Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Like proof of concept of the Falcon 1. Let's load it up on a truck and let's take it to Washington, DC and just park it in front of the, I think it was in front of the FAA and not the Pentagon. The engineers were like what are we doing? This is crazy. This is just showmanship. But it works. They get the attention of DC. That's crazy. I think I remember, too, it was a more shiny, nice, idealized rocket than the one they're actually designing, but it had this SpaceX logo on it. Yup. Meanwhile, Tom and the team are working away at building the Merlin and the rocket. The original goal was to fly in 2003. That gets pushed to 2004. Finally, in 2005, they're ready to go. Gwynne has managed to land, not a small satellite deployer as the first customer, but the Department of Defense. They're starting to experiment with launching small satellites. They want to say okay, we'll take a fly on you guys. We'll put up a small satellite.…

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