In September 2001, Elon Musk discussed the possibility of private individuals launching space ventures with his former university classmate Adeo Ressi. In his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson writes: “For a private individual it was obviously too expensive to build a rocket. Or was it? What were the necessary material requirements? The only thing really needed, he thought, was metal and fuel, which were not that expensive”. The two concluded that it warranted an attempt.
Today, Musk is Tesla’s main shareholder and the owner of X (formerly Twitter). He is considered to be the richest man in the world and strongly supported the election of Donald Trump, whose adviser he will become. This article, however, will only deal with his activity as a space entrepreneur.
Fail fast and try again
In May 2002, Musk was already a millionaire after selling his Zip2 software company to Compaq when he acquired a small Californian start-up and renamed it SpaceX. This is now one of the most important space companies in the world alongside CASC, which produces the Chinese Long March rockets (200 launches in the last five years alone). SpaceX is unlisted but is valued at $250 billion. This success would have been impossible without crucial contracts from NASA and the Pentagon ($15 billion in the last decade), but Musk’s singular management methods have also played an essential role.
In April 2023, on the eve of the SpaceX super-rocket Starship’s first flight, when the launch came under scrutiny from regulators, Musk complained that: “This is how civilisations decline. They quit taking risks [...] their arteries harden” and this happens “when you’ve had success for too long”. Isaacson writes that “when it came to building rockets”, Musk “believed in the ‘fail-fast’ method: fail fast, take risks, learn from failures, revise and correct mistakes, repeat attempts”.
After three years of work on the engine by a team of engineers who had worked at TRW (the company that built the rocket propulsion system which took Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon), SpaceX completed the Falcon 1 in 2005. The name is borrowed from the “Star Wars” saga: Musk thinks he is at the beginning of an adventure that could lead mankind to colonise Mars.
From the Pacific to Cape Canaveral
SpaceX planned to launch the Falcon 1 from the US Air Force base at Vandenberg, only a few kilometres from its factory. However, since the schedule was delayed, the company decided to accept the US Army’s proposal to use a launch platform on the small island of Kwaja-lein in the middle of the Pacific. Between March 2006 and July 2008, three launch attempts failed; the fourth succeeded in September 2008 and was the last, because in the meantime funding had run out.
With the success of Falcon 1, SpaceX applied to participate in NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services programme and make trips to the International Space Station (ISS), both to resupply it with materials and to transport astronauts, once the Shuttle was retired. In December 2008, NASA offered $1.6 billion for twelve round trips to the ISS.
To provide that kind of service, SpaceX needed a more powerful launcher, and so the Falcon 9 was born, a reference to the number of Merlin engines needed to propel it. The 48-metre-high launcher is ten times more powerful than the Falcon 1, and able to carry a capsule, named Drag on, which can dock with the ISS.
For the Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX rented and refurbished the launch sires at Cape Canaveral — first Complex 40 and then Complex 39A, from which some Apollo and Shuttle missions had been launched. In June 2010, the first launch of the Falcon 9 succeeded, and later that year the Dragon capsule returned to Earth from its test mission. Crew Dragon made nine trips with astronauts to the ISS, while there was only a single outing of its competitor Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which returned unmanned for safery reasons.
Recover and reuse
Space missions are expensive because launchers are expendalile and can only be used once. SpaceX thought that they could make huge savings if they could recover and reuse the first stage of each rocket, which contains the fuel and thrust motors. In December 2015, this operation succeeded for the first time, and in April 2017 a recovered first stage was reused on a Falcon 9. Since then, in less than a decade, boosters have been recovcred 348 times and reused 323 times, some of them in more than a dozen flights.
In the middle of the last decade, Europe chose a traditional expendable design for the new Ariane 6 rocket amidst scepticism about the cost-effectiveness of recoveries. As one expert told Las Eichos, boosters need to be refitted and tested, the fuel required for decelerating prior to landing limits the overall thrust and load of the rocket, and that ultimately customers might not be willing to use a “second-hand” rocket.
In 2017, Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA, an alliance between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) stated that the benefits of recovery are basically small, no more than 10%. Alain Charmeau (CEO of Ariane Group) asked: “Is reuse a panacea? In the long term, on the horizon of 2050, certainly yes [...] but in the medium term this is not so certain” [Le Figam, December 15th, 2017). The table of launches by SpaceX and Ariane Group sums up Europe’s delay and lost leadership position because of this choice.
Starlink and Ukraine
In early 2015, Musk announced the creation of a division of SpaceX called Starlink. The idea was to put a constellation of 40,000 satellites into low orbit capable of covering the globe and providing an internet connection. The goal was to finance interplanetary missions by selling Starlink’s services. Research showed that, in flattened form, 50 satellites could be put into orbit with a Falcon 9, a technique which today is used for 50% of satellite launches.
Starlink currently has 6,400 satellites in orbit, and in 2023 reported 4 million customers and revenues of $6.6 billion. Constellations of low-orbit telecommunication satellites are literally gaining ground from large satellites in geostationary orbit. Concerning the latter, production orders to Boeing, Loral, Airbus, and Thales Alenia Space have fallen from 22 in 2015 to 5 in 2018. The mission of putting them into orbit was normally assigned to Ariane rockets, another reason for the current European crisis.
In February 2022, at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Kiev’s Deputy Prime Minister Mychajlo Fedorov asked Musk for permission to use the Starlink constellation. Musk agreed, and 100,000 terminals arrived in the country within a year. Starlink’s services held up well against the Russian military’s attempts to disrupt it. The international press extolled its success, a trial-by-fire that whetted the appetites of many Western armies.
In October 2022, Musk ordered engineers to interrupt constellation servies within 100km of Crimea in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone submarine attack on the Russian naval base in Sevastopol. In his view, the attack would have meant crossing a red line, as had previously been explained to him by the Russian ambassador.
It is interesting to note what Isaacson writes about the event in his book. Musk warned the government in Kiev, the Russian ambassador, the American security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of his decision. His direct contact with half of the world’s most important institutional bodies is therefore not a recent development.
SpaceX has set up a defence division called Starshield, which provides services to the Pentagon and American security agencies, including the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), with which it operates some spy satellites. The US Space Force has signed a confidential agreement with Starshield concerning the use of the Starlink constellation, an arrangement that includes “unique terms and conditions” which prevents any interruptions, writes Space News [October 3rd, 2023].
The Starship mega-rocket
Last October, the Starship mission succeeded on its fifth attempt. From the launch pad at Boca Chica in Texas, a giant rocket blasted off, consisting of the Super Heavy, a 70-metre high first stage propelled by 33 engines, on which the Starship, a 50-metre-long spacecraft, was installed. SpaceX’s plan is to make them both recoverable and for Starship to be the protagonist of trips to the Moon and Mars.
In the October test, the Super Heavy detached at an altitude of 70km, returned towards the launch base, slowed almost to a hover, and was caught by the two arms, or “chopsticks”, of a tower called Mechazilla. This is necessary because the Super Heavy has no landing legs to save on weight. In a subsequent test the catch failed, but SpaceX plans to continue using this technique.
In closing, to return to Musk, the “chopsticks” are his imaginative homage to Master Miyagi, from the film The Karate Kid, who demonstrates that it is possible to catch a fly with chopsticks. This brings us back to Starlink, whose satellites have a lifespan of five years: when the constellation is complete, 8,000 satellites will need to be replaced annually; the Falcon 9 will no longer do. The Starship has a payload of 150 tonnes, 18 times more than Falcon 9 and, in theory, its cost per launch is seven times smaller.
Lotta Comunista, November 2024