FTL: A SpaceX Story

Chapter I

Present day.

Late spring. It's that time when you wouldn't be able to tell whether it's March or April.

Hawthorne, California.

The BFR's maiden flight went without a hitch. The incredible, explosive booms of the 31 methalox powered Raptor engines have again, proclaimed SpaceX's uncompromising intention of next-generation space exploration. Spectators' hearts trembled as the enormous booster returned from atop the exosphere and landed precisely onto the launch coupling of pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, at same launch complex where the famous Saturn V rocket ascended over 50 years ago carrying three humans to the lunar orbit and two onto the surface of the moon. Touch, refuel and go space flights were no longer a preposterous dream and gone were the days of million dollars' worth of booster equipment splashing into oblivion.

As Elon's popular analogy on SpaceX's reusable rockets, using expendable launch vehicles are like parachuting out of a 747 at the end of your flight and allowing it to crash. That's just mad, as the audience laughed. He envisioned a future where sending a payload into orbit is not unlike chartering a cargo flight between airports. You would only have to pay a small service charge plus the price of the fuel, which is methane and oxidizer (mostly oxygen), both incredibly cheap. Well, on Earth at least.

Elon had decided to stick with the name BFR. Nominally, stood for the Big Falcon Rocket. He had not-so-secretly loved the Doom reference to call his sophisticated reusable orbit launching system "Big Fucking Rocket". Not an entirely surprising decision for a space company with a track record pebbled with science fiction references.

Even with Space Exploration Technologies Corp again at the top of its PR popularity since the first Falcon Heavy launch, Musk knows more hard work lied ahead before his vision of near future space expedition would realize. The BFR's 45 tonnes of inaugural cargo payload would keep the ISS supplied for the entirety of next year. After booster separation, the BFR ship started its three Raptor vacuum engines and two raptor ASL engines, proceeding towards the ISS' orbit. Upon rendezvous, the flight computer lined the ship up sideways - from the station cupola perspective - before firing the RCS thrusters with robotic and indescribable precision and had docked - completely automated, of course - with the ISS's IBDM docking adapter. The sleek and ample design of the BFR docked sideways to the ISS had hugely resembled the space shuttle missions. A missed sight for more than a decade since the ending of the Space Shuttle program.

...

Nothing's gonna change my world

Nothing's gonna change my world

Nothing's gonna change my world

Nothing's gonna change my world

...

The official video of the first BFR flight on SpaceX's Youtube channel was accompanied by a remastered version of the Beatles'. Which is, incidentally, playing on the office speakers right now, from a shuffling playlist. It's been almost a week since the launch. Elon had been using this period of PR relaxation to enforce SpaceX's production and the rigorous quality assurance procedures on the crewed version of BFR ships and additional boosters. Absolute emphasis has been placed on the BFR's reliability, which has been done by heavily consolidating resources towards the engine durability testing to achieve an even higher rating than the NASA human-rated certification (1 loss in 500 missions), with multiple redundancies built in design. The ship can complete landing with either one of its two atmospheric retro thrusters, allowing the auto-descent procedures to accommodate for the unlikely scenario of an engine failure at any point.