RW Johnson: The ascent of Elon Musk

Key topics.Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 to break the aerospace industry monopoly.SpaceX's Falcon 1 was the first private rocket to reach orbit in 2008.Musk revolutionized rockets with reusable boosters, cutting launch costs..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson___STEADY_PAYWALL___.When Elon Musk was ousted as CEO of PayPal in 2000 he walked away with $180 million and had two projects in mind. One was to build an electric car, hence he founded Tesla. But far more ambitious was his ambition to build a rocket which could travel to Mars. As a first step, that meant building a rocket which could break into the comfortable duopoly of Boeing's Delta IV and Lockheed Martin's Atlas V rockets which supplied NASA and the USAF. Hence SpaceX, founded in May 2002..Musk felt a certain contempt for America's space Establishment. Their rockets were stuck in the 1960s and 1970s and were far, far too expensive. And even NASA showed no interest in going to Mars. But he was taking on the whole military-industrial complex. The business of making America's military and space rockets was sewn up by Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, ATK Aerospace and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Everything was done on a cost-plus basis, with guaranteed profits. NASA executives moved smoothly on to lucrative positions in these big companies and politicians round the country were fiercely protective of the established aerospace industries in their constituencies. It was a closed shop. Indeed, Boeing and Lockheed set up the United Launch Alliance to monopolise the launch business..Musk knew he had to move fast, keep things cheap and recruit the best. He began with a small team inspired by the same vision and he insisted on interviewing every recruit himself. He exuded confidence: "The thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And then I'm very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. And I'm generally super good at engineering personally." All true. He personally interviewed the first 3,000 people that SpaceX recruited, though for the crucial early years it was only a few hundred strong..Read more: 🔒 Starship setback: SpaceX rocket explodes in seventh test flight.Musk divided his time roughly 50-50 between SpaceX and Tesla. He often worked late into the night and expected others to do the same. At SpaceX they all worked in T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, almost all of them in their 20s and 30s, and often to hard rock music. Musk wasn't interested in people writing plans or reports: he wanted them to do things. And since he would usually make both engineering and financial decisions on the spot, things moved fast. The emphasis was on learning by doing, correcting each problem as it arose, without lengthy concept and design phases..The plan was to build a rocket – the Falcon 1 – capable of taking a payload into orbit. But Musk was always thinking far ahead to a Falcon 5, a Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy and even a Starship. He read voraciously, studying other rocket pioneers, particularly Wernher von Braun in Germany and the US and Sergei Korolev in the USSR. .Initially the Falcon's test site was at Mojave Air and Space Port but once it became clear that Musk was planning a rocket with 70,000 lbs thrust, the Mojave authorities, alarmed by its magnitude, forced him to leave. Meanwhile Vandenberg USAF base was chosen as a launch site though SpaceX had to build its own launch pad at considerable expense. All went well until the Falcon did a static fire test, the rocket blasting away though not leaving the ground. This thoroughly alarmed the USAF..The point was that until then no one had taken Musk seriously. Many others – some of them also internet millionaires – had set out to build a space rocket. None of them had succeeded and the USAF, like everyone else, expected Musk to fail. The test fire had shown he was in deadly earnest. A Titan IV launch was scheduled for the main launch pad and now the USAF told Musk he couldn't try a Falcon launch until after the Titan launch. But no date was fixed for that and after six months had passed Musk realised he was being kept permanently on ice. So the only thing to do was to find another launch site, this time nearer the Equator..This led SpaceX to the remote Kwajalein ("Kwaj") atoll in the Marshall Islands, thousands of miles away in the Pacific, and ultimately to a tiny eight acre islet, Omelek, where they built a new launch pad in record time. Every piece of equipment had to be flown in from California and finally ferried to Omelek by catamaran. By March 2006 the Falcon attempted a launch but a fuel leak saw its Merlin engine flicker out. .More frantic preparations saw a second launch attempted in 2007. Beforehand Musk asked each division head for their top ten risks. The launch went well, the second stage ignited – and then began to spin out of control: a disaster. What had happened was that as the rocket consumed fuel, the remaining fuel began to slosh around – causing the spin. When they went back over the launch they found that one executive had listed "slosh" as his 11th risk. Thereafter Musk always looked at the top eleven risks….Then in August 2008 they launched again. Everything went fine until the second stage took over. The first stage began to drop away but then shot up and hit the second stage, destabilising it. It had burnt its last bit of fuel. Everything would have been fine if just one number had been changed in the software. It was heart-breaking. .Musk had now spent over $100 million on SpaceX and was out of money. One of his children had died. His marriage had broken up and he had even lost his house. The recession had hit. In desperation he told his team to launch again in six weeks. So another Falcon had to be flown to Omelek, with SpaceX employees crowding onto the plane as well. As the plane began its descent towards Honolulu the Falcon in the cargo bay began to crumple inwards – the result of the sudden change in pressure. The rocket had been designed to travel at ground level. The pilots wanted to jettison the rocket but instead a SpaceXer decided to climb inside the rocket. The pilots warned that they were running out of fuel and he had only minutes. But he managed to alter the pressure and all was well..Next day the Falcon reached Omelek where it was examined. Repairs would take six weeks, with the Falcon shipped back to California. Musk knew the money would run out well before then and said, you have a week to repair it and it's got to be done on the spot. "I was stressed out of my mind", he admitted later. The SpaceXers worked like demons and it was done in under a week. Then it had to be tested by filling the tanks to full pressure. Normally this would be done with a harmless gas like nitrogen but all they had on Omelek was the real fuel – kerosene and liquid oxygen, an explosive mix. There was nothing for it but to use that. It worked. If anything had gone wrong Omelek would have been blown up with all the people on it. They launched and the Falcon went smoothly into orbit..This was the first time any non-govermental actor had managed to put a rocket into orbit. Jeff Bezos had launched Blue Origin in 2001 but 24 years later he has yet to get a rocket into orbit. From a standing start SpaceX had done it in a little over six years. Musk immediately canceled the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5 and proceeded to the Falcon 9 – a rocket 157 feet tall, compared to the Falcon 1's 68 feet, and weighing 735,000 lbs compared to the Falcon 1's 60,000 lbs. It was powered by 9 Merlin engines. With this Musk challenged the United Launch Alliance. .It was no contest: Musk's rocket cost only a quarter of the Lockheed-Boeing rival. And meanwhile SpaceX had designed and built the Dragon spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station. In 2018 SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy – with 27 Merlin engines – the world's most powerful rocket. By 2020 SpaceX had two-thirds of all the world's satellite launch business, with the profits financing the building of the even more gigantic Starship..It had always been part of Musk's plan that the booster stage of the rocket must be saved and re-used, further cutting costs. He pointed out that if every time someone flew internationally the 747 they flew in had to be scrapped, very few people could afford to fly. And so it came about that the world saw SpaceX's booster stages fly back down and land safely – a remarkable achievement. This too saw Boeing, Lockheed, Blue Origin and everybody else frantically trying to catch up. But Musk even has plans for the second stage of a Starship to be recovered in the same way. It's worth quoting Musk talking about this to give the flavour of his conception:.Read more: 🔒 Gideon Rachman: Elon Musk is an unguided geopolitical missile."It's not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw their rockets away all the time. It's fucking hard to make something like this. One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket. Nobody has succeeded. For a good reason. Our gravity is a bit heavy. On Mars this would be no problem. On the Moon, a piece of cake. On Earth, fucking hard. Just barely possible. It's stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system. It would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of humanity. That's why it's hard. Why does this hurt my brain ? It's because of that. Really, we're just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far ? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago.".Today's headlines are full of Musk being the world's richest man and his extremely ill-judged political career as Trump's adviser. But apart from being a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur Musk is a risk-taker par excellence. He seems to take a fairly full range of drugs. At parties he has volunteered to be the blind-folded target around whose profile a knife-thrower would fling his knives. He also agreed, at a party, to take on a 300 lb Sumo wrestler. At SpaceX he frequently motivated his staff by taking outrageous bets with them. He always paid up, though he usually won. He may be rich now but in 2008 he came close to bankruptcy, explaining that Tesla and SpaceX were like his two children and that he couldn't bear for either one to go bust..It is already clear that Musk is ill-suited to politics. In the space of a few months he has become one of the world's most unpopular people. But it is difficult to believe that his present political trajectory can last for long. One would have thought that the colonisation of Mars was ambition enough. But he's clearly an extremely complicated individual so prediction is all but impossible..Read also:.🔒 FT: Musk's SpaceX catches returning booster rocket in technical milestoneTrump and Musk look on as SpaceX launches sixth major starship testSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket falters in rare in-flight failure

RW Johnson: The ascent of Elon Musk

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