It took four years for Elon to turn his first start-up, Zip2, into a $307 million cash sale. It took four years for Musk to make PayPal the largest online payment provider in the world, only for eBay to make it the sites primary payment engine to the tune of a $1.5 billion. Its been four years since Musks Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, came into being in El Segundo, California.
Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, had a lift-off but was lost shortly after.
Falcon 1: Vehicle lost shortly after lift-off

Posted: Mar 24, 2006 10:30 pm EST
Following a number of busted deadlines, Elon Musk's rocket finally took flight today. Unfortunately the vehicle was lost later in the first stage burn.

The customer for this mission was DARPA and the Air Force. Falcon 1 was to accelerate to 17,000 mph (twenty-five times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes. The target orbit was 400 km X 500 km (just above the International Space Station) at an inclination of 39 degrees.

Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, was to provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.

Dispatched through thick and thin

The 34-year-old South African Elon Musk earned multi-millions from the sale of Web-software maker Zip2 to Compaq in 1999 and of PayPal to eBay in 2003. Since then, Elon has been losing much of his money on building his own private rocket in a test facility in Texas.

The pioneer has dispatched through thick and thin - offering all the details of his battle for space. "I think Ive come to realize what makes orbital rocket development so tough. It is not that any particular element is all that difficult, but rather that you are forced to develop a very complex product that cant be fully tested in its real environment until launch and, when you do launch, there can be zero significant errors," he said.

The inital launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base (near Santa Barbara, California) was abandoned last year for a tropical island - the Island of Dr. Yes. As a result of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by the Defense Department over the past several decades, Kwajalein is home to some of the worlds most powerful radar tracking and space communications systems.

"I expect the Falcon V development to be considerably faster and easier than the Falcon I development, because it uses most of the same components," Elon said earlier about his extended plans. "Unlike Falcon I, where we had to develop two complete engines from scratch, Falcon V in its initial version requires only minor adjustments to the existing Merlin engine. The avionics are the same as Falcon I and the airframe architecture on Falcon V is just a wide body version of Falcon I. Also, most of our launch site infrastructure and the environmental permits already accommodate both vehicles," says Elon.

But this is all only the beginning, according to Elon: His ultimate goal is to "make life multi-planetary." He wants human life spread out to the moon and Mars, using the next generation Falcon handling 100 tons of load.


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