November 11, 2010 Last part of the 2010 Hawthorne tour: Musk shows the 17-foot Falcon 9 fairing, the Dragon pressure vessel under construction, and the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 stages, before closing the tour with a call for new hires.
Last part of the 2010 Hawthorne tour: Musk shows the 17-foot Falcon 9 fairing, the Dragon pressure vessel under construction, and the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 stages, before closing the tour with a call for new hires.
So what we're looking at over there, that's a quarter section of the Falcon 9, 17 foot diameter fairing. It's 17 foot diameter obviously, and 50ft long. It's capable of taking the largest satellites in the world. And it could actually literally fit a city bus in that fairing. It's that big because that's just a quarter section of it. It's made of carbon fiber. It's very lightweight and uses the most advanced analytical techniques to optimize the mass. It's actually the lightest weight fairing of its kind as well. What we're looking at here is the Dragon spacecraft pressure vessel. So it's almost done. We just need to do the forward and aft bulkheads. It's actually upside down right now, but you can see the main hatch, some of the windows. The actual common berthing mechanism where it berths to the space station is right there because it would ordinarily be the other way around. And this is an actual Flight fidelity article that's going to go through qualification testing. This area is dedicated to our Dragon spacecraft assembly. So you see various tools. That's for our heat shield making, the composite parts on our heat shield. Over there are the sides, the side shields and the nose cone. That's the engineering test article, basically engineering pathfinder for our heat shield for Dragon, which is used a very advanced material called the phenolic impregnated carbon ablator, which is really the best heat shield material you could possibly have. And this is our engineering test article of our Dragon spacecraft. So it's not flight fidelity. The part we saw earlier, we saw the welded piece, that's actually flight fidelity. But this was used as an engineering pathfinder to figure out how we might make Dragon. And actually it's been very useful. On the right there is a space station berthing mechanism ring. That's an actual ring that will mate to the space station. There's another one on the Dragon itself, although the guide vanes aren't present. Here are various pieces like windows and pushers and frangible nuts. These are structural bulkheads, structural reinforcing bulkheads. That's the little model we use to determine splashdown loading. So here we are in the east high bay. So we have two very large high bays. We're in the east one right now. The east high bay is used for Falcon 9 stage construction and it's also temporarily used for storage, which is why you see various bits and pieces behind me. This area under the high bay is used for Falcon 9 tank fabrication. So you can see behind me various barrel sections for Falcon 9. That's actually serial number two. That completed tank is serial number two of Falcon 9. Serial number one is on the test stand in Texas and then serial number three is in barrel sections on the floor. And we're getting ready to weld together those barrel sections and create our third tank, which would actually be the first flight tank. So the first one is a run tank, second one is the qualification tank and the third one will see flight. That's a Falcon 1 second stage bulge former. So that's a classic bulge forming tool that's used to take two welded cones of typical refractory alloy metal like columbium hafnium alloy and belgian it to a round contour which is the optimized contour for maximizing the efficiency of rocket thrust. This cleaner here is also climate controlled, particulate controlled. And it's currently used for propulsion components as well as temporarily it's used to do composite layout. So that giant tool you see there is the mandrel that's used to create the composite parts for Falcon 9. So it creates the interstage, the dragon trunk section and the propulsion section skirt. Anything that's a body diameter 12 foot diameter cylindrical part. And that'll be moved over to the actual composites area when we have that composite preparation room done, which will be fairly soon. This area is where we do a lot of the Falcon 1 structural assembly. So behind me that's a Falcon 1 half section of a nose cone. That's the tool on which the nose cones are made. That's an avionics, a payload adapter cone. That's another payload adapter cone. That's a mandrel for the Falcon 1 interstage which is similar to the Falcon 9 interstage. In fact, the Falcon 9 interstage is just a scaled up version of the Falcon 1 interstage. This is a barrel section for Falcon 1 Flight 5. So we have Flight 3 on the island, the quadruple atoll. Ready for launch. Almost ready for launch. Flight 4 is going to be right behind that will launch in about three or four, four months time. And then this is Flight 5, which will launch sometime in the first half of next year. We have a lot of customers that are interested in that and we expect to do a deal on that fairly soon. And this area is also used for our composites fabrication. So we've got a big oven there which is used to put big pots in a small oven for smaller parts. What we're looking at here is a Falcon 1 upper stage. So you can see the engine and actuators and all that plumbing is for the attitude control system. It will actually hold the pressure in bottles. There's a lot more stuff that goes in the back. You can see the tank and the little skirt at the back that holds a lot of the structure. That's for flight four. And then the flight five unit is right there behind it with obviously not much stuff done on it yet. This is a snack section. So we offer people that work here get free snacks and drink, which is kind of a common thing in the Internet world but relatively unusual in the space world. And we think people are working late and, and they need a snack or something, they should have one readily available. Alright, well, thanks for following me on the tour. That was just SpaceX Hawthorne. There's actually a lot more other SpaceX facilities. We have a big test site in Texas. We've got a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Launch island in Kwajalein Atoll. And we're looking for great people of all kinds to join the company. So if you're interested, please send us a resume.