It all started with the dream of growing a rose on Mars.
That vision, Elon Musk's vision, morphed into a shake-up of the old space industry, and a fleet of new private rockets. Now, those rockets will launch NASA astronauts from Florida to the International Space Station -- the first time a for-profit company will carry astronauts into the cosmos.
"What I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go," Musk told a cheering gathering of space professionals in Mexico in 2016.
Musk "is a revolutionary change" in the space world, said Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, whose Jonathan's Space Report has tracked launches and failures for decades.
Michael Lopez-Alegria, a ex-astronaut and former Commercial Spaceflight Federation chief, said "I think history will look back at him like a da Vinci figure."
Musk has become best known for Tesla, his effort to build an electric-vehicle company. But SpaceX predates it.
At 30, Musk was already rich from selling his internet financial company PayPal and its predecessor Zip2. He arranged a series of lunches in Silicon Valley in 2001 with G. Scott Hubbard, who had been NASA's Mars czar and was then running the agency's Ames Research Center.
Musk wanted to somehow grow a rose on the red planet, show it to the world and inspire schoolchildren, recalls Hubbard.
"His real focus was having life on Mars," said Hubbard, a Stanford University professor who now chairs SpaceX's crew safety advisory panel.
The big problem, Hubbard told him, was building a rocket affordable enough to go to Mars. Less than a year later Space Exploration Technologies, called SpaceX, was born.
There are many space companies and like all of them, SpaceX is designed for profit. But what's different is that behind that profit motive is a goal, which is simply to "Get Elon to Mars," McDowell said. "By having that longer-term vision, that's pushed them to be more ambitious and really changed things."
Everyone at SpaceX, from senior vice presidents to the barista who offers its in-house cappuccinos and FroYo, "will tell you they are working to make humans multiplanetary," said SpaceX's former space operations director, Garrett Reisman, an ex-astronaut now at the University of Southern California.
Musk founded the company just before NASA ramped up the notion of commercial space.
Traditionally, private firms built things or provided services for NASA, which remained the boss and owned the equipment. The idea of bigger roles for private companies has been around for more than 50 years, but the market and technology weren't yet right.
NASA's two deadly space shuttle accidents -- Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 -- were pivotal, said W. Henry Lambright, a professor of public policy at Syracuse University.
When Columbia disintegrated, NASA had to contemplate a post-space shuttle world. That's where private companies came in, Lambright said.
After Columbia, the agency focused on returning astronauts to the moon, but still had to get cargo and astronauts to the space station, said Sean O'Keefe, who was NASA's administrator at the time. A 2005 pilot project helped private companies develop ships to take cargo to the station.
SpaceX got some of that initial funding. The company's first three launches failed. The company could have just as easily failed, too, but NASA stuck by SpaceX and it started to pay off, Lambright said.
"You can't explain SpaceX without really understanding how NASA really kind of nurtured it in the early days," Lambright said. "In a way, SpaceX is kind of a child of NASA."
But it all comes back to Musk's dream. O'Keefe said Musk has his eccentricities, huge doses of self-confidence and persistence, and that last part is key: "You have the capacity to get through a setback and look ... toward where you're trying to go."
For Musk, it's Mars.
A Section on 05/24/2020