Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Elon Musk of SpaceX

Episode Date: February 16, 2009

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Elon Musk of SpaceX, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. My guest for this special edition of the program is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Space Exploration Technologies. You probably know the company as SpaceX,

where they have just received an initial $1.6 billion contract from NASA. We're giving Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla the week off so that we can bring you an extended conversation with Elon Musk. They'll be back next time. We'll still let you know who won the latest space trivia contest when we get to this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. 37-year-old Elon Musk started SpaceX even before he sold the PayPal online payment system to eBay. That sale came in

handy. Building rockets, really big rockets, takes big bucks. And Elon wanted to build them in a new way, one that would allow him to equal or surpass the performance and reliability of the rockets whose names are synonymous with the American space program. Names like Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Saturn. And he wanted his Falcon series to be cheaper, much cheaper, than anything else currently available. A Falcon 1 has completed one entirely successful test flight. The much larger Falcon 9 may fly as soon as this summer.

I visited Elon at SpaceX headquarters in Southern California. We spoke at a conference room, one of the few private areas in the cavernous facility, which also happens to contain the design center for Tesla Motors, builder of Elon's all-electric sports car. I don't know where to start congratulating you, whether it's on the successful launch of the Falcon 1 a while back, but I think I'll stick with what's more recent and the award of that COTS contract. Did I get that right from NASA? Well, actually, technically it's the award of the CRS contract or Cargo Resupply Services.

We won the COTS competition almost three years ago. And so you'll soon be flying missions up to ISS and providing everything that they need to keep that place running. That's correct. NASA awarded us 12 of the 20 missions for cargo resupply following the retirement of the space shuttle, which occurs at the end of next year. Eight of the 20 were given to orbital sciences,

although our vehicle actually carries more per mission than an Orbital Sciences vehicle. So, in fact, we're about two-thirds of the cargo that goes to the space station will go on our vehicle. And in the immediate years following shuttle retirement, all of it will. Which brings up some other interesting questions that we won't go into, but OSC, which has been around for a little while. some other interesting questions that we won't go into, but OSC, which has been around for a little while, when I look at the other competition out there, or at least the companies that came into being around the time that you guys did, a lot of them are still making more money off of t-shirts than actually going into space. And so you seem to be doing very, very well for a seven-year-old company. Yeah, we're not quite seven.

We'll be seven in June-ish. But yeah, I think things are going reasonably well. We've been profitable for the last two years. We'll be profitable, I think, for at least the next, well, just based on existing contracts. Because we have many contracts besides the NASA contract. That's not the only one. We'll be profitable, I think, for at least the next four or five years. And maybe forever. I don't know. I certainly aspire to be. And that's important because that means we'll have

additional money to apply to R&D and to continue to improve the technology. This is not a case where I intend to sell a company or declare dividends and make large sums of money or something like that. It's really from the standpoint of bringing in revenue so that we can continue to improve the technology and advance the state of the art of space exploration. In fact, I almost get the impression, and I have no idea if this is the case, that everything else that you did was leading up to this. Well, I suppose not from any conscious goal. I mean, I did, when I was in college, there were three areas that I thought would most affect the future of humanity, being the internet,

transitioning to a sustainable energy economy, and the third being space exploration, in particular, the extension of life to multiple planets. And I didn't really anticipate that I would be involved in space because space is a very high capital endeavor and usually the province of governments. So I wasn't thinking from the standpoint necessarily of goals that I'd have, just something that would be really important to the future. Well, in fact, it's in the mission. You want to make us a space-faring civilization. Right. What SpaceX aspires to do is to lower the cost and improve the reliability of space transportation to the point where it is possible to make life multi-planetary, to create a growing

civilization on someplace other than Earth. Not that I expect that we will do that, because I think that would be a pretty bold assumption. I suspect the odds are against us succeeding in doing that. But nonetheless, the aspiration is to move things as far in that direction as we can. Well, I'm willing to place my bet against the odds in this case. All right. We were talking about the website just before we started recording. It is a rocket geek's heaven. And so unlike what can be found at the major contractors, actually, some of them right up the road from here, I had such a blast.

And, you know, I thought I'd be asking somebody for a tour today. But the truth is you took me on a tour. You took me on a virtual tour of this facility. And it's magnificent. And you were remarkably open, which seems to be part of the culture here. Yeah, well, I believe in maximizing communication. You know, where companies, I think, fall down as they grow is that they fail to pay attention to the value of good communication. they grow is that they fail to pay attention to the value of good communication.

When companies are small, communication is easy because there's only a small number of people and they can easily interact and exchange information and coordinate their activities. And so necessarily there's a minimum of bureaucracy and what I refer to as noise. For those familiar with the signal to noise ratio, signal is what you want. That's the desired output. And then noise is all the nonsense associated with getting signal. And you really want to have a really good signal-to-noise ratio, which most large companies don't. There's a lot of bureaucracy and managers managing managers managing managers. And lots of politics and things that ultimately don't contribute to the end product,

the thing that is truly of value. I've tried at SpaceX to minimize that by having a fairly dense concentration of people. So people are kind of in fairly dense cubes, closely close together. All the managers are in cubes too, including me. The managers are with their groups. There's no mahogany row or anything like that. And then just I encourage people to communicate across departments. Don't go through your manager and then your manager talks to the other manager

and then that manager talks to their person because that's just really – that really results in miscommunication and slow communication. So I encourage people to talk between departments. I'll tell you the other thing that I got out of the tour and the rest of the website that impressed me as much as the rockets you're creating, which we really ought to talk about at some point, and the culture, but it's what you're achieving in terms of systems integration. You create 80% of what goes into your rockets.

I mean, my God, it's like Henry Ford at Dearborn. Well, it's not quite as bad as Henry Ford. He actually mined the ore. We're not that crazy. I think actually if I was in a different business, that percentage would be lower. The reason it's so high is because the space supply chain is very expensive, and you have very few options, often only one supplier in a particular arena. If we didn't make stuff ourselves, we would be beholden to those legacy costs. And so necessarily, if you're going to try to create a revolutionary rocket

that's substantially lower cost and aspires to be higher reliability, and actually we intend to try to make reusability work, then it's very difficult to use much of the existing supply chain because you will inherit those costs and the inability to reuse stuff and all that. So we kind of had to do it. But if you take Tesla as an example, the percentage of in-house stuff is much less. It's probably half, 50% or thereabouts rather than 80%, because the automotive supply chain is much more efficient. You may not be buying many legacy products from other providers, but you've paid a great

deal of attention to the legacy of aerospace development. Yes. I mean, in one sense, just to avoid mistakes that were made in the past. But you've paid a great deal of attention to the legacy of aerospace development. Yes. I mean, in one sense, just to avoid mistakes that were made in the past. So they've tried to avoid mistakes that others have made in the past. You know, I've studied prior rocket developments. I know quite a bit about the history of rocketry and why people made various decisions along the way. And I mean, I could articulate why our rocket is lighter, lower cost than prior rockets. And you put those costs right up on the website.

I mean, I looked around. I wanted to see if any of the big guys or anybody else actually had a price sheet. I mean, you'll – if I came to you today with a 400-kilogram payload, you could tell me. I think it was $7.9 million, and you'd put me in low-Earth orbit. Yeah. I believe in fixed and open pricing. And so it's not just like a Persian rug bazaar when you want to buy a rocket launcher. I've been there.

I mean, with the other launch providers, they kind of size you up and see what they can take you for, really. That's kind of how the pricing is determined. And besides, since we're the low-cost provider, it makes sense for us to advertise that. I think if you're a high-cost provider, you probably don't want to advertise that. Yeah, you might want to keep that under one of those first thoughts. Yeah, it's like some restaurants where they don't have prices on the menu. It's like if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Yeah, right, right.

You're achieving this. I mean, Falcon's flying. Yeah. You have a contract. Falcon 9 is going to fly soon. Yep. I watched that spectacular test of those nine engines going off on your test stand in Texas. It's all coming together.

And you already said it at least once. A lot of it seems to be this key word of reliability as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and some would sort of attack us on the basis of saying, well, for Falcon 1, well, only one out of four launches has succeeded. But you really need to divide launch vehicle failure into two categories. One is where you're trying to get the design right, and that's where the early failures will come from. And then the next category is once you've gotten the design right

and gotten it over at least once, then future errors are errors of consistency. So you have to separate between errors of design and errors of consistency. The first three flights, the problems were errors of design. They were not errors of quality assurance or production. It was a little unfortunate because with flight two, we really came very close to reaching orbit. We certainly reached space. On our second flight, we reached space,

and there was a slight design error in the upper stage where our gains were too high, control gains, and we didn't put slush baffles in the liquid oxygen tank because we thought we could control the stage without adding in the weight of slush baffles. And that turned out to be untrue. And then with Flight 3, the problem was that we switched out the main engine for the new design engine. It's a much more advanced engine, and it's the same engine we'll be using on Falcon 9. So we wanted to test using on Falcon 9,

so we wanted to test on Falcon 1 first. And unfortunately, it turned out to have a longer-than-expected thrust transient, and so during stage separation, the first stage rear-ended the second stage. But Flight 4 was flawless. We'll have more of our extended conversation with Elon Musk of SpaceX when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration

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Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We continue our conversation with Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. NASA has just awarded the company a major contract for resupply of the International Space

Station. Elon is very much an engineer, as you'll readily hear if you take his online tour of SpaceX. Yeah, no, I'm actually, if anything, more an engineer than a business man. I do the business stuff in order to do the engineering that I want to do. It's funny, a lot of people do sort of think of me more as a businessman than anything else. But in order to do the engineering that I want to do and the design that I want to do, I kind of need to do the business stuff. Otherwise, some business

guys can be in charge of me and won't be allowed to do what I want to do. That's the reason I do it. So I do pretty well. But there are certainly way better business people out there than me. And I'm not sure I'd necessarily win in a set-piece battle. So I think I'd do okay in a set-piece battle.

But then if you're allowed to invent pieces, then somebody would have to be pretty good to beat me. I think you've stepped outside the game. Right. Other end of this table is a beautiful little model of this spacecraft called Dragon. Right. It's got windows. It does, absolutely. We designed Dragon and Falcon 9 to meet the NASA human rating standards

and to obviously have the basic functionality needed for people. The only significant missing technical item from Dragon is the escape tower, which is not a trivial thing, of course, but that's really the gating item for carrying people. Presuming you want an escape system, which the shuttle does not have, by the way, but presuming you want an escape system, then that'll take us about two years to get that developed. And that's why we're hoping that NASA will exercise what's called COTS-D, which is Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Section D, which is an option on the existing COTS agreement that we have for

cargo. Cargo is A through C. And so all NASA has to do is exercise that option. And in the stimulus bill, unfortunately, there was enough money was allocated to enable NASA to exercise COTS-D. Oh, I didn't know that. That's terrific. Yeah, this is just very recent news. Wow, yeah. It's really good value for money for the taxpayer because the way the COTS program works is

that we're only paid as we achieve milestones. So if we don't achieve milestones, we don't get paid. It's a fixed price. So it's none of this cost-plus government contracting stuff where you are awarded for spending more than you should have. It's also the only chance that the United States has of having astronaut transport after the shuttle retirement next year and before Ares and Orion is ready to carry astronauts to the space station in 2016.

I believe they'll do an initial flight in 2015, but that won't go to the station. The first station flight is 2016. So if COTS-D isn't exercised, then we'll be thumbing rides from the Russians for five or six years and paying a lot, by the way. In fact, we're expecting a cost per mission of approximately between $120 and $140 million all in, and that's including all of the NASA safety systems. In fact, a lot of that cost is going through all the NASA certification and so forth, really heavy-duty safety system, and it's a seven-seater.

I figure $17 to $20 million per seat. And by the way, seven is the same number of people as the shuttle carries. The Russians are currently charging us $47 million, and that price is not going to go down if they are the only option. So for those that are listening and want to be helpful to the cause of space exploration, and particularly American manned space exploration, they should definitely contact their congressman or senator and voice support for COTS-D. And there are some who say, well, yeah, but how do you know that SpaceX will succeed? I say, well, first of all, like I said, the COTS money is only paid as we meet milestones.

It's not like other government programs where the more we fail, the more taxpayer it pays. The fact that NASA has selected us to be the operational, to do the heavy lifting as far as cargo resupply is a good endorsement. And so I'm certainly very hopeful that this will happen. I want to look even farther down the line. You've got the Falcon 9 around the corner. But after that, Falcon 9 Heavy, which by the time it flies, may be the most powerful booster in the American lineup.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, a Falcon 9, just the basic Falcon 9, will be the most powerful single-core vehicle in the American fleet with a slight upgrade of the propulsion system. It will actually have a sea-level thrust of over a million pounds. And that compares to the next best, which is the Atlas V. Although an American rocket actually has a Russian main engine, and that does about 867,000 pounds of thrust and lift-off. As you say, Falcon 9 Heavy is three times that capability, so it'd be over 3 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

You know, you're approaching half the thrust of a Saturn V. One of the things I love about that is also your launch pad at Canaveral. Right. And the legacy there, the fact that this was where the Titan IV came from. And the legacy there, the fact that this was where the Titan IV came from. Absolutely. Yeah, we're very proud to be on Launch Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral. That was, as you say, the home base of Titan IV, which was, while a very expensive rocket, it was quite a magnificent rocket. And it was the most powerful vehicle in the American fleet until retirement.

I mean, apart from the shuttle. And the shuttle, although it has a very high thrust, its payload is not that great. Its realistic payload is around 35,000 pounds. It's a pretty big vehicle. It has wings. Right. There's a lot of mass on the shuttle that is not useful in orbit. Wings, landing gear, control surfaces, yeah. There's a lot of mass on the shuttle that is not useful in orbit. Wings, landing gear, control surfaces.

Yeah. There's no air in space. On the website, SpaceX.com, there is a Falcon launch vehicle lunar capability guide, a sort of white paper. Oh, really? You didn't know? Yeah. It's very cool. Maybe it should be taken off the website. I didn't know this was on the website very cool. Maybe it should be taken off the website.

I didn't know this was on the website. Okay. But it makes for interesting reading. It's led me to think that Dragon probably has the capability of spending a pretty good amount of time in space and not necessarily in low-Earth orbit. in space and not necessarily in low-Earth orbit. Well, I really should emphasize that Dragon is fundamentally designed to be a low-Earth orbit servicing vehicle. You know, it's possible we could go to higher orbits. Falcon 9 doesn't quite have the delta V to go and do moon missions,

and it's not, you know, that's kind of the province of Ares Orion. And our focus right now is just making sure we get low-Earth orbit servicing operational. And then certainly possible we'd do developments beyond that. But I think for the time being, we need to sort of focus on getting Falcon 9 and Dragon working. And then long-term, as I said at the beginning of the conversation, we want to go and be helpful to NASA in reaching the moon and Mars and so forth. But, you know, right now we've got to focus on getting the Earth orbit right. And you do have a busy manifest.

Yeah. And it's also on the website. I noticed in 2011 a flight for Bigelow Aerospace. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully we'll be launching Bigelow's space station and then perhaps servicing that space station with people. Yeah. Very exciting stuff.

All right. And it's going to be fun to follow. I'm sure you're putting in a lot of hours, but they must go quickly, and it's got to be fun. Yeah, it's not always fun, I have to admit, but it's got to be fun. Yeah, it's not always fun, I have to admit. But it's very stressful. But I guess we get into a cadence of launches and so forth. It's going to get less stressful and more fun.

Thank you very much. Elon Musk is the CEO and CTO of Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX. Good Lord, what is going on out there? We're talking with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, because it's time for What's Up. It sounds like the wind is up. Where are you? Well, I'm testing some planetary wind dynamics and general fluid dynamics from my observation post here in Southern California. And that's the ocean we hear in the background? Indeed, the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, just in case you're confused.

Hey, you better step back inside because that's just roaring away. And we want to have a clear channel to hear about the night sky. All right, just don't keep me long. Okay. All right, well, you know, if you've got a nice clear sky, which occasionally we do these days, you can check out some cool stuff in the evening. Venus, still the extremely bright star-like object in the west in the early evening, and that'll be throughout February, but it starts going lower to the horizon when we go to March. February 27th, crescent moon next to Venus should be pretty. Not that it's hard

to find either of them, but pretty conjunction in the sky. We've got Saturn rising in the mid-evening in Leo, and then in the pre-dawn sky, it's going to get really busy really soon. It's already starting. We get Jupiter getting higher and higher in the next few weeks. This is all over in the east before dawn. Jupiter growing higher and higher. It's the really bright star-like object. Mercury next brightest is starting to come up. Mid-February to early March, it'll be visible.

And Mars is gradually growing higher below Jupiter, and so it's below all of them. growing higher below Jupiter, and so it's below all of them. February 22nd, those three planets, Jupiter, Mercury, and Mars, all within a five degree circle in the sky, and they're near the thin crescent moon, but all very low to the horizon. But if you can get a nice crisp view to the east and get yourself up before dawn, February 22nd, really cool looking picture. And any of the days around that and after that, you'll still see a bunch of planets over there. And they'll get easier to see as time goes along, but they won't be all nestled together after the next

couple weeks. On to Random Space Fact! I was a little frightened there that I thought it might just keep going forever. Well, I could do that, but that really wouldn't be that much fun probably for, well, really anyone. So instead, let me just give you some space information. The James Webb Space Telescope, sort of a follow-on to Hubble, but also much bigger and looking in the infrared entirely, it's going to live at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. That is on the other

side of the Earth from the Sun and four times farther from Earth than the Moon. And that way, it always gets to point its big giant sunshade towards the sun and also towards the Earth and block out that pesky interference. And this is kind of interesting, though it orbits the sun beyond the Earth's orbit, where normally something would be going slower as the farther out you go. Earth's gravity actually drags it along so it stays in the same place relative to the Earth. Yes, and I just read that they're actually starting to fabricate the telescope itself. So coming soon to a solar system near you. Give you some more random space facts about it in coming weeks.

On to the trivia contest. We asked you what was the name of the Apollo 9 command module. Kind of amused me, so I had to share. And how'd we do, Matt? You know, we got almost a record-setting response to this. I don't know why, but we sure enough picked the winner, Len Johnson. I think he's been entering for something like two years, more than two years, and he finally, his name came up on random.org, or his number, I should say, Len Johnson of Park Ridge, Illinois, who provided the name for us, Gumdrop. And do you know why?

No, I do not. I do want to know why. Because, apparently, the astronauts were allowed to choose the name. And when they first saw their command module, it was wrapped in blue plastic. And so, Gumdrop. Gumdrop, their command module, it was wrapped in blue plastic. And so, gumdrop. Gumdrop, the command module. Okay, extra points. The lunar module. Spider. Yep, you got it.

Yeah, that one I guessed from, and I take it it was the same theory. That's what it looked like. I suppose. Kind of literal. So what should we give away this next time, Matt? You want to do more calendars or go back to shirts? I'm enjoying the calendar. Let's stick with that. All right. It is cool. So another year in space calendar.

If you answer the following question correctly and are randomly selected as that week's winner, simple question this week, how old is the universe? question this week. How old is the universe? In other words, how long ago was the Big Bang based on things like the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy? Easy for you to say. Yeah, exactly. And other observations. Back when I was a boy, actually, even when I was in graduate school, they were still, it was, well, it's 10 to 20 billion years old. Now they feel they can nail it down to what just seems like incredible accuracy.

So tell me, how old is the universe? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And you have until the 23rd of February, Feb 23, at 2pm Pacific Time, to get us that answer. Alright, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about nuts! Thank you, and good night. And I didn't even tell you that I just bought some

from the campfire kid up the block. No, but I was watching the surveillance video and I had an idea. I hate that stuff on Google. Anyway, he's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for What's Up, this time from somewhere along the Pacific coast. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.