Elon Musk: Gazing at the stars

Tech business transfer

Part of SpaceX’s spectacular success so far has been Musk’s transfer of business practices honed at PayPal and other startups to the design and engineering of rockets and the Dragon spacecraft. The company designed and built in-house the Merlin engines that power its Falcon 9 rocket. It also developed key components like the guidance and rendezvous technologies needed to reach the station.

Musk and his engineers showed their mettle during Dragon’s first flight to the space station in May when one of two laser radars used to calculate the spacecraft’s closing distance to the station malfunctioned. Musk and his engineering team at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., mission control center figured out on-the-fly that the laser beam needed to be narrowed. Only then would NASA managers allow Dragon to get close enough to the station for astronauts to grab the cargo ship with a 58-foot robotic arm.


That’s precisely the kind of seat-of-the-pants engineering commercial space companies will require in order to succeed in the unforgiving environment of outer space.
 
While SpaceX is the first and only commercial space company to reach the space station, Musk’s ultimate goal remains sending humans to Mars. "I think we'll be able to send, probably, the first people to Mars in roughly 12 to 15 years. That's my estimate," the billionaire entrepreneur boldly predicted in a recent interview on ABC’s Nightline.

Musk was asked recently whether he has learned more from his failures or his successes. “In the case of both Tesla and SpaceX,” he responded, “at the beginning people said … I was likely to fail, and I agreed with them.” While critics said his chances of success were zero, “I thought it was probably, maybe 20 or 30 percent or 40 percent. It’s just because there are no prior precedents for success in creating an orbital space company, really, or a new car company in the last 90 years.”

Despite the early success of SpaceX, critics like space expert John Pike argue that “Elon hasn’t blown up enough hardware” and SpaceX has so far been “plagued by random success.”

So far, Musk has proven his critics wrong and is basking in the glow of the first two successful commercial space flights to the International Space Station. There are much bigger challenges ahead for Musk. Key among them is whether his space machines will function properly when human beings are strapped inside.