1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500 employees = ?

Cool story in Air&Space about SpaceX, the company started by Paypal co-founder Elon Musk to make space travel affordable. You should go read the whole article, but here’s a few choice quotes for those that won’t. Musk sounds a lot like Steve Jobs to me in that he’s got the reality distortion field. He tells his people they can do something they thought impossible and they get it done.

On rocket design

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 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.”

On the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system

“If you were sitting at a n 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,” he says. “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.”

Some rocket scientist humor

Combustion instability can make an engine undergo what veterans dryly call an RUD, for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly; civilians would call it blowing up.

On designing parts in house

“That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”