While SpaceX eyes its “BFR,” an early employee now pursues an “SFR”

Vector could begin orbital flights of its micro-rocket by 2018. (credit: Vector Space Systems)

Before he founded SpaceX to colonize Mars, Elon Musk turned to long-time aerospace veteran Jim Cantrell in 2001 for advice. The rocket-building bug hadn’t bit Musk yet, but the tech prodigy still wanted to make a grand gesture to get NASA and the rest of the world talking about Mars. Musk had settled upon the idea of sending mice to Mars and back, having them procreate along the way. With about $20 million to burn, Musk sought to buy three old Russian ICBMs and retrofit them as launch vehicles.

It was a crazy plan. But Cantrell, who had worked with the Soviet and then the Russian space program for more than two decades, agreed to help smooth negotiations with the Russians. The scheme fell apart, of course, but that failure led Musk to the epiphany that he should build his own rockets, and he founded SpaceX in June 2002. Cantrell said at the time that the only foreseeable money-making pathway was big payloads: multiton communications and national security satellites.“In those days, you’d look at the market, and the only rational decision you could make was to start small and grow the size of the vehicle,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell left SpaceX in 2002, seeing the venture as too risky and unlikely to turn a profit. (It succeeded, he said, because Musk could not conceive of failure). However, even as SpaceX has become a dominant player in the large satellite launch industry, the small satellite industry has grown rapidly. The miniaturization of communications and imaging satellites has led to a new generation of rocket companies, such as Firefly Space Systems and Rocket Lab, which have built smaller launchers. Their rockets will generally heft payloads larger than 100kg into Sun-synchronous orbits 500km or higher.

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