Inside SpaceX
SpaceX's original headquarters in El Segundo were not quite up to the company's desired image as a place where the cool kids want to work. This is not a problem for SpaceX's new facility in Hawthorne. The building's address is 1 Rocket Road, and it has the Hawthorne Municipal Airport and several tooling and manufacturing companies as neighbors. While the SpaceX building resembles the others in size and shape, its all-white color makes it the obvious outlier. The structure looks like an enormous, rectangular glacier that's been planted in midst of a particularly soulless portion of Los Angeles Country's sprawl.
Visitors to SpaceX have to walk past a security guard and through a small executive parking lot where Musk parks his black Model S, which is on the side of the building's entrance. The front doors are reflective and hide what's on the inside, which is more white. There are white walls in the large hall entrance, a funky white table in the waiting area, and a white check-in desk with a pair of orchids sitting in white pots. After going through the registration process, guests are given a name badge and led into the main SpaceX office space. Musk's cubicle is a supersize unit, it sits to the right where he has a couple of celebratory Aviation Week magazine covers up on the wall, pictures of his boys, next to a huge flat screen monitor, and various worthless objects on his desk, including a boomerang, some books, a bottle of wine, and a giant samurai sword named Lady Vivamus, which Musk received when he won the Heinlein Prize, an award given for big achievements in commercial space. Hundreds of other people work in cubicles amid the big, wide open area, most of the executives, engineers, software developers, and salespeople tapping away on their computers. The conference rooms that surround their desks all have space-themed names like Apollo or Wernher von Braun and little nameplates that explain the label's significance. The largest conference rooms have ultramodern chairs, while panoramic photos of a Falcon 1 taking off from Kwaj or the Dragon capsule docking with the ISS hang on the walls in the background.
Take away the rocket swag and the samurai sword and this central part of the SpaceX office look just like what you might find at your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley headquarters. The same thing cannot be said for what visitors encounter as they pass through a pair of double doors into the heart of the SpaceX factory.
The 550,000-square-foot factory floor is difficult to process at first glance. It's one continuous space with grayish epoxied floors, white walls, white support columns. A small city's worth of stuff like people, machines, noise has been pilled into this area. Just near the entrance, one of the Dragon capsules that has gone to the ISS and returned to Earth hangs from the ceiling with black burn marks running down its side. Just under the capsule on the ground are a pair of the 25-foot long landing legs built by SpaceX to let the Falcon rocket come to a gentle rest on the ground after a flight so it can be flown again. To the left side of this ground after a flight, so it can be flown again. To the left of the entrance there's a kitchen, and to the right side, there's the mission control room. It's a closed off area with expansion glass windows and fronted by wall-size screens for a rocket's progress. It has 4 rows of desks with about 10 computers each for the mission control staff. Step a bit farther into the factory and there are a handful of industrial work
<br />
areas separated from each other in the most informal of ways. In some spots there are blue lines on the floor to mark off an area and in other spots blue workbenches have been arranged in squares to cordon off the space. It's a common sight to have of the Merlin engines raised up in the middle up and tuning its bits and pieces.
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Visitors to SpaceX have to walk past a security guard and through a small executive parking lot where Musk parks his black Model S, which is on the side of the building's entrance. The front doors are reflective and hide what's on the inside, which is more white. There are white walls in the large hall entrance, a funky white table in the waiting area, and a white check-in desk with a pair of orchids sitting in white pots. After going through the registration process, guests are given a name badge and led into the main SpaceX office space. Musk's cubicle is a supersize unit, it sits to the right where he has a couple of celebratory Aviation Week magazine covers up on the wall, pictures of his boys, next to a huge flat screen monitor, and various worthless objects on his desk, including a boomerang, some books, a bottle of wine, and a giant samurai sword named Lady Vivamus, which Musk received when he won the Heinlein Prize, an award given for big achievements in commercial space. Hundreds of other people work in cubicles amid the big, wide open area, most of the executives, engineers, software developers, and salespeople tapping away on their computers. The conference rooms that surround their desks all have space-themed names like Apollo or Wernher von Braun and little nameplates that explain the label's significance. The largest conference rooms have ultramodern chairs, while panoramic photos of a Falcon 1 taking off from Kwaj or the Dragon capsule docking with the ISS hang on the walls in the background.
Take away the rocket swag and the samurai sword and this central part of the SpaceX office look just like what you might find at your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley headquarters. The same thing cannot be said for what visitors encounter as they pass through a pair of double doors into the heart of the SpaceX factory.
The 550,000-square-foot factory floor is difficult to process at first glance. It's one continuous space with grayish epoxied floors, white walls, white support columns. A small city's worth of stuff like people, machines, noise has been pilled into this area. Just near the entrance, one of the Dragon capsules that has gone to the ISS and returned to Earth hangs from the ceiling with black burn marks running down its side. Just under the capsule on the ground are a pair of the 25-foot long landing legs built by SpaceX to let the Falcon rocket come to a gentle rest on the ground after a flight so it can be flown again. To the left side of this ground after a flight, so it can be flown again. To the left of the entrance there's a kitchen, and to the right side, there's the mission control room. It's a closed off area with expansion glass windows and fronted by wall-size screens for a rocket's progress. It has 4 rows of desks with about 10 computers each for the mission control staff. Step a bit farther into the factory and there are a handful of industrial work
<br />
areas separated from each other in the most informal of ways. In some spots there are blue lines on the floor to mark off an area and in other spots blue workbenches have been arranged in squares to cordon off the space. It's a common sight to have of the Merlin engines raised up in the middle up and tuning its bits and pieces.
Tell me in the comments below. If you had liked and or if I need improvements. I have opinions seriously, and please share this, seriously, this helps a lot with the growth of this blog.
Most of the online readers don't share this article as they think the bloggers don't require social share. Don't forget to subscribe. However, the fact is the,
I have developed this blog piece by piece, your share will continue encouraging me. So, I appreciate your support in advance. Hope you had a nice time reading. Thanks for reading. Read to gain knowledge.Kudos!!!!!!
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