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Founders: #172 Elon Musk (Early Days of SpaceX)

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What I learned from reading Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger. ---- [12:38] Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them. [20:55] He could be difficult to work for, certainly. But his early hires could immediately see the benefits of working for someone who wanted to get things done and often made decisions on the spot. When Musk decided that Spincraft could make good tanks for a fair price, that was it. No committees. No reports. Just, done. [22:05] Most of all he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done. [27:42] The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs , bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX did. [41:24] It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way, Musk wrote in a postmortem. SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.

[00:00:00] To understand SpaceX, where it aspires to go, and why it just might succeed, one must voyage back to the Falcon 1 rocket and dig up the roots. The seeds for everything SpaceX has grown into today were planted during the early days of the Falcon 1 program by Elon Musk. Back then, he sought to build the world's first low-cost orbital rocket. All of the aspirational talk about Mars would mean nothing if SpaceX could not put a relatively simple rocket like the Falcon 1 into orbit. And so, with a burning intensity, he pressed toward that goal. SpaceX began with nothing [00:00:40] but…

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