Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa.
During his childhood, he was an avid reader, in fact at the age of 10 he became passionate about programming, (which he learns by himself using a Commodore VIC-20) and at 12 he sells the code he created for a video game written in BASIC, called Blastar, to the magazine called PC and Office Technology for about $ 500. An online version of the game still exists today. See link in description
He graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and knowing it was easy to get to the United States from Canada, he moved there in June 1989, after gaining citizenship through his Canadian mother. Here he attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
After 2 years he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he first received a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and then a bachelor's degree in physics from the College of Arts and Sciences.
In 1995 he moved to California to start a doctorate in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University, but he retired only after 2 days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations, in fact in the same year he founded, with his brother, Zip2, a company of web software, which was acquired by Compaq for $ 307 million. From the sale, Musk received $ 22 million which you invest in X.com, an online payment and financial services company.
A year later, the company merged with Confinity, giving rise to today's PayPal.
When this is bought by eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion, Elon Musk becomes one of the best-known entrepreneurs in the world.
In 2001 Elon Musk proposed the Mars Oasis project, which consisted of an attempt to build an experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing freeze-dried gel seeds, which once rehydrated would allow plants to grow on Martian soil.
Since 2002, he has become a citizen of the United States and Musk establishes his third SpaceX company.
In 2004 Elon Musk joined Tesla as a main investor, a company specializing in the production of electric cars, photovoltaic panels and energy storage systems to promote the use of renewable and non-polluting sources.
The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation known as SpaceX, aims to develop a completely reusable mass interplanetary transport system, in order to reduce costs to a tenth and thus also allow the colonization of Mars.
The development of this innovative system is active with several prototypes under the name of Starship, at Boca Chica TX, site where SpaceX is building the necessary infrastructure to produce, test and launch the vehicle. The project includes a completely reusable spacecraft whose goal is human transport to the Solar System (and immediately to Mars) and the consequent return to Earth.
SpaceX has also developed the Falcon 1 launchers, now no longer in use, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: the most powerful rocket produced so far and the Dragon and Dragon 2 capsules, for transporting cargo and astronauts to and from the Station. International Space.
At the beginning the company consisted of a small start-up with a few employees, but immediately the foundations were laid for the construction of rockets with reduced production costs: the first project was called Falcon 1. In March 2006, the first launch, but it was a failure, in fact 30 seconds after launch the rocket exploded. Only the fourth test was successful and represented a first for private aerospace agencies: the Falcon 1 was in fact the first private rocket to reach orbit. This result was very important for the company, because SpaceX would have risked bankruptcy.
SpaceX subsequently replaced the previous generation of rockets with the Falcon 9, a family of launchers developed within a project funded mainly by NASA and inaugurated on June 4, 2010 with the first flight of the Falcon 9 v1.0.
Starting in 2013, the company began carrying out tests by launching a program for the development of reusable launch systems; in 2015 this goal was achieved with the first landing of an orbital rocket, the Falcon 9.
SpaceX has developed four families of engines: the only retired are the Kestrels, while those still in production are the Merlins and Raptors for propulsion during launch, and the Draco, for attitude control.
Starship is a fully reusable launch vehicle, under development: it consists of two stages, the booster and the spacecraft, called Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX's goal is to replace the current launch vehicles (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) with this new architecture.
SpaceX originally designed the Interplanetary Transport System (Starship's old name and design) with the sole purpose of exploring and colonizing Mars and other interplanetary targets. From 2017, instead, it began to focus on a vehicle that would support every type of launch service that SpaceX offers: in Earth orbit, in lunar orbit, interplanetary missions and even intercontinental travel to Earth.
The Dragon is a reusable orbital transport capsule capable of reaching low Earth orbit and re-entering. In late 2010, it became the first spacecraft to be brought into orbit and then back to earth by a private company; in 2012 it reached the International Space Station. Its heat shield is designed to withstand re-entry speeds from lunar or Martian orbits.
Its evolution is the Dragon2 which has two variants: Crew Dragon, a space capsule capable of ferrying up to seven astronauts, and Cargo Dragon, an updated replacement for the original Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft is launched with the Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket and returns to Earth via an ocean splashdown. Unlike its predecessor (the Dragon1), the spacecraft can dock alone at the ISS instead of being moored. Crew Dragon features an integrated launch escape system that can accelerate the vehicle away from the rocket in an emergency., The spacecraft is equipped with redesigned solar panels and has new flight computers and avionics. As of March 2020, four Dragon 2 spacecraft have been produced.
SpaceX's commitment to the satellite sector was announced in January 2015: the initial idea was to place a constellation of 4000 satellites for the global internet, later called Starlink, in orbit around the Earth.
Since its foundation, SpaceX has established a widespread presence in the US for Elon Musk, the aim of SpaceX is to establish human colonies on the Moon and Mars.
New spaceships, new rockets, new technologies will lead the human being to become a multi-planetary species. To do this, however, there are many issues to face ... Because one thing is to reach the goal (and this is already a great challenge), another is to settle and survive. There is still a lot of work to do to obtain the stable mini ecosystems that will be needed to make the colonies self-sufficient, and at the moment not even the International Space Station can do without supplies from Earth.
The challenge is still open.
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