On a pleasant Sunday evening in August 2008 three hundred scientists gathered to watch their handiwork leave earth.
Their handiwork was a 70-foot rocket called Falcon 1. It stood tall on Omelek Island, a solitary spot of rock roughly 2,500 miles southwest of Honolulu. The 7.9-acre island that had formerly operated as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site now served as launch pad for a private company called SpaceX. The scientists, a colorful mob of T-shirts and polos, gazed at the island and at their missile from across the world, in a white-walled workshop at 1 Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California.
Falcon 1 was to be the first nongovernment spacecraft to orbit the planet. If the day’s launch went as planned, the name of the company, printed in dark, futuristic letters on Falcon 1’s side, would be etched into record books and documentaries alongside Sputnik and Apollo. It would be a historic victory for the new space age.
That is, if it didn’t fall dead into the ocean like the first two Falcons.
Sixteen months had passed since the previous Falcon 1 hadn’t quite made it to orbit. After liftoff, the first stage (or bottom half) of the rocket successfully separated, falling to earth to allow the second stage (the rest of the rocket) to shoot into orbit. But the second stage engine unexpectedly shut off after seven and a half minutes. SpaceX engineers diagnosed the trouble and spent the next year working around the clock to perfect and polish every rivet. Now they milled about in the high-ceilinged corporate command room, abuzz with excitement. This could be it. As they waited beneath the giant screens broadcasting their rocket’s video feed from 4,955 miles away, the man behind their mission stepped into the mission control trailer at the back of the room.
Elon Musk. The dark-haired South African entered, wearing his usual outfit—fitted T-shirt and jeans—and took command. The oft-mythologized billionaire—after whom Robert Downey Jr. modeled his character, Tony Stark, in the Iron Man films—was at the time simply a millionaire and perhaps not even that. Into SpaceX he’d plunged his personal fortune, which over six years had been whittled down to a stump.
A few years ago, Musk had disclosed that he had enough money to attempt three rocket launches. He regretted saying it. Now, after two unsuccessful attempts to reach orbit, the eyes of his 300 exhausted employees, many of whom had worked 80-hour weeks during the summer, stared at the Falcon 1 video feed. And so did thousands of spectators around the globe.
Elon Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, in a family of five whose patriarch left when the kids were young. The young Elon preferred books to sports, and he was always making things. Around age ten, he ran out of books, so he read the encyclopedia, “out of desperation,” he says. At age twelve, he programmed a space-battle video game and sold it. At sixteen, he tried to open a video arcade, but he couldn’t get government permission to use the location he’d picked. He kept reading books.
By age 31 he was living in California and had sold two successful companies. The second, the online payments company PayPal, made him $165 million.
When a friend asked him what he wanted to do next, Musk remarked that he’d always been interested in space. “I didn’t think there was anything I could do as an individual. But,” he told Wired magazine in 2012, “it seemed clear that we would send people to Mars.” That excited him. It would be an important step for humanity—he was convinced. However, when he checked NASA’s website, he found no Mars mission.
It turned out that in a 1989 study, NASA had estimated a half-trillion-dollar price tag on a manned trip to Mars. Since then, politicians wouldn’t touch the idea.
Musk was piqued. He had built two businesses in an industry ruled by Moore’s law, the principle that says technology gets exponentially cheaper and more powerful over time. Space flight ought to be getting easier, he thought. Perhaps he could use his Internet money and expertise to nudge the industry forward.
So he bought some books.
In the six ensuing years, Musk became one of the world’s foremost experts on rocketry. He hunted down mavericks like aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell, who helped him put together an Ocean’s Eleven–like team of rocket scientists. “I thought he was a lunatic,” Cantrell recalls. But Musk’s plan was too tempting to turn down.
Cantrell took the gig. And they started building spaceships.
When Spacex launched in 2002, NASA employed about 18,000 people and many more contractors. About 400,000 people had contributed to the Apollo program, according to author Catherine Thimmesh, who years later tallied up all the spacesuit seamstresses and propulsion engineers and software experts involved.
Musk’s vision was to do with a tiny team what NASA wouldn’t with its tens of thousands: “To make life multiplanetary,” he said, as often as he had occasion to talk about it. To ensure the continuation of “human consciousness.”
~~Smartcuts: How Hackers Innovators and Icons Accelarate Success -by- Shane Snow
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