The second question the team had to answer was whether they should rebuild an existing rocket or design a new rocket from a clean sheet. What if SpaceX could rebuild the old Saturn V rocket that launched the craft used when we landed on the Moon. Elon argued the Saturn V was a great rocket and its design was much better compared with the Space Shuttle.350 “The holy grail of SpaceX would be to build the Saturn VI,” Elon said.365
Finding old Saturn V blueprints wasn’t an issue. A rumor circulated that the blueprints for the Saturn V rocket were lost, or rather destroyed by the US government so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. But the rumor proved to be false. The blueprints for the Saturn V rocket exists and are stored at the Marshall Space Flight Center and at the Federal Archives. Rocketdyne, the manufacturer of the large F-1 and smaller J-2 engines used in the Saturn V, have also saved their blueprints.279
The problem with rebuilding the Saturn V rocket is that it was designed in the 1960s. It’s impossible to reproduce the rocket because the parts are not manufactured anymore. To rebuild the Saturn V, it has to be redesigned with modern parts, and in the end it’s easier to design a completely new rocket.279 And that’s what the engineers at SpaceX set out to do.
The rockets designed by SpaceX had to be cheap. We want to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base if we can afford it. Launching a rocket is easy compared with how to do it cheaply. You can compare SpaceX with Henry Ford who didn’t invent the car – he just made it available to the public by designing the cheap and reliable T-Ford.
A rocket with a capsule can be more expensive than a Space Shuttle. After the Space Shuttle accident in 2003, when Columbia disintegrated during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, the US government ordered the development of the Ares I rocket. “As is not unusual with large government programs, the schedule slipped and costs ballooned by tens of billions,” Elon said. President Barack Obama canceled the new rocket because it didn’t make sense anymore. To finish the rocket, the program would have needed another $50 billion and the cost per flight would have been $1.5 billion. The cost per flight with the Space Shuttle was $1 billion. This is despite the fact that Ares I could carry only four astronauts and the Space Shuttle could carry at least seven.277
To come up with the answer why rockets were expensive, Elon used his engineering skills. “I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Elon said. “And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, OK, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price – which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.”305 In comparison, the price of the material in a car in relationship to the price of the car itself is about 25 percent. Neither rocket fuel was the reason to why rockets were expensive. The cost of the fuel and oxygen used in a modern rocket is about 0.3 percent of the price.
If neither material nor rocket fuel could be blamed as the reason to why rockets were so expensive, what was the real reason? When SpaceX was founded, Boeing or Lockheed manufactured most rockets. Their rockets were far from cheap simply because they never needed to cut the costs. The rockets were partly funded by the US government, and if the rockets became more expensive than what the contract with NASA said, they received more money. Rockets that are more expensive were actually something good. “If you were sitting at an executive meeting at Boeing and Lockheed and you came up with some brilliant idea to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta, you’d be fired,” Elon said. “Because you’ve got to go report to your shareholders why you made less money. So their incentive is to maximize the cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of cancellation.”288
On the other hand, Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed and famous for aircraft like F-117 Nighthawk and SR-71 Blackbird, gave back money to the government. They gave it back either because they had brought in a project under budget or because they saw that what they worked with was just not going to work.407
SpaceX’s plan was now complete. They would design a rocket with a capsule on the top. To lower the price per launch, all parts of the rocket had to be reusable within a matter of hours – not months as with the Space Shuttle. SpaceX needed to avoid the mentality of other companies that design expensive rockets just to make more money from the government. “Our first order of business is to defeat the incumbent, old school rocket companies,” Elon said. “Lockheed. Boeing. Russia. China. If this is a chess game, they don’t have much of a chance.”50
Launching a Truck Into Space
SpaceX set out to build the cheap and reliable T-Ford rocket. The Falcon Explorer was the result of their hard work, but they would later change the name to Falcon 1. As the number 1 indicates, the Falcon 1 would be the first in a series of rockets named after the spacecraft Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars movies.299 The main character in the first trilogy, Luke Skywalker, called the ship “a piece of junk” when he first saw it. “The ship may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts,” the captain of the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo, told Skywalker.
Neither Falcon 1 looked like much. SpaceX designed the rocket to have the same performance as a reliable truck. “Think of cars, is a Ferrari more reliable than a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?” Elon asked. “Current rockets are designed to have ultra-high performance, often to the point of far exceeding the thrust needed to get the job done. Right now, a lot of rockets used to launch satellites are former missiles. The way the launches work, it’s as if when you boarded a commercial jetliner you knew that should any of the engines fail, you’d crash and die. Would you get on board?”288,289,311
But it wouldn’t be cheap to design the truck. SpaceX needed much of the initial capital together with government funding – approximately $100 million.280 The total number of employees were now 150 SpaceXers.
While the Saturn V from the Apollo program was a three-stage rocket, the Falcon 1 had only two stages. You split a rocket into stages to save weight. After the launch, and when the first stage has run out of fuel, it will separate from the second stage and fall back to Earth. The engines attached to the second stage will now start and power the rest of the rocket up to space. While the first stage of the Falcon 1 rocket had a speed of 6850 mph [11 000 km/h], the second stage had a speed of 17 000 mph.
To find the engines needed to power the rocket, Elon contacted Tom Mueller. He was a member of the Reaction Research Society – a group of amateur rocket enthusiasts. They launched rockets on a dry lakebed at the edge of the Mojave Desert. But Mueller was no amateur. He had joined the group to do all the crazy stuff he wasn’t allowed to do at his job as a rocket engineer.278
Mueller’s life story resemble the same story as shown in the movie October Sky. The movie tells the true story of Homer Hickham, who grew up in a coal mining community. Hickham was inspired by the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 and decided to become an engineer despite his father’s negative thoughts. His father wanted him to become a coal miner, but Hickham didn’t listen to him and would eventually become a NASA rocket scientist. The only difference from the movie is that Mueller grew up in the small logging community St. Maries, Idaho.