S8 Ep662: 2. The Grueling Birth of the Falcon 9 Rocket The sources detail the intense development of the Falcon 9, featuring nine Merlin engines housed in an "octaweb" structure. Engineers endured a "road trip from Hades," transporting the massive rocket by truck f
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
2. The Grueling Birth of the Falcon 9 Rocket The sources detail the intense development of the Falcon 9, featuring nine Merlin engines housed in an "octaweb" structure. Engineers endured a "road trip from Hades," transporting the massive rocket by truck from Texas to Florida via backroads, even crashing it into a building in Louisiana. Before the 2010 inaugural launch, crews used a hair dryer to fix rain-damaged antennas. Despite the technical hurdles and 100-hour work weeks, the successful launch proved that a private company could build a medium-lift rocket, eventually securing vital cargo contracts with NASA. (2)
1897 WAR OF THE WORLDS
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel with Eric Berger, the senior staff writer at Ars Technica, most importantly |
| 0:06.1 | the author of the new book, Reentry, SpaceX Elon Musk and the reusable rockets that launched |
| 0:12.0 | a second space age. This is volume two in Eric's chronicling of the trip to Mars. To anticipate, in the first book, we got to the launch from Quadolin Island. |
| 0:26.7 | It's an elaborate story, but on the fourth try, rolling the dice with the last of the money, |
| 0:32.6 | they satisfy the demands of NASA and launch into orbit Falcon 1, one engine, the Merlin engine, |
| 0:39.9 | older version. |
| 0:41.7 | Now we're going to go to Musk's idea, which is nine Merlins in a booster. |
| 0:47.6 | And in the summer of 2009, there's a whole crew of young people who enjoy partying and the demands of a Texas |
| 1:01.0 | summer with crickets and rattlesnakes and heat and squalls and they are getting ready for |
| 1:08.0 | the first stage to go to Florida. What is it that they have to do that summer to prepare |
| 1:13.7 | the first stage? How are they working this, Eric? Well, they have kind of the first stage, the |
| 1:21.3 | booster, they have the engines, but there's so much more that goes into a rocket than just kind |
| 1:27.3 | of the outward appearance, right? |
| 1:28.7 | You've got all of the guts in it, the computers, the flight computers that help the vehicle fly, |
| 1:33.2 | because once a rocket launches, no one is controlling the flight of that rocket. |
| 1:36.5 | It's making all of the calculations on its own. |
| 1:39.4 | You've got to wire up all of the plumbing to get the propellant from the liquid oxygen and liquid |
| 1:45.9 | hydro, excuse me, liquid kerosene tanks down to the engines. You've got all of the electrical |
| 1:51.9 | connections running up and down the vehicle. And just putting that all together for the first |
| 1:57.4 | time, I mean, this was a much more complex rocket than any of the the engineers had worked on before at SpaceX. And so it was just a long, hot summer. And the people who were |
| 2:08.0 | there described it as the hardest they'd ever worked at SpaceX, which is really saying |
| 2:12.4 | something because they certainly put people through the ringer at that company. But it was just, it was the kind of thing where you take, you know, |
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