Launching a Truck Into Space 139
lunar lander that helped Neil Armstrong and the other
astronauts to land on the Moon. Mueller had now designed
a prototype rocket engine in his garage. One day, he got a
telephone call from a space entrepreneur.
“How much do you think we can get the cost of
an engine down, compared to what you were predicting
they’d cost at TRW?” Elon asked.
“Oh, probably a factor of three,” Mueller replied.
“We need a factor of ten,” Elon said.^288
Elon asked him if he could get the prototype engine to
fly. Mueller replied that he could if he had a team with
skilled engineers. Elon hired him and Mueller decided to
leave his job at TRW. “I had several other opportunities,
but when Elon approached me I could see he was different,”
Mueller said. “The others always had a gimmick, like a
helicopter blade or some miracle technology. Elon just
wanted to take the best technology already out there, build
a simple vehicle and use the right propellants.”^307
For fourteen years, Mueller worked for TRW and can
now compare the differences between TRW and SpaceX.
It took him and 80 other engineers five years to design an
engine intended for the Delta IV rocket, but Boeing decided
to choose another engine. All the money and resources used
to develop the original engine were wasted. “I can’t think
of anything I was responsible for at TRW that ever flew,”
Mueller said.^71
At SpaceX, Mueller developed a rocket engine together
with a team of only 25 engineers. They got the cost of the
engine down by a factor of ten, as Elon had demanded,