Scott Nolan

It's just going to perform.

And so, yeah, it's SpaceX culture back then was really almost equal parts aerospace.

automotive, and then kids straight out of school who wanted to work hard on something, had the latest training.

So we knew all the analytical techniques, but didn't know much about the industry.

And these people from the industry, from automotive or from aerospace or from wherever, would just be the gray-haired people who just taught us what we had to do and work together to go as fast as we could to get capability back.

And so when I got there, 2003, we were designing test stands that our engines were going to go into.

And then by 2004, we were testing engines.

By 2005, they were really working well.

2006, I then got to go work on the Dragon program and worked on a couple of subsystems there for controlling the temperature, controlling the pressure inside the capsule.

And that capsule was going up to the space station.

That was the plan.

So by this time, the space shuttle had been grounded.

So we'd had the accident with the space shuttle.

And we'd put that fleet on pause.

And there was a big need by NASA.

NASA said, we need capability to go back to the space station.

And we need to be able to take cargo up there.

We need to be able to return cargo from the space station for experiments that we're doing for astronauts that are up there.

At the time, we were totally relying on Russia to get cargo and astronauts up and down.

And so NASA wanted to create a new domestic capability for that, both a capsule and a new launch vehicle since the space shuttle was grounded.