About 25 years ago, Adeo Ressi, Elon Musk’s former college roommate, begged the tech entrepreneur not to start a rocket company.
Musk had just reaped millions of dollars from the sale of PayPal, which he helped create, to eBay. He and Ressi were looking for ways to send terrestrial plant life to Mars. They had a budget of $50 million, but soon discovered that it was not enough to cover the cost of a rocket. So Musk told his friend that he was going to build his own.
Ressi said he had organized a panel of space experts one day in a hotel conference room in Santa Monica, California, and brought in Musk to hear why the idea was silly. Private spaceflight was expensive and the economics made little sense, the dozen people present said. But Musk didn’t pay attention to them.
“I really want to congratulate him for his incredible perseverance,” Ressi said in an interview. “For making it happen.”
Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has come a long way since Ressi’s failed intervention. On Friday, SpaceX debuted on the stock market as the world’s largest initial public offering, a $2 trillion behemoth that has launched hundreds of rockets into space; operates a dominant satellite Internet service, Starlink; and oversees Musk’s social network and artificial intelligence efforts, X. The company’s initial public offering was so big that Musk became the world’s first billionaire.
However, SpaceX’s success was never a sure thing. Musk and his team of executives and engineers overcame numerous obstacles and solved problems as varied as rocket physics and connecting multiple satellites in orbit.
Musk acknowledged how implausible SpaceX’s achievements were. On Friday, at the company’s Starbase headquarters in Texas for the IPO, the 54-year-old said he had given SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of success.
“I told people this: ‘I’ll probably fail. But we should try,'” he said.
Musk’s space dreams were initially modest and centered on sending some seeds to Mars in a small greenhouse through a company he had started with Ressi, Life to Mars. He thought that if people on Earth saw green shoots growing on Mars, they would be excited enough to pressure Congress to give more money to NASA.
So Musk traveled to Russia in hopes of finding an old ICBM that could launch the greenhouse into space cheaply. The Russians despised him. On the flight back to the United States, Musk turned to Jim Cantrell, a space industry veteran, and some other colleagues and told them he would build one himself.
“It’s an amazing story,” said Cantrell, who became SpaceX’s fourth employee. “Now we see what it has become, but at the time it seemed quite inconsequential.”
In the early years of SpaceX, it alternated between striking failures and resounding successes. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, was small. Its first two launches, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, failed. SpaceX was starting to run out of money.
At the time, Musk said he would try one more time to make the rocket work, recalled Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and former friend of Musk’s.
The third attempt also failed. But Musk later said he would try again. If he failed a fourth time, he might have given up entirely, Zubrin said.
“That would have been the end of SpaceX,” he said.
In September 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 launch reached orbit. A fifth did the same almost a year later.
By then, SpaceX had won a key contract from NASA to develop the much larger Falcon 9 rocket and its accompanying Dragon capsule to carry cargo to the International Space Station. The first launch of the Falcon 9, in 2010, reached orbit, as did the second six months later. In 2014, SpaceX won another major contract from NASA to carry astronauts, not just cargo, to the space station.
By charging less to launch satellites, SpaceX grew to dominate the rocket business. SpaceX also used its rapid and inexpensive launch capability to deploy Starlink Internet satellites starting in 2019. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth to transmit high-speed Internet to nearly every corner of the planet. That idea dates back a couple of decades, but Starlink, now SpaceX’s biggest business, was the first that didn’t end up bankrupt.
Musk, who simultaneously runs electric car maker Tesla, also turned his attention to getting people to Mars with a spacecraft big enough to carry colonists. (Shipping seeds was no longer the main objective).
In 2016, Musk revealed initial plans for SpaceX’s largest rocket, now known as Starship, at an International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico. Earlier that year, he said at another conference that the company would launch a mission to Mars in 2025.
Since then, SpaceX’s test flights have included failures and hopeful advances, although rarely as fast as Musk promises. In March 2024, he said Starship would reach Mars “within five years.” A year later, he said the spacecraft would leave for Mars “late next year.” NASA has said the best-case scenario would be for humans to reach Mars in the mid-2030s.
In May, Starship’s 12th test flight was a huge success, as the upper stage spacecraft crossed halfway around the world and performed maneuvers to simulate a landing. But the booster stage failed when Starship returned to Earth, halting future flights for now.
Even if there are future failures, Musk has stoked a generation of space enthusiasts, especially with SpaceX’s stratospheric IPO this week.
“What SpaceX is really doing is building the infrastructure that can support and sustain this bright new promise of a new space economy,” said Royden D’Souza, 49, a freelance journalist and podcast host in Doha, Qatar, who has focused on the cosmos for nearly three decades. “When you build a highway to space, when you build a highway to a new place, there is the potential for completely new economies to emerge.”
Sheera Frenkel contributed with reports.
