“SpaceX is very focused on going to Mars, and they talk about how the other work they do generates resources for that,” he says. Bruno wonders if SpaceX might be a little too obsessed with its long-term vision of colonizing Mars (Musk wants to move a million people there over the next century) to sweat the details of mundane cargo launches today. “He’s not as present in the space community as Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX,” Bruno says, a gentle jab hinting that the polymath Musk’s mind may be occupied elsewhere. “Space was getting kind of boring for the general public.” “Elon Musk is someone you have to absolutely admire for the excitement he has brought back to space,” he says. “I don’t know that ULA has that kind of dynamic going on.”īruno, 55 years old to Musk’s 47, responds graciously to being cast in the “clueless old duffer” role.
“SpaceX is famous for working young kids to the bone, burning them out in two to three years, and still having a line around the block waiting to get in,” he says. Michael Lopez-Alegria, former astronaut and ex-president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, explains how the rival companies are perceived.
Reliability, though, is less inspiring than inventiveness. That’s the most important mission: the very next one.” (Corporate headquarters is near Denver.) “We have a slide we show internally, which shows 122 boxes with little pictures of rockets, and a little blank box at the end. “One of the subtle things you would notice, if you hung out with us, is that we count,” says Bruno, during a break from an executive meeting held at a hotel near the company’s manufacturing center in Decatur, Alabama. Reliable ULA has been, its Delta and Atlas rockets completing 122 successful launches as of last fall, and five more since. The imperium in this case is United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of America’s two aerospace titans, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, mashed together a dozen years ago to create a reliable national delivery service for U.S. Old Space, according to this construction, stays hopelessly mired in the past.īruno is in charge of the establishment empire striking back. Among space enthusiasts, Musk and the company he founded, SpaceX, are the disrupters, the swashbuckling innovators whose cheap, reusable rockets will pave the way for an explosion of orbital commerce and creativity. Tory Bruno resists the temptation to trash-talk Elon Musk, for the most part.
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