American Spaceflight Is Now in Elon Musk’s Hands
Updated at 5:00 p.m. ET on May 27, 2020.
In the winter of 2010, the private aerospace company SpaceX was set to launch a capsule as a demonstration for NASA, hoping to prove that it could, someday, deliver supplies to the International Space Station. When engineers inspected the Falcon 9 rocket just days before takeoff, they discovered a crack on an engine nozzle. Dismantling the hardware, fixing the faulty piece, and putting it all back together would take weeks, and officials at SpaceX didn’t want to wait that long. Instead, Elon Musk, the company’s billionaire CEO and chief engineer, sent a technician with a pair of shears to Cape Canaveral to cut around the crack and trim the troublesome part away.
“There were NASA engineers banging their hands against the wall, saying, ‘What are we doing?’” Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a SpaceX adviser, recalled in a recent interview. “This is crazy. This is insane.” On more than one occasion, Musk’s move-fast-and-break-things mantra was diametrically opposed to NASA’s slow-and-steady ethos.
[Read: The astronaut wives know exactly what to expect]
The rocket made . But if someone had told those engineers that nearly a decade later, NASA would be willing to strap two of its finest astronauts into a SpaceX capsule and wave them off into space, they probably wouldn’t have
