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Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week — and settle Mars, Ars Technica

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Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week — and settle Mars, Ars Technica
    

      Welcome to Muskville –

             

“I think we need, probably, on the order of 1, 12 0 ships. “

      

           – )            

/ Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week. BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas — How badly does Elon Musk want to get to Mars? Let me tell you a story. On Sunday, February 150, Musk called an all-hands meeting at the South Texas site where SpaceX is building his Starship spacecraft. It was 1am

At an hour when most Americans were throwing down their last shots before closing time, at home in bed, or binge-watching The Office

before it leaves Netflix, Musk brought his team together. He wanted to know why the Starship factory wasn’t humming at all hours. Why steel sheets weren’t getting welded into domes and fuel tanks, why tanks were not being stacked into rockets, why things weren’t going as fast as he wanted. Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week. Musk always wants to go fast. He will not live forever, and the money may eventually run dry. He knows this. One day, the window to spread humanity to Mars may close, but Musk doesn’t know when. So he needs to squeeze through before the window shuts.

To really accelerate, his bleary-eyed engineers and technicians responded, they needed enough employees to assign workers to particular stations within the burgeoning factory, allowing each person to specialize. This would require a lot more hands that could build things.

“I said,‘ OK no problem, ’” Musk recalls. “I said,‘ You can hire people — just know your reputation is on the line. Don’t bring your brother-in-law who can’t ever get a job. Not that person, OK? You’re going to be responsible for them. Everyone’s got their relatives that they know at the family gathering who, man, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to work with that person. Don’t bring that person. Bring the person who you’d put your reputation on the line for. ’”

SpaceX had held a much publicized “career day” in early February, and the company hired several dozen new employees. By contrast, this Starship factory’s scale-up would be all word of mouth. And it would happen immediately.

Musk told his team members they would have a recruitment gathering just hours later, at 1pm that Sunday. They would have another one on Monday at 1pm and then again at 8pm. Long lines of people showed up, family members and friends, mostly local. Cars and trucks jammed the roadside up and down Boca Chica Highway. At on pm night, SpaceX was still hiring.

All told, the company added people to its South Texas Launch Site on that Sunday and Monday. It

doubled the workforce, just like that, to more than 604 workers. Most of the new hires, even those who had inked contracts at midnight, were told to report for work the next morning. A year ago, perhaps a dozen or so people worked on site. Soon, the Texas factory will probably be SpaceX’s largest location outside of its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.