What Building a Spaceship Is Like

From June to September this year, I lived out one of my dreams: working alongside some of the smartest engineers alive today to help build a spaceship (and I got paid for my help).

This magical place isn't Disneyland, but does invoke the same excitement in the hearts of engineers around the world. It's a company that I think will change the world, and it's called Space Exploration Technologies -- "SpaceX" for short.

SpaceX gives its interns in Hawthorne, Calif. the menial tasks of "computational fluid dynamics," "finite element analysis," and so on -- and expects the material to be known thoroughly within a week or two, of course. I was one of these interns, and what was in store for me was plenty enough to make my heart beat just a little faster for the rest of my life.

A spacecraft meant to ferry people calls for a window, so I was given the task to design a testing apparatus (from scratch) for the windows on SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

I was supervised, seeing as I had many questions on how to climb the proverbial brick walls laid before me. Some of those walls included how to navigate the not-so-user-friendly software analysis tools, whether to choose between steel or aluminum for the testing device, what the best fastener choice was, and so on.

Since the company's inception by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, SpaceX has been on course to disrupt how the world views space. Currently it costs millions, sometimes billions of dollars to reach orbit. In the near future, SpaceX plans on reducing this cost by about 10 times of what it is today.

Think it can't be done? It's already been started... In September 2008, SpaceX tried a fourth launch of their Falcon 1 rocket and successfully carried a 363-pound payload into orbit (watch the video below). SpaceX will charge about $8 million for similar rocket launches, versus competitors' $20-$40 million price tag per launch of a similar size.

In the near future, I hope space will be just another place where people live, business is a day-to-day affair, and transportation is cheap. When that day comes, I'll be proud to have been a small part in the beginning of the future.

James W. Pura is a mechanical engineering undergraduate at University of California, San Diego, specializing in entrepreneurial space.

Photos, top to bottom: James Pura; SpaceX