Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as a 30-year-old with a vision so audacious it borders on science fiction: ferrying humans to Mars and colonizing Earth's neighboring planet. Twenty-four years later, that scrappy rocket company has become the world's dominant commercial space provider, and now Musk is preparing for what could be the largest initial public offering in history—seeking to raise up to $75 billion from the stock market.
The journey from vision to dominance has been anything but smooth. When Musk first launched his venture after selling his earlier companies, including the online payments startup that became PayPal, he was frustrated that NASA had no Mars mission on its agenda. His early attempts to inspire public interest in space travel were creative but unfeasible—he even tried to send seeds in a glass-enclosed greenhouse to Mars to grow plants. Instead, he did what any determined entrepreneur might do: he founded a rocket company. The early days were brutal, with failures piling up and money draining away until 2008, when SpaceX finally got the Falcon 1 off the ground.
Today, the Falcon 9 has become the company's workhorse, completing hundreds of missions and establishing SpaceX as the go-to provider for commercial launches. The Dragon spacecraft reached the International Space Station in 2012, making SpaceX the first private company to send a crew to space. Now the company is developing the enormous Starship rocket—a reusable orbital vehicle designed to carry both crew and cargo—with a test launch of its third-generation model scheduled for Thursday. This represents the 12th Starship test flight, part of SpaceX's philosophy of "fail fast, learn fast," a mentality that has led to several fiery explosions but also rapid innovation.
Yet success has brought new pressures. SpaceX is under contract with NASA to produce a lunar landing variant of Starship, part of an ambitious plan to perform an in-orbit rendezvous between NASA's Orion spacecraft and at least one lunar lander by 2027. The stakes are higher now. G. Scott Hubbard, the physicist who formerly directed NASA's Ames Research Center, noted that the company's "swashbuckling" approach—the willingness to "move fast and break things"—works differently when human lives and government commitments are on the line. When NASA is involved, Hubbard explained, "you've got to be very rigorous."
Concerns about Starship's readiness are real. Multiple experts across government and industry have questioned whether the system will be feasible, and some doubt it will meet NASA's timeline. Last fall, NASA even raised the possibility of reopening its lunar lander contract and turning to Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin instead—a move that sent shockwaves through both companies. The pressure to deliver is immense.
Still, Hubbard acknowledged that SpaceX employs "fantastic people working for them" from top universities. The company has earlier this year merged Musk's artificial intelligence venture xAI into SpaceX and is building out space data centers, expanding its ambitions beyond rockets and satellites. The sprawling enterprise behind Starlink—the satellite internet service that serves as the company's financial engine—has already reshaped how we think about commercial spaceflight. Whether it can deliver on its most ambitious promises remains to be seen, but the world is watching.