Elon Musk Reinventing Space Technology

Musk is a 48 years old engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur, and philanthropist. The founder, CEO, and chief engineer plus designer of SpaceX also the early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla.Inc.

Early life

Elon Musk was born on June 28th, 1971 to Maye Musk, a model and dietician and Errol Musk, a South African African electromechanical engineer, pilot, and a sailor in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He has two younger siblings Kimbal and Tosca.

His maternal grandfather Dr. Joshua Haldeman was an American born Canadian, His Paternal grandmother was British and also had a Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.

After the divorce of his parents in 1980, Musk lived mostly in the suburbs of Pretoria with his father. He decided to live with his father after two years of his parents’ divorce but he came to regret the decision very quickly. Musk is estranged from his father and deems him to be a terrible human being.

Elon Musk was an avid reader during his childhood. His interest in computing developed at a young age, almost 10 while using the commodore VIC-20.

He started to learn computer programming using a manual card and by the age of 12, he created and sold the code of a BASIC-based video game called Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.

One of his childhood readings was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series which taught him that one should always take the set of actions that prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and also reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.

Elon Musk was severely bullied throughout his school life and was once hospitalized when a group of bullies threw him down a flight of stairs.

He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston high school before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School.

When Elon Musk was about to go to college his father insisted that he should go to college in Pretoria but he became determined to move to the United States instead, Musk knew that it would be easier to move from to Canada to the United States and moved there against his father’s wishes in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday. After getting a Canadian passport through his Canadian born mother.

Education

While Musk was awaiting his Canadian documentation Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five months.

Later when he went to Canada Musk entered Queen’s University in 1989. Avoiding mandatory service in South African military. In 1992 he left for University of Pennsylvania. Musk graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Wharton and Got a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the College of Arts and Sciences.

In 1994 Musk got two internships in Silicon Valley over the summer, one at an energy storage start-up called Pinnacle Research Institute, Which researched electrolytic ultra-capacitors for energy storage and also at the Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games.

Bruce leak, the former lead engineer behind Apple’s QuickTime who had hired Musk at the time said that “Musk had boundless energy, Kids these days have no idea about hardware or how stuff works but he had a PC hacker background and was not afraid to just go figure things out”.

In 1995, Musk was accepted into a Ph.D. program in energy physics/materials science. At Stanford University, California.

Career 

Zip2| Elon Musk and Facts

Eager to pursue opportunities in the internet boom, he decided to launch his first company Zip2, a web software company with his brother Kimbal in 1995, with money raised from small angel investors.

The company developed and marketed an online city guide for a newspaper publishing industry, with included maps, directions, and yellow pages. With the vector graphics mapping and direction code being implemented by Musk in Java. Musk got contracts with the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch. Musk’s attempts to become the CEO of the Company were thwarted by the board.

Later Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 Million US dollars in cash in February 1999. Musk got US$22 million from his 7 percent share from the sale.

X.com and PayPal

Musk Co-founded another online financial service and email payment company called X.com with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2. After a year the company merged with Confinity which had a money transfer service called PayPal in 2001.

 Musk was ousted from his role as CEO in October 2000, due to a disagreement with other company’s executives over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix –based infrastructure to Microsoft one but remained on the board nonetheless.

In October 2000, eBay acquired PayPal for US$1.5 billion in stock of which Musk received US$165 million. Musk was the largest shareholder of the company and owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.

In December 2017, Musk purchased Domain X.com for an undisclosed amount of money state that it has a sentimental value for him.

Tesla| Electric Cars, Solar Panels

Elon Musk also co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. Tesla is an automobile manufacturing plant and as the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk leads all of the product design, engineering, and global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products, and solar energy products.

From the day of the inception of the company in 2003, Tesla’s mission has been to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. The first Tesla product was debuted in 2008, The Roadster sports car, followed by the Model S sedan, which was introduced in 2012 and the Model X SUV Launched in 2015. Model S received Consumer Reports’ Best Overall Car and has also been named the Ultimate Car of the Year by Motor Trend.

Model X was the first-ever SUV to 5-star safety ratings in every category and sub-category on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s test.

Tesla started deliveries of Model 3 in 2017, a mass-market electric vehicle with more than 320 miles of range, and unveiled Tesla Semi, which is designed to save owners around $200,000 on a million miles based on fuel costs alone.

 In 2019, Tesla unveiled Cybertruck, which will have better utility than a traditional truck and more performance than a sports car, as well as the Model Y compact SUV, which started customer deliveries in early 2020.

Along with automobiles Tesla also produces three energy storage products, the Powerwall home battery, the Powerpack commercial-scale battery, and Megapack, which is designed for utility-scale installations.

Tesla became the world’s first vertically-integrated sustainable energy company with the acquisition of SolarCity in 2016, the leading provider of solar power systems in the U.S, and in 2017 released Solar Roof – a striking and affordable energy generation product.

The Launching of SpaceX 

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“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than in the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”

-Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the lead designer at SpaceX and oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to the orbit of the Earth and ultimately to other planets. The SpaceX Falcon1 was the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach the orbit in 2008.

On 22nd May 2012 Musk and SpaceX made history by sending the Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The rocket was sent to the international space station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there. Making it the first time a private company had ever sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. 

Musk said about the launch “I feel very lucky.. For us, it’s like winning the Super Bowl’’.

In December 2013, the Falcon 9 carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance in which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched with the Earth’s rotation.

In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and the communication systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX experienced the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made entirely from reusable parts, the kind of development that opened doors for more affordable space travel.

In November 2017 the company experienced a setback when an explosion occurred during a test of the company’s new Block 5 Merlin engine. It was reported by SpaceX that no one was hurt and the company further claimed that the incident would not hamper its planned rollout of future generations of Falcon 9 rockets.

In February 2018, the company achieved another milestone moment with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. It’s armed with an additional 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and also serve as a vessel for deep space missions. 

The Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk’s cherry-red Tesla Roadster for the test run, equipped with cameras to’’ provide some epic views” for the vehicle’s planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, SpaceX experienced the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, the Block 5 Falcon touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after its liftoff.

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for the BFR, a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was going to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the BFR in 2022, as part of his ambitious goal to colonize the Red Planet.

In March 2018, Elon Musk told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early 2019 while delivering a knowing nod about his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

In April 2018, it was announced that SpaceX is going to construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property was an ideal location for SpaceX, as it’s behemoth rocket will only be movable by a barge or a ship when completed.

In late March 2018, SpaceX got permission from the U.S government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit to provide internet services. The satellite network, which is called Starlink would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas and would also boost competition in heavily populated markets that are typically only dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched its first batch of sixty satellites in March 2019 and followed with another payload of 60 satellites in November 2019. This represented significant progress for the Starlink venture but the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky and with the potential for thousands more to come got astronomers worried who felt that the proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying other distant objects in space.

SpaceX Launch 2020

For the first time ever SpaceX (A private company) partnered with NASA sent two astronauts into space. At 3:22 P.M on Saturday, 30th May 2020, Behnken and Hurley became SpaceX’s first human passengers to launch into orbit aboard Crew Dragon.

On Sunday, 31st May the astronaut’s ship docked to the international space station. Making it the first-ever time that a commercial spaceship has delivered a crew to the $150 laboratory and the size of the football field.

Behnken and Hurley’s stay up there may last up to 110 days. NASA had retired its space-shuttle program 9 years ago, Musk said about witnessing the crewed launch from the U.S soil after 9 years overwhelmed him.

Musk said in a press conference after the launch that “I have spent 18 years working towards this goal, so it’s hard to believe that it’s happened”. Since the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis in 2011 into Earth orbit. NASA has been forced to use Russian launch systems such as the Soyuz to send its astronauts into orbit but the astronaut’s mission Demo-2 is meant to show NASA that SpaceX can launch people in to orbit and return them to Earth safely.

In Demo-2 NASA seeks to reduce space travel costs through private companies such as SpaceX and Aerospace companies Boeing. When Musk was asked during the post-launch briefing for a message for those who doubted him and his company.

 Musk said “To be totally frank, I doubted us too. I thought we had maybe — when starting SpaceX — maybe had a 10% chance of reaching orbit. So to those who doubted us, I was like, 'Well, I think you're probably right,'"

He said it took us four attempts to just get to the orbit with Falcon 1. He further said that SpaceX barely made it there with the Falcon 1’s successful launch or the fourth failure would have bankrupted the company.

Musk thinks of the launch as a milestone that took much too long to reach a path toward landing on the moon again and eventually setting a path to populating other worlds. 

"This is hopefully the first step on a journey towards a civilization on Mars," Musk said.