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

Star Wars
’ Millennium Falcon and his role as the architect of an
exciting future. At a time when the cost of sending a 550-pound payload started at $30 million, he
promised that the Falcon 1 would be able to carry a 1,400-pound payload for $6.9 million.
Bowing to his nature, Musk set an insanely ambitious timeline for all of this. One of the earliest
SpaceX presentations suggested that the company would complete its first engine in May 2003, a second
engine in June, the body of the rocket in July, and have everything assembled in August. A launchpad
would then be prepared by September, and the first launch would take place in November 2003, or about
fifteen months after the company started. A trip to Mars was naturally slated for somewhere near the end
of the decade. This was Musk the logical, naïve optimist tabulating how long it should take people
physically to perform all of this work. It’s the baseline he expects of himself and one that his employees,
with their human foibles, are in a never-ending struggle to match.
As space enthusiasts started to learn about the new company, they didn’t really obsess over whether
Musk’s delivery schedule sounded realistic or not. They were just thrilled that someone had decided to
take the cheap and fast approach. Some members of the military had already been promoting the idea of
giving the armed forces more aggressive space capabilities, or what they called “responsive space.” If a
conflict broke out, the military wanted the ability to respond with purpose-built satellites for that mission.
This would mean moving away from a model where it takes ten years to build and deploy a satellite for a
specific job. Instead, the military desired cheaper, smaller satellites that could be reconfigured through

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software and sent up on short notice, almost like disposable satellites. “If we could pull that off, it would
be really game-changing,” said Pete Worden, a retired air force general, who met with Musk while
serving as a consultant to the Defense Department. “It could make our response in space similar to what
we do on land, sea and in the air.” Worden’s job required him to look at radical technologies. While many
of the people he encountered came off as eccentric dreamers, Musk seemed grounded, knowledgeable,
and capable. “I talked to people building ray guns and things in their garages. It was clear that Elon was
different. He was a visionary who really understood the rocket technology, and I was impressed with
him.”
Like the military, scientists wanted cheap, quick access to space and the ability to send up
experiments and get data back on a regular basis. Some companies in the medical and consumer-goods
industries were also interested in rides to space to study how a lack of gravity affected the properties of
their products.
As good as a cheap launch vehicle sounded, the odds of a private citizen building one that worked
were beyond remote. A quick search on YouTube for “rocket explosions” turns up thousands of
compilation videos documenting U.S. and Soviet launch disasters that have occurred over the decades.
From 1957 to 1966, the United States alone tried to blast more than 400 rockets into orbit and about 100
of them crashed and burned.
5
 The rockets used to transport things to space are mostly modified missiles
developed through all of this trial and error and funded by billions upon billions of government dollars.
SpaceX had the advantage of being able to learn from this past work and having a few people on staff that
had overseen rocket projects at companies like Boeing and TRW. That said, the start-up did not have a
budget that could support a string of explosions. At best, SpaceX would have three or four shots at making
the Falcon 1 work. “People thought we were just crazy,” Mueller said. “At TRW, I had an army of people
and government funding. Now we were going to make a low-cost rocket from scratch with a small team.
People just didn’t think it could be done.”
In July 2002, Musk was gripped by the excitement of this daring enterprise, and eBay made its
aggressive move to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion. This deal gave Musk some liquidity and supplied him
with more than $100 million to throw at SpaceX. With such a massive up-front investment, no one would
be able to wrestle control of SpaceX away from Musk as they had done at Zip2 and PayPal. For the
employees who had agreed to accompany Musk on this seemingly impossible journey, the windfall
provided at least a couple of years of job security. The acquisition also upped Musk’s profile and
celebrity, which he could leverage to score meetings with top government officials and to sway suppliers.
And then all of a sudden none of this seemed to matter. Justine had given birth to a son—Nevada
Alexander Musk. He was ten weeks old when, just as the eBay deal was announced, he died. The Musks
had tucked Nevada in for a nap and placed the boy on his back as parents are taught to do. When they
returned to check on him, he was no longer breathing and had suffered from what the doctors would term a
sudden infant death syndrome–related incident. “By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been
deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead,” Justine wrote in her article for