The Evolution of SpaceX Insane Curiosity
“ You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great- and
that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about.
It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past.
And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars”
These are the words of Elon Musk, a nerdy boy from South Africa who became a world-famous
American engineering entrepreneur whose story is a lesson in how a few simple principles
and work ethics that are applied relentlessly can yield astonishing results.
Curious to know more about Elon Musk and how he developed his SpaceX company to get us
off this planet?
Keep Watching!
Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa of a model, Maye Musk and an electromechanical
engineer, Errol Musk.
He is the eldest of his siblings and a citizen of three countries, South Africa, Canada,
and the United States.
Musk spent his entire childhood reading encyclopedias and learning programming.
In the summer of 1995, he moved to the silicon valley and registered in a PhD program in
applied physics at Stanford University.
Two days after registration, Musk withdrew the program.
At that time, his younger brother, Kimball Musk, had just graduated from Queen’s University
with a business degree and came to join him in california.
The early internet was a promising field and they decided to launch an online business
startup called Zip2.
Shortly after launching their startup, the brothers found angel investors for Zip2 and
built it into a successful company.
In 1999, they sold it to the computer maker, Compaq, for approximately 280 million dollar.
After selling Zip2, Elon founded an online financial services company called “X.Com”
on his own.
The main rival of “X.Com” was another company called “Confinity” which was founded
by Peter Thiel and two others just months after X.Com launch.
In March 2002, the two companies merged and took on the name of their main product, PayPal,
which is a person-to-person online money transfer Service.
In October 2002, the same year, Ebay, the online auction service, bought PayPal for
1.5 billion dollar.
At the age of 31, Elon Musk, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7%
of its equity shares, found himself possessing 165 million dollar worth of Ebay Stock.
On leaving PayPal, he has founded and Co-founded many companies, two of which are SpaceX and
Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune building them up.
The main focus of these two companies is addressing existential risks to the long-term survival
of humanity, such as climate change risk, single-planet dependency risk and human species
obsolescence risk.
We will focus on SpaceX evolution in this video.
Which was founded to solve the single-planet dependency risk.
Passage 1
According to Musk, Humanity’s long-term survival is at risk if it stays limited to
just this one planet.
Sooner or later, some disaster that could be natural such as asteroids or supervolcano
or even man-made such as nuclear war, will end our residency here.
Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, in May 2002 to get us off
the planet.
He taught himself the necessary skills to design rockets in addition to being chief
technology officer and CEO of SpaceX.
He started with 11 employees, the most important of them is Gwynne Shotwell, who was put in
charge of business development.
Soon after being hired, Shotwell established herself as Musk’s right-hand woman at SpaceX.
She became a legend in the space-tech world and the SpaceX company may have failed without
her.
The story began in 2002, when Shotwell had a brief conversation with Musk, and two weeks
later, she was working for him as the company’s seventh employee.
The company’s first rocket, the single-engine Falcon 1, failed three times before it successfully
carried a satellite into space in 2008.
In the same year, NASA awarded SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract to transport cargo
in 12 flights to the space station.
In addition to this contract, SpaceX has inked commercial contracts with more than 4 billion
dollar to launch satellites aboard its larger Falcon 9 rocket, for various countries and
telecommunications companies.
Most of these contracts were awarded to SpaceX thanks to Shotwell PR skills.
Consequently, SpaceX has gone from a startup with half a dozen employees to a major government
contractor with nearly 5 billion dollar in contracts and more than 3,000 people on its
payroll.
SpaceX Launches Timeline
1- Falcon 1; in September 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid fuel
rocket to reach Earth's orbit.
Falcon l's first launch attempt came on November 26th, 2005 at 5:11 p.m. Musk played down the
chances of success, telling reporters that the likelihood of a new rocket launching from
a new launch pad on its first attempt was low.
Musk's prediction proved right on the mark when the launch had to be scrubbed when an
auxiliary liquid-oxygen (LOX) fill tank had a manual vent valve incorrectly set to vent.
The time it took to correct the problem resulted in too much LOX boiling off and too much helium
was lost.
Since LOX was used to chill the helium bottles, the loss of the LOX meant there was no way
to cool the bottles.
The launch team managed to refill the LOX tanks, but the rate at which they could add
helium was slower than the rate at which LOX was boiling away, so the decision was taken
to scrub.
Launch attempt #2 took place on December 19th, 2005, but a structural issue with the fIrSt-stage
fuel tank (a faulty valve caused a vacuum in the fIrst-stage fuel tank which sucked
inward and caused structural damage) resulted in another scrub.
After replacing the first stage, the launch of Falcon 1 was set to take place on February
10th, 2006.
Despite the first two scrubs, Musk was unfazed, telling reporters that hiccups were to be
expected with the debut of any new launch system, adding that each launch attempt brought
valuable experience to the flight team.
True enough, but it was probably experience that the flight team was growing weary of,
especially when launch attempt #3 resulted in a scrub after problems cropped up during
a planned engine test.
Saturday, March 25th, 2006, was the date set for launch attempt #4.
This time, the launch proceeded according to plan.
One minute before launch, Falcon 1 switched to the computerized launch sequence.
Seconds before launch, a spark lit, which fired a turbo-pump spinning at 21,000 rpm,
pushing LOX and kerosene into the Falcon's main engine combustion chamber.
A moment later, flames erupted beneath the Falcon, generating 72,000 pounds of thrust.
That was as good as it got.
Immediately following lift-off, the vehicle rolled, rocking back and forth, and then,
at T+26 seconds, rapidly pitched over.
Impact occurred at T+41 seconds onto a dead reef less than 100 meters from the launch
site.
The FalconSAT -2 payload separated from the booster and landed on the island, sustaining
minor damage.
After poring over video footage, data points, and flight telemetry, the cause of the launch
failure was identifIed as a small fIre that had broken out on the fIrst-stage engine.
The fIre had been caused by a fuel leak and the cause of the fuel leak was an aluminum
nut from the fuel pump - the nut had cracked, having corroded in the salty, humid air.
The choice to go with aluminum fIttings rather than more durable stainless steel had been
a cost-saving decision: in the business of launching rockets, weight equals money and
that meant choosing aluminum over stainless steel.
Unfortunately, that aluminum had been sitting in the humid tropical environment for 10 weeks,
with predictable and costly results.
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In september 2008, Falcon I rose from the launch pad, accelerating quickly on a burst
of flame.
At 37,000 feet, it reached maximum dynamic pressure, known as Max Q - an event that was
followed by fIrst-stage separation.
As the long second-stage nozzle glowed white hot, the team in El Segundo popped champagne
corks.
Three hundred seconds into flight, the rocket's second stage started to spin and wobble.
Three minutes later, the stage was spinning faster.
The second-stage engine flamed out, but the rocket continued to roll.
At II minutes II seconds into flight, the video feed went blank.
Regardless, Musk claimed success with the launch of the vehicle.
After all, he had gotten his rocket farther into space than any company ever had, with
an engine designed entirely from scratch, all the major milestones were met, and the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) reps had walked away happy, impressed
at how quickly the SpaceX team had refueled the beefed-up Falcon 1.
With the successful launch of Falcon I, Musk could look to the future, part of which was
to help humanity become a spacefaring civilization.
To achieve that goal, he knew he had to establish a blueprint that followed a path of ever-increasing
capability and reliability while simultaneously reducing costs - goals he had alluded to in
his Senate Testimony in 2004.
By following this plan, Musk hoped to ultimately reduce the cost of launching vehicles into
orbit and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of 10.
It was a bold ambition, but Musk believed that by eliminating the traditional layers
of management internally and subcontractors externally, SpaceX could reduce its costs
and accelerate decision-making and delivery.
He also believed that by keeping most of the manufacturing in-house, SpaceX could reduce
its costs, keep tighter control of quality, and ensure a tight feedback loop between the
design and manufacturing teams.
And, by concentrating on simple, proven designs with a primary focus on reliability, Musk
was sure SpaceX could reduce the costs associated with complex systems operating at the margin.
Coupled with the newly emerging market for private and commercial space transport, Musk
hoped that his new model for reaching orbit would reignite humanity's efforts to explore
and develop space.
2- First Land Landing, on 21 december, 2005, the Falcon 9 rocket delivered 11 communications
satellites to orbit, and the first stage returned and landed at landing zone1, the first ever
orbital class rocket landing.
3- Droneship Landing, on April 8, 2016, the falcon 9 rocket launched the Dragon spacecraft
to the international space station, and the first stage returned and landed on the “Of
course I still love you” droneship.
4- First Re-flight, on March 30, 2017, SpaceX achieved the world’s first re-flight of
an orbital class rocket.
Following delivery of the payload, the Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth for the second
time.
5- Falcon Heavy First Flight, Falcon Heavy is the world’s most powerful operational
rocket by a factor of two, capable of carrying large payloads to orbit and supporting missions
as far as the Moon or Mars.
On february 7, 2018, Falcon Heavy made its first launch to orbit, successfully landing
2 of its 3 boosters and launching its payload to space.
6- Crew Dragon Docks with ISS, crew dragon docked with the international space station
on March 3, 2019, at 3:02 a.m PST, becoming the first American spacecraft to autonomously
dock with the orbiting laboratory.
Colonizing Mars
Even when Mars is at closest approach, the Red Planet is 150 times farther than the Moon.
Over the decades, dozens of manned Mars mission architectures have been suggested, all of
which have been obscenely expensive.
But Musk reckons he can charge his passengers (colonists) just US$500,000.
While Musk has a vehicle in mind (reusable of course), the real challenge will be making
the numbers work.
Of course, one way to do this is reusability.
Traditionally, rockets are thrown away after every flight, which is a terrible way to do
business, especially if you plan to send 80,000 people to a distant planet.
But Musk reckons he can fix the problem of reusability and, by doing so, drive down mission
costs to just tens of dollars per kilogram to Low Earth Orbit.
If he does that, then he’ll be in a good position to charge budget prices for seats
on board his colony spaceship.Eighty thousand people on Mars sounds like science fiction
to most people, especially when you consider no government agency has even come close to
sending just one astronaut there.
But, until a few years ago, a commercial assembly line for spacecraft didn’t exist.
Don’t forget, we’re talking about a visionary – someone who pushed way beyond the envelope
to achieve what many thought was downright impossible.
Thanks for Watching Everyone!
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Can you guess the edge of the SpaceX company?
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