00:23:56 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:23:56] S1: You worked at SpaceX from, like, 2003 to, I think, like, two thousand seven ish. Right? Mhmm. What was that like? And then what were you able to kinda, like, take from that to starting this company? [00:24:06] S0: Yeah. So SpaceX was not my first job. Even though it's my first job out of college, the one... The place I worked right before SpaceX was Boeing. And so during college, I was an intern at Boeing on what seemed like the coolest project you could do, which was a government military project at a top secret location working on a military program. And so I had been a mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, undergrad undergrad and master's, and so this seemed like a great place to go, much more interesting than working on commercial airliners, I thought. So let's work on a military program, and let's try and push the limits on what's possible in the aerospace world. And, it was a multi thousand person project out in the desert, and it was relatively slow. I tried to work as fast as I could, do as much as I could. And I actually got feedback from coworkers who said, hey, you're doing too much. You're going too fast. You should slow down a little bit. We have to make this they literally said we have to make this project last. [00:25:11] S1: Is it because of the incentives with how they were getting funded?
00:25:11 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:25:11] S1: Is it because of the incentives with how they were getting funded? [00:25:14] S0: I think it was partly culture. It was partly the people there. But ultimately, you could say it came back to the incentive structure of running a cost plus program, where whatever you spend, you get that times one point x, and that's the money that you make. And so, yeah, there's a very clear incentive to maintain the contract, do the best job that you can, take very little risk, and on the margins, maybe go a little bit slower to do a better job and take less risk. And that's gonna that's gonna increase the budget of the project. Now you you only wanna do that up until the point that the the project keeps going. You don't wanna push it so far that it gets questioned. But to a limit, that was the incentive. And so I had worked on a very large aerospace program in college, and then after college graduated. Well, before graduating, I was an intern at SpaceX in 2003 and then joined full time in 2004. And when I got there, it was, you know, 30 something people as an intern, 50 something as a as a full time employee, and it was like night and day. And even after my internship, I knew SpaceX was going to win on... In the launch market just by seeing the two cultures. [00:26:25] S1: And This is, like, years before... Didn't they land their first rocket in 2008?
00:26:30 · Scott Nolan
[00:26:30] S0: First successful launch or orbital launch. Yeah. 2008. And so, yeah, to your question, what was it like? It was a was a team of, let's say, 50 people working on the basic infrastructure required to achieve the mission of SpaceX, which was let's make spaceflight much more affordable so we get much more of it. And let's make it reliable and safe and bring down the costs, and let's actually help humanity make the next step towards Mars. So there were 50 people who were a mix of new grads, people from the industry, all true believers in the mission, working in this small company that was relatively unknown at the time, not taking the standard aerospace job, but believing that a small group of people could do something to move an industry forward that had completely stagnated for decades. And so when I was there, it was 2003. We were starting on building test stands. There was initial engine designs, initial engine tests, and we just scaled it up into engine development program on Merlin, on other engines, get those working, get performance up higher and higher, integrate those into Falcon one and the original Falcon one launches. So that was like a three year arc to see that progression. And it was just a lot of people working as hard as it took to make things succeed and working constantly sixty hour weeks or more, but not one hundred hour weeks every week. We know where we're headed. We wanna get there as fast as possible at the lowest total cost. And, yeah, let's let's do our best to to make this succeed.
00:28:10 · Ty Morse
[00:28:10] S1: One thing I've noticed over the past probably twenty years is Elon's way of building companies has drastically shifted. Like, even 2008, 2009, SpaceX and Tesla were near bankruptcy. Same thing with, like, 2018 production hell that brought Tesla close to the brink. I think for a very long time, Elon didn't wanna run multiple companies. Talulah Riley, at one point, said that he was, like, waking up in the middle of the night throwing up and stuff, trying to basically survive. What was kind of the evolution of the way that he operated over that time frame?
00:28:42 · Scott Nolan
[00:28:42] S0: I would say, yeah, when I when I started there in, let's... Full time 2004, the pace was fast. Everyone was working hard. But I think the lesson that's been learned since then by everybody at SpaceX is just the the feeling of urgency Mhmm. Of how long these projects can take if you allow them to and how close survival might be to the line and how you just don't know where the line is. And instead of letting things get to the brink with, like you said, two companies that were on the verge at the same time trying to survive that, nearly impossible. Instead of getting to that point, let's work harder up front. Let's go faster up front. Let's have higher you know, expectations of ourselves to avoid ever letting it get that close ever again. I think that that is the lesson I would draw from that is people were probably too comfortable. We all were very optimistic. We all believed it was going to work, but it did turn out to be close. And so we probably should have been stepping on the gas even harder on day one. And so maybe that's one lesson, I think. Yeah. There's probably many, many lessons learned over the years about how to how to maintain a really strict meritocracy, how to reward the best people, how to attract the best people, and how to just have extremely high standards around all these things to to actually achieve the long term mission. Because if you allow any drift, you're very unlikely to actually make a huge impact. And so you've just gotta be extremely strict, extremely focused on what you're trying to achieve. And then, you know, today, we're... I guess we're about twenty four years into SpaceX. And so you realize these these things can take a very long time, and so we should try and go as fast as we can so we can really get it done.
00:30:28 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:30:28] S1: What was the feeling internally when the first three rocket launches, like, failed? [00:30:33] S0: So I was there for the first two. The first one was... I think people were pretty discouraged. That was... You know, we had obviously hoped it would get to orbit. And we did get off the pad and got some altitude, but then there was a fuel leak in the engine area, which caused a fire, which led to the rocket not making it to to second stage ignition or separation or even max q. And so that was pretty discouraging, but we knew that the first one... Like, it's almost like in The Matrix, no one ever makes their first jump. Very unlikely for our first rocket to actually make it. And so we knew, okay, that's... We should expect that this was a coin flip on the first one, and so that's why we have enough funding for three. And the second one really was very close. It was a... It was... The second... Two and three were very, very close. The second one had a fuel slash instability that led to spiraling and then eventually air and, you know, gas ingestion, which made the [00:31:31] S1: engine burn out. Just not in in the fuel tank. There wasn't these, like, stoppers to stop the slashing of the fuel.