SpaceX is valued at around $400 billion and is critical for U.S. space access, but it surely wasn’t at all times the powerhouse that it’s today.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Using money that he comprised of the sale of PayPal, Musk and his recent company developed their first rocket, the Falcon 1, to challenge existing launch providers.
“There have been actually lots of startup aerospace corporations seeking to tackle this market. They recognized we had a monopoly provider called United Launch Alliance. That they had merged the Boeing and Lockheed rocket launch capability to at least one company, they usually were charging the federal government lots of of tens of millions of dollars to launch satellites,” said Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator at NASA.
In 2003, Musk paraded Falcon 1 across the streets of Washington hoping to draw the eye of presidency agencies and the multi-million dollar contracts that they offered. It worked, and in 2004, SpaceX secured a couple of million dollars from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force to further develop its rockets.
Despite the federal government support, the corporate struggled. Its first three launches of the Falcon 1 failed to succeed in orbit.
“NASA, and specifically the the initial business cargo contract, is what saved the corporate when it was on the point of bankruptcy,” said Chris Quilty, president and Co-CEO of Quilty Space, a space-focused research firm.
NASA awarded the $1.6 billion contract, referred to as Industrial Resupply Services to SpaceX in 2008, just months after the primary successful flight of the Falcon 1. The contract called on SpaceX to make use of its recent rocket, the Falcon 9, together with its Dragon capsule to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station over the course of 12 missions. In 2014, SpaceX won one other NASA contract value $2.6 billion to develop and operate vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Today, SpaceX dominates large parts of the space market from launch to satellites. In 2024, SpaceX conducted a record-breaking 134 orbital launches, greater than double the quantity of launches done by the subsequent most prolific launch provider, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, in accordance with science and technology consulting firm BryceTech. These 134 launches accounted for 83% of all spacecraft launched last 12 months. In accordance with a July report by Bloomberg, SpaceX was valued at $400 billion.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are the first means by which NASA launches astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. The corporate’s Starlink satellites have turn out to be indispensable for providing web access to distant areas in addition to to U.S. allies during wartime. The corporate’s Starship rocket, though still in testing, can be key to the U.S. plan to return to the moon. SpaceX can be constructing a network of spy satellites for the U.S. government called Starshield as a part of a $1.8 billion contract. Even competitors including Amazon and OneWeb have launched their satellites on SpaceX rockets.
“The ecosystem of space is modified by, really it’s SpaceX,” Garver said. “The lower cost of access to space is doing what we had dreamed of. It’s built up an entire community of corporations all over the world that now have access to space.”
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