1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500 employees = ?
South African-born
born entrepreneur
Elon Musk, 40, ended up in the
United States because, he says,
it’s where great things happen.
Musk is gambling that his
company, SpaceX, can change
the world with its Falcon rockets
and Dragon capsules by carrying
cargo, and eventually people, to
orbit. (Space X)
You can be rich enough to buy a
rocket and still get sticker shock. In
early 2002, PayPal co
co-founder Elon
Musk,
sk, already a multimillionaire at
30, was pursuing a grand scheme
to rekindle public interest in
sending humans to Mars. A
lifelong space enthusiast with
degrees in physics and business,
Musk wanted to place a small
greenhouse laden with seeds and
nutrient gel on the Martian
surface to establish life there, if
only temporarily. The problem
wasn’t the lander itself; he’d
already talked to contractors who
would build it for a comparatively
low cost.
The problem was launching it.
Unwilling to pay what U.S. rocket
companies were charging, Musk
made three trips to Russia to try to
buy a refurbished Dnepr missile,
but found deal-making
deal
in the wild
west of Russian capitalism too risky
financially.
On the flight home, he recalls, “I
was trying to understand why
rockets
were
so
expensive.
Obviously the lowest cost you can
make anything for is the spot
value of the material constituents.
And that’s if you had a magic
wand and could rearrange the
atoms. So there’s just a question of
how efficient you can be about
getting the atoms from raw
material state to rocket shape.”
That year, enlisting a handful of
veteran space engineers, Musk
formed
Space
Exploration
Technologies, or SpaceX, with two
staggeringly ambitious
a
goals: To
make spaceflight routine and
affordable, and to make humans
a multi-planet
planet species.
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