SpaceX is slated to fulfill its most important mission to date.
Born to a model mother and engineer father in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk grew up with a voracious appetite for reading, technology, and computers. Those interests became particularly important when he was bullied in school, he has said during interviews, and they helped form the basis for his technical disposition.
“He’s a guy with unlimited ambition,” his brother, Kimbal Musk, said during a"in 2014. “It’s not a typical type of ambition. His mind just needs to be constantly fulfilled, and the problems that he takes on therefore need to be more and more complex over time in order to keep him interested.” He found more complex problems to solve in North America, where he had ties through his Canada-born mother and American grandparents. Degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania paved the way for him to pursue graduate school at Stanford, but he left before earning a degree. Business ideas dominated his mind.60 Minutes ," speaking on the topic of Silicon Valley-produced software. “I also read a lot of comic books, and they all seemed to be set in the United States. So it’s like, ‘Well, I’m going to go to this place.’ ” His first major business venture was Zip2, a kind of online directory founded in 1995 that included maps – a major feature considering digital directions wouldn’t become ubiquitous until smartphones came along more than a decade later. The company developed online city guides for The New York Times, which reported inIn 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, one of the first online financial services companies. After a series of mergers and transitions, it was renamed to something more familiar to today’s users: PayPal. When the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk made about $160 million from the deal, setting him up to personally invest in his long-forming dream of starting Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.To get his spaceflight ambitions – primarily taking payloads and humans to Mars – off the ground, Musk attempted to buy refurbished Russian ballistic missiles. That proved to be too expensive, and working with Russian officials was difficult. “After my second or third trip back from Russia, I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s got to be a better way to solve this rocket problem,’ ” Musk said at thein Austin, Texas. “So we embarked on that journey to create SpaceX in 2002.” Musk knew he was entering an entrenched, high-risk industry: “In the beginning, I actually wouldn’t even let my friends invest because everyone would lose their money. I thought I’d rather lose my own money.”Over the years, Musk has been clear: NASA saved SpaceX. After Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit three times but succeeded on the fourth try, his upstart company was strapped for cash and turning the page to its final chapter., NASA announced SpaceX had been awarded a $1.6 billion contract to fly supplies to the International Space Station, a program now known as Commercial Resupply Services. Since 2012, SpaceX has flown Dragon to the ISS 20 times on newer Falcon 9 rockets. Its Crew Dragon capsule has flown to the station once and is slated for a second trip with Behnken and Hurley. Along the way, his company staged coup after coup. In 2007, it acquired the rights to lease Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 40, which hosted Titan rockets. “He was most impressive in cobbling together what was needed for a successful launch site with scraps and whatever was available,” said Dale Ketcham, Space Florida vice president of government and external relations. “Some of his most impressive achievements were based on his ability to make stuff happen by using what was available and using simple physics to get done what needed to get done.Aside from Mars, one of Musk’s primary goals is reusability. An airline doesn’t discard a Boeing 747 after each flight; similarly, Musk wants rockets to be reused. More than 50 SpaceX boosters have flown back to Earth – either to Florida, California or an offshore drone ship – where some were refurbished for future flights. The launch provider's pricing supports Musk's belief that reusability will bring down the cost of flying people and cargo to orbit. A typical Falcon 9 launch costs $50 million to $60 million, which is significantly cheaper than other orbital vehicles in its class., the company’s constellation of low-orbit satellites that beam internet connectivity to the ground, Musk is building the revenue streams necessary to fund his desire to build a vehicle capable of going to Mars. That vehicle, known as Starship, is a massive rocket in prototype form at SpaceX's remote facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
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