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SpaceX is so much more than just Elon Musk, the company employs many other interesting people. Among the most recognizable are engineers who sometimes host the launch broadcasts. However, one of the truly key figures at SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Operating Officer and President of the company.
We’re bringing you another installment of our new series of articles about SpaceX and their canceled projects. This time we’ll take a look at the F9R-Dev2 test vehicle and SpaceX’s connection to Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Elon Musk’s companies often collaborate, share workers or even transfer technologies. I’ve put together a summary of actual examples of this cooperation. They mainly involve Tesla and SpaceX because they collaborate the most, but we’ll also look at OpenAI or the Boring Company. In some cases, the companies became intertwined so significantly that it led to real concerns.
We’re launching a new series of articles about SpaceX and some of their projects that never saw the light of day. One of them was crossfeed funcionality for Falcon Heavy. It is a unique way of fuel transfer between the side boosters and the center core of a rocket. It increases payload capacity but was never actually developed in practice.
Over the years, we’ve met quite a few webcast hosts who are all actual SpaceX engineers. John Insprucker is a fan-favorite, though. He currently works as the Principal Integration Engineer but he has actually spent his entire career working with rockets.
Elon Musk is the public face of SpaceX but there are lots of other extremely talented people at the company who sort of live in Musk’s shadow. One of them is Tom Mueller who was in charge of engine development at SpaceX during the most crucial years.
Interesting situation happened during preparations for Dragon’s first mission in 2010. It illustrates how SpaceX takes a very different approach to solving problems compared to most aerospace companies.
SpaceX is preparing for the first Starhopper flight and two Falcon 9 launches, Musk’s secretive company Neuralink will make its first public announcement, and Tesla will announce its financial results for the record-breaking second quarter. All of this will be followed by Musk’s presentation about the Starship rocket, which has undergone many design changes in recent months.
I couldn’t find a list of known SpaceX launch contract values, so I made my own list with all the F9/FH launches I could find prices for. The list will be updated over time.
In another installment of our SpaceX Stories series, we bring you a 2017 interview with former SpaceX employee Daniel Frolich. He was actually the very first intern the company hired back when SpaceX had just 15 employees and was located in El Segundo. The interview contains some interesting stories from the early days of SpaceX and also from Dragon development.
