David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Let's talk about this. The launch site is on Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll. If you work for SpaceX at this time and you have to go out there, here's how you do it. You take a five-hour flight from LAX to Hawaii. You stay overnight. You catch the 7:00 AM flight to the Marshall Islands, which of course, make several stops in that area of the Pacific because you don't just have an everyday back and forth single shot to the Marshall Islands. In fact, I think my high school Guidance Counselor went on the Peace Corp there. This is a remote location. Also, sadly, a place where we tested lots of weapons in World War II and I'm sure, many other times. Then, you get to the Marshall Islands. You then have another hour-long boat ride to actually get to Omelek Island. Every time you go out and back, it's like a multiday experience that you're putting up with. Changing time zones all over the place just to do your job which is a top 0.1% in terms of the cognitive requirement to do that job. And spoiler alert, a good portion of the company spends most of the next 3½ years going back and forth to this island. They initially think they could launch in November 2005. There's a valve problem, the launch gets canceled. It takes them until March 2006 until they get all the systems to go again. They ignite the Falcon 1. It takes off. It starts climbing. Everybody's going nuts. About 25 seconds in, it blows up. Remember, it has the Department of Defense's experimental smallsat and it's ferrying up its payload. That gets blown up at the rocket and ends up falling through the roof of the building of the launch facility there. It mostly ends up surviving. A lot of the rocket ends up getting blown into the ocean. Elon notes in his postmortem from the event, “It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way. SpaceX is in this for the long haul. Come hell or high water, we are going to make this work. " They're not deterred. It takes them another year to attempt a second launch, March 2007. This time, they make it three minutes into the flight. The first stage of the rocket has separated. The Merlin engine did its job fantastically. The second stage kicks in. The smaller Kestrel engine that's going to take the rocket and the payload into orbit. Everybody's cheering, high-fiving, then, as it actually says in the book, it starts to wiggle. I can also imagine this. This must've been so demoralizing. Two things I wanted to point out here. I remember thinking about this the first time I watched Apollo 13 when I was a kid. They don't know exactly what's going to happen when it goes up but you can model a lot of it out with equations. You do. You run computer simulations and you do your best. What if you didn't think of one force that's going to be acting at one point during the journey? In this case, the one force that they either didn't think of or was miscalculated in some capacity is either the fuel or some kind of fuel was sloshing around causing it to spin.…

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