SpaceX #3: Decisive and Aggressive Musk

Elon Musk, remember, is always on multiple projects companies at any given instant. Of the time he spends on any company, he spends 80-90% of his time on the engineering questions, writes Eric Berger in Liftoff. Since he is also the guy who is funding the company, Musk says:

“Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that the money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend the money… Whereas I am making the engineering decisions and spending decisions.”

 

Of course, some decisions went wrong. Like the time he OK’ed aluminium nuts instead of steel ones because they were lighter – “with rockets, every ounce matters”. But the aluminium nut had not been able to tolerate the continuous salt water spray from the ocean when the rocket was being prep’ed, setting off a cascading set of problems that caused the rocket flight to be aborted mid-flight.

 

From early on, Musk knew the company needed customers outside of government, i.e., “commercial” customers – private players and other countries that wanted to put satellites in space. He therefore insisted the rocket be designed with commercial customers in mind, not just NASA.

 

With the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the US began to consider the option of using private means to get astronauts into and back from space. In theory, this could have been an opportunity for SpaceX. In practice though, as Musk says:

“Most of the time, they (NASA) didn’t know who I was. And if they did know, I was some Internet guy, so I was probably going to fail.”

 

Maybe for that reason, maybe for others, NASA awarded a $227 million contract to Kistler, another space company:

“Musk seethed… Here, he believed, NASA had used favouritism to award a contract, without competition.”

Musk wanted to sue. He was advised against it – 90% you’ll lose, and even if you win, you will have an angry customer. Musk sued anyway, partly because he needed the contact desperately, and partly because it was “wrong”. SpaceX won – partly because NASA needed cargo delivery systems to space in the future, and had realized they needed to open the door to new competition anyway. This was just one among many courtroom battles SpaceX would fight.

“Elon Musk was not walking on eggshells on the way to orbit. He was breaking a lot of eggs.”