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SpaceX Falcon 1 First Orbital Launch
Category: Science & Technology Key figures: Elon Musk (CEO and chief designer, SpaceX), Gwynne Shotwell (President, SpaceX), Hans Koenigsmann (Vice President of Mission Assurance)
Summary
On September 28, 2008, at 23:15 UTC, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket lifted off from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, and successfully delivered a 165-kilogram non-functional mass simulator to low Earth orbit — becoming the first privately developed, fully liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. The achievement came on the vehicle’s fourth flight attempt after three consecutive failures in 2006, 2007, and a third in August 2008 that had come within seconds of success before a stage-separation anomaly destroyed the rocket.
SpaceX had been founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with $100 million of his own capital from the PayPal sale, with the explicit goal of dramatically reducing the cost of access to space. By mid-2008, three failed launches had nearly exhausted the company’s reserves. With Tesla Motors simultaneously facing its own financing crisis during the global financial downturn, Musk later acknowledged that both companies were weeks from insolvency. The fourth Falcon 1 rocket was assembled from remaining parts in approximately six weeks. A chartered Boeing C-17 Globemaster III transported the vehicle to the launch site; during the flight, improper repressurization partially collapsed the rocket’s structure, requiring emergency repairs on the island before the launch could proceed.
The fourth flight used a two-stage configuration: a Merlin 1C engine burning liquid oxygen and RP-1 (refined kerosene) on the first stage, and a Kestrel vacuum-optimized engine on the second stage. The first stage separated cleanly and the second stage performed a nominal burn, inserting the payload into a circular orbit at roughly 500 km altitude. The company’s webcast recorded thousands of simultaneous viewers; Musk’s emotional address to his team after confirmation of orbit became widely shared online. On December 23, 2008 — three months after the orbital success — NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station using the as-yet-unflown Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. Musk later stated that this contract, announced “a few days before Christmas,” arrived just as the company had run out of money.
Significance
Falcon 1 Flight 4 established that a private company operating outside the traditional government-contractor framework could develop a functioning orbital launch vehicle from scratch. The achievement ended a half-century in which access to space had been exclusively the domain of state programs or large established aerospace primes. The subsequent NASA CRS contract provided the financial runway for SpaceX to develop the Falcon 9, which first flew in June 2010, and the Dragon capsule, inaugurating the commercial cargo era for the ISS. Longer-term, the Merlin engine family that powered Falcon 1 scaled into the nine-engine cluster of the Falcon 9 and the twenty-seven-engine cluster of Falcon Heavy, eventually making SpaceX the world’s most prolific launch provider and enabling the company’s reusable rocket program. The 2008 orbital success is therefore considered the foundational event of the modern commercial spaceflight industry.
Sources
- Falcon 1 — Wikipedia
- SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon 1 Rocket Into Orbit — Space.com
- Falcon — Britannica
- SpaceX: the closest Elon Musk bankruptcy story — Slidebean
Related
- Large Hadron Collider First Beam — The LHC’s first beam occurred just 18 days before Falcon 1’s orbital success, making September 2008 an extraordinary month for science and technology.
- Lehman Brothers Collapse — The same fortnight that saw SpaceX’s triumph also saw the collapse of Lehman Brothers, illustrating the contrasting trajectories of 2008.