Fans of the SpaceX Falcon 9 program, this one’s for you! For critics of Elon Musk, rest easy — you know hijinks will inevitably turn up.
Last week, we dove into video analysis of the Starship 4/20 launch in Boca Chica, Texas, and the problems surrounding the Raptor engines, observations apparently confirmed by Elon Musk during a Twitter Spaces chat.
In both those stories, I’ll admit it — I had my Falcon 9 facts out of order — only slightly in some places but definitely far afield in others, and the commenters were quick (and correct) to admonish me.
The problem is I’ve been focused on what drives the SpaceX business — namely Starship, the viability of which is linked inexorably to Starlink, Elon Musk’s global megaconstellation of 42,000 low-Earth satellites he hopes to launch via Starship in coming years.
Yes, we all see the number.
So you’ve all convinced me to give the Falcon 9 it’s proper due, so here we are! You’re not going to love all of it. But there are some cool things I’m definitely going to credit. You’re always free to arrive at your own conclusions.
As it turns out, telling the story of Falcon 9 (and the oft-delayed FalconHeavy) reveals quite a lot more about the current challenges confronting SpaceX. So get your coffee and get comfortable, this one will go the full set of rounds.
Let’s start with something we can probably agree on — landing rockets is cool.
But are the Falcon 9 and FalconHeavy rockets “reusable,” as is often said?
Straight off, we can say that to date, NASA confirms SpaceX has at best only demonstrated “partial reusability.” So technically, we could end things right here with a clear answer of “no” and go home, right?
Let’s not be hasty or pedantic. I’m going to roll with “partial reusability” and still generously allow you to decide for yourself to what degree these rockets deserve or betray this “reusable” label. You might even start to wonder how exactly Elon Musk helped (hurt?) this promising program along the way.
So hop into the Delorean, let’s go back to 2011 and listen to Elon describe this reusable system to reporters in Washington D.C.:
Right at the top, Elon explains how the reusable rocket will function:
“Land, basically, for the first stage. After stage separation, turn the stage around, re-light the engines, boost back to the launch pad, and land propulsively on landing legs.”
He really has a way of capturing the beauty of spaceflight in words; choose your own “inspired” meme. We’ll unpack how Falcon performs in these functions later, but for now let’s get some additional detail from the NBC News coverage:
A totally reusable rocket would greatly reduce the cost of spaceflight. A conventional rocket is used once: As fuel is used up each stage falls away and burns up on descent through the atmosphere or remains in orbit as junk.
Musk said a Falcon 9 costs about $50 million to $60 million, but the cost of fuel and oxygen for a launch is only about $200,000.
"So obviously if we can reuse the rocket, say a thousand times, then that would make the capital cost of the rocket per launch only about $50,000," he said.
Musk did not detail a timeline or cost for development. "If it does work, it'll be pretty huge," he said.
Musk said the animation was about a 90 percent accurate depiction of the envisioned rocket.
You can decide if any of that turned out “90% accurate.” Hey, I understand designs iterate and change! Again, I don’t want to be pedantic. Just, I dunno, don’t puff your chest out and assign a wildly high number to something you haven’t built yet (he eventually learned this trick).
Anyone in business development might take pause at that level of unreasonable confidence (or wishful thinking, take your pick) to consider to what degree this might be vaporware.
So far we’ve not spent much time on Gwynne Shotwell, the President and COO of SpaceX. That changes today, so here’s Forbes to introduce her:
Gwynne Shotwell is SpaceX's president and COO, and manages the operations of the commercial space exploration company founded by Elon Musk. ...
Shotwell was the 11th employee of SpaceX, and joined the company in 2002. Before that, she was at Microcosm, Inc. as space systems director.
Here she is in 2013. At this point, SpaceX had successfully launched the Falcon 9 on five voyages, four of those carrying the Dragon Capsule, the first private capsule to reach the space station (which again, is darn cool — congratulations, engineers!)
Two minutes in, she describes the company’s business plan:
“Our goal is to fly often, not to make a ton of money on a few launches but to make a good amount of money on tons of launches, we’re really trying to expand the market.”
She’s speaking here at the CASBAA Satellite Industry Forum. Scanning the list of participants reveals quite a few significant players in this, uh, space.
One you might want to note is Steve Collar, at the time the head of o3b Networks and now CEO of SES, which acquired o3b in 2016. SES directly competes with SpaceX and Starlink for customers in maritime operations (such as cruise ships) through their o3b mPower medium-Earth-orbit broadband constellation.
Hold on, how did SpaceX go from “tons of launches” to competing with SES for satellite customers with their own Starlink megaconstellation?
We’ll get there. For now, let’s return to the video of Gwynne in 2013 at the 3:00 mark:
“We were founded in 2002 with a singular goal of providing highly-reliable, low-cost access to space. My founder is focused primarily on technologies to take humans into space. Many think that in this industry that’s irrelevant to this particular group, and I argue otherwise.”
This is the only time in her prepared remarks she mentions Elon — simply as “the founder.” Rather than spend much time on Elon’s Mars mission (which is a very real thing, honest), Gwynne touts the company’s “exploding” staff and operations (her joke, not mine — 4:40), and the challenges and opportunities for SpaceX’s core business, which in 2013 was a growing $5 billion manifest of contracted payload to be sent into orbit over at least 50 planned launches.
To be fair, it was “irrelevant” to this particular crowd of satellite businesspeople looking for ways to exploit an evolving space market during a period of growth, so it’s not all that surprising Elon’s Mars folly doesn’t get much play here.
But consider, Gwynne set the development costs of the Falcon 9 and Dragon Capsule at ~$850m (rounded numbers by Gwynne here), with NASA having kicked in ~$400m, in addition to expertise and experience. With the Falcon 9 poised to be the financial backbone of the company, isn’t it a little curious the founder’s name is not being invoked more?
Elon’s name only comes up again in the Q&A — twice, and both elicit interesting responses from Gwynne.
The first comes when the interviewer observes that Elon’s transition “from PayPal to rocket science is a big leap, and a very visionary thing” (ahem). Check out her answer 17 minutes in:
“What’s really key and what keeps SpaceX the kind of a vibrant company, for those of you who have visited, it’s got a really great buzz to it, people are really excited about what they’re doing and what they’re working on.
“I think when you stop innovating and you stop working on visionary things, that’s when you kind of contract. You probably get really good at doing what you’re doing, but I think you probably become a little bit lethargic. It’s the new entrants that come and really shake things up. I think it’s important for Elon to continue laying out real audacious goals.”
Now one might say that’s how a savvy executive “manages up.” Gwynne here appears to have Elon exactly where he will be most productive to the company’s vital Falcon 9 cargo manifest. Specifically:
Real quickly, did you notice when the interviewer asked the question, Gwynne began her reply, “I’ve got that question many times,” a perfectly normal way to stall start. But at 17:21, the poor guy seems to have a tiny crisis of confidence, speculating everyone in the room is now judging his bourgeois questioning.
Is this important to the story? Absolutely not. Why mention it?
If anyone out there is asking right now, why would a brilliant man like Elon Musk need to be managed-up by those who work for him? Let’s have a sidebar here to round-up of Elon’s own Kessler Syndrome of management faults that have orbited his career:
NewRepublic: Is Elon Musk the Worst Boss Ever? An Investigation (Dec. 2022):
Is Elon Musk the worst boss who ever lived? He fires people who disagree with him publicly. He fires people who disagree with him privately. He fires people for expressing sympathy for the people he’s fired previously. He lays off half his workers indiscriminately. These indiscriminate firings may violate federal antidiscrimination law. He installs beds in the company’s San Francisco office so employees will never have to leave. He smears the company’s former safety chief in a manner reminiscent of QAnon.
Good news here for Elon, because turns out he’s too mid even to stand out as “worst ever” in the vast pool of emotionally-stunted, insecure, lonely bosses who lack possession of basic coping skills whenever confronted with anxiety or stress. Instead, these bad managers indulge every instinct to wield power like a cudgel, with all the sophistication of a child screaming, “GIMME!”
I guess there’s still time.
This next “fun Elon at work” story that appears to support this notion comes from Wired in 2018, “Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk” (which is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant portion via The Los Angeles Times):
Musk’s short fuse is legend. If something’s wrong and it’s important to Musk, employees have learned to avoid his presence if possible.
Back in 2017 Musk was looking for someone to blame after his plans for cutting-edge automation at Tesla’s Nevada battery factory began chewing up factory productivity.
...the CEO was apoplectic, trying to figure out what was wrong and who was to blame when he summoned a young engineer over to assist him.
“Hey, buddy, this doesn’t work!” he shouted at the engineer, another employee told Duhigg. “Did you do this?”
“You mean, program the robot?” the engineer said. “Or design that tool?”
“Did you f— do this?” Musk asked him.
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to?” the engineer replied apologetically.
“You’re a f— idiot!” Musk shouted back. “Get the f— out and don’t come back!”
Not being able to answer basic questions of clarification and losing patience sounds an awful lot like this infamous exchange with then-Twitter engineer Ian Brown (guess how that turned out):
For people under the misapprehension Elon is some kind of engineer, the de-pantsing here is simply incredible.
Ian Brown: “When you say a total rewrite, do you mean starting with the skeleton, or a bunch of engineers sit down at a white board and say, ‘What is Twitter?’”
Elon: “Uh...”
Elon pause-watchers, I clocked a four-Mississippi here. And I see you software engineers out there nodding vigorously at that “white board” reference.
Ian Brown: (impatient) “Revolution or reform?”
Elon: “Ah, I just mean literally there’s… you can try to amend the crazy stack that exists, or re-write it, um… and...”
Ian Brown: “When you say crazy stack, what do you mean? I mean, break it down.”
Clocked a three-Mississippi here.
Elon: “Have you seen Georgia’s, like, diagram?”
Ian Brown: “No, no, no. What do you mean by crazy?”
[crosstalk, laughter]
Elon: “I mean, who are you?”
Ian Brown: “What do you mean, who am I? You gave me the fucking mic.”
Ian Brown, you’re a legend. Somehow, even after all this, even after the moderator appears to call out to boot the engineer, we get this final exchange:
Ian Brown: “Like, what is the stack, Elon? Come on! Take me from top to bottom, what does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What’s so abnormal about this stack versus every other large scale system on the planet, buddy? Come on. Give it to me.”
Elon: “Amazing, wow. You’re a jackass.”
Let me assure you, Elon takes a massive “L” here. I mean, this is the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s that bad.
I adore a good engineer.
Not all of you have had an opportunity to work with software engineers, QA, or anything of the sort, but Elon is being asked a simple “A” or “B” question here and he appears totally at sea. He then seems to react in rage and frustration, the very “short fuse” described in the previous report from Wired.
If you come away from that clip and think the engineer was being a jackass and underserving of an answer, fair enough. But if you have any friends in that line of work, play that clip and see what they say.
I did mention Elon’s name came up a second time in Gwynne’s Q&A -- as SpaceX matured and grew as a business, could she imagine the company shedding its more “punk” style to settle into something moderate? At 19:35:
“I don’t think SpaceX — you know, unless Elon gets hits by a bus, which would really be awful [knocks on wood], I don’t see SpaceX becoming ‘the moderate.’ It’s very contrary to what he is about and what he wants SpaceX to be.”
There’s a bone for anyone who thinks I went too far suggesting Gwynne was managing-up Elon. I mean, she clearly says she definitely doesn't want him hit by a bus. I also frequently visualize my loved ones being mowed down by a bus, and that is scary! [knocks on wood].
Good news, we can leave Elon behind for a bit. Now I won’t get nit-picky here about the many missed dates and missions referenced in Gwynne’s 2013 talk. We all know space is challenging, launch windows are fluid — I’m not trying (that hard) to be a jerk (it comes natural, what can I say?)
Let’s focus on just one part, the key promise of reusable rockets. Here’s Gwynne at 11:27:
“I’m so excited to sell the operators here a launch vehicle where really the only cost associated with that vehicle —excuse me, other than the non-recurring, the initial investment of the stages themselves — [is] the cost of fuel and the mission operations.
“So if we get this right, and we’re trying hard to get this right, we're looking at launches to be the in the $5-to-$7 million dollar range, which would really change things dramatically.”
If you’ve read any of my previous diaries, it won’t surprise you to discover SpaceX is nowhere near the standard established by Gwynne in 2013. A Falcon 9 launch has costs beyond “fuel and mission operations,” and considerably more than “$5-to-$7m” (though to be fair, cheaper than competitors — we’ll get to that).
So let’s now unpack exactly what “partial reusability” actually means, since that is really the only thing left on the table -- remember, NASA has established full reusability has not been achieved.
And I’m not even declaring victory! How am I not the fairest of them all? I’m here for you, Falcon 9 fans, because in this snapshot from 2013, the business makes sense to me. $5 billion lined up on your manifest is some great upside from a ~$450m investment (I mean, extremely roughly speaking here, I’m sure there are loads of associated operational costs, etc). But big picture, I’m into the Falcon 9 here, honest to turtle.
I mean, I’ve never been the type to walk across a casino floor and “feel the money;” all I hear is noise. But Gwynne in 2013 talking about SpaceX and Falcon 9? Trust me, I feel the money.
Environmentalists, I do see you — we’re not going to touch on the impact of any of these launches today, though by all means contribute in the comments! I’m already going to to go long here, but I promise we’ll spend a whole day on the environmental issues soon (which, as you’d imagine, are not at all insignificant).
So look, if the next part of story was Elon and Grimes founding a commune in the desert outside of Gerlach, California following a spectacular acid trip during a sunrise Daft Punk performance at the trash fence at Burning Man, while the SpaceX engineers continued to iterate and improve upon the Falcon 9, this might be a completely different story.
(I hope that very specific burner reference gives me some bona fides here. Would you believe the late Larry Harvey once spent a good hour on the phone trying to convince me to return to the playa back in the late 90s? Yet here we all remain. Thanks, Obama.)
Rather than bore you with a history of Falcon 9 launches since 2013, let me offer you this enthusiastic video from the GREAT SPACEX YouTube channel, published last week. SpaceX fans, you’re going to love this one, because it lauds praise on a robust rocket program. Zero trigger warning -- eat up, no crumbs!
I’m going to take a moment here to say yes, I absolutely, 100% failed to give the Falcon 9 program its due in previous diaries, and upon further review, to those engineers I sincerely apologize. There is a lot of cool, cool stuff there. Mea culpa.
However — reusable? Inexpensive? There are some reasons to be skeptical.
First, let’s familiarize ourselves with the Falcon 9 as it functions today with this extremely helpful (and short) explainer form the The Back Story YouTube channel:
In that video, you may have noticed the first stage booster is far and away the bulk of the rocket. So obviously, reusability here is a big deal and reduces the cost, making SpaceX the cheapest option in most cases, as seen here when we got a look at U.S. Space Force contract modifications in 2020:
...How much cheaper have SpaceX rocket launches become? Thanks to a series of contract modifications just announced by the U.S. Space Force, we finally know.
Last week, Space Force announced that it will permit SpaceX to fly reused (or as SpaceX prefers, "flight-proven") Falcon 9 rockets to launch the government's next two government GPS III satellites. The government had previously insisted that such "national security" satellites be launched aboard brand new rockets, but SpaceX has successfully re-flown used rockets for other customers 38 times now.
It seems that that's enough to have finally convinced Space Force that this is a safe way to get to orbit -- and cheaper, to boot.
How much cheaper? Initially, SpaceX had agreed to launch these government GPS satellites for about $97 million each. But in return for being permitted to fly reusable rockets, SpaceX now says it can cut the price it charges Space Force for the next two launches by a total of $52.7 million -- a savings of more than $26 million each -- as BreakingDefense.com reported last week.
I know, that’s a lot higher than what Gwynne said in 2013 when they were aiming for fully reusable rockets in the $5-to-$7m range, and back in 2011 Elon said, over time, the launches could end up costing as little as $50,000. Obviously we haven’t realized quite this level of savings yet.
There’s plenty of good reasons for the reality of these economics, but one might wonder what Elon and Gwynne were looking at a decade ago when these aspirational goals were promoted. For now, let’s stay focused on reusability — we’ll have more to say about economics and competitors in a minute.
While it was always intended for both stages of the Falcon 9 to be reused, the second-stage booster remains single-use -- and there are no plans for that to change.
SpaceflightNow in 2021:
Although SpaceX has proven it can safely reuse first stages, payload shrouds*, and Dragon capsules, the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage remains a single-use component. None of SpaceX’s competitors in the commercial launch industry have successfully re-flown an orbital-class booster. Some companies, like Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, plan to eventually recover and reuse their rocket boosters.
*Also called Fairings, these will come up shortly!
Animations Xplaned on YouTube has a decent overview on the challenges of recovering the second stage if you’d like to get more into the weeds here, but we need to be fair to SpaceX and concede none of their competitors can recover this stage, either.
SpaceX has abandoned all efforts here in favor of Starship.
“With Starship, we’ll hopefully reuse the whole thing,” Musk said. “This is a hard problem for rockets, that’s for sure. It’s taken us, we’re like 19 years in now. I think the Starship design can work. It’s just, it’s a hard thing to solve, and the support of NASA is very much appreciated in this regard. I think it’s going to work. I think it’s going to work.
“I’d say it’s only recently though that I feel that full and rapid reusability can be accomplished,” Musk said. “I wasn’t sure for a long time, but I am sure now.”
Hold on, what did he say in 2011?
Musk said the animation was about a 90 percent accurate depiction of the envisioned rocket.
I’ll grant you he may be referencing the cosmetics of the rocket there, though that would mean he possibly sold a product a decade ago he wasn’t sure until “only recently” would function as he claimed.
The final part of the rocket to discuss is one place we can unabashedly hand it to the SpaceX engineers in the quest toward full reusability. Here’s spectacular footage of a fairing (and actually, the first SpaceX has reused) reentering the atmosphere following an April launch:
This article from 2022 touts the recovery program’s considerable streak of success:
Between May 2021 and June 2022, SpaceX successfully recovered every fairing half from missions launched from Florida. This success streak ended on July 7, 2022, when only one half was recovered during the Starlink 4-21 mission.
Further to this, on July 24, SpaceX launched the Starlink 4-25 mission and did not attempt to recover either fairing half for the first time since 2019. Support vessel Doug departed Port Canaveral without the fast boats necessary for the operation, and the vessel tracking shows that the ship never left the booster landing zone to sail towards the area where the fairing halves would land.
That’s right, support vessel Doug. Even better, its sister vessel is Bob. And with those two names combined, a distinct Canuck cries out: "Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo!"
Holds up.
So now is as good a time as any to bring up FalconHeavy, as we haven’t really discussed it too much so far. Even in 2013, this was a headache for Gwynne. At 6:17:
“FalconHeavy, I’ll talk a little bit in the future. I tell my engineering teams, ‘C’mon, it can’t be that hard, it’s just three Falcon 9’s glued together, let’s move it.’
“But obviously it’s a little more complicated than that.”
A lot more complicated, as it turned out. But really, let’s not go down that rabbit hole today. For now, I think it’s uncontroversial to simply say the FalconHeavy is a stopgap for SpaceX until Starship is ready and set that to the side.
That Falcon 9 booster rocket? Sure, that’s a “reusable rocket” in my mind. Very cool piece of machinery. I see the benefits — though with caveats, because the specific promise of a booster flying “thousands” of times, where it would land, receive basic maintenance and then be refueled and sent back into service (under 24 hours) is where SpaceX has considerable work to do.
Though they have been getting better turning around the boosters. Recently, SpaceX clocked the best time to date:
SpaceX has successfully launched and landed the same Falcon 9 booster twice in three weeks, smashing the current record for orbital-class rocket turnaround.
The existing record was also held by Falcon 9 and set in early 2021 when booster B1060 launched a Turkish communications satellite and a batch of Starlink spacecraft just 27 days and 4 hours apart. Now, just under 15 months later, a new Falcon 9 booster has decisively taken the crown.
And yes, these things are insanely complicated!
My question would be, what future is ahead for the Falcon 9? It seems like SpaceX’s primary focus is Starlink, and in turn Starship (although that appears more a “chicken or the egg” conundrum at this point).
So what happened? I mean, one can sort of imagine a blanket being tugged from two ends here, between Elon’s Starship/Starlink and Falcon 9. Maybe it all fits together if we take a closer look.
First, how has the satellite market evolved from where we started with Gwynne in 2013? You don’t need to be in the industry to understand something we all see every day — electronics get smaller and lighter every year. Smaller satellites, smaller rockets.
Around 2019, SpaceX was confronted by this shift in the industry. From The Motley Fool:
Big rockets are out. Small satellites -- and the small rockets that can carry them into orbit -- are in.
This was the upshot of StratSpace Intelligence's Intelligence Report & Market Forecast last year, which predicted a big uptick in smaller space rocket launches in coming years, alongside a plateauing of missions utilizing large rockets like the SpaceX Falcon 9 and United Launch Alliance Atlas V. With miniaturization increasingly permitting small satellites to do the work previously only do-able by large satellites -- and the cost of building small satellites falling to just a few tens of thousands of dollars apiece -- there's simply not as much demand for putting big honking satellites into orbit anymore.
The result: There is an "excess" of large space rockets on the market today, a serious overcapacity of about "about 100%" more big rockets than we actually need. That means SpaceX is going to have to find a new use for some of its big reusable rockets.
Ah, there it is. Hey, SpaceX wouldn’t be the first company to end up with excess inventory after some aggressive strategy. Sometimes a pivot point arrives.
There’s also some fascinating detail in that story about Spaceflight Industries reselling portions of its free space in cargo that was going aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 launches, and that seems to have given Elon some bright ideas, if you’ve got the time, this fills in some blanks on how SpaceX started putting the squeeze on the little guys, as you’re going to see in a minute.
SpaceX costs did actually go up recently, as reported in Space.com, 2022:
SpaceX just raised prices for its launch and Starlink internet services, citing the inflationary pinch that the rest of us are feeling as well.
For example, the price of a launch of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has gone up from $62 million to $67 million and it now costs $97 million, rather than the previous $90 million, to book a flight of the company's huge Falcon Heavy launcher. That's a roughly 8% boost in both cases. (SpaceX launches are still cheaper than comparable rides offered by their competitors, however, in part because SpaceX flies reusable rockets.)
Though as I alluded up above, the increases were nowhere near enough to spare competitors any breathing room, as The Motley Fool reported February:
In a vividly titled piece that got no small amount of attention among space investors earlier this month, SpaceNews warned of a coming "bloodletting" in the space industry. Demand for space launch continues to grow despite the lingering effects of the pandemic, and despite the looming recession. And yet companies that specialize in launching small satellites in particular are "struggling to make money," warns SpaceNews, and not all of these companies will survive.
Investors bet that as the price of space launches decreased, demand for space launch services would increase -- and they were right to do so.
Problem is, one particular space company is doing its darnedest to vacuum up as much of this business as possible for itself, leaving only scraps for the rest of the industry. The culprit, of course, is SpaceX.
One might wonder how exactly Elon’s Starship fits into this “too many big rockets” trend? After all, as I keep patiently pointing out, Starship is not about going to Mars anytime soon. It’s about unleashing hordes of Starlink V2 satellites to add to its ever-growing megaconstellation of 42,000 objects.
Elon explains all of this himself in this 2022 leaked e-mail to employees obtained by SpaceExplored:
“The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2).
“Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.”
In that same The Motley Fool article, Rich Smith explains how SpaceX found a use for all those excess rockets:
Just as I predicted back in 2019, SpaceX saw the potential of the growing market for small satellite launches. Not wanting to miss out on the gold rush, it figured out how to use its own large rockets to launch many, many small satellites at once -- at prices too low for other companies to compete with.
Okay, exhale. You’ve almost made it.
Let’s just throw some notes up here on the white board, kind of summing up what we all just read together.
* The Falcon 9 is cool. The booster on its own is a reusable rocket in my book, though not quite as advertised (though SpaceX has done really well in places)
* In 2019, the industry began a shift away from big rockets to small, leaving SpaceX with 100% too much Falcon 9 inventory. (Sharp observation from ObeyMyBrain in the comments that I’m being fuzzy with the number here, as the it’s the entire industry that finds itself with 100% too much inventory, so this isn’t quite correct to state — though I think we all know the Falcon 9 makes up a gigantic part of the overall number)
* SpaceX found a use for their excess rockets by bundling up smaller loads, undercutting competitors.
* Despite the market demanding smaller rockets, both Starship and FalconHeavy fit the mold of Elon’s oft-stated admiration for the Soviets massive N1, a failed rocked program that never reached orbit.
* Starship began life ostensibly for a Mars mission that now appears unlikely (kindly), and now according to Elon Musk is mission-critical for mass delivery of V2 Starlink satellites, as neither the Falcon 9 or FalconHeavy can lift them into orbit.
* Investors see SpaceX as the only viable place to invest. They wouldn’t mind a Starlink spin-off, either. They’re running out of places to put their money as SpaceX dominates.
Quite the pivot from 2019, looks like. Still, I mean… it’s a strategy. Up to you.
We started today with Gwynne, so she can help bring us home. Here she is in a TED Talk in 2018, reported here by CNBC. Let me tell you, sometimes you see a quote that takes your breath away:
But when Musk first articulates a goal, Shotwell says she listens and thinks before responding.
“First of all, when Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ or, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that. I don’t know how.’ So you zip it, and you think about it, and you find ways to get that done,” says Shotwell.
She has also had to get used to the idea is will never be easy going at SpaceX.
“I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals, make them achievable, and kind of roll the company over from this steep slope, get it comfortable,” says Shotwell.
Gwynne is very, very good at her job. Tough role.
That said, in terms of “making Elon’s dreams achievable,” it should be noted that the title of this TED Talk was “SpaceX's plan to fly you across the globe in 30 minutes.” Which just… no. I’ll spare you all here, but trust me — nevergonnahappen. No time for that nonsense right now — we’ll talk another time.
Still, one might wonder how it feels for someone who has built a lauded, successful program see the entire business shift toward a huge whale of a rocket whose engines keep exploding to deliver a megaconstellation of 42,000 additional pieces of space junk as Federal dollars pivot away from satellite to terrestrial broadband.
Tax Musk. Fund NASA. Get a different result.
I’m through, see you in the comments.