I Don’t Need These Russians 130
welding technique... down to the gnat’s ass.”^288
Henry Ford always said there are no big problems;
there are just a lot of little problems. “Ford was just the
kinda guy that when something was in the way, he just
found a way around it,” Elon said. To solve the problem of
why it was so expensive to launch rockets, SpaceX had to
break it down into smaller questions.
The first question the SpaceX team had to answer was
whether they should build a capsule on the top of a rocket
or a new Space Shuttle. Arguing the Space Shuttle should
have retired ten years earlier than it did, they came to the
conclusion a capsule was the best alternative.^53 The idea
behind the Space Shuttle might have been sound, but in
reality it had several drawbacks. “The Shuttle is just an
incredible complex and dangerous machine,” Elon said.^365
The Space Shuttle didn’t have an escape module that
could save the crew if something went wrong after the
launch. AsTitanicwould never sink, the engineers who
constructed the Space Shuttle decided it didn’t need an
escape module because it would never fail.^350 “It [the Space
Shuttle] really is not a good design,” Elon said. “It is some-
thing where if anything goes wrong, the crew dies. And
that is no good. We were much better off with the Apollo
approach [a capsule] where if something went wrong with
the booster, you had an escape module.”^365 The idea behind
an escape module is similar to an ejection seat in a military
aircraft. If something happens after the launch, the escape