Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Josh, before diving into the next chapter of your career and founding Levels, we got to ask. Is there a fun Elon story that you've got, or something crazy? Everything that happens when you're working at SpaceX I'm sure is crazy, but anything you want to share? I think one moment that always just reminds me of the kind of unique culture of SpaceX was really the first major launch. I got to SpaceX just after they flew the Falcon 9 1.0 rocket for the first time. Basically, SpaceX failed three times to get the Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. The fourth time it was successful, then on the first try, they got the larger Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. I got there just after that success. The second Falcon 9 rocket was getting ready to launch. At this time, the duration between launches was on the order of years. Everyone was working full time, basically hand-building a vehicle. We had this machine, this entire integrated first and second stage on the launch pad. There was an air conditioning vent that basically conditioned the interstage. It's basically the hollow space between the first stage and second stage. The second stage sits on top of it and has this very long vacuum nozzle. It's designed to give better efficiency to the rocket engine in the vacuum of space. It's very long and it's very, very thin. It's thin enough that you can tear it with your fingers. It was metallic at the time, but it's very well supported. Its skirt is supported by these rings. This air conditioning unit was blowing a high volume of air into the interstage to keep it purging. We noticed, during inspections, that the skirt had actually been fluttering in the high-pressure sort of air source and it was actually torn. This was a really big problem, of course, for a number of reasons—just debris and also efficiency loss in the engine. The typical approach in old aerospace would be, break everything down, disintegrate, push the schedule out, analyze everything, determine why this failure happened, press release, redesign. The SpaceX approach was, Elon calls up one of the lead technicians in the entire company, his name is Marty. He used to basically work on airplanes and was an airplane mechanic. The guy was just an absolute machine and brilliant. Elon convinces him to get on an airplane to Cape Canaveral with a pair of shears, go up in an extremely tall genie boom—this guy is terrified of heights by the way—crawl through a hole in the interstage, which is about yay big, into an integrated stacked rocket. You’re 100+ feet off the ground, there's a second stage above you. It’s that essentially bombs below you and bombs above you.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.