T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 1 Musk四处攒了一帮人，火箭发动机原型在车库里造的，连续3次发射失败，第五次失败
公司就要破产了，结果第四次成功。
He did find people like Tom Mueller, a frustrated engineer at the
conglomerate TRW’s aerospace division, who was building a rocket engine for
fun in his garage. That—the largest liquid-fueled engine ever built by an
an amateur—turned out to be the earliest version of the Merlin, which
powers SpaceX’s rockets. Musk also met Hans Koenigsmann, a German engineer
who became the company’s fourth technical employee, at a rocketry club
launch in the Mojave desert. “My German accent helps in presentations,”
Koenigsmann says. “When I say, ‘This will work,’ it is more convincing
than other accents for some reason.”
------------------------------
Hackler: You talked about your work with the Falcon 1. That rocket had three
failed launch attempts before it successfully launched. Can you talk about
your experiences with that, what sort of effort you put in to make the
rocket successful, and meet the milestones and continue the program?
Koenigsmann: The first launch failure was heartbreaking, because we were 50,
60 people, maybe more. No more than 200, certainly. A lot of people worked
a long time. I spent probably three or four months on the launch site in the
middle of the Pacific [Ocean] for that. At the end, it didn’t fly very far
. We learned a lot of things we did wrong, and learning sometimes hurts.
After that, we looked at it and we decided to learn the lesson and move on.
We did this basically three times. The second time didn’t feel anywhere as
harsh as the first time. The vehicle actually flew very far, and then didn’
t make orbit, but at least it flew out of sight. It’s a difference whether
the rocket comes back and hits the launch site and you collect debris, or
that it goes away and then disappears somewhere. It doesn’t make a
difference in the end, but for you personally it’s a different feeling. In
one case, you collect debris and it’s a sad day. In the other case it’s
still a sad day, but you’re not collecting debris.
On the third flight we were a little bit smarter. We had two vehicles
actually, so we knew that if something goes wrong we can do this quickly
again. Between the third and the fourth flight we changed one number,
nothing else. That was the time we needed to separate the two stages. That
was another important lesson learned, but I always thought organizations go
through this. NASA went through this. NASA had early beginnings where they
destroyed a couple rockets along the way, and that helped NASA. Both the
experience that comes with that, and I felt that we did this independently
on our own.
I don’t want to say we replicated exactly what NASA did in the’50s and ’
60s, but it had a little bit of that flavor. We built a rocket, and then we
realized that part does not work, and we have to fix it over here. We did a
lot of stuff on our own without anybody telling us at the time. The first
five years—what is the date for the first COTS involvement?
Hackler: The Space Act Agreement was signed in [August] 2006.
Koenigsmann: The first four or five years, we were on our own. We learned
that lesson on our own. There’s nothing better than learning lessons on
your own, because you really believe that, and you really know why you’re
doing this. You really know how to avoid it, and it’s the truth that you
learned along the way. From my perspective, as bad as it looks losing three
vehicles in a row, I feel like we learned that lesson, and that’s what
makes SpaceX these days. | w*********a
发帖数: 9279 | 2 garage里造液体火箭。 没把他自己炸死就不错了。 竟然还能成功。 | T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 3
SpaceX开始创业的故事挺有意思，现在这个车库开始设计的发动机是美国唯一新式自产
液体发动机。
【在 w*********a 的大作中提到】
: garage里造液体火箭。 没把他自己炸死就不错了。 竟然还能成功。
| s**********d
发帖数: 36899 | 4 难道是家里的garage？
【在 w*********a 的大作中提到】
: garage里造液体火箭。 没把他自己炸死就不错了。 竟然还能成功。
| l********k
发帖数: 14844 | 5 听上去像是租别人家的garage
【在 s**********d 的大作中提到】
: 难道是家里的garage？
| T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 6
自己家的，9-11以后难道没被fbi监控。
In late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a
liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage.
Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace
firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific
ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To
satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to
airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in
the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club. RRS
members, many of them employees at aerospace firms, meet regularly in the
Los Angeles area to build and launch the biggest and highest flying rockets
they can—just as the group has done since it was founded in the early 1940s
.
Building a liquid-fuel rocket engine isn’t easy, even for an experienced
propulsion engineer. Liquid propellants are cheap and provide lots of
lifting power, but the engines rely on a host of valves and seals to control
the flow. And they usually require supercooled oxidizers, like liquid
oxygen, to mix with the fuel so it can ignite. The resulting combustion—
essentially a controlled explosion—is channeled at high pressure into the
nozzle, creating the thrust that propels the rocket. Despite these
challenges, by early 2002 Mueller had moved his operations to a friend’s
rented warehouse and was putting the finishing touches on the world’s
largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, an 80-pounder designed to produce
13,000 pounds of thrust.
Mueller’s ambitious moonlighting caught the attention of Internet
multimillionaire Elon Musk, who met the engineer at the warehouse in January
2002 as Mueller was trying to attach his homemade engine to an airframe.
Fresh from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk was seeking staff
for a new space company, soon to be called Space Exploration Technologies,
or SpaceX. He eyed the rocket engine and asked a simple question: “Can you
build something bigger?”
Mueller never fired that engine. He took it back to his garage, where it
still sits. Instead, he took up Musk’s offer to join the nascent private
space venture.
【在 s**********d 的大作中提到】
: 难道是家里的garage？
| T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 7
要创业得有garage。Spacex要将来一统江湖，这些人也会像苹果一样成为传奇。
【在 l********k 的大作中提到】
: 听上去像是租别人家的garage
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