LIFTOFF, Elon Musk and the Desperate early days that launched SPACEX
Eric Berger, 2021
The creation and subsequent success of the company SPACEX is one of the most improbable and stunning business success stories of modern times. Elon Musk started the company in 2003 with 100 million dollars of his own money, a couple dozen engineers and a rented warehouse in Hawthorne, Ca and within 18 years turned it into the preeminent worldwide leader in space launch services with over 2/3’s of the global market. This industry was dominated for decades by huge legacy aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed. The history of start-up firms that challenged this status quo is a history of a graveyard of failures. How did Elon Musk achieve this remarkable success? That is the subject of this page-turning technological thriller by Eric Berger who put this narrative together with the input of all the original engineers and employees including Musk himself.
I, myself, spent the first five years of my employment after engineering school, working in this exact same industry so I have increasingly been intrigued by what SpaceX achieved. My experience allows me certain insight, although somewhat dated, but probably partially relevant today, into the obstacles Musk faced. I would say that the launch service business would be without a doubt the most difficult place to embark on a startup company. Firstly, it is technically totally unforgiving in that it requires impeccable quality control. The smallest error in installation or manufacture such as a single mistake in a line of software code, a defective nut holding a fuel line in place, a damaged O-ring, can and will lead to a catastrophic failure costing multiple tens of millions of dollars. Secondly the economics of the business are totally unforgiving. Since at launch 90% of a vehicles weight is fuel, the remaining 10% is launch vehicle structure and payload. The launch vehicle must be painstakingly engineered close to failure design specs. An additional pound of redundant structure to increase strength will cost nine pounds of fuel consumed and a subsequent loss of payload capacity. Engines must be designed to absolute, maximum thermodynamic efficiency or lose payload capacity. Thirdly the major money for this industry comes from two semi-political, large, and somewhat opaque bureaucracies, NASA, and the Airforce. The industry from its very origins has been dominated by the Legacy Aerospace contractors who over decades have greased the political skids in Washington to deliver pork to Congressional districts and provide benefits and jobs to ex-employees of the government bureaucracies. Delivering services at low cost has always been low on these contractor’s priority lists. A start-up that would deliver launch services at a dramatically lower cost would upset this status quo and would pose a direct threat not only to the legacy contractors but also many politicians, dependent on their political contributions. Considering all these obstacles, how could Musk, who had no previous experience in aerospace, achieve such an overwhelming dominance in this most bureaucratic and politically tainted industry? That is the story told here.
When Musk was queried by the author of the fact that Bezos, with his Blue Origin, space launch company had been working for twenty years to develop a large launch vehicle engine, pumped billions of dollars of his own money into the effort, and still not delivered one or delivered a single pound of payload to orbit, he replied: “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank. So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I am supergood at engineering, personally. Most of the design decisions are mine, good or bad”. “Boastful? Maybe. But SpaceX built and tested its first rocket engine in less than three years with Musk leading the way”. 20 years later Bezos is still trying. Musk’s secret, I believe, was to hire the best young, hands-on, not afraid to get dirty engineers who shared his vision of human spaceflight. He then empowered them. When an engineer told him that a timeline or a design was impossible, Musk would say: “Don’t tell me it’s impossible, tell me what you need to get it done”. I was reminded of a saying someone told me in my early days as an engineer: “To try and Fail is to learn, to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been”’ Musk let his engineers push the boundaries and their own abilities and sometimes inevitably fail so in the end they could succeed. Also, very importantly, he went outside the framework of fat-cat aerospace subcontractors and developed his own in-house manufacturing capability and in this way could become a low cost competitor to the aerospace giants. Most important, he hates bureaucracy, committees, trying to avoid responsibility, CYA, and fulminating and talking about doing things rather than actually doing them.
There is a great narrative plot line to this book. When Musk first started his company, he tried to secure a launch space at Vandenberg Airforce base in California. Frustrated with the Airforce bureaucracy he decided to go around the bureaucracy and moved his first launch operation to a tiny coral atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific. There, his intrepid band of engineers would labor relentlessly for four years to get his first satellite to orbit. A large part of this book covers this period where his employees would labor punishing grueling hours to make his rocket work. After four years and three launch failures, Musk was within weeks of running out of money. He had to launch his remaining fourth rocket to have access to a business saving NASA contract and money to develop a rocket to deliver supplies to the space station. With money running out and immense obstacles to get his fourth launch to orbit, the SpaceX crew 5000 miles out in the Pacific worked around the clock to pull off a successful launch and set the company on its amazing trajectory.
54 years ago, I was a young mechanical systems engineer assembling Titan 3C Airforce rockets at launch pad 41, Cape Canaveral Florida. I remember remarking to my fellow workers, one day, that we were building these beautifully engineered multimillion dollars shining pieces of hardware, only to light them off and a couple of minutes later see them crash to the bottom of the ocean. I said that is crazy. Elon Musk said the same thing in 2003 and he did something about it. Now SpaceX launches about 2 Falcon 9 rockets a month from Launch pad 41, the same one where I worked 54 years ago. He not only launches but he retrieves the first stages to be refurbished and used over and over again. By doing so he has reduced the price of satellite launches to ¼ of what Boeing-Lockheed was charging before he arrived and thus totally overturned the status quo applecart of the space launch business and breathed new life into the endeavor of human space flight. And I haven’t even mentioned what he has achieved with Tesla! Even if you’re not a techy, read this book, you will be amazed. JACK
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Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX
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Cool insight on rocket development
After reading the book “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson, I’ve become hooked on learning more about the SpaceX process. It’s very interesting to get Eric Bergers interpretation of Elon Musk as a person. For instance, Walter Isaacson would criticize Musk for asking engineers manufacturing questions about a process years to come when they are trying to focus on launching a rocket in T-minus 30 seconds. Isaacson calls it a bad stress coping mechanism for those around him while Eric Bergers praises Musk for constant multitasking thoughts about SpaceX’s future. While reading Liftoff you learn more about key engineers to spaces and I know have a lot more respect for people like Tom Mueller who created the Merlin engine.
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Top reviews from other countries
- Clyve WesterlundReviewed in Australia on July 18, 2021
Liftoff! A Sensation and Story You Must Read
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- AkshayReviewed in India on September 21, 2021
Unbelievable story, written phenomenally!
- Neil S. RieckReviewed in Canada on May 23, 2021
A must-read for Space buffs
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