14 ms·

Is SpaceX changing the rocket equation?

295 points by bfe 15y ago

bfe 15y ago
This article discusses how SpaceX seems to be able to get things done faster, for less expense, and with better performance, than any of its competitors -- partly because they care more about the end result of being able to send stuff and people into space and to Mars instead of just selling launches.
burgerbrain 15y ago
It is no exaggeration to say that SpaceX gives me hope for the future of humanity. Godspeed Elon Musk.
ph0rque 15y ago
“It’s very common to do component and system-level testing…. That’s very typical in aerospace, ” says Alan Lindenmoyer of Houston’s Johnson Space Center, who has been working with SpaceX since 2005 as manager of the agency’s Commercial Crew and Cargo program. “But to actually put a vehicle together and do system-level testing of the rocket is not. That’s a level of rigor you don’t typically see.” So they do unit and integration tests? Sounds thorough...
- bfe 15y ago
  As part of their testing they actually pass a stainless steel nut through the kerosene and liquid oxygen lines into the engine while it's firing, something that would make almost any other rocket engine explode. It sounds like to say they do more thorough testing than their competitors is an understatement.
  - nobody31415926 15y ago
    In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker would do - not what nasa would do. The engines on your 777 are designed so that a 6ft long fan blade moving faster than the speed of sound can break off and not go through the engine cowling and into your lap. They blow up $30M engines in testing to prove this
    - masklinn 15y ago
      > In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker would do - not what nasa would do. I think that's a very good way to put it: nasa gets rockets built so they work, all of their engineering is built so it's as perfect as can be from the start. It's a huge cost, but it allows them not to blow up rockets in testing. SpaceX sees that as spaceworthy aircraft-building, they drive up-front costs lower by not focusing as much on design reliability and instead blow up engine to test how they behave.
      - Maakuth 15y ago
        This would be true if rockets actually never exploded. But it seems to me they actually do, and that's why it's useful to test very unfortunate scenarios as well. It's not like they design jet engines' blades to come loose and cause destruction, but they - or some aviation authority - have decided that the engines should not explode even in a case of blade separation. I find it a lot more comforting to know jet engine is tested to not explode in such situation than I would if I was told jet engines are designed perfect. Because perfection is not something engineering can achieve, only extremely small probabilities of failure.
        qntm 15y ago
        I think the difference there is that when a 747 engine explodes, there are three other engines and the plane may well still be landable. When a Space Shuttle engine explodes, everybody is almost certainly dead and the Shuttle crashes. I'm saying that pragmatically, unrecoverable errors don't need testing, and NASA's class of possible unrecoverable errors is much wider than any airline's. The fact that SpaceX feels the need to test so rigorously is a good sign about what they want to be "recoverable" and therefore about how safe their hardware is intended to be.
        mikeash 15y ago
        A lot more rocket failures are recoverable than you might think, though. Engines can fail in many ways that don't destroy everything. Apollo 13 nearly became famous for exploding on launch due to massive resonant vibration, but a premature shutdown of the affected engine saved it. (Oddly, that shutdown was due to a mistaken fuel level reading, not the vibrations directly, so the save was something of an accident.) At least one Shuttle launch experienced an engine failure/shutdown as well. These engines didn't explode, of course, but there's a whole range of failures and many can be planned for. Even when the entire thing does explode, you can still save your crew if you've planned properly. A Soyuz capsule's escape system saved its crew when the rocket exploded in 1983. It appears to me that NASA's approach is to prefer systems which can't fail over systems which can fail safely. On the surface, this seems better, but when your foolproof system still fails and you haven't built it to withstand that, then you're in serious trouble. I don't think there's any inherent reason why shedding a turbine blade during a rocket launch has to destroy the entire vehicle. Designing the system to withstand that makes it heavier and not perform as well, of course, but it seems like an overemphasis on performance while disregarding nearly everything else has really hurt space technology.
  - porfirio 15y ago
    And yet SpaceX has a 57% success rate (4/7), while the Delta family of rockets has had a 97.5%+ success rate (80/82, from 2000-2011, with the other 2 being only partial failures). According to my spreadsheet calculations, SpaceX costs about double the Delta, even though a SpaceX launch costs $60 million, while a Delta launch costs $400 million, because SpaceX's odds of success are much lower, and it's not just the rocket exploding, but the billion dollar payload it's carrying. To be fair, SpaceX has launched seven times, and the last four flights have been successful, so it's success rate is probably higher than 57% by now. Assuming those parameters stay the same, the breakeven point for cost equivalence between Delta and SpaceX is about a 75% success rate for SpaceX. But while the payload may "cost" a billion, losing it obviously incurs some added opportunity cost, eg lost capabilities that you otherwise would have had, had it not exploded. If you increase the payload cost to 1.5 billion, SpaceX needs to achieve a success rate of about 81% to equal the price of a Delta. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%932019) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
ethanpil 15y ago
The greatest point of the article: Patents have become bullshit. Here is the quote: 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.”
- bfe 15y ago
  It's long been standard IP management to weigh between patents and trade secrets based on the specifics of a case.
  - nobody31415926 15y ago
    Especially if nobody ever gets to see your finished product in one piece - people generally don't file patents on bombs for example. Although ironically the Germans did file a patent on an anti-handling bomb fuse that they subsequently used in WWII
deleted 15y ago
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angli 15y ago
I'm really interested in SpaceX, as it seems like the ultimate example of the free market doing things better than the government. I was particularly interested of the claim that they've outdone – and undercut – the Chinese. I'm having trouble deciding if that is based upon fundamentally better technology, or just that the Chinese have no need to optimise that much, as they aren't resource-constrained. The skeptic in me says the latter, but I'm hopeful it's the former.
MikeCapone 15y ago
And prices are expected to rise significantly in the next few years, according to defense department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer is in the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed their advertised prices. “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.” I can't help but think of all the other places where that kind of system operates and makes costs much higher than they should be... How much better would the world be if fewer resources were wasted thus?
- bfe 15y ago
  It's not just hypothetical -- Robert Zubrin describes exactly that scenario when he was an engineer at Lockheed and had to watch his inventions shelved because they would have undercut the costs of the existing launch technology, which prompted him to quit and start his own company. (See his outstanding book "Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization".)
  - T-zex 15y ago
    Sadly this book is not on Kindle.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      The bright side is that it can't be drm'ed on paper ;-)
- cletus 15y ago
  My family has been involved in both mining and construction at various times past and present so I've seen a couple of areas where "cost plus" pricing is used. Generally speaking, it's a recipe for the provider to stick their snout in the trough as far as it will go. There is absolutely no incentive to lower costs or improve efficiencies. It does indeed become a game of brinkmanship between maximizing costs (profits) and cancellation. I have seen it used in construction to mitigate risk. One example springs to mind. A particularly wealthy but eccentric individual wanted to build a lavish home. He was notorious for changing his mind, adding to the project and so on. The only way the company in question would touch the construction contract was on a "cost plus" basis. Whenever you do this you basically have to trust the provider to a certain extent and it only really works if they trade on reputation and a hit to their reputation actually matters (often it doesn't).
dantheman 15y ago
I loved this article, very inspiring. It's great to see good news reported. I want to go to Mars.
- robotresearcher 15y ago
  The author is Andrew Chaikin. He's a good writer and the archetypal space nut. His book on Apollo is terrific. http://www.andrewchaikin.com/ http://www.andrewchaikin.com/
MikeCapone 15y ago
It's a Linux-powered rocket too! The Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning to be human-rated, meaning an increased focus on reliability. The rocket’s avionics and controls are triple-redundant (as will be some sensors in the human-rated version of the Atlas V), and the flight computers, which run on Linux, will “issue the right commands even if there’s severe damage to the system,” Musk says.
- cop359 15y ago
  That's actually very weird. Wouldn't having an OS like Linux make it so you can't guarantee computation times and guarantee exactly when processes will start and end? I don't really know much about OS's but I'd write control systems in a pure language compiled directly to machine code with no OS. That way you would have certain guarantees of execution and auditing the code would be significantly cheaper. I remember hearing that auditing code for satellites is outrageously expensive because most languages have side effects. So it's thousands and thousands of dollars per line of code to guarantee that it'll do what it says it will do regardless of execution path.
  - tobtoh 15y ago
    I may be wrong, but my understanding is that custom control systems are used generally when you have physical restraints of some sort (limited memory, computational power) or require the speed. I'd imagine for the purposes of SpaceX though, they don't have those restrictions and so they make huge gains by using an extremely well known "off-the-shelf" OS where they can easily source programmers. The fact that the OS is (relatively) well understood would also possibly mean it's easier to test. All of which means that for minimal trade-off in reliability, they make large gains in development time and cost.
  - gajomi 15y ago
    I agree it sounds weird at first. On second thought, whether or not it is so strange depends on one means by "flight computers". For example, for something like logging or pre-flight checks the exact timing would matter that much, and it would be convenient to have a full blown OS. When timing matters (e.g. flight control?), I imagine that one could set up controllers (with their own CPUs and straight to the metal programming of the sort you described) as devices that accept commands from and stream data to the primary flight computer. This is %100 speculation. I would be curious to know what kind of temporal precision is needed for rocket control, since if it is a sloppy enough process then all this worrying about timing it for nought.
kiba 15y ago
Hmm, if they can get rocket cheap, they can make their rocket safer over time, because you can test more and more of them.
- wonjohnchoi 15y ago
  Totally agreed
bcl 15y ago
Clearly they are. They have shown what can be done when you take proven designs and techniques and skip the bureaucratic BS that is inherent in being a NASA, Boeing, etc.
bobwaycott 15y ago
I love space and programming more than anything. This article just filled my head with a bajillion ideas and made me wonder why on earth I haven't thought before about chasing both in my career choices. A very inspiring read, complete with such nice asides about how operating as a startup with a mission can get so much fun and work accomplished, and shows that serving the interests of shareholders and profits first can utterly derail accomplishing your mission.
brc 15y ago
It's interesting how they attribute so much of their success to Apollo program information. So much data must have been created during that program - I wonder how much of it is sitting on dusty shelves unused? I've often wondered what type of improvements you could make if you built a Saturn V type rocket with modern technology and materials. It looks like we're probably going to find out over the next ten years.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Saturn 5 is lost technology. The build was split up over a bunch of different sub contractors. There's no central repository for plans. Some plans are lost forever; others are in basements or attics of various engineers. There was no single group of engineers who know how to put together a Saturn 5. Yes; it's be cool to see old designs meet new methods. But it's also cool to see what modern materials and chemistry can do.
  - cstross 15y ago
    Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual flight missions, each and every one of them was a prototype: the rocket engineers working on them had worked on multiple prototype missiles before, and a whole lot of snags and bugs were hand-patched on each vehicle. Even if we could magic up a complete set of designs and build new production lines based on them, we'd have lost a chunk of the hands-on knowledge of how to fix problems with the design (stuff that wasn't recorded by a process that predated ISO9000 and similar QA protocols). Also, people tend to over-estimate the SV stack. As it happened, in its first iteration it was barely capable of the mission -- the LEM came in overweight, and only the fact that the SV out-performed its design specs by a couple of percent made the Block 1 lunar missions possible. (By Block 2 -- Apollo 15-17 -- they'd tweaked enough things that they could fly a heavier LEM with the lunar rover kit and additional supplies.) In contrast, you might find Musk's plans for Falcon Heavy interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy 16,000Kg to translunar injection, 14,000Kg to Mars. It's not up to flying an Apollo mission profile (the LEM weighed 14,700Kg; the CSM stack 30,300Kg) but it's capable of putting a LEM-sized payload into Lunar orbit, and it might be possible to rig up some kind of lunar-orbit rendezvous profile surface mission using 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches.
tzury 15y ago
Single Page version (+ Readability) http://www.readability.com/articles/2pzowoyw http://www.readability.com/articles/2pzowoyw
alex_c 15y ago
Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims. And yet, it's this kind of completely unrealistic goals that really pushes things forward. Even if SpaceX only gets... dunno, 25% of the way to that goal, chances are they'll have accomplished more than anyone else is trying.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  NASA is about to launch a 1 ton rover on mars and even if the mission in a compleat failure they have already sent enough stuff to the Mars that we know a lot about the planet's geology, history, chemistry, and have a fairly high resolution imaging of the entire surface. The only meaningful step after this is a self sustaining colony on Mars that can exist without supply's from earth. Everything else IMO is just showmanship. PS: Yea I know a solid manufacturing base plus 5+ million people might seem like several steps away, but until that happens we don't have meaningful levels of redundancy, just an outpost that would take a while to die off. (bad vacation) http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivational-posters-bad-vacation/ http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivati...
6ren 15y ago
I think this is an answer to people who are "too smart to succeed" because they optimize the product only. It's just a matter of optimizing across domains, (e.g. trade-off cost and performance), which takes a certain adaptability and flexibility of mind. It's a kind of lateral intelligence and reframing which is useful in solving everything but textbook problems. > Simplicity enables both reliability and low cost. As Woz said - though Woz also mentioned the advantage of making it simple enough to fully hold in his head. (http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html). So, in a back-handed way, a limited working memory can be a gift (though I'm not suggesting that Woz's working memory was limited). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258655 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258655 one page (works) http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=1+visionary+%2B+3+launchers+%2B+1%2C500+employees+%3D+%3F+%7C+Space+Exploration+%7C+Air+%26+Space+Magazine&urlID=464931307&action=cpt&partnerID=285367&cid=133542138&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airspacemag.com%2Fspace-exploration%2FVisionary-Launchers-Employees.html%23 http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&tit...
- gokult 15y ago
  This TED talk by George Whitesides titled "Towards a science of simplicity" comes to mind - http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_...
martythemaniak 15y ago
"On the flight home, he recalls, “I was trying to understand why rockets were so expensive. Obviously the lowest cost you can make anything for is the spot value of the material constituents. And that’s if you had a magic wand and could rearrange the atoms. So there’s just a question of how efficient you can be about getting the atoms from raw material state to rocket shape.” Brilliant.
- idonthack 15y ago
  If you think that's brilliant, you need to take Economics 101 again.
Joakal 15y ago
As long ITAR exists, the rest of the world will eventually overshadow USA [0] for peaceful ventures into space. Also, SpaceX is competing against very entrenched corporations that resorts to many tactics [1]. For SpaceX to advance USA's space technology, they'd have to submit to military expensive contracts too, militarising space. I really wish I could support American space companies. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/c2b9oum http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t... [1] http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-martin.html http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-martin... Edit: Why am I being downvoted? That ITAR makes USA alone in space travel?
- dantheman 15y ago
  How does ITAR make the rest of the world overshadow the US?
  - Joakal 15y ago
    That thread has some discussion of ITAR limitations including the heavy bureaucracy of dealing in anything remotely space technology as state secrets. The whole thread I'm referring to: http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t...
RobPfeifer 15y ago
Does anyone have any idea how to figure out what their "energy per Pound to orbit" is and how it might compare to their competition? Would be curious as their relative efficiencies.
- mkn 15y ago
  It turns out that "relative efficiencies" from an energy standpoint is not the relevant consideration, by two or three orders of magnitude. Fuel costs for launch vehicles are a negligible fraction of the total cost to fly. Musk is working the rest of the problem by simplifying the design, designing for manufacturability, using off-optimum technologies, building everything under one roof, and so on.
mprovost 15y ago
But can you buy insurance for their launches? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...
amirmansour 15y ago
I've been an avionics intern at SpaceX for the past two years, and I can tell you for sure that if anyone is gonna take humans to Mars it will be SpaceX. The same goes for propulsive landing of a rocket for reusability: http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=recent http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=rec... Everything at SpaceX is designed with reusability in mind, and every system is highly redundant. And to top it off, they have some of the best, most talented, and most experienced engineers out there. With all that said, the reason why SpaceX will succeed is their culture. Most of the company's employees are young and highly motivated (including myself I guess). When I started my work at SpaceX, one of the engineers told me to prepare to shed some blood and tears as well as prepare for the most stressful yet rewarding work of your life. He was right. There were times where I did not go home for 4 days straight (this was not recommended). They did not asked me to do this. I just wanted to do it. The thing that is cool about SpaceX is that you will do REAL work on you first day, and you will have a significant impact right away. Even if you are an intern. I know a lot people on Hacker News are essentially web programmers (Me too actually. Django FTW). If you guys are looking for a job, they are always hiring. One way to get hired is to start out as an intern (if you are at an intern stage in your life). If you want to actually program the rocket, and got some ROCK SOLID C++ programming skills, then you are exactly what SpaceX wants. So please apply. Space exploration is hands down one of the important pursuits we can have as civilization, so the best need to work on this challenge in my view. Let me tell you, there is no feeling to see something that you designed and built actually entered outer space. I can't describe it. You just have to experience it for yourself. So if you're bored on your current job, look into SpaceX. Plus having Elon Musk as a boss is pretty bad ass. The guys is simply defines legitness!
- itmag 15y ago
  Now this is interesting. When I read about awesome brogrammers working on the next hip web app with a cutesy hipster name, my eyes glaze over. But you guys are really ENGINEERS, and doing something with massive value. I am a bit surprised that coders can actually get a job at such a place, I would have thought you only hired like aerodynamic physics professors or whatever. Maybe you could go into more detail about what you do at work and what kind of people get hired? :)
kore 15y ago
I'm inspired by this man's dreams and the way he's striving for it, even though the end goal is decades off. Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.”
erikpukinskis 15y ago
Watching the rocket re-use video, I realized that Elon Musk is not just building a space commerce empire, he's actually putting himself in a position where he could be the world's first true supervillain. Not that I think that's what he's up to, but if he has a lair on Mars, and controls the galaxy's only fleet of interplanetary missiles.... he could ask for quite a ransom. The parallels to Ozymandias are a little scary. Just sayin'.
- simondlr 15y ago
  Elon feels like a real-world Iron Man.
  - NickPollard 15y ago
    Funny you should say that, Jon Favreau has said that Elon Musk was the basis for much of the portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron man films. (He also has a cameo in Iron Man 2, and the SpaceX lab was used as a set). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
    - mahmud 15y ago
      Geez, Musk & Shuttleworth are both South Africans.
- nobody31415926 15y ago
  I'm sure the FBI monitors CEO for purchases of large quantities of piranhas and white cats with diamond collars.
dirtyaura 15y ago
If you are, like me, interested to learn more about Space X, watch Musk's AIAA 2011 Keynote. Q&A session covers a few interesting technical problems. He talks about costs, reusability, vertical launch, nuclear propulsion etc. Part 1 is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTpZEKDShWM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTpZEKDShWM, but Q&A starts at 5 mins into part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzMs4nvfcc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzMs4nvfcc
- dirtyaura 15y ago
  Also one point was very interesting: Musk doesn't see business potential in mining minerals from moon or Mars ("Earth has a lot of stuff in its crust and Earth is big"), but thinks that there are lot of people willing to move to space.
johnyzee 15y ago
SpaceX claims to be able to manufacture cheaper than China while being more thorough than NASA, all the while developing and building their components in-house. I would love for all this to be true but would have to remain sceptical for the time being.
FrojoS 15y ago
I really wish there was a good way for non-americans to contribute to SpaceX. While their spare use of external suppliers seems to make sense, it makes it even harder to contribute. I find it sad that the potentially biggest undertaking of mankind is once again an USA only party - run by a foreigner (Musk). Well at least everyone will be able to buy SpaceX shares once they have an IPO.
amirmansour 15y ago
UPDATE: I'm posting this comment to address some of the questions you guys asked. I'm actually an Computer Science guy stuck in the body of an Electrical Engineer. I mostly design hardware, however in my first year I did a good amount of highly optimized embedded systems programming. I wish I could go into more detail but that's against company policy. However, my high school (the good old days) robotics mentors that also work at SpaceX are the top developers of the avionics software. What they mostly do is program the flight computer. Also the code that just brings every little sensor data together. Again I would really love to sit here and talk to you guys about the technical details, but I'm simply not allowed. So sorry for the broad sentences. Regarding the type of people that get hired. As I said SpaceX hires the BEST. As an intern, KEN BOWERSOX, an amazing astronaut sat 2 desks away from me. I could have walked up to the guy at anytime and ask him how it was like in space. Look at this list of people running the company: http://www.spacex.com/company.php http://www.spacex.com/company.php After reading that you see how top notch these people are. The same goes for their employees. SpaceX hires from everywhere, but it seems they are really into the stereotypical TOP engineering schools. It felt like everyone was from Stanford. A lot of people from University of Michigan, Carnegie Melon, and MIT. The company is in California, but it felt like that a huge chunk of the company was recruited from outside the state. Just go into the parking lot, and you can see license plates from every state (I saw one from Maine...long ass drive). There were few interns from the University of California system (like myself). If you guys want to apply, I want to not just tell you all the good stuff. There is also the not so pretty side. Be prepared to give the job your everything. Specially if you are a young engineer because you mostly likely don't have any experience under your belt to make you an irreplaceable asset. Also people forget that SpaceX is a STARTUP. Yes they have 1500 employees. But this is not some little photo sharing iPhone app company (no offense guys, you really need stop with those). It's an aerospace startup, which means 1500 employees is pretty much a small amount of people. Also Elon Musk has this philosophy where a small amount of people can achieve BIG things. With that said they are hiring like crazy last time I checked (which was like 2 months ago). Since it is a startup, job security is not good. Since the people they hire are very good, they mostly don't get fired. But at the same time the deadlines, and goals can sometimes seem like a fantasy. This sometimes leads to people getting fired. This happened a lot during my stay. With all that said, from working at Jet Propulsion Lab, and now SpaceX my goal is turn my current graduate research into a startup. I've learned that I'm simply not the type of person that can work for others for the rest of my life. Graduating with an engineering degree and doing 9 to 5 stressful job will get old very fast. After my stay at SpaceX I already feel burned out (I worked on some high priority projects). However, I am really passionate about my current project (I can't stop thinking about it), and my goal is to turn that into a company. Unfortunately, I might have to say goodbye to SpaceX to pursue this dream.

295 points by bfe 15y ago

bfe 15y ago

This article discusses how SpaceX seems to be able to get things done faster, for less expense, and with better performance, than any of its competitors -- partly because they care more about the end result of being able to send stuff and people into space and to Mars instead of just selling launches.

burgerbrain 15y ago

It is no exaggeration to say that SpaceX gives me hope for the future of humanity. Godspeed Elon Musk.

ph0rque 15y ago

“It’s very common to do component and system-level testing…. That’s very typical in aerospace, ” says Alan Lindenmoyer of Houston’s Johnson Space Center, who has been working with SpaceX since 2005 as manager of the agency’s Commercial Crew and Cargo program. “But to actually put a vehicle together and do system-level testing of the rocket is not. That’s a level of rigor you don’t typically see.” So they do unit and integration tests? Sounds thorough...

bfe 15y ago
As part of their testing they actually pass a stainless steel nut through the kerosene and liquid oxygen lines into the engine while it's firing, something that would make almost any other rocket engine explode. It sounds like to say they do more thorough testing than their competitors is an understatement.
- nobody31415926 15y ago
  In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker would do - not what nasa would do. The engines on your 777 are designed so that a 6ft long fan blade moving faster than the speed of sound can break off and not go through the engine cowling and into your lap. They blow up $30M engines in testing to prove this
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker would do - not what nasa would do. I think that's a very good way to put it: nasa gets rockets built so they work, all of their engineering is built so it's as perfect as can be from the start. It's a huge cost, but it allows them not to blow up rockets in testing. SpaceX sees that as spaceworthy aircraft-building, they drive up-front costs lower by not focusing as much on design reliability and instead blow up engine to test how they behave.
    - Maakuth 15y ago
      This would be true if rockets actually never exploded. But it seems to me they actually do, and that's why it's useful to test very unfortunate scenarios as well. It's not like they design jet engines' blades to come loose and cause destruction, but they - or some aviation authority - have decided that the engines should not explode even in a case of blade separation. I find it a lot more comforting to know jet engine is tested to not explode in such situation than I would if I was told jet engines are designed perfect. Because perfection is not something engineering can achieve, only extremely small probabilities of failure.
      - qntm 15y ago
        I think the difference there is that when a 747 engine explodes, there are three other engines and the plane may well still be landable. When a Space Shuttle engine explodes, everybody is almost certainly dead and the Shuttle crashes. I'm saying that pragmatically, unrecoverable errors don't need testing, and NASA's class of possible unrecoverable errors is much wider than any airline's. The fact that SpaceX feels the need to test so rigorously is a good sign about what they want to be "recoverable" and therefore about how safe their hardware is intended to be.
        mikeash 15y ago
        A lot more rocket failures are recoverable than you might think, though. Engines can fail in many ways that don't destroy everything. Apollo 13 nearly became famous for exploding on launch due to massive resonant vibration, but a premature shutdown of the affected engine saved it. (Oddly, that shutdown was due to a mistaken fuel level reading, not the vibrations directly, so the save was something of an accident.) At least one Shuttle launch experienced an engine failure/shutdown as well. These engines didn't explode, of course, but there's a whole range of failures and many can be planned for. Even when the entire thing does explode, you can still save your crew if you've planned properly. A Soyuz capsule's escape system saved its crew when the rocket exploded in 1983. It appears to me that NASA's approach is to prefer systems which can't fail over systems which can fail safely. On the surface, this seems better, but when your foolproof system still fails and you haven't built it to withstand that, then you're in serious trouble. I don't think there's any inherent reason why shedding a turbine blade during a rocket launch has to destroy the entire vehicle. Designing the system to withstand that makes it heavier and not perform as well, of course, but it seems like an overemphasis on performance while disregarding nearly everything else has really hurt space technology.
- porfirio 15y ago
  And yet SpaceX has a 57% success rate (4/7), while the Delta family of rockets has had a 97.5%+ success rate (80/82, from 2000-2011, with the other 2 being only partial failures). According to my spreadsheet calculations, SpaceX costs about double the Delta, even though a SpaceX launch costs $60 million, while a Delta launch costs $400 million, because SpaceX's odds of success are much lower, and it's not just the rocket exploding, but the billion dollar payload it's carrying. To be fair, SpaceX has launched seven times, and the last four flights have been successful, so it's success rate is probably higher than 57% by now. Assuming those parameters stay the same, the breakeven point for cost equivalence between Delta and SpaceX is about a 75% success rate for SpaceX. But while the payload may "cost" a billion, losing it obviously incurs some added opportunity cost, eg lost capabilities that you otherwise would have had, had it not exploded. If you increase the payload cost to 1.5 billion, SpaceX needs to achieve a success rate of about 81% to equal the price of a Delta. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%932019) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

ethanpil 15y ago

The greatest point of the article: Patents have become bullshit. Here is the quote: 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.”

bfe 15y ago
It's long been standard IP management to weigh between patents and trade secrets based on the specifics of a case.
- nobody31415926 15y ago
  Especially if nobody ever gets to see your finished product in one piece - people generally don't file patents on bombs for example. Although ironically the Germans did file a patent on an anti-handling bomb fuse that they subsequently used in WWII

deleted 15y ago

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angli 15y ago

I'm really interested in SpaceX, as it seems like the ultimate example of the free market doing things better than the government. I was particularly interested of the claim that they've outdone – and undercut – the Chinese. I'm having trouble deciding if that is based upon fundamentally better technology, or just that the Chinese have no need to optimise that much, as they aren't resource-constrained. The skeptic in me says the latter, but I'm hopeful it's the former.

MikeCapone 15y ago

And prices are expected to rise significantly in the next few years, according to defense department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer is in the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed their advertised prices. “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.” I can't help but think of all the other places where that kind of system operates and makes costs much higher than they should be... How much better would the world be if fewer resources were wasted thus?

bfe 15y ago
It's not just hypothetical -- Robert Zubrin describes exactly that scenario when he was an engineer at Lockheed and had to watch his inventions shelved because they would have undercut the costs of the existing launch technology, which prompted him to quit and start his own company. (See his outstanding book "Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization".)
- T-zex 15y ago
  Sadly this book is not on Kindle.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    The bright side is that it can't be drm'ed on paper ;-)
cletus 15y ago
My family has been involved in both mining and construction at various times past and present so I've seen a couple of areas where "cost plus" pricing is used. Generally speaking, it's a recipe for the provider to stick their snout in the trough as far as it will go. There is absolutely no incentive to lower costs or improve efficiencies. It does indeed become a game of brinkmanship between maximizing costs (profits) and cancellation. I have seen it used in construction to mitigate risk. One example springs to mind. A particularly wealthy but eccentric individual wanted to build a lavish home. He was notorious for changing his mind, adding to the project and so on. The only way the company in question would touch the construction contract was on a "cost plus" basis. Whenever you do this you basically have to trust the provider to a certain extent and it only really works if they trade on reputation and a hit to their reputation actually matters (often it doesn't).

dantheman 15y ago

I loved this article, very inspiring. It's great to see good news reported. I want to go to Mars.

robotresearcher 15y ago
The author is Andrew Chaikin. He's a good writer and the archetypal space nut. His book on Apollo is terrific. http://www.andrewchaikin.com/ http://www.andrewchaikin.com/

MikeCapone 15y ago

It's a Linux-powered rocket too! The Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning to be human-rated, meaning an increased focus on reliability. The rocket’s avionics and controls are triple-redundant (as will be some sensors in the human-rated version of the Atlas V), and the flight computers, which run on Linux, will “issue the right commands even if there’s severe damage to the system,” Musk says.

cop359 15y ago
That's actually very weird. Wouldn't having an OS like Linux make it so you can't guarantee computation times and guarantee exactly when processes will start and end? I don't really know much about OS's but I'd write control systems in a pure language compiled directly to machine code with no OS. That way you would have certain guarantees of execution and auditing the code would be significantly cheaper. I remember hearing that auditing code for satellites is outrageously expensive because most languages have side effects. So it's thousands and thousands of dollars per line of code to guarantee that it'll do what it says it will do regardless of execution path.
- tobtoh 15y ago
  I may be wrong, but my understanding is that custom control systems are used generally when you have physical restraints of some sort (limited memory, computational power) or require the speed. I'd imagine for the purposes of SpaceX though, they don't have those restrictions and so they make huge gains by using an extremely well known "off-the-shelf" OS where they can easily source programmers. The fact that the OS is (relatively) well understood would also possibly mean it's easier to test. All of which means that for minimal trade-off in reliability, they make large gains in development time and cost.
- gajomi 15y ago
  I agree it sounds weird at first. On second thought, whether or not it is so strange depends on one means by "flight computers". For example, for something like logging or pre-flight checks the exact timing would matter that much, and it would be convenient to have a full blown OS. When timing matters (e.g. flight control?), I imagine that one could set up controllers (with their own CPUs and straight to the metal programming of the sort you described) as devices that accept commands from and stream data to the primary flight computer. This is %100 speculation. I would be curious to know what kind of temporal precision is needed for rocket control, since if it is a sloppy enough process then all this worrying about timing it for nought.

kiba 15y ago

Hmm, if they can get rocket cheap, they can make their rocket safer over time, because you can test more and more of them.

wonjohnchoi 15y ago
Totally agreed

bcl 15y ago

Clearly they are. They have shown what can be done when you take proven designs and techniques and skip the bureaucratic BS that is inherent in being a NASA, Boeing, etc.

bobwaycott 15y ago

I love space and programming more than anything. This article just filled my head with a bajillion ideas and made me wonder why on earth I haven't thought before about chasing both in my career choices. A very inspiring read, complete with such nice asides about how operating as a startup with a mission can get so much fun and work accomplished, and shows that serving the interests of shareholders and profits first can utterly derail accomplishing your mission.

brc 15y ago

It's interesting how they attribute so much of their success to Apollo program information. So much data must have been created during that program - I wonder how much of it is sitting on dusty shelves unused? I've often wondered what type of improvements you could make if you built a Saturn V type rocket with modern technology and materials. It looks like we're probably going to find out over the next ten years.

DanBC 15y ago
Saturn 5 is lost technology. The build was split up over a bunch of different sub contractors. There's no central repository for plans. Some plans are lost forever; others are in basements or attics of various engineers. There was no single group of engineers who know how to put together a Saturn 5. Yes; it's be cool to see old designs meet new methods. But it's also cool to see what modern materials and chemistry can do.
- cstross 15y ago
  Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual flight missions, each and every one of them was a prototype: the rocket engineers working on them had worked on multiple prototype missiles before, and a whole lot of snags and bugs were hand-patched on each vehicle. Even if we could magic up a complete set of designs and build new production lines based on them, we'd have lost a chunk of the hands-on knowledge of how to fix problems with the design (stuff that wasn't recorded by a process that predated ISO9000 and similar QA protocols). Also, people tend to over-estimate the SV stack. As it happened, in its first iteration it was barely capable of the mission -- the LEM came in overweight, and only the fact that the SV out-performed its design specs by a couple of percent made the Block 1 lunar missions possible. (By Block 2 -- Apollo 15-17 -- they'd tweaked enough things that they could fly a heavier LEM with the lunar rover kit and additional supplies.) In contrast, you might find Musk's plans for Falcon Heavy interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy 16,000Kg to translunar injection, 14,000Kg to Mars. It's not up to flying an Apollo mission profile (the LEM weighed 14,700Kg; the CSM stack 30,300Kg) but it's capable of putting a LEM-sized payload into Lunar orbit, and it might be possible to rig up some kind of lunar-orbit rendezvous profile surface mission using 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches.

tzury 15y ago

Single Page version (+ Readability) http://www.readability.com/articles/2pzowoyw http://www.readability.com/articles/2pzowoyw

alex_c 15y ago

Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims. And yet, it's this kind of completely unrealistic goals that really pushes things forward. Even if SpaceX only gets... dunno, 25% of the way to that goal, chances are they'll have accomplished more than anyone else is trying.

onemoreact 15y ago
NASA is about to launch a 1 ton rover on mars and even if the mission in a compleat failure they have already sent enough stuff to the Mars that we know a lot about the planet's geology, history, chemistry, and have a fairly high resolution imaging of the entire surface. The only meaningful step after this is a self sustaining colony on Mars that can exist without supply's from earth. Everything else IMO is just showmanship. PS: Yea I know a solid manufacturing base plus 5+ million people might seem like several steps away, but until that happens we don't have meaningful levels of redundancy, just an outpost that would take a while to die off. (bad vacation) http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivational-posters-bad-vacation/ http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivati...

6ren 15y ago

I think this is an answer to people who are "too smart to succeed" because they optimize the product only. It's just a matter of optimizing across domains, (e.g. trade-off cost and performance), which takes a certain adaptability and flexibility of mind. It's a kind of lateral intelligence and reframing which is useful in solving everything but textbook problems. > Simplicity enables both reliability and low cost. As Woz said - though Woz also mentioned the advantage of making it simple enough to fully hold in his head. (http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html). So, in a back-handed way, a limited working memory can be a gift (though I'm not suggesting that Woz's working memory was limited). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258655 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258655 one page (works) http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=1+visionary+%2B+3+launchers+%2B+1%2C500+employees+%3D+%3F+%7C+Space+Exploration+%7C+Air+%26+Space+Magazine&urlID=464931307&action=cpt&partnerID=285367&cid=133542138&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airspacemag.com%2Fspace-exploration%2FVisionary-Launchers-Employees.html%23 http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&tit...

gokult 15y ago
This TED talk by George Whitesides titled "Towards a science of simplicity" comes to mind - http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_...

martythemaniak 15y ago

"On the flight home, he recalls, “I was trying to understand why rockets were so expensive. Obviously the lowest cost you can make anything for is the spot value of the material constituents. And that’s if you had a magic wand and could rearrange the atoms. So there’s just a question of how efficient you can be about getting the atoms from raw material state to rocket shape.” Brilliant.

idonthack 15y ago
If you think that's brilliant, you need to take Economics 101 again.

Joakal 15y ago

As long ITAR exists, the rest of the world will eventually overshadow USA [0] for peaceful ventures into space. Also, SpaceX is competing against very entrenched corporations that resorts to many tactics [1]. For SpaceX to advance USA's space technology, they'd have to submit to military expensive contracts too, militarising space. I really wish I could support American space companies. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/c2b9oum http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t... [1] http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-martin.html http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-martin... Edit: Why am I being downvoted? That ITAR makes USA alone in space travel?

dantheman 15y ago
How does ITAR make the rest of the world overshadow the US?
- Joakal 15y ago
  That thread has some discussion of ITAR limitations including the heavy bureaucracy of dealing in anything remotely space technology as state secrets. The whole thread I'm referring to: http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t...

RobPfeifer 15y ago

Does anyone have any idea how to figure out what their "energy per Pound to orbit" is and how it might compare to their competition? Would be curious as their relative efficiencies.

mkn 15y ago
It turns out that "relative efficiencies" from an energy standpoint is not the relevant consideration, by two or three orders of magnitude. Fuel costs for launch vehicles are a negligible fraction of the total cost to fly. Musk is working the rest of the problem by simplifying the design, designing for manufacturability, using off-optimum technologies, building everything under one roof, and so on.

mprovost 15y ago

But can you buy insurance for their launches? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...

amirmansour 15y ago

I've been an avionics intern at SpaceX for the past two years, and I can tell you for sure that if anyone is gonna take humans to Mars it will be SpaceX. The same goes for propulsive landing of a rocket for reusability: http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=recent http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=rec... Everything at SpaceX is designed with reusability in mind, and every system is highly redundant. And to top it off, they have some of the best, most talented, and most experienced engineers out there. With all that said, the reason why SpaceX will succeed is their culture. Most of the company's employees are young and highly motivated (including myself I guess). When I started my work at SpaceX, one of the engineers told me to prepare to shed some blood and tears as well as prepare for the most stressful yet rewarding work of your life. He was right. There were times where I did not go home for 4 days straight (this was not recommended). They did not asked me to do this. I just wanted to do it. The thing that is cool about SpaceX is that you will do REAL work on you first day, and you will have a significant impact right away. Even if you are an intern. I know a lot people on Hacker News are essentially web programmers (Me too actually. Django FTW). If you guys are looking for a job, they are always hiring. One way to get hired is to start out as an intern (if you are at an intern stage in your life). If you want to actually program the rocket, and got some ROCK SOLID C++ programming skills, then you are exactly what SpaceX wants. So please apply. Space exploration is hands down one of the important pursuits we can have as civilization, so the best need to work on this challenge in my view. Let me tell you, there is no feeling to see something that you designed and built actually entered outer space. I can't describe it. You just have to experience it for yourself. So if you're bored on your current job, look into SpaceX. Plus having Elon Musk as a boss is pretty bad ass. The guys is simply defines legitness!

itmag 15y ago
Now this is interesting. When I read about awesome brogrammers working on the next hip web app with a cutesy hipster name, my eyes glaze over. But you guys are really ENGINEERS, and doing something with massive value. I am a bit surprised that coders can actually get a job at such a place, I would have thought you only hired like aerodynamic physics professors or whatever. Maybe you could go into more detail about what you do at work and what kind of people get hired? :)

kore 15y ago

I'm inspired by this man's dreams and the way he's striving for it, even though the end goal is decades off. Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.”

erikpukinskis 15y ago

Watching the rocket re-use video, I realized that Elon Musk is not just building a space commerce empire, he's actually putting himself in a position where he could be the world's first true supervillain. Not that I think that's what he's up to, but if he has a lair on Mars, and controls the galaxy's only fleet of interplanetary missiles.... he could ask for quite a ransom. The parallels to Ozymandias are a little scary. Just sayin'.

simondlr 15y ago
Elon feels like a real-world Iron Man.
- NickPollard 15y ago
  Funny you should say that, Jon Favreau has said that Elon Musk was the basis for much of the portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron man films. (He also has a cameo in Iron Man 2, and the SpaceX lab was used as a set). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
  - mahmud 15y ago
    Geez, Musk & Shuttleworth are both South Africans.
nobody31415926 15y ago
I'm sure the FBI monitors CEO for purchases of large quantities of piranhas and white cats with diamond collars.

dirtyaura 15y ago

If you are, like me, interested to learn more about Space X, watch Musk's AIAA 2011 Keynote. Q&A session covers a few interesting technical problems. He talks about costs, reusability, vertical launch, nuclear propulsion etc. Part 1 is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTpZEKDShWM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTpZEKDShWM, but Q&A starts at 5 mins into part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzMs4nvfcc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzMs4nvfcc

dirtyaura 15y ago
Also one point was very interesting: Musk doesn't see business potential in mining minerals from moon or Mars ("Earth has a lot of stuff in its crust and Earth is big"), but thinks that there are lot of people willing to move to space.

johnyzee 15y ago

SpaceX claims to be able to manufacture cheaper than China while being more thorough than NASA, all the while developing and building their components in-house. I would love for all this to be true but would have to remain sceptical for the time being.

FrojoS 15y ago

I really wish there was a good way for non-americans to contribute to SpaceX. While their spare use of external suppliers seems to make sense, it makes it even harder to contribute. I find it sad that the potentially biggest undertaking of mankind is once again an USA only party - run by a foreigner (Musk). Well at least everyone will be able to buy SpaceX shares once they have an IPO.

amirmansour 15y ago

UPDATE: I'm posting this comment to address some of the questions you guys asked. I'm actually an Computer Science guy stuck in the body of an Electrical Engineer. I mostly design hardware, however in my first year I did a good amount of highly optimized embedded systems programming. I wish I could go into more detail but that's against company policy. However, my high school (the good old days) robotics mentors that also work at SpaceX are the top developers of the avionics software. What they mostly do is program the flight computer. Also the code that just brings every little sensor data together. Again I would really love to sit here and talk to you guys about the technical details, but I'm simply not allowed. So sorry for the broad sentences. Regarding the type of people that get hired. As I said SpaceX hires the BEST. As an intern, KEN BOWERSOX, an amazing astronaut sat 2 desks away from me. I could have walked up to the guy at anytime and ask him how it was like in space. Look at this list of people running the company: http://www.spacex.com/company.php http://www.spacex.com/company.php After reading that you see how top notch these people are. The same goes for their employees. SpaceX hires from everywhere, but it seems they are really into the stereotypical TOP engineering schools. It felt like everyone was from Stanford. A lot of people from University of Michigan, Carnegie Melon, and MIT. The company is in California, but it felt like that a huge chunk of the company was recruited from outside the state. Just go into the parking lot, and you can see license plates from every state (I saw one from Maine...long ass drive). There were few interns from the University of California system (like myself). If you guys want to apply, I want to not just tell you all the good stuff. There is also the not so pretty side. Be prepared to give the job your everything. Specially if you are a young engineer because you mostly likely don't have any experience under your belt to make you an irreplaceable asset. Also people forget that SpaceX is a STARTUP. Yes they have 1500 employees. But this is not some little photo sharing iPhone app company (no offense guys, you really need stop with those). It's an aerospace startup, which means 1500 employees is pretty much a small amount of people. Also Elon Musk has this philosophy where a small amount of people can achieve BIG things. With that said they are hiring like crazy last time I checked (which was like 2 months ago). Since it is a startup, job security is not good. Since the people they hire are very good, they mostly don't get fired. But at the same time the deadlines, and goals can sometimes seem like a fantasy. This sometimes leads to people getting fired. This happened a lot during my stay. With all that said, from working at Jet Propulsion Lab, and now SpaceX my goal is turn my current graduate research into a startup. I've learned that I'm simply not the type of person that can work for others for the rest of my life. Graduating with an engineering degree and doing 9 to 5 stressful job will get old very fast. After my stay at SpaceX I already feel burned out (I worked on some high priority projects). However, I am really passionate about my current project (I can't stop thinking about it), and my goal is to turn that into a company. Unfortunately, I might have to say goodbye to SpaceX to pursue this dream.