spacex founded

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American aerospace manufacturer, space transportation services and communications company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. SpaceX manufactures the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, several rocket engines, Dragon cargo, crew spacecraft and Starlink communications satellites.

SpaceX's achievements include the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1 in 2008), the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft (Dragon in 2010), the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (Dragon in 2012), the first vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015), the first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2017), and the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the International Space Station (SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 in 2020). SpaceX has flown and reflown the Falcon 9 series of rockets over one hundred times.

SpaceX is developing a satellite megaconstellation named Starlink to provide commercial internet service. In January 2020 the Starlink constellation became the largest satellite constellation in the world. SpaceX is also developing Starship, a privately funded, fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch system for interplanetary spaceflight. Starship is intended to become the primary SpaceX orbital vehicle once operational, supplanting the existing Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon fleet. Starship will be fully reusable and will have the highest payload capacity of any orbital rocket ever on its debut, scheduled for the early 2020s.

2001–2004: Founding

In 2001, Elon Musk conceptualized Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse and grow plants on Mars. He announced that the project would be "the farthest that life's ever traveled" in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration and increase NASA's budget Musk tried to purchase cheap rockets from Russia but returned empty-handed after failing to find rockets for an affordable price

On the flight home Musk realized that he could start a company that could build the affordable rockets he needed. By applying vertical integration,using cheap commercial off-the-shelf components when possible, and adopting the modular approach of modern software engineering, Musk believed SpaceX could significantly cut launch price.

In early 2002, Musk started to look for staff for his new space company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached rocket engineer Tom Mueller (later SpaceX's CTO of propulsion), and invited him to become his business partner. Mueller agreed to work for Musk, and thus SpaceX was born SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees Musk personally interviewed and approved all of SpaceX's early employees, even going so far as convincing Larry Page to transfer a Google employee from San Francisco to Los Angeles so that the employee's spouse, a potential SpaceX hire, would take the job.

and first orbital launches

SpaceX developed its first orbital launch vehicle, the Falcon 1, with private funding The Falcon 1 was an expendable two-stage-to-orbit small-lift launch vehicle. The total development cost of Falcon 1 was approximately US$90 million to US$100 million.

In 2005, SpaceX announced plans to pursue a human-rated commercial space program through the end of the decade, a program which would later become the Dragon spacecraft In 2006, NASA announced that the company was one of two selected to provide crew and cargo resupply demonstration contracts to the ISS under the COTS program

The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures. These failures almost ended the company as Musk had planned and financing to cover the costs of three launches; Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time as well Musk was reportedly "waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain" because of the stress

However, things started to turn around when the first successful launch was achieved shortly after with the fourth attempt on 28 September 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded the first Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to SpaceX in December, thus financially saving the company. Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon after retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009; this allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9 Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at this time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with NASA

Commercial launches and rapid growth

SpaceX launched the first commercial mission for a private customer in 2013. In 2014, SpaceX won nine contracts out of the 20 that were openly competed worldwide That year Arianespace requested that European governments provide additional subsidies to face the competition from SpaceX Beginning in 2014, SpaceX capabilities and pricing also began to affect the market for launch of U.S. military payloads, which for nearly a decade was dominated by the large U.S. launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) The monopoly had allowed launch costs by the U.S. provider to rise to over US$400 million over the years

In January 2015, SpaceX raised US$1 billion in funding from Google and Fidelity, in exchange for 8.33% of the company, establishing the company valuation at approximately US$12 billion The same month SpaceX announced the development of a new satellite constellation, called Starlink, to provide global broadband internet service. The following June, the company asked the federal government for permission to begin testing for the project, aiming to build a constellation of 4,425 satellites

The Falcon 9 had its first major failure in late June 2015, when the seventh ISS resupply mission, CRS-7 exploded two minutes into the flight The problem was traced to a failed 2-foot-long steel strut that held a helium pressure vessel, which broke free due to the force of acceleration. This caused a breach and allowed high-pressure helium to escape into the low-pressure propellant tank, causing the failure