Space exploration Technologies also known as SpaceX was founded in 2002 by serial entrepreneur and visionary Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and to enable the colonization of Mars. At the time no one took the company seriously, I mean how could have anyone imagined that a private company led by someone with no experience in rocket sciences would end up dominating the rocket launch business within a little over a decade and lead the way for building the most advanced rockets on the planet?
How it started
Musk has said on numeral occasions that the moon landing was one of the greatest human achievement if not the greatest. He was enormously inspired by that feat and he thought the logical step for NASA was to go to mars. Musk who is a South-African native left his native country at the age of 17 with his brother Kimbal. Both immigrated in Canada and ultimately fought their way to the United States.
Although Musk’s father insisted that Elon go to college in Pretoria, Musk became determined to move to the United States. As he states, “I remember thinking and seeing that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the world.” Knowing it would be easy to get to the United States from Canada, he moved to Canada against his father’s wishes in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday, after obtaining a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. At the age of 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military.
He left in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania; he graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.
After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a Ph.D. in energy physics. However, his move coincided with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation. He sold Zip2 and got about $22 million from the deal. He later co-founder Paypal which also sold to Ebay, Musk walked from the deal with the lion share of $185 million as the company’s largest shareholder.
After the Paypal deal Musk came with an idea to increase NASA budget with the goal making mars mission possible. In 2001, Musk conceived Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration. Given that rocket were too expensive in the United States, Musk flew to Moscow with some of his closest friends to purchase refurbished Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM).
The Russians did not take him seriously and were completely dismissive and disrespectful to his regard. After a failed second attempt and on his way back from Moscow, Musk calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket actually were only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time. It was concluded that theoretically, by applying vertical integration and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70-percent gross margin. Ultimately, Musk ended up founding SpaceX with the long-term goal of creating a true spacefaring civilization.
Rapid Growth
The company has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2002, growing from 160 employees in November 2005 to 1,100 in 2010, 3,800 employees and contractors by October 2013, nearly 5,000 by late 2015, and about 6,000 in 2018. In that time frame, SpaceX went from having no experience to becoming the most dominant launch provider. The following chart says it all!
Musk posted a twitt in reply to an Ars Technica article about SpaceX’s surge in the launch market in which he reminded that SpaceX achieved this fate despite having heavily subsidized competitors.
Given the impressive progress and success achieved by the company in rocket reusability over the past few years, none of its competitors is laughing now, in fact, the European Space Agency has recently launched a 3-year project to develop the necessary technology for reusable rockets. The proposed concept looks a lot like SpaceX’s approach.
