(photo courtesy of Jenny Hautmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) 

The nerd in me makes Pi Day (3/14) a personal favorite. This recent Pi Day was a special treat. 

We’ve delved into Musk the man, with all his foibles, many times before. He is certainly determined to further cement that self-destructive personal tendency. 

That should not take away from Musk the engineer, though. This week he not only surpassed himself, but also every rocketeer in human history. 

Rocket science is difficult and expensive - so much so that they have typically been funded by nations and huge bureaucracies. 

As an example, the U.S. government recently commissioned the Space Launch System (SLS) with a goal to attain rocket supremacy. Able to lift 95 tons into low earth orbit (LEO), this is planned to be the largest rocket in history. Its first iteration was designed to have a payload of 95 metric tonnes and eventually rival the 140 tonne payload of the king of rockets, Apollo’s Saturn V. 

It will take a decade before the SLS can attain these lofty goals. China too aspires to launches in that range of 140 tonnes to an altitude of between 100 and 1,000 miles, but they too do not expect to attain these heights for another decade at the earliest. 

The U.S. SLS project is expected to cost about $40 billion for the first four launches, despite its reliance on rocket engines and solid rocket boosters from the Space Shuttle era. It has managed just one launch. Intended to occur in 2016, it did not occur until 2022. Another is planned for perhaps late next year. 

This is a colossal program, even if it relied upon decades-old technologies. Because of its tried-and-proven-true technologies, the first launch was a success, albeit an expensive one. China too is pouring tens of billions into their versions of super-heavy launch vehicles. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk doesn’t just talk about it, he does it, and with his own money. On Thursday he succeeded spectacularly. He sent a booster of SpaceX design to the point in which its second stage Starship could separate and continue on halfway around the world. The 33 rocket engines in the first stage and nine engines in the second performed flawlessly and as designed. The Starship stage also practiced opening its Pez-dispenser style opening where the second stage will someday eject satellites in orbit. 

These rocket motors are the most sophisticated and efficient ever designed. They are the only engines that have mastered the most efficient of all designs, a full-flow staged combustion cycle, using cryogenically cooled methane and oxygen as the fuels. Each engine offers almost 600,000 pounds of thrust, with the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any design. But unlike the designs of every other rocket in the past, including the SLS, these rockets are not designed to operate for a few minutes and then burn up as the emptied booster carcass falls to Earth. Instead, they are designed to return to Earth, land, and be reused dozens or a hundred times. They are built to last. 

Even so, Musk anticipates he can build them for less than a million dollars each, which is a hundredth the cost of the RS-25 engines in the SLS. In doing so, he is on course to completely revolutionize space access and travel.

In other words, Musk is doing what others have yet to do, and at one hundredth the cost. Granted, it took him three flights to get it right. You may have heard reports that this third flight failed. This is only because he also had another goal, to attempt to return the booster and Starship back to the surface of the Earth in a controlled manner. No nation or manufacturer has ever tried to return a rocket or booster from orbit to the surface of the Earth on its own power, except Musk. He designed and built his Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets to do just that. After a few failures at first, he now boasts a 99.4% success rate for missions accomplished and for successfully returning home rockets for any mission designed to have a reentry. His only failures was one mission that chose not to launch a secondary payload at a lower than desired orbit, and one failure of the rocket during a preparation for launch. Musk’s record is the envy of the rocketry world. His ability to refly each rocket dozens of times also allows him to bring payloads to space at perhaps a hundredth the price of any comparable competitor. 

Musk’s “failure” on Thursday was only in his partial success to bring his booster and Starship back to the surface. One made it within 500 meters of the surface, and the other developed a spin that caused it to burn up on reentry because its heat shields could not remain aligned in a bellyflop position. He succeeded in doing what no rocket has done before, even if he fell short of doing the impossible. No worries, though. He will probably get that right pretty soon too. 

The SLS may be able to do a fraction of what SpaceX aspires to do, but at a hundred times the cost and a hundredth the rate of launches per decade. The European Space Agency plans to build a reusable first stage rocket like Musk’s Falcon 9, at a similar launch cost, but will be able to only carry a hundredth the payload Musk will launch successfully a hundred times this year alone. He had redefined success in space. He and only he has so far been able to perform at that level. Even if he doesn't fully succeed, he still succeeds more than anybody else in the history of rocketry.

It makes one wonder whether national bureaucracies and the industrial juggernauts they fund can produce the results that one highly motivated entrepreneur can provide. Maybe we all can learn from his successes.