I Don’t Need These Russians 118
wanted to be on the safe side and be able to launch another
rocket.^288
The cheapest American rocket was Boeing’s Delta II.
With a launch cost of $50 million, they thought it was too
expensive. So they began a global hunt for cheap rockets.
“We went everywhere: France, small private contractors in
Russia, the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab, the people who
have the X Prize,” Ressi said.^60
In France, they met with Arianespace – the European
organization that launched several of the world’s satellites.
“We rented the penthouse suite of one of the major hotels
in Paris, across from the Louvre,” Ressi said. “We had the
whole top floor, usually rented by the sultan of Brunei
or something. Elon and I invited all our friends. It was
basically about sixty hours of meetings and thirty hours
of partying.”^278
One peculiar thing Elon learned in Paris was that you
first might think all the women are good looking. “Actually
if you look carefully, they aren’t really so good looking,
they just think they are,” Elon said. “They walk proudly,
dress with style and act as if they own the world. Women
are lucky, they can make themselves look better. We [men]
have to settle for the way we look.”81,115
It turned out also the European rockets were too ex-
pensive, so they decided to head east. In 2001, they began
traveling to Russia to negotiate if they could use the Dnepr
rocket, named after the Dnepr river. The Dnepr was a
converted Russian SS-18 Satan intercontinental ballistic
missile developed in the 1960s. An intercontinental ballistic