Elon Musk and the Burden of Belief

Selling the dream of Mars is one thing. Building the rockets to get there, through explosive failures and public doubt, is another. This is the story of SpaceX's early years, a visceral look at how Elon Musk navigated the immense pressure of a bold vision. We'll explore how he maintained the faith of his team and investors when the mission seemed on the brink of collapse.

The Island of Broken Dreams

The heat on Omelek Island was a physical presence, a thick, wet blanket that clung to the skin. It was a sliver of coral and sand in the Kwajalein Atoll, a remote outpost of the United States Army halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Palm trees fringed the shore, leaning away from the trade winds, their fronds rattling a dry, constant rhythm. But the engineers at SpaceX barely noticed the scenery. Their world had shrunk to the slender white needle of the Falcon 1 rocket, standing stark against the infinite blue of the Pacific sky. It was March 24, 2006, and everything felt both provisional and absolute. Elon Musk, who had poured a hundred million dollars of his dot-com fortune into this venture, watched from the control bunker. He had founded SpaceX four years earlier with a singular, almost ludicrous goal: to make humanity a multi-planetary species. Mars was the destination, but Omelek was the first step. And it was a shaky one. The talk of Martian colonies meant nothing if they couldn't even get a relatively simple rocket into orbit. The countdown was a staccato prayer. Inside the rocket’s thin aluminum skin, super-chilled liquid oxygen and kerosene waited. The call for liftoff came. Fire and noise erupted from the base of the Falcon 1. For a few glorious seconds, the rocket ascended, a triumphant exclamation point against the heavens. Then, at twenty-five seconds, it began to roll. A plume of smoke turned darker. The rocket pitched, suddenly drunk, and arced back toward the sea. An internal fire, caused by a corroded aluminum nut on a fuel line, had triggered an engine shutdown. The first flight was over. It had ended in a fireball just yards from where it began. The dream had survived launch by less than half a minute.

The Island of Broken Dreams

A Litany of Failures

A year later, they were back. March 21, 2007. The rocket was a new iteration, the team leaner and tougher. The memory of the first failure was a ghost that haunted the launch preparations. This time, the ascent was perfect. The Merlin engine, a new design built in-house, performed flawlessly. The rocket climbed, punching through the atmosphere, reaching the silence of near-space. For five minutes, everything went right. But then, at an altitude of 180 miles, as the first stage prepared to separate, the vehicle began to spin. Fuel sloshed in the second-stage tank, a liquid pendulum that grew more violent with each oscillation. The rocket, fighting for control, lost the battle. The second stage engine never ignited. The mission was lost. Another multimillion-dollar firework. The third attempt came on August 2, 2008. By now, the pressure was immense. The world was watching, and the whispers in the aerospace industry had grown to a roar: the internet millionaire was in over his head. This launch carried a payload for the Department of Defense and two small NASA satellites. More than money was riding on this flight; credibility was on the line. From the control room, they watched the telemetry. The liftoff was, in the words Musk would later use, "picture perfect." The first stage burn was clean. Two minutes and twenty seconds into the flight, the command was given for stage separation. And then, confusion. The video feed from the rocket cut out. At the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where employees were gathered to watch a delayed feed, the screen went blank. A collective groan filled the room. They knew what it meant. The problem, they would discover, was subtle and devastating. The new, more powerful Merlin 1C engine had a longer thrust decay. After the engine was commanded to shut down, a small amount of residual thrust continued to push from the first stage. It was just enough to cause the massive first stage to bump into the second stage after separation. The collision sent both tumbling. It was a design flaw, an unforeseen consequence of an upgrade. It was another failure.

The Last Shot

Seven weeks later, on September 28, 2008, a fourth Falcon 1 stood on the launchpad at Omelek. It was a skeleton crew on the island, a small band of true believers who had worked feverishly to assemble the rocket. This was, as Musk had stated plainly, the last shot. If this launch failed, SpaceX was finished. The rocket itself was almost identical to the last one, with one small but crucial change: they increased the time delay between the first stage engine shutdown and the command for stage separation. It was a tiny modification, a breath of a pause to allow the residual thrust to dissipate. The countdown began again, the familiar litany of checks and verifications. But this time, it felt different. It was not hope, but a kind of grim determination that filled the bunker. They had failed in every conceivable way. Now, there was nothing left to do but light the candle one more time. At 23:15 Coordinated Universal Time, the Merlin engine ignited. The Falcon 1 climbed, steady and true, into the darkening sky over the Pacific. It passed the point of the first failure. It passed the point of the second. It reached the moment of stage separation, the ghost of the third attempt. In the control room, a voice called out the confirmation: "Stage separation confirmed." There was no collision. The second stage engine ignited, its small Kestrel engine burning a faint, distant star in the onboard camera feed. It burned for six minutes, a lifetime of anxiety and anticipation. Then, engine shutdown. The call came through, clear and unbelievable: "We have reached orbit." For the first time in history, a privately funded, liquid-fueled rocket had achieved Earth orbit. In the control room, a wild cheer went up, a release of years of pent-up frustration and doubt. Back in Hawthorne, the factory floor exploded in a scene of pure joy. Elon Musk, watching the data stream, was overcome. He walked out of the control room, unable to speak, the immense burden of belief finally lifted. He had bet everything on this moment, and against all odds, he had won. The path to Mars, once a distant abstraction, now seemed, for the first time, real. It started here, with a tiny rocket, on a remote island, on the very last try.

Elon Musk and the Burden of Belief

The Island of Broken Dreams

Elon Musk and the Burden of Belief

The Island of Broken Dreams

A Litany of Failures

The Speech

The Last Shot