Rarely does a day go by in recent times without the words "Elon Musk" popping up on our newsfeeds. And, for better or worse, his influence on our lives is unmistakable: Teslas are commonplace, Twitter is now known as "X" and half of all active satellites in orbit right now are from the SpaceX stable.
But amongst the controversy surrounding him, there remains a fascinating tale about someone who was prepared to challenge conventional wisdom and refuse to take "no" for an answer when it came to disrupting established industries.
And for the self-confessed space nerds amongst us, there’s no better place to start than the incredible story of the early days of SpaceX.
Eric Berger's book Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX is based on exclusive interviews with Musk and incredible access to all the key players in the story. It paints the SpaceX founder as an intensely driven and demanding leader, yet someone with both the wherewithal to go the extra mile in incentivising his staff and the resilience to not blanch at the first sign of failure.
In fact, despite the more caricaturish portraits we may see of Musk these days, perhaps the most exceptional thing about his leadership back in the early days of SpaceX was just how plain sensible he was: a boss with a fantastic idea who was “usually right”.
So how did a gargantuan space company grow from such relatively modest roots? And why does it feel like it all happened at light speed?
First principles thinking
Musk’s attitude to problem-solving was radical and refreshing in what had become a fairly stuffy sector.
US space exploration had grown slow and dependent on long-established suppliers who won enormous government contracts. And given the political scrutiny that (rightly) applies to public money, this could never be a fast-moving process.
In his own (ahem...) diplomatic words, Musk said:
I began to understand why things were so expensive. I looked at the horses that NASA had in the stable. And with horses like Boeing and Lockheed, you’re screwed. Those horses are lame.
Musk wanted new horses. But thoroughbreds aren’t easy to come by. If he was to ever get the best space stable, he'd need to adopt a different approach from anyone who'd gone before him.
What Musk did has been likened to the philosophical process of "reasoning from first principles," which I explore in this video. Musk went all the way back to his vision of wanting to build a rocket. From there, he questioned everything and did not accept that the only way to proceed was by copying what had gone before him.
For example, rather than wasting time and money on the "middle-men" companies like Boeing and Lockheed that traditionally supplied rocket components, he opted to source as many elements and materials as he could internally.
Most worthy of note, however, is that Musk wanted his rockets to be reusable. Just like the aeroplane that takes you on your summer holidays, he saw no reason why these eye-wateringly expensive bits of kit could only be used once. Land it and re-use it!
As John Thornhill wrote in the Financial Times:
The singular feature of the SpaceX story was the astonishing pace at which the company developed, opting for a high-risk iterative approach rather than the linear method traditionally favoured by the industry.
And as such, the only time-scale he was beholden to was his own.
Mr. Motivator
So we know Musk had a great vision. But what was it like to actually work for him? Well, in a day-to-day sense he made the El Segundo headquarters a pleasant place to do business: with a Coke machine and yoghurt dispenser that colleagues could use for free. Even more generously, though, was his commitment to treat employees whose roles necessitated working away from home for prolonged periods. They were gifted an "all-expenses-paid vacation wherever he or she decided to go”.
Quite the company perk! And yet we know from research (collated brilliantly in Daniel Pink’s book Drive) that the carrot-and-stick approach to motivation can only get you so far. Surely no one was that buzzed about a free Sprite that it inspired them to build a rocket, were they?
Unsurprisingly, Liftoff suggests there’s more to it than that. If you want to know the secret to how SpaceX workers were so motivated… well, it’s the autonomy, stupid! As Structures Engineer, Florence Li said:
He would always make sure that we would come out and look at the bigger picture. I think that was really important to kind of keep that focus. [...] A big thing was really having to learn to think, since nobody gave you a cookie-cutter job and told you what you do. That really made us all much better engineers.
“Having to learn to think” and become autonomous is such a purposeful driver for any job. And by going back to first principles and that “bigger picture,” the lack of a so-called cookie-cutter to work from was the spark for truly rapid innovation.
A-Team assemble
Getting the right people into the right jobs became an obsession for Musk, who “met with every single person the company hired through the first three thousand employees [...] His people had to be brilliant. They had to be hardworking. And there could be no nonsense.”
Bulent Altan – an aeronautics engineer – was one such individual Musk set his sights on. Convinced Altan would refuse a role in L.A. due to his wife's job at Google in San Francisco, Musk personally called Google CEO Larry Page and requested a transfer for her. “When Musk identified someone he wanted to hire, he could be relentless.”
This determination to go to extraordinary lengths to hire only the very best people is reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ ideology:
It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players… The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players.
Undoubtedly, one such SpaceX A player was Gwynne Shotwell…
As Business Manager, she was able to defy all odds and secure lucrative contracts for SpaceX, including one with NASA (even during these early days with nothing but rocket debris to show for their efforts). Possessing high emotional intelligence and the ability to gently persuade, she became a formidable foil for Musk’s brashness:
He is blunt and, at times, awkward – she all smiles and smooth talk. But beneath their differing veneers they are sympatico, sharing the same fearless philosophy of charging forward headlong, seeking to mold the industry in their image.
So Musk had a philosophy, recruited well and motivated his team. But there is one more element that Liftoff reveals about the SpaceX success story…
Reaching orbit
If you’re not already familiar with those first SpaceX missions, allow me to (very quickly!) tell you the story. A not very long time ago in a galaxy not far away, Musk named his first rocket "Falcon 1" after his favourite movie spaceship – you guessed it, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
Even as the first Falcon 1 launch was being counted down, Musk was deep in conversation about which materials to try for the next attempt. Such was his attitude to constantly iterating, learning and trying again. His foresight was not misplaced, as flight one didn’t get very far from the ground before becoming engulfed in flames.
Flight two almost reached orbit before being brought down by fuel "sloshing" issues – giving the SpaceX team a huge dose of encouragement, as well as a vital learning point.
Flight three was disastrous, with coordination problems between the liftoff stage and orbiting stage causing two parts of the rocket to crash into each other.
At this point the team were understandably disheartened, not just that they hadn’t progressed but that they’d seemingly gone backwards. Coupled with the realisation that money and resources had almost totally run out, and with the 2008 global financial crisis about to bite, Musk and his colleagues could’ve been forgiven for giving up.
And yet, they had that final magic ingredient: resilience.
As Berger writes:
Musk differed from his competitors in another, important way – failure was an option... Musk urged his team to move fast, build things and break things.
By learning from mistakes and maintaining this healthy relationship with failure, it stands to reason that his team was better equipped to pull themselves up from the canvas after being knocked down.
And the result for launch four? Punch it, Chewie! The Falcon 1 reached orbit!
Watch those first four missions here.
Nowadays, most people will have made their mind up about Elon Musk; a divisive figure whose active participation in the so-called "culture wars" alongside his acquisition of Twitter have undoubtedly impacted his reputation. Dumping the iconic flying bird in favour of the black "X" branding has more than a whiff of "the dark side," don't you think?
But it’s still possible to be inspired by those early days of SpaceX: the leadership principles, resilience and determination to learn from mistakes.
Curious to know more about the benefits of embracing failure? Check out my blog on Black Box Thinking here.
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