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SpaceX executive talks rocket R&D: “Nobody paid us to make Falcon Heavy”

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Set to give a keynote speech on October 3rd at 2018’s International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Hans Koenigsmann – SpaceX Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability – attended an impromptu talk one day prior, titled “From the University of Bremen to SpaceX”.

Speaking before a small audience, the University of Bremen graduate and fourth employee to join SpaceX discussed his opinions of Falcon Heavy, BFR, and more, frankly relating how SpaceX intentionally chose to build Falcon Heavy on its own, going so far as to turn down funding reportedly offered by one or more US government agencies.

Falcon Heavy’s first static fire, Feb. 2018. (SpaceX)

From Bremen to SpaceX (to Bremen)

Hopefully a sign of things to come for his 09:20 UTC, Oct. 3 keynote, titled “Reusability: The Key to Reliability and Affordability”, Hans’ precursor talk centered around the circuitous path that led him from University of Bremen to SpaceX, humorously describing how he “got bored of airplanes pretty quickly” after becoming an aerospace engineer. He quickly turned to space, hopping between a number of German smallsat projects that eventually led him to settle in the U.S. after flying there and back “at least 25 times”.

Once in the US, he wound up working at spaceflight startup Microcosm – alongside now-president and COO of SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell – for several years before running into Elon Musk and almost immediately accepting the eccentric entrepreneur’s SpaceX job offer in 2002. He has worked for SpaceX ever since and now spends a majority of his time managing and overseeing its BFR, Block 5, and Crew Dragon programs with a focus on systematically ensuring reliability. He touched on the company’s BFR development program and pointed to the fabrication of massive composite structures as the single most pressing challenge facing SpaceX engineers and technicians.

Asked by an audience member about the apparent difficulty of developing the heat-shield segment of BFR’s spaceship upper stage (BFS), Koenigsmann was quite confident that it would be a relatively easy aspect of the craft’s development, making the argument that what really matters to the craft is overall heat transfer per unit of its shield. From a basic comparison of the area of a given heat shield and the spacecraft’s mass at reentry, his lack of concern is probably warranted – a BFR spaceship’s worst-case LEO reentry is likely to be less stressful than an average Space Shuttle reentry.

“Try [to not] get money from the government”

Perhaps most intriguing of all Koenigsmann’s comments was an almost unprovoked segue into the US government’s involvement in Falcon Heavy development. According to the SpaceX executive, the company was actually approached by “the government”, with the unknown agency or agencies stating – in Hans’ words – that they wanted to be a part of the rocket’s development. According to Hans, SpaceX responded in an extremely unorthodox fashion: “we said, ‘Nope! We just wanna build it, you can buy it when it’s ready and we’ll charge you for the service.’” He noted in the next sentence that funding was the primary lever on the table:

“It’s a great position to do this, you gotta find the money, you gotta know people that have money and are willing to invest in your company, and [SpaceX has] been lucky enough to know some of those people.” 

In other words, when given an opportunity to either rely on government funding or some other source of capital for a given R&D project, SpaceX – or at least Hans Koenigsmann, VP of Reliability – would apparently recommend the latter option in almost all cases. Again, without being prompted, he elaborated on his feelings about funding sources, culminating in a statement that is simply profound coming from an executive in the aerospace industry. The following quote is unabridged and straight from Hans himself:

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“You need to [try to not] get money from the government, otherwise the government will tell you what to build and how to build it… they will tell you how to build this and that’s just not always – I mean for some things it’s the best to do, but in others it’s actually not.”

 

This sentiment could suggest that SpaceX will seek to prioritize private funding sources for the development of future vehicles like BFR’s rocket and spaceship, although there is plenty of room for interpretation in Hans’ IAC 2018 comments. SpaceX currently maintains strong and productive relationships with both NASA and the USAF, primarily centered around the company’s $2.6B fixed-price contract for the development and operation of Crew Dragon.

Watch and listen to Hans Koenigsmann’s full presentation below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs2LBeLCo_s


For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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SpaceX just launched its secret Starfall saucer again

SpaceX launched its Starfall capsule again on Bandwagon-5, this time listed openly beside rideshare customers.

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An artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starfall capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. (Image: SpaceX)
An artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starfall capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. (Image: SpaceX)

SpaceX launched its Starfall reentry capsule for the second time on Tuesday morning, flying it as the payload of the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission. Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida at 7:04 a.m. ET with 32 payloads, and the first stage booster, on its 19th flight, landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas about nine minutes later.

Starfall was scheduled to separate last, 2 hours and 48 minutes after liftoff. The final customer satellite on SpaceX’s mission timeline comes off the upper stage about an hour and nine minutes in, which left a long gap before the capsule was due to be released alone. SpaceX later posted that the payload deployment sequence is complete. At liftoff, the company said Starfall “enables affordable, routine access to a microgravity environment, providing unique opportunities for on-orbit manufacturing, scientific research, and testing.”

As Teslarati reported before the first Starfall flight, SpaceX made no public announcement about the vehicle then, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings. This time Starfall is an item name on the official mission page, listed beside paying rideshare customers. SpaceX has still not said what, if anything, is aboard this Starfall, Spaceflight Now noted.

The FAA’s environmental assessment from May describes a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that weighs roughly 4,600 pounds and can bring 2,200 pounds of payload back to Earth.

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Interestingly, the same rocket also carries a competitor’s hardware. Varda Space Industries launched its W-Series 7 capsule on Bandwagon-5, a spacecraft about three times smaller than Starfall that will test whether microgravity can improve the solubility of a cancer drug called Protac. It is Varda’s ninth reentry capsule, and W-8 and W-9 launched earlier this month on Transporter-18. SpaceX has been Varda’s launch provider since the company’s first Falcon 9 rideshare contract in 2021.

SpaceX has not published where or how this Starfall will come down. The preview we ran in June described a recovery from the Pacific Ocean, and the company has not said whether this flight follows the same plan. The launch also arrives hours before SpaceX posts its third quarter results after the market closes, a report we previewed earlier this week.

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The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”

The Boring Company has modified a Tesla powered tunnel truck to carry freight containers underground.

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The Boring Company has found a second job for the Tesla hardware it already runs underground. In a post on X, Elon Musk’s tunneling company showed its latest Prufrock Liner Truck modified to carry a standard 20 foot shipping container. “Using TBC tunnels to transport freight,” the company wrote. “The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20′ shipping container. Fits like a glove!”

The photo shows a red container sitting on a long, low white chassis parked outside, with drive hardware visible at one end. The Boring Company did not say where or when freight hauling would start, which customers it has in mind, or how many trucks it is converting.

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Until now, the liner trucks have hauled concrete. Teslarati reported in August on Liner Truck 3, which uses Model 3 battery packs and drive units to move more than 22,000 pounds of precast tunnel segments to the boring machine. It has 28 miles of range, tops out at 12 mph, and is piloted remotely from the company’s operations center in Texas. The freight version appears to be the same platform with a different bed, and The Boring Company has not said whether it will also be remotely piloted.

Freight has been on the company’s menu for years. When TBC updated its product lineup in 2021, its freight tunnel was described as sized to fit a standard shipping container, “barely.” The company later used the idea at Tesla’s own factory, where Prufrock 3 dug a tunnel to Giga Texas that now moves finished Cybertrucks away from the production line.

The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D in September at a $23 billion valuation, and Teslarati has covered how that money is tied to a UAE tunneling push and a faster Nashville build. In Nashville, Prufrock MB1 and MB2 are mining at the same time, and a third machine is expected to launch in late October. Each machine needs a steady supply of liner trucks, so any design that works for segments and containers alike gives the company more use out of the same Tesla parts.

The Vegas Loop remains the only Boring Company system open to the public, and it moves passengers in Tesla vehicles. A freight service would be a separate product, and the post gave no indication that one is close to launch. For now, it is a truck, a container and a short caption saying they fit together.

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Elon Musk will give ‘every kid in America’ a SpaceX share in 2027

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Credit: Grok Imagine

Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”

SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.

It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.

Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.

Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:

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There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.

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