Chap­ter 28: Strike Three

In August 2008, SpaceX faced a cru­cial moment on the remote atoll of Kwa­jalein with the launch of the Fal­con 1 rock­et. After two pre­vi­ous attempts had end­ed in fail­ure, the third launch was seen as the com­pa­ny’s last chance. Elon Musk had invest­ed near­ly all of his resources into SpaceX, telling his team that they could only afford to attempt three launch­es. This time, the stakes were high­er as the Fal­con 1 was tasked with car­ry­ing a sig­nif­i­cant pay­load: an Air Force satel­lite weigh­ing 180 pounds, two small­er NASA satel­lites, and the ash­es of James Doohan, the actor best known as Scot­ty from Star Trek.

The launch ini­tial­ly seemed suc­cess­ful, with the team in Los Ange­les, includ­ing Musk, watch­ing eager­ly. Cheers filled the con­trol room as the rock­et ascend­ed, and the upper stage detached as planned, giv­ing hope that the satel­lite car­go would reach orbit. How­ev­er, a moment of hor­ror quick­ly fol­lowed when the boost­er unex­pect­ed­ly bumped into the sec­ond stage short­ly after detach­ing, lead­ing to anoth­er failed mis­sion. The issue was traced back to the redesigned cool­ing sys­tem of the Mer­lin engine, which, while effec­tive at sea lev­el, mal­func­tioned in the vac­u­um of space, caus­ing an unin­tend­ed spurt of thrust.

In the after­math of this third con­sec­u­tive fail­ure, Musk was finan­cial­ly drained, and both SpaceX and his oth­er ven­ture, Tes­la, were in cri­sis. Despite these over­whelm­ing chal­lenges and per­son­al strug­gles, includ­ing a dif­fi­cult peri­od in his mar­riage, Musk remained unde­terred. He resolved to con­tin­ue pur­su­ing SpaceX’s goals, declar­ing his unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to achiev­ing orbit and refus­ing to blame his team for the set­back. The next day, in a somber con­fer­ence call with key team mem­bers, Musk revealed that parts for a fourth rock­et were ready in Los Ange­les, direct­ing them to pre­pare it for trans­porta­tion to Kwa­jalein. This moment under­scored Musk’s resilience and deter­mi­na­tion to per­se­vere despite fac­ing seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able obsta­cles.