The SpaceX Archive
About
The archive
The SpaceX Archive holds the founding decade of SpaceX, 2002 to 2013, in the words of the people who were there. It has 173 documents: 120 company updates, 43 articles from the press of the time, and 10 other documents, from the founding papers to Elon Musk's testimony to Congress.
Every document runs in full, as first published. Nothing is summarized or rewritten. Every line the editor adds names its source.
The timeline
The front page is the decade on one timeline, with 632 marks: every update, article, launch and event, and the photos and video of the time. It scrolls sideways through the years. Each mark opens its document or its source.
The essay
Three Falcon 1 rockets failed between 2006 and 2008. By September 2008 SpaceX had money for one more attempt. The editor's essay asks what SpaceX did differently, and why nobody has copied it: “Atoms are Cheap, Process is Pricey”, on FutureBlind.
The book
This archive began as a book, SpaceX Foundation: the same updates and articles, set in print. The book is printed, and not yet widely published. The Book has the details.
Sources
Where each document comes from, and the sources of the timeline's numbers, are on Sources.
Also from Explorist
If you like this archive, you might like berkshireletters.com: Warren Buffett's letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, from 1965 on, built the same way.
About the editor
Max Olson is an engineer, investor and writer in the California Bay Area. In 2013 he started Explorist Productions to publish Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, a compilation of Warren Buffett's letters made with Buffett himself, which sold over 100,000 copies. He has followed SpaceX since he watched the first Falcon 9 launch in June 2010. This archive began as his research into how SpaceX worked in its first years, read from the primary sources. He writes at FutureBlind.
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