WELCOME

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

June 19, 2018 by James Ashley

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

SpaceX says that it is working with private companies and NASA to rebuild its manufacturing plant at Omelek to make the rocket. The Falcon 1 is about 10 centimeters long, about a foot wide and about a half in diameter, and it weighs about 4.6 kilograms.

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is no stranger to engineering problems. In 2014, in a major speech at the TechCrunch conference, he described SpaceX's Falcon 9 as "extremely expensive" to build. In the following year, he also referred to SpaceX's attempt to build a rocket that would carry astronauts for a decade as "a terrible idea," something he called a "strategic failure."

After SpaceX's last successful failure, it was still a far cry from the success of the company's rocket boosters. The Falcon 9 was capable of flying for a year or two, but at a cost of $50 million, and at that point, it was a "serious and unproven program," according to Musk. So, in July, Musk said, "We'll be there."

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"We'll try to make every last bit of the [Falcon] rocket for this mission."

The SpaceX engineers who died in 2012 were not just SpaceX's top engineers, they were also the biggest names in space exploration.

The first rocket of the decade was named after the company's founder, Terry T. T. Tern, who died in 2006. That rocket had one of its longest flights, with more than 7,000 kilometers (1,000 miles) of flight time. Tern's name has been associated with science and exploration for more than a century. On his deathbed, he was asked whether he had ever dreamed of being a rocket booster. "It felt incredibly amazing," he said.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, after initial design, is seen in the hangar of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a launch testing in July, 2014.

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)