A visit to SpaceX

Today I was incredibly fortunate to take a private tour of SpaceX.  SpaceX is the amazing company founded by one of Paypal's founders, Elon Musk, who is as passionate about space and energy as Steve Jobs was about technology.  Elon built an unbelievable company from scratch that has achieved what so many other companies and governments have failed to: cheap, efficient, reliable space travel.  Touring their facility was an absolute treat; walking around inside was like a tour of the most amazing metal shop and manufacturing facility you can imagine.  I felt like a kid walking into Disneyland for the first time; I could hardly stop smiling.  My only disappointment was that I couldn't take photos inside; but with a few Google searches, I was about to find a whole bunch that more or less depict what I saw.

After I arrived, I first met an ex-coworker from Google there, John; he got a nice promotion almost 4 years ago and had incredible foresight to join SpaceX long before they were making headlines right and left in the news.  He took us around and showed us a few great things; he couldn't be happier there and proudly told us about how his Dad toured the facility and said: "Son, you did well; you couldn't have found a better place to work."

The first part of the building we entered was like any modern office: full of computers, desks, and cubicles.  Elon is quite humble and has a cubicle himself and not an office.  There were numerous conference rooms scattered throughout the area, and the ones I saw were named after space scientists like Von Braun: an early rocket scientist from the 1920's and 1930's.

John showed us to the lunch room / show room / mission control area, which was also the entrance to the main shop floor:




One of the first things we saw was 2 Dragon Capsules (the main space shuttle SpaceX builds).  The first was the actual dragon capsule that went into space and successfully returned to Earth; it was quite charred from its trip, and clearly had a few miles on it :)  It looked like:

Because Iron Man's Tony Stark was actually inspired by Elon Musk and the SpaceX facility is so impressive, parts of the Iron Man movie was actually shot right in the SpaceX building.  Doing a quick Google Image search for "Elon Musk" will show you the lifestyle he lives and why he is the perfect inspiration for Tony Stark.  Hammer Industries and all of the robots they were manufacturing was filmed right where we toured.  To commemorate this, they had a statue of Iron Man in the main shop entrance:

After thanking John for showing us around, we went back in and met the main tour group.  I was taken around by the people ops director, and he held a private tour for only Googlers; it was a small group of perhaps 10 or so people walking around.  This was truly an amazing opportunity as the SpaceX facility is private; there are no regular tours.  So going on a tour alone is a treat; going on a small one led by an incredibly knowledgeable person was an unreal gift.  It was led by one of the technical trainers, Warren, who regularly worked with so many teams at the company; he was the perfect person to lead such a tour as his knowledge was very good about all of the departments within.

We started off with a presentation and overview of what the company does.  They have amazingly in just 8 years built many rockets and had 3 successful launches into space.  The most recent accomplishment was one nobody else has achieved: sending a capsule into space loaded with all kinds of supplies, docking it to the International Space Station, loading it up with items to send back to Earth, and successfully landing it.  This is an amazing feat, and on top of all of that they are able to do this at a fraction of the cost of any other government out there even with mostly all American labor and American parts (about 85%); not too shabby.  The company is now profitable, and may go public in a year.  They've grown rapidly to about 1,800 employees.  We regularly hear jokes made about simple things in life like: "Well, it isn't exactly rocket science".  Rocket science is exactly what SpaceX does.

We saw many cool videos and images showing their work like:

Then we started our tour.  Warren was so passionate about his work and shared many amazing stories.  I was fascinated to hear him talk about NASA culture vs. SpaceX culture; the difference felt as wide as the grand canyon.  NASA employees are often found wearing suits and ties, balding, and preferring old proven solutions.  Compare that to the SpaceX culture where employees wear shorts and t-shirts, are often recent college grads, are scrappy, innovative, and nimble, are people who haven't been told limitations of what's possible, who question everything, and who prefer simple and modern solutions over old ones.  

With this culture comes an abundance of passion and energy for what the SpaceX team does.  The perfect story to illustrate this was with the recent Dragon Capsule launch.  So many of the team showed up for the launch, docking, and splash down events and stood right outside of mission control to cheer on these big moments for the company, the industry, and all of space travel.  Oh, and some of these events occurred at 4am and still hordes of employees showed up.  Just as can be seen in this photo:

  

We got to see the mission control room; it's full of computers and desks and actually is pretty simple.  It probably looked something like the below photo when Dragon was flying; it was almost entirely empty when I was there on Friday as the mission had ended and everyone got to go home and get some much deserved sleep!

The machinery and products being built here were unbelievably impressive.  One room held a nearly million dollar "3-D metal printer."  This device would take in a 3-D digital representation of what was desired and use lasers and raw metal dust to "print" the device; it allows SpaceX to make all kinds of intricate pieces, some of which can't be built otherwise.  Another crazy device was a huge circular and vertical welder: instead of using solder like a traditional welder, this machine had a drill bit that spun so fast that it melts 2 metal pieces together.  The output of all of this is often rocket cases or rocket engines.  SpaceX's are completely custom built and far more efficient than NASA's; we walked by some that looked very impressive like this:

Another great example of the SpaceX style of thinking is cost.  Anytime a component could be purchased by a third party, the price was closely scrutinized.  If the price tag seemed overly high, Elon simply would tell his team they needed to figure out how to build that component themselves at SpaceX from scratch and do it far cheaper.  Another cool example was comparing the size of components between NASA and SpaceX.  NASA had much less concern for size, and as a result made huge rockets that required massive barges to ship around their rockets; this is slow and expensive.  SpaceX only builds things that are small enough to be loaded on a truck and driven around the country; this keeps costs quite low and transportation times too.  By keeping parts and designs simple, costs are much lower than NASAs.  And for all of this, SpaceX's launch record is a perfect 3 successes out of 3 tries; most other groups who have tried to launch something 3 times had at least one explosion.

On site, they had quite a few Dragon capsules.  Of course, this is one of their main products, so it's not a big surprise.  Here's a polished looking new Dragon capsule:

Here's what the capsule looked like when attached to the International Space Station last week:

We saw many Dragon capsules in various stages of production; just like a car assembly line, many are being built at the same time and go through various stages of development.  Some Dragons were just skeletons beginning to be assembled.  Others were more complete and had electronic equipment being added on.  One was completely draped in a metal cloth for radio wave testing.  We got to see the bottoms of the capsules being built; that's an interesting part as it contains the heat shields that keep the cargo and eventually astronauts alive when re-entering Earth; they're designed to withstand 4,000 degrees Farenheit of heat or more while still keeping the cargo at a comfy 85 degrees.  We got to see the heat tiles and walk within inches of them; it amazed me they let us get so close to such a vital part of the ship.

Here's one last glimpse of the amazing machine shop and the incredible products they build:

Thank you, SpaceX, for a world class tour of your stellar facility.  SpaceX is an amazingly impressive company, and one that I respect incredibly.  Google and it are the two companies at the top of my personal list for being absolutely impressive and amazing.  Well done SpaceX - I'm a huge fan.