SpaceX is one of Elon Musk’s biggest success stories. Since he founded the company in 2002, it has become a major player in the space industry.
SpaceX launches happen on a fairly regular basis. All of its Florida launches take place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base or the Kennedy Space Center, according to NASA.
Most recently, Falcon 9 launched 23 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The last non-Starlink mission was a Falcon 9 launch of Dragon’s 30th Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station
SpaceX wasn’t always an industry darling. It nearly went bankrupt in 2008 following three failed SpaceX launch attempts.
According to Musk, its fourth attempt was its last chance at being viable, and it was this last-ditch effort that made SpaceX the first private company to achieve a successful orbital launch. This success encouraged NASA and some private investors to invest further.
Musk funded the company in part with his sale of PayPal to eBay. He invested a third of his fortune into the venture, received $278 million from NASA, and got further funding from the United States Department of Defense.
The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, cost $100 million to build.
A new Starship mega-rocket is key to Musk’s ambition to bring costs down to about $10 million per launch, a crucial move for those vying to set up their futuristic industries in space like asteroid mining, or space factories.
“With Starship, SpaceX is poised to slash launch costs by an order of magnitude again,” Brendan Rosseau, a teaching fellow at Harvard Business School writing a book about the space industry, told Business Insider.
SpaceX’s Starship captured a stunning video of its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere as it finished its first successful flight through space in March.
SpaceX aired the footage live on its webcast on X, showing thick ultra-heated plasma lashing Starship and turning parts of the spacecraft red-hot.
It’s hard to design a spacecraft that can withstand those extreme conditions, which may be why Starship ultimately didn’t survive the fall.
But the thick resistance of the atmosphere also helps slow down the fall, so that Starship can eventually land itself on solid ground and live to fly another day.
