In 2001, Elon Musk had just pocketed $180 million from the sale of PayPal and was already obsessed with a question most people never ask seriously: Why hasn’t humanity become a multi-planetary species? He visited NASA’s website looking for a Mars mission plan and found nothing. No budget. No roadmap. No timeline.

His first idea wasn’t to build a rocket company. It was a publicity stunt — the “Mars Oasis” project, where he’d send a small greenhouse to Mars with seeds and nutrients to grow a plant and reignite public passion for space exploration. He flew to Moscow twice to buy refurbished ICBMs for cheap. The Russians famously laughed at him and quoted a price of $8 million per rocket.

On the flight home, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the fundamental cost of rocket components. What he found was revelatory: the raw materials — aluminum alloys, titanium, copper, carbon fiber — cost only about 2% of the price of an assembled rocket. The rest was pure inefficiency, government overhead, and contractor markup. The aerospace industry was overcharging because it had no competition.

On May 6, 2002, Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — SpaceX — in El Segundo, California. He put in $100 million of his own money and recruited a team of engineers willing to work insane hours for below-market salaries in exchange for equity in what most of the industry considered a suicide mission.

SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, was designed to be the world’s first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. It was also supposed to be cheap, reliable, and fast. The first three attempts would be none of those things.

The emotional weight of that fourth launch cannot be overstated. By August 2008, Musk was simultaneously running Tesla through its worst cash crisis. He was going through a divorce. He had three attempts remaining across both companies. At one point, a close friend recalled that Musk was sleeping on a friend’s couch and had less than $1 million liquid cash to his name.

Three months after Falcon 1’s historic success, SpaceX signed a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA, reeling from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and facing the 2010 shuttle retirement, had decided to outsource low-Earth orbit logistics to private companies. The establishment was outraged. Congress was skeptical.

But the contract gave SpaceX the runway it needed. The company used the NASA funds to accelerate development of a far more powerful rocket: the Falcon 9, named for its nine Merlin engines arranged in an octagonal pattern.

On June 4, 2010, Falcon 9 launched successfully on its very first attempt. The space industry’s jaw dropped. By contrast, it took Boeing’s Delta IV and Lockheed’s Atlas three and two tries, respectively, to reach orbit on their debuts.

Every rocket ever launched had one thing in common: after use, they were thrown away. Each $50–200 million vehicle used for eight minutes and then splashed into the ocean or burned up in the atmosphere. Elon Musk considered this insane.

SpaceX began secretly working on vertical landing technology as early as 2011 through a testbed program called Grasshopper. Most engineers thought landing a rocket back on its tail was physically impossible at orbital velocities.

On December 21, 2015, SpaceX did what most aerospace veterans said was impossible: the Falcon 9 first stage returned from space and landed vertically at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral. Three days earlier, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin had landed their New Shepard suborbital rocket, prompting a rare public dispute.

But SpaceX kept going. On April 8, 2016, they landed a Falcon 9 on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Then they began re-flying boosters. The rocket that was once a $60M single-use vehicle became a $6M per-use asset. The economics of space changed overnight.

After the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, the United States had no way to send astronauts to space. For nine years, NASA paid Russia up to $90 million per seat on Soyuz capsules. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program was supposed to fix this.

On May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rode SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule “Endeavour” to the ISS — the first crewed orbital launch from American soil in nine years.

Building rockets is expensive. Even with reusability, SpaceX needed a consistent revenue source that didn’t depend on government contracts. The answer was audacious: build the world’s largest satellite constellation and provide global broadband internet from space.

Starlink began as a side project around 2015. Hundreds (eventually thousands) of small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) at roughly 550 km altitude could provide low-latency, high-speed internet to anywhere on Earth. The network would generate billions in recurring subscription revenue to fund SpaceX’s Mars ambitions.