Risky Business

Before that launch, I’d talked to everyone working on the project. I said that if flight four failed we’d do flight five, and if flight five failed we’d do flight six. I would never give up on something as long as I believed there was a reasonable chance of success.

Space is risky, and we knew it. The phrase ”It ain’t rocket science” implies that rocket science is pretty hard—and it is. Only a few countries in the world have gotten anything at all into orbit.

While our first three test flights did not reach orbit, it would be inaccurate to call them failures, as each one taught us a lot about the design of the rocket. And none of the problems were related to production or quality assurance. So even though we had only one success out of four flights, that doesn’t mean our success rate is 25 percent. In principle, all our future flights should work if we build them the same way.

Reusability will come later. It’s hard; nobody has ever really achieved it. Even the space shuttle isn’t really reusable, in that it costs more per flight than it would to buy a new expendable launch vehicle of greater cargo capacity. I think we can do it. So far, though, we haven’t even been able to recover the first stage; on flight four, it didn’t have enough thermal protection and was fried on reentry. On flight five, which is coming up later this year, we took off the recovery system to give us more room in the payload module. But on flight six we plan to make a strong effort to recover the rocket. Reusability is critical to making multiplanetary life financially possible, so this is something we have to get right and hone to perfection.

For more articles, go to Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?