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

Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics,
and
Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion,
along with several more seminal texts.
Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had emerged from this
meditative process with the realization that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the

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Russians were offering. Forget the mice. Forget the plant with its own video feed growing—or possibly
dying—on Mars. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to
explore space.
As word traveled around the space community about Musk’s plans, there was a collective ho-hum.
People like Zubrin had seen this show many times before. “There was a string of zillionaires that got sold
a good story by an engineer,” Zubrin said. “Combine my brains and your money, and we can build a
rocket ship that will be profitable and open up the space frontier. The techies usually ended up spending
the rich guy’s money for two years, and then the rich guy gets bored and shuts the thing down. With Elon,
everyone gave a sigh and said, ‘Oh well. He could have spent ten million dollars to send up the mice, but
instead he’ll spend hundreds of millions and probably fail like all the others that proceeded him.’”
While well aware of the risks tied to starting a rocket company, Musk had at least one reason to think
he might succeed where others had failed. That reason’s name was Tom Mueller.
Mueller grew up the son of a logger in the tidy Idaho town of St. Maries, where he developed a
reputation as an oddball. While the rest of the kids were outside exploring the woods in winter, Mueller
stayed warm in the library reading books or watching 
Star Trek
at his house. He also tinkered. Walking to
grade school one day, Mueller discovered a smashed clock in an alley and turned it into a pet project.
Each day, he fixed some part of the clock—a gear, a spring—until he got it working. A similar thing
happened with the family’s lawn mower, which Mueller disassembled one afternoon on the front lawn for
fun. “My dad came home and was so mad because he thought he’d have to buy a new mower,” Mueller
said. “But I put it back together, and it ran.” Mueller then got stuck on rockets. He started buying mail
order kits and following the instructions to build small rockets. Rather quickly, Mueller graduated to
constructing his own devices. At the age of twelve, he crafted a mock-up space shuttle that could be
attached to a rocket, sent up into the air, and then glide back to the ground. For a science project a couple
of years later, Mueller borrowed his dad’s oxyacetylene welding equipment to make a rocket engine
prototype. Mueller cooled the device by placing it upside down in a coffee can full of water—“I could
run it like that all day long”—and invented equally creative ways to measure its performance. The
machine was good enough for Mueller to win a couple of regional science fair competitions and end up at
an international event. “That’s where I promptly got my ass kicked,” Mueller said.
Tall, lanky, and with a rectangular face, Mueller is an easygoing sort who muddled through college for
a bit, teaching his friends how to make smoke bombs, and then eventually settled down and did well as a
mechanical engineering student. Fresh out of college, he worked for Hughes Aircraft on satellites—“It
wasn’t rockets, but it was close”—and then went to TRW Space & Electronics. It was the latter half of
the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program had the space gearheads dreaming about kinetic
weapons and all sorts of mayhem. At TRW, Mueller experimented with crazy types of propellants and
oversaw the development of the company’s TR-106 engine, a giant machine fueled by liquid oxygen and
hydrogen. As a hobby, Mueller hung out with a couple hundred amateur rocketry buffs in the Reaction
Research Society, a group formed in 1943 to encourage the building and firing of rockets. On the
weekends, Mueller traveled out to the Mojave Desert with the other RRS members to push the limits of
amateur machines. Mueller was one of the club’s standouts, able to build things that actually worked, and
could experiment with some of the more radical concepts that were quashed by his conservative bosses at
TRW. His crowning achievement was an eighty-pound engine that could produce thirteen thousand pounds
of thrust and earned accolades as the world’s largest liquid-fuel rocket engine built by an amateur. “I still
keep the rockets hanging in my garage,” Mueller said.
In January 2002, Mueller was hanging out in the workshop of John Garvey, who had left a job at the
aerospace company McDonnell Douglas to start building his own rockets. Garvey’s facility was in

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Huntington Beach, where he rented an industrial space about the size of a six-car garage. The two men
were fiddling around with the eighty-pound engine when Garvey mentioned that a guy named Elon Musk
might be stopping by. The amateur rocketry scene is tight, and it was Cantrell who recommended that
Musk check out Garvey’s workshop and see Mueller’s designs. On a Sunday, Musk arrived with a
pregnant Justine, wearing a stylish black leather trench coat and looking like a high-paid assassin.
Mueller had the eighty-pound engine on his shoulder and was trying to bolt it to a support structure when
Musk began peppering him with questions. “He asked me how much thrust it had,” Mueller said. “He
wanted to know if I had ever worked on anything bigger. I told him that yeah, I’d worked on a 650,000-
pound thrust engine at TRW and knew every part of it.” Mueller set the engine down and tried to keep up
with Musk’s interrogation. “How much would that big engine cost?” Musk asked. Mueller told him TRW
built it for about $12 million. Musk shot back, “Yeah, but how much could you really do it for?”
Mueller ended up chatting with Musk for hours. The next weekend, Mueller invited Musk to his house
to continue their discussion. Musk knew he had found someone who really knew the ins and outs of
making rockets. After that, Musk introduced Mueller to the rest of his roundtable of space experts and
their stealthy meetings. The caliber of the people impressed Mueller, who had turned down past job offers
from Beal and other budding space magnates because of their borderline insane ideas. Musk, by contrast,
seemed to know what he was doing, weeding out the naysayers meeting by meeting and forming a crew of
bright, committed engineers.
Mueller had helped Musk fill out that spreadsheet around the performance and cost metrics of a new,
low-cost rocket, and, along with the rest of Team Musk, had subsequently refined the idea. The rocket
would not carry truck-sized satellites like some of the monster rockets flown by Boeing, Lockheed, the
Russians, and others countries. Instead, Musk’s rocket would be aimed at the lower end of the satellite
market, and it could end up as ideal for an emerging class of smaller payloads that capitalized on the
massive advances that had taken place in recent years in computing and electronics technology. The rocket
would cater directly to a theory in the space industry that a whole new market might open for both
commercial and research payloads if a company could drastically lower the price per launch and perform
launches on a regular schedule. Musk relished the idea of being at the forefront of this trend and
developing the workhorse of a new era in space. Of course, all of this was theoretical—and then,
suddenly, it wasn’t. PayPal had gone public in February with its shares shooting up 55 percent, and Musk
knew that eBay wanted to buy the company as well. While noodling on the rocket idea, Musk’s net worth
had increased from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. In April 2002, Musk fully abandoned the
publicity-stunt idea and committed to building a commercial space venture. He pulled aside Cantrell,
Griffin, Mueller, and Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer at Boeing, and told the group, “I want to do
this company. If you guys are in, let’s do it.” (Griffin wanted to join but ended up declining when Musk
rebuffed his request to live on the East Coast, and Cantrell only stuck around for a few months after this
meeting, seeing the venture as too risky.)
Founded in June 2002, Space Exploration Technologies came to life in humble settings. Musk
acquired an old warehouse at 1310 East Grand Avenue in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles humming
with the activity of the aerospace industry. The previous tenant of the 75,000-square-foot building had
done lots of shipping and had used the south side of the facility as a logistics depot, outfitting it with
several receiving bays for delivery trucks. This allowed Musk to drive his silver McLaren right into the
building. Beyond that the surroundings were sparse—just a dusty floor and a forty-foot-high ceiling with
its wooden beams and insulation exposed and which curved at the top to give the place a hangarlike feel.
The north side of the building was an office space with cubicles and room for about fifty people. During
the first week of SpaceX’s operations, delivery trucks showed up packed full of Dell laptops and printers

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and folding tables that would serve as the first desks. Musk walked over to one of the loading docks,
rolled up the door, and off-loaded the equipment himself.
Musk had soon transformed the SpaceX office with what has become his signature factory aesthetic: a
glossy epoxy coating applied over concrete on the floors, and a fresh coat of white paint slathered onto
the walls. The white color scheme was intended to make the factory look clean and feel cheerful. Desks
were interspersed around the factory so that Ivy League computer scientists and engineers designing the
machines could sit with the welders and machinists building the hardware. This approach stood as
SpaceX’s first major break with traditional aerospace companies that prefer to cordon different
engineering groups off from each other and typically separate engineers and machinists by thousands of
miles by placing their factories in locations where real estate and labor run cheap.
As the first dozen or so employees came to the offices, they were told that SpaceX’s mission would
be to emerge as the “Southwest Airlines of Space.” SpaceX would build its own engines and then
contract with suppliers for the other components of the rocket. The company would gain an edge over the
competition by building a better, cheaper engine and by fine-tuning the assembly process to make rockets
faster and cheaper than anyone else. This vision included the construction of a type of mobile launch
vehicle that could travel to various sites, take the rocket from a horizontal to vertical position, and send it
off to space—no muss, no fuss. SpaceX was meant to get so good at this process that it could do multiple
launches a month, make money off each one, and never need to become a huge contractor dependent on
government funds.
SpaceX was to be America’s attempt at a clean slate in the rocket business, a modernized reset. Musk
felt that the space industry had not really evolved in about fifty years. The aerospace companies had little
competition and tended to make supremely expensive products that achieved maximum performance. They
were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.
Musk, by contrast, would apply some of the start-up techniques he’d learned in Silicon Valley to run
SpaceX lean and fast and capitalize on the huge advances in computing power and materials that had
taken place over the past couple of decades. As a private company, SpaceX would also avoid the waste
and cost overruns associated with government contractors. Musk declared that SpaceX’s first rocket
would be called the Falcon 1, a nod to