6 MICE IN SPACE
5 太空召唤：建立SpaceX创新大军
他感觉大众好像已经丧失了对未来的雄心和希望。他希望激发大众的兴趣，使他们重拾对科学、征服未知和技术创新的热情。
ELON MUSK TURNED THIRTY IN JUNE 2001, and the birthday hit him hard. “I'm no longer a child prodigy,” he told Justine, only half joking. That same month X.com officially changed its name to PayPal, providing a harsh reminder that the company had been ripped away from Musk and given to someone else to run. The start-up life, which Musk described as akin to “eating glass and staring into the abyss,”had gotten old and so had Silicon Valley. It felt like Musk was living inside a trade show where everyone worked in the technology industry and talked all the time about funding, IPOs, and chasing big paydays. People liked to brag about the crazy hours they worked, and Justine would just laugh, knowing Musk had lived a more extreme version of the Silicon Valley lifestyle than they could imagine. “I had friends who complained that their husbands came home at seven or eight,” she said. “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more. People didn't always get the sacrifice he made in order to be where he was.”
2001年6月，埃隆·马斯克步入而立之年，这个生日对他触动很大。他半开玩笑地告诉贾斯汀：“我不再是一个神童了。”同月，X.com正式更名为PayPal，似乎再次提醒外界：该公司不再属于马斯克，已经交于他人运营。马斯克曾用“吞着玻璃同时凝视深渊”来描述自己的创业生活，但这种生活已然老去，硅谷亦是如此。马斯克好似置身于一个贸易展览会之中，那里的人全都任职于技术行业并整天谈论融资、IPO，并追逐着丰厚的薪水，也喜欢炫耀自己超长的工作时间，而贾斯汀听了只是笑了笑，因为她知道马斯克的生活方式之极端已然超乎人们对硅谷生活方式的想象。“我的一些朋友抱怨说她们的丈夫晚上七八点才回家，”她说，“埃隆晚上11点才回家，然后还要再工作一会儿。人们通常看不到他为了实现今日的成就所付出的牺牲。”
The idea of escaping this incredibly lucrative rat race started to grow more and more appealing. Musk's entire life had been about chasing a bigger stage, and Palo Alto seemed more like a stepping-stone than a final destination. The couple decided to move south and begin their family and the next chapter of their lives in Los Angeles.
脱离收入丰厚但竞争激烈的生活环境的想法变得越来越有吸引力。马斯克终生都在追逐一个更大的舞台，而帕洛阿尔托似乎更像一块垫脚石而非最终目的地。于是马斯克夫妇决定举家南迁，在洛杉矶开启家庭和生活的新篇章。
“There's an element to him that likes the style and the excitement and color of a place like L.A.,” said Justine. “Elon likes to be where the action is.” A small group of Musk's friends who felt similarly had also decamped to Los Angeles for what would be a wild couple of years.
“他身上的某种特质与洛杉矶这座城市的风格、热闹和色彩很契合，”贾斯汀说，“埃隆喜欢待在风口浪尖。”马斯克的一小撮有着相似特质的朋友也跑到洛杉矶，他们一起度过了疯狂的几年。
It wasn't just Los Angeles's glitz and grandeur that attracted Musk. It was also the call of space. After being pushed out of PayPal, Musk had started to revisit his childhood fantasies around rocket ships and space travel and to think that he might have a greater calling than creating Internet services. The changes in his attitude and thinking soon became obvious to his friends, including a group of PayPal executives who had gathered in Las Vegas one weekend to celebrate the company's success. “We're all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on eBay,” said Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor. “He was studying it and talking openly about space travel and changing the world.”
马斯克不仅为洛杉矶的浮华与大气所深深吸引，还有来自太空的召唤。在被排挤出PayPal之后，马斯克开始反思儿时关于火箭飞船和太空旅行的梦想，并认为这是比设计互联网服务更加伟大的使命。身边的朋友很快便意识到马斯克态度和思想上的转变，其中包括PayPal的一些高管。他们在拉斯维加斯度过了一个周末，庆祝公司取得的成功。“我们都在硬石咖啡厅内的小屋里待着，而埃隆却在那里读一本晦涩的苏联火箭手册。那本手册都发霉了，似乎是从PayPal买的，”PayPal的早期投资人凯文·哈茨(Kevin Hartz)说，“他在研究这本手册，并且公开谈论太空旅行和改变世界的事儿。”
Musk had picked Los Angeles with intent. It gave him access to space or at least the space industry. Southern California's mild, consistent weather had made it a favored city of the aeronautics industry since the 1920s, when the Lockheed Aircraft Company set up shop in Hollywood. Howard Hughes, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Boeing, and myriad other people and organizations have performed much of their manufacturing and cutting-edge experimentation in and around Los Angeles. Today the city remains a major hub for the military's aeronautics work and commercial activity. While Musk didn't know exactly what he wanted to do in space, he realized that just by being in Los Angeles he would be surrounded by the world's top aeronautics thinkers. They could help him refine any ideas, and there would be plenty of recruits to join his next venture.
随后，马斯克选择洛杉矶是有意为之。因为这座城市可以让他有机会接触太空，或者说至少可以接触太空行业。自20世纪20年代洛克希德飞机公司在好莱坞设立车间以来，南加州因其温和且稳定的天气成为备受航空业青睐的城市。霍华德·休斯(Howard Hughes)、美国空军、美国航空航天局、波音公司和其他个人及组织都在洛杉矶及其周围地区展开了大量的生产制造活动和尖端试验。今天，这座城市仍然是军事航空业和商业活动的中心。虽然马斯克并不明确自己要在太空中完成什么项目，但是他认识到只要留在洛杉矶，身边就不乏世界顶尖的航空业人士，他们可以帮助马斯克完善想法。那里还会有很多高素质人才加入到他的下一段创业旅程。
Musk's first interactions with the aeronautics community were with an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts, members of a nonprofit group called the Mars Society. Dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet, the Mars Society planned to hold a fund-raiser in mid-2001. The $500-per-plate event was to take place at the house of one of the well-off Mars Society members, and invitations to the usual characters had been mailed out. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting. “He gave us a check for five thousand dollars,” Zubrin said. “That made everyone take notice.” Zubrin began researching Musk, determined he was rich, and invited him for coffee ahead of the dinner. “I wanted to make sure he knew the projects we had under way,” Zubrin said. He proceeded to regale Musk with tales of the research center the society had built in the Arctic to mimic the tough conditions of Mars and the experiments they had been running for something called the Translife Mission, in which there would be a spinning capsule orbiting Earth that was piloted by a crew of mice. “It would spin to give them one-third gravity—the same you would have on Mars—and they would live there and reproduce,” Zubrin told Musk.
马斯克和航空学会的第一次互动是和一群不拘一格的太空爱好者见面，他们来自非营利组织“火星学会”(Mars Society)。这一组织致力于火星探索和火星定居，他们计划于2001年年中在一名家境比较富裕的学会成员家中举办一场筹款活动，每张门票价值500美元，并按照惯例向一些名人发出了邀请函。让协会负责人罗伯特·卓比林(Robert Zubrin)感到意外的是，他们收到了埃隆·马斯克的回函，但没人知道是谁邀请了他。“他给了我们一张5 000美元的支票，”卓比林说，“这引起了所有人的关注。”卓比林开始打听有关马斯克的一些情况，在确定他是个富翁之后，邀请他在活动之前一起喝咖啡。“我希望确定他的确了解我们在做的项目。”卓比林说。他向马斯克介绍了学会为模拟火星上的艰苦条件而在北极圈建立的研究中心，以及正在进行的一项名为“生命迁徙任务”的实验。这项实验是让一架关着一些老鼠的模拟太空舱围绕地球轨道旋转着。“之所以绕地球旋转，是为了让太空舱产生同火星上相同的重力，即在地球上重力的1/3，老鼠就在舱里生活并繁衍。”卓比林向马斯克介绍道。
When it was time for dinner, Zubrin placed Musk at the VIP table next to himself, the director and space buff James Cameron, and Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist for NASA with a deep interest in Mars. “Elon is so youthful-looking and at that time he looked like a little boy,” Stoker said. “Cameron was chatting him up right away to invest in his next movie, and Zubrin was trying to get him to make a big donation to the Mars Society.” In return for being hounded for cash, Musk probed about for ideas and contacts. Stoker's husband was an aerospace engineer at NASA working on a concept for an airplane that would glide over Mars looking for water. Musk loved that. “He was much more intense than some of the other millionaires,” Zubrin said. “He didn't know a lot about space, but he had a scientific mind. He wanted to know exactly what was being planned in regards to Mars and what the significance would be.” Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated another $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert as well.
筹款晚宴上，卓比林安排马斯克坐在自己旁边的VIP(贵宾)席位，同桌的还有著名导演及太空爱好者詹姆斯·卡梅隆和NASA(美国国家航空航天局)行星科学家卡罗尔·斯托克(Carol Stoker)，他对火星也有着浓厚的兴趣。“埃隆本来就长得年轻，那晚他就像个小男孩儿似的，”斯托克说，“卡梅隆马上就开始跟他搭讪，邀请他投资自己的下一部电影，卓比林也试图说服他向火星学会投入大笔资金。”马斯克也向他们讨教了许多想法并索要了联系方式，算是被追着要投资的回报。斯托克的丈夫曾是NASA的一名航天工程师，研究的项目是如何让飞机在火星上空滑翔，寻找液态的水。这正是马斯克最感兴趣的话题。“他比其他富豪专注得多，”卓比林说，“他对太空的了解并不多，但他具有非常科学的思维方式。他想清楚地了解我们关于火星的计划，以及这些计划的意义。”马斯克立刻就喜欢上了火星学会，并加入其董事会。他又捐献了10万美元，用于支持学会在沙漠建立科研工作站。
Musk's friends were not entirely sure what to make of his mental state. He'd lost a tremendous amount of weight fighting off malaria and looked almost skeletal. With little prompting, Musk would start expounding on his desire to do something meaningful with his life—something lasting. His next move had to be either in solar or in space. “He said, ‘The logical thing to happen next is solar, but I can't figure out how to make any money out of it,'” said George Zachary, the investor and close friend of Musk's, recalling a lunch date at the time. “Then he started talking about space, and I thought he meant office space like a real estate play.” Musk had actually started thinking bigger than the Mars Society. Rather than send a few mice into Earth's orbit, Musk wanted to send them to Mars. Some very rough calculations done at the time suggested that the journey would cost $15 million. “He asked if I thought that was crazy,” Zachary said. “I asked, ‘Do the mice come back? Because, if they don't, yeah, most people will think that's crazy.'” As it turned out, the mice were not only meant to go to Mars and come back but were also meant to procreate along the way, during a journey that would take months. Jeff Skoll, another one of Musk's friends who made a fortune at eBay, pointed out that the fornicating mice would need a hell of a lot of cheese and bought Musk a giant wheel of Le Brouère, a type of Gruyère.
马斯克的朋友们甚至都不知道该如何形容他当时的精神状态。他得了疟疾，痊愈之后瘦了许多，看起来骨瘦如柴。在没有任何征兆的情况下，马斯克会突然说起他的志向，说他希望用一生去完成一些有意义的、永恒的事情。他的下一个目标是太阳能或者太空。“他说，‘从逻辑上来说，我的下一个目标应该是太阳能，但我想不出如何从中盈利，’”马斯克的投资人兼密友乔治·扎卡里(George Zachary)在回忆他们的一次午餐聚会时说道，“然后他开始谈论太空，我以为他在说办公空间，就像开发房地产那样开发写字楼[1]。”实际上，火星学会已经远远不能满足马斯克的胃口。与其将一群老鼠送入地球轨道，马斯克更想把它们送到火星上去。根据当时的粗略计算，这一旅程需要花费1 500万美元。“他问我是不是觉得那样很疯狂，”扎卡里说，“我问他，‘那些老鼠还能回来吗？我之所这么问，是因为如果它们回不来的话，那么大多数人都会觉得这个想法很疯狂。’”结果他说能回来，那些老鼠不仅要在火星和地球之间往返，还要在耗时几个月的旅途中繁衍后代。马斯克另一位靠eBay发财的朋友杰夫·斯科尔( Jeff Skoll)开玩笑说，这群走到哪儿生到哪儿的老鼠可能需要很多很多的奶酪才能够活着回来。他给马斯克买了一大块Le Brouere奶酪饼(瑞士干酪的一种)。
Musk did not mind becoming the butt of cheese jokes. The more he thought about space, the more important its exploration seemed to him. He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. The average person might see space exploration as a waste of time and effort and rib him for talking about the subject, but Musk thought about interplanetary travel in a very earnest way. He wanted to inspire the masses and reinvigorate their passion for science, conquest, and the promise of technology.
马斯克全然不介意朋友拿奶酪开他的玩笑。对太空思考得越多，他越意识到探索的重要性。他感觉大众好像已经丧失了对未来的雄心和希望。人们可能会觉得探索太空是一件浪费时间和精力的事，因此在与马斯克谈论这一话题便时不时地挖苦他，但马斯克却在非常真诚地思索星际之旅这件事。他希望激发大众的兴趣，使他们重拾对科学、征服未知和技术创新的热情。
His fears that mankind had lost much of its will to push the boundaries were reinforced one day when Musk went to the NASA website. He'd expected to find a detailed plan for exploring Mars and instead found bupkis. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place,” Musk once told Wired. “Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing. It seemed crazy.” Musk believed that the very idea of America was intertwined with humanity's desire to explore. He found it sad that the American agency tasked with doing audacious things in space and exploring new frontiers as its mission seemed to have no serious interest in investigating Mars at all. The spirit of Manifest Destiny had been deflated or maybe even come to a depressing end, and hardly anyone seemed to care.
有一天，马斯克登录NASA的网站，这让他开始担忧人类已经失去了开疆拓土的雄心壮志。他本来期望能在网站上找到一些关于火星探索的详细计划，但一点相关内容都没找到。“一开始我想，天哪，我大概找错地方了，”马斯克有一次对《连线》杂志的记者说，“为什么一点计划和安排都没有？什么都没有。真是疯了。”马斯克坚信，美国人骨子里有着深植于人性的探索精神。但他很失望，本应大胆无畏、以探索太空新领域为使命的美国机构似乎对火星探索一点兴趣也没有。昭昭天命[2]的精神已不被推崇甚至消失殆尽，几乎没有人在乎它了。
Like so many quests to revitalize America's soul and bring hope to all of mankind, Musk's journey began in a hotel conference room. By this time, Musk had built up a decent network of contacts in the space industry, and he brought the best of them together at a series of salons—sometimes at the Renaissance hotel at the Los Angeles airport and sometimes at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto. Musk had no formal business plan for these people to debate. He mostly wanted them to help him develop the mice-to-Mars idea or at least to come up with something comparable. Musk hoped to hit on a grand gesture for mankind—some type of event that would capture the world's attention, get people thinking about Mars again, and have them reflect on man's potential. The scientists and luminaries at the meetings were to figure out a spectacle that would be technically feasible at a price tag of approximately $20 million. Musk resigned from his position as a director of the Mars Society and announced his own organization—the Life to Mars Foundation.
和许多意欲重振美国精神和为全人类带来希望的人一样，马斯克的行动始于酒店会议室。此时，马斯克在太空领域的人脉已初具规模，其中的一些顶尖人才受邀参加了他举办的一系列沙龙活动，有时在洛杉矶机场万丽酒店，有时在帕洛阿尔托的喜来登酒店。马斯克并没有正式的商业计划供他们讨论。他主要希望他们能够帮助自己实现送老鼠上太空的想法或者至少能够想到类似的计划。他希望做一件能够触动全人类的、能令世界瞩目的事情，让人们再次想起火星，思考人类的潜能。与会的科学家和权威人士需要构思出一种技术上可行的方案，而且预算在2 000万美元左右。马斯克退出了火星学会的董事会，并成立了自己的组织——火星生命基金会(Life to Mars Foundation)。
The collection of talent attending these sessions in 2001 was impressive. Scientists showed up from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. James Cameron appeared, lending some celebrity to the affair. Also attending was Michael Griffin, whose academic credentials were spectacular and included degrees in aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and applied physics. Griffin had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm called In-Q-Tel, at NASA, and at JPL and was just in the process of leaving Orbital Sciences Corporation, a maker of satellites and spacecraft, where he had been chief technical officer and the general manager of the space systems group. It could be argued that no one on the planet knew more about the realities of getting things into space than Griffin, and he was working for Musk as space thinker in chief. (Four years later, in 2005, Griffin took over as head of NASA.)
2001年年中，许多著名的业内人士出席了这些活动。来自NASA附近的喷气推进实验室(JPL)的科学家们也参加了活动。詹姆斯·卡梅隆也来了，他借助自己的名气为活动做了宣传。迈克尔·格里芬(Michael Griffin)也出席了活动，他深厚的学术造诣涉及航天工程、电气工程、土木工程和应用物理学领域。格里芬效力中央情报局的风险投资部门IQT电信(In-Q-Tel)以及NASA、喷气推进实验室。他曾供职于卫星与飞船制造商——美国轨道科技公司(Orbital Science Corporation)，担任首席技术官和空间系统集团总经理，此时正在办理辞职手续。可以说，在这个世界上没有谁会比格里芬更了解怎么把物体送入太空了，他已经成为马斯克智囊团中的领军人物。(4年后，也就是2005年，格里芬接任NASA负责人一职。)
The experts were thrilled to have another rich guy appear who was willing to fund something interesting in space. They happily debated the merits and feasibility of sending up rodents and watching them hump. But, as the discussion wore on, a consensus started to build around pursuing a different project—something called “Mars Oasis.” Under this plan, Musk would buy a rocket and use it to shoot what amounted to a robotic greenhouse to Mars. A group of researchers had already been working on a space-ready growth chamber for plants. The idea was to modify their structure, so that it could open up briefly and suck in some of the Martian regolith, or soil, and then use it to grow a plant, which would in turn produce the first oxygen on Mars. Much to Musk's liking, this new plan seemed both ostentatious and feasible.
专家们乐于看到又一位富翁对他们的研究感兴趣，并乐意资助他们进行有趣的太空探索。他们热烈地讨论着将啮齿动物送出地球并观察它们交配的价值和可行性。然而，随着讨论的深入，大家一致同意想要开展一个新项目——叫作“火星绿洲”。依据该计划，马斯克需要买下一枚火箭，将一个机械温室发射到火星上去。一群科研人员已经在研究适用于太空的植物生长室了。科学家需要调整生长室的结构，让其能够短暂地开启，采集一些火星表面的岩屑或土壤，用来培育植物，这样就能在火星上产生第一口氧气。这一新计划既引人注目又具有可行性，正对马斯克的胃口。
Musk wanted the structure to have a window and a way to send a video feedback to Earth, so that people could watch the plant grow. The group also talked about sending out kits to students around the country who would grow their own plants simultaneously and take notice, for example, that the Martian plant could grow twice as high as its Earth-bound counterpart in the same amount of time. “This concept had been floating around in various forms for a while,” said Dave Bearden, a space industry veteran who attended the meetings. “It would be, yes, there is life on Mars, and we put it there. The hope was that it might turn on a light for thousands of kids that this place is not that hostile. Then they might start thinking, Maybe we should go there.” Musk's enthusiasm for the idea started to inspire the group, many of whom had grown cynical about anything novel happening in space again. “He's a very smart, very driven guy with a huge ego,” Bearden said. “At one point someone mentioned that he might become Time magazine's Man of the Year, and you could see him light up. He has this belief that he is the guy who can change the world.”
马斯克希望能给生长室开一扇窗，以便将视频传回地球，这样一来，人们就能观察到植物在火星上的长势。专家们还提出向全美各地的学生发放幼苗，让他们同一时间在家里种下这些植物，然后进行比较，比如，在相同的时间里，火星植物是否会比地球植物长得高一倍。“这一概念已经以各种形式存在一段时间了，”资深航天工业专家戴夫·比尔登(Dave Bearden)在参加会议时说，“火星上将会有生物存在，而且是我们送到那儿的。我们希望告诉千千万万的少年，那里并不可怕。这样一来，他们可能会开始考虑‘也许我们可以去火星’。”马斯克对这一想法的热情打动了团队，而他们当中的很多人曾对太空中能否再次出现新奇事物都持怀疑态度。“他特别聪明、有上进心并且非常自负，”比尔登说，“有一次，有人说他可能会入选《时代》杂志的‘年度风云人物’，他马上面露喜色。他相信自己是有能力改变世界的那个人。”
The main thing troubling the space experts was Musk's budget. Following the salons, it seemed like Musk wanted to spend somewhere between $20 million and $30 million on the stunt, and everyone knew that the cost of a rocket launch alone would eat up that money and then some. “In my mind, you needed two hundred million dollars to do it right,” Bearden said. “But people were reluctant to bring too much reality into the situation too early and just get the whole idea killed.” Then there were the immense engineering challenges that would need solving. “To have a big window on this thing was a real thermal problem,” Bearden said. “You could not keep the container warm enough to keep anything alive.” Scooping Martian soil into the structure seemed not only hard to do physically but also like a flat-out bad idea since the regolith would be toxic. For a while, the scientists debated growing the plant in a nutrient-rich gel instead, but that felt like cheating and like it might undermine the whole point of the endeavor. Even the optimistic moments were awash in unknowns. One scientist found some very resilient mustard seeds and thought they could possibly survive a treated version of the Martian soil. “There was a pretty big downside if the plant didn't survive,” Bearden said. “You have this dead garden on Mars that ends up giving off the opposite of the intended effect.”*
马斯克的预算案是让太空专家们最头疼的一件事。在沙龙活动结束之后，马斯克意欲投入2 000万~3 000万美元来完成这一计划，但所有人都知道，仅火箭发射这一项的花费就可能超过这个预算。“在我看来，至少需要两亿美元才能做好这件事，”比尔登说，“但人们不愿意过早地将实际情况和盘托出，生怕计划因此而夭折。”随后，他们又面临着很多亟待解决的技术挑战。“在生长室上开一扇窗是一项真正的热力学挑战，”比尔登说道，“一旦开了一扇窗，就无法使生长室内的温度达到足以维持生命的水平。”而通过生长室采集火星土壤不仅很难实现，还有可能是个馊主意，因为火星表面的岩屑或土壤可能有毒。之后，科学家们又讨论在营养丰富的胶质中培养植物，但这有点自欺欺人，因为这有悖初衷。即使是在最乐观的情况下，也充满未知。一位科学家发现了一些适应能力非常强的芥菜籽，他认为这些种子在经过处理的火星土壤中有可能存活下来。“如果植物无法在火星上存活，这个打击对我们来说太过沉重了，”比尔登说，“我们费尽心思想把花园带到火星上，结果花园里的植物却没能存活下来。这会起到截然相反的效果。”[3]
Musk never flinched. He turned some of the volunteer thinkers into consultants, and put them to work on the plant machine's design. He also plotted a trip to Russia to find out exactly how much a launch would cost. Musk intended to buy a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, from the Russians and use that as his launch vehicle. For help with this, Musk reached out to Jim Cantrell, an unusual fellow who had done a mix of classified and unclassified work for the United States and other governments. Among other claims to fame, Cantrell had been accused of espionage and placed under house arrest in 1996 by the Russians after a satellite deal went awry. “After a couple of weeks, Al Gore made some calls, and it got worked out,” Cantrell said. “I didn't want anything to do with the Russians again—ever.” Musk had other ideas.
马斯克从未退缩。他聘请了几名志愿者专家担任顾问，负责植物生长室的设计工作。他还准备去一趟俄罗斯，亲自调查每发射一枚火箭到底需要多少资金。马斯克打算从俄罗斯购买一枚翻新的洲际弹道导弹(ICBM)，用作运载火箭。为此马斯克找到了吉姆·坎特雷尔(Jim Cantrell)。吉姆是个与众不同的人，他曾效力于美国和其他政府，从事一系列机密和非机密工作。在一桩卫星交易失败后，俄罗斯政府指控坎特雷尔犯有间谍罪，并于1996年将其软禁。正是这起事件使他声名远扬。“几个星期之后，时任美国副总统艾伯特·戈尔(Albert Arnold Gore Jr)来电斡旋，我这才得以获释，”坎特雷尔说道，“我再也不想和俄罗斯人打交道了，永远不再打交道。”马斯克不得不另辟蹊径。
Cantrell was driving his convertible on a hot July evening in Utah when a call came in. “This guy in a funny accent said, ‘I really need to talk to you. I am a billionaire. I am going to start a space program.'” Cantrell could not hear Musk well—he thought his name was Ian Musk—and said he would call back once he got home. The two men didn't exactly trust each other at the outset. Musk refused to give Cantrell his cell phone number and made the call from his fax machine. Cantrell found Musk both intriguing and all too eager. “He asked if there was an airport near me and if I could meet the next day,” Cantrell said. “My red flags started going off.” Fearing one of his enemies was trying to orchestrate an elaborate setup, Cantrell told Musk to meet him at the Salt Lake City airport, where he would rent a conference room near the Delta lounge. “I wanted him to meet me behind security so he couldn't pack a gun,” Cantrell said. When the meeting finally took place, Musk and Cantrell hit it off. Musk rolled out his “humans need to become a multiplanetary species” speech, and Cantrell said that if Musk was really serious, he'd be willing to go to Russia—again—and help buy a rocket.
7月一个酷热的夜晚，坎特雷尔开着他的敞篷车行驶在犹他州的公路上，这时，他接到一个电话。“那家伙的口音很奇怪，他对我说，‘我必须跟你谈谈，我是个亿万富翁，我想实施一项太空计划。’”坎特雷尔没听清谈话内容——以为对方的名字是伊恩·马斯克——于是告诉马斯克一到家就给他回电话。一开始，他们彼此互不信任。马斯克不肯让坎特雷尔知道自己的手机号码，选择用传真机给他打电话。坎特雷尔觉得马斯克挺有趣的，但又有点操之过急。“他问我附近有没有机场，明天有没有时间见他，”坎特雷尔说，“我开始对他心存戒备。”为了防止有人故意设局陷害自己，坎特雷尔约马斯克在盐湖城机场见面，他在那里租了一间会议室。“我希望他经过安检之后再来找我，这样他就不可能带着枪了。”坎特雷尔说。但到了真正会面的时候，两人一拍即合。马斯克滔滔不绝地向坎特雷尔介绍自己的想法——“人类应该成为一种跨行星物种”，而坎特雷尔表示，如果马斯克是认真的，他愿意再去一次俄罗斯，帮他买一枚火箭回来。
In late October 2001, Musk, Cantrell, and Adeo Ressi, Musk's friend from college, boarded a commercial flight to Moscow. Ressi had been playing the role of Musk's guardian and trying to ascertain whether his best friend had started to lose his mind. Compilation videos of rockets exploding were made, and interventions were held with Musk's friends trying to talk him out of wasting his money. While these measures failed, Adeo went along to Russia to try to contain Musk as best as he could. “Adeo would call me to the side and say, ‘What Elon is doing is insane. A philanthropic gesture? That's crazy,'” Cantrell said. “He was seriously worried but was down with the trip.” And why not? The men were heading to Russia at the height of its freewheeling post-Soviet days when rich guys could apparently buy space missiles on the open market.
2001年10月底，马斯克、坎特雷尔和大学时期的好友阿德·雷西乘飞机一同前往莫斯科。雷西一直守护着马斯克，并设法弄清楚自己最好的朋友是否已经失去理智。雷西让马斯克看了一系列关于火箭爆炸的视频，还同其他朋友一起与之谈心，劝他不要再浪费钱了。但这些办法都没有见效，阿德于是跟他一起去了俄罗斯，希望能够尽力看好他。“阿德会把我叫到一边，然后对我说，‘埃隆做事已经失去理智了。难道他自以为是在发扬博爱精神吗？他真是疯了。’”坎特雷尔说，“因为太担心，所以阿德跟着我们一起去了。”有钱人其实可以正大光明地在公开市场上购买航天导弹，但他们非得跑到后俄罗斯去买，阿德确实有必要担心他是不是疯了。
Team Musk would grow to include Mike Griffin, and meet with the Russians three times over a period of four months.* The group set up a few meetings with companies like NPO Lavochkin, which had made probes intended for Mars and Venus for the Russian Federal Space Agency, and Kosmotras, a commercial rocket launcher. The appointments all seemed to go the same way, following Russian decorum. The Russians, who often skip breakfast, would ask to meet around 11 A.M. at their offices for an early lunch. Then there would be small talk for an hour or more as the meeting attendees picked over a spread of sandwiches, sausages, and, of course, vodka. At some point during this process, Griffin usually started to lose his patience. “He suffers fools very poorly,” Cantrell said. “He's looking around and wondering when we're going to get down to fucking business.” The answer was not soon. After lunch came a lengthy smoking and coffee-drinking period. Once all of the tables were cleared, the Russian in charge would turn to Musk and ask, “What is it you're interested in buying?” The big windup may not have bothered Musk as much if the Russians had taken him more seriously. “They looked at us like we were not credible people,” Cantrell said. “One of their chief designers spit on me and Elon because he thought we were full of shit.”
马斯克又把迈克尔·格里芬拉进了团队，在4个多月的时间里，他们和俄罗斯人碰头三次[4]。他们还和其他几家公司碰了几次面，其中包括给俄罗斯联邦宇航局制造过火星和金星探测器的拉沃契金设计局，以及商用火箭发射器制造商Kosmotras公司。所有的会面程序都依照俄罗斯的传统习俗进行。俄罗斯人经常不吃早餐，他们会提议11点左右在办公室见面，这样就能早点儿吃午饭。然后，他们可以在会客的过程中就着三明治、香肠，当然还有伏特加闲聊个把小时甚至更久。这时，格里芬通常会变得不耐烦。“他无法忍受愚蠢之人，”坎特雷尔说，“他会环顾四周，心想，‘该死的，我们什么时候才能开始谈生意啊。’”但他没那么幸运，吃完午饭，俄罗斯人还要抽烟、喝咖啡，这又要花好长时间。终于所有桌子都清理干净了，带头的俄罗斯人才问马斯克：“你想买什么来着？”哪怕俄罗斯人对他的态度能认真一点儿，他也不至于那么生气。“他们打量着我们，好像我们是一群不靠谱儿的人，”坎特雷尔说，“他们中的一位首席设计师用鄙夷的眼神看着我和埃隆，他觉得我们一无所知。”
The most intense meeting occurred in an ornate, neglected, prerevolutionary building near downtown Moscow. The vodka shots started—“To space!” “To America!”—while Musk sat on $20 million, which he hoped would be enough to buy three ICBMs that could be retooled to go to space. Buzzed from the vodka, Musk asked point-blank how much a missile would cost. The reply: $8 million each. Musk countered, offering $8 million for two. “They sat there and looked at him,” Cantrell said. “And said something like, ‘Young boy. No.' They also intimated that he didn't have the money.” At this point, Musk had decided the Russians were either not serious about doing business or determined to part a dot-com millionaire from as much of his money as possible. He stormed out of the meeting.
交锋最激烈的一次会面，发生在莫斯科市中心附近一幢被人遗忘的大楼里，这幢楼估计是俄国十月革命前建造的。双方不停地推杯换盏，喝的还是伏特加，嘴里高呼“为了太空事业！”“为了美国！”。马斯克打算以2 000万美元的价格购买三枚弹道导弹，改装之后送上太空。借着酒劲儿，马斯克开门见山地问对方，买一枚导弹需要多少钱。对方回答说：每枚800万美元。马斯克还价到800万两枚。“他们就坐在那儿，看着他，”坎特雷尔说，“好像说了‘小伙子，别闹了’这样的话。他们还讽刺他没那么多钱。”这时，马斯克觉得这群俄罗斯人要么就是没有诚意做这笔买卖，要么就是想从他这个互联网大亨身上狠狠敲一笔。最后，他愤然离席。
The Team Musk mood could not have been worse. It was near the end of February 2002, and they went outside to hail a cab and drove straight to the airport surrounded by the snow and dreck of the Moscow winter. Inside the cab, no one talked. Musk had come to Russia filled with optimism about putting on a great show for mankind and was now leaving exasperated and disappointed by human nature. The Russians were the only ones with rockets that could possibly fit within Musk's budget. “It was a long drive,” Cantrell said. “We sat there in silence looking at the Russian peasants shopping in the snow.” The somber mood lingered all the way to the plane, until the drink cart arrived. “You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow,” Cantrell said. “It's like, ‘My God. I made it.' So, Griffin and I got drinks and clinked our glasses.” Musk sat in the row in front of them, typing on his computer. “We're thinking, Fucking nerd. What can he be doing now?” At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he'd created. “Hey, guys,” he said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”
马斯克一行人的情绪跌至低谷。当时是2002年2月底，他们出门叫了辆出租车直接去了机场。冬天的莫斯科街道上堆满了积雪和垃圾。在出租车上，大家一言不发。马斯克来俄罗斯的时候信心满满，心想自己马上就能为全人类带来一场翻天覆地的变化，如今却铩羽而归，对人性感到失望至极。以马斯克的预算，他们只买得起俄罗斯人的火箭。“当时感觉时间过得真慢，”坎特雷尔说，“我们就坐在那儿沉默不语，看着俄罗斯农民冒雪出去采购。”忧郁的气氛一路陪伴着他们，直到登机后飞机上的酒水车推到面前。“每次飞机从莫斯科起飞，我的心情就特别舒畅，”坎特雷尔说，“那感觉就像，‘天哪，我逃出来了。’所以，我和格里芬开始喝酒碰杯。”马斯克坐在他们前面一排，正在电脑前打字。“我们心想，‘这个呆子，他现在还能干吗？’”这时马斯克突然转过身来，亮出了他制作的电子表格。“兄弟们，”他说，“我觉得我们可以自己造火箭。”
Griffin and Cantrell had downed a couple of drinks by this time and were too deflated to entertain a fantasy. They knew all too well the stories of gung-ho millionaires who thought they could conquer space only to lose their fortunes. Just the year before, Andrew Beal, a real estate and finance whiz in Texas, folded his aerospace company after having poured millions into a massive test site. “We're thinking, Yeah, you and whose fucking army,” Cantrell said. “But, Elon says, ‘No, I'm serious. I have this spreadsheet.'” Musk passed his laptop over to Griffin and Cantrell, and they were dumbfounded. The document detailed the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket. According to Musk's calculations, he could undercut existing launch companies by building a modest-sized rocket that would cater to a part of the market that specialized in carrying smaller satellites and research payloads to space. The spreadsheet also laid out the hypothetical performance characteristics of the rocket in fairly impressive detail. “I said, ‘Elon, where did you get this?'” Cantrell said.
格里芬和坎特雷尔这时已经几杯酒下肚，对他的白日梦再也提不起兴趣了。他们听过很多这样的故事，一个个雄心勃勃的有钱人都认为自己能够征服太空，结果只是让自己的财富付诸东流。安德鲁·比尔(Andrew Beal)是得克萨斯州房地产和金融界的奇才，就在去年，他关闭了自己的航空公司，而他投资在大型试验场的几百万美元都打了水漂。“我们心想‘做你的春秋大梦去吧’，”坎特雷尔说，“但埃隆说，‘不，我是认真的。你看这个表格。’”马斯克把他的笔记本电脑递给格里芬和坎特雷尔，他们惊呆了。表格里详细列明了建造、装配和发射一枚火箭所需的成本。根据马斯克的计算，他需要建造一枚大小适中的火箭，以满足那些搭载小型卫星和研究设备的细分市场的需求，这样就能节省一笔发射费用。他在表格中还列出了假设的火箭性能特性，内容十分详细。“我说，‘埃隆，你从哪里得到这些数据的？’”坎特雷尔说。
Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had emerged from this meditative process with the realization that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the Russians were offering. Forget the mice. Forget the plant with its own video feed growing—or possibly dying—on Mars. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to explore space.
马斯克用了几个月的时间研究航天工业及其背后的物理原理。他从坎特雷尔和其他人那里借来了《火箭推进原理》(Rocket Propulsion Elements)、《天体动力学基础》(Fundamentals of Astrodynamics)、《燃气涡轮和火箭推进的空气动力学》(Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion)，还有其他各种专业书籍。马斯克仿佛又找到了童年时的状态，他努力吸收关于太空的一切知识，在这一系列近似冥想的学习过程中，他终于意识到，自己制造的火箭可以，而且也应该比俄罗斯人的更便宜。忘了老鼠计划吧。忘了可以回传生长影像的植物吧，它有可能在火星上死掉。通过更低的太空探索成本，马斯克可以激发人们重新思考太空探索。
As word traveled around the space community about Musk's plans, there was a collective ho-hum. People like Zubrin had seen this show many times before. “There was a string of zillionaires that got sold a good story by an engineer,” Zubrin said. “Combine my brains and your money, and we can build a rocket ship that will be profitable and open up the space frontier. The techies usually ended up spending the rich guy's money for two years, and then the rich guy gets bored and shuts the thing down. With Elon, everyone gave a sigh and said, ‘Oh well. He could have spent ten million dollars to send up the mice, but instead he'll spend hundreds of millions and probably fail like all the others that proceeded him.'”
马斯克的计划传遍了整个太空研究领域，但大家都对这个消息不以为然。卓比林和其他人都听说过很多类似的故事。“不少亿万富翁都被工程师的花言巧语蒙得晕头转向，”卓比林说，“结合我的头脑和你的资金，我们可以建造一艘火箭船，这不仅有利可图，还能开创太空事业的新纪元。工程师在接下来的两年里都会拿着有钱人的资金到处忙活儿，直到有一天有钱人觉得没劲了，项目就无疾而终了。至于埃隆，大家提到他时都是一声叹息，说道：‘好吧，他本来只需要花1 000万美元送老鼠上太空，但现在他却要花几亿美元，然后像他的前辈一样什么也没做出来。’”
While well aware of the risks tied to starting a rocket company, Musk had at least one reason to think he might succeed where others had failed. That reason's name was Tom Mueller.
虽然马斯克知道成立一家火箭公司会面临多大的风险，但至少有一个理由支持着他，让他觉得自己能在别人失败的地方爬起来。这个理由就是汤姆·米勒(Tom Mueller)。
Mueller grew up the son of a logger in the tidy Idaho town of St. Maries, where he developed a reputation as an oddball. While the rest of the kids were outside exploring the woods in winter, Mueller stayed warm in the library reading books or watching Star Trek at his house. He also tinkered. Walking to grade school one day, Mueller discovered a smashed clock in an alley and turned it into a pet project. Each day, he fixed some part of the clock—a gear, a spring—until he got it working. A similar thing happened with the family's lawn mower, which Mueller disassembled one afternoon on the front lawn for fun. “My dad came home and was so mad because he thought he'd have to buy a new mower,” Mueller said. “But I put it back together, and it ran.” Mueller then got stuck on rockets. He started buying mail order kits and following the instructions to build small rockets. Rather quickly, Mueller graduated to constructing his own devices. At the age of twelve, he crafted a mock-up space shuttle that could be attached to a rocket, sent up into the air, and then glide back to the ground. For a science project a couple of years later, Mueller borrowed his dad's oxyacetylene welding equipment to make a rocket engine prototype. Mueller cooled the device by placing it upside down in a coffee can full of water—“I could run it like that all day long”—and invented equally creative ways to measure its performance. The machine was good enough for Mueller to win a couple of regional science fair competitions and end up at an international event. “That's where I promptly got my ass kicked,” Mueller said.
米勒出生在爱达荷州的圣玛丽小镇，父亲是一名樵夫。他是小镇上有名的怪人。冬天，当别的孩子都在树林里探险时，米勒一个人坐在暖和的图书馆里看书，或者在自己家里看《星际迷航》。他还会精修器件。上小学后的一天，米勒在一条小巷里发现了一座破旧的钟，他把它当成宝贝。每天他都要修理钟的几个零件——一个齿轮、一根弹簧，直到指针再次转动。类似的事情也发生在家里的割草机上，一天下午，米勒在家门口的草坪上把割草机拆了。“父亲回家的时候很生气，因为他以为自己需要买一台新的割草机了，”米勒说道，“但我重新把它组装好了，它还能割草。”然后米勒迷上了火箭。他开始邮购材料，根据说明书建造小型火箭。米勒很快就制造出了火箭。年仅12岁的他制作了一架航天飞机模型，它可以搭载在火箭上，升空并滑翔回到地面。几年后，为了进行一个科学项目，米勒向父亲借了一台气焊设备，用来制造火箭引擎原型。米勒将设备倒置在一个装满水的咖啡罐中来冷却。“我可以这样忙活儿一整天。”他还发明了同样创新的方法来测定设备的性能。这一设备让米勒获得了许多地区性的科学竞赛奖，但却没能在国际赛事中获奖。“这让我很受挫。”米勒说。
Tall, lanky, and with a rectangular face, Mueller is an easygoing sort who muddled through college for a bit, teaching his friends how to make smoke bombs, and then eventually settled down and did well as a mechanical engineering student. Fresh out of college, he worked for Hughes Aircraft on satellites—“It wasn't rockets, but it was close”—and then went to TRW Space & Electronics. It was the latter half of the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program had the space gearheads dreaming about kinetic weapons and all sorts of mayhem. At TRW, Mueller experimented with crazy types of propellants and oversaw the development of the company's TR-106 engine, a giant machine fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. As a hobby, Mueller hung out with a couple hundred amateur rocketry buffs in the Reaction Research Society, a group formed in 1943 to encourage the building and firing of rockets. On the weekends, Mueller traveled out to the Mojave Desert with the other RRS members to push the limits of amateur machines. Mueller was one of the club's standouts, able to build things that actually worked, and could experiment with some of the more radical concepts that were quashed by his conservative bosses at TRW. His crowning achievement was an eighty-pound engine that could produce thirteen thousand pounds of thrust and earned accolades as the world's largest liquid-fuel rocket engine built by an amateur. “I still keep the rockets hanging in my garage,” Mueller said.
米勒是个高高瘦瘦、长着一张方形脸的小伙子。他为人随和，在大学里得过且过，没事就教教朋友如何制造烟幕弹。最后他终于安定了下来，成为一名机械工程专业的优秀学生。大学毕业之后，最开始他在休斯飞机公司从事卫星研究。“那不是火箭，不过也差不多。”随后他又去了TRW天空与电子设备公司(TWR Space & Electronics)。20世纪80年代下半叶，罗纳德·里根(Ronald Reagan)的星球大战计划引起了太空爱好者们的极大兴趣，他们幻想着制造出各种动力学武器和可能引起的各种混乱。米勒在TRW公司实验了许多种推进剂，负责TR-106型引擎的开发。这是一种以液态氧气和氢气作为燃料的大型设备。业余时间里，米勒喜欢和来自反应力研究学会的几百号业余火箭爱好者聚会。反应力研究学会成立于1943年，致力于推进火箭的建造和发射。周末的时候，米勒会和学会的其他成员一起去莫哈韦沙漠，改进他们自己研制出来的非专业设备。米勒是学会的杰出成员之一，擅长制造一些能够真正运作起来的机器，还会实践一些不被TWR公司保守上司认可的激进设想。他引以为傲的成就是一台重达80磅的火箭推进器，它可以产生1.3万磅的推力，被誉为世界上最大的由业余爱好者制造的液体燃料火箭推进器。米勒说，“那些火箭现在还挂在我的车库里呢。”
In January 2002, Mueller was hanging out in the workshop of John Garvey, who had left a job at the aerospace company McDonnell Douglas to start building his own rockets. Garvey's facility was in Huntington Beach, where he rented an industrial space about the size of a six-car garage. The two men were fiddling around with the eighty-pound engine when Garvey mentioned that a guy named Elon Musk might be stopping by. The amateur rocketry scene is tight, and it was Cantrell who recommended that Musk check out Garvey's workshop and see Mueller's designs. On a Sunday, Musk arrived with a pregnant Justine, wearing a stylish black leather trench coat and looking like a high-paid assassin. Mueller had the eighty-pound engine on his shoulder and was trying to bolt it to a support structure when Musk began peppering him with questions. “He asked me how much thrust it had,” Mueller said. “He wanted to know if I had ever worked on anything bigger. I told him that yeah, I'd worked on a 650,000-pound thrust engine at TRW and knew every part of it.” Mueller set the engine down and tried to keep up with Musk's interrogation. “How much would that big engine cost?” Musk asked. Mueller told him TRW built it for about $12 million. Musk shot back, “Yeah, but how much could you really do it for?”
2002年1月，米勒去约翰·加维(John Garvey)的车间闲逛。加维已经从麦道飞机公司离职，准备自己制造火箭。车间位于亨廷顿海滩，他在那儿租了一间工业厂房，规模相当于可以停放6辆车的停车场。当时他们正在捣鼓那台80磅的火箭推进器，然后加维说一个叫埃隆·马斯克的人可能会来车间看看。业余火箭爱好者的社交圈子联系很紧密，正是坎特雷尔建议马斯克去看看加维的车间和米勒的设计。一个周日，马斯克来到车间，他穿着一件时髦的黑色皮风衣，看起来活像个身价不菲的杀手，同行的还有他已经怀孕的妻子贾斯汀。当马斯克开始发问的时候，米勒正扛着那台80磅的火箭推进器，准备把它放到一个支架上。“他问我，这玩意儿的推力有多大？”米勒说，“他想知道我是否制造过更庞大的设备。我说做过，之前我在TRW公司制造过一台可以产生65万磅推力的火箭推进器，每个细节我都一清二楚。”米勒放下火箭推进器，准备好好回答马斯克的质询。“这么大一个火箭推进器要花多少钱？”马斯克问道。米勒告诉他，TRW公司花了大约1 200万美元。马斯克又问：“好吧，如果让你自己制造的话，需要多少钱？”
Mueller ended up chatting with Musk for hours. The next weekend, Mueller invited Musk to his house to continue their discussion. Musk knew he had found someone who really knew the ins and outs of making rockets. After that, Musk introduced Mueller to the rest of his roundtable of space experts and their stealthy meetings. The caliber of the people impressed Mueller, who had turned down past job offers from Beal and other budding space magnates because of their borderline insane ideas. Musk, by contrast, seemed to know what he was doing, weeding out the naysayers meeting by meeting and forming a crew of bright, committed engineers.
结果米勒和马斯克聊了好几个小时。米勒邀请马斯克下周末到他家里做客，继续讨论之前的话题。马斯克意识到，他终于找到了一个真正对制造火箭细节了如指掌的人才。在那之后，马斯克把米勒介绍给了团队中的其他专家，让他参与他们的会议。专家们的专业水平给米勒留下了深刻印象，他们拒绝了比尔(Beal)宇航技术公司和其他航天巨头提供的职位，就是为了实现自己近乎疯狂的想法。而马斯克不同，他似乎知道自己在做什么，经过一次又一次的会议，他淘汰了那些唱反调的人，最终留下了一群志同道合的精英工程师。
Mueller had helped Musk fill out that spreadsheet around the performance and cost metrics of a new, low-cost rocket, and, along with the rest of Team Musk, had subsequently refined the idea. The rocket would not carry truck-sized satellites like some of the monster rockets flown by Boeing, Lockheed, the Russians, and others countries. Instead, Musk's rocket would be aimed at the lower end of the satellite market, and it could end up as ideal for an emerging class of smaller payloads that capitalized on the massive advances that had taken place in recent years in computing and electronics technology. The rocket would cater directly to a theory in the space industry that a whole new market might open for both commercial and research payloads if a company could drastically lower the price per launch and perform launches on a regular schedule. Musk relished the idea of being at the forefront of this trend and developing the workhorse of a new era in space. Of course, all of this was theoretical—and then, suddenly, it wasn't. PayPal had gone public in February with its shares shooting up 55 percent, and Musk knew that eBay wanted to buy the company as well. While noodling on the rocket idea, Musk's net worth had increased from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. In April 2002, Musk fully abandoned the publicity-stunt idea and committed to building a commercial space venture. He pulled aside Cantrell, Griffin, Mueller, and Chris Thompson, an aerospace engineer at Boeing, and told the group, “I want to do this company. If you guys are in, let's do it.” (Griffin wanted to join but ended up declining when Musk rebuffed his request to live on the East Coast, and Cantrell only stuck around for a few months after this meeting, seeing the venture as too risky.)
米勒在马斯克的表格中增加了新型低成本火箭性能和成本方面的参数，并在其他团队成员的帮助之下，重新完善了这一构想。不同于波音公司、洛克希德公司、俄罗斯人和其他国家发射的大型火箭，马斯克制造的火箭不会搭载大型卫星，而是瞄准低端卫星市场。借助于近年来迅速发展的计算机与电子技术，它最终将成为理想的更小载荷的新兴火箭。他的火箭直接瞄准太空产业的一大理论，即如果一家公司能够大幅降低每次发射的成本并定期进行发射的话，将会为商用和科研使用有效载荷打开一个全新市场。马斯克对于他的想法能够走在潮流的最前沿很得意，并努力成为航天新时代的主力。当然，这些都还仅仅存在于理论层面，但很快就将付诸实践。PayPal已于2月上市，股价暴涨55%，马斯克知道eBay也想收购这家公司。在忙于构思如何制造火箭的同时，他的身家已经从几千万暴涨到了几亿美元。2002年4月，马斯克不再满足于仅仅是个宣传噱头这一想法了，他决定成立一家商业化的太空公司。他将坎特雷尔、格里芬、米勒和波音公司的航空工程师克里斯·汤普森(Chris Thompson)召集起来，对他们说：“我想开一家太空公司，如果你们想入伙，那我们就开始干吧。”(格里芬本来想要入伙，但马斯克拒绝了他住在东海岸的请求，因此他婉拒了这一提议，而坎特雷尔在这次会议之后观望了几个月就走了，他认为这家公司风险太大。)
Founded in June 2002, Space Exploration Technologies came to life in humble settings. Musk acquired an old warehouse at 1310 East Grand Avenue in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles humming with the activity of the aerospace industry. The previous tenant of the 75,000-square-foot building had done lots of shipping and had used the south side of the facility as a logistics depot, outfitting it with several receiving bays for delivery trucks. This allowed Musk to drive his silver McLaren right into the building. Beyond that the surroundings were sparse—just a dusty floor and a forty-foot-high ceiling with its wooden beams and insulation exposed and which curved at the top to give the place a hangarlike feel. The north side of the building was an office space with cubicles and room for about fifty people. During the first week of SpaceX's operations, delivery trucks showed up packed full of Dell laptops and printers and folding tables that would serve as the first desks. Musk walked over to one of the loading docks, rolled up the door, and off-loaded the equipment himself.
2002年6月，毫不起眼的太空探索技术公司(SpaceX)成立了。在洛杉矶郊区埃尔塞贡多格兰大道东1310号，马斯克租了一间旧仓库用于开展太空事业，这一带的太空产业较繁荣。这幢建筑占地7.5万平方英尺，之前的租户是一家货运公司，他们把大楼的南侧用作后勤仓库，改装后设置了几个接货口，供货运卡车装卸货。这方便了马斯克直接开着他的银色迈凯伦进入大楼。除了这个仓库之外，大楼的其他地方都很简陋，只有水泥地面和一块40英尺高的天花板，上面的木梁和隔热层都暴露在外面，形成一个弧形屋顶，看上去像是个飞机库。大楼的北侧是办公区，有几个办公隔间，空间大约可以容纳50人。SpaceX刚刚成立的第一个星期，运货卡车在大楼里进进出出，送来各种戴尔笔记本电脑、打印机和折叠桌——这些就是公司的第一批办公桌。马斯克走到其中一个卸货区，打开卷帘门，自己动手卸载设备。
Musk had soon transformed the SpaceX office with what has become his signature factory aesthetic: a glossy epoxy coating applied over concrete on the floors, and a fresh coat of white paint slathered onto the walls. The white color scheme was intended to make the factory look clean and feel cheerful. Desks were interspersed around the factory so that Ivy League computer scientists and engineers designing the machines could sit with the welders and machinists building the hardware. This approach stood as SpaceX's first major break with traditional aerospace companies that prefer to cordon different engineering groups off from each other and typically separate engineers and machinists by thousands of miles by placing their factories in locations where real estate and labor run cheap.
马斯克很快把就依据自己的风格重新布置了SpaceX的办公室：在水泥地板涂上一层环氧树脂涂层，墙上刷的是白色乳胶漆。整个工厂以白色系为主，这样看起来既干净又敞亮。办公桌四散在工厂里，这样一来，毕业于常春藤大学的计算机科学家、负责机器设计的工程师和负责制造硬件的电焊工、机械师都可以坐在一起。这一安排在业内算是一个重大突破，因为传统的航空公司都会让工程师和机械师分开工作，他们会在房租和人力都便宜的地方设立工厂，工程师和机械师往往相隔千里。
As the first dozen or so employees came to the offices, they were told that SpaceX's mission would be to emerge as the “Southwest Airlines of Space.” SpaceX would build its own engines and then contract with suppliers for the other components of the rocket. The company would gain an edge over the competition by building a better, cheaper engine and by fine-tuning the assembly process to make rockets faster and cheaper than anyone else. This vision included the construction of a type of mobile launch vehicle that could travel to various sites, take the rocket from a horizontal to vertical position, and send it off to space—no muss, no fuss. SpaceX was meant to get so good at this process that it could do multiple launches a month, make money off each one, and never need to become a huge contractor dependent on government funds.
第一批员工入职时，他们被告知，SpaceX的目标是成为“太空行业中的西南航空公司”。SpaceX能够自己制造火箭推进器，然后向供应商采购火箭的其他零件。公司的立足之本是制造质量更好、价格更低廉的火箭推进器，并优化装配过程，这样一来，他们制造火箭的速度就会比其他公司更快，并且更省钱。这包括建造一种可移动的发射平台，它能够移动到不同的地点，将火箭从水平位置调整至垂直状态，然后再发射进入太空，一切都有条不紊。SpaceX打算迅速掌握这一流程，每个月多发射几枚火箭，以便从中盈利，这样就不会成为一家需要依靠政府资金才能存活的大型承包商了。
SpaceX was to be America's attempt at a clean slate in the rocket business, a modernized reset. Musk felt that the space industry had not really evolved in about fifty years. The aerospace companies had little competition and tended to make supremely expensive products that achieved maximum performance. They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick. Musk, by contrast, would apply some of the start-up techniques he'd learned in Silicon Valley to run SpaceX lean and fast and capitalize on the huge advances in computing power and materials that had taken place over the past couple of decades. As a private company, SpaceX would also avoid the waste and cost overruns associated with government contractors. Musk declared that SpaceX's first rocket would be called the Falcon 1, a nod to Star Wars' Millennium Falcon and his role as the architect of an exciting future. At a time when the cost of sending a 550-pound payload started at $30 million, he promised that the Falcon 1 would be able to carry a 1,400-pound payload for $6.9 million.
SpaceX将会开启美国火箭领域的新纪元，一切都会变得更加现代化。马斯克认为，太空产业在过去的50年内并没有真正进步。航空公司之间少有竞争，尽管它们生产的产品性能极佳，但却造价高昂。它们发射的每一枚火箭都和法拉利一样又贵又好，但其实有时候便宜一点的本田雅阁就能满足要求。相比之下，马斯克会利用自己曾经在硅谷学到的新技术来经营SpaceX，充分利用在过去几十年里迅速发展的计算机和材料科学，使得整个公司运作得又快又好。作为一家私营企业，SpaceX还可以避免像政府承包商那样的浪费和成本超支。马斯克宣布SpaceX的第一枚火箭名为“猎鹰1号”，这是向电影《星球大战》中的“千年隼”号和自己致敬，因为他将是精彩未来的缔造者。当时，发射一枚550磅载荷火箭的成本至少需要3 000万美元，但马斯克承诺，“猎鹰1号”将能够搭载1 400磅的载荷，并且只需要花费690万美元。
Bowing to his nature, Musk set an insanely ambitious timeline for all of this. One of the earliest SpaceX presentations suggested that the company would complete its first engine in May 2003, a second engine in June, the body of the rocket in July, and have everything assembled in August. A launchpad would then be prepared by September, and the first launch would take place in November 2003, or about fifteen months after the company started. A trip to Mars was naturally slated for somewhere near the end of the decade. This was Musk the logical, naïve optimist tabulating how long it should take people physically to perform all of this work. It's the baseline he expects of himself and one that his employees, with their human foibles, are in a never-ending struggle to match.
秉持一贯的行事作风，马斯克为这一目标设置了近乎疯狂的时间表。SpaceX最早的一份报告显示，公司将在2003年5月和6月分别制造出第一台和第二台火箭推进器，7月完成火箭机身的生产，8月一切装配完毕，发射台将在9月准备完毕，首次发射将于2003年11月进行，这距公司成立仅15个月。登陆火星的计划被延至2010年年底。这些都是马斯克这个天真的、做事有逻辑的乐观主义者为员工定下的完成工作的时限。这是马斯克对自己和员工的最低期望，他幻想着员工们——他们有着各自的不足——都能为实现这个目标而不懈地努力工作。
As space enthusiasts started to learn about the new company, they didn't really obsess over whether Musk's delivery schedule sounded realistic or not. They were just thrilled that someone had decided to take the cheap and fast approach. Some members of the military had already been promoting the idea of giving the armed forces more aggressive space capabilities, or what they called “responsive space.” If a conflict broke out, the military wanted the ability to respond with purpose-built satellites for that mission. This would mean moving away from a model where it takes ten years to build and deploy a satellite for a specific job. Instead, the military desired cheaper, smaller satellites that could be reconfigured through software and sent up on short notice, almost like disposable satellites. “If we could pull that off, it would be really game-changing,” said Pete Worden, a retired air force general, who met with Musk while serving as a consultant to the Defense Department. “It could make our response in space similar to what we do on land, sea and in the air.” Worden's job required him to look at radical technologies. While many of the people he encountered came off as eccentric dreamers, Musk seemed grounded, knowledgeable, and capable. “I talked to people building ray guns and things in their garages. It was clear that Elon was different. He was a visionary who really understood the rocket technology, and I was impressed with him.”
当听说了这家新公司之后，太空爱好者们并不关心马斯克的时间安排是否切合实际，他们只是很激动，因为终于有人决定采用价格低廉且快速的运作方法了。一些军方成员早就已经提议给武装部队配备更强大的太空设备，他们称之为“太空快速响应”。一旦冲突爆发，军方希望特定任务卫星能够迅速做出反应。如果做到这一点，将使目前这种需要花10年时间才能将卫星制造和部署完毕的模式遭到弃用。军方需要的是价格更低廉、更小巧的卫星，能够通过软件重新配置，一接到通知就能马上发射，类似于一次性卫星。“如果我们能够做到这一点，一切将重新洗牌，”已经退休的空军上将皮特·沃登(Pete Worden)在美国国防部担任顾问时与马斯克结识，他说，“它会让我们在太空的响应速度和海陆空作战时一样快。”沃登的工作需要他随时关注尖端科技。他感觉自己遇到过的很多人只是在做白日梦，但马斯克看起来有理有据、知识渊博而且能力不凡。“我也曾与其他在车库里制造射线枪和其他设备的人交谈过，但很明显，埃隆的确与众不同，他很有远见，而且真正了解火箭技术，我对他印象深刻。”
Like the military, scientists wanted cheap, quick access to space and the ability to send up experiments and get data back on a regular basis. Some companies in the medical and consumer-goods industries were also interested in rides to space to study how a lack of gravity affected the properties of their products.
同军方一样，科学家们需要低成本且快速地进入太空，能够发射实验设备并定期获得数据反馈，而一些医疗和消费品行业的公司同样对进入太空感兴趣，他们想要研究缺乏重力会对其产品性能产生怎样的影响。
As good as a cheap launch vehicle sounded, the odds of a private citizen building one that worked were beyond remote. A quick search on YouTube for “rocket explosions” turns up thousands of compilation videos documenting U.S. and Soviet launch disasters that have occurred over the decades. From 1957 to 1966, the United States alone tried to blast more than 400 rockets into orbit and about 100 of them crashed and burned.The rockets used to transport things to space are mostly modified missiles developed through all of this trial and error and funded by billions upon billions of government dollars. SpaceX had the advantage of being able to learn from this past work and having a few people on staff that had overseen rocket projects at companies like Boeing and TRW. That said, the start-up did not have a budget that could support a string of explosions. At best, SpaceX would have three or four shots at making the Falcon 1 work. “People thought we were just crazy,” Mueller said. “At TRW, I had an army of people and government funding. Now we were going to make a low-cost rocket from scratch with a small team. People just didn't think it could be done.”
虽然一枚便宜的运载火箭这个概念听起来不错，但一个家民营公司制造的火箭能否使用还是个未知数。如果你在视频网站YouTube上快速搜索“火箭爆炸”，你会看到几千个关于过去几十年里发生在美国和苏联的火箭发射事故的视频。1957~1966年，单单美国就尝试发射过400多枚火箭，其中大约100枚坠毁并爆炸了。大多数用于运载设备的火箭都是由导弹改造而成的，政府对此投入了数十亿美元的资金，并反复进行实验和调整。SpaceX的优势在于它能够吸取过去的教训，而且它还拥有几名经验丰富的员工，他们都曾在波音和TRW之类的公司参与过火箭项目。但公司的预算仅够发射三四次，一旦接连遭遇失败，导致爆炸，便无法从头再来。“大家都觉得我们疯了，”米勒说，“在TRW公司，有一支团队来做这项工作，并且有政府的资金支持。但现在我们只有几个人，要制造一枚低成本的火箭，我们几乎是白手起家。没有人相信我们会成功。”
In July 2002, Musk was gripped by the excitement of this daring enterprise, and eBay made its aggressive move to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion. This deal gave Musk some liquidity and supplied him with more than $100 million to throw at SpaceX. With such a massive up-front investment, no one would be able to wrestle control of SpaceX away from Musk as they had done at Zip2 and PayPal. For the employees who had agreed to accompany Musk on this seemingly impossible journey, the windfall provided at least a couple of years of job security. The acquisition also upped Musk's profile and celebrity, which he could leverage to score meetings with top government officials and to sway suppliers.
2002年7月，马斯克沉浸在成立新公司的喜悦中。eBay展开攻势，以15亿美元收购PayPal。这笔交易让马斯克获得了一笔流动资金，他向SpaceX投入了1亿多美元。有了这么一大笔投资，再没有人能够像当初收购Zip2和PayPal那样把SpaceX的控制权从马斯克手中夺走了。对于那些坚定地忠于马斯克、愿意和他一起完成这个看似不可能完成的任务的员工来说，这笔投资如同及时雨一般，足以支持他们之后好几年的工作。这笔资金也增强了马斯克的自信和声誉，让他在和政府官员会面时能够平起平坐，并对供应商们发号施令。
And then all of a sudden none of this seemed to matter. Justine had given birth to a son—Nevada Alexander Musk. He was ten weeks old when, just as the eBay deal was announced, he died. The Musks had tucked Nevada in for a nap and placed the boy on his back as parents are taught to do. When they returned to check on him, he was no longer breathing and had suffered from what the doctors would term a sudden infant death syndrome–related incident. “By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead,” Justine wrote in her article for Marie Claire. “He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died. Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada's death. I didn't understand this, just as he didn't understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as ‘emotionally manipulative.' I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada's death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets.” Later, Justine chalked up Musk's reaction to a defense mechanism that he'd learned from years of suffering as a kid. “He doesn't do well in dark places,” she told Esquire magazine. “He's forward-moving, and I think it's a survival thing with him.”
但接下来突然发生了一件让他猝不及防的事。贾斯汀生下了一个男孩儿，取名为内瓦达·亚历山大·马斯克。就在PayPal被eBay收购的消息公布时，刚刚出生10周的内瓦达夭折了。当时，夫妇俩给已经睡着的孩子掖好被子，让他平躺着睡觉，医生都是这么教父母的。当他们再次查看孩子的时候，他已经停止了呼吸。医生称孩子死于婴儿猝死综合征，是一种会导致婴儿死亡的意外事故。“当医务人员赶来为他急救时，他已经因缺氧太久而脑死亡了，”贾斯汀在为《美丽嘉人》撰写的文章中写道，“他在奥兰治县的医院里靠呼吸机维持生命，三天后我们决定摘下他的呼吸器。他就这么死在了我的怀里。埃隆明确表示他不想谈及内瓦达的死，我无法理解，就好像他无法理解我在人前的悲痛，他说我这是‘被感情牵着鼻子走’。于是我决定放下悲痛，两个月后，我第一次去诊所打算尝试试管婴儿。埃隆和我想要尽快再生一个孩子。在接下来的5年里，我生了双胞胎和三胞胎。”后来，贾斯汀把马斯克的反应归因于小时候的痛苦遭遇而形成的防御心理。“他害怕黑暗，”她接受《时尚先生》杂志采访时说道，“他一直不断向前，只有这样他才能生存下去。”
Musk did open up to a couple of close friends and expressed the depth of his misery. But for the most part, Justine read her husband right. He didn't see the value in grieving publicly. “It made me extremely sad to talk about it,” Musk said. “I'm not sure why I'd want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future. If you've got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you. I'm not sure what should be done in such situations.”
马斯克只向最好的朋友敞开心扉，诉说自己心底的伤痛。但大多数时候，贾斯汀读懂了她的丈夫。他不明白把悲伤表达出来的好处。“谈论这种事只会让我极度悲伤，”马斯克说，“我不明白为什么要谈论这种极度伤心的话题。这对未来没有好处。如果你已经有了其他的孩子和责任，沉浸在悲痛里对身边的所有人都没有好处。我不知道在这样的情况下该做什么。”
Following Nevada's death, Musk threw himself at SpaceX and rapidly expanded the company's goals. His conversations with aerospace contractors around possible work for SpaceX left Musk disenchanted. It sounded like they all charged a lot of money and worked slowly. The plan to integrate components made by these types of companies gave way to the decision to make as much as practical right at SpaceX. “While drawing upon the ideas of many prior launch vehicle programs from Apollo to the X-34/Fastrac, SpaceX is privately developing the entire Falcon rocket from the ground up, including both engines, the turbo-pump, the cryogenic tank structure and the guidance system,” the company announced on its website. “A ground up internal development increases difficulty and the required investment, but no other path will achieve the needed improvement in the cost of access to space.”
内瓦达夭折之后，马斯克让自己埋首于SpaceX的工作中，并迅速对公司的目标进行了扩展。他和航天承包商们讨论SpaceX可能开展的外包工作，但结果却让他很失望。听起来他们都要收取很大一笔费用，但工作进度却很慢。与其将这些公司制造的零件整合在一起，不如自己动手在SpaceX制造零件。“在总结了‘阿波罗’号飞船、X-34/Fastrac型火箭和以前的其他运载火箭项目的经验之后，SpaceX打算独立从事‘猎鹰’号火箭的全部开发工作，包括两台火箭推进器、涡轮泵、低温贮罐结构和制导系统。”SpaceX公司在网站上宣布，“内部开发工作加大了研发难度，所需的资金也增多了，但为了降低登陆太空的成本，我们别无选择。”
The SpaceX executives Musk hired were an all-star crew. Mueller set to work right away building the two engines—Merlin and Kestrel, named after two types of falcons. Chris Thompson, a onetime marine who had managed the production of the Delta and Titan rockets at Boeing, joined as the vice president of operations. Tim Buzza also came from Boeing, where he'd earned a reputation as one of the world's leading rocket testers. Steve Johnson, who had worked at JPL and at two commercial space companies, was tapped as the senior mechanical engineer. The aerospace engineer Hans Koenigsmann came on to develop the avionics, guidance, and control systems. Musk also recruited Gwynne Shotwell, an aerospace veteran who started as SpaceX's first salesperson and rose in the years that followed to be president and Musk's right-hand woman.
马斯克聘请的公司高管们可谓全明星阵容。米勒马上就开始了制造两台引擎的工作，它们分别以两种猎鹰的名字命名，即灰背隼(Merlin)和茶隼(Kestrel)。克里斯·汤普森曾经是一名水兵，曾在波音公司担任运营副总裁，管理德尔塔火箭和“大力神”号火箭的生产。蒂姆·布扎(Tim Buzza)也来自波音公司，他是世界上最优秀的火箭测试专家之一。史蒂夫·约翰逊(Steve Johnson)曾经在JPL和其他两家商业太空公司任职，现在担任SpaceX的高级机械工程师。航空工程师汉斯·克尼格斯曼(Hans Koenigsmann)负责航空电子技术、制导和控制系统的开发。马斯克还聘请了格温·肖特维尔(Gwynne Shotwell)，她在航空领域经验丰富，作为SpaceX的第一位销售员，经过多年的升迁，最终晋升为总裁，成为马斯克的左膀右臂。
These early days also marked the arrival of Mary Beth Brown, a now-legendary character in the lore of both SpaceX and Tesla. Brown—or MB, as everyone called her—became Musk's loyal assistant, establishing a real-life version of the relationship between Iron Man's Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. If Musk worked a twenty-hour day, so too did Brown. Over the years, she brought Musk meals, set up his business appointments, arranged time with his children, picked out his clothes, dealt with press requests, and when necessary yanked Musk out of meetings to keep him on schedule. She would emerge as the only bridge between Musk and all of his interests and was an invaluable asset to the companies' employees.
随后，玛丽·贝思·布朗也加入了团队，她如今是SpaceX和特斯拉的传奇人物。布朗——大家都叫她MB，作为马斯克的助手，一直忠心耿耿，他们的关系简直是电影《钢铁侠》中托尼·史塔克和佩珀·波茨的现实版。如果马斯克一天工作20个小时，布朗也会同样如此。在过去的几年里，她给马斯克买饭、预订行程、安排他陪伴自己孩子的时间、为他挑衣服、处理媒体要求，必要时，她会把马斯克拉出会议室，让他履行工作时间表。她是连接马斯克和他所有兴趣爱好的桥梁，对于公司员工来说，她是团队里一名珍贵无比的骨干人员。
Brown played a key role in developing SpaceX's early culture. She paid attention to small details like the office's red spaceship trash cans and helped balance the vibe around the office. When it came to matters related directly to Musk, Brown put on her firm countenance and no-nonsense attitude. The rest of the time she usually had a warm, broad smile and a disarming charm. “It was always, ‘Oh, dear. How are you, dear?'” recalled a SpaceX technician. Brown collected the weird e-mails that arrived for Musk and sent them out as “Kook of the Week” missives to make people laugh. One of the better entries included a pencil sketch of a lunar spacecraft that had a red spot on the page. The person who sent in the letter had circled the spot on his own drawing and then written “What is that? Blood?” next to it. In other letters there were plans for a perpetual motion machine and a proposal for a giant inflatable rabbit that could be used to plug oil spills. For a short time, Brown's duties extended to managing SpaceX's books and handling the flow of business in Musk's absence. “She pretty much called the shots,” the technician said. “She would say, ‘This is what Elon would want.'”
布朗在SpaceX的早期文化中扮演了关键的角色。她会留意很小的细节，比如办公室里红色宇宙飞船形状的垃圾桶；她还会帮助调节办公室里的气氛。当发生和马斯克直接相关的事情时，她始终坚定地站在他这一边，淡定、从容。在其他时候，她脸上总是露出温暖的微笑，让人如沐春风。“她总是说：‘亲爱的，你好。’”SpaceX的一名技术人员回忆道。布朗会收集别人发给马斯克的一些奇奇怪怪的信，给它们取名为“一周笑料”，并发给大家，博大家一笑。曾经有一封信中画了一艘月球飞船的素描，页面上有一个红点。发这封信的人把这个红点手动圈出来，然后在旁边写上：“那是什么？血？”还有些信件提出了制造永动机的计划，并建议制造一个巨大的充气式兔子，用来阻止石油泄漏。有一段时间，布朗还负责管理公司的账目并在马斯克外出时处理公司业务。“她几乎独揽大权，”那位技术人员说，“她会说‘埃隆就是希望我这么做’。”
Her greatest gift, though, may have been reading Musk's moods. At both SpaceX and Tesla, Brown placed her desk a few feet in front of Musk's, so that people had to pass her before having a meeting with him. If someone needed to request permission to buy a big-ticket item, they would stop for a moment in front of Brown and wait for a nod to go see Musk or the shake-off to go away because Musk was having a bad day. This system of nods and shakes became particularly important during periods of romantic strife for Musk, when his nerves were on edge more than usual.
她最大的天赋可能是会看破马斯克的心理。在SpaceX和特斯拉的办公室里，布朗把她的办公桌安放在马斯克前方几英尺处，这样一来，大家必须经过她才能见到马斯克。如果有人需要申请采购一个高价物件，他们会在布朗面前等一会儿，如果她点头，他们就可以进去找马斯克申请；如果她摇头，他们最好赶快闪人，因为马斯克今天心情不佳。这种点头摇头的提示在马斯克心情极度暴躁的情况下尤其重要。
The rank-and-file engineers at SpaceX tended to be young, male overachievers. Musk would personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams. It was not unusual for him to call the students in their dorm rooms and recruit them over the phone. “I thought it was a prank call,” said Michael Colonno, who heard from Musk while attending Stanford. “I did not believe for a minute that he had a rocket company.” Once the students looked Musk up on the Internet, selling them on SpaceX was easy. For the first time in years if not decades, young aeronautics whizzes who pined to explore space had a really exciting company to latch on to and a path toward designing a rocket or even becoming an astronaut that did not require them to join a bureaucratic government contractor. As word of SpaceX's ambitions spread, top engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Sciences with a high tolerance for risk fled to the upstart, too.
SpaceX的普通工程师都是年轻的小伙子，他们在学校时成绩优异。马斯克会亲自到顶尖大学的航天学院打听成绩最好的学生。他经常会打电话到宿舍找这些学生并直接聘请他们到自己的公司工作。迈克尔·科隆诺(Michael Colonno)在进入斯坦福大学时就收到过马斯克的来信。“我还以为这是个恶作剧电话，”他说，“我开始还不相信，他居然成立了一家火箭公司。”在网上搜索了马斯克的信息之后，学生们都会愿意加入SpaceX。在近几年或者近几十年里，对于渴望探索太空的年轻航天人才来说，这是第一次有机会进入一家有趣的公司、设计火箭，甚至成为一名宇航员，而不需要加入一家官僚主义横行的政府承包商。SpaceX的雄心壮志传遍业界，许多喜欢冒险的顶级工程师纷纷从波音公司、洛克希德马丁公司和轨道科技公司离职，来到这家行业新贵工作。
Throughout the first year at SpaceX, one or two new employees joined almost every week. Kevin Brogan was employee No. 23 and came from TRW, where he'd been used to various internal policies blocking him from doing work. “I called it the country club,” he said. “Nobody did anything.” Brogan started at SpaceX the day after his interview and was told to go hunting in the office for a computer to use. “It was go to Fry's and get whatever you need and go to Staples and get a chair,” Brogan said. He immediately felt in over his head and would work for twelve hours, drive home, sleep for ten hours, and then head right back to the factory. “I was exhausted and out of shape mentally,” he said. “But soon I loved it and got totally hooked.”
在SpaceX成立的第一年中，每个星期都会有一两个新员工加入他们的团队。凯文·布罗根(Kevin Brogan)是公司的第23名员工，他来自TRW公司。他在TRW受到各种条条框框的限制，让他无法自由工作。“我管它叫乡村俱乐部，”他说，“在那儿根本没人干活儿。”布罗根在SpaceX面试后的隔天就开始工作了，他们让他在办公室里随便挑一台电脑用。“结果我自己去弗里电子商场买了所有必需品，又去史泰博办公用品商场买了把椅子。”布罗根说。他当时觉得莫名其妙，工作了12个小时后，他开车回家，睡了10个小时，然后又回到了工厂。“我累坏了，这简直是身体和心理的双重折磨，”他说，“但我很快就爱上了这种工作方式，都无法自拔了。”
One of the first projects SpaceX decided to tackle was the construction of a gas generator, a machine not unlike a small rocket engine that produces hot gas. Mueller, Buzza, and a couple of young engineers assembled the generator in Los Angeles and then packed it into the back of a pickup truck and drove it out to Mojave, California, to test it. A desert town about one hundred miles from Los Angeles, Mojave had become a hub for aerospace companies like Scaled Composites and XCOR. A lot of the aerospace projects were based out of the Mojave airport, where companies had their workshops and sent up all manner of cutting-edge airplanes and rockets. The SpaceX team fit right into this environment and borrowed a test stand from XCOR that was just about the perfect size to hold the gas generator. The first ignition run took place at 11 A.M. and lasted ninety seconds. The gas generator worked, but it had let out a billowing black smoke cloud that on this windless day parked right over the airport tower. The airport manager came down to the test area and lit into Mueller and Buzza. The airport official and some of the guys from XCOR who had been helping out urged the SpaceX engineers to take it easy and wait until the next day to run another test. Instead, Buzza a strong leader ready to put SpaceX's relentless ethos into play, coordinated a couple of trucks to pick up more fuel, talked the airport manager down, and got the test stand ready for another fire. In the days that followed, SpaceX's engineers perfected a routine that let them do multiple tests a day—an unheard-of practice at the airport—and had the gas generator tuned to their liking after two weeks of work.
SpaceX决定开发的第一批项目之一是制造一台气体发生器，这是一种类似于小型火箭推进器的机器，能够产生热气。米勒、布扎和一群年轻工程师在洛杉矶组装了这台气体发生器，把它装进一辆小皮卡，带到加州的莫哈韦沙漠进行测试。莫哈韦是距离洛杉矶约100英里处的一座沙漠小镇，那里是缩尺复合材料公司(Scaled Composites)、XCOR航天公司和其他一些航天公司的测试中心。许多航天项目都在莫哈韦机场周围进行。这些公司在那里建立了自己的工厂，发射各种尖端飞机和火箭。SpaceX团队也来到这里，向XCOR借了一个试验台，它的大小正好可以放置那台气体发生器。初次点火发射在上午11点进行，维持了90秒。气体发生器启动了，但它释放出大量黑色烟雾，由于当天没有风，烟雾把机场控制塔都遮住了。机场管理人员冲到测试现场，把米勒和布扎训斥了一顿。机场领导和XCOR的一些人前来劝架，让SpaceX的工程师们不要紧张，明天再测试一次。作为领导人物，布扎决定发挥SpaceX永不放弃的精神，他叫来几辆卡车，运来了更多的燃料，并说服了机场管理人员，同意他们再测试一次。接下来的几天里，SpaceX的工程师们完善了整个流程，一天能够进行好几次测试，这是在机场进行测试的其他公司从来没有做到的。经过两个星期的反复测试，他们终于把气体发生器调试到了理想的状态。
They made a few more trips to Mojave and some other spots, including a test stand at Edwards Air Force Base and another in Mississippi. While on this countrywide rocketry tour, the SpaceX engineers came across a three-hundred-acre test site in McGregor, Texas, a small city near the center of the state. They really liked this spot, and talked Musk into buying it. The navy had tested rockets on the land years before and so too had Andrew Beal before his aerospace company collapsed. “After Beal saw it was going to cost him $300 million to develop a rocket capable of sending sizeable satellites into orbit, he called it quits, leaving behind a lot of useful infrastructure for SpaceX, including a three-story concrete tripod with legs as big around as redwood tree trunks,” wrote journalist Michael Belfiore in Rocketeers, a book that captured the rise of a handful of private space companies.
他们又去了几次莫哈韦沙漠以及其他场地，包括爱德华兹空军基地的一个试验台和密西西比州的另一个试验台。在这次乡村火箭之旅中，SpaceX的工程师们在临近得克萨斯州中心区域的小城市麦格雷戈意外发现了一个300英亩的试验场。他们对这里感到很满意，建议马斯克把它买下来。多年前，海军曾在这里进行火箭测试，安德鲁·比尔在他的航天公司倒闭前也在这里进行过试验。“当比尔发现开发一枚能够将大型卫星送入轨道的火箭需要3亿美元时，他就放弃了，并且留下了很多有用的基础设施，现在正好能为SpaceX所用，其中包括一座三层混凝土三脚架，支架像红杉树干那样粗。”记者迈克尔·贝尔费欧在《火箭专家》(Rocketeers)一书中写道。这本书记录了几家私营太空公司的崛起。
Jeremy Hollman was one of the young engineers who soon found himself living in Texas and customizing the test site to SpaceX's needs. Hollman exemplified the kind of recruit Musk wanted: he'd earned an aerospace engineering degree from Iowa State University and a master's in astronautical engineering from the University of Southern California. He'd spent a couple of years working as a test engineer at Boeing dealing with jets, rockets, and spacecraft.*
年轻的工程师杰里米·霍尔曼(Jeremy Hollman)就住在得克萨斯州，正好可以就近在那里的试验场工作。霍尔曼正符合马斯克的招聘条件：他在艾奥瓦州立大学取得了航天工程学位、在南加州大学取得了航天工程硕士学位。他在波音公司做过几年测试工程师，负责喷气机、火箭和宇宙飞船的测试。[5]
The stint at Boeing had left Hollman unimpressed with big aerospace. His first day on the job came right as Boeing completed its merger with McDonnell Douglas. The resultant mammoth government contractor held a picnic to boost morale but ended up failing at even this simple exercise. “The head of one of the departments gave a speech about it being one company with one vision and then added that the company was very cost constrained,” Hollman said. “He asked that everyone limit themselves to one piece of chicken.” Things didn't improve much from there. Every project at Boeing felt large, cumbersome, and costly. So, when Musk came along selling radical change, Hollman bit. “I thought it was an opportunity I could not pass up,” he said. At twenty-three, Hollman was young, single, and willing to give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX nonstop, and he became Mueller's second in command.
霍尔曼在波音公司的时候受到各种限制，让他对大型航空公司没有好印象。他第一天到职的时候正值波音公司和麦道公司合并，两家公司合并为一家大型的政府承包商。公司举办了一次野餐活动来鼓舞士气，结果连这么简单的活动他们都办不好。“一位部门主管发表了一通演说，他说我们是一家有信念的公司，然后又说公司现在资金紧缺，”霍尔曼说道，“他要求所有人一分一厘都要节约。”之后的情况并没有好转。波音公司的每个项目都很庞杂并且非常烧钱。所以当马斯克以掀起行业巨变来游说的时候，霍尔曼马上抓住了这个机会。“我认为这是一个我不能错过的机会。”
Mueller had developed a pair of three-dimensional computer models of the two engines he wanted to build. Merlin would be the engine for the first stage of the Falcon 1, which lifted it off the ground, and Kestrel would be the smaller engine used to power the upper, second stage of the rocket and guide it in space. Together, Hollman and Mueller figured out which parts of the engines SpaceX would build at the factory and which parts it would try to buy. For the purchased parts, Hollman had to head out to various machine shops and get quotes and delivery dates for the hardware. Quite often, the machinists told Hollman that SpaceX's timelines were nuts. Others were more accommodating and would try to bend an existing product to SpaceX's needs instead of building something from scratch. Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel.
米勒已经为他想制造的两台火箭推进器构建了三维计算机模型。“灰背隼”是“猎鹰1号”第一级所需的推进器，能够将它发射离开地面；“茶隼”比它小一号，用来提供动力，它是火箭第二级所需的推进器，在太空中负责制导。霍尔曼和米勒联手确定出推进器的哪些零件SpaceX可以自己在工厂制造，哪些零件应该外部采购。对于那些需要外部采购的零件，霍尔曼需要去不同的机械工厂了解报价和交货期限。总有一些机械师告诉霍尔曼，SpaceX的日程安排太过疯狂。还有些工厂比较懂得变通，他们愿意尝试对现有的产品做出调整以满足SpaceX的要求，而不是完全从头开始制造。霍尔曼还发现，创新可以帮助他走得更远。比如说，他发现只要改动一下现成的汽车排污阀的密封部分，就能符合火箭燃料的使用条件了。
After SpaceX completed its first engine at the factory in California, Hollman loaded it and mounds of other equipment into a U-Haul trailer. He hitched the U-Haul to the back of a white Hummer H2 and drove four thousand pounds of gear* across Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to Texas and the test site. The arrival of the engine in Texas kicked off one of the great bonding exercises in SpaceX's history. Amid rattlesnakes, fire ants, isolation, and searing heat, the group led by Buzza and Mueller began the process of exploring every intricacy of the engines. It was a high-pressure slog full of explosions—or what the engineers politely called “rapid unscheduled disassemblies”—that would determine whether a small band of engineers really could match the effort and skill of nation-states. The SpaceX employees christened the site in fitting fashion, downing a $1,200 bottle of Rémy Martin cognac out of paper cups and passing a sobriety test on the drive back to the company apartments in the Hummer. From that point on, the trek from California to the test site became known as the Texas Cattle Haul. The SpaceX engineers would work for ten days straight, come back to California for a weekend, and then head back. To ease the burden of travel, Musk sometimes let them use his private jet. “It carried six people,” Mueller said. “Well, seven if someone sat in the toilet, which happened all the time.”
在SpaceX位于加州的工厂制成了第一台火箭推进器之后，霍尔曼把它和很多其他设备装进了一辆V–Haul拖车。他将拖车挂在白色悍马H2后面，载着4 000磅的设备沿着10号公路从洛杉矶一路开到了得克萨斯州的试验场[6]。把推进器送达得克萨斯州之后，SpaceX开始了有史以来最重要的一次团队合作。冒着被响尾蛇、火蚁攻击的危险，忍受着与世隔绝的孤独和酷热，布扎和米勒带领的团队开始探索推进器的每一个细节。这是一项压力很大的工作，一不小心就会爆炸，工程师们很委婉地称之为“毫无预兆地快速解体”。这将考验这群工程师的努力和技术是否真正过关。成功之后，SpaceX的员工们用纸杯喝了一瓶价值1 200美元的人头马庆祝，开着悍马回到了公司的公寓，而且还幸运地通过了酒驾测试。从那以后，从加州到试验场的这段艰苦跋涉被戏称为“得州牛车之旅”。SpaceX的工程师们会连续工作10天，然后回加州过个周末，随后又回来继续工作。为了缓解长途颠簸之苦，马斯克有时会允许他们搭乘他的私人飞机。“他的私人飞机只能载6个人，”米勒说，“不过，如果有人愿意坐在卫生间里的话，就能载7个人，我们一直是7个人乘一架飞机。”
While the navy and Beal had left some testing apparatus, SpaceX had to build a large amount of custom gear. One of the largest of these structures was a horizontal test stand about 30 feet long, 15 feet wide, and 15 feet tall. Then there was the complementary vertical test stand that stood two stories high. When an engine needed to be fired, it would be fastened to one of the test stands, outfitted with sensors to collect data, and monitored via several cameras. The engineers took shelter in a bunker protected on one side by a dirt embankment. If something went wrong, they would look at feeds from the webcams or slowly lift one of the bunker's hatches to listen for any clues. The locals in town rarely complained about the noise, although the animals on nearby farms seemed less impressed. “Cows have this natural defense mechanism where they gather and start running in a circle,” Hollman said. “Every time we fired an engine, the cows scattered and then got in that circle with the younger ones placed in the middle. We set up a cow cam to watch them.”
虽然海军和比尔遗留下一些试验装置，SpaceX还是得制造很多定制设备。其中最大的设备是一座长约30英尺、宽约15英尺、高约15英尺的水平试验台，还有一座两层楼高的互补垂直试验台。推进器需要点火时，工程师们会把它绑在其中一座试验台上，配备几个感应器来收集数据，并通过几台摄像机进行监视。工程师们躲在一边的沙坑内，那里有一个可以用来掩护的路堤。如果哪里出错了，他们会通过网络摄像头查看反馈信息，或打开一个舱口盖，寻找任何可能的线索。虽然附近农场的动物们似乎不太高兴，但镇上的本地人倒很少抱怨有噪声。“奶牛具有与生俱来的防御机制，它们会聚集在一起，开始绕圈跑，”霍尔曼说道，“我们每次给推进器点火时，牛群都会四散开来，形成一个圈，把幼崽保护在内圈。我们在那儿安装了个摄像机用于观察它们。”
Both Kestrel and Merlin came with challenges, and they were treated as alternating engineering exercises. “We would run Merlin until we ran out of hardware or did something bad,” Mueller said. “Then we'd run Kestrel and there was never a shortage of things to do.” For months, the SpaceX engineers arrived at the site at 8 A.M. and spent twelve hours there working on the engines before retiring to the Outback Steakhouse for dinner. Mueller had a particular knack for looking over test data and spotting some place where the engine ran hot or cold or had another flaw. He would call California and prescribe hardware changes, and engineers would refashion parts and send them off to Texas. Often the workers in Texas modified parts themselves using a mill and lathe that Mueller had brought out. “Kestrel started out as a real dog, and one of my proudest moments was taking it from terrible to great performance with stuff we bought online and did in the machine shop,” Mueller said. Some members of the Texas crew honed their skills to the point that they could build a test-worthy engine in three days. These same people were required to be adept at software. They'd pull an all-nighter building a turbo pump for the engine and then dig in the next night to retool a suite of applications used to control the engines. Hollman did this type of work all the time and was an all-star, but he was not alone among this group of young, nimble engineers who crossed disciplines out of necessity and the spirit of adventure. “There was an almost addictive quality to the experience,” Hollman said. “You're twenty-four or twenty-five, and they're trusting you with so much. It was very empowering.”
“茶隼”和“灰背隼”都遭遇了挑战，工程师们会对它们轮流进行工程学测试。“我们会运行‘灰背隼’，直至我们耗尽硬件或遇到某种困难，”米勒说道，“然后，我们会运行‘茶隼’，我们总在忙活儿。”几个月以来，SpaceX工程师们每天早上8点到达试验场，进行12个小时的推进器测试，随后下班，去牛排馆吃饭。米勒有一种特别的方法，可以用来查看测试数据，发现引擎哪里发热、变冷或出现瑕疵。他会给加州打电话，提出修改硬件的要求，工程师们便会重新设计零件，然后寄到得州去。得州的工人们经常利用铣床和车床自己修改米勒所要求的零件。“‘茶隼’已经测试得差不多了，最让我感到自豪的时刻，是我们在车间里把网购来的材料，从惨不忍睹变得性能优越。”米勒说。一些在得州的团队成员甚至已经能够在三天内制造出一台可以用于测试的推进器。公司还要求这些员工熟悉软件。他们会通宵达旦地为推进器制造一台涡轮泵，第二天晚上接着干活儿，调整一系列应用程序来控制推进器。霍尔曼一直在做这种工作，他是个全才，但他不是唯一一个能做到这点的人。出于必要和冒险精神，这群头脑敏捷的年轻工程师个个都拥有跨学科的本领。“这一经历令我们痴迷，”霍尔曼说道，“尽管你才二十四五岁，但他们那么信任你，会让你觉得充满力量。”
To get to space, the Merlin engine would need to burn for 180 seconds. That seemed like an eternity for the engineers at the outset of their stint in Texas, when the engine would burn for only a half second before it conked out. Sometimes Merlin vibrated too much during the tests. Sometimes it responded badly to a new material. Sometimes it cracked and needed major part upgrades, like moving from an aluminum manifold to a manifold made out of the more exotic Inconel, an alloy suited to extreme temperatures. On one occasion, a fuel valve refused to open properly and caused the whole engine to blow up. Another test gone wrong ended up with the whole test stand burning down. It usually came to Buzza and Mueller to make the unpleasant call back to Musk and recap the day's foibles. “Elon had pretty good patience,” Mueller said. “I remember one time we had two test stands running and blew up two things in one day. I told Elon we could put another engine on there, but I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad and was kinda short with Elon. I said, ‘We can put another fucking thing on there, but I've blown up enough shit today.' He said, ‘Okay, all right, that's fine. Just calm down. We'll do it again tomorrow.'” Coworkers in El Segundo later reported that Musk had been near tears during this call after hearing the frustration and agony in Mueller's voice.
为了能够升空，“灰背隼”推进器需要燃烧180秒。一开始，这对得克萨斯州的工程师们来说是不可能完成的任务，当时，引擎最多只能燃烧0.5秒，然后就会失灵。有时，“灰背隼”在试验时晃动得非常厉害；有时它不能适应新材料；还有可能会发生破损，需要升级主要零件，比如把一根铝歧管换成由更独特的铬镍铁合金制作的歧管，这样就能适应极端温度。有一次，一个燃料阀没能正确打开，造成整台推进器被炸毁。还有一次测试出错，整个试验台都被烧毁了。一般都是布扎和米勒负责打电话给马斯克报告这些小缺陷。“埃隆很有耐心，”米勒说道，“我记得有一次，我们在同一天运行了两个试验台，结果炸毁了两台设备，我告诉埃隆，我们可以再试另一台推进器，但我当时真的很泄气，又累又抓狂，简直不想跟埃隆说话了。我对他说，‘我们可以把另一个玩意儿放在那儿，但我今天已经受够了，今天真够倒霉。’他说对我，‘好吧，没事的，冷静点。我们明天重新再来。’”后来，埃尔塞贡多的同事对他们说，那天，当在电话里听到米勒受挫又苦恼的声音时，马斯克简直要哭了。
What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack. Hollman was one of many engineers who arrived at this realization after facing one of Musk's trademark grillings. “The worst call was the first one,” Hollman said. “Something had gone wrong, and Elon asked me how long it would take to be operational again, and I didn't have an immediate answer. He said, ‘You need to. This is important to the company. Everything is riding on this. Why don't you have an answer?' He kept hitting me with pointed, direct questions. I thought it was more important to let him know quickly what happened, but I learned it was more important to have all the information.”
马斯克不能忍受的是找借口推脱或者缺乏明确的工作计划。霍尔曼在领教过马斯克的标志性拷问后领悟到了这一点。“这是我接过的最糟糕的一通电话，”霍尔曼说道，“测试出了问题，埃隆问我要多久才能修好，我当时没有马上回答。他说，‘你必须回答，这对我们公司很重要，所有事情都取决于此，你怎么能一无所知呢？’他直截了当地追问我。我以为应该快点让他知道发生了什么事才对，但之后我领悟了，更重要的是了解全面信息之后再告诉他。”
From time to time, Musk participated in the testing process firsthand. One of the more memorable examples of this came as SpaceX tried to perfect a cooling chamber for its engines. The company had bought several of these chambers at $75,000 a pop and needed to put them under pressure with water to gauge their ability to handle stress. During the initial test, one of the pricey chambers cracked. Then the second one broke in the same place. Musk ordered a third test, as the engineers looked on in horror. They thought the test might be putting the chamber under undue stress and that Musk was burning through essential equipment. When the third chamber cracked, Musk flew the hardware back to California, took it to the factory floor, and, with the help of some engineers, started to fill the chambers with an epoxy to see if it would seal them. “He's not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Mueller said. “He's out there with his nice Italian shoes and clothes and has epoxy all over him. They were there all night and tested it again and it broke anyway.” Musk, clothes ruined, had decided the hardware was flawed, tested his hypothesis, and moved on quickly, asking the engineers to come up with a new solution.
有时，马斯克会直接参与实验过程。其实，最难忘的一次经历是SpaceX试图完善推进器的冷却室。公司以7.5万美元的价格购买了几个冷却室，并向里面注水以测定其抗压能力。在最初的测试中，其中一个比较贵的冷却室破裂了。然后，第二个冷却室又在同样的部位裂开了。马斯克要求进行第三次测试，工程师们在一旁战战兢兢地看着。他们认为大概是水压太大了导致的，马斯克这么做会把所需的设备全部弄坏。在第三个冷却室破裂后，马斯克将硬件送回加州，把它放在工厂地板上，在几名工程师的帮助下开始把环氧树脂装进冷却室，看看会怎么样。“他不怕亲自动手，”米勒说道，“他当时穿的衣服和鞋子都是意大利名牌，最后都弄脏了。他们一整晚都在那儿做实验，但不管怎么做，冷却室都会破裂。”马斯克认为硬件存在缺陷，他验证了自己的假设，便迅速采取行动，让工程师想出新的解决方案。
These incidents were all part of a trying but productive process. SpaceX had developed the feeling of a small, tight-knit family up against the world. In late 2002, the company had an empty warehouse. One year later, the facility looked like a real rocket factory. Working Merlin engines were arriving back from Texas, and being fed into an assembly line where machinists could connect them to the main body, or first stage, of the rocket. More stations were set up to link the first stage with the upper stage of the rocket. Cranes were placed on the floor to handle the heavy lifting of components, and blue metal transport tracks were positioned to guide the rocket's body through the factory from station to station. SpaceX had also started to build the fairing, or case, that protects payloads atop the rocket during launch and then opens up like a clam in space to let out the cargo.
这些行动虽然只是尝试性的，但很有成效。SpaceX形成了一种特有的团队氛围，就像一个亲密的大家庭，一起抵御别人的质疑。2002年下半年的时候，公司还只拥有一座空仓库。一年后，这个仓库看起来已经像个真正的火箭工厂了。“灰背隼”推进器从得克萨斯州运送过来，放入装配线中，这样一来，机械师们就能把它们和火箭主体(即火箭的第一级)组装起来。随后，公司建立了更多站点，将第一级的火箭和第二级连接起来。他们利用起重机把零件吊起来，还铺设了蓝色的金属运输轨道，将火箭机身从一个工作站运送到另一个工作站。SpaceX还开始制造整流罩，能够在发射过程中保护火箭运载的设备，然后像蛤蜊一样打开并卸载设备。
SpaceX had picked up a customer as well. According to Musk, its first rocket would launch in “early 2004” from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a satellite called TacSat-1 for the Department of Defense. With this goal looming, twelve-hour days, six days a week were considered the norm, although many people worked longer than that for extended periods of time. Respites, as far as they existed, came around 8 P.M. on some weeknights when Musk would allow everyone to use their work computers to play first-person-shooter video games like Quake III Arena and Counter-Strike against each other. At the appointed hour, the sound of guns loading would cascade throughout the office as close to twenty people armed themselves for battle. Musk—playing under the handle Random9—often won the games, talking trash and blasting away his employees without mercy. “The CEO is there shooting at us with rockets and plasma guns,” said Colonno. “Worse, he's almost alarmingly good at these games and has insanely fast reactions. He knew all the tricks and how to sneak up on people.”
SpaceX还得到了一个客户。根据马斯克的计划，第一枚火箭将于2004年年初在范登堡空军基地发射，为美国国防部运载一枚名为TacSat–1的卫星。随着目标日期的临近，每天工作20小时、每周工作6天已成常态，很多人的工作时间甚至更长。他们只有在周日晚上8点左右才能休息一会儿，那时马斯克允许他们用自己的工作电脑玩一会儿“雷神之锤III竞技场”和“反恐精英”之类的射击游戏。在那段指定的时间里，子弹上膛的声音在办公室里此起彼伏，大约20个人在那儿持枪作战。马斯克在游戏中的名字是Random9，他总是赢，喜欢讲脏话来干扰对手，然后毫不留情地把自己的员工炸死。“CEO总是用火箭和等离子枪打我们，”科隆诺说道，“更糟糕的是，他对这种游戏很拿手，反应超级快。他了解所有的招数，知道怎么偷偷接近我们。”
The pending launch ignited Musk's salesman instincts. He wanted to show the public what his tireless workers had accomplished and drum up some excitement around SpaceX. Musk decided to unveil a prototype of Falcon 1 to the public in December 2003. The company would haul the seven-story-high Falcon 1 across the country on a specially built rig and leave it—and the SpaceX mobile launch system—outside of the Federal Aviation Administration's headquarters in Washington, D.C. An accompanying press conference would make it clear to Washington that a modern, smarter, cheaper rocket maker had arrived.
即将进行的火箭发射激起了马斯克的销售员本能。他想向大众展示他勤奋的员工们的成果，为SpaceX赢得一些关注。马斯克决定在2003年12月向公众展示“猎鹰1号”的原型。他们准备用一台特制的设备将7层楼高的“猎鹰1号”连同SpaceX的移动发射系统运到联邦航空管理局总部的外面。随后他们将在华盛顿召开新闻发布会，昭示天下，他们已经制造出了现代化、智能化并且价格更低廉的火箭。
This marketing song and dance didn't sound sensible to SpaceX's engineers. They were working more than one hundred hours per week to make the actual rocket that SpaceX would need to be in business. Musk wanted them to do that and build a slick-looking mock-up. Engineers were called back from Texas and assigned another ulcer-inducing deadline to craft this prop. “In my mind, it was a boondoggle,” Hollman said. “It wasn't advancing anything. In Elon's mind, it would get us a lot of backing from important people in the government.”
SpaceX的工程师们对这种营销手段不感兴趣。他们每周工作100个小时以上，就是为了制造能让SpaceX站稳脚跟的商用火箭。马斯克把他们从得州叫回来制作一个漂亮的实物模型，他们用了很短的时间就做好了。“在我看来，这是很无聊的事情，”霍尔曼说道，“这个模型毫无用处。但在埃隆看来，它会帮助我们从政界要人那里赢得很多支持。”
While making the prototype for the event, Hollman experienced the full spectrum of highs and lows that came with working for Musk. The engineer had lost his regular glasses weeks earlier when they slipped off his face and fell down a flame duct at the Texas test site. Hollman had since made do by wearing an old pair of prescription safety glasses,* but they too were ruined when he scratched the lenses while trying to duck under an engine at the SpaceX factory. Without a spare moment to visit an optometrist, Hollman started to feel his sanity fray. The long hours, the scratch, the publicity stunt—they were all too much.
在制作火箭原型的时候，霍尔曼体会到了为马斯克工作带来的喜怒哀乐。他的眼镜在几个星期前从脸上滑落，掉进得州试验场的一条火焰导管里了。于是霍尔曼只能戴上一副老式的护目镜[7]，但是，当他试着钻到引擎下面的时候，刮到了镜片，这副眼镜也坏了。由于没有时间去配眼镜，霍尔曼变得很急躁。工作时间长、眼镜刮花、作秀，事情实在太多了。
He vented about this in the factory one night, unaware that Musk stood nearby and could hear everything. Two hours later, Mary Beth Brown appeared with an appointment card to see a Lasik eye surgery specialist. When Hollman visited the doctor, he discovered that Musk had already agreed to pay for the surgery. “Elon can be very demanding, but he'll make sure the obstacles in your way are removed,” Hollman said. Upon reflection, he also warmed to the long-term thinking behind Musk's Washington plan. “I think he wanted to add an element of realism to SpaceX, and if you park a rocket in someone's front yard, it's hard to deny it,” Hollman said.
一天晚上，他在工厂里发牢骚，没留意到马斯克就站在附近，并听到了一切。两个小时后，玛丽·贝思·布朗出现了，她拿了一张预约卡，让他去眼科专家那儿看病。当去看医生的时候，他发现马斯克已经支付了手术费。霍尔曼说，“埃隆对工作的要求很高，但他会先清除你前进路上的障碍物。”深思熟虑之后，他也接受了马斯克关于华盛顿计划的长远打算。霍尔曼说，“我觉得他是想让SpaceX看起来更真实一些，如果你把一枚火箭放在别人的院子里，人们就没法说它子虚乌有了。”
The event in Washington ended up being well received, and just a few weeks after it took place, SpaceX made another astonishing announcement. Despite not having even flown a rocket yet, SpaceX revealed plans for a second rocket. Along with the Falcon 1, it would build the Falcon 5. Per the name, this rocket would have five engines and could carry more weight—9,200 pounds—to low orbit around Earth. Crucially, the Falcon 5 could also theoretically reach the International Space Station for resupply missions—a capability that would open up SpaceX for some large NASA contracts. And, in a nod to Musk's obsession with safety, the rocket was said to be able to complete its missions even if three of the five engines failed, which was a level of added reliability that had not been seen in the market in decades.
在华盛顿召开的新闻发布会取得了空前的成功，几个星期之后，SpaceX宣布了另一项令人惊讶的决定。尽管SpaceX连一枚火箭都还没有发射过，但它已经在计划下一枚火箭了。他们将在制造“猎鹰1号”的同时制造“猎鹰5号”。从名字来看，这枚火箭将拥有5台引擎，能够装载更重——重达9 200磅——的设备，并将其送入低地轨道。最重要的是，“猎鹰5号”在理论上能够到达国际空间站，完成补给任务，这将给SpaceX带来更多与NASA合作的机会。此外，由于马斯克非常重视安全性，据说这枚火箭能够在3台引擎失灵的情况下继续完成任务，这在过去几十年是闻所未闻的。
The only way to keep up with all of this work was to do what SpaceX had promised from the beginning: operate in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up. Musk was always looking for brainy engineers who had not just done well at school but had done something exceptional with their talents. When he found someone good, Musk was relentless in courting him or her to come to SpaceX. Bryan Gardner, for example, first met Musk at a space rave in the hangars at the Mojave airport and a short while later started talking about a job. Gardner was having some of his academic work sponsored by Northrop Grumman. “Elon said, ‘We'll buy them out,'” Gardner said. “So, I e-mailed him my resume at two thirty A.M., and he replied back in thirty minutes addressing everything I put in there point by point. He said, ‘When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords.' It floored me that he would take the time to do this.” After being hired, Gardner was tasked with improving the system for testing the valves on the Merlin engine. There were dozens of valves, and it took three to five hours to manually test each one. Six months later, Gardner had built an automated system for testing the valves in minutes. The testing machine tracked the valves individually, so that an engineer in Texas could request what the metrics had been on a specific part. “I had been handed this redheaded stepchild that no one else wanted to deal with and established my engineering credibility,” Gardner said.
完成这一计划的唯一方法，就是按照SpaceX成立之初所承诺的那样，即本着硅谷创业精神来做。马斯克一直在寻找头脑灵活的工程师，他们不仅要在学业上表现出色，还要能够发挥自己的聪明才智做出一些特别的成就。当发现优秀的人才时，他会使出浑身解数把他或她招至麾下。打个比方，马斯克在莫哈韦机场飞机库举办的一场航天大会上遇到了一个人，但不一会儿，他就已经向那个人发出工作邀请了。这个人就是布莱恩·加德纳(Bryan Gardner)。加德纳的一部分学术工作是由美国军工企业诺斯洛普·格鲁门公司(Northrop Grumman)赞助的。“埃隆说‘我们会帮你偿还赞助费’，”加德纳说道，“于是，我在下午两点半把简历发给他，30分钟内他就逐项回复了我邮件里的所有内容。他说，‘希望你面试的时候能够具体地描述你的工作，而不是用一些专业术语。’他愿意花时间做这些细枝末节的事，这打动了我。”受聘之后，加德纳负责改进“灰背隼”引擎阀门的测试系统。引擎有几十个阀门需要测试，人工测试一个阀门通常需要花3~5个小时才能完成。6个月后，加德纳开发了一个在几分钟内就能完成阀门测试的自动化系统。这一设备能够追踪单个阀门，这样一来，得克萨斯州的工程师就能了解某一特殊零件的阀门了。加德纳说道，“没有人愿意负责这项工作，但我完成了，这让我在公司树立了威信。”
As the new hires arrived, SpaceX moved beyond its original building to fill up several buildings in the El Segundo complex. The engineers were running demanding software and rendering large graphics files and needed high-speed connections between all of these offices. But SpaceX had neighbors who were blocking an initiative to connect all of its buildings via fiber optic lines. Instead of taking the time to haggle with the other companies for right of way, the IT chief Branden Spikes, who had worked with Musk at Zip2 and PayPal, came up with a quicker, more devious solution. A friend of his worked for the phone company and drew a diagram that demonstrated a way to squeeze a networking cable safely between the electricity, cable, and phone wires on a telephone pole. At 2 A.M., an off-the-books crew showed up with a cherry picker and ran fiber to the telephone poles and then ran cables straight to the SpaceX buildings. “We did that over a weekend instead of taking months to get permits,” Spikes said. “There was always this feeling that we were facing a sort of insurmountable challenge and that we had to band together to fight the good fight.” SpaceX's landlord, Alex Lidow, chuckled when thinking back to all of the antics of Musk's team. “I know they did a lot of hanky stuff at night,” he said. “They were smart, needed to get things done, and didn't always have time to wait for things like city permits.”
随着新员工陆续履职，除了原有的几栋办公楼外，SpaceX在埃尔塞贡多的几栋楼也都挤满了人。工程师们运行着复杂的软件，传输大型的图形文件，需要所有办公室之间的网络速度足够快。但大楼里的其他公司阻挠他们铺设光纤网络。与其花时间和其他公司争论，曾经和马斯克一起在Zip2和PayPal共事过的IT主管布兰登·斯派克斯(Branden Spikes)另辟蹊径，想出了一个更快的解决方案。他在电话公司工作的朋友帮他画了一张图，说明如何把网络电缆安全地夹在电线杆的电力线和电话线中间。深夜两点，一群人蹑手蹑脚地开着车载升降台出现了，他们安全地把光纤插进电线杆，直接将网线拉到了SpaceX的大楼里。“我们用一个星期就搞定了这件事，而不是花几个月去获得许可，”斯派克斯说道，“我们总是会遇到一些看似无法克服的挑战，我们只能团结起来把它打败。”
Musk never relented in asking his employees to do more and be better, whether it was at the office or during extracurricular activities. Part of Spikes's duties included building custom gaming PCs for Musk's home that pushed their computational power to the limits and needed to be cooled with water running through a series of tubes inside the machines. When one of these gaming rigs kept breaking, Spikes figured out that Musk's mansion had dirty power lines and had a second, dedicated power circuit built for the gaming room to correct the problem. Doing this favor bought Spikes no special treatment. “SpaceX's mail server crashed one time, and Elon word for word said, ‘Don't ever fucking let that happen again,'” Spikes said. “He had a way of looking at you—a glare—and would keep looking at you until you understood him.”
无论上班时间或下班时间，马斯克总是不遗余力地督促员工做得更多更好。斯派克斯的其中一项工作是在马斯克的家里安装他的专属游戏设备，这使计算机的运行能力达到了极限，需要在设备内部用一系列水管来冷却。其中一台游戏设备总是发生故障，斯派克斯发现，这是因为马斯克家里的电力线太脏了，他在游戏室安装了一根专用电线解决了这个问题。但这项额外的工作没有让斯派克斯赚到加班费。“有一次，SpaceX的邮件服务器崩溃了，埃隆咬牙切齿地说‘我不希望这种事再次发生’，”斯派克斯说，“他会一直瞪着你，直到你理解了他的意思，才会将目光移开。”
Musk had tried to find contractors that could keep up with SpaceX's creativity and pace. Instead of always hitting up aerospace guys, for example, he located suppliers with similar experience from different fields. Early on, SpaceX needed someone to build the fuel tanks, essentially the main body of the rocket, and Musk ended up in the Midwest talking to companies that had made large, metal agricultural tanks used in the dairy and food processing businesses. These suppliers also struggled to keep up with SpaceX's schedule, and Musk found himself flying across the country to pay visits—sometimes surprise ones—on the contractors to check on their progress. One such inspection took place at a company in Wisconsin called Spincraft. Musk and a couple of SpaceX employees flew his jet across the country and arrived late at night expecting to see a shift of workers doing extra duty to get the fuel tanks completed. When Musk discovered that Spincraft was well behind schedule, he turned to a Spincraft employee and informed him, “You're fucking us up the ass, and it doesn't feel good.” David Schmitz was a general manager at Spincraft and said Musk earned a reputation as a fearsome negotiator who did indeed follow up on things personally. “If Elon was not happy, you knew it,” Schmitz said. “Things could get nasty.” In the months that followed that meeting, SpaceX increased its internal welding capabilities so that it could make the fuel tanks in El Segundo and ditch Spincraft.
马斯克一直在寻找能够跟得上SpaceX的创造力和步调的承包商。与其盲目地在航天领域乱找，他宁愿在不同领域寻找具有相似经历的供应商。一开始，SpaceX需要采购燃料罐——这是火箭的主体。马斯克在中西部找到了几家公司，它们制造过乳制品和食品加工行业使用的大型金属农用储存设备。这些供应商还尽力与SpaceX的日程保持步调一致。马斯克总是乘飞机去往美国各地，拜访这些供应商，有时他会搞突然袭击，去查看承包商的工作进度。有一次，马斯克去威斯康星州一家名为Spincraft的公司视察。马斯克和几名员工坐着他的私人飞机远道而来，他们晚上很晚才到达，以为会看到一群工人加班加点帮他们制造燃料罐。结果马斯克发现，Spincraft的工作进度远远落后于原定计划，他对Spincraft的一名员工说道，“你们拖了我们的后腿，这让我很不爽。”Spincraft的总经理戴维·施密茨(David Schmitz)说，“马斯克的苛刻是出了名的，他总会亲自来追踪进度。”“如果埃隆不高兴了，你要知道，”施密茨说，“事情会变得非常不愉快。”在那次视察之后的几个月，SpaceX在公司内部增设了焊接岗位，这样他们就能抛弃Spincraft，自己在埃尔塞贡多制造燃料罐了。
Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they're meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.' Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,' which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.' This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.” Musk could be equally brisk with employees who were not hitting his standards. “He would often say, ‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,'” Spikes said.
有一位业务员乘飞机来到SpaceX，推销一些技术性基础设施。他采用的是几个世纪以来业务员基于人际关系形成的一套标准流程——拜访、说一会儿话、感受对方的态度，然后开始谈生意。马斯克不吃这一套。“那个家伙进来以后，埃隆问他为什么他们要见面，”斯派克斯说，“他说，‘是为了拉拉关系。’埃隆回答说，‘好吧，很高兴见到你。’他的潜台词是‘滚出我的办公室’。这个家伙花了4个小时来这儿，结果见了他两分钟就离开了。埃隆对这种事最没有耐心了。”埃隆对于没有达到他标准的员工也一样苛刻。“他总是说，‘如果你想解雇某人，就应该马上解雇，否则只会浪费彼此的时间。’”斯派克斯说道。
Most of the SpaceX employees were thrilled to be part of the company's adventure and tried not to let Musk's grueling demands and harsh behavior get to them. But there were some moments where Musk went too far. The engineering corps flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself. Musk also hired a documentary crew to follow him around for a while. This audacious gesture really grated on the people toiling away in the SpaceX factory. They felt like Musk's ego had gotten the best of him and that he was presenting SpaceX as the conqueror of the aerospace industry when the company had yet to launch successfully. Employees who made detailed cases around what they saw as flaws in the Falcon 5 design or presented practical suggestions to get the Falcon 1 out the door more quickly were often ignored or worse. “The treatment of staff was not good for long stretches of this era,” said one engineer. “Many good engineers, who everyone beside ‘management' felt were assets to the company, were forced out or simply fired outright after being blamed for things they hadn't done. The kiss of death was proving Elon wrong about something.”
SpaceX的大多数员工都很渴望参与公司的冒险，也试着避免让自己受到马斯克严格标准和苛刻行为的影响。但有时候马斯克做得太过火了。每次在新闻里看到马斯克宣称猎鹰火箭是由他自己设计的，工程师们都会特别愤怒。有一段时间，马斯克还雇用了几个制作纪录片的人跟拍自己。这激怒了SpaceX工厂里长期埋头苦干的员工。他们觉得马斯克已经极度自我膨胀，他认为SpaceX已经是整个航天产业的老大了，但他们甚至还没有成功发射过一枚火箭。有些员工发现了“猎鹰5号”的缺陷或者提出让“猎鹰1号”能够更快完工的建议，但马斯克总是无视他们，甚至用更加恶劣的态度对待他们。这证明埃隆已经跑偏了。“他对待员工的这种态度对公司的长远发展是不利的，”一位工程师说道，“工程师都认为自己是公司的重要资产，但很多很优秀的工程师却因为一些与己无关的事被迫离开了公司，或者被直接开除了。”
Early 2004, when SpaceX had hoped to launch its rocket, came and went. The Merlin engine that Mueller and his team had built appeared to be among the most efficient rocket engines ever made. It was just taking longer than Musk had expected to pass tests needed to clear the engine for a launch. Finally, in the fall of 2004, the engines were burning consistently and meeting all their requirements. This meant that Mueller and his team could breathe easy and that everyone else at SpaceX should prepare to suffer. Mueller had spent SpaceX's entire existence as the “critical path”—the person holding up the company from achieving its next steps—working under Musk's scrutiny. “With the engine ready, it was time for mass panic,” Mueller said. “No one else knew what it was like to be on critical path.”
2004年年初，SpaceX本来计划这时发射火箭，但最终计划没能成行。米勒及其团队制造的“灰背隼”引擎是有史以来最高效的火箭引擎。测试引擎所花的时间比马斯克的预期久了一点。最终，2004年秋，引擎达到了发射要求。这意味着米勒和其团队终于能够松口气了，但SpaceX的其他员工开始忙活儿起来了。米勒在SpaceX的工作可谓“关键路径”，他在马斯克的高压之下支撑着公司进入下一个阶段。“引擎准备好之后，就轮到大家开始恐慌了，”米勒说道，“没人知道成为‘关键路径’会是怎样一番滋味。”
Lots of people soon found out, as major problems abounded. The avionics, which included the electronics for the navigation, communication, and overall management of the rocket, turned into a nightmare. Seemingly trivial things like getting a flash storage drive to talk to the rocket's main computer failed for undetectable reasons. The software needed to manage the rocket also became a major burden. “It's like anything else where you find out that the last ten percent is where all the integration happens and things don't play together,” Mueller said. “This process went on for six months.” Finally, in May 2005, SpaceX transported the rocket 180 miles north to Vandenberg Air Force Base for a test fire and completed a five-second burn on the launchpad.
很快，大家发现引擎还是存在很多重大问题。航空电子设备，包括导航、通信和火箭整体管理系统都成了噩梦。还有许多看起来无足轻重的小事，比如，能够与火箭主计算机对话的闪存驱动器因为不明原因发生故障。管理火箭的软件也出了大问题。“最后10%的工作就是整合整个火箭，但你现在才发现这些设备无法一起运作，”米勒说道，“这种情形持续了6个月。”最终，2005年5月，SpaceX将火箭运送至距离工厂180英里处的范登堡空军基地进行试发射，最后在发射台完成了一次为时5秒的点火。
Launching from Vandenberg would have been very convenient for SpaceX. The site is close to Los Angeles and has several launchpads to pick from. SpaceX, though, became an unwelcome guest. The air force gave the newcomer a cool welcome, and the people assigned to manage the launch sites did not go out of their way help SpaceX. Lockheed and Boeing, which fly $1 billion spy satellites for the military from Vandenberg, didn't care for SpaceX's presence, either—in part because SpaceX represented a threat to their business and in part because this startup was mucking around near their precious cargo. As SpaceX started to move from the testing phase to the launch, it was told to get in line. They would have to wait months to launch. “Even though they said we could fly, it was clear that we would not,” said Gwynne Shotwell.
对于SpaceX来说，去范登堡空军基地发射火箭很方便，那里靠近洛杉矶，还有几个发射台可供选择。尽管如此，SpaceX还是成了不速之客。空军对SpaceX的到来表现得很冷淡，专门负责发射场的管理人员也没有向他们提供特别的帮助。洛克希德公司和波音公司当时也在范登堡为军方发射价值10亿美元的间谍卫星，他们同样无视SpaceX的存在，一方面是因为SpaceX对他们的业务构成了威胁，另一方面是因为这家公司在他们的贵重物品附近转悠。当SpaceX从测试阶段进展到发射阶段时，发射场管理方告诉他们需要排队，可能要等待几个月才能发射。“即使他们同意我们发射了，很明显，我们也不愿意等到那时候。”格温·肖特维尔说。
Searching for a new site, Shotwell and Hans Koenigsmann put a Mercator projection of the world up on the wall and looked for a name they recognized along the equator, where the planet spins faster and gives rockets an added boost. The first name that jumped out was Kwajalein Island—or Kwaj—the largest island in an atoll between Guam and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean and part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. This spot registered with Shotwell because the U.S. Army had used it for decades as a missile test site. Shotwell looked up the name of a colonel at the test site and sent him an e-mail, and three weeks later got a call back with the army saying they would love to have SpaceX fly from the islands. In June 2005, SpaceX's engineers began to fill containers with their equipment to ship them to Kwaj.
为了寻找新的发射场，肖特维尔和汉斯·克尼格斯曼用墨卡托投影仪将世界地图投影在墙上，沿着赤道寻找合适的地点。在赤道附近，地球的自转速度更快，能够为火箭发射提供额外的助力。第一个映入眼帘的名字是夸贾林岛，或称为夸贾林环礁，它是太平洋上位于关岛和夏威夷之间的一座环状珊瑚岛，属于马绍尔群岛共和国。这个地方之所以给肖特维尔留下印象，是因为美国军方几十年来一直利用它作为导弹发射场。肖特维尔找到了测试场中一位陆军上校的联系方式，给他发了一封邮件。三个星期之后，肖特维尔收到了军方的回电，他们表示愿意让SpaceX在岛上发射火箭。2005年6月，SpaceX的工程师把设备装进集装箱，将它们运往夸贾林环礁。
About one hundred islands make up the Kwajalein Atoll. Many of them stretch for just a few hundred yards and are much longer than they are wide. “From the air, the place looks like these beautiful beads on a string,” said Pete Worden, who visited the site in his capacity as a Defense Department consultant. Most of the people in the area live on an island called Ebeye, while the U.S. military has taken over Kwajalein, the southernmost island, and turned it into part tropical paradise and part Dr. Evil's secret lair. The United States spent years lobbing its ICBMs from California at Kwaj and used the island to run experiments on its space weapons during the “Star Wars” period. Laser beams would be aimed at Kwaj from space in a bid to see if they were accurate and responsive enough to take out an ICBM hurtling toward the islands. The military presence resulted in a weird array of buildings including hulking, windowless trapezoidal concrete structures clearly conceived by someone who deals with death for a living.
夸贾林环礁由大约100座小岛构成。很多小岛的长度仅数百米，而宽度远远小于其长度。彼得·沃登(Pete Worden)曾作为国防部顾问造访这里，他说：“从空中往下看，这个地方好像一根细绳上串着无数美丽的小珠子。”这里的大多数人都生活在一座名为艾比耶的小岛上，美国军方已经接管了位于最南面的夸贾林岛，把它变成了热带天堂兼邪恶博士的秘密巢穴。美国花了几年时间把弹道导弹从加州发射至夸贾林岛，在“星球大战”计划[8]期间，他们利用这座小岛进行了太空武器实验。他们从太空中将激光束瞄准夸贾林，查看它们是否能够精确敏锐地拦截射向这些岛屿的洲际弹道导弹。军队的驻扎使岛上建筑林立，包括高大的、没有窗户的梯形混凝土建筑，很明显，这是某个靠与死神打交道谋生的人设计的。
To get to Kwaj, the SpaceX employees either flew on Musk's jet or took commercial flights through Hawaii. The main accommodations were two-bedroom affairs on Kwajalein Island that looked more like dormitories than hotel rooms, with their military-issued dressers and desks. Any materials that the engineers needed had to be flown in on Musk's plane or were more often brought by boat from Hawaii or the mainland United States. Each day, the SpaceX crew gathered their gear and took a forty-five-minute boat ride to Omelek, a seven-acre, palm-tree-and vegetation-covered island that would be transformed into their launchpad. Over the course of several months, a small team of people cleared the brush, poured concrete to support the launchpad, and converted a double-wide trailer into offices. The work was grueling and took place in soul-sapping humidity under a sun powerful enough to burn the skin through a T-shirt. Eventually, some of the workers preferred to spend the night on Omelek rather than make the journey through rough waters back to the main island. “Some of the offices were turned into bedrooms with mattresses and cots,” Hollman said. “Then we shipped over a very nice refrigerator and a good grill and plumbed in a shower. We tried to make it less like camping and more like living.”
为了到达夸贾林，SpaceX的员工们搭乘马斯克的私人飞机或商务飞机从夏威夷转机。他们住在夸贾林岛上的一个两居室里，那儿看起来不像酒店房间，更像是宿舍，尤其是有那些军用的衣柜和书桌。工程师所需的所有材料都必须由马斯克的私人飞机运过来，更常见的情况是由夏威夷或美国出发的船只运送过来。SpaceX团队每天早上集合，带着装备坐45分钟的船到达奥麦利克岛，他们要把这座占地只有七英亩，长满棕榈树和植被的小岛改造成自己的发射台。经过几个月的努力，一小队人马将树木砍倒、灌注水泥来支撑发射台，并将一辆双倍宽度的拖车改造成办公室。这些工作十分消耗体力，那里湿度大，并且阳光很猛烈，能够穿过T恤灼伤皮肤。最后，有些工人宁愿睡在奥麦利克岛上，也不愿意坐船经由汹涌的海面回到主岛。“有了床垫和折叠床，办公室直接变成了卧室，”霍尔曼说道，“然后我们用船运来冰箱、烧烤架，还自己安装了淋浴器。我们试着让一切看起来不像是野营，而是正常的生活状态。”
The sun rose at 7 A.M. each day, and that's when the SpaceX team got to work. A series of meetings would take place with people listing what needed to get done, and debating solutions to lingering problems. As the large structures arrived, the workers placed the body of the rocket horizontally in a makeshift hangar and spent hours melding together all of its parts. “There was always something to do,” Hollman said. “If the engine wasn't a problem, then there was an avionics problem or a software problem.” By 7 P.M., the engineers wound down their work. “One or two people would decide it was their night to cook, and they would make steak and potatoes and pasta,” Hollman said. “We had a bunch of movies and a DVD player, and some of us did a lot of fishing off the docks.” For many of the engineers, this was both a torturous and magical experience. “At Boeing you could be comfortable, but that wasn't going to happen at SpaceX,” said Walter Sims, a SpaceX tech expert who found time to get certified to dive while on Kwaj. “Every person on that island was a fucking star, and they were always holding seminars on radios or the engine. It was such an invigorating place.”
这里每天早上7点日出，SpaceX团队也是在这个时间开始工作。他们先开几个会，确定要做些什么，讨论解决问题的方案。当大型设备运到后，工人们将火箭机身水平地放在一个临时机库里，花好几个小时将所有零件安装上去。“我们总是有事做，”霍尔曼说道，“如果引擎没问题，那么航空电子设备或软件就会出问题。”晚上7点，工程师们结束了一天的工作。“其中一两个人会主动做晚饭，他们会做牛排、马铃薯和意大利面，”霍尔曼说道，“我们有一台DVD播放器和很多电影光盘，还有人在码头钓鱼。”对于许多工程师来说，这是一段曲折又奇妙的经历。“在波音公司工作，你会觉得很舒适，但在SpaceX，这种情况绝不会发生。”SpaceX的一位技术专家沃尔特·西姆斯(Walter Sims)在夸贾林的时候利用空闲时间获得了潜水证书，他说，“在岛上的每个人都是明星，他们经常举办关于无线电或火箭引擎的研讨会，这里真是个充满活力的地方。”
The engineers were constantly baffled by what Musk would fund and what he wouldn't. Back at headquarters, someone would ask to buy a $200,000 machine or a pricey part that they deemed essential to Falcon 1's success, and Musk would deny the request. And yet he was totally comfortable paying a similar amount to put a shiny surface on the factory floor to make it look nice. On Omelek, the workers wanted to pave a two-hundred-yard pathway between the hangar and the launchpad to make it easier to transport the rocket. Musk refused. This left the engineers moving the rocket and its wheeled support structure in the fashion of the ancient Egyptians. They laid down a series of wooden planks and rolled the rocket across them, grabbing the last piece of wood from the back and running it forward in a continuous cycle.
工程师们总是为马斯克愿意投资哪些东西，不愿意投资哪些东西而苦恼。总部有人提议购买一台价值20万美元的设备或昂贵的零件，这对“猎鹰1号”来说是必要的，但马斯克会拒绝这一申请。他却很愿意花差不多的钱给工厂地板铺一层发光面，因为这样看起来会好看一些。在奥麦利克岛上，工人们希望在飞机库和发射台之间铺设一段200码的小路，这样会使运输火箭方便一些，但马斯克拒绝了。这让工程师们只能利用古埃及人的方法搬运火箭及其支撑结构。他们放置了很多木板，让火箭在木板上滚动前进，然后把最后一块木板从后面移到最前面，依次循环来搬运火箭。
The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a handful of the SpaceX team had any idea how to make a launch happen. Time and again, the rocket would get marched out to the launchpad and hoisted vertical for a couple of days, while technical and safety checks would reveal a litany of new problems. The engineers worked on the rocket for as long as they could before laying it horizontal and marching it back to the hangar to avoid damage from the salty air. Teams that had worked separately for months back at the SpaceX factory—propulsion, avionics, software—were thrust together on the island and forced to become an interdisciplinary whole. The sum total was an extreme learning and bonding exercise that played like a comedy of errors. “It was like Gilligan's Island except with rockets,” Hollman said.
整个情况变得很滑稽。一家刚刚起步的火箭公司试图在一个与世隔绝的地方完成一项人类已知的最困难的工作。但事实上，只有一小部分SpaceX团队成员知道怎么发射火箭。他们经常把火箭放在发射台上，垂直竖立几天，然后在技术和安全检查时就会发现新问题。工程师们会在火箭上长时间工作，直到他们精疲力竭才把火箭放平送回机库，以防空气中的盐分对火箭造成损坏。几个月前在SpaceX工厂从事推进系统、航空电子系统和软件工作的几个团队，全部聚集到这个岛上通力合作，这把每个人都被逼成了跨学科的人才。这一经历让他们学会了很多。“除了多出一枚火箭之外，这里简直像是‘盖里甘的岛’[9]。”霍尔曼说。
In November 2005, about six months after they had first gotten to the island, the SpaceX team felt ready to give launching a shot. Musk flew in with his brother, Kimbal, and joined the majority of the SpaceX team in the barracks on Kwaj. On November 26, a handful of people woke up at 3 A.M. and filled the rocket with liquid oxygen. They then scampered off to an island about three miles away for protection, while the rest of the SpaceX team monitored the launch systems from a control room twenty-six miles away on Kwaj. The military gave SpaceX a six-hour launch window. Everyone was hoping to see the first stage take off and reach about 6,850 miles per hour before giving way to the second stage, which would ignite up in the air and reach 17,000 miles per hour. But, while going through the pre-launch checks, the engineers detected a major problem: a valve on a liquid oxygen tank would not close, and the LOX was boiling off into the air at 500 gallons per hour. SpaceX scrambled to fix the issue but lost too much of its fuel to launch before the window closed.
2005年11月，在他们初次登岛后的6个月，SpaceX团队一切准备就绪，可以发射火箭了。马斯克和他的兄弟金巴尔也来到了岛上，和其他团队成员一起住在夸贾林的宿舍里。11月26日，少数几个人在凌晨3点就起床了，他们往火箭里注入了液态氧。然后，他们躲到了约3英里外的小岛上找掩体，而SpaceX团队的其他成员则在夸贾林岛上距离其25英里的控制室内监视着发射系统。军方给了SpaceX6个小时的发射时间。所有人都希望第一级能够成功升空，达到约6 850英里的时速，然后进入第二级，在空中点火并达到1.7万英里的时速。但是，当进行发射前检查时，工程师们发现了一个重大问题，液态氧气罐上的一个阀门无法关闭，这导致液态氧以每小时500加仑的速度蒸发到空气中。SpaceX团队赶紧修理了阀门，但火箭因损失了太多燃料，无法在发射期限内进行发射。
With that mission aborted, SpaceX ordered major LOX reinforcements from Hawaii and prepared for another attempt in mid-December. High winds, faulty valves, and other errors thwarted that launch attempt. Before another attempt could be made, SpaceX discovered on a Saturday night that the rocket's power distribution systems had started malfunctioning and would need new capacitors. On Sunday morning, the rocket was lowered and split into its two stages so that a technician could slide in and remove the electrical boards. Someone found an electronics supplier that was open on Sunday in Minnesota, and off a SpaceX employee flew to get some fresh capacitors. By Monday he was in California and testing the parts at SpaceX's headquarters to make sure they passed various heat and vibration checks, then on a plane again back to the islands. In under eighty hours, the electronics had been returned in working order and installed in the rocket. The dash to the United States and back showed that SpaceX's thirty-person team had real pluck in the face of adversity and inspired everyone on the island. A traditional three-hundred-person-strong aerospace launch crew would never have tried to fix a rocket like that on the fly. But the energy, smarts, and resourcefulness of the SpaceX team still could not overcome their inexperience or the difficult conditions. More problems arose and blocked any thoughts of a launch.
发射任务中止后，SpaceX从夏威夷调来了液态氧补给，准备在12月中旬再次发射。但大风、阀门故障及其他问题导致发射再次受阻。就在SpaceX准备进行下一次发射时，某个周六的晚上，工程师发现火箭的配电系统发生故障，需要更换新的电容。周日早上，他们把火箭放平，分成两段，这样技师就能进入内部拆下电路板。有人发现，明尼苏达州一家电子产品供应商周日照常营业，于是他们派出一名员工乘飞机去买了一些新的电容。周一的时候，他在加州的SpaceX总部测试这些电容是否能够通过各种热度和振动测试，之后他又乘飞机回到岛上。在不到80个小时的时间里，电子设备已经恢复正常运转，被重新装回火箭里。SpaceX的30人团队在身处逆境时紧紧团结在一起，鼓舞了岛上每个人的士气。传统的300人火箭发射团队不可能在这么短的时间内坐着飞机去解决问题。但SpaceX团队的能量、智慧和资源依旧没能克服他们缺乏经验的劣势和困难的条件。之后又有更多问题出现，阻碍了发射进程。
Finally, on March 24, 2006, it was all systems go. The Falcon 1 stood on its square launchpad and ignited. It soared into the sky, turning the island below it into a green spec amid a vast, blue expanse. In the control room, Musk paced as he watched the action, wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt. Then, about twenty-five seconds in, it became clear that all was not well. A fire broke out above the Merlin engine and suddenly this machine that had been flying straight and true started to spin and then tumble uncontrollably back to Earth. The Falcon 1 ended up falling directly down onto the launch site. Most of the debris went into a reef 250 feet from the launchpad, and the satellite cargo smashed through SpaceX's machine shop roof and landed more or less intact on the floor. Some of the engineers put on their snorkeling and scuba gear and recovered the pieces, fitting all of the rocket's remnants into two refrigerator-sized crates. “It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way,” Musk wrote in a postmortem. “A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded; 3 of 5 for Ariane; 9 of 20 for Atlas; 9 of 21 for Soyuz; and 9 of 18 for Proton. Having experienced firsthand how hard it is to reach orbit, I have a lot of respect for those that persevered to produce the vehicles that are mainstays of space launch today.” Musk closed the letter writing, “SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.”
2006年3月24日，终于万事俱备。“猎鹰1号”矗立在方形发射台上，准备点火。它冲上云霄，下面的小岛变成了一个绿色的小点。马斯克穿着短裤、平底人字拖和T恤衫，在控制室内踱着步，观看着发射过程。大约25秒后，他们发现发射并不顺利。“灰背隼”引擎的上方失火，本来垂直向上飞的火箭突然开始旋转，最后失控坠落到地面。“猎鹰1号”直接落到了发射场上。大多数残骸掉进了距发射台250英尺的暗礁中，火箭搭载的卫星设备把SpaceX的车间屋顶撞得粉碎，幸好卫星还算完整。一些工程师带上潜水管和潜水装置跳到水中寻找火箭残骸，并把找到的所有残骸装到两个冰箱那么大的板条箱中。“值得注意的是，那些成功发射火箭的公司可能也是一路捡着残骸挺过来的，”马斯克在事后分析报告中这样写道，“一个朋友告诉我，飞马火箭发射了9次，只有5次成功了；阿丽亚娜火箭发射了5次，只有3次成功；阿特拉斯火箭发射了20次，只有9次成功；‘联盟’号火箭发射了21次，只有9次成功；‘质子’号火箭发射了18次，只有9次成功。在直接体验了进入轨道有多难之后，我对那些坚持制造火箭的人充满了敬佩之情，他们是当今太空发射事业的中流砥柱，”马斯克在文章的最后写道，“SpaceX将继续努力，无论上天入地，不成功誓不罢休。”
Musk and other SpaceX executives blamed the crash on an unnamed technician. They said this technician had done some work on the rocket one day before the launch and failed to properly tighten a fitting on a fuel pipe, which caused the fitting to crack. The fitting in question was something basic—an aluminum b-nut that's often used to connect a pair of tubes. The technician was Hollman. In the aftermath of the rocket crash, Hollman flew to Los Angeles to confront Musk directly. He'd spent years working day and night on the Falcon 1 and felt enraged that Musk had called out him and his team in public. Hollman knew that he'd fastened the b-nut correctly and that observers from NASA had been looking over his shoulder to check the work. When Hollman charged into SpaceX's headquarters with a head full of fury, Mary Beth Brown tried to calm him and stop him from seeing Musk. Hollman kept going anyway, and the two of them proceeded to have a shouting match at Musk's cubicle.
马斯克和其他SpaceX主管把这次坠毁归咎于一名技师，但他们未透露姓名。他们说，这名技师在发射前一天进行火箭检测工作，没有拧紧燃油管上的一个配件，导致配件破裂。有问题的这个基础配件是一个铝制的B型螺母，通常用来连接两条管道。这名技师正是霍尔曼。在火箭坠毁之后，霍尔曼飞回洛杉矶，与马斯克当面对质。他花了几年的时间，夜以继日地致力于“猎鹰1号”的生产，当马斯克把责任推到他和他的团队身上时，他感到愤怒异常。霍尔曼知道，他肯定拧紧了那枚螺母，NASA的观察员也检查了他的工作。当霍尔曼愤怒地冲进SpaceX的总部时，玛丽·贝思·布朗试着让他冷静下来，让他别去找马斯克。霍尔曼根本不听劝阻，二人在马斯克的房间里大吵起来。
After all the debris was analyzed, it turned out that the b-nut had almost certainly cracked due to corrosion from the months in Kwaj's salty atmosphere. “The rocket was literally crusted with salt on one side, and you had to scrape it off,” Mueller said. “But we had done a static fire three days earlier, and everything was fine.” SpaceX had tried to save about fifty pounds of weight by using aluminum components instead of stainless steel. Thompson, the former marine, had seen the aluminum parts work just fine in helicopters that sat on aircraft carriers, and Mueller had seen aircraft resting outside of Cape Canaveral for forty years with aluminum b-nuts in fine condition. Years later, a number of SpaceX's executives still agonize over the way Hollman and his team were treated. “They were our best guys, and they kind of got blamed to get an answer out to the world,” Mueller said. “That was really bad. We found out later that it was dumb luck.”*
对所有残骸进行分析得出的结论证明，那枚B型螺母是因为在夸贾林的含盐空气中存放了几个月而腐蚀了，所以才会破损。“火箭的一侧因为覆盖了一层盐所以生锈了，你必须把它刮掉，”米勒说，“但我们3天前做过静电点火测试，一切都是正常的。”为减轻50磅的重量，SpaceX尝试用铝制部件代替不锈钢。当过海军的汤普森曾见到航空母舰上的直升机采用了铝制零件且一切正常。米勒曾看到停放在卡纳维拉尔角的飞机40年来依然完好无损，该飞机也采用了铝制B型螺母。多年以后，一些SpaceX的高层依然认为处理霍尔曼和其团队的决定不正确。“他们是我们最棒的伙伴，归罪于他们，只是为了给世人一个交代，”米勒说道，“这真的很糟糕，我们后来发现这只是因为不走运而已。”[10]
After the crash, there was a lot of drinking at a bar on the main island. Musk wanted to launch again within six months, but putting together a new machine would again require an immense amount of work. SpaceX had some pieces for the vehicle ready in El Segundo but certainly not a ready-to-fire rocket. As they downed drinks, the engineers vowed to take a more disciplined approach with their next craft and to work better as a collective. Worden hoped the SpaceX engineers would raise their game as well. He'd been observing them for the Defense Department and loved the energy of the young engineers but not their methodology. “It was being done like a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley would do software,” Worden said. “They would stay up all night and try this and try that. I'd seen hundreds of these types of operations, and it struck me that it wouldn't work.” Leading up to the first launch, Worden tried to caution Musk, sending a letter to him and the director of DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department, that made his views clear. “Elon didn't react well. He said, ‘What do you know? You're just an astronomer,'” Worden said. But, after the rocket blew up, Musk recommended that Worden perform an investigation for the government. “I give Elon huge credit for that,” Worden said.
火箭坠毁之后，很多人都在主岛上的酒吧里借酒消愁。马斯克希望在6个月内再次发射火箭，但重新组装一枚新火箭的工作量十分庞大。虽然SpaceX在埃尔塞贡多还有一些可以使用的设备，但这对于一枚随时可以发射的火箭来说是远远不够的。工程师们在喝酒时发誓，要用一种更规范的方法制造下一枚火箭，要团结起来做得更好。沃登希望SpaceX的工程师们能够提高自己的能力，他代表国防部观察他们很久了，他赞赏他们的干劲儿，但不赞同他们的工作方法。“他们做起事来就跟硅谷那群毛头小子在开发软件时一样，”沃登说道，“他们会通宵达旦地试这个试那个。我已经见过几百种这类试验，但我认为这没什么用。”在第一次发射之前，沃登曾经试图提醒马斯克，他给马斯克和美国国防部高级研究计划局分别寄了一封信，明确表达了他的观点。“埃隆没有采纳我的看法。他对我说，‘你懂什么？你只是个天文学家。’”沃登说。但在火箭爆炸之后，马斯克建议沃登代表政府展开调查。“为此我高度赞扬了埃隆一番。”沃登说。
Almost exactly a year later, SpaceX was ready to try another launch. On March 15, 2007, a successful test fire took place. Then, on March 21, the Falcon 1 finally behaved. From its launchpad surrounded by palm trees, the Falcon 1 surged up and toward space. It flew for a couple of minutes with engineers now and again reporting that the systems were “nominal,” or in good shape. At three minutes into the flight, the first stage of the rocket separated and fell back to Earth, and the Kestrel engine kicked in as planned to carry the second stage into orbit. Ecstatic cheers went out in the control room. Next, at the four-minute mark, the fairing atop the rocket separated as planned. “It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do,” said Mueller. “I was sitting next to Elon and looked at him and said, ‘We've made it.' We're hugging and believe it's going to make it to orbit. Then, it starts to wiggle.” For more than five glorious minutes, the SpaceX engineers got to feel like they had done everything right. A camera on board the Falcon 1 pointed down and showed Earth getting smaller and smaller as the rocket made its way methodically into space. But then that wiggle that Mueller noticed turned into flailing, and the machine swooned, started to break apart, and then blew up. This time the SpaceX engineers were quick to figure out what went wrong. As the propellant was consumed, what was left started to move around the tank and slosh against the sides, much like wine spinning around a glass. The sloshing propellant triggered the wobbling, and at one point it sloshed enough to leave an opening to the engine exposed. When the engine sucked in a big breath of air, it flamed out.
一年后，SpaceX准备好再次进行火箭发射。2007年3月15日，试点火成功。3月21日，“猎鹰1号”终于升空。它从棕榈树环绕的发射台上一跃而起，冲向太空。它飞了几分钟，工程师们在这期间一直报告系统一切正常，处于极佳的状态。3分钟后，火箭的第一级解体，并掉落地球，“茶隼”引擎按计划开始启动，准备将第二级送入轨道。控制室内爆发出一阵欢呼声。接下来，在第4分钟的关口上，火箭上方的整流罩也按计划张开了。“一切都按计划实现了，”米勒说道，“我就坐在埃隆旁边看着他，‘我们做到了。’我们抱在一起，相信火箭最终会进入轨道。但后来，火箭又开始摆动。”在那5分多钟里，SpaceX的工程师们觉得他们所做的一切都是正确的。“猎鹰1号”上的一台摄像机指向下方，显示地球正在变得越来越小，火箭正有条不紊地进入太空。但随后米勒发现火箭由摇摆变成胡乱抖动，设备失控、解体，最后爆炸了。这一次，SpaceX的工程师们很快就找到了发生故障的原因。由于推进燃料逐渐被消耗，燃料罐中剩下的燃料开始在罐子里来回旋转搅动，就像红酒在酒杯里晃动一样。晃动的推进燃料引起火箭摆动，达到一定程度时，引擎的一个开口暴露出来。当大量空气进入引擎时，就燃烧起来了。
The failure was another crushing blow to SpaceX's engineers. Some of them had spent close to two years shuffling back and forth between California, Hawaii, and Kwaj. By the time SpaceX could attempt another launch, it would be about four years after Musk's original target, and the company had been chewing through his Internet fortune at a worrying rate. Musk had vowed publicly that he would see this thing through to the end, but people inside and outside the company were doing back-of-the-envelope math and could tell that SpaceX likely could only afford one more attempt—maybe two. To the extent that the financial situation unnerved Musk, he rarely if ever let it show to employees. “Elon did a great job of not burdening people with those worries,” said Spikes. “He always communicated the importance of being lean and of success, but it was never ‘if we fail, we're done for.' He was very optimistic.”
这次失败对于SpaceX的工程师来说又是一次致命的打击。有些人已经花了将近两年的时间往返于加州、夏威夷和夸贾林。等到SpaceX能进行下一次发射时，距离马斯克的最初目标已经过去了4年，马斯克通过互联网产业积累的财富很快就要花光了。马斯克曾信誓旦旦地告诉大众，他不成功决不罢休，但公司内外的人都知道，SpaceX的资金可能只够再进行一两次发射了。尽管财务状况让马斯克变得很焦躁，但他几乎从不把这一面表现在员工面前。“埃隆让员工不要担心资金问题，这一点很好，”斯派克斯说道，“他总是告诉我们精益和成功的重要性，但是他也从来不会说‘如果我们失败了，那就结束吧’，他总是很乐观。”
The failures seemed to do little to curtail Musk's vision for the future or raise doubts about his capabilities. In the midst of the chaos, he took a tour of the islands with Worden. Musk began thinking aloud about how the islands could be unified into one landmass. He suggested that walls could be built through the small channels between the islands, and the water could be pumped out in the spirit of the manmade systems in the Netherlands. Worden, also known for his out-there ideas, was attracted to Musk's bravado. “That he is thinking of this stuff is kind of cool,” Worden said. “From that point on, he and I discussed settling Mars. It really impressed me that this is a guy that thinks big.”
失败似乎完全没有影响马斯克对未来的展望，也没有令他质疑自己的能力。他在混乱之中和沃登一起环游了这些小岛。马斯克开始自言自语，说如何将这些岛屿整合成一片陆地。他提议，在岛屿之间的通道上建造防护墙，并本着荷兰人填海造陆的精神将水抽干。同样因奇思妙想而闻名的沃登被马斯克的勇敢折服。“他想的这件事真是太酷了，”沃登说道，“然后他和我讨论了火星移民计划。他是个野心勃勃的人，让我印象深刻。”
[1]房地产(realestate)里面的办公空间(office space)所用的“空间”(space)与“太空”(space)是同一个单词。——译者注
[2]Manifest Destiny为一种惯用措辞，是19世纪美国民主党所持的一种信念，认为美国被赋予了向西扩张至横跨北美洲大陆的天命。——译者注
[3]卓比林和其他火星爱好者听到马斯克的植物计划时很沮丧。“这一点意义都没有，”卓比林说道，“完全只是表面功夫，而且门一打开，数百万的微生物就会跑出来，违反了NASA关于污染控制的协议。”
[4]关于马斯克这段时期的多数文章都说他去过莫斯科三次。但是根据坎特雷尔的详细记录，事实并非如此。马斯克与俄罗斯人在莫斯科见了两次，还有一次是在南加州的帕萨迪纳。他也曾分别在巴黎和伦敦与阿丽亚娜航天公司(Arianespace)和萨里卫星(Surry Satellites)接洽，马斯克考虑收购后者。
[5]布扎了解霍尔曼在波音的工作表现，在SpaceX创办6个月之后，成功说服他到这家公司工作。
[6]包括13 000镑的铜块。
[7]霍尔曼在回到埃尔塞贡多之前，用钻床移除了眼镜上的安全防护罩。他说，“我可不想在乘飞机回家的路上看起来像个怪咖。”
[8]“星球大战”计划是美国在20世纪80年代研议的一个军事战略计划，源自美国总统罗纳德·里根在冷战后期发表的一次演说。——编者注
[9]《盖里甘的岛》是20世纪60年代的美国情景喜剧，讲述的是一群人被遗弃到岛上，开始时感觉愉快，但在他们等待救援的漫长时间里，一个个开始变得性格乖戾。——编者注
[10]在这次事件之后，霍尔曼于2007年11月离开这家公司，之后又回来一段时间培训新人。本书采访的许多人都表示，霍尔曼是SpaceX初期非常重要的人物，当时他们担心如果少了他，这家公司可能会倒闭。