ISTANBUL
A Turkish engineer working on SpaceX’s first rocket project, Falcon-1, blamed the company’s owner, the billion-dollar tycoon Elon Musk, forcing them to work as “slaves.”
“We were left alone on an island. He [Elon Musk] he made us work as slaves, ”Bülent Altan said in a book called“ Lift-off, ”describing his early days in the company.
Altan, who worked on the construction of the Falcon-1 launch pad and rocket on the small Pacific Ocean of Omelek in the early 2000s, noted that Musk called the engineers “success.”
“In our first year on the island, there was a big problem with logistics. There were delays in delivering food to the island, ”he said.
According to the Turkish engineer, in the fall of 2005, workers on the island “stood up and began a strike.”
“We all sat on the island’s shores like wild beasts waiting for their prey,” he said.
“After a while, a plane, which couldn’t land on the island, dropped frozen chicken wings and cigarettes, and we ran to collect them all,” he said.
The first test of Falcon-1 failed; the rocket dropped the flames and crashed on the ocean, as mentioned in the book written by Eric Berger.
In the second test in March 2007, the rocket reached a place.
According to Altan, workers on the island received a rich meal full of good food and drink only after the third trial.
Meanwhile, the future SpaceX Starship exploded on a landing pad after a city tour in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 3rd.
The ship Mars looked like it was orbiting a whirlpool but then it exploded on a landing pad with such force that it rushed into the air.
The tape happened just minutes after SpaceX announced its success. Two previous test planes crashed into fireballs.
The full-scale prototype of Musk’s proposed Mars spacecraft went up more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) after taking off from southern Texas on March 3. It descended horizontally over the Gulf of Mexico and then moved just in time for landing.
The shiny bullet-shaped rocket was still intact this time at a touchdown, prompting SpaceX reporter John Insprucker to say, “it’s the third-time charm as it is called” before SpaceX ended its broadcast- nets of the test.
But then the Starship exploded and was thrown into the air before sinking to the ground in flames.
There was no immediate report from SpaceX of what went wrong. But Musk took the bright side in a tweet: “Starship 10 landed in one piece! RIP SN10, honorable release. ”
“The SpaceX team is doing a great job! One day, the real measure of success is that Starship flights are common, ”he said.
Musk plans to use Starships to send humans to the moon and Mars.
The last two prototypes reached similar heights in December 2020 and February but sank into the ground at Boca Chica, Texas, and exploded.
Each of the last three test trips lasted six and a half minutes.