Erik Seedhouse - SpaceX’s Dragon: America’s Next Generation Spacecraft

Commercial Space Operations, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA

Elon Musk. Credit: SpaceX

In 2015, Elon Musk doesnt need to be introduced. Like Wernher von Braun, Musk is a legend in his own lifetime, and deservedly so. A billionaire many times over thanks in part to PayPal and Tesla, Musk is a transformational technologist who has plans to retire on Mars. Why? Not to inspire or to make money. Musks aim is nothing less than to make us a multi-planet species. For Musk, colonizing Mars is extinction insurance, and he wants to send a manned mission sooner rather than later. And cheaper. As he points out in interviews, the Curiosity rover that is ambling around on Mars cost more than US$3 billion. Musk reckons, for that money, we should be sending humans and he has a plan to do exactly that. Shortly before SpaceX was founded, Musk remembers a late night spent searching for a NASA website that outlined the plans for a manned mission to Mars. It was 2001 and the Shuttles were still flying at a flight rate that was sufficient to persuade the public that manned spaceflight was still a serious concern. Now, in 2015, with the Shuttle a rapidly receding memory, the notion that manned spaceflight is a vibrant arena is pure delusion. In 2015, American, European, and Canadian astronauts climb on board the Soyuz for their ride to the International Space Station (ISS), and there arent many people who want to watch spacefarers climb into an aged space vehicle to a destination that is 1,000 times closer to Earth than the Moon. Mars? That isnt even on most peoples radar. But many people have accepted this as the norm. A manned mission to Mars? That wont happen for decades, especially if we rely on a government to get us there. A few decades ago, following the Moon landing, the thinking was different. The Apollo program would springboard us to Mars and visits to the Moon and the Red Planet would become routine. Permanent bases would be built on the lunar surface and, after settling on Mars (Figure ), we start shooting for the outer planets. Nothing was impossible. Except that it was.

Back in 2001, when Musk (see sidebar) discovered there were no manned Mars missions on the books, he reckoned the US was no longer interested in manned space exploration. But two years later, the Columbia accident proved otherwise. Still, the budget for NASA had been atrophying at an alarming rate since the mid-1960s, when the agency received 4.4% of the federal budget. In the 2000s and 2010s, the NASA budget was just 0.5% of the total US budget, which is part of the reason Musk couldnt find any information about a manned Mars mission. Appalled at the lack of progress, Musk began dreaming up a manned Mars mission of his own, but first he needed to build a rocket company, and so SpaceX was born. The story of this visionary company is told in SpaceX : Making Commercial Spaceflight a Reality , which was written by this author and published in 2013, so what follows is a brief overview of how Musk made his company the success that it is today.

When SpaceX launched in 2002, Musk was trying to buy repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for just US$7 million each. He had a number of meetings with the Russians and was close to purchasing three ICBMs for US$21 million, only to be told that the Russians meant US$21 million for one . Fed up of dealing with the Russians, Musk decided to build his own rocket. The challenges facing Musk were intimidating. Between 1957 and 1966, the US had sent 429 rockets into orbit, a quarter of which failed. And they had done this with nearly unlimited budgets. Undeterred, Musk started recruiting veterans from the aerospace world in El Segundo, California. One of his first employees was Tom Mueller, a leading propulsion expert. Mueller was followed by more rocket engineers joining the SpaceX cause. To run the day-to-day operations of his company, Musk hired Gwynne Shotwell (Figure ), who became SpaceXs seventh employee as Vice President of Business Development (today Shotwell is President).