On September 15, 2021, SpaceX's first all-civilian spaceflight was launched. Musk believes in making space travel accessible to everyone. Falcon Heavy successfully completed its first night launch about two months later, on June 25, landing both side boosters successfully but narrowly missing a soft touchdown with the center rocket core.Įlon Musk celebrates the launch of the Crew Dragon capsule. All three rockets returned to Earth successfully after Falcon Heavy's second launch, on April 11, 2019, although the c entral core stage did not survive the journey back to shore from its ocean drone-ship landing pad, due to high sea swells. The rocket blasted its cargo to low Earth orbit, and then an upper stage fired to carry the car somewhere toward Mars and the asteroid belt.Īlthough its two side boosters landed successfully on twin pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, its center rocket core crashed and burned. In March 2018, SpaceX successfully flew a heavier rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which carried the Roadster car on its maiden flight. Dragon is hefted using a rocket called the Falcon 9. In completing the mission before Boeing, the Crew Dragon became the first crewed vehicle to fly from the U.S. At the same time that Musk was working on the Crew Dragon capsule, Boeing were also in the final stages of testing for carrying humans into space. SpaceX’s human-rated version of Dragon, called Crew Dragon, carried astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS on May 30, 2020. Related: Every SpaceX Starship explosion and what Elon Musk and team learned from them (video) Dragon won multiple rounds of funding under NASA's Commercial Crew program and is now sending regular shipments of cargo to the station. The company's track record was a factor in NASA awarding it money to develop the Dragon spacecraft for cargo runs to the ISS. Musk funded SpaceX through his own money at first, and then gained enough experience to attract millions of dollars from NASA to develop his rockets and spacecraft, and to bring cargo to the ISS. SpaceX has operations at Cape Canaveral but the company's headquarters are in Hawthorne, CA. The SpaceX building at Cape Canaveral, FL. The first successful rocket SpaceX flew, the Falcon 1, took four tries to get off the ground before a successful test flight in September 2008. On the contrary, I thought the chances of success were tiny, but that the goal was important enough to try anyway." By no means did I think victory was certain. reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 100," he added. What is blocking us from doing that, Musk wrote in a 2008 Esquire piece, is "the ridiculously recalcitrant problem of big, reusable, reliable rockets." Musk has repeatedly said that humans must be an interplanetary species to combat the threat of asteroids and potential human catastrophes, such as nuclear war and engineered viruses. In the face of naysayers, he doubled down and worked on a business plan. He began SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) in 2002 with ambitious plans to launch a viable, privately funded space company. Musk now had a fortune in hand, and at the tender age of 30 was looking to put his energies into something new. That company, later known as PayPal, was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Elon Musk saved Tesla from bankruptcy before becoming CEO (Image credit: Getty)Īfter Compaq bought Zip2 for more than $300 million in 1999, Musk turned his attention to online bill payments.
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