Musk doesn’t care much recently, SpaceX is preparing for a new breakthrough in 2023

News on January 18, although SpaceX and Tesla are both companies owned by Elon Musk (Elon Musk), their recent performances are quite different. Tesla has languished since Musk bought Twitter, while SpaceX continues to thrive. In this regard, some people believe that this may be due to Musk’s distraction.

Whatever the reason, SpaceX is gearing up for a new breakthrough in 2023 with a goal of 100 launches. This means that SpaceX will launch roughly every three days, and the launch cadence in 2022 is about every six days.

As early as March, SpaceX will attempt the first-ever commercial spacewalk with its Crew Dragon spacecraft in space about 700 kilometers above Earth. Soon, the company will also make its first attempt at orbiting Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, in preparation for future trips to the Moon and Mars.

SpaceX, which was last valued at about $140 billion, has been working toward that goal. Musk, who makes infrequent appearances, has delegated more authority to SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell . Since the acquisition of Twitter was completed at the end of October last year, Musk has focused on transforming it and reduced his involvement in SpaceX’s day-to-day affairs, according to people familiar with the matter.

People familiar with the matter also said that Musk is more often helping SpaceX develop a long-term vision, including its goal of going to Mars, than focusing on day-to-day minutiae. For example, the Falcon 9 launch workflow has become fairly standardized over the years. So while Musk’s attention is elsewhere, it doesn’t appear to have had much of an impact on SpaceX’s operations.

extra work

According to former SpaceX employees, when Musk focuses too much on day-to-day operations, it often means a lot of extra work. He would throw himself into the project and sometimes push hard for changes.

For example, when Musk thinks certain hardware has too many pipes, connectors, or wires, or doesn’t fit his design aesthetic, he will ask employees to redesign and simplify the system, forcing employees to spend more time proving that certain parts work. raison d’être, or making major design improvements that can often take weeks to complete. Sometimes, the previous design even has to be completely reinvented.

When Musk turned his attention to SpaceX, the company sometimes froze hiring because he wanted to have the final say on whether all new hires were admitted, one former employee said. For example, at the end of 2021, multiple departing employees said that Musk believes that the company has too many employees and needs to lay off employees. Before that, he required hiring managers to certify that candidates were good enough, prompting managers to try a variety of methods, including asking candidates for their SAT scores. At these times, few people were hired because it was difficult to get Musk’s approval.

Another departing employee described scenes from a tense meeting ahead of SpaceX’s first crewed flight as the company competed with Boeing to be the first to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station .

One Friday night, Musk emailed the SpaceX Crew Dragon crew to come for an emergency meeting the next morning, early Saturday morning. When Musk finally showed up late, he told the team that the launch couldn’t be delayed and that they all had to try as hard as they could to stick to the schedule. He also told the team that there were too many people involved in the project. The short dialogue upset many people as they tried to carry out the mission as safely as possible.

Stick to the mission

Given the precedent, many current SpaceX employees are relaxed about Musk’s recent focus on Twitter. With Musk reducing his appearances, most of SpaceX’s top executives report to Shotwell. NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in December that he had had discussions with Shotwell, who assured him that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter would in no way affect SpaceX’s work.

Musk’s mission for SpaceX is to help humans become a multi-planetary species, a mission that continues to progress in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX develops and builds a prototype Starship. In recent months, Shotwell and Mark Juncosa, SpaceX’s vice president of spacecraft engineering, have taken over nearly the entire project.

In the early days of the Starship program, Musk often came to work at the Boca Chica production facility, sometimes personally overseeing the schedule and insisting on revisions to the design, many employees said. Now Junkosa, who was in charge of SpaceX’s space internet project “Starlink,” has assumed that role, overseeing hardware development and setting project timelines.

According to current employees, Junkosa took over the Starship program with an increased emphasis on launch reliability and more testing that could help reduce risk. The first few years of Starship development were risky, with SpaceX conducting suborbital test flights every few months, and some attempts ended with exploding landings that scattered debris on nearby wetlands. On the same day that Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter, some media disclosed that a test accident at SpaceX may have injured more than 20 employees.

Since the successful landing of the Starship test flight in May 2021, SpaceX has not conducted a similar test launch. The company’s next major flight, the first orbital launch of Starship, will mark another major milestone. Musk recently said that Starship would conduct an orbital test launch as early as February or March, though his predictions of launch dates tend to be less accurate.

Reliability will be key to the continued progress of the Starship program as it will play an important role in NASA’s return to the Moon. The agency has selected a modified version of Starship to carry astronauts to the lunar surface, with plans for a mission as early as early 2025. SpaceX also has big plans for Starship, including using it to launch future Starlink internet satellites.

Thanks to the executives behind Musk, SpaceX can move fast without a leader. But at the end of the day, they need to realize the vision Musk laid out, and his return is only a matter of time. (little)