The Greatest Adventurer

How Elon Musk and SpaceX have breathed life back into the space travel industry...

- Keith Gordon

It’s easy now to think of Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the ultimate success story, given the live broadcasts of its rockets soaring into space before landing softly back on terra firma minutes later. After all, there are few harder tasks for a startup than breaking into an established industry full of enormous, well-connected companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and requiring huge amounts of capital investment in research and development before any return can be expected.

With each successive launch seemingly pushing SpaceX’s capabilities further and further, it’s tempting to forget how hard it’s been for the company to not only thrive but even survive. Yet are we really surprised by SpaceX’s willingness to fight the status quo and upend conventional wisdom when we remember who founded the company and still runs it? After all, Elon Musk isn’t one to pass on an opportunity, no matter how challenging.

Whether it was simplifying and securing digital payments on the internet (PayPal), getting the public to accept electric cars (Tesla), or expanding renewable energy (SolarCity), Musk’s ventures all seem to find opportunity in problems that would have discouraged other entrepreneurs. The same goes for SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies), founded in 2002 as Musk’s response to the high cost of launching objects into orbit, as well as NASA’s pullback from many aspects of space travel and transport with the end of the shuttle program. Many foresaw the problem of fewer launch options with NASA scaling back, but Musk wasn’t cowed by the obvious challenges of the private space industry.