Is SpaceX Changing the

Rocket Equation?
1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500
employees = ?

South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk, 40, ended up in the United

States because, he says, it's where great things happen. Musk is gambling
that his company, SpaceX, can change the world with its Falcon rockets
and Dragon capsules by carrying cargo, and eventually people, to orbit.
(Space X)
By Andrew Chaikin
Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe
January 2012

Read more at https://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-

changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/
#lFA3gEijTqEizi72.99You can be rich enough to buy a rocket and
still get sticker shock. In early 2002, PayPal co-founder Elon
Musk, already a multimillionaire at 30, was pursuing a grand
scheme to rekindle public interest in sending humans to Mars. A
lifelong space enthusiast with degrees in physics and business,
Musk wanted to place a small greenhouse laden with seeds and
nutrient gel on the Martian surface to establish life there, if only
temporarily. The problem wasn’t the lander itself; he’d already
talked to contractors who would build it for a comparatively low
cost. The problem was launching it. Unwilling to pay what U.S.
rocket companies were charging, Musk made three trips to
Russia to try to buy a refurbished Dnepr missile, but found deal-
making in the wild west of Russian capitalism too risky financially

On the flight home, he recalls, “I was trying to understand why

rockets were so expensive. Obviously the lowest cost you can
make anything for is the spot value of the material constituents.
And that’s if you had a magic wand and could rearrange the
atoms. So there’s just a question of how efficient you can be
about getting the atoms from raw material state to rocket shape.”
That year, enlisting a handful of veteran space engineers, Musk
formed Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with two
staggeringly ambitious goals: To make spaceflight routine and
affordable, and to make humans a multi-planet species.
Nine years later, SpaceX employs 1,500 people and occupies a
half-million-square-foot facility in Hawthorne, California, that used
to produce fuselage sections for Boeing 747s. Today it is filled
with rocket parts, including stages and engines for its Falcon 9
boosters, which can place up to 23,000 pounds of payload in low
Earth orbit. Off to one side sits a slightly charred, cone-shaped
Dragon capsule that a year ago became the first commercial
spacecraft to be launched into orbit and recovered. Sometime
next year, SpaceX plans to launch the first of 12 Dragons to the
International Space Station, each hauling six tons of cargo, under
a $1.6 billion resupply contract with NASA. More than two dozen
commercial launches are also booked. And by 2015, the piloted
version of Dragon is expected to be ready to pick up where the
space shuttle left off, carrying astronauts to and from the orbiting
outpost.
All very impressive. But what really sets SpaceX apart, and has
made it a magnet for controversy, are its prices: As advertised on
the company’s Web site, a Falcon 9 launch costs an average of
$57 million, which works out to less than $2,500 per pound to
orbit. That’s significantly less than what other U.S. launch
companies typically charge, and even the manufacturer of China’s
low-cost Long March rocket (which the U.S. has banned
importing) says it cannot beat SpaceX’s pricing. By 2014, the
company’s next rocket, the Falcon Heavy, aims to lower the cost
to $1,000 per pound. And Musk insists that’s just the beginning.
“Our performance will increase and our prices will decline over
time,” he writes on SpaceX’s Web site, “as is the case with every
other technology.” Like the Chinese, many observers in this
country are wondering how SpaceX can deliver what it promises.

After nearly a decade of struggling to reach this point, Musk isn’t

about to reveal the finer details of how he and his privately held
company have created the Falcon and Dragon. They don’t even
file patents, Musk says, because “we try not to provide a recipe by
which China can copy us and we find our inventions coming right
back at us.” But he talks freely about SpaceX’s approach to rocket
design, which stems from one core principle: Simplicity enables
both reliability and low cost. Think of cars, Musk says. “Is a Ferrari
more reliable than a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?”
Simplifying something as complex as a rocket is no easy task.
And historically, most rocket makers have made their top priority
performance, not cost. The space shuttle’s main engines were the
highest-performance rockets ever flown, but they helped make
the shuttle what Musk calls “a Ferrari to the nth power” that
required thousands of worker-hours to refurbish between flights.
The Atlas and Delta rockets purchased under the government’s
Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program serve NASA and
Department of Defense customers whose main concern is
reliability. “What the EELV program does is launch national
reconnaissance satellites that cost billions of dollars a pop,”
explains former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern.
“[Defense department customers] don’t care whether [the launch
cost] is $100 million or $300 million; it’s in the noise. What they
want is a guarantee it’s going to work.” And, says Stern, the track
records of Atlas and Delta are nearly flawless. “They’re
spectacular…. That said, they’re very expensive.”
United Launch Alliance, the consortium of Boeing and Lockheed
Martin that produces both the Delta and the Atlas, does not make
its prices public. But budget documents show that in 2010 the
EELV program received $1.14 billion for three rockets—an
average of $380 million per launch. And prices are expected to
rise significantly in the next few years, according to defense
department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer is in the
government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which
ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed
their advertised prices. “If you were sitting at a n executive
meeting at Boeing and Lockheed and you came up with some
brilliant idea to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta, you’d be fired,”
he says. “Because you’ve got to go report to your shareholders
why you made less money. So their incentive is to maximize the
cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of cancellation.”
That’s a little overstated, says Stern. Yes, rockets are expensive
largely “because the system allows it.” But in today’s economy,
ULA’s military customers are calling for prices to come down. “I
know that they have an incentive to reduce their cost,” Stern says,
“but it’s at the margin.” In other words, ULA’s cost-saving efforts
are limited by the high overhead associated with traditional ways
of building and launching rockets.
Musk says that overhead starts with how the launch vehicle is
designed. The workhorse Atlas V, for example, used for
everything from planetary probes to spy satellites, employs up to
three kinds of rockets, each tailored to a specific phase of flight.
The Russian-built RD-180 first- stage engines burn a highly
refined form of kerosene called RP1. Optional solid-fuel strap-on
boosters can provide additional thrust at liftoff, and a liquid
hydrogen upper stage takes over in the final phase of flight. Using
three kinds of rockets in the same vehicle may optimize its
performance, but at a price: “To a first-order approximation,
you’ve just tripled your factory costs and all your operational
costs,” says Musk.

Instead, from the very beginning, SpaceX designed its Falcon

rockets with commonality in mind. Both of Falcon 9’s stages are
powered by RP1 and liquid oxygen, so only one type of engine is
required. Both are the same diameter and are constructed from
the same aluminum-lithium alloy, reducing the amount of tooling
and the number of processes and resulting in what Musk calls
“huge cost savings.”
No choice was more critical than the Merlin rocket engines used
to power Falcon 9. SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller and his
team selected an engine type called the pintle that was pioneered
by Mueller’s former employer, TRW, which used it for the descent
stage of the Apollo lunar module. Unlike most rocket engines, in
which droplets of fuel and oxidizer are sprayed into the
combustion chamber through an injector plate resembling a
shower head, the pintle uses a needle-like injector that’s more like
the nozzle on a garden hose. It’s not only less expensive to make,
Mueller says, but it is also less susceptible to combustion
instability, a runaway buildup of energy within the thrust chamber
that has vexed engineers since the dawn of the Space Age (it
added years and many millions of dollars to development of the
giant F-1 engines for the Saturn V moon rocket, for example).
Combustion instability can make an engine undergo what
veterans dryly call an RUD, for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly;
civilians would call it blowing up. Even the Merlin had a couple of
RUDs in the early days of development. “There are a thousand
things that can happen when you go to light a rocket engine,”
Mueller says, “and only one of them is good.”
That, of course, was hardly news by the time SpaceX got started;
studies had shown that over the previous two decades, the vast
majority of rocket failures were due to engine malfunctions. And
so, before attempting the multi-engine Falcon 9, Musk began with
the smaller and less expensive Falcon 1, which uses a single
Merlin engine in its first stage. Test launches of this 70-foot rocket,
beginning in 2006, were SpaceX’s baptism by fire. Only after
three failed attempts did the Falcon 1 become the first privately
built liquid-fuel vehicle to reach orbit, in September 2008. Musk
and his team were both elated and sobered. “We knew it would
be hard,” Mueller says, “but it was harder than we thought.”
The rest of the aerospace world took notice. With the early Falcon
1 failures, says Stern, Musk “showed spine, showed he would
spend his own money, showed he would stick with it.” And the
lessons learned from Falcon 1 smoothed the path for Falcon 9,
whose successful maiden launch, in June 2010, impressed
observers accustomed to watching other would-be rocket
startups, from AMROC in the 1980s to Kistler in the 1990s, fail
before getting anything into space.
The Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning to be human-
rated, meaning an increased focus on reliability. The rocket’s
avionics and controls are triple-redundant (as will be some
sensors in the human-rated version of the Atlas V), and the flight
computers, which run on Linux, will “issue the right commands
even if there’s severe damage to the system,” Musk says. The
choice of nine engines for the first stage was made with reliability
in mind: From the moment of liftoff, Falcon 9 can suffer an engine
shutdown and keep flying; after about 90 seconds, it can tolerate
a second engine shutdown. Even if an engine explodes, says
Mueller, the others will not be affected.
Of course, SpaceX goes to great lengths to prevent such a
scenario. Part of the Merlin’s qualification testing involves feeding
a stainless steel nut into the fuel and oxidizer lines while the
engine is running—a test that would destroy most engines but
leaves the Merlin running basically unhindered. Every Falcon
upper and lower stage is test-fired in Texas before it’s cleared to
fly. “It’s very common to do component and system-level
testing…. That’s very typical in aerospace, ” says Alan
Lindenmoyer of Houston’s Johnson Space Center, who has been
working with SpaceX since 2005 as manager of the agency’s
Commercial Crew and Cargo program. “But to actually put a
vehicle together and do system-level testing of the rocket is not.
That’s a level of rigor you don’t typically see.” On the pad at Cape
Canaveral, Florida, the rocket undergoes an additional brief firing
a few days before launch. And just before liftoff, for a few
moments after the engines are lit, their performance is analyzed
by the Falcon’s computers before hold-down clamps are released
and the rocket is allowed to rise.
The Merlin engine itself has undergone a number of
improvements, including reducing the number of parts and
increasing its power and efficiency. According to Mueller, the
140,000-pound-thrust Merlin 1D, designated the production model
for Falcon 9, has the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any rocket
engine ever made.
Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the
components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight
computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t
originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices.
Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular
engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half
in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way
out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for
much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind
of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves,
and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic
propellants.
“That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says,
“and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve.
You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’
He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re
done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were
in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where,
Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
In a few cases, SpaceX has even been able to advance the state
of the art. For the Dragon’s heat shield, the company chose a
material called PICA (phenolic impregnated carbon ablator), first
developed for NASA’s Stardust comet-sample-return spacecraft.
Rejecting the prices they were getting from the manufacturer, they
took advantage of help from NASA’s Ames Research Center to
make it themselves. According to Mueller, SpaceX’s material,
called PICA-X, is 10 times less expensive than the original, “and
the stuff we made actually was better.” In fact, says Musk, a
single PICA-X heat shield could withstand hundreds of returns
from low Earth orbit; it can also handle the much higher energy
reentries from the moon or Mars.

Musk, who is SpaceX’s chief designer as well as its CEO, is

involved in virtually every technical decision. “I know my rocket
inside out and backward,” he says. “I can tell you the heat treating
temper of the skin material, where it changes, why we chose that
material, the welding technique…down to the gnat’s ass.” And he
pushes his people to do more than they think is possible. “There
were times when I thought he was off his rocker,” Mueller
confesses. “When I first met him, he said, ‘How much do you think
we can get the cost of an engine down, compared to what you
were predicting they’d cost at TRW?’ I said, ‘Oh, probably a factor
of three.’ He said, ‘We need a factor of 10.’ I thought, ‘That’s kind
of crazy.’ But in the end, we’re closer to his number!”
Musk’s relentless pushing has paid off. A recent study by NASA
and the Air Force finds that it cost about $440 million for SpaceX
to get from a blank sheet of paper to the first Falcon 9 launch (a
figure, Musk says, which also includes most of the Falcon 1
development). If NASA had done the same thing, with its
management structure and traditional use of aerospace
contractors, the study finds, it would have spent three times that
much.
If SpaceX’s progress sometimes seems like a 21st century replay
of NASA’s early history, that’s partly because the company has
greatly benefited from the space agency’s vast technical archive.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants,” Mueller says. “With
the Apollo program they learned so much. And we can get access
to all that. We use that tremendously. A private company in a
vacuum could not do what we did.”
But as for SpaceX’s organizational style, it’s Silicon Valley, not
NASA, that had the most influence. In Hawthorne, where
everyone including Musk works in cubicles instead of offices to
encourage communication, the buzzwords of the business culture
—lean manufacturing, vertical integration, flat management—are
real and fundamental. Says former SpaceX business
development director Max Vozoff, “This really is the greatest
innovation of SpaceX: It’s bringing the standard practices of every
other industry to space.” Having almost all of SpaceX’s engineers
under one roof means the process of designing, testing, and
improving is greatly streamlined. One NASA manager who visited
SpaceX quips that when there is a new problem to solve, “it looks
like a flash mob” in the hallway.
Some observers have questioned whether SpaceX’s smaller
workforce can build and operate a vehicle safe enough for
astronauts to fly (see “Is It Safe?” April/May 2009). But former
astronaut Ken Bowersox, who joined SpaceX in 2009 as vice
president of astronaut safety and mission assurance, says safety
stems mostly from a vehicle’s design. Bowersox, who flew four
space shuttle missions as well as the Russian Soyuz, says that at
NASA the shuttle’s complexity required a large organization to
manage the risks. “People started to think that that’s the only way
you can operate. And I have to say that I would’ve been in that
boat if I hadn’t been sent off to train in Russia,” where the
workforce is much smaller. Because the Soyuz is far simpler than
the shuttle and includes an escape system, he says, it is safer
despite the inevitable human errors. Dragon follows the same
design philosophy.

Human-rating the Dragon will require development and flight tests

of a launch abort system, which could cost nearly a billion dollars.
Before astronauts are allowed to fly it, NASA will subject the craft
to an intensive review. Lindenmoyer, the commercial crew
program manager, thinks Musk and his team can meet the
agency’s standards. “Everybody has a perception of SpaceX,
what they must not be doing,” he says. “But when you get in there
and you’re shoulder to shoulder with them, you quickly learn that
that is not the case. Believe me, I was skeptical at first. Do they
follow all those standards for quality and safety? Yes, they do.
They absolutely do.”
Many of Lindenmoyer’s NASA colleagues remain skeptical—even
some who have visited SpaceX. “There’s quality control in
development, and then there’s quality control in production,” says
one agency senior manager who asked not to be named. “The
history of launch vehicle development suggests that design issues
might crop up in the first or second launch, but it’s the process
problems that start to show up on the sixth, the seventh, and the
eighth launch.” Noting that so far Musk’s team has launched only
two Falcon 9s, this skeptic asks, “How does he ever get to a rate
—you know, he’s talking about flying a dozen, two dozen times a
year? And as they fly their vehicle, how long before they have a
major accident? And are they able to sustain a major accident and
still be a viable company?”
Musk appears undaunted by these worries, maybe because he’s
already thinking ahead to bigger ones. He says he is committed to
turning Falcon 9 into “the first fully and rapidly reusable rocket”
because, he says, that accomplishment is key to making
spaceflight affordable and routine. To cut the cost of getting to
orbit to just $100 per pound, Musk says, “you need to be able to
launch multiple times a day, just like an airplane. And it’s got to be
complete, so you can’t be throwing away a million dollars of
expendable hardware every flight either.” Musk has targeted
reusability from the start. Merlin engines, for example, are
designed to fly tens of missions—provided you can get them
back. An animation on SpaceX’s Web site shows how that might
happen: Cast-off Falcon 9 stages reenter the atmosphere at
between 17 and 25 times the speed of sound, then use their own
guidance systems and engines to fly back to the launch site,
where they land upright on deployable legs. A test program called
Grasshopper is already in the works at SpaceX’s Texas facility. No
one can predict how many years it might take to achieve full and
rapid reusability, but Musk says, “it’s absolutely crucial. It’s
fundamental. I would consider SpaceX to have failed if we do not
succeed in that.”
The insistence on reusability “drives the engineers insane,” says
Vozoff. “We could’ve had Falcon 1 in orbit two years earlier than
we did if Elon had just given up on first stage reusability. The
qualification for the Merlin engine was far outside of what was
necessary, unless you plan to recover it and reuse it. And so the
engineers are frustrated because this isn’t the quickest means to
the end. But Elon has this bigger picture in mind. And he forces
them to do what’s hard. And I admire that about him.”
Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization
on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington,
D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the
right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you
can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a
middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million
dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move
to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite
for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth
now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the
century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that,
that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than
one in a million people will decide to do that.” Talking about a city
on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to
fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons
space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has the immediate hurdle of converting the

doubters with a track record of low cost and reliability. Rivals
know that success would hit the rocket business like a tsunami,
and at least one aerospace engineer greets that prospect with a
mix of hope and doubt. “Honestly, as an American, I want them to
succeed,” says Mike Hughes, who works for a company (he asked
that it not be named) planning a competing crew vehicle. “If I see
SpaceX failing their launches and killing crew, I will be
disheartened and weakened…. I want them to be our
competition.” But Hughes predicts SpaceX will have to learn the
same painful lessons that every other rocket builder has. “Over
time, they will experience failure. The failure will teach them that
they weren’t so smart when they laid out the numbers at the
beginning. Just like us, just like NASA. And they’re going to have
to redesign stuff. And they’re going to have to add new tests in.
And their schedules will slip, and their customers will suffer. And
all of this is because what we do is just freaking hard.”
No one needs to tell the people at SpaceX that they’re pushing the
limits of technology. But Alan Stern, for one, remains convinced
that Musk is in it for the long haul. “He wants to make people a
multi-planet species, and he’s not going to quit. He’ll change the
model, or he’ll spend more of his own money—he’ll do something.
He’s not in it to build the rockets; that’s a means to an end. It’s a
religion for him.”
If Stern is right, when the astronauts aboard the International
Space Station receive their six tons of supplies from a SpaceX
vehicle launched by a SpaceX rocket next year, they just might be
witnessing the first step in a journey to Mars.
Andrew Chaikin, author of Voices From the Moon (Studio,
2009), plans to cover the first commercial lunar landing — as a
crew member.

Read more at https://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-

changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/#lFA3gEijTqEizi72.99