Chapter Four - SpaceX, Failure, and Fire

CHAPTER FOUR

SpaceX, Failure, and Fire

ELON MUSK WASN’T a rocket scientist.
But he was about to become one.

After PayPal, he could’ve retired. Bought an island. Lived off the interest. Played golf with other billionaires.

Instead, he decided to colonize Mars.

In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. He didn’t start it because space was cool (though it was). He started it because NASA had lost its mojo and no one else was trying to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

The long-term goal? Build reusable rockets. Slash launch costs. Make life interplanetary.

The short-term reality? Explosions.

Musk and his scrappy team worked out of a warehouse in El Segundo, California. They had no experience building rockets from scratch, but they were young, hungry, and unreasonably committed.

Their first rocket was called the Falcon 1 (a nod to Star Wars). It was a skinny, two-stage launch vehicle designed to lift small payloads into orbit. It looked like a soda can taped to a firework.

They launched Falcon 1 three times between 2006 and 2008.

All three launches failed.

Engines exploded. Rockets veered off-course. Millions went up in smoke. Engineers slept under desks, rewrote code at midnight, and ate cold pizza while watching dreams fall from the sky.

They were running out of money.

Musk was now funding SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity all at once. He’d sunk nearly his entire PayPal fortune into these ventures. If the next launch failed, everything might collapse.

In September 2008, Falcon 1 launched for the fourth time.

This time, it made orbit.

For the first time in history, a privately developed liquid-fueled rocket had reached Earth’s orbit.

SpaceX wasn’t a joke anymore.

Weeks later, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

Musk had pulled off the impossible: he’d built a rocket company from scratch and survived.

But that was only phase one.

He didn’t just want to reach orbit.

He wanted to reach Mars.