A lot of people really only heard of SpaceX relatively recently, so they may think, say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was. But it wasn't. Falcon 1 is where we started out, we started off with just a few people who really didn't know how to make rockets. And the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer was not because I wanted to, it's because I couldn't hire anyone. Nobody good would join, so I ended up being that by default. And I messed up the first three launches. Fortunately the fourth launch worked or that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day.
Falcon 1 was quite a small rocket. When we were doing Falcon 1 we were really trying to figure out what is the smallest useful payload that we could get to orbit. We thought okay, something around half a ton to orbit, you know that could launch a decent sized small satellite to low Earth orbit, and that's why we sized Falcon 1.
We got the Falcon 1 to orbit and then we did our first satellite launch, which was a commercial mission for Malaysia. That launch successfully put the satellite into orbit and I think it's actually still up there.
We took most of the lessons learned from Falcon 1 and began to scale that up to Falcon 9 with an order of magnitude more thrust, around a million pounds of thrust. Falcon 1 was quite a small rocket compared to Falcon 9. Particularly when you factor in payload, Falcon 9 is many times more, sort of on the order of 30 times more payload than Falcon 1.
Our goal has been to create something that is a reliable truck, essentially, rather than a Ferrari. In the Falcon 9, we've leveraged the engine we developed with the Falcon 1, the Merlin 1-C. We essentially ganged nine of those together on the first stage, and then one on the upper stage with an expanded nozzle. That actually gave us about 20 times the payload capability of Falcon 1 because, in the case of Falcon 9, we were using a pump fed upper stage as opposed to a pressure fed upper stage. It's an important difference, for those of you who are familiar with how rockets are designed. It has engine-out capability, so you can lose any one of the main engines and still make it to orbit. I think that's actually a very important principle. There's an advantage to having the 9 engines, because if one of them doesn't work and has what we call a RUD - which is Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - then it still makes it to orbit. That's something we think is important for commercial airliners, given that almost all airliners have multiple engines. All commercial airliners have multiple engines so that if you're going across the Pacific at night and you lose an engine you don't go down, you don't have to use that life raft or that jacket that they give you, which I think has not been used effectively, very often. Jet turbines are far more reliable than rocket engines so if that principle makes sense for jet turbines, it really makes sense for rocket engines. So multi-engine, I think is good, and we're going to keep that philosophy going forward.
In 2010 we did the first launch of Falcon 9 version 1, and we managed to get that to orbit. That had about a 10-ton-to-orbit capability, so it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1.
It also was assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft. As far as cargo transport was concerned, out of budget necessity NASA had gone commercial.
When we first created Dragon version one we didn't really know how to create a spacecraft. We'd never designed a spacecraft before.
The basic concept of operations of the Falcon 9 with the Dragon spacecraft in cargo configuration was a two stage vehicle. The Falcon 9 drops the Dragon off in orbit, and then Dragon goes from that parking orbit, maneuvers under it's own power to the Space Station where it is captured by the arm and it is berthed to the station. At the end it reenters, same way that the Apollo capsules reentered, blunt body reentry, and lands in the ocean. So, while there are a lot of interesting technologies in version one, it does have a relatively conventional landing approach. It throws out parachutes to land in the water off the coast of California, after it comes back from the Space Station, and it does have a life support system, but not one that can last for a long time or carry a lot of people. It’s a great spacecraft and it was a great proof-of-concept. It showed us what it took to bring something back from orbit, which is a very difficult thing to do. Usually when something comes in from orbital velocity, it burns up in a big fireball.
You know, I’m a big believer in sort of not getting too corporate and losing any sort of sense of humor, so when we did the first test flight of our Dragon spacecraft, we were thinking of what sort of interesting and wacky things we can put on there. And I really liked the cheese shop sketch from Monty Python, so it was like, “lets put a big wheel of cheese in the spacecraft.” We got the biggest wheel of cheese the Beverly Hills Cheese Shop had – a giant wheel of stinky Gruyere. We kept it secret because if something had gone wrong with the flight, then people would have thought that perhaps we’ve been distracted by the cheese or something. We don’t ever really want to be in a boring corporate situation. It’s better to have a sense of humor and don’t get too wrapped up in yourself.
2012 is when the Dragon spacecraft was docked to the Space Station and returned to Earth, when we delivered and returned cargo from the Space Station. I don’t think the public realizes how cool the ISS is, that is an awesome thing that's up there. Some people don’t realize we have a Space Station. We have a gigantic Space Station, it’s huge, it's really gigantic. It’s a pretty incredible structure that we have orbiting the Earth. I think we should do something to educate the public about the awesomeness of the Space Station, because it is pretty amazing.
And then President Obama said, 'we should also outsource astronaut transport to commercial entities. If we can fly in Boeing airliners and Airbus airliners and feel good about that, then why can't our spacecraft be built by commercial entities too? There was a Battle Royale against that, which won by a 3% margin in the House of Representatives.
That was a hairy battle. I’m probably not the guy that people would bet on. It’s like a little kid fighting a bunch of sumo wrestlers, usually the sumo wrestlers win. We were a little scrappy company, but every now and then a little scrappy company wins. This was one of those times.
I should make sure to very strongly credit NASA in this arena in terms of how helpful they've been. NASA put out a big competition and awarded two contracts for astronaut transport, one of which went to Boeing - they got a slightly larger contract - and one to us.
I worry slightly about some of the big government contractors. In the space arena some of the big government contractors would definitely like to see SpaceX die. On the military side we had not been allowed to compete for the primary military contract because Boeing and Lockheed had managed to shut down all competition.
It used to be Boeing and Lockheed competing and then, I don't know if you know the back story, but there was all sorts of shenanigans. And like, Boeing stole thousands of documents from Lockheed, and used those in their competition against Lockheed, and Lockheed found out. I mean, these guys have some pretty bad track records here of really bad behavior. The Boeing CFO went to jail for bribing the top Air Force procurement officer and they had been doing so for years. I don't know if you know the Darleen Druyun situation, so it's not paranoia or made up, people did time in the big house. You can pretty much bet that's the tip of the iceberg. The Air Force did a thorough investigation and concluded that was the only one - it was only her. They would definitely like to see SpaceX die. I'm sure I am being tortured in effigy right now. You know when you see a movie, and there's the bad corporation in the movie, that's like the big defense contractors. Those are our competition in a lot of cases. Lockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they've certainly tried to stomp on us.
I guess they're afraid that we'll take some of the huge gravy train they have exclusive access to, that it’s not going to be as big.
People have tried, but usually the military-industrial complex was able to resist any attack by a newcomer. It was like fighting this giant citadel with very high walls, and usually if a small force attacks a large citadel it is not the citadel that falls.
The people fighting it are in the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the procurement officers who then go work at Boeing and Lockheed or their prime contractors, which is actually what happened.
It's easy to understand from a game theory standpoint, because essentially we're asking them to award the contract to a company where they're probably not going to get a job, against the company where their friends are. So they've gotta go against their friends and their future retirement program. This is a difficult thing to expect.
So we did have a bit of a challenge with the Air Force, and this is something where I'm sort of surprised there was not more journalistic interest, because the Air Force was proposing to extend the sole source monopoly of Boeing and Lockheed until 2018. The reasoning given for that was preservation of the industrial base. Although, oddly, for some reason we were not included in the industrial base, and this is doubly odd because the main rocket used by Boeing and Lockheed, the United Launch Alliance, was the Atlas V which has a Russian main engine. And a center airframe, the interstage, and the forward airframe, the faring are made in Switzerland. So which industrial base were we talking about preserving? The one in Russia? That didn’t make much sense in light of Russia's de facto-annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region and the formal severing of military ties. The Atlas V couldn’t possibly be described as providing assured access to space for our nation when supply of its main engine depends on President Putin's permission.
Our Falcon launch vehicles are truly made in America. We design and manufacture the rockets in California and Texas, with key suppliers throughout the country, and launch them from either Vandenberg Air Force Base or Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. We do a huge part of our R&D in Central Texas near Waco. We’re building a third launch site in South Texas near Brownsville that’ll give us good contingency capability if there’s a say hurricane coming trough the Cape and we still need to get to the Station. That would insure continuity of service.
This stands in stark contrast to the United Launch Alliance's most frequently flown vehicle, the Atlas V. It's worth noting that the Merlin 1A engine, the main engine on Falcon 1 was only the second American-built booster engine to see flight in about 25 years. The other one was the RS-68 for the Delta IV, and before that was the Space Shuttle main engine. It was actually the first new American hydrocarbon engine to see flight since the '60s.
When the merger between Boeing and Lockheed's business occurred, the merger promised in the press release a $150 million of savings. Instead, there were billions of dollars of cost overruns, and a non-recovery breach for the program exceeding 50% of its cost projections. According to congressional records, in FY14 the Air Force paid an average of $380 million for each national security launch, while subsidizing ULA's fixed costs to the tune of more than a billion dollars per year, even if they never launch a rocket. By contrast, SpaceX's price was well under a $100 million. Meaning a savings of almost $300 million per launch. Which, in many cases, would pay for the launch and the satellite combined. If you took something like a GPS satellite which is about $140 million, you could actually have a free satellite with the launch. Which is an enormous difference, and we were seeking no subsidies to maintain our business.
I think that we're unique in the launch business of publishing our prices on our website. Whereas other launch providers sort of treat it like a rug bazaar - they'll charge you what they think you can afford. We believe in every day low prices, you know, and we've stuck to our guns on that.
You know, we have 1% of the lobbying power of Boeing and Lockheed. If this decision is made as a function of lobbying power, we are screwed. If this were just a matter of lobbying power we would have no chance. I'm not sure what the combined Boeing and Lockheed lobbying forces are, but if they were to send them all out at once the sky is dark. I mean, it's a swarm. They have entire buildings, you can see it as you go into DC, you know. We've got half of one floor.
In order to be certified as an EELV provider, SpaceX had to meet a number of requirements that were never demanded of the incumbent provider. We were required to successfully launch three flights of our upgraded Falcon 9 vehicle, which we achieved. It has required a lot of effort from me and from other people at SpaceX just to find people in Congress who are ideologically motivated, and who aren't swayed by lobbying or only perhaps a little bit swayed. You know, John McCain spent a lot of time in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp, one would think about his politics he's not easily intimidated. He thinks this was a crazy issue because here we have the taxpayers paying three times more for a rocket. I mean, Boeing and Lockheed make decent rockets but three times more is really crazy, and the engine maker is majority owned by the Kremlin, directly, there's not even a fig leaf in-between. So, why are we sending taxpayer money to fund the Russian war machine? In the interests of national security, we're sending hundreds of millions of dollars to a country that is doing terrible things and certainly not acting in our best interests. This makes no sense, it's like a Joseph Heller novel you know, it's so crazy.
The justice department was the one defending the defense department. They shouldn't be defending the defense department, this is crazy, they should care about justice. In fact, at one point the judge actually had to remind the justice department lawyer that he works for the American people, not for Boeing and Lockheed.
I think, as a country, we've generally decided that competition in the free market is a good thing and that monopolies are not good. It’s interesting to note that from the point from which Boeing and Lockheed's launch business merged - the point where they stopped being competitors - the costs doubled since then.
I think that companies should just get together and compete as best they can. Totally cool, just let it be a fair game. That’s all have a fair game, level playing field, may the best company or group of companies win. And frankly, if our rockets are good enough for NASA, why are they not good enough for the Air Force? It doesn't make sense.
2013 is when we first started doing vertical takeoff and landing tests, and where we were going to the next generation of Falcon 9, which is a vertical take-off and landing capability. And 2014 is when we were able to have the first orbital booster do a soft landing in the ocean. The landing was soft, then it fell over and exploded, but the landing — for 7 seconds — it was good. And we also improved the capability of the vehicle from 10 tons to about 13 tons to LEO (low Earth orbit).
Going from Dragon version one to Dragon 2 we wanted to take a big step in technology, really create something that was a step change in spacecraft technology. In terms of lessons learned from Dragon 1, there's certainly a lot that we learned in every aspect of the vehicle - whether it's the heat shield technology, the Draco engine technology, orbital maneuvering, de-orbit and trying to achieve a precision reentry path through the high velocity entry, that's quite a difficult thing. You got to operate in a vacuum, hypersonic, supersonic, transonic, subsonic, that’s just a lot of regimes for any flying object to go through.
Although Dragon version one lands with parachutes, before the parachutes open it actually is executing a very precise guided path with the engines firing during reentry. The thing that is interesting and maybe slightly scary is that the Dragon is a robotic spaceship that is automatically navigating itself to the Space Station. It does pause at various points and asks if everything is OK, so it asks permission to proceed. But who knows it could be like HAL 9000, I mean we say like open the pod bay doors and he doesn't do it.
Some important characteristics are that it'll be capable of carrying seven people - seven astronauts for several days. We were actually designing the system with people in mind from the beginning. It's been way more difficult than cargo for sure, as soon as people enter the picture it's really a giant step up in making sure things go right, and for sure the oversight from NASA is much tougher. Technically, if somebody were to stow aboard the cargo version of Dragon, they'd actually be fine. I mean, hopefully, if it came back, they'd be fine. In the pressurized volume we actually maintain sea level pressure, we maintain humidity, we maintain the temperature very precisely because we're trying to transport experiments that have plants and mice and fish and that kind of thing, to orbit and back. So, you could certainly stow away, and do it, but in order for it to be really safe enough we want to establish a standard of safety beyond the Space Shuttle and anything else prior. You really want to have a launch escape capability, and you want to have lots of flights under the belt and tested without anyone on-board before putting people on-board.
It has an improved version of our PICA heat shield, and it's all-round, I think, really a big leap forward in technology. It really takes things to the next level.
One of the technologies that was really critical to the development of the SuperDraco engine was the ability to do 3D metal printing, because it is quite a complex engine and was very difficult to form all the cooling channels and the injector head and the throttling mechanism. But being able to print very high strength advanced alloys, I think was crucial to being able to create the SuperDraco engine as it is.
In crew configuration we can carry the same amount of people as the Space Shuttle. Cargo configuration we carry less, but now that the Space Station is assembled there really isn't a need for the added cargo capacity of the Space Shuttle. It would be like people going to visit your house in a giant semi trailer. It wouldn't make much sense.
It's very important to be able to take things back and forth from the Space Station. Obviously we need resupply the astronauts with food and what not. We also need to bring up space experiments, replacement hardware, we need to bring experiments back so they can be analyzed in a laboratory, we need to bring back hardware that needs to be repaired, so it's really an important transport cargo function. We are the only means to bring cargo back from the Space Station. With the Soyuz you can bring people back, but it's very small, so it's basically what you can tuck under your seat.
To give you a sense of relative size, Dragon is much larger than the Soyuz, in fact you can put the entire Soyuz spacecraft just inside the pressurized section of Dragon. Soyuz can carry three people in a very cramped environment, and we can carry seven people in a roomy environment. We're building the interior to look nice and feel futuristic. It needs to feel like a real spaceship. We're building a ship that NASA's going to use and that other people will use.
We've actually spend a lot of effort on the spacesuit design, on both the functionality and the aesthetics. It's actually really hard, because if you just optimize for functionality it's one thing. If you optimize for aesthetics it doesn't work. Like those things you see in movies, they don't work, so it's like, 'OK. How do we make something that looks cool and works?' With the key goal here being that when people see that spacesuit, we want them to think, 'Yeah. I want to wear that thing one day. That looks awesome.'
In terms of an astronaut corps I kinda think what we should be transporting are scientists and engineers, not pilots, really. Dragon doesn't need pilots. It obviously goes there with just cargo. We sent up 40 mice, they were not piloting the craft. So really, it's a means of transporting people to the Earth-Moon orbit region in order to do science, basically. Potentially to the Moon to do some exploration there. But I kind of think it should be easy to go on a spacecraft, you should be able to just get on with no training and go. It shouldn't be hard.
Yeah, I think it would be fun to ride in Dragon at some point. Some people sometimes think that this is a round-about way of getting me personally into space, but it would be a lot cheaper to buy a ride on the Soyuz. A lot less hassle. But I'd definitely like to fly at some point, that would be great.
December 2015, that was definitely one of the best moments of my life: when the rocket booster came back and landed at Cape Canaveral. That was really... yeah.
My personal probability, we looked into it the night before the flight, and I thought we had probably a 60% chance of success, maybe 70%. There were just so many things that had to go right, and it was an incredibly complex set of maneuvers that the booster had to make. It's flying away from the pad at 5000 km/h, in the wrong direction. It has to deploy the upper stage, do a U-turn, and contain the propellant without centrifuging. The reason it has to be done with nitrogen attitude thrusters is because it's in a vacuum and has to be done quite rapidly. Then restart to boost back in a ballistic arc to Cape Canaveral, which was quite a scary maneuver. Then deploy the hypersonic grid fins and maneuver from hypersonic, through supersonic, to subsonic, and then finally to light the engine again for landing.
After liftoff I ran outside the launch control center onto the causeway to watch the ascent, and I was just wishing that it would make it to orbit. I think that would have been a good day frankly if it would just been that. Then I was in touch with the rest of the crew in mission control and they were giving me updates on the flight. Then I watched the booster come back in, light its engine, and land. It really felt like it was almost on top of us even though it was maybe 3 or 4 miles away. I ran out onto the causeway to watch the landing. The sonic boom, sound only travels at 1000 km/h, reached me about the same time as the rocket touched down, so I actually thought at first that it had exploded. But it turned out to be just that the sonic boom almost exactly coincided with the touchdown point, the sound reached me several seconds later. At first I thought, well at least we got close, but then I went back into launch control, and it was this amazing video of the rocket still actually standing there on the launch pad, or the landing pad I should say. I couldn’t quite believe it.
I can't say exactly where it would rank, but I do think it was a revolutionary moment. No one had ever brought an orbital-class booster back intact. This was a useful mission, it delivered 11 satellites to orbit and then came back and landed. That's perhaps the thing that's really significant, that we achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites. This was a fundamental step change in technology compared to any other rocket that had ever flown. That really showed we could bring an orbit-class booster back from a very high velocity, all the way to the launch site, land it safely, and with almost no refurbishment required for re-flight. It was really amazing and spectacular, and I think it means a lot for the future of launch.
Then in 2016 we also demonstrated landing on a ship. The landing on the ship is very important for very high-velocity geosynchronous missions. That’s important for reusability of Falcon 9, because about roughly a quarter of our missions are sort of servicing the Space Station, and then there's a few other low Earth orbit missions. But most of our missions, probably 60% of our missions, are commercial geo (geosynchronous) missions. So we've got to do these high-velocity missions that really need to land on the ship out to sea. They don't have enough propellant on board to boost back to the launch site.
Hopefully this year we'll be launching Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy ended up being a much more complex program than we thought. It actually ended up being way way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought, At first it sounds really easy, because it's two first stages of Falcon 9’s strapped on as boosters. It's actually not. We had to redesign almost everything except the upper stage in order to take the increased loads. So Falcon Heavy ended up being much more a new vehicle then we realized, and took us a lot longer to get it done.
The Falcon Heavy requires the simultaneous ignition of 27 orbit class engines, there’s a lot that can go wrong there. It’s just one those things that is really difficult to test on the ground. There’s a lot of risk associated with Falcon Heavy, and there’s real good chance that that vehicle does not make it to orbit. I hope it goes far enough away from the pad so that it does not cause pad damage, I would even consider that a win. I think Falcon Heavy will be a great vehicle, but there’s just so much that’s impossible to test on the ground. It just ended up being really way more difficult than we originally thought. We were pretty naive about that. But when it’s fully optimized it's about 2.5 times the capability of the Falcon 9, well over 100,000 pounds to LEO payload capability. The nice thing is that it does have a throw capability to toss a Dragon in a loop around the Moon.