Rocket Man

Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk launched a 50-lb. wheel of cheese into space. Really.

Musk was preparing for the first orbital test of his brand-new Dragon spacecraft atop his brand-new Falcon 9 rocket, and it seemed a shame to send the ship up empty. So he drove to nearby Beverly Hills, Calif., and bought the biggest piece of cheese he could find; then he and a few of his engineers at the Space Exploration Technologies Co., or SpaceX, rigged it into place inside the capsule and sent it off. The Dragon made it into orbit and came home safely–becoming the first vehicle launched by a private company to achieve such a feat–and today the cheese (an earthy Le Broure, in case you were wondering) rests in a display case just off the factory floor of the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne. The Soviets had Laika the dog. The U.S. had Ham the chimp. Musk has his wheel of space cheese.

Last month Musk had much more serious business on his mind. Another Dragon spacecraft was flying, this one to deliver half a ton of provisions and equipment to the International Space Station (ISS). The ship launched successfully on May 22 and, in another first for the private sector, docked with the station three days later. On May 31, Dragon came home, landing in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California, precisely on target and two minutes ahead of schedule.

“Splashdown successful!!” announced Musk via Twitter from his front-row seat in his own mission control inside the 50,000-sq.-ft. SpaceX factory. “Sending fast boat to Dragon.”

Never mind the giants of NASA’s magnificent past, men with jet fuel in their blood who over just eight years in the 1960s guided the U.S. from a standing start to the surface of the moon. One of the biggest players in the American space program today is a 41-year-old South African entrepreneur with undergraduate degrees in physics and business from the University of Pennsylvania, a background in e-commerce and not a lick of formal training in aerospace engineering.

But here’s what Musk does have: 1,800 employees, birds on the pad and billions of dollars in contracts to launch payloads for customers around the world–including NASA. Other aerospace companies launch payloads for profit too, but those payloads are all satellites that need only to be trucked to orbit. Musk has both his own fleet of rockets and his own working spacecraft: a navigable, habitable machine designed to fly and maneuver and dance and dock and hold an atmosphere and support a crew–and travel not just in orbit but into deep space.

“It has a new-car smell,” said astronaut Don Pettit after Dragon docked with the ISS and he opened the hatch and peered inside. Very soon, that car got sold. “We became a customer today,” announced Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, after the Dragon splashed down safely. Little wonder: SpaceX, a mere corporation, had just accomplished something only sovereign nations had done before.

Musk has been compared to Tony Stark–the brilliant industrialist and inventor who, in his off-hours, becomes Iron Man–and the SpaceX factory has even been used as a set in one of the Iron Man movies. The comparison–with the exception of the costumed-superhero part–is not entirely unapt. Musk’s business plan was not supposed to work, and yet it does. His spacecraft were not supposed to fly, and yet they do. What Bill Gates was to the operating system and Steve Jobs was to sleek, ingenious and elegant design, Musk may be to rockets. That’s starting to look like a very good thing for America’s future in space, and never mind any faux humility, Musk himself will tell you so.

“In terms of things that are actually launching,” he says, “we are the American space program.”

Insanely Great 2.0

The first mistake i made when i visited Musk in his Hawthorne office was to touch the very big sword on his desk–or at least touch it the wrong way. The sword had been awarded to him a few months before by the Heinlein Society, named after legendary science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Musk is proud of the sword, but when he handed it to me to examine, I grabbed it partly by the blade. That leaves fingerprints, and fingerprints carry oil, and oil spoils the finish. He quickly called to an assistant for a cloth to restore the shine.

Musk is not so much fastidious as he is contained. His speaks with the kind of quiet intensity that, when it comes from someone who corners you at a party, can cross the line into crazyland. From Musk it just seems well thought out and deeply felt. His extremely uncluttered desk is in a large corner cubicle in a vast plain of cubicles in what was once an assembly factory for Boeing aircraft fuselages. A few people at SpaceX have offices with doors–financial guys or engineers working on extremely proprietary designs–but the CEO doesn’t.

Pictures of Musk’s five young sons–a set of triplets and a set of twins–hang above the desk. The boys are the product of his first marriage, to Justine Musk, author of BloodAngel and other fantasy books. His second marriage, to British actress Talulah Riley, ended this year. Musk tweeted about that too: “It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day.”

Musk also keeps a small collection of books on his desk–a sort of autodidact’s guide on how to build rockets: Huzel and Huang on the fundamentals of liquid propellants, Sutton and Biblarz on propulsion elements, J.E. Gordon’s Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. Next to them is one other book: Einstein, by Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. It’s not clear which, if either, of Isaacson’s subjects Musk sees himself in. Maybe both.

Musk is neither shy nor boastful about being self-taught in a field he means to lead. Rather, spelunking for knowledge on his own seems to be a matter of mere efficiency. “I find universities a very slow place to learn things,” he says. Born in South Africa, he moved to Canada–his mother’s home country–when he was in his teens. He attended Queen’s University before switching to Penn in 1992 and graduating with his double major. Unmoved by the undergraduate experience, he gave formal education a last chance in 1995, enrolling in a Stanford University Ph.D. program in physics and materials sciences. He dropped out after two days.

Musk’s taste for learning things independently has been a pattern since way back. Like innumerable small boys, he first got bitten by the space bug when he built and launched model rockets. Unlike most boys, he did not build them from kits. Instead he designed his rockets from the fins up and powered them with fuel of his own devising.

He grew up with a respect–sometimes grudging–for Russia’s and America’s historic lineups of rockets and can tick them off with a sommelier’s familiarity. “The Saturn 5 is hard to beat,” he says. “The Titan 2 is impressive from a mass-fraction point of view. The Soyuz is not a great design, but it’s been around a long time and they’ve optimized the heck out of it.”

But his talent with computers, including writing code, is a far easier skill to monetize, and he became caught up in the dotcom boom–a move that would, in its own way, lead him back to space. In 1999 he founded X.com a little-known online-payment company that, after some acquisitions and expansions, became PayPal, a very well-known online-payment company. In 2002 he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, and in the years that followed he rolled his fortune into three other start-ups: SpaceX in 2002; Tesla Motors, which manufactures electric cars, in 2003; and SolarCity, which markets solar-energy systems, in 2006. All three are going concerns, but it was SpaceX that was destined to become a game changer, thanks in part to NASA’s well-documented woes.

Barely a year after SpaceX was founded, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, eliminating any doubt that the shuttles, while beautiful, were a fragile, rococo, temperamental mess. In early 2004, President George W. Bush announced that the remaining fleet would be retired by 2010 and that NASA would return to its Apollo roots, building old-style expendable spacecraft. But the new program would have to be implemented by the same ossified NASA bureaucracy and funded by the same obstreperous bunch in Congress, and the whole enterprise soon fell back into the familiar lather-rinse-repeat pattern of overpromising and underdelivering, too little funding and too much infighting.

By 2006, the space agency had faced reality and announced that it was establishing the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, under which it would let the private sector take over the business of making taxi runs to low Earth orbit, freeing NASA to focus on missions to the moon, asteroids or Mars.

SpaceX and several other companies leaped at the news. The likes of Richard Branson, Paul Allen and Burt Rutan already had a head start in space-tourism ventures, offering suborbital joyrides to wealthy customers who could afford a six-figure, 20-minute vacation. But COTS would mean playing with the big boys, using real rockets to put real spacecraft into orbit–and perhaps beyond–and doing real work there.

By 2008, NASA had selected two winners in the COTS competition: SpaceX, which would be awarded a $1.6 billion contract to make 12 runs to the ISS from 2012 to 2015, and Orbital Sciences, a Virginia company that would get essentially the same deal. NASA was happy to work with both–but both would first have to prove they could build and fly the promised machines.

Musk staffed up fast, hiring from the industry, engineering schools and NASA itself, quickly filling the first floor of the factory. “I came to SpaceX in March of 2011,” says Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut and veteran of two shuttle missions who is now a senior engineer for the company, “and I’m already senior to 20% of the staff in terms of longevity.”

Musk gave the SpaceX headquarters a deliberately Silicon Valley feel. The most centrally located spot in the building–with the factory floor to your left, the vast warren of offices to your right and the glassed-in mission control directly in front of you–was chosen as the perfect place to build a frozen-yogurt station. “I like the randomness of it,” Musk says. “A frozen-yogurt bar in a rocket factory.”

There’s whimsy in the booster and spacecraft names too. The Falcon rocket is named after Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon; the Dragon is named after Puff, the spacecraft’s reportedly magical cousin. “I had planned to call it Magic Dragon,” says Musk. The unlikely cargo that flew in 2010 was a tribute to the famed Monty Python sketch about a cheese shop that has no cheese.

The Simplicity Doctrine

Behind all the playfulness, however, is some hardheaded engineering. Musk may or may not emulate Steve Jobs, but he has a Jobsian respect for simplicity. SpaceX builds three different rockets: the Falcon, with one engine, known as the Merlin; the Falcon 9, with nine Merlins; and the still-in-development Falcon Heavy, which will have three side-by-side clusters of the same nine. That tall-grande-venti lineup is a lot easier to manage than NASA’s hodgepodge of multiple boosters from multiple suppliers with the dinosaurically strange shuttle atop them all. Reisman speaks fondly–and diplomatically–of his NASA career, but he appreciates the difference in engineering philosophy at his new gig. “People ask how it’s possible to be safer but also more cost-effective,” he says. “It’s possible because complexity is the enemy of both.”

SpaceX simplifies things in a lot of ways. The engines, for example, are built with improved cooling systems that let them run at lower temperatures, which allows them to be built of less exotic metals. The manned version of the Dragon will have an emergency system that will allow the crew vehicle to pop free and fly away from a Falcon booster that’s about to blow–but the escape rockets will be built around Dragon’s bottom, a simpler arrangement than the rocket tower that was bolted atop the old Apollo craft to do the same job.

“The number of major events that have to go right for a crew to survive an emergency on the Dragon is about half as many as with the shuttle,” says Reisman.

The simplicity extends to SpaceX’s policy on outsourcing–or the relative absence of it. The company keeps 80% of its manufacturing in-house, leaning on subcontractors only when absolutely necessary. That’s something NASA can’t do–not with 100 Senators and 435 Representatives clamoring for a slice of space pork to take home to their constituents. Scattering bits of work all over the country is a great way to make a project unkillable but a terrible way to make it cost-effective. “The bureaucracy here is different,” says Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s director of propulsion systems. “If you want to change something or fix something, just talk to Elon. It keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high.”

In the Pipeline

Dragon’s next flight, another iss resupply mission, is scheduled for this fall and will be launched on another Falcon 9. The Falcon Heavy could fly as early as next year. That would increase the amount of hardware SpaceX can put into low Earth orbit from a respectable 23,000 lb. to a whopping 117,000 lb. Also close to emerging from the pipeline is the crew-rated version of the Dragon.

After the Dragon’s first flight, in 2010, Musk took some heat for declaring, “If there had been people sitting in Dragon today, they would have had a nice ride.” That was something of an overstatement, considering the spacecraft had (and still has) no seats, instrument panel, crew-rated air-pressure system or carbon dioxide scrubbers. But all of that is in the works. The goal is to be ready to fly a crew in 2014.

Should that come off as planned, Musk will offer his people-carrying services not just to NASA but to other countries too, barring national-security issues. He’d also like to claim some of the business NASA has been losing in recent years. Russia charged the U.S. upwards of $50 million per seat to launch American astronauts to the ISS; once the shuttles stood down, a price hike was announced, to nearly $63 million. “We can repatriate some of that money,” says Musk.

He’d be happy to carry private citizens as well and is careful not to disparage the efforts of Branson and the like, since customers who get a taste of suborbital flight and enjoy it may re-up for an orbital trip with SpaceX. Ultimately, Musk would like to be able to get people to and from Mars for about $500,000 per seat. No one, however, should expect to see the SpaceX chief himself going aloft anytime soon. “I would like to go to space, but I have to forgo that,” Musk says, citing the five sons and three companies he must look after. “I have to be careful with personal risks.”

SpaceX could still stumble–and stumble badly. Traveling in space will never be easy, and terrible things can always happen. The Apollo 1 spacecraft was not supposed to burst into flames and kill its crew–until it did; a one-in-a-billion multiple-system failure was never supposed to occur on Apollo 13, and that happened too. Orbital Sciences, Musk’s main competitor, has its own test flight scheduled for later this year, and the company did not earn a COTS contract by accident. It’s been around longer than SpaceX and has already established its ability to launch satellites. A success or two for Orbital coupled with a setback or two for SpaceX could change things completely.

Musk could also get tripped up by his hubris. He’s become more press-savvy lately, effusively thanking NASA for its support of SpaceX and taking care not to overstate his successes as he’s done in the past. But his humility goes only so far. He has claimed almost no patents on his rocket systems because he believes he’s so far ahead of the field that no one would be able to copy him anyway. “Elon’s philosophy is, Just move fast enough that no one catches you,” says Mueller. That’s a nice idea–unless someone actually does catch you.

None of this discourages Musk. Human beings belong in space, he believes, and not just dog-paddling in low Earth orbit. On an otherwise empty wall in the SpaceX offices is an oversize picture of Mars. It’s there as inspiration–and destination. “I believe,” says Musk, “that I have a design in mind that would enable the colonization of Mars.”

Self-delusion? Maybe. Cockiness? Surely. But as Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean of the old St. Louis Cardinals once said, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” Musk is hardly ready to go to Mars yet, but he took a significant step off the Earth last month. For now, at least, the bragging rights are all his.

FOR MORE ON MUSK, GO TO time.com/elonmusk