Statements by SpaceX Employees
Tom Mueller
Tom Mueller (
Wikipedia,
LinkedIn) is one of SpaceX's founding employees. He served as the VP of Propulsion Engineering from 2002 to 2014 and Propulsion CTO from 2014 to 2019. He currently serves as an Senior Adviser. He's regarded as one of the foremost spacecraft propulsion experts in the world and owns many patents for propulsion technologies.
Not true, I am an advisor now. Elon and the Propulsion department are leading development of the SpaceX engines, particularly Raptor. I offer my 2 cents to help from time to time"
Source
We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing.
Source
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.
Source (Ashlee Vance's Biography).
Kevin Watson
Kevin Watson (
LinkedIn) developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon. He previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory.
Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Source (Ashlee Vance's Biography).
Kevin has attested to the biography's veracity.
Garrett Reisman
Garrett Reisman (
Wikipedia,
LinkedIn,
Twitter) is an engineer and former NASA astronaut. He joined SpaceX as a senior engineer working on astronaut safety and mission assurance. He was later promoted to director of crew operations. He left this position in May 2018 and is now a Senior Advisor. He also functions as Professor of Astronautical Engineering at University of Southern California.
“I first met Elon for my job interview,” Reisman told the USA TODAY Network's Florida Today. “All he wanted to talk about were technical things. We talked a lot about different main propulsion system design architectures.
“At the end of my interview, I said, ‘Hey, are you sure you want to hire me? You’ve already got an astronaut, so are you sure you need two around here?’ ” Reisman asked. “He looked at me and said, ‘I’m not hiring you because you’re an astronaut. I’m hiring you because you’re a good engineer.’ ”
Managing SpaceX and Tesla, building out new businesses and maintaining relationships with his family makes Musk a busy billionaire.
“He’s obviously skilled at all those different functions, but certainly what really drives him and where his passion really is, is his role as CTO,” or chief technology officer, Reisman said. “Basically his role as chief designer and chief engineer. That’s the part of the job that really plays to his strengths."
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What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.
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Josh Boehm
Josh Boehm (
LinkedIn,
Quora) is the former Head of Software Quality Assurance at SpaceX.
Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business (but I would say the former takes up much more of his mental real estate). Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.
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Source)
Statements by External Observers
Eric Berger
Eric Berger (
Twitter,
LinkedIn) is a space journalist and
Ars Technica's senior space editor.
He has been interviewing SpaceX employees for an upcoming book on its early days.
True. Elon is the chief engineer in name and reality.
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Source)
Christian Davenport
Christian Davenport is
the Washington Post's defense and space reporter and the author of "Space Barons". The following quotes are excerpts from his book.
He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.
Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.
Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.
Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.
“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
Mosdell ( 10th employee ) found Musk a touch awkward and abrupt, but smart. Mosdell had showed up prepared to talk about his experience building launchpads, which, after all, was what SpaceX wanted him to do. But instead, Musk wanted to talk hard-core rocketry. Specifically the Delta IV rocket and its RS-68 engines, which Mosdell had some experience with when at Boeing. Over the course of the interview, they discussed “labyrinth purges” and “pump shaft seal design” and “the science behind using helium as opposed to nitrogen.”
After the meeting on Valentine’s Day adjourned, Musk offered to give the group a tour of his facility. To this group of engineers and entrepreneurs, it was like an invitation to a six-year-old to visit a chocolate factory. As Musk guided them through the factory floor, the group “let loose with detailed, technical questions, and he answered all of them,”
Gedmark said.
“Not once did he say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that because it’s proprietary.’… It was certainly impressive.”
John Carmack
John Carmack (
Twitter,
Wikipedia) is a programmer, video game developer and engineer. He's the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and current CTO of Oculus VR.
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
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Robert Zubrin
Robert Zubrin (
Wikipedia) is an aerospace engineer and author, best known for his advocacy of human exploration of Mars.
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
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Statements by Elon Himself
Yes. The design of Starship and the Super Heavy rocket booster I changed to a special alloy of stainless steel. I was contemplating this for a while. And this is somewhat counterintuitive. It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction.
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I know more about rockets than anyone at the company by a pretty significant margin, I could redraw substantial portions of the rocket from memory without the blueprints
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Tim Dodd: "What people don't understand is that you're the lead engineer. You're literally sitting"
Musk: "Literally. This is a... I've actually had a dinner with some, with a, with a friend and he was like 'well who's the chief engineer of SpaceX?' I was like it's me. He was like 'it's not you, who is it?' Look it's either someone with a very low ego or I don't know."
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Interviewer: What do you do when you're at SpaceX and Tesla? What does your time look like there?
Elon: Yes, it's a good question. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things*. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.* Engineering and design, so it's developing next-generation product. That's 80% of it.
Interviewer: You probably don't remember this. A very long time ago, many, many, years, you took me on a tour of SpaceX. And the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it. And I don't think many people get that about you.
Elon: Yeah. I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. Business is fine. But really it's like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is Chief Operating Officer. She manages legal, finance, sales, and general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture. At Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and, yeah, so I'm in the design studio, take up a half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Because the biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory. And that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself.
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