A small recap on the history and the making of Elon Musk`s space exploration program and the reason to why it is one of the most exciting companies of the decade to come. This Blog post is also suitable for all those, who did not follow the company in the early days and who are entering the hype train right now.

Space X - Some Background story

The company was founded by the utter most conflicting personalities of the last decade, Elon Musk. SpaceX`s foundation goes back to 2002 and was one of the first of its kind: a privately owned space program.

Keeping in mind that the space shuttle program was to end, the supply to the International Space Station would be diminished by 50%, leaving Russia to remain as the only remainder of space travel. Further, the founder’s dream is to one day be able to colonialize Mars, a planet yet to be reached by human beings, bearing in mind the extreme costs that this mission would imply under current space programs. Mainly for the latter reason, SpaceX`s initial focus lied on increasing cost-effieciency by investing in the development of reusable rockets. During an interview, Elon Musk referred to it as commercial flights in the actual days are being handled: Sending a rocket to space, delivering its cargo or passengers, returning to earth and after a short turnaround being able to shoot to space once more.

After a lot of failed attemps to gain acess to old (ballistic) rockets from Russian goverment, in order to use them to build some kind of fundamental knowledge, Elon Msuk realized that from the demanded price for such a rocket only 3% were actual production cost. Further, the underlying science remained roughly the same throughout the last decades. Bearing this in mind, instead of using old technologies he opted to begin from scratch, improving existing technologies and ideas.

Since the underlying risk was fairly high he invested his own money without any further funding, such that the main goal at hand was to initially get any kind of rocket working on the lowest amount of money possible. For that, every part used in the rocket would actually be built in the headquarters which has always been a great cost factor. In addition to that, the resulting logistical difficulties were low. Extanding the budget limitation, his aim was to build a team of young and innovative employees who would be willing “…give up their social life…” prioritizing SpaceX and its sucess in their life.

Struggling with fincances and the explosion of the first Falcon rocket, the following two attemps of launches failed, too, puttin gthe company under more distress. Whilst facing problems on his personal life and his other company (Tesla), Elon Musk was facing the last attempt of saving SpaceX with his fourth launch of “Falcon 1”. His company could only continue iff a sucessfull product could be delivered. Fortunately, this las mission was sucessful and turned out to be the first privately financied and produced rocket to go into and even orbit around Earth.

Even though his product was working just fine, money was running out (crisis of 2008) and in order to maintain the company, Elon reached out to several institutions and funds from which only one gave him a positive response (and therefore money): NASA. By this, SpaceX had been awarded 1.7 billion dollars in order to assure the supply to the International Space Station (ISS). In the following years NASA would add another 2.6 billion dollars in order for SpaceX to produce a spacecraft which would take two astronauts to the ISS. Apart from NASA, Google and Fidelity Investments got hold of 1 billion dollars in shares holding now 8.3% of the company (2015), investing in Elon Musk`s idea of delivering satellites in order to create a global telecommunications network, extending Internet supply.

What makes SpaceX be this sucessfull?

One of the reasons of SpaceX`s success and records can be resumed in one single point: They are privately funded. From this, we distinguish three major components and innovations used throughout the history of the company:

• Vertical integration of their spacecrafts.
• Modular approoach from software engineering.
• 85% produced in-house (hardware) -> something quite odd in the aerospcae industry.

Apart from this, it is possible to see the rapid growth of the company and the missions conducted, as listed below:

• Falcon 1, 28/09/2008 -> First privately funded liquid fueled rocket reaching orbit.
• RazakSAT on Falcon 1 (#5), 14/07/2009 -> Sucessfully delivering a commercial satelitte in orbit.
• Dragon capsule demo flight, 09/12/2010 -> Launching to orbit and recovery of the spacecraft.
• Dragon c2+, 25/05/2012 -> Launching spacecraft to ISS.
• SES-8 on Falcon 9 (#5), 03/12/2013 -> Putting a commercial satelitte in geosynchronous orbit.
• Falcon 9 (#20), 22/12/2015 -> First landing of an orbital stage on land.
• Falcon 9 (#23), 08/04/2016 -> First landing of an orbital stage on ocean platform.
• B1021 on Falcon 9 (#32), 30/03/2017 -> First launch and sucessfull landing of reused rocket.
• Dragon 106 on CRS11 mission, 03/06/2017 -> Sucessfull free flight of commercial cargo spacecraft crew.
• Crew Dragon Demo 1, 02/03/2019 -> Sucesfull launching of an human rated spacecraft to space.
• SPX (#72) on Falcon 9 (#69), 03/03/2019 -> Sucessfull automatic dockin gon ISS.
• Crew dragon 2, 30/03/2020 - Sucessfully delivering manned spacecraft to ISS, recovering booster on ocean platform.

One must notice, that the speed in which sucess and history is being made, seems sheerly impossible. This shows not only the dedication of Elon Musk and his team, but also the determination of delivering. And not delivering good but best.

Elon Musk sees not only himself, but human kind as “…multi-planet species…”

Due to this, the problem is more of a logistic kind: As most of the parts are being produced in Hawthorne and lift-offs do generally take place in Cape CAneveral, relocating the rocket is costly and unhandy. For this very reason, SpaceX opted to outsource transportation to trucking services and not by ship, as NASA has don eit with the Saturn V.

For future launches, SpaceX is considering buying land in Port Canaveral, Florida, where rockets shall be refurbished and storage of used boosters.

What next?

From a cost persepctive, Musk plans to make space travel more affordable. Comparing the costs for American astronauts where NASA had to allocate aroung 88 million dollars to the Russian spaceforce per seat in order to launch astronauts to space to 55 million dollars per seat as in SpaceX. Apart from, Elon Musk thinks that it will be possible to reduce the costs to around 1.100 dollars per kilo, much less than the 54.500 dollars from the space shuttle program or the current 2.720 dollars, as for a launch of the Falcon 9.

Nevertheless, the initial idea Musk proposed back in 2001 was to start building miniature greenhouse on Mars in order to grow plants, as taken as an inspiration in the movie “The marsian”, starring Matt Damon. Elon himself can be quoted with the phrase: “Thie woud be the furthest that life has ever traveled.”. That being said, the Mars mission is estimated to start in 2024. During this mission the main goal is to be seeking watersources in order to provide life on the red planet. As Elon said in an interview early in 2016, he would like to die on Mars.”