Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne, is in the part of California famous for the home of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Their music flowed out of the hot rods and sports cars at the Hawthorne Boulevard – one of the world’s most well known cruising spots. The cruisers told their parents they were going to the Hawthorne city library, only a block from the cruising spot, but they just met at the library so they could cruise Hawthorne Boulevard. When their parents discovered the lie, they took the car keys, hence the “Fun fun fun til her daddy takes the t-bird away” in the Beach Boys song Fun, Fun, Fun .

Before Hawthorne drowned in engine sound and music, you could hear military airplanes takeoff from the Jack Northrop Field. During the Second World War, Jack Northrop founded Northrop Aircraft Corporation, and they flew airplanes, like the P-61 Black Widow, from the airfield adjacent to 1 Rocket Road. At the address, you can today find a large factory ordered by Northrop in 1966 in which parts for the Boeing 747 were manufactured.

The surroundings may be welcoming, but almost no one is, for 1 Rocket Road belongs to SpaceX. The security around the area is high to avoid industrial espionage. SpaceX has a policy not to apply for patents, simply because they believe a competitor will copy these patents. “Our primary long-term competition is in China,” Elon said. “If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.” 305

Before SpaceX moved to 1 Rocket Road, they looked at Howard Hughes’s old compound in Playa Vista. Famous from the movie The Aviator , Hughes had a vision as large as Elon’s when he designed a giant aircraft made entirely of wood. “It will invite comparisons. I better not pee in a jar or grow my fingernails long,” Elon said. He didn’t want to be compared with Hughes, who displayed signs of mental illness when he became obsessed with the size of peas and sorted them by size with a special fork. 301

The entire US space industry involves almost 500 000 people across 50 states. In comparison, the entire SpaceX is in one building – except for the tasks that must be performed in a more remote place. Steve Jobs thought the right kind of building could do great things for a culture. If everyone works in the same building, the creativity will increase. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” Jobs said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” 3

To make the environment as creative as possible, 1 Rocket Road had to be completely renovated. Elon himself picked the colors, the furniture, the spaceship-looking trashcans, and the toilets. “I was looking for creative urinals. It’s a nice pot,” Elon said. 54The factory became so futuristic that a couple of scenes from a movie were filmed inside of it.

Elon enjoyed watching the movies Chicago and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers . 307But he doesn’t like movies that rely on character stupidity in order to advance an already implausible plot. “They come across a downed moose that obviously wasn’t killed by a bear and then one woman finds bloody claw marks in the stone wall because some kind of creature was so desperate to escape something chasing it and she doesn’t even say, ‘Hey, look at this, this is weird?’” Elon said about a bad movie he saw. “Didn’t anybody in the group go down into that cave with a bad, bad feeling? It’s like I can see right through the story, it’s like I can see right around behind it to this idiot who’s sitting at the typewriter inflicting this crap on me in the first place.” 162,170

One morning, Elon read a strange e-mail. “Will you read this for me,” Elon asked Justine. “I’m not misreading it, right? That is the actor?” she asked. In the e-mail, the star of the movie Iron Man , Robert Downey Jr, asked if he could visit Elon as part of his research to learn how to live and act like an engineering genius. 155“When I was trying to bring the character of genius billionaire Tony Stark to the big screen in Iron Man, I had no idea how to make him seem real,” the producer and director of the movie, Jon Favreau, said. “Robert Downey Jr said, ‘We need to sit down with Elon Musk.’ Downey was right. Elon is a paragon of enthusiasm, good humor and curiosity – a Renaissance man in an era that needs them.” 416

Elon accepted the request and the actor took the chance to participate in a real meeting between SpaceX and NASA engineers. “Was that actually Robert Downey Jr and why was he at that meeting?” one engineer asked Elon. To return the favor, Tony Stark’s garage in the movie included a Roadster, and Elon and his wife were invited to the movie set. “I think he said that he was a lifelong fan of comics in general and Iron Man in particular,” Justine said of Downey Jr. “This movie is pretty special to him – the light in his eyes was like a kid’s.” 150

In the sequel, Iron Man 2 , Elon had a small role in the movie as himself where he, while wearing a white suit, talked rocket engines and electric airplanes with Tony Stark. “Mr Musk,” Stark’s secretary, Pepper Potts, said before the conversation began. In the movie, you can also see a couple of scenes filmed inside of the SpaceX factory.

Standing in the entrance to the factory, there’s a life-size statue of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit. The movie crew signed it. You can also find a large robot from the television series Battlestar Galactica and the now famous cheese that traveled to space and back.

The factory includes office space, manufacturing, and several special rooms. There’s a room with a climate control. You need to have a constant temperature to measure something with high accuracy because materials expands and contracts as the temperature changes. To test if the different parts of the rocket can survive a launch, there’s a shaker room simulating a real rocket launch. In the factory, you can also find the mission control room that looks like a classroom with rows of desks after each other. In the movies, the mission control room is usually sloped, but at SpaceX the room is flat. The office space is open to maximize the communication between employees. Each employee has a quite large cubicle with low walls. Elon himself has his office in this open office space. At other companies, it’s more common that thick walls surround the office of the CEO. 333

To decrease the price of the rockets, SpaceX manufacture about 80 percent of the parts in the factory. The main reason to why rockets are so expensive is the high cost culture in the space industry. “There’s this tendency of big aerospace companies to outsource everything,” Elon said. “They outsource to subcontractors, and then the subcontractors outsource to sub-subcontractors, and so on. You have to go four or five layers down to find somebody actually doing something useful – actually cutting metal, shaping atoms. Basically, things take a long time and costs a lot if you buy it from an airspace supplier. Things are cheap and readily available if you buy it from an industrial supplier. The whole airspace industry have gotten used to that situation and we [SpaceX] need to get them not used to that situation.” 305

SpaceX needed to purchase an engine valve. The supplier explained how it would take more than one year and thousands of dollars to develop the valve. SpaceX told them it was too expensive and it would take too long time. “Good luck with that,” the supplier replied, smiled, and left the building. SpaceX set out to develop the valve themselves, and it was ready when they needed it. The smiling supplier called back and said they were now willing to make the valve. SpaceX replied that they had already made it themselves. “There was just silence at the end of the line,” Tom Mueller said. “They were in shock. That scenario has been repeated to the point where we passionately avoid space vendors.” 288