Behind the Scenes With the World’s Most Ambitious Rocket Makers
Popular Mechanics
An improbable partnership between an Internet mogul and an engineer could revolutionize the way NASA conducts missions—and, if these iconoclasts are successful, send paying customers into space.
Mueller’s ambitious moonlighting caught the attention of Internet multimillionaire Elon Musk, who met the engineer at the warehouse in January 2002 as Mueller was trying to attach his homemade engine to an airframe. Fresh from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk was seeking staff for a new space company, soon to be called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. He eyed the rocket engine and asked a simple question: “Can you build something bigger?â€
Mueller never fired that engine. He took it back to his garage, where it still sits. Instead, he took up Musk’s offer to join the nascent private space venture.
Today SpaceX has more than 700 employees, 500 of them at corporate headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Mueller is vice president of propulsion. “TRW is a huge company with a tiny propulsion department,†Mueller says. “Here, I’m kind of king.â€
On the floor of the Hawthorne facility, a former Boeing 747 assembly plant, rests the engine assembly from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Soot from a test firing coats the 12-foot-high structure. Seven of nine engines are in place; technicians have removed the other two and stood them upright on nozzles nearly 3 feet wide. Topped with a 3200-hp turbopump and a tangle of plumbing, each engine stands taller than a man.
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