Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

To deliver cargo and astronauts to space, SpaceX designed the Dragon capsule. The design of the Dragon is similar to the capsule that carried the first humans to space. With a white color and eighteen Draco thrusters for control in space, it consists of two main sections. While the upper cone-shaped section, with a flattened top, is pressurized and will return to Earth, the lower cylindrical-shaped section is not pressurized and will not return to Earth.

The Dragon can carry six tonnes of cargo or seven astronauts. The astronauts inside of the cone-shaped section will sit in two rows, with four in the first row and three in the row behind them. In the case of an emergency, eleven astronauts could sit in the Space Shuttle when it returned from space, but seven astronauts was the most common number.

With solar arrays as wings, the Dragon capsule might resemble a flying dragon. But the name originates from the song Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul, and Mary. It was often said the song was a reference to smoking weed, something the authors of the song rejected. But the urban legend lives on. When Elon founded SpaceX, his friends thought he was “puffing” weed to come up with such a crazy idea. 299

While in space, the Dragon capsule will smell like a fire-breathing dragon. It’s difficult to prove, but several astronauts have reported that space has a smell. “Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses,” an astronaut said. “At first I couldn’t quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell. The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.” 293

The first launch of the Falcon 9 took place in June 2010. “It’ll be considered a good day if even the first stage functions correctly. It’ll be a great day if both stages function correctly,” Elon said. 306It carried a mock-up of the Dragon capsule, and it was a successful launch. The capsule was put into a 155-mile-high orbit [250 km], where it remained for a year before burning up in the atmosphere while descending back to Earth.

A real version of the Dragon capsule, on the top of a Falcon 9, launched in December 2010. Before the launch, SpaceX announced that the capsule carried a secret cargo. After the Dragon returned to Earth, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean, SpaceX revealed that the cargo had consisted of a wheel of cheese bolted onto the floor of the capsule. 292

The cheese was a tribute to the sketch The Cheese Shop performed by the British comedian group Monty Python. The idea behind the sketch is that a man walks into a cheese store where he patiently asks what types of cheese the store sells. When the man has gone through all sorts of cheese, it turns out that the store doesn’t have any cheese. We now know SpaceX bought the last one. “Don’t take yourself too seriously, or you’ll start believing your own bullshit,” Elon said. So it’s clear that Elon has a high respect for comedy, but he dislikes the general celebrity culture. An anonymous celebrity wanted a Roadster for free in exchange for promoting it, but Elon said no. 58,156

After the second flight of Falcon 9, Elon made a statement. “It proves that we didn’t just get lucky the first time around,” he said. “Next year we expect four to five launches, the year after that eight to ten, and the launch rate will increase by 100 percent every year for the next four to five years.” 50

To lower the price per launch, all parts of SpaceX’s rockets had to be reusable. “The insistence on reusability drives the engineers insane,” a SpaceXer said. “We could have had Falcon 1 in orbit two years earlier than we did if Elon had just given up on first stage reusability.” 288But Elon knew the rockets had to be reusable if they at the same time would be cheap. All earlier modes of transportation have been reusable – except for rockets. “Imagine how expensive flying would be if a 747 was a single-flight use,” Elon said. “That’s a multi-million-dollar aeroplane you’d be throwing away every time. Who could possibly justify such a thing? We’d all be going in boats.” 4

SpaceX designed the first stage of the Falcon 9 to fall back to Earth with parachutes. But in the future all the rocket’s stages will land by themselves without parachutes. To fulfill the promise, SpaceX developed the Grasshopper. Like the craft that landed on the Moon, the Grasshopper consists of thrusters and four foldable legs. The thrusters will make each stage land on the ground again in a vertical position. “Design completed for bringing rocket back to launchpad using only thrusters. Yay. Wings r just dead weight in space,” Elon said in a Twitter message.

The Grasshopper will increase the turnaround time. Making rockets affordable requires not only reusable rockets, the rockets have to launch again in a short amount of time. A commercial aircraft can fly again in a matter of minutes. The Space Shuttle failed because it was designed to launch again in a matter of days, but in reality it took several months before it could launch again. If the Grasshopper concept works as expected, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will launch again in a matter of hours. It will take more time before the second stage can launch again, so to even out, and since the upper stage is less expensive, SpaceX can manufacture more of those. 315

A drawback with the Grasshopper is that the payload will decrease. The rocket stages have to preserve fuel so they can land again and the Grasshopper technology increases the weight. But because the rockets can launch more frequently, the system as a whole will be less expensive. “The payload penalty for full and fast reusability versus an expendable version is roughly 40 percent, [but] propellant cost is less than 0.4 percent of the total flight cost. Even taking into account the payload reduction for reusability, the improvement is therefore theoretically over a hundred times,” Elon said. 315

When SpaceX’s system is fully developed, a pound [0.45 kg] of cargo will cost $100 to launch. “Our performance will increase and our prices will decline over time as is the case with every other technology,” Elon said. 288The cars from Tesla Motors will become cheaper and cheaper in a similar way as when our computes became cheaper and cheaper, and so will the rockets.

NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011 after it had been in service since 1981. They now turned to SpaceX for help to launch cargo to the International Space Station. NASA agreed to pay SpaceX $40 million per launch, which is a price reduction of about 50 to 66 percent. $30 million was the price for a launch with the Pegasus rocket, and $50 million for a launch with the Taurus rocket, but those rockets carried a smaller payload compared with the Falcon 9. It was estimated that the price of the Chinese rocket, the Shenzhou, is $50 million per launch.

Only four entities had flown a spacecraft to the International Space Station: US, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency. SpaceX became the fifth when the Dragon docked with the space station in May 2012. “At this point, employees all over the company went bananas,” a SpaceXer said.

When not launching cargo, SpaceX would like to sell trips around the Moon and to the International Space Station. 59But SpaceX is not primarily a tourist vessel like the Virgin Galactic founded by Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic uses a design based on the same concept that won the Ansari X Prize: a carrier aircraft launches a smaller spacecraft from its belly. “I’ve nothing against tourism; Richard Branson is brilliant at creating a brand, but he’s not a technologist,” Elon said. “What he’s doing is fundamentally about entertainment, and I think it’s cool, but it’s not likely to affect humanity’s future in a significant way. That’s what we’re trying to do. We want to put life on Mars.” Elon, however, bought a ticket on the Virgin Galactic. 58,316