Nine years later, SpaceX employs 1,500
people and occupies a half
half-million-
square-foot
foot
facility
in
Hawthorne,
California, that used to produce fuselage
sections for Boeing 747s. Today it is filled
with rocket parts, including stages and
engines for its Falcon 9 boosters, which
can place up to 23,000 pounds of
payload in low Earth orbit. Off to one side
sits a slightly charred, cone
cone-shaped
Dragon capsule that a year r ago became
the first commercial spacecraft to be
launched into orbit and recovered.
Sometime next year, SpaceX plans to
launch the first of 12 Dragons to the
International Space Station, each hauling
six tons of cargo, under a $1.6 billion
resupply contract
act with NASA. More than
two dozen commercial launches are also
booked. And by 2015, the piloted version
of Dragon is expected to be ready to
pick up where the space shuttle left off,
carrying astronauts to and from the
orbiting
outpost.
All very impressive.
ve. But what really sets
SpaceX apart, and has made it a
magnet for controversy, are its prices: As
advertised on the company’s Web site, a
Falcon 9 launch costs an average of $57
million, which works out to less than
$2,500 per pound to orbit. That’s
significantly
ificantly less than what other U.S.
launch companies typically charge, and
even the manufacturer of China’s low
low-
cost Long March rocket (which the U.S.
has banned importing) says it cannot
beat SpaceX’s pricing. By 2014, the
company’s next rocket, the Falcon
Falco
Heavy, aims to lower the cost to $1,000
per pound. And Musk insists that’s just the
beginning.
“Our
performance
will
increase and our prices will decline over
time,” he writes on SpaceX’s Web site, “as
is the case with every other technology.”
Like the Chinese,
hinese, many observers in this
country are wondering how SpaceX can
deliver what it promises.
After nearly a decade of struggling to
reach this point, Musk isn’t about to
reveal the finer details of how he and his
privately held company have created
the Falcon
lcon and Dragon. They don’t even
file patents, Musk says, because “we try
not to provide a recipe by which China
can copy us and we find our inventions
coming right back at us.” But he talks
freely about SpaceX’s approach to
rocket design, which stems from one core
principle:
Simplicity
enables
both
reliability and low cost. Think of cars, Musk
says. “Is a Ferrari more reliable than a
Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?”
Simplifying something as complex as a
rocket is no easy task. And historically,
most rocket makers have made their top
priority performance, not cost. The space
shuttle’s main engines were the highest-
highest
performance rockets ever flown, but they
helped make the
e shuttle what Musk calls
“a Ferrari to the nth power” that required
thousands of worker-hours
worker
to refurbish
between flights. The Atlas and Delta
rockets
purchased
under
the
government’s
Evolved
Expendable
Launch Vehicle program serve NASA and
Department of Defense customers whose
main concern is reliability. “What the EELV
program does is launch national
reconnaissance satellites that cost billions
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