How Did SpaceX Get to the Top of the Aerospace Heap?
Let’s talk about Elon Musk’s personality. When Musk starts a project, he throws himself completely into it. He has been known to sleep on the factory floor and work well over 100 hours a week until that project is finished. Some say the hardest working employee of SpaceX is Musk himself. It is said Musk loves what he does and when you love your employment you want to go to work and accomplish things. This fits Musk’s personality perfectly. Musk is not risk adverse and has taken risks many times and at least most of them have paid off. His first big risk was taken in 1995 when he and his brother founded a company called Zip2. He only had the company for a year and it was sold to Compaq computers giving Musk and his brother a tidy profit of about $20,000,000. Musk could have settled back, managed his money and had a pretty good life without working, but his personality wouldn’t allow him to just do nothing. He went out and founded one of the first online banks called X.com. His mental process allows him to review how things are done and ways he can improve them. In a way, Elon Musk has the personality of a genius. Before SpaceX, the aerospace companies would just slog along usually being late with their schedules of building spacecraft and satellites and routinely asking for more and more funds as schedules fell further and further behind. They were allowed to do this by the government, which would feed them more money whenever they asked for it. The bidding process was a sham because spacecraft and satellites usually never were built for the bid price. We can see this happening today when we look at ship construction and also the construction of airplanes. When we look at airplanes, we realize most of them were made by the same companies which always fell behind with the spacecraft. Maybe Elon Musk should go into the military airplane business. It certainly needs a shot in the arm. As I said Elon Musk is not stupid and he must’ve known he was going up against companies which had huge lobbies in Congress. It wasn’t until 2009 SpaceX lobbying costs reached only $600,000 a year and this year have only reached $2.4 million. Contrast that with Boeing which this year has reached $15.1 million in lobbying costs. So, you can see the money SpaceX spent on lobbying is pitifully inadequate if it had decided to out-spend the huge existing space companies in order to get contracts. I think if we look at this we realize lobbying, surprisingly didn’t enter into SpaceX’s success and probably only succeeded in letting lawmakers know who the company was. I believe reliability was a much bigger issue with the rank and file at NASA and the military than we first thought. SpaceX has demonstrated they learn from their mistakes and usually after maybe a few unsuccessful tests whatever problem they were trying to solve is solved. They don’t take many years to figure something out as do the legacy space companies. Look how relatively fast they were able to solve the landing problems. In all the years the legacy space companies were around, they never solved anything to do with landings except for the space shuttle which was one of the most dangerous vehicles ever designed. When SpaceX issues a contract with the government it is different than the legacy space companies. Their contracts are far less restrictive then the legacy space companies so they are much better for the government to sign. The legacy space companies must really despise Elon Musk because they had the goose that laid the golden egg and thanks the Elon Musk that egg is starting to rot. Other space companies which are relatively new are also realizing they may be able to beat out the legacy companies so we have to look for a new wave of companies doing more for the government and the legacy companies doing less. Take the issue of reliability, SpaceX has been able to create rockets which are dependable. One of the few problems SpaceX had incurred happened when a subcontractor falsified reports about SpaceX rocket parts. That company is now defunct. They were doing quality assurance and falsified reports at least three dozen times. The reports were for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. This problem seems to have been overcome. The problem came when an employee of PMI industries LLC which specialized in high tolerance machining was forging inspectors signatures on reports. This was unfortunate but could have happened to any company. SpaceX like other space companies, subcontracts the making of some of its parts. Innovation at SpaceX has made them a company to be reckoned with and is also made the general public aware of their abilities. Take the landings for example, many of us were fascinated as their rockets came down tail first and attempted to land on a barge. This was the way we grew up watching rockets landing in sci-fi films. It was a mystery to me why the big aerospace companies never tried this. Anyway, it took several attempts, but that really wasn’t many when we think about what was being accomplished. After a few tries they finally nailed it. This meant some stages of the rocket which landed could then be reused, cutting down on the cost of the next launch. As we know, other rocket launching companies, send their rockets up and then coming down they burn up in the atmosphere. Let’s not forget the barge itself which the rockets land on is robotic. No lives are risked during landings because no humans are on the barge. In summary, SpaceX is more dependable, more innovative and cheaper to use, is it any wonder they finally rose to the top just like the cream in your coffee.
|
