The topic of the day. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk set himself a major challenge: that of aerospace conquest. If the beginnings of his private company SpaceX were difficult, this tech boss, who became a multi-billionaire after notably reselling PayPal to EBay, quickly established himself as a key player in space.
“SpaceX’s goal is to develop technology that will allow life to become multi-planetary and make humanity a space civilization. I find it very exciting and very inspiring“, declared Elon Musk on his social networks.
Why are we talking about it ? How did the major aerospace players react to the arrival of SpaceX? How did Elon Musk manage to make his company essential? What were its beginnings?
To analyse. “When Musk decided to embark against all odds on this SpaceX space adventure twenty years ago, it is concretized by a first model which is called the Falcon. Moreover, he calls it the Falcon, in homage to Star Wars and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon. At the beginning of the adventure, he has funding that is certainly important, because he is a millionaire, but in space, for space issues, everything costs very quickly, extraordinarily, expensive. He knows he only has two or three shots in front of him possible. Indeed, at the beginning, it’s a disaster, the first shots don’t work at all. He doesn’t yet have the know-how to do it,” explains Olivier Lascar, editor-in-chief of the digital department at Science and Future, author of the book Investigation of Elon Musk: the man who defies science at Alisio Sciences.
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