The main secret of Space X's success has been revealed. How do you like Elon Musk?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the comments under one of the previous videos, you asked me to talk about SpaceX. Well, let's figure it out. Let's start with the official legend.

In 2001. Elon Musk suddenly gets the idea to colonize Mars. After that, he comes to Russia, where he tries to find a cheaper rocket for himself. Nothing works in Russia, but an insight comes - you need to make the launch vehicle yourself, because it will cost 10% of the existing state price tag!

In 2002, driven by this brilliant idea, Musk created SpaceX. She hires a talented guy Tom Mueller, who, according to the media, spent all the evenings and weekends to design a liquid-jet engine in his garage. Nothing special, because each of us has a friend who collects something similar in the garage, a rocket engine, a satellite, a mini-nuclear power plant, or, at worst, a cold fusion plant.

Well, in 2006, Musk has a Merlin jet engine, designed for use on rockets of the Falcon family. Immediately, Musk has access to the launch site, located at Cape Canaveral, with all his belongings. Then a successful launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Just a fairy tale: the rocket flies, the first stage sits down, the world applauds. But let's figure out what was not included in this fabulous version.

To begin with, the cycle of creating a jet engine for a launch vehicle in reality takes much longer. Not a single private company "from scratch", not having experience, groundwork and technologies, in the timeframe that were announced by Musk, under no circumstances and money will be able to create it.

Even Elon himself recently reproached American companies for using the Russian RD-180 engine, at the same time calling its design flawless. “It's a shame that Lockheed Martin and Boeing are forced to use a Russian engine for Atlas. But the design is impeccable,”he wrote on his Twitter.

The Russian company Energomash supplies the United States with RD-180 engines for the Atlas III and Atlas V launch vehicles. In 2014, the US Congress banned their use, but as a result, the ban was lifted a year later due to the lack of its own production of engines in the country. So making rocket engines is not easy, even if you turn on the dollar printing press at full capacity. It takes years of development, hundreds of prototypes, cyclic testing, and more. And Musk simultaneously got his own engine, his own carrier, his own control system, which is fully integrated and interfaced with the control systems of the cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral and the Vanderberg base. But it doesn't work that way. Control systems are not reconfigured for a new carrier. The entire media interface is rigidly connected through piping, pneumatics, control signals. These are hundreds of control channels connecting the ground with the rocket … And we see the following picture: after 5 years from the moment of the "inspiration" Musk takes a finished rocket out of his pocket and says: “Here's a rocket for you, which is already in all respects coupled with the Canaveral and Vandenberg launch complexes ". Where could he get these parameters? Where did he get the entire interface for connecting the carrier to the launch complex? There is only one answer - all this in a finished form came from somewhere else. It is even more interesting: Musk started with a small Falcon 1 rocket, the first two launches of which were paid for by the US Department of Defense as part of the DARPA program for evaluating promising launch vehicles. For those not in the know, DARPA is responsible for developing new technologies for use in the military, independent of conventional military research institutions and reporting directly to the Pentagon's top leadership. It was DARPA who was responsible for sponsoring the development of the ARPANET network, which later became the Internet … So, a super-closed, super-cool office, into which our inventor-innovator Musk immediately appears. Another miracle is that Elon not only immediately finds full support in the Pentagon and DARPA, but also manages to hire people who have already worked together. Who is Musk-hired Tom Mueller? From open English-language sources, it follows that, firstly, Tom Mueller did not use his garage for a test bench for the Merlin engine, but the site of a former aircraft ammunition factory located in his home state of Texas. And this is logical. Anneal, i.e. it is impossible to test a new running engine in the garage; this is done at sensitive facilities. And Musk has access to them.

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