TechStuff In Spaaace(X) - Part One

been hearing yeah. So um, Mr Musk, if I've been mispronouncing your name all this time, I do apologize very sincerely. But we did do a previous episode called tech Stuff looks at Elon Musk, and we published that back on March thirteenth, two thousand thirteen. So, you know, back in back in the days when we were young and idealistic and we looked at tech with bright fresh eyes. I'm not sure if I was ever idealistic even when I

was young. Well, uh, I can't speak for you. Actually, I still consider myself both young and idealistic, so I don't know why I even framed it that way. But at any rate, during that old episode, we did mention his work in privatizing space. Yeah he um, he developed an interest. Some would argue it bordered on obsession with the idea of creating a private company that would get

America really back into the space exploration game. And you may think, wait a minute, you know, NASA has been around and been working for for decades, what does he mean get back into it? And the reason, you know, his reasoning was that it turns out a lot of the stuff that we require, the stuff we use to get things up into space, come from other countries. So we're gonna be talking a lot about the United States in this episode and part two. It's going to be

a two partner. So just warning all of our friends from other countries. This is very US centric. But it also is an interesting example of how a private company can ache some pretty bold steps into an industry that for a long time was dominated by very, very large and very kind of closed off silos. Oh sure. Well, and also, as we will talk about, I think a lot of Musk's concept in starting up this company was

for very American reasons. And that's with a like shake fist shaken in the air, kind of American sort of the America. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I don't I don't know that that's a that's a loaded intonation. That's true, that's true. I I mean it. I mean it with a sparkle in my eye. I actually think that that he's done some incredible work. And there are a lot of people who talk about his personality and his driving

ambition and like his inability to imagine failure. I've actually seen that quoted a few times different people, that when he when he sees a goal, he can't imagine not achieving it, which I guess as long as you do achieve your goals is okay. So let's talk about space X and how it came to be. And it's really not that old of an organization. Oh no, it only really started up in two thousand one. Yeah, this was before there was an official organization of an official company.

This was back when Elon Musk, who was freshly super duper rich from his work with PayPal uh I, started to think, what am I? What am I going to do with this money? I've made all this money and that's fantastic, but what do I do with it? And he started talking with another Internet millionaire named Adeo Ressi, and they were talking about the possibility of funding a space mission. They both had this fascination with space exploration. You know, they they both thought of it as this

amazing thing. It kind of makes me think of like the kids who you know, like, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be an astronaut? Yeah, yeah, no, the whole Final Frontier kind of concept exactly. So I think for him, he was thinking, well, I might not be an astronaut, but I sure as heck can make sure I can fund someone to go up there. And so they started talking about what they could do, and they pulled in an aerospace consultant named

Jim Cantrell to talk about it. Now, the original plan was not to form a company and privatize space in that way. They thought about buying all the components as if they were in NASA, essentially buying them from the existing infrastructure that's out there, putting it all together, and funding a private mission to Mars, which is a lofty and awesome goal. Yes, very good pun there is quite lofty. I didn't I didn't really intend it to be a pun. But that's but I'm glad that I made one um

for the sake of the show. Uh, And I do want to put in that there there were indeed a lot of private companies that were maybe not launching stuff into space here in the United States at any rate, but certainly helping create stuff for the exploration of space at this point, Like you know, if you remember from our A, T and T episodes, private satellites go back to the nineteen sixties and by the late eighties and early nineties here in the States that the government was

not just allowing, but encouraging and enforcing commercial space endeavors and uh and we were actually kind of way behind Europe and all of that. So this kind of thing had been going on. Yeah. In fact, if you if you look at all the NASA launches, it's not that NASA was It's not like they had these enormous manufacturing plants where they were churning out the rockets and the engines and everything, and they were buying them up in private company. Yeah, largely in the US that would be

Locked Martin or Boeing. Those would be the two big companies that NASA would get equipment from. And in fact that it's interesting because that's still sort of how things are today for the most part. And we'll talk about how that's become kind of an interesting conversation around the whole SpaceX thing. Oh yeah, yeah, it's very much. NASA is very much threaded through everything that space X does. So what happened with this private plan to try and fund a mission to Mars, Well, they kind of hit

a little bit of a stumbling block a little bit. Yeah. It's imagine that you are on say Amazon dot com, and you see enormous launch rocket offered, and it's offered for you know, you could get seven of them for twenty million dollars, and you think, hey, you know, I'm I got this plan. I'm gonna need seven of these things. I got twenty million, let's put that in my cart.

And then when you put it in your cart and you go and you check out, and then says, oh, oh you know what, I know what we said, but instead of seven for twenty million, each of these is now going to be twenty millions, So your your total has gone up. That's kind of what happened. When Musk and crew went to Russia to look at purchasing the launch vehicles they would have used for this mission. They ran into all this red tape, There was all this

corruption they had to deal with. They talked about bribery issues. When they had Russians come over to UH to the United States, they would end up having to throw these like lavish parties and stuff in order to keep the Russians happy. And eventually Musk said, this is not how I want to do business. He said, I think I see where the real problem is with the space industry.

It's not it's you can't just point a finger and say this enormous organization is inefficient and and and byzantinean and it's just enormous and no one knows what's going on.

It's not just that, although that's probably a factor. It's also that the different entities this organization is dealing with aren't always on the up and up, or aren't are maybe perhaps are able to leverage their position as being this one company that produces the thing you need and kind of holding the whole industry hostage as a result. And that's when Musk said, you know, maybe we should look at some other alternative to just purchasing stuff from

other people. What could we do instead of that? And in UH in two thousand and two, that's when he kind of came to the conclusion that instead of trying to to buy all this stuff out and uh and then have a private launch. Maybe forming your own company

and building the stuff yourself is the better idea. So by two thousand two, Musk had decided that buying these components and then having a privatized mission just wasn't going to work, and so instead he looked at the possibility of creating a company that would build its own rockets, which is a big, big deal, especially to to do that here in America. So he founded a company called Space Explorations Technology, but everyone calls its space X. That's

essentially the name now. It really no one refers to it by its old name. Now. According to The New York Times, Musk invested about a hundred million dollars of his own money into the company, so you could say that he was pretty determined to have this happen. I mean, that's a huge investment. Keep in mind, that's one third of the money he made from his sale of PayPal to eBay. Now that whole sale was about one point five billion dollars, but three hundred million of it went

to Musk. So he gets three hundred million dollars and immediately one third of it he invests in the take this thing. Yeah, that's that takes guts, and that's a huge No one has ever argued that Musk doesn't have guts. So one of the things he wanted was to have this new company lower the cost of putting stuff up into orbit, particularly small payloads such as smaller satellites, because otherwise, if you were a company and you had built a

satellite for your business, whatever that business might be. Let's just say it's a telecommunications company and they've got a small satellite they want to put up in space. Normally you would have to wait until you could have that piggyback onto another payload because it's so small that the expense of launching it would be too great. Now, this way, Musk is hoping to bring price down to be more

attractive to customers that are making these smaller satellites. You still might piggyback several together, but overall, the the price tag drops and then you don't have to you know, have all the you end up having an increase in innovation, is really what it comes down. Yeah, So he starts to look at how companies get stuff up into space, and like I said, in the US, you had Boeing

and Locked. Those were your two companies that you could really work with if you wanted to try and get stuff up into space, and they built the rockets that were necessary to get payloads up there. At Boeing produced the Delta four rocket and Lockeed produced the Atlas five. And so you had a duopoly, meaning that there were

only two companies who had to choose from. And by the way, Boeing and Lockeed work in partnership together in the United Launch Alliance or u l A. So when I say duopoly, you know, essentially you're it's it's similar to a monopoly that you just have these two entities

that can determine exactly how much things cost. And UH they have all the contracts with lots of big customers like the United States military for example, which means that a lot of their stuff, although you know, certainly worth purchasing, was very expensive. Yes, so that meant that UH, an orderization like NASA or smaller companies that had these satellites, they had a real incentive to look around for an alternative. The problem was that for the longest time, there was

no alternative. Right. Meanwhile, the Russian and Ukrainian space programs offered rockets at a lower cost, which was driving business out of America, his driving business overseas, and Musk wanted to reverse that trend by creating a real competitor in the United States that could be in the space industry and offer competitive prices to bring jobs and money back into the US. So that really was kind of the driving force of his sales pitch when he was going

around getting investors early on in SpaceX UM. He also wanted to do more than just since satellites up. I mean, that's that's a money maker right there, because people are going to be producing these for various industries and they gotta get up there somehow, sure, and cargo as well

for the for the space station. Absolutely, because we have astronauts aboard the International Space Station and occasionally they need to either say and stuff back that needs to be repaired or maintained, or it's the result of whatever experiments they've been doing, or they of course need more stuff to come up, you know, supplies, that kind of thing. So those would both be you know, money making endeavors. But he also wants to send people up there, which

is much more complex and expensive venture. Yeah, I mean, you can design a spacecraft to carry cargo and not have to worry as much about things like life support systems because there's nothing alive necessarily in that cargo. I mean you might you might have some mice, or there's usually some microbes at the very least. Yeah, but I doubt that. I doubt they're very concerned about it. Yeah, the microbe you know, the microbe supergroups are really poorly funded.

But anyway they are, they are in fact microscopic, one might say. But uh, Musk really wanted to to you know, this idea of of sending people not just to the International Space Station, but further. He had a dream early early on of this being kind of a stepping stone toward getting people off Earth and onto other planets or moons, and the idea being that, you know, in order to do that, the first thing you have to do is

solve the transportation problem. And so SpaceX so far has really focused on the transportation part of it, but they have not lost sight of this extended goal to get people onto the surface of Mars, onto the moon, maybe even have the foundation for further exploration, which is really hard. Yea, that right there is going to take I mean literally, it's gonna take a long time, Like it's gonna take a long time to develop the technology and it's gonna

take a long time to get there. But yeah, this is the kind of stuff he says is necessary for that to ever be part of our future. So kind of a kind of an inspiring thing if you're really into space right now. It was really cool that he

was thinking about that this early in the company. Yeah, So meanwhile he was saying that, you know, it's necessary for this company company to exist because NASA has seen its budget cut multiple times over the last couple of decades, and so they have to do more with less, and so it would be good to have the option to work with a company that could potentially launch things for

much less money than what their competitors could do. Right. Although, you know, okay, despite these budget cuts, the the U S shuttle program at NASA was going pretty strong during this period. There would be a five or six shuttle launches each year in two thousand and two thousand one, and two thousand two, which ain't too shabby, right, So we still at this point had a shuttle program which was nice. Yes, we will get more into the fate of that later. Yeah, But over the next few years,

SpaceX started to work on developing that rocket technology. I mean, it's a brand new company, so they started really hiring people either straight out of school or people who were former engineers at at NASA Laboratory Worries, and they first started developing a rocket called the Falcon one, which is a two stage vehicle. H Now, if you ever hear that the two stage vehicle or three stage whatever, and

you wonder what that means. Those are the rockets that have segmented parts, right, and your first stage is the one that's closest to the ground when the rocket is standing upright. That first stage is designed to launch the rocket off the launch platform and at a certain altitude, detached from the rest of the vehicle and fall back to Earth, which will also trigger stage two, which will continue firing the rocket further out right and until it

gets to whatever destination orbit it's supposed to go to. UH. And then you might have multiple stages depending upon the design of the rocket, but this particular one was a two stager UH and it had a Merlin engine for its first stage, and the second stage had a kestral engine designed by a guy named Tom Mueller, and mueller Head gained Musk's attention because he had he had taken

on a d I Y project. You know, the kind of thing like you know when you're in school and you just you're really interested in something and you just want to build a version of it for yourself. Yeah, you just decided to do it. You just decided to go out there and build a thirteen thousand pound forest liquid fuel rocket in a friend's warehouse. Yeah, that's fifty eight newtons you know in case. Yeah, I know, some

people like the toy with cars. This guy was just building a rocket that would have an enormous amount of force behind it. So today, yeah, he was. He took d I Y to a level that is beyond my reckoning. But today Mueller is the vice president of propulsion Development, Big shock. So they start working on this Falcon one project. By two thousand three, they would open a testing facility, right, Yeah,

and the small town of McGregor, Texas. And this is where all of their equipment and vehicle parts are proven as safe as possible or scrapped and taken back to the drawing. Right. And then we had another terrible news story. Yeah. Also in two thousand three over at NASA, disaster befell the Shuttle program this year. That was when the Columbia orbiter would break apart during its re entry and and

all seven members of its crew would be lost. When it had launched, pieces of insulating foam had broken off of the main engines external fuel tank and damaged the heat protection tiles on the left wing of the craft. And y'all, re entry is serious business. An orbiter will be moving at some seventeen thousand miles per hour, that's some eight thousand kilometers per hour, and exposed to friction based heat of approximately three thousand degrees fahrenheit a k

a thousand six d fifty degrees celsius. So it's a it's a dangerous time, certainly, but um so so not. NASA would wind up grounding the Shuttle program while it investigated this disaster and and started planning safeguards for the future. And certainly the folks over at SpaceX we're taking very careful note obviously. Yeah. I mean, if their plan was to eventually put people up into space, and I don't mean for this to be a spoiler for part two. But that's something that SpaceX has yet to do. They

haven't they haven't launched demanded mission yet. But if they do wish to do this, they have to obviously take these things into account and and you know, personal safety has got to be paramount and there in their estimation when they're building these things. Keeping in mind that. The interesting thing about astronauts is they talk about, Hey, you need to ask us what if the risk is worth it? Because many of us are ready to sign up. As soon as something is shown to be uh, to be

working in working condition, I'll sign up. And I'm thinking, wow, you are a different kind of person than I am. Uh. It's it's inspiring, but not me um so. So, in two thousand four, facing further budget cuts and continued fallout from this Columbia disaster, then President George W. Bush announced the NASA Shuttle programs eventual retirement. It was set out a few years from from this announcement, right, I don't think it was specified quite yet. We'll get there. Yeah.

It was one of those things that made a lot of people very sad, because, of course, space exploration is one of those things that is often very inspiring, particularly to young people who see this this uh incredible endeavor to learn what we do not yet know, and it's it's got adventure wrapped up in it. I mean, you can't deny it. Oh yeah, yeah, well you know, But NASA shuttle program would regain its feet the next year, in two thousand five, they would send a single shuttle

up for the first time since Columbia's loss. And and over the next six years, the Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor shuttles would become active again, largely collaborating with the European Space Agency on projects to build, maintain, and also crew

the International Space Station. And you know, I wanted to talk about all of this NASA stuff because even though it's not directly at this point related to SpaceX, you know, public American opinion about space exploration is so tied to what's going on with NASA UM and and also you know they do vi all of their stuff from the commercial space industry, so it's very much a part of

of what's going through SpaceX's mind right now. Absolutely. I mean, this this is such a huge interconnected web, right You've got this thing where it's not just it's not just the scientific endeavor, the loss of that that you have to take into account. I mean, that is already an enormous thing, but on top of it, it's business. Right.

If NASA ends up scrapping this whole program and there's no replacement, there's nothing that takes the Space Shuttle's place in that time, and there are fewer contracts out there for a company like SpaceX, right, or for Lockheed or for Boeing. I mean, you've got this enormous industry that relies upon this demand, and if the demand goes away, then that's a problem. Meanwhile, that also meant that NASA

had to outsource a lot of work to Russia. Whenever Russia was sending up capsules to the International Space Station, they had to rely upon that. And again it it illustrated that there needed to be some sort of new entity to allow UH the United States to be able to operate independently of other nations. This is also the time two thousand five, That's also the time when SpaceX would buy a stake in a company called Surrey Satellite

Technology Limited to the company that builds small satellites. So now they've got a stake in a company that actually is trying to send stuff up into space. Moving on to two thousand six. On March two thousand six, my wife had a birthday. But more importantly, in the context of this particular episode, SpaceX had a test launch of the Falcon one launch vehicle also known as a rocket, but launch vehicles what they call it in the biz. And so the launch vehicle, uh, you know it, it

took off. Unfortunately, a fuel line ruptured and caused a fire and massive failure of the rocket, and all launch data aboard the rocket was lost as a result of this launch failure. Now, despite the failure, SpaceX landed a developmental contract with NASA, and it's called a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services or COTS contract worth a cool two D seventy eight million dollars. Now, SpaceX's role would be to create the launch vehicles that would shuttle crew and cargo

to and from the International Space Station. So this particular first launch, you can actually see the video that was shot during their their test launches, and uh, it is unfortunate that they lost all the data. As I recall, I read one report where Musk and Mueller had a rather tense discussion after this. I would imagine Musk as someone who cannot envision failure. Seeing a test vehicle fail was probably a pretty rough rough especially failed that spectacularly. Um,

but hey, there's a there's another test flight coming up, right. Yeah. Yeah, they did pick themselves back up, and on March twenty two of two seven they would send another Falcon one which ended in failure. Yeah. The rocket it successfully launched off the platform, but when it got to the stage separation part where the first stage and second stage we're

supposed to separate, they didn't disconnect properly. So the second engine the of the of stage two, it ignited, but then seven minutes thirty seconds into the launch, the engine shut down prematurely. The rocket did not make it into orbit, but it did retain the data from the launch, so SpaceX could actually take that data and be able to look to improve for so they called it a partial success.

It made it succeeded in part of the mission parameters, not all of them, because it didn't make it into orbit, but because they were able to retrieve the data and see exactly what went wrong, they could address it at least learn from it. Right. So two eight, SpaceX Lands and NASA launched services contract that could be worth up to about one point six billion dollars when it's all Sadden. This is all about again sending stuff up to the

I S. S to to kind of resupply it. So right, right, And on August two they would do a third test launch, which also ended in failure. Yeah, three times in a row, so this had to be tough for everyone at SpaceX. Now, in this case, the Stage one section, uh it's separated from Stage two. There the two came apart, but then Stage one's engines flared up at the last second after separation, which meant that the disconnected Stage one collided with the Stage two rocket that also had the payload on it

and sent it out of control. Yeah. So, I mean, if you imagine that you've got a car that you're towing behind you, and then suddenly the towing uh apparatus comes loose and then somehow the car actually behind you accelerates and slams into you. That's kind of what happened.

It was not good, um, but however, again they learned more from that and on sept n eight, so within the same year, they had a couple of months later they completed a successful test launch that got the Falcon one into orbit, yeah, which is again it's the speed of it that's that's really impressive to me. It's a private company building this stuff, you know, and not relying

on other other companies to provide things like engines. They're building all of this, putting it together and launching it, and to be able to do that so relatively quickly is really impressive to me, because I mean, I don't know if any of you out there listeners, if you've never gone to a space center to see how big these things are, if you ever get the opportunity take it,

it is awe inspiring. It is you see how tiny you are in relation to some of these rockets, and it, I mean, the first time I ever saw it absolutely took my breath away. So to think of a company being able to turn that around so quickly, it's pretty phenomenal. Also, keep in mind that one of the things they wanted to do was design a rocket like then one. Design a rocket that could be used multiple times. And usually you launch these things, they separate out and you retrieve

the stuff and you scrap it. You don't use the launch vehicle a second time. But that's their whole goal, is they want to be able to use the same launch vehicle for multiple missions, not just not just the capsule, not just the part that holds the cargo and the possibly the crew, but the entire launch vehicle, which is pretty ambitious considering the way that they were always dealt with. And it's another thing that would have driven the price of a launch far, far down because you don't have

to build. So very important for them to have this successful launch, and I'm sure there was a lot of celebrating in Mudville that night. So it was the first privately funded liquid rocket fuel vehicle to ever go into orbit, So pretty amazing well done, and that same year. The story is amazing to me too. Gwen shot Well, who was the seventh SpaceX employee, she was the former VP of business Development, becomes the president and chief Operating Officer

of SpaceX. So Gwen shot Well is the president, Musk is the CEO, and she is a phenomenal person. You need to read some of her interviews or watch some of her interviews. Very articulate, very uh, very enthusiastic, and very ambitious as far as the space industry goes. I mean, just like Musk very much on We're going to put people in Mars by I mean, that's it takes a lot of of of gumption to say something like that

and to mean it. You know, it doesn't come across as it's you know, like, this is a plan we have and maybe it will happen. You really believe it? When none not even a sales pitch. Yeah, And I was like, well, this is what we're doing. Oh by the way, guys, we're going to Mars and anyone want to go. So she attended school and majored to mechanical engineering. She went into the auto industry for a while and

then later went to the aerospace industry. She met with Elon Musk in two thousand two, had had like lunch with him and immediately was thinking this is kind of a cool organization. So she came on as the seventh employee. Shot Well is credited as being largely responsible for some of the biggest deals SpaceX has landed in its history,

and she's also on the company's board of directors. So if you've never heard about her, because I think most of the time when we hear about SpaceX, we tend to hear about Musk mask he's so closely identified with the organization understandably so. And he's also kind of a one man show a lot of the time. He's a

very dynamic personality. This is true. But but shot well, she she has a lot of responsibility for the success of the company, I would say, and uh, I hope maybe I'll be able to do an episode about her in the future tech stuff that would be great. Now, in two thousand nine, we are less than one year away from its first successful test. SpaceX launches a low

earth orbiting set, a light called the Razak SAT. That's are a Z A K S A T, and it's a Malaysian satellite and it has a high resolution camera on it. Pointed, the purpose of it was to point at Malaysia and to provide high resolution images of Malaysia. Because here's the thing about Malaysia, it gets cloudy a lot and a lot. Of the the dedicated UH satellites that get satellite imagery of various regions, they're dedicated for

enormous areas. Right, So the satellite actually goes through an orbit that makes makes it pass over different parts of Earth taking pictures along the way. Well, if that means that this you know satellite only occasionally passes over your country, and your country is often under cloud cover, then you might not really have very many pictures exactly. So by having a dedicated satellite with a dedicated camera, the hope was to be able to get much better images because

it'd be concentrating on a smaller region. Uh. And so this was the first mission where a SpaceX rocket actually took a working payload up into space. Uh. Follow up, the satellite failed after operating for only a year, but it still was a proof of concept that SpaceX could actually do business. Yeah. So at that time, because they had had this success, keep in mind they had a successful test and one successful launch of the Falcon one carrying a payload, they retire the Falcon one to to

focus on building a more powerful vehicle. Yes, and we will talk all about that more powerful vehicle in our next episode where we will continue the story of SpaceX. It's it's funny because we're getting up to the year two thousand ten, and you'd think, you know, we just covered two thousand one through two thousand nine, and how can two thousand, two thousand fourteen have enough for a second episode. Let's get so much. Yes, it picks up so much, and we're really excited to talk about this

in our next episode. Meanwhile, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's another company you want to hear about, or a specific kind of technology, or maybe you're just wondering, Hey, what was tech like in the year nineteen SI no reason, just let us know. Will be glad to look at that and consider it for an episode and maybe even do one. But in order for you to let us know, you gotta gotta contact because just shouting it out the window

does not work. So send us an email or addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler, or handle it. All three is text stuff H. S W and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and bousands of other topics. Does it has to Works dot Com