SpaceX

Last updated- 20/06/2019

SpaceX was founded on May 6th, 2002, by the billionaire and CEO of the famous electric car company, Tesla. His name is pretty well known across the world because of the bizarre things he has achieved in his career. 

Elon Musk was born on the 28th of June 1971, in Pretoria South Africa. He developed an interest in computers at an early age and managed to sell a video game he created for $500. He later moved to Canada at the age of 17 to avoid mandatory service in the South African military and also so he could attend Queen's University. In 1992, he left Pennsylvania to study physics and business. He began a Ph.D. in applied physics and material sciences at Stanford University in 1995 but dropped out after two days to pursue an entrepreneurial career. He later co-founded Zip2, a web software company, which Compaq bought for $340 million in 1999. He then founded X.com, which was an online bank, and later merged with Confinity in 2000. In that same year, X.com became the famous company PayPal, which was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion dollars in October 2002.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002. He founded it to reduce space transportation costs and he wanted to enable the colonization of Mars. Musk also tried to buy cheap rockets from Russia but the prices were too high according to him. The Russians replied to him saying, "What's the matter little boy, don't have the money?" Elon replied to them saying that he would build his own rockets. On his way home he realized he could start his own space company, and he did! In 2002, Elon was looking for staff for his new company. He approached Tom Mueller(rocket engineer)who agreed to work for Elon. When Elon Musk launched his first few rockets they failed. In fact, one of the launches failed very early in the mission. SpaceX's fourth launch almost killed the company. But today they're doing amazing things like landing the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, and many more achievements! Elon Musk has definitely changed the way we think about rockets and space travel. 

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