Liftoff by Eric Berger

Author:Eric Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Texas

January 2003–August 2008

Tom Mueller had watched Flight Two of the Falcon 1 rocket with white knuckles. Sitting beside Musk, the chief of propulsion felt his once-strong bond with the boss fraying. Although Musk publicly blamed Hollman and Thomas for the fuel leak that led to the first Falcon 1 failure, behind closed doors Mueller had not escaped Musk’s ire. An uncomfortable rift had grown between the two men after they had worked so closely together in designing and building the Merlin rocket engine.

“My engine caught on fire, so I was in deep shit,” Mueller said. “For the whole year between the first two launches, Elon and I were not good.”

Following the first launch failure, Musk sought to buoy the spirits of his team by offering them a brief escape. At a cost of more than $100,000, he booked a private Zero-G flight to give employees a taste of spaceflight. Many had come to SpaceX with, if not the outright dream of becoming an astronaut, at least a hope that one day they might ride on top of one of the company’s rockets. During the flight on board a 727 aircraft, about three dozen employees experienced several minutes of weightlessness as the plane flew parabolas, alternating between floating around the cabin at the top of the arc, and pulling nearly 2Gs at the bottom.

“It was like everybody who got a good grade got to fly on the Zero-G flight,” Mueller said. “Well, I didn’t get to fly in the Zero-G flight.” Mueller, one of SpaceX’s best engineers, had been left off the invite list.

Prior to Flight Two, Mueller and Musk had discussed the mission at length. Both agreed that once the second-stage engine lit, the rocket had it made. The Kestrel engine was simple and robust, and had never suffered any significant failures. When the Kestrel engine came alive on Flight Two, Mueller leaped out of his chair and cheered. Musk joined him, and they hugged and whooped together. In the span of a single moment, all was forgiven. Even the second stage’s failure a few minutes later, as it spun out of control, could not entirely extinguish the mood. This one wasn’t Mueller’s fault. The rekindled trust was a good thing, as Mueller and Musk had a big task ahead of them. In California, Mueller and the propulsion team were designing a more advanced Merlin engine, which they would soon put on the test stand in Texas. This new engine would have huge implications for the company.

It would, in fact, very nearly break SpaceX.

A lot of rocket companies had been broken by then. A predecessor at Vandenberg Air Force Base seeking to build a low-cost rocket, Amroc, had gone bust in the 1990s. Some of SpaceX’s earliest and most critical employees, including Koenigsmann, fled from Microcosm and its sputtering rocket program. In Mojave, where SpaceX performed its first gas generator tests in late 2002, a commercial space company named Rotary Rocket had run out of money only a year earlier.

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