Your flight to Mars will start in Texas
From humble beginnings, SpaceX is racing forward into the future.
Eighteen years ago the Secret Service agents guarding President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford received something of a shock. Thick, low clouds stretched across the Central Texas sky late on the night of March 15, 2003, when suddenly the horizon lit up. The main house shook and rattled as a thunderous noise rumbled across the property. The alarmed agents were roused, but after a few seconds the light faded and the noise ebbed. The remote countryside quieted down for the night.
Several miles away, a small team of engineers and propulsion technicians at SpaceX celebrated what was only the second test firing of the Merlin rocket’s thrust chamber, the very heart of their brand new engine. Nothing had blown up, and that early in a rocket development program, anything short of destroyed hardware represented a win. As they poured celebratory drinks, the tired engineers did not realize their test stand pointed toward the president’s property, nor that the low clouds had amplified the blast that night.
The next morning, two black Suburbans waited at the front gate of the company’s test facility in McGregor when the rocket scientists arrived for work. Some very serious Secret Service agents wanted to know just what had happened the night before. Bush was at Camp David that night preparing for the invasion of Iraq, but agents remained resident at the ranch throughout his presidency. Although SpaceX could not reorient the test stands, the company did gradually begin to get better about warning the surrounding community about future tests.
Unless you lived somewhere southwest of Waco in the 2000s, you probably did not realize that SpaceX had begun to build a major facility in Texas. And yet, those blasts in McGregor may prove to be a pivotal moment for the settlement of Mars, and history may deem them as consequential to Texas history as the Spindletop gusher.
This state, especially Houston, is NASA country. The astronauts live here, and for decades have trained for moon missions, space shuttle flights and stays aboard the International Space Station at Johnson Space Center. The iconic Mission Control rooms in Houston oversee all of NASA’s human spaceflights.
Texans might be forgiven for assuming this is how it will always be, but that may not prove true. In recent years, perhaps due to a lessening of political power, Johnson Space Center has ceded key influ
ence to other NASA centers. The commercial crew program, which is responsible for getting humans to the International Space Station, is now managed at Kennedy
Space Center in Florida. And the program to develop a lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Program is not being led by Houston, but rather Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
NASA’s role in human spaceflight is changing, too. Rather than launching its own astronauts, the space agency now buys rides to orbit from SpaceX, with its Crew Dragon vehicle, and from Boeing, with its Starliner vehicle. In this new era, SpaceX’s third crewed mission to the station for NASA should launch next month.
The state’s fading political influence in spaceflight and the rise of commercial spaceflight suggest that if Texas is to maintain a key role this century, it may have to embrace entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk as well as Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin has a suborbital launch site in West Texas, near Van Horn. In fact, it now seems plausible that human missions to Mars might launch not from Florida, but Texas; and not on a NASA rocket, but one built by SpaceX.
That certainly seemed improbable back in May 2002, when Musk founded SpaceX with the express goal of settling Mars. He arrived in Texas only a few months later. Then, as now, Musk craved a hands-off approach from government officials when it came to his businesses. Developing rockets can be a messy, loud business indeed. “Rocket engine development is really ugly early on,” said Tom Mueller, vice president of propulsion for SpaceX in the company’s formative years.
“It always is. There’s always so many things that can go wrong, and when they do, it’s usually pretty catastrophic.”
Musk found the wide open spaces he needed in McGregor. A Texas banker named Andy Beal had built up the site for his own rocket company, but abandoned the project after running into technical problems with his hardware, and warnings that NASA was more interested in preserving the status quo of launch companies than supporting new entrants to the industry. Local officials were therefore more than happy to lease the 100-acre site to Musk when he came calling in November 2002.
A first site visit
Back then, in many ways, the site remained wild, Texas ranch land. Early on Musk brought his father, Errol, for a visit. The two have always had a complicated relationship, and Musk endured a difficult childhood. But he credits his father with teaching him the fundamentals of engineering. Musk did not realize it, but as he built circuit boards and model airplanes as a kid, he was learning important lifelong lessons. “My dad is an extremely talented electrical and mechanical engineer,” Musk said. “He tutored me, and I didn’t even know it at the time.” In 2003 the elder Musk lived in Los Angeles, and Elon thought he might be able to help with some construction work at McGregor.
As site manager Joe Allen took the two Musks around, they went into a building called the instrument bay, beneath what would become the Merlin engine test stand. Allen was tidying up the room as the others entered, but as he bent over to pick up one piece of paper, a diamondback rattlesnake hissed back. He returned the paper and calmly told the Musks to not approach the area. He walked out of the instrument bay, found a piece of steel, then came back inside and clubbed the rattlesnake. Errol Musk was evidently impressed. Allen heard him turn to Mueller and say, “You’ve hired that guy, right?”
There were other critters, too. In Central Texas, black field crickets lay their eggs in the fall, and then these eggs hatch in the spring. About three months later, the crickets reach maturity, the adults get wings, and each one starts frantically looking for mates. Thousands and thousands of crickets congregate into biblical swarms, which are particularly drawn to bright lights at night. They pile up like snow drifts at doors and walls. According to Allen, the best way to kill them is not insecticide, but Dawn soap or liquid Tide.
“The soap suffocates them,” Allen said. “It works better than any insecticide that we would ever use. But when they’re dead, they stink like a dead horse.”
The engineers and technicians fought the crickets every year with brooms and leaf blowers. But the swarms could rarely be kept at bay for long. At least they didn’t bite. Black widow spiders are common in Central Texas, as well as the rattlesnakes.
From those humble beginnings SpaceX would go on to test three versions of the Merlin rocket engine, eventually reaching orbit for the first time in 2008. As I write in my new book “LIFTOFF,” covering the origin of SpaceX, these were desperate days for Musk and his small team of engineers and technicians. They almost failed on multiple occasions, but after finally having success with its small Falcon 1 rocket, the company received a handsome contract from NASA worth more than $1 billion to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
Pivotal role
Since then, the company has raced forward into the future.
Last year it launched humans from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle’s retirement. In recent years the company has also mastered the reuse of Falcon 9 rocket first stages, built the world’s largest booster in the Falcon Heavy, and launched and operated the largest fleet of satellites in the world — more than any other company or country.
Through it all, the SpaceX team in McGregor played a pivotal role in testing rocket engines, and even rockets themselves. All new rockets go through the test site for pre-launch firings to ensure their readiness for space. In recent years the company has expanded its presence in Texas. It now has grand plans for the Brownsville area, including the possible incorporation of a new city, “Starbase,” at the Southern tip of the state where the mudflats along the Rio Grande River slide into the Gulf of Mexico.
Musk's recent expansion into Texas is not without controversy. No longer are his rocket tests waking up a few Secret Service agents. SpaceX's build and test site in South Texas is pushing aside the last remaining residents of Boca Chica Village, and roads to the nearby beach are closed on a regular basis. However disruptive his methods may be, however, he has a track record with SpaceX and Tesla of getting results. And so far, to be a part of what could be the next great leap in space, local and state officials have supported his efforts, and its potential to transform the South Texas economy.
It is here, beneath tents, that SpaceX is building its towering Starship vehicles — intended to one day carry humans to Mars — at a rapid cadence of one or two a month. Many of them have exploded on the test stand, or while attempting to land. But this is part of the plan. Legendary NASA flight director Gene Kranz famously said, “Failure is not an option.” But for Musk, when it comes to developmental test flights, failure is an option.
It is very easy to engineer a vehicle to death. NASA and its prime contractor, Boeing, have spent a decade and more than
$20 billion to build a single Space Launch System rocket that may fly in 2022. During this process the vehicle has succumbed to paralysis by analysis, in which every possible contingency must be engineered out of the vehicle. There literally is no margin to fail, because it takes so long, and so much money to build a single rocket.
These days, Texas’ comparative light regulatory touch and go-italone ethos are facing fierce criticism in the wake of the winter storm that crippled our independent power grid. And yet, when it comes to space, the story is inverted. The slow-paced, federally funded ways of the past don’t hold as much promise as they once did.
Musk has decided there is a better way. The acid test for any rocket is to go fly it. That way, you find the problems, fix them, and fly again until a vehicle is ready for prime time. He believes this is the fastest way to finish the Starship vehicle and get it into orbit and, by 2026, on to Mars with humans. Two decades of success in Texas suggest he may not be wrong.