Can a rocket be cute?

On a sparkling morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, the answer is clearly yes. All around are towering launch-pad gantries that have sent dozens of big, expensive, aggressively not-cute rockets skyward since 1958. But rising out of the base’s lupines and sage is a plain, white “event tent”—one that would look more natural at a bar mitzvah than here at big-league rocketry’s West Coast headquarters. And inside, lying on a semitrailer, is Falcon I.

READY TO ROCK

Bolted down and roaring away at a test facility in McGregor, Texas, the Merlin engine that will power the new Falcon I rocket at liftoff mixes kerosene and liquid oxygen at 785 pounds per square inch, then blasts out 75,000 pounds of thrust. “We have run 17 tests in one day,” says Dean Ono, a senior propulsion engineer for the upstart rocket manufacturer Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. “That’s a month’s worth of testing at a big company.”
At 70 feet, it is barely one-fifth the length of a Saturn V, the rocket that propelled Apollo astronauts to the moon. Technicians could straddle the hull, which is five and a half feet in diameter, like Slim Pickens riding the nuke in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While most rockets have three or four stages, this one has just two, and it runs on refined kerosene that costs less per gallon than regular unleaded at a California gas station. At the moment, 10 engineers are running it through a pre–test-fire check, a job that for most rockets requires a cast of hundreds. Watching them swarm over the little craft, one can’t help but reflect that the name Falcon seems a stretch: Were Sparrow and Titmouse taken?


But this unassuming subcompact promises to dramatically slash the cost of putting satellites into orbit and maybe even resurrect America’s moribund space effort. Falcon I is the first rocket produced by Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX for short. The three-year-old El Segundo, California, firm aims to loft 1,400-pound payloads into orbit for a dirt-cheap $6.5 million a pop, as opposed to the roughly $30 million charged by the next-cheapest aerospace company, and that’s just for starters. The company has already begun prototyping and selling payload space for a larger rocket and hopes eventually to offer both manned and unmanned vehicles for one-tenth the current standard price. “Getting to the moon in 10 years is definitely doable,” says SpaceX vice president Chris Thompson.

Indeed, for a small company, the SpaceX principals tend to think very big. Chairman and CEO Elon Musk, an Internet multimillionaire who is personally bankrolling the whole effort, says his ultimate motivation for starting the company is no less than saving humanity from suicide. “Sixty years ago, we didn’t have atomic weapons. What might we have 60 years from now?” he muses. “Establishing a self-sustaining second human civilization on Mars” is, in his view, “the most important goal. If you need to back up your data, then backing up the biosphere is important too.”

Musk’s boldness runs throughout the 130-person enterprise, which fills four industrial buildings just south of Los Angeles International Airport. On the surface, SpaceX could be mistaken for a California-casual, surfer-dude outfit: T-shirts and jeans are de rigueur, the company sponsors staff outings to Star Wars: Episode III–Revenge of the Sith and other geeky flicks, and one of the chief testing engineers is a tattooed 23-year-old. But the managerial staff, mostly recruited from big aerospace’s upper echelons, is deadly serious and plans to show Boeing and Lockheed Martin no more mercy than Wal-Mart does old-line department stores. “What those companies are charging to put something into space is nothing less than highway robbery,” declares Thompson, who should know; he managed production and testing at McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, for 15 years. “They say they are commercial, but the truth is they are overregulated, overstaffed government programs. We definitely want to take all of their business.”

“We are going to start a revolution,” agrees Tom Mueller, vice president of propulsion, who formerly ran rocket-engine development for TRW, now part of Northrop Grumman.

Outside observers aren’t quite so sure, but they grant the effort respect. “They are young and inexperienced, but they are doing the right things, and I think they will make it,” says Robert Sackheim, chief propulsion engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He adds that it’s about time. Thirty years ago, he says, U.S. aerospace firms handled about 80 percent of the world’s launches; now, it is closer to 20 percent. “Today there are at least 30 spacefaring countries. We’re slipping behind. We’re on the verge of going out of business in space.”

Still, this is rocket science. Gravity is heavy, atmosphere is thick, rockets—even simple ones—tend to explode, and the corporate testing ground is strewn with private orbital-services start-ups that have crashed and burned. Maverick aircraft designer Burt Rutan captured the Ansari X Prize in 2004 by lofting his manned, reusable rocket plane SpaceShipOne into space, but that was a suborbital flight requiring about 2 percent of the energy needed to reach and maintain orbit. Whether SpaceX sends just one payload whirling around Earth—much less a colony to Mars—depends on many slippery variables, not least of which is the mettle of its main man.

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS

Graphic by Christoph Niemann

 SpaceX’s Falcon I is an unmanned two-stage rocket with a reusable first stage that will parachute to a water landing soon after liftoff. The upper stage is designed to boost a satellite into orbit 317 miles above Earth’s surface. If successful, Falcon I will reach much greater heights than SpaceShipOne, which was developed by Burt Rutan and his aviation company, Scaled Composites, and garnered the $10 million Ansari X Prize in October 2004 as the first privately financed craft to carry three people to a suborbital altitude of 100 kilometers, or 62.5 miles. For his part, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes that Rutan and other private rocketeers will stay in the game. “This supersedes competition,” he says. “Frankly, I think it would be a good thing if there were other companies besides SpaceX pursuing low-cost access to space orbit and beyond.”