Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Aviation
Week
magazine covers up on the wall, pictures of his boys, next to a huge flat-screen monitor, and various
knickknacks on his desk, including a boomerang, some books, a bottle of wine, and a giant samurai sword
named Lady Vivamus, which Musk received when he won the Heinlein Prize, an award given for big
achievements in commercial space. Hundreds of other people work in cubicles amid the big, wide-open
area, most of them executives, engineers, software developers, and salespeople tapping away on their
computers. The conference rooms that surround their desks all have space-themed names like Apollo or
Wernher von Braun and little nameplates that explain the label’s significance. The largest conference
rooms have ultramodern chairs—high-backed, sleek red jobs that surround large glass tables—while
panoramic photos of a Falcon 1 taking off from Kwaj or the Dragon capsule docking with the ISS hang on
the walls in the background.
Take away the rocket swag and the samurai sword and this central part of the SpaceX office looks just
like what you might find at your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley headquarters. The same thing cannot be
said for what visitors encounter as they pass through a pair of double doors into the heart of the SpaceX
factory.
The 550,000-square-foot factory floor is difficult to process at first glance. It’s one continuous space
with grayish epoxied floors, white walls, and white support columns. A small city’s worth of stuff—
people, machines, noise—has been piled into this area. Just near the entryway, one of the Dragon capsules

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that has gone to the ISS and returned to Earth hangs from the ceiling with black burn marks running down
its side. Just under the capsule on the ground are a pair of the twenty-five-foot-long landing legs built by
SpaceX to let the Falcon rocket come to a gentle rest on the ground after a flight so it can be flown again.
To the left side of this entryway area there’s a kitchen, and to the right side there’s the mission control
room. It’s a closed-off area with expansive glass windows and fronted by wall-size screens for tracking a
rocket’s progress. It has four rows of desks with about ten computers each for the mission control staff.
Step a bit farther into the factory and there are a handful of industrial work areas separated from each
other in the most informal of ways. In some spots there are blue lines on the floor to mark off an area and
in other spots blue workbenches have been arranged in squares to cordon off the space. It’s a common
sight to have one of the Merlin engines raised up in the middle of one of these work areas with a half
dozen technicians wiring it up and tuning its bits and pieces.
Just behind these workspaces is a glass-enclosed square big enough to fit two of the Dragon capsules.
This is a clean room where people must wear lab coats and hairnets to fiddle with the capsules without
contaminating them. About forty feet to the left, there are several Falcon 9 rockets lying next to each other
horizontally that have been painted and await transport. There are some areas tucked in between all of
this that have blue walls and appear to have been covered by fabric. These are top-secret zones where
SpaceX might be working on a fanciful astronaut’s outfit or rocket part that it has to hide from visitors and
employees not tied to the projects. There’s a large area off to the side where SpaceX builds all of its
electronics, another area for creating specialized composite materials, and another for making the bus-
sized fairings that wrap around the satellites. Hundreds of people move about at the same time through the
factory—a mix of gritty technicians with tattoos and bandanas, and young, white-collar engineers. The
sweaty smell of kids who have just come off the playground permeates the building and hints at its
nonstop activity.
Musk has left his personal touches throughout the factory. There are small things like the data center
that has been bathed in blue lights to give it a sci-fi feel. The refrigerator-sized computers under the lights
have been labeled with big block letters to make it look like they were made by Cyberdyne Systems, the
fictional company from the Terminator movie franchise. Near the elevators, Musk has placed a glowing
life-size Iron Man figure. Surely the factory’s most Muskian element is the office space that has been built
smack-dab in its center. This is a three-story glass structure with meeting rooms and desks that rises up
between various welding and construction areas. It looks and feels bizarre to have a see-through office
inside this hive of industry. Musk, though, wanted his engineers to watch what was going on with the
machines at all times and to make sure they had to walk through the factory and talk to the technicians on
the way to their desks.
The factory is a temple devoted to what SpaceX sees as its major weapon in the rocket-building
game, in-house manufacturing. SpaceX manufactures between 80 percent and 90 percent of its rockets,
engines, electronics, and other parts. It’s a strategy that flat-out dumbfounds SpaceX’s competitors, like
United Launch Alliance, or ULA, which openly brags about depending on more than 1,200 suppliers to
make its end products. (ULA, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, sees itself as an engine
of job creation rather than a model of inefficiency.)
A typical aerospace company comes up with the list of parts that it needs for a launch system and then
hands off their design and specifications to myriad third parties who then actually build the hardware.
SpaceX tends to buy as little as possible to save money and because it sees depending on suppliers—
especially foreign ones—as a weakness. This approach comes off as excessive at first blush. Companies
have made things like radios and power distribution units for decades. Reinventing the wheel for every
computer and machine on a rocket could introduce more chances for error and, in general, be a waste of

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time. But for SpaceX, the strategy works. In addition to building its own engines, rocket bodies, and
capsules, SpaceX designs its own motherboards and circuits, sensors to detect vibrations, flight
computers, and solar panels. Just by streamlining a radio, for instance, SpaceX’s engineers have found
that they can reduce the weight of the device by about 20 percent. And the cost savings for a homemade
radio are dramatic, dropping from between $50,000 to $100,000 for the industrial-grade equipment used
by aerospace companies to $5,000 for SpaceX’s unit.
It’s hard to believe these kinds of price differentials at first, but there are dozens if not hundreds of
places where SpaceX has secured such savings. The equipment at SpaceX tends to be built out of readily
available consumer electronics as opposed to “space grade” equipment used by others in the industry.
SpaceX has had to work for years to prove to NASA that standard electronics have gotten good enough to
compete with the more expensive, specialized gear trusted in years past. “Traditional aerospace has been
doing things the same way for a very, very long time,” said Drew Eldeen, a former SpaceX engineer. “The
biggest challenge was convincing NASA to give something new a try and building a paper trail that
showed the parts were high enough quality.” To prove that it’s making the right choice to NASA and itself,
SpaceX will sometimes load a rocket with both the standard equipment and prototypes of its own design
for testing during flight. Engineers then compare the performance characteristics of the devices. Once a
SpaceX design equals or outperforms the commercial products, it becomes the de facto hardware.
There have also been numerous times when SpaceX has done pioneering work on advancing very
complex hardware systems. A classic example of this is one of the factory’s weirder-looking
contraptions, a two-story machine designed to perform what’s known as friction stir welding. The
machine allows SpaceX to automate the welding process for massive sheets of metal like the ones that
make up the bodies of the Falcon rockets. An arm takes one of the rocket’s body panels, lines it up against
another body panel, and then joins them together with a weld that could run twenty feet or more.
Aerospace companies typically try to avoid welds whenever possible because they create weaknesses in
the metal, and that’s limited the size of metal sheets they can use and forced other design constraints. From
the early days of SpaceX, Musk pushed the company to master friction stir welding, in which a spinning
head is smashed at high speeds into the join between two pieces of metal in a bid to make their crystalline
structures merge. It’s as if you heated two sheets of aluminum foil and then joined them by putting your
thumb down on the seam and twisting the metal together. This type of welding tends to result in much
stronger bonds than traditional welds. Companies had performed friction stir welding before but not on
structures as large as a rocket’s body or to the degree to which SpaceX has used the technique. As a result
of its trials and errors, SpaceX can now join large, thin sheets of metal and shave hundreds of pounds off
the weight of the Falcon rockets, as it’s able to use lighter-weight alloys and avoid using rivets, fasteners,
and other support structures. Musk’s competitors in the auto industry might soon need to do the same
because SpaceX has transferred some of the equipment and techniques to Tesla. The hope is that Tesla
will be able to make lighter, stronger cars.
The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have
tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket
company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost
friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes
on specialized talent
*
offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk
said. Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an
e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between
Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. “I do
think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and

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wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.”
*
In the early days of SpaceX, Musk knew little about the machines and amount of grunt work that goes
into making rockets. He rebuffed requests to buy specialized tooling equipment, until the engineers could
explain in clear terms why they needed certain things and until experience taught him better. Musk also
had yet to master some of the management techniques for which he would become both famous and to
some degree infamous.
Musk’s growth as a CEO and rocket expert occurred alongside SpaceX’s maturation as a company. At
the start of the Falcon 1 journey, Musk was a forceful software executive trying to learn some basic things
about a very different world. At Zip2 and PayPal, he felt comfortable standing up for his positions and
directing teams of coders. At SpaceX, he had to pick things up on the job. Musk initially relied on
textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after
another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the
SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at
first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers.
“Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what
you know.” People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb
incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and
intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child
vacuuming books into his brain. After a couple of years running SpaceX, Musk had turned into an
aerospace expert on a level that few technology CEOs ever approach in their respective fields. “He was
teaching us about the value of time, and we were teaching him about rocketry,” Brogan said.
In regards to time, Musk may well set more aggressive delivery targets for very difficult-to-make
products than any executive in history. Both his employees and the public have found this to be one of the
more jarring aspects of Musk’s character. “Elon has always been optimistic,” Brogan said. “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 has been pilloried by the press for setting and then missing product delivery dates. It’s one of
the habits that got him in the most trouble as SpaceX and Tesla tried to bring their first products to market.
Time and again, Musk found himself making a public appearance where he had to come up with a new
batch of excuses for a delay. Reminded about the initial 2003 target date to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acted
shocked. “Are you serious?” he said. “We said that? Okay, that’s ridiculous. I think I just didn’t know
what the hell I was talking about. The only thing I had prior experience in was software, and, yeah, you
can write a bunch of software and launch a website in a year. No problem. This isn’t like software. It
doesn’t work that way with rockets.” Musk simply cannot help himself. He’s an optimist by nature, and it
can feel like he makes calculations for how long it will take to do something based on the idea that things
will progress without flaw at every step and that all the members of his team have Muskian abilities and
work ethics. As Brogan joked, Musk might forecast how long a software project will take by timing the
amount of seconds needed physically to write a line of code and then extrapolating that out to match
however many lines of code he expects the final piece of software to be. It’s an imperfect analogy but one
that does not seem that far off from Musk’s worldview. “Everything he does is fast,” Brogan said. “He
pees fast. It’s like a fire hose—three seconds and out. He’s authentically in a hurry.”
Asked about his approach, Musk said,