The commercial space race is about to begin. Early Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. EDT, the first privately designed and built spacecraft destined for the International Space Station is expected to lift off from the historic Cape Canaveral Air Force Station not far from the Atlantic Ocean on Florida's east coast. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are designed and built by Space Exploration Technologies -- the company better known as SpaceX -- at the company's factory not far from the Pacific Ocean in Hawthorne, California.
Tomorrow's scheduled launch puts an exclamation point on a new era of space transportation. If the first era of space flight focused on a Cold War-driven race to show what could be done, and the second era focused on making space flight and delivering orbiting payloads routine, this new era is focused on making all of the above a lot less expensive.
SpaceX is leading the charge to bring down the cost of flying to space. Driven by a personal desire to make life multi-planetary -- aka travel to Mars -- the company's founder and leader Elon Musk has built a program with about $4 billion worth of contracts and launch orders already on its books. But it has only launched a few customer payloads so far.
With just a handful of launches under its belt, SpaceX has yet to successfully prove its business case of dramatically reducing the cost of delivering payloads into orbit. And both its founder Elon Musk, and current customer NASA, rarely miss an opportunity to emphasize the challenging nature of the upcoming ISS mission. But the company is on target for backing up its low cost promise and is managing to achieve this goal by spending hundreds of millions, rather than billions of dollars.
Musk honed his business skills in the internet startup arena of the late 1990s. He makes no secret that one of the keys to reducing the cost of space flight is operating an efficient company that is nimble and lacks the bloated layers that exist in many of the large, veteran aerospace companies that have been building rockets and spacecraft for the past 50 years. SpaceX has received large investments from private sources -- including a hundred million from Musk himself -- as well as funding from NASA. But the company operates more like a lean startup despite the fact it should soon overtake Russia as the number-one producer of rocket engines in the world.
Like at most startups, employees often wear multiple hats. Engineers, including Musk, work in an office-free open cubicle layout less than a minute's walk from where technicians are building rocket engines and machines are welding together space capsules. Leave your desk, walk past a conference room, open a door and you step into a giant rocket factory. Actually the first thing you walk past on the factory floor is open floor space that is the cafeteria, which is right next to the mission control room, then a few steps after that you walk by the rocket engine assembly line.
During lunch you can watch the software team rehearsing the upcoming mission to the ISS a few feet away to your right. You can hear the construction of aluminum-lithium being formed and machined into the cylinders that will form the body of the Falcon 9 rocket just out of sight in front of you, or watch the complex circuitry of the flight hardware and avionics being inspected under a microscope to your left.
More than 80 percent of the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft are built in-house. From the combustion chamber and nozzle at the bottom of the engine, to the capsule and its protective shield at the top. SpaceX designs and builds just about everything itself in a factory at the Hawthorne Airport where Jack Northrop built his legendary airplanes including flying wings and fighter jets. Just a handful of years ago, this same building was home to a factory making panels for Boeing 747s, today it is a self-contained space program hoping to make space flight as inexpensive and reliable as possible.
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