Press SpaceX’s early success and struggles are not a product of Musk alone. The engineers and technicians working on the Falcon 1 were building a liquid-fueled rocket from scratch, which had never been done by a private company before.
They were manufacturing their own parts, writing their own code for the rocket’s computer. And sometimes they were doing this in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at SpaceX’s launch facility at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 5,000 miles from California.
