Ryan M. Patrick

Posted this on Twitter, may as well share here too. No NDAs will be violated, and of course opinions are my own.

I was the government mission manager for the STP-2 (Space Test Program-2) launch – the first DOD Falcon Heavy. I owned the $160M contract, had to make all technical and programmatic decisions, etc. It was a long 3 and a half years but on launch day it was all worth it in the end!

I had met Elon before, a few years back, at SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, but he had been sitting down (an important point for later). And I had heard rumors he was coming to the launch but there were so many details I’d had to keep track of it probably had slipped my mind. We were launching at the end of our window (0230 EDT) so imagine my shock when at around 1:00 AM this very large man walks in, surrounded by a small horde of his sons, and two security detail.

Elon is a big dude, if you ever see him in person. Maybe 6’3″ or 6’4″ and broad at the shoulders. Which shocked me because I had thought he’d be a smaller guy. He came over, introduced himself to me and all of the Air Force colonels/colonel-equivalent civilians, and then started to explain how rockets work to his kids.

He’s a weird dude. Like, I’m a weird guy, and he’s next level. He laughed at strange places in a conversation, made jokes connecting things that aren’t really funny, and tried to sell one of the O-6s a Tesla while he was talking with someone else. Also engaged me in a conversation about classic video games – I prefer Half Life, he’s more of a Doom/Quake player. Just a surreal experience, but they all moved to the other side of Firing Room 4 for the actual launch.

When the Falcon Heavy went up, we’d had an issue where the sensor for the igniter (TEA-TEB) went out so we kept dumping it into its reservoir, so there was about 2-3x as much as we needed. The force blew the T/E back all of the way through the closed LC-39a hangar door into its resting spot! Elon took one look at the camera feed, said something along the lines of “that’s going to be expensive,” and then moved on like nothing had happened.

The boosters came back to LZ-1 and LZ-2 and we all watched it from the fire escape – Elon’s security keeping a close eye on the USAF colonels! – and then went back to finish executing the mission. SpaceX *nailed* orbital insertion, all 25 satellites went exactly where they needed to go. And they caught a fairing half with the Ms. Tree boat – the first time they had ever done that, and Elon and a few O-6s watched it happen on my government laptop! However, they didn’t recover the center core, and with that Elon and his entourage left before we made it to our disposal orbit in MEO. He *did* though tell the SpaceX VP to hand out the mission patches before he departed.

I’m much more neutral on Elon than everyone else here, but I’ve never had bad experiences with him as a person. His companies, though, on the other hand…