Can a rocket be cute?
On a sparkling morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, the answer is clearly yes. All around are towering launch-pad gantries that have sent dozens of big, expensive, aggressively not-cute rockets skyward since 1958. But rising out of the base’s lupines and sage is a plain, white “event tent”—one that would look more natural at a bar mitzvah than here at big-league rocketry’s West Coast headquarters. And inside, lying on a semitrailer, is Falcon I.
At 70 feet, it is barely one-fifth the length of a Saturn V, the rocket that propelled Apollo astronauts to the moon. Technicians could straddle the hull, which is five and a half feet in diameter, like Slim Pickens riding the nuke in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While most rockets have three or four stages, this one has just two, and it runs on refined kerosene that costs less per gallon than regular unleaded at a California gas station. At the moment, 10 engineers are running it through a pre–test-fire check, a job that for most rockets requires a cast of hundreds. Watching them swarm over the little craft, one can’t help but reflect that the name Falcon seems a stretch: Were Sparrow and Titmouse taken?
But this unassuming subcompact promises to dramatically slash the cost of putting satellites into orbit and maybe even resurrect America’s moribund space effort. Falcon I is the first rocket produced by Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX for short. The three-year-old El Segundo, California, firm aims to loft 1,400-pound payloads into orbit for a dirt-cheap $6.5 million a pop, as opposed to the roughly $30 million charged by the next-cheapest aerospace company, and that’s just for starters. The company has already begun prototyping and selling payload space for a larger rocket and hopes eventually to offer both manned and unmanned vehicles for one-tenth the current standard price. “Getting to the moon in 10 years is definitely doable,” says SpaceX vice president Chris Thompson.
Indeed, for a small company, the SpaceX principals tend to think very big. Chairman and CEO Elon Musk, an Internet multimillionaire who is personally bankrolling the whole effort, says his ultimate motivation for starting the company is no less than saving humanity from suicide. “Sixty years ago, we didn’t have atomic weapons. What might we have 60 years from now?” he muses. “Establishing a self-sustaining second human civilization on Mars” is, in his view, “the most important goal. If you need to back up your data, then backing up the biosphere is important too.”
