel at the Los Angeles airport and sometimes at the Sheraton in Palo Alto. Musk had no formal business plan. He mostly wanted them to help him develop the mice-to-Mars idea or at least to come up with something comparable. Musk hoped to hit on a wondrous gesture for mankind—some type of event that would capture the world's attention, get people thinking about Mars again, and have them reflect on man's potential. Scientists showed up from NASA's JPL. Cameron was there again, along with Griffin. No one on the planet knew more about the realities of getting things into space than Griffin, and he was consulting for Musk. Four years later, he would be running NASA.



The experts were thrilled to have another rich guy appear who was willing to fund something interesting in space. They happily debated the merits and feasibility of sending up the mice. But the discussion turned to a different project, the "Mars Oasis." In this scenario, Musk would buy a rocket and use it to shoot what amounted to a robotic greenhouse to Mars, a space-ready growth chamber for plants that could open up briefly and scoop in some of the Martian regolith, or soil, and then use it to grow a plant, which would in turn produce the first oxygen on Mars. Much to Musk's liking, this plan seemed both ostentatious and feasible.

Musk wanted the space greenhouse to have a way to send a video feed to earth, so people could watch the plant grow. The group also talked about mailing kits to students around the country who would nurture their own plants simultaneously and notice, for example, that the Martian plant could grow twice as high as its earthbound counterpart in the same amount of time. Musk's enthusiasm for the idea started to inspire the group, many of whom had grown cynical about anything novel happening in space again. There were immense engineering challenges that would need solving. Getting Martian soil into the structure seemed not only hard to do physically but also problematic because the regolith would be toxic. For a while, the scientists debated growing the plant in a nutrient-rich gel instead, but that felt like cheating. Even the optimistic moments were awash in unknowns. One scientist found some very resilient mustard seeds and thought they could possibly survive a treated version of the Martian soil. "There was a pretty big downside if the plant didn't survive," said Dave Bearden, a space industry veteran who attended the meetings. "You'd have this dead garden on Mars."

[svmich]

(2 из 4)

The main thing troubling the space experts was Musk's budget. Following the salons, it seemed like Musk wanted to spend somewhere between $20 million and $30 million on the stunt, and everyone knew that the cost of a rocket launch alone would eat up that money and then some. Musk, however, had his own plans. He'd been devouring books he'd borrowed from Cantrell and others. They included Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion. According to Musk's calculations, he could undercut existing launch companies by building a modest-size rocket that specialized in carrying smaller satellites and research payloads to space. In June 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. He was on his way to Mars.



SpaceX's first headquarters was in an old warehouse at 1310 East Grand Ave. in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles. It had 75,000 square feet of open space and several receiving bays, allowing Musk to drive his silver McLaren F1 sports car right into his office. It was a sparse, hangarlike building with a dusty floor and curved ceilings. During the first week of SpaceX's operations, delivery trucks showed up with laptops and printers and folding tables. Musk walked over to one of the loading docks, rolled up the door, and offloaded the equipment himself. Desks were eventually interspersed around the factory so the computer scientists and engineers designing the machines could sit with the welders and machinists building the hardware. In aerospace, this was daring. Traditional aerospace companies separate engineers and machinists by thousands of miles.

SpaceX planned to do a lot of things differently. Instead of assembling parts fr om thousands of suppliers, the company would build as much machinery as it could in-house. This included things like a mobile launchpad and—most ambitiously—rocket engines. Wherever possible, SpaceX would be faster, cheaper, and better than its competitors. It would launch multiple rockets each month, make money off each one, and never need to become a huge contractor dependent on government funds. SpaceX's first rocket would be called the Falcon 1, a nod toStar Wars' Millennium Falcon. At a time when the cost of sending a 550-pound payload into orbit started at $30 million, Musk promised that the Falcon 1 would be able to carry a 1,400-pound payload for $6.9 million.

The proposed timeline for upending the aerospace industry was comically short. One of the earliest SpaceX presentations promised the first complete engine by May 2003, a second engine in June, the body of the rocket in July, and everything assembled by August. A launchpad would be ready by September, and the first launch would take place in November 2003, or about 15 months after the company started. A trip to Mars was naturally slated for somewh ere near the end of the decade. "Elon has always been optimistic," said Kevin Brogan, an early SpaceX recruit. "That's the nice word. He can be a downright liar about when things need to get done. He will pick the most aggressive time schedule imaginable assuming everything goes right, and then accelerate it by assuming that everyone can work harder."

Musk sought out young overachievers, personally calling top students in aerospace programs and recruiting them over the phone. "I thought it was a prank call," said Michael Colonno, who heard from Musk while attending Stanford. "I did not believe for a minute that he had a rocket company." Once the students looked Musk up on the Internet, selling them on SpaceX was easy. As word of SpaceX's ambitions spread, top engineers with a high tolerance for risk from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences fled to the upstart, too.

Throughout the first year at SpaceX, one or two new employees joined almost every week. Brogan was employee No. 23 and came from TRW, a soon-to-be-shuttered aerospace player, wh ere he'd been used to various internal policies blocking him from doing work. "I called it the country club," he said. "Nobody did anything." Brogan started at SpaceX the day after his interview and was told to scrounge around the office and find a computer to use. "It was go to Fry's and get whatever you need and go to Staples and get a chair," Brogan said.

One of the first projects was the construction of a gas generator, a machine not unlike a small rocket engine that produces hot gas to power pumps. Tom Mueller, another TRW veteran, Tim Buzza, a defector from Boeing, and a couple of young engineers assembled the generator in Los Angeles and then packed it into the back of a pickup truck and drove it out to Mojave to test it. A desert town about 100 miles from Los Angeles, Mojave had become a hub for aerospace companies such as Scaled Composites and XCOR.

The SpaceX team borrowed a test stand from XCOR that was just about the perfect size to hold the gas generator. The first ignition run took place at 11 a.m. and lasted 90 seconds. The generator worked, but it let out a billowing black cloud that settled right over the airport tower. In the days that followed, SpaceX's engineers perfected a routine that let them do multiple tests a day—an unheard-of practice at the airport—and had the gas generator tuned to their liking after two weeks of work.




The SpaceX team made a few more trips to Mojave and some other spots, including a test stand at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California and another in Mississippi. While on this countrywide rocketry tour, the SpaceX engineers visited a 300-acre test site in McGregor, Texas, a small city near the center of the state. The site was a leftover from another billionaire, Andrew Beal, a real estate and finance whiz in Texas, who had folded his aerospace startup after pouring millions into the massive test facility. The SpaceX engineers really liked this spot—and the three-story concrete test stand Beal had left there—and talked Musk into buying it.

Jeremy Hollman, a young engineer, soon found himself living in Texas. Hollman exemplified the kind of recruit Musk wanted: He'd earned an aerospace engineering degree from Iowa State University and a master's in astronautical engineering from the University of Southern California. He'd spent a couple of years working as a test engineer at Boeing dealing with jets, rockets, and spacecraft. At 23, Hollman was young, single, and willing to give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX nonstop, and he became Mueller's second in command.

Mueller had developed a pair of 3D computer models of the two engines he wanted to build. Merlin would be the engine for the first stage of the Falcon 1, which lifted it off the ground, and Kestrel would be the smaller engine used to power the upper, second stage of the rocket and guide it in space. Together, Hollman and Mueller figured out which parts SpaceX would build at the Los Angeles factory and which parts it would try to buy. For the purchased parts, Hollman had to head to various machine shops and get quotes and delivery dates for the hardware. Quite often, the machinists told Hollman that SpaceX's timelines were nuts. Others were more accommodating and would try to bend an existing product to SpaceX's needs instead of building something from scratch. Hollman also found that ingenuity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available carwash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel.

In addition to building its own engines, rocket bodies, and capsules, SpaceX designed its own motherboards and circuits, sensors to detect vibrations, flight computers, and solar panels. On a radio, SpaceX's engineers found that they could reduce the weight of the device by about 20 percent. And the cost savings were dramatic, dropping from the $50,000 to $100,000 for the industrial-grade equipment used by aerospace companies to $5,000 for SpaceX's unit.

Even as they were trying to figure out Falcon 1, Musk was planning to build something he was calling the BFR, aka the Big Falcon Rocket or Big F---ing Rocket. It would have the biggest rocket engine in history. Musk's bigger, faster mentality amused and impressed some of the suppliers that SpaceX occasionally turned to for help, like Barber-Nichols, a Colorado-based maker of rocket engine turbo pumps and other aerospace machinery. Bob Linden, a Barber-Nichols executive, remembers dealing with him. "Elon showed up with Tom Mueller and started telling us it was his destiny to launch things into space at lower costs and to help us become spacefaring people," he said. "We thought the world of Tom but weren't quite sure whether to take Elon too seriously. They began asking us for the impossible. They wanted a turbo pump to be built in less than a year for under $1 million. Boeing might do a project like that over five years for $100 million. Tom told us to give it our best shot, and we built it in 13 months. He was relentless."



The SpaceX ­facility in McGregor, Texas.
Source: SpaceX

After SpaceX completed its first engine at the factory in California, Hollman loaded it along with mounds of other equipment into a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the back of a white Hummer H2, and drove it down Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to the test site in Texas. Amid rattlesnakes, fire ants, isolation, and searing heat, the group fastened their prototype engine to the stand, filled it with liquid oxygen and kerosene, hid in a bunker behind a dirt berm, and fired it, for all of 0.1 seconds. The bad news was it would need a lot of work. The good news was it didn't blow up. (That would happen later, and the engineers had a term for that, a "rapid unscheduled disassembly.") After that first successful burn, the employees christened the site by drinking a $1,200 bottle of Rémy Martin, left over from SpaceX's inaugural party, out of paper cups.

Over the next years, the trek from California to the test site became known as the Texas Cattle Haul. SpaceX engineers would work for 10 days straight in Texas, come back to California for a weekend, and then head back. To ease the burden of travel, Musk sometimes let them use his private jet. "It carried six people," Mueller said. "Well, seven if someone sat in the toilet, which happened all the time."

Musk, of course, wasn't just building rockets. In 2003, about a year after he started SpaceX, Musk helped found Tesla Motors, which planned to sell an electric sports car. Musk had spent years pining after a good electric car, and though he had committed $100 million to SpaceX, he would now put an additional $70 million into Tesla and end up as the company's CEO. It was a decision that would almost break both companies.

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Stills from Iron Man 2

As he prepared to begin filming Iron Man in early 2007, director Jon Favreau rented out a complex in Los Angeles that once belonged to Hughes Aircraft, the aerospace and defense contractor started about 80 years earlier by Howard Hughes. The facility had a series of interlocking hangars and served as a production office for the movie. It also supplied Robert Downey Jr., who was to play Iron Man and his human creator, Tony Stark, with a splash of inspiration. Downey felt nostalgic looking at one of the larger hangars, which had fallen into a state of disrepair. Not too long ago, that building had played host to the big ideas of a big man who shook up industries and did things his own way.

Downey had heard about a Howard Hughes-like figure who had constructed his own industrial complex about 10 miles fr om the Iron Man set. Instead of visualizing how life might have been for Hughes, Downey could perhaps get a taste of the real thing. In March 2007, he visited SpaceX's headquarters in El Segundo and wound up receiving a personal tour from Musk. "My mind is not easily blown, but this place and this guy were amazing," Downey said.

To Downey, the SpaceX facility looked like a giant, exotic hardware store. Enthusiastic employees were zipping about, fiddling with an assortment of machines. Young white-collar engineers interacted with blue-collar assembly line workers, and they all seemed to share a genuine excitement for what they were doing. "It felt like a radical startup company," Downey said. After the initial tour, Downey came away pleased that the sets being hammered out at the former Hughes factory did have parallels to the SpaceX operations. "Things didn't feel out of place," he said.

The men walked, sat in Musk's office, and had lunch. Downey appreciated that Musk was not a foul-smelling, fidgety, coder whack job. What Downey picked up on instead were Musk's "accessible eccentricities" and the feeling that he was someone who could work alongside the people in the factory. When he returned to the Iron Man production office, Downey asked that Favreau be sure to place a Tesla Roadster in Tony Stark's workshop. "After meeting Elon and making him real to me, I felt like having his presence in the workshop," Downey said. "They became contemporaries. Elon was someone Tony probably hung out with and partied with, or more likely they went on some weird jungle trek together to drink concoctions with the shamans." Musk later had a cameo in Iron Man 2.

Musk enjoyed his rising profile. He and Justine bought a house in Bel Air. Their neighbors were Quincy Jones, and Joe Francis, the creator of the Girls Gone Wild videos. Musk and some former PayPal executives produced Thank You for Smoking and used Musk's jet in the movie. While not a carouser, Musk took part in the Hollywood nightlife and its social scene. "We had a domestic staff of five; during the day our home transformed into a workplace," Justine wrote in a magazine article for Marie Claire. "We went to black-tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs, with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying next to us. When Google co-founder Larry Page got married on Richard Branson's private Caribbean island, we were there, hanging out in a villa with John Cusack and watching Bono pose with swarms of adoring women outside the reception tent."

By this time, SpaceX was looking like a real aerospace company. It had built and tested its engines and completed a full rocket body. All Musk needed now was to fire the thing into the sky and see what happened.



Justine Musk by the pool of the Bel Air home she shared with Elon.
Photographer: Lauren Greenfield/Institute

Under normal circumstances, SpaceX might have launched its rockets from the nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base. The site has several launchpads to pick from, but none of the current tenants—Boeing, Lockheed, and the Air Force—were all that interested in helping an Internet executive get to space. Locked out locally, SpaceX decided to try Kwajalein Island—or Kwaj—the largest island in an atoll between Guam and Hawaii and part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Army had used it for decades as a missile test site. Gwynne Shotwell, then SpaceX's vice president for business development, looked up the name of a colonel at the test site and sent him an e-mail. Three weeks later she got a call back from the Army saying they would love to have SpaceX fly from the islands.

To get to Kwaj, the SpaceX employees either flew on Musk's jet or took commercial flights through Hawaii. The main accommodations were two-bedroom affairs that looked more like dormitories than hotel rooms, with their military-issued dressers and desks. Over the course of several months a small team of people cleared brush on nearby Omelek Island to create a launch site and converted a double-wide trailer into offices. The work took place in soul-sapping humidity under a sun powerful enough to burn the skin through a T-shirt. The SpaceX team started at sunrise, around 7 a.m., and went until 7 p.m. "One or two people would decide it was their night to cook, and they would make steak and potatoes and pasta," Hollman said. "We had a bunch of movies and a DVD player, and some of us did a lot of fishing off the docks." For many of the engineers, this was both a torturous and magical experience. "At Boeing you could be comfortable, but that wasn't going to happen at SpaceX," said Walter Sims, a SpaceX tech expert who found time to get certified to scuba dive while on Kwaj. "Every person on that island was a f---ing star, and they were always holding seminars on radios or the engine. It was such an invigorating place."

Time and again, the rocket would get rolled out to the launchpad and tipped vertical for a couple of days, and then technical and safety checks would reveal a host of new problems. As soon as they could, the engineers returned it to the hangar to protect it from the salty air. Teams that had labored separately for months back at the SpaceX factory—propulsion, avionics, software—were thrown together on the island and forced to become an interdisciplinary whole. "It was likeGilligan's Island except with rockets," Hollman said.

Finally, on March 24, 2006, the engineers had fixed enough bugs to launch. The Falcon 1 stood on its square launchpad and ignited. It soared into the sky and started to shrink against the vast blue expanse. In the island control room, Musk paced as he watched the action, wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt. Then, about 25 seconds in, a fire broke out above the Merlin engine, and suddenly this machine that had been flying straight and true started to spin and then tumble back to earth. The Falcon 1 ended up falling directly onto the launch site. Most of the debris went into a reef 250 feet from the launchpad, and the satellite cargo smashed through SpaceX's machine shop roof and landed more or less intact on the floor. Some of the engineers put on their snorkeling and scuba gear and recovered the pieces, fitting all of the rocket's remnants into two refrigerator-size crates.



After the crash, there was a lot of drinking at a bar on the main island. Musk wanted to launch again within six months, but putting together a new machine would require an immense amount of work. Musk had vowed publicly that he would build a working rocket, but people inside and outside the company were doing back-of-the-envelope math and could tell that SpaceX likely could afford only one more attempt. To the extent that the financial situation unnerved Musk, he rarely if ever let it show to employees. "Elon did a great job of not burdening people with those worries," said Branden Spikes, head of IT for SpaceX. "He always communicated the importance of being lean and of success, but it was never, 'If we fail, we're done for.' He was very optimistic."

Meanwhile, SpaceX had put another group of engineers on a new project to develop the Falcon 9, a nine-engine rocket that would serve as a possible replacement for the retiring space shuttle. SpaceX had yet to prove it could get to space successfully, but Musk was already positioning the company to bid on big-ticket NASA contracts.

In mid-2008, SpaceX prepared its fourth rocket for launch. Typically, the body of the Falcon 1 traveled to Kwaj via barge. Maybe it was "go fever," which is how rocket people describe the manic decision-making that can characterize a launch, but this time around Musk and the engineers were too excited and desperate to wait for the ocean journey. Musk rented a military cargo plane to fly the rocket body from Los Angeles to Hawaii and then on to Kwaj. This would have been a fine idea except the SpaceX engineers forgot to think about what the pressurized plane would do to the body of the rocket, which is less than an eighth of an inch thick. As the plane started its descent into Hawaii, strange noises came from the cargo hold. "I looked back and could see the stage crumpling," said Bulent Altan, the former head of avionics at SpaceX. "I told the pilot to go up, and he did." The rocket was buckling from the increasing air pressure like an empty water bottle.

Altan saw that the SpaceX team on the plane had about 30 minutes to do something about the problem before they would need to land. They pulled out their pocketknives and cut away the shrink wrap that covered the rocket. They found a maintenance kit on the plane and used the wrenches to open up some nuts on the rocket that would allow its internal pressure to match that of the plane's. When the plane landed, the engineers divvied up the duties of calling SpaceX's top executives to tell them what happened. It was 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, and one of the executives volunteered to deliver the news to Musk.

It looked like three months of work to fix the rocket. The body had caved in several places, and the baffles placed inside the fuel tank to stop the fuel from sloshing had broken. Musk ordered the team to continue on to Kwaj and sent in a reinforcement team with repair parts. Two weeks later, the rocket was fixed. "It was like being stuck in a foxhole together," Altan said. "You weren't going to quit and leave the person next to you behind."

The fourth and possibly final launch for SpaceX took place on Sept. 28, 2008. SpaceX employees had worked nonstop shifts for months to reach this moment. They had been separated from their families, in exile on their tiny, hot outpost—sometimes without much food—for days on end as they waited for launch windows to open and dealt with the aborts that followed.

In the late afternoon, the SpaceX team raised the Falcon 1 to its launch position. It stood tall, looking like a bizarre artifact from the future as palm trees swayed beside it and a smattering of clouds crossed through the spectacular blue sky. By this time, SpaceX had turned each launch into a major Web production, so there was a worldwide audience. The Falcon 1 was not carrying real cargo this time; neither the company nor the military nor NASA wanted to see something else blow up or get lost at sea, so the rocket held a 360-pound dummy payload.

Musk, back in Los Angeles, tried to distract himself from the mounting pressure by going to Disneyland with his brother Kimbal and their children, but by 4 p.m. he was back in SpaceX's L.A. control room, watching the feed. As the rocket rumbled and then climbed higher, the employees inside SpaceX's headquarters let out raucous cheers. Each milestone that followed—clearing the island, engine checks coming back good—was again met with whistles and shouts. After the first stage fell away, the second stage fired up about 90 seconds into the flight and the employees turned downright rapturous, filling the webcast with their ecstatic hollering. "Perfect," said one of the talking heads. The Kestrel engine glowed red and started its six-minute burn. "When the second stage cleared, I could finally start breathing again and my knees stopped buckling," said James McLaury, a machinist at SpaceX.

The fairing opened up around the three-minute mark and fell back toward earth. And, finally, around nine minutes into its journey, the Falcon 1 shut down just as planned. After six years—about four-and-a-half more than Musk had once planned—the first privately built, liquid-fueled rocket had reached orbit.

"Everyone burst into tears," Kimbal said. "It was one of the most emotional experiences I've had." Musk left the control room and walked out to the factory floor, wh ere he received a rock star's welcome. "Well, that was freaking awesome," he said. "As the saying goes, 'The fourth time is the charm,' right?"