"The ability of SpaceX to reach orbit and safely transport payloads into space is not in question. On my part, I will never give up, and I mean that."
(Elon Musk)
The foregoing was part of a letter (1) received by the employees of the American company "SpaceX" on the eve of a severe failure, on the third of August 2008 the third launch of the "Falcon 1", after the failure of two other launches in the previous two years, but a team Work had counted on this latest launch after adding a powerful new engine and fixing errors in the last launch. SpaceX placed four small satellites on top of this missile, specially for the Aerospace and Aviation Agency and the US Department of Defense and another private company, and waited for it to actually reach Earth orbit Low load conductivity.
Not like any failure
But that did not happen, during the separation from the missile (2), the first stage - due to the power of the new engine - bounced back and hit the fuel again, while the second stage fuel was still close to it, which caused it to crash after a short period and the mission failed, in that period it was Six years have passed since the establishment of the company and the financing started to run out, only one additional attempt is left and the company declares bankruptcy, especially that Kistler, which received almost the same amount of funding, has declared bankruptcy also months ago, and everyone saw that private companies enter the missile track Space is both an economic and technological catastrophe.
Perhaps those are the worst moments for SpaceX, and by extension Elon Musk, but he decided to continue the path to his end and to happen what could happen, and he sent to his employees this enthusiastic speech in order to push them to continue to work with the same enthusiasm, but the expectations for success were Weak, so what really happened between this extreme failure that night of 2008 and what "SpaceX" is accomplishing as we speak now in 2020 is undoubtedly worthy of reflection.
SpaceX yesterday (3), on May 31, through its "Falcon 9" missile, sent the two astronauts from NASA's "Doug Harley" and "Bob Pinken" to the International Space Station, and thus became " SpaceX, "the first private company in history to carry astronauts to space, and with successes in the past few years during which the company transferred separate payloads to the International Space Station and private satellites for multiple governments and companies, SpaceX announced the beginning of a new industry in which private companies can enter to compete. But how was Elon Musk able to reach his company with this success after she approached bankruptcy?
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/DRBfdUM7JA
- SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 30, 2020
Russian missiles and vodka
Well, there is a lot of will, ambition, effort, persistence and all of those bright words of course, but in practice the first thing that helped Mask was a conviction he built during the development of his company "Tesla", which is that to attract the attention of the investor must reduce the price so that it becomes a surprise to everyone in the market And to implement this approach, you must rely on a very basic idea in the world of economics that simply says: "Create it yourself."
In order for a NASA to build a missile, it does not require that you manufacture all of its parts, but only import a large group of them from other companies through a group of agents, if you consider the cost of all agents, manufacturers and their employees on a transmitter and receiver flight Simple to one of the Falcon missiles, for example, it might collect a cost of $ 100,000, while SpaceX makes it at a cost of only $ 5,000. It is a huge reduction in costs, especially since the company manufactures 85% of its missile components from scratch.
In fact, the source of that idea - specifically for "SpaceX" - was a previous disappointment when Musk (4) was in Paris trying to buy some rockets from the European Space Agency, which I offered at a very high price compared to the money he had at the time, there he heard The Russians were displaying three ICBMs at the selling table, so he would have given them $ 21 million, but they laughed at it. At this point Musk asked himself and his team: What if we decided to weigh and value the missile's material? All iron, copper, plastic, nickel and other materials. Here he discovered that the price difference, without agents, was 97% of the price of a single missile, and thus the new plan began.
But that idea is not as easy as it seems, it takes a lot of experience to build a missile with the power of "Falcon 9", the missile that Musk contracted with NASA to build about 15 years ago in order to perform transportation-related tasks to the International Space Station and received about 300 One Million Dollars Here, Mask worked on two basic plans to develop the capabilities of his engineers and his entire team.
The first relates to the location of workplaces. Heavy tech companies usually tend to build their factories in Asia and Africa due to the presence of cheap labor there, but Tesla and SpaceX factories are in the United States of America (5), so there is no national dimension - though It was used for marketing purposes - rather, Musk worked to develop the expertise of his engineers and workers by putting them together in the same place, where the company's offices are usually in separate areas of the state separate from factories, but for Tesla and SpaceX everyone was close to Some of it, bug fixes and development processes were done concurrently with manufacturing.
Not only that, but Musk was, from the start, following a policy that integrates developments with the rapid launch to support the expertise of his relatively modern team, and at that point he disagrees with the other billionaire who entered the space, "Jeff Bezos" through the company Blue Origins, At first glance it seems to work very slowly, but the idea that Bezos works in a way is "to move slowly faster than to move quickly", as it builds strong alliances on economic and political scales, and gives the theoretical time longer to form a heavy basis for action.
The second plan is that Elon Musk is, in the end, not an angel (6), who is known to be a solid entrepreneur, pressuring his employees to complete work as quickly as possible, and does not accept any waiver of exceptional standards in the work environment, and this starts from above An engineer to the youngest worker, you will see on the social media platforms famous marketing rules that say that Elon Musk does not believe in meetings and that he is interested in production at the expense of working hours and you feel happy, but you will hear in the news - from time to time - about workers who have completed more than 100 hours per week Without the holidays that caused their illness, he caught himself often talking about 80 hours of work per week as normal.
Make it cheaper
At that point that stands between scientific achievement and entrepreneurship, there is Elon Musk, he is not a scientist, not even an engineer in the understandable sense, but it is similar to "Henry Ford", where the latter's job was not to create new technology for cars from scratch, but to work to reconsider To what already exists: How can we adjust it so that it becomes cheaper? How can we make rockets a commercial activity, just as Henry Ford turned cars into commercial activity, so we reached a stage where the world contains approximately 1 billion cars?
This simple philosophy (make it cheaper) is the reason for all of the unique SpaceX production by extension, the reason why Elon Musk - at some point - simply asked himself by saying: If we were able to reduce the price of the missile exceptionally after we built its parts, would Could we lower the price further so that it becomes only a very easy price compared to what we pay now?
This will only happen if SpaceX can reuse its missiles. Imagine, for example, that the planes are used for only one flight and then get damaged. How much will the ticket cost? The same is true for missiles. Indeed, the cheapest thing about the missile is its fuel. If we can return the missile to Earth, the flight of "Falcon 9" to the International Space Station, for example, will cost only about $ 100,000, which is a very small number.
In the year 2012, "SpaceX" started its tests (7) on the system of returning missiles to ground bases after performing its tasks by pushing the second stage of space. The tests started on a simplified model and the goal was to rise from the ground a small distance and then descend standing, starting with one meter, then ten Then tens of meters, then hundreds of meters, and when they reached a limit of 1000 meters above the surface of the earth, experiments began on the giant rocket, "Falcon 9 ″, at first the experiments were unsuccessful, but that - in fact - is another part of a simple and effective engineering policy as well. Very: "trial and error".
Little by little, engineering expertise in trial and error has accumulated, bringing the landing success rates of ground bases to 100%. In each SpaceX missile, you can find 6 exquisite engineering tricks that work together with great flexibility to make the missile more like a person descending to Earth.
The first of which is, for example, the development of the Merlin engine so that it can be restarted again for the return journey, as well as building a precise global positioning system (GPS) integrated in the missile to control its itinerary, and modifying the engine so that it can change the direction of propulsion unlike the usual missiles Space, you will find side holes in the missile to adjust its position if it is on the verge of falling, and side fins that control the stability of the missile during landing, and very flexible landing parts that run when approaching the ground to stand the missile stable and confident stepping as king.
Separately, each of these additions is not difficult engineering, but merging them together in one ambitious time-pressing action plan is the secret of SpaceX’s success in returning 3 units of the Falcon 9 missile (together they make one missile called now “Falcon”). Heavy) to Earth After launching the mission, Falcon Heavy was the most powerful working missile on Earth at the time of its launch on February 6, 2018, but the eye-catching thing was not the missile’s greatness, but rather the cost of missions on it, in previous NASA missions. The cost of delivering one kilogram to Earth orbit (8) was $ 54,000, with Falcon Heavy dropping that cost to $ 1,300, which is Elon Musk's real achievement.
Elon Musk, then, is an entrepreneur with different interests. He combined skilled engineers with the iPhone and Samsung building policy to create a new competitive world, but this time he turned missiles more than 70 meters high. This type of work policy is able to embrace one of the most important advantages in the history of engineering, which is Brainstorming to create the most bizarre ideas, experiment with them, adjust the results, then develop companies in small but steady steps, it's like Toyota's famous Kaizen policy.
Magic Dragon
This is in addition to another important policy that Mask has been developing with SpaceX and Tesla during their short history. Its goal is also to reduce costs as much as possible, along with the ability to place Musk himself at the top of the list of those referred to as Lebanon whenever they pass here or there. Thus political weight is also given to understand this policy. Let's consider a little more the name "Falcon", it is adapted (9) from the name (Millennium Falcon), the vehicle that Joey Johnston designed for the movie "Star Wars", so that the name "Dragon" himself, which The capsule on top of the missile, adapted from the title (10) of a famous American song, is called "Puff, the Magic Dragon".
I carried the first "Dragon" capsule that arrived at the International Space Station with a huge cheese disc on it, while the "Falcon Heavy" missile carried an old Tesla car for Elon Musk, while when the astronauts from the International Space Station entered the "Dragon" capsule after the first A successful docking in 2010, they said that its smell was "like a new car", and yesterday's trip carried Harley and you with a plastic dinosaur with them, which is a game for one of the children of one of them. It has a very high price that we can bypass paying through things like that.
In fact, we can take that idea back until 2001 before the creation of "SpaceX", which started through a tumultuous "trend" created by Elon Musk when he announced his participation (11) in an ambitious project to go to Mars, called "The Oasis of Mars", This means that the space agencies of the Earth will send plants to Mars inside a closed room as the beginning of a promising project for the reconstruction of Mars, this project - as you notice - is as close to creative imagination as it is to a business plan, but for Mask it was not only that, but was a way to attract attention People to the world of space again.
Humans reached the moon in the sixties, that was the height of human interest in spaceflight, interest in this range began to decrease slowly and with it the budget of the American space project decreased until we reached the year 2011 when (12) the space shuttle project stopped completely and the process of sending astronauts and payloads to The International Space Station runs through Russian companies, which made the American society completely see the issue of "space", at which point the smart entrepreneur Musk, who knows well that the public’s interest is half of the deal, begins with his strikes that ignited the enthusiasm of the whole world for what he is doing through that Small movements!
All of that opened the door for more commercial trips to space in an era that all countries of the world want to send satellites and other payloads for separate purposes into space, and with a mass turnout that did not happen for more than half a century the door became wide open to Elon Musk - his companions from the world of billionaires Silicon Valley To take broad strides starting from the moon and not ending at Mars, at a time in our history when space rockets became closer to a bus or train!
Gods of the Olympic Mountains
At that point, let us pause a little to wonder about Elon Musk himself, that he is not one person, but rather a new business policy that was born from the womb of smartphones competing with government policies that have been calculating, which has become slow and very expensive in a very fast digital era, at the same time the experience is not positive in proportion One hundred percent, because inside those bright factories from outside you can see a lot of pressure on people like you and me, you can also meet creative engineers but nobody knows their names.
But there is no doubt that what attracts the most attention to this man is his ambition. Consider it a little, after Elon Musk got $ 165 million in his 13th stake in the PayPal sale. Perhaps his thoughts about what one of us wants in his life may change. It is similar to what happened in the movie "Without Borders" ( Limitless) When Eddie - the star of the movie that Bradley Cooper played - got a transparent pill that raised the level of his intelligence, he not only aspired for money or fame, but aspired for greatness, to be influential not only in a small scale but in the whole world.
Elon Musk is a similar case, his adventures in the companies "Solar City", "Tesla" and "SpaceX" and others indicate that he possesses this strange kind of ambition, not of course to the world as it seems from his messages, and it is also a key characteristic of the Silicon Valley kings ( We would like to create a better world etc.), but for its own sake, as if it wanted to dig itself as an ancient Greek myth created to remain from the gods of war, beauty, good or evil, it is an eye-catching experience, no doubt, on all possible possibilities for the future of the world with it.
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