SpaceX Revisits First Successful Launch To Orbit With Falcon 1 Rocket

Space.com

The Falcon 1 made history on September 28, 2008 by becoming the "first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach Earth orbit," according to SpaceX.  Hear from the team that made it happen.  Credit: SpaceX

Transcript

00:00In the early days it was very clear, it was like a David and Goliath story, you

00:07know, no privately developed launch vehicle company had ever achieved Earth

00:10orbit. Everybody tried and failed. I started within the first year of the

00:14program and we were designing and building Falcon 1. The rocket was out on

00:19Omelac. It was so cool to go to this secluded place for work. All that was

00:24there was the launch pad, a very small hangar, an office trailer, and basically

00:29an outhouse for a bathroom. We would sleep under the stars sometimes, have

00:33horrific sunburns sometimes. It was like Omelac Survivor we called it and we were

00:39right there next to the rocket and the launch pad. Living through the first few

00:45failures of Falcon 1 was really difficult. We literally had blood, sweat, and tears

00:50on that rocket and then to see it come back down so quickly it was heartbreaking.

00:54Flight 2 was disappointing because we made it almost all the way to orbit. We

00:58basically started spinning out of control once the vehicle was in space but then

01:02flight 3 was just so sad to basically go through stage separation and then have

01:07the stages come back and recontact. That one hurt the most. We were essentially out

01:11of money at that time. We had had the three failures but we luckily we had had

01:16another kind of spare vehicle ready to go. We pushed super hard to get that

01:20vehicle ready. We rented a C-17 to fly the first stage and second stage over to

01:26Kwajalein instead of taking the three weeks on the barge. When we were landing you

01:30know we heard a loud pop. We looked back and saw that the first stage tanks had

01:34sunken in. I think we thought for sure we were done. I think we thought that was the

01:39end of SpaceX.

01:40We still felt like the underdogs. We still had

01:45everything to prove so it was just like nope we're gonna fix it and we're gonna

01:48make this happen. Three weeks later I think we had the first successful flight

01:52of Falcon 1.

02:02It worked. We buckled the stage on the way to Kwajalein and we still managed to get

02:08that rocket to orbit so that gave us good confidence moving forward that we'd be

02:12able to get anything to orbit. For me it was like a dream come true because it was

02:16something that we had been working so hard for for years like since I started

02:19at SpaceX and that we had seen so many failures for. I just felt validated and

02:24proud of the team for doing something that I think a lot of people didn't think

02:28was possible.

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