Adding rocket man to his resume

“Really,the whole purpose of SpaceX from the beginning has been human spaceflight,” Musk said last June to a blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight programme. When he started SpaceX in 2002,Musk was an Internet entrepreneur who had made his fortune with PayPal. SpaceX now has 900 employees. It successfully launched a small Falcon 1 rocket into orbit in 2008,and successfully deployed a satellite last year. It has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to bring supplies to the International Space Station in its larger Falcon 9 rocket.

To the blue-ribbon panel last June,Musk said he expected that all of the pieces of the first Falcon 9 would arrive at SpaceX’s launching pad in Florida by the end of the summer and that the maiden flight would take off by the end of the year. Musk told the panel that this year SpaceX would be “doing our flights that actually go to the space station,carrying cargo and bringing it back”.

The first Falcon 9 flight has still not taken off. The second stage arrived at Cape Canaveral last month,about half a year later than Musk stated to the panel. The first launching is now scheduled for no sooner than March 22. The target for first delivery of cargo to the space station is now sometime in the first half of 2011. Meeting even that will be impressive.

The headquarters of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.—SpaceX’s official name—certainly look like the future. Located near Los Angeles International Airport,the building’s lobby has the sleekness of a boutique hotel.

Musk said he did not set out to be a rocket manufacturer. Rather,with some of the millions of dollars he reaped from the sale of PayPal to eBay,he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars—a private science experiment to see if Earth plants could grow in Martian soil. Beyond the science,he said he thought the sight of a green plant on Mars would capture people’s imagination and reinvigorate interest in space. But a rocket to get Mars Oasis off the ground was expensive.

He wondered whether it would make more sense to build his own rockets,and he started talking to people in the rocket business. By most accounts,SpaceX has assembled a talented team and successfully streamlined costs while aiming for high reliability. Instead of turning to subcontractors,SpaceX builds almost everything—about 80 per cent,by value—at its California factory. “They essentially have created their own low-cost avionics and rocket companies,” said Douglas O. Stanley,an aerospace research engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has made several visits to the SpaceX factory.

Stanley estimates that SpaceX was able to develop its Merlin engine,which provides propulsion for the first stages of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets,at one-fourth to one-third the cost that a traditional engine manufacturer would have required. Musk points out that SpaceX already manufactures more rocket engines than all other companies in the United States combined.

While SpaceX has cut costs,it has not avoided the failures that afflict rocket development. The first three flights of the Falcon 1 failed. Musk said he had invested $100 million of his own money in SpaceX,nearly twice what he originally planned. He says the company can survive four Falcon 9 failures.

But Musk also expressed confidence that the development of Falcon 9,despite its greater size and complexity,would go more smoothly than that of Falcon 1. Lessons learned from the earlier failures have been applied to the Falcon 9,which shares many Falcon 1 components,like the Merlin engines. And once the Falcon 9 proves ready for cargo,it is straightforward to add seats,a carbon dioxide scrubber and other systems to make the capsule suitable for astronauts,Musk said. “The escape system and then flight testing the escape system are the only things of note,” he said.