SpaceX’s unlikely journey from far-fetched idea to $2 trillion behemoth

About 25 years ago, Adeo Ressi, Elon Musk’s former college roommate, begged the tech entrepreneur not to start a rocket company.

Mr. Musk just raked in millions of dollars by selling PayPal, which he helped create, to eBay. He and Mr. Ressi were looking for ways to send terrestrial plant life to Mars. They had a budget of $50 million, but soon found that was not enough to cover the cost of the rocket. So Mr Musk told his friend he would build his own.

Mr Ressi said he organized a panel of space experts one day in a hotel conference room in Santa Monica, California, and brought Mr Musk in to hear why the idea was a fool’s errand. Private spaceflight was expensive and the economics didn’t make sense, about a dozen people said. But Mr. Musk didn’t listen to them.

“I really want to congratulate him on his incredible persistence,” Mr. Ressi said in an interview. “For making it happen.

Mr Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has come a long way since Mr Ressi’s failed intervention. On Friday, SpaceX debuted on the stock market as the world’s largest initial public offering, a trillion-dollar behemoth that has launched hundreds of rockets into space; operates the dominant satellite Internet service Starlink; and oversees Mr. Musk’s efforts in artificial intelligence and social network X. The company’s IPO was so huge that Mr. Musk became the world’s first billionaire.

However, SpaceX’s success was never certain. Mr. Musk and his team of executives and engineers have overcome numerous obstacles and tackled problems as diverse as rocket physics and connecting multiple satellites in orbit.

Mr. Musk acknowledged how far-fetched SpaceX’s achievements were. Speaking at Starbase headquarters in Texas on Friday for the IPO, the 54-year-old said he gave SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of success.

“I told people this: ‘It’s probably going to fail. But we should try,'” he said.

Mr. Musk’s space dreams were modest at first, centered on sending some seeds to Mars in a small greenhouse through a venture he started with Mr. Ressi, Life to Mars. He thought that if people on Earth saw the green shoots pushing up on Mars, they would be excited enough to get Congress to give more money to NASA.

So Mr. Musk traveled to Russia, hoping to find an old intercontinental ballistic missile that could cheaply launch the greenhouse into space. The Russians rejected him. On the flight back to the United States, Mr. Musk approached Jim Cantrell, a space industry veteran, and several other colleagues and said he would build one himself.

“It’s an amazing story,” said Mr. Cantrell, who became SpaceX’s fourth employee. “Now we see today what it has become, but at the time it seemed quite insignificant.”

SpaceX’s early years were filled with eye-popping failures and spectacular successes. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, was small. His first two launches from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean failed. SpaceX was running out of money.

At that point, Mr. Musk said he would try one more time to make the rocket work, recalled Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and former friend of Mr. Musk.

The third attempt didn’t work either. But Mr Musk then said he would try again. If it failed a fourth time, he might give up altogether, Mr. Zubrin said.

“That would be the end of SpaceX,” he said.

In September 2008, the fourth launch of Falcon 1 reached orbit. Likewise, the fifth almost a year later.

By then, SpaceX had won a key contract from NASA to develop a much larger Falcon 9 rocket and an accompanying Dragon capsule that would carry cargo to the International Space Station. The first Falcon 9 launch in 2010 reached orbit, as did the second six months later. In 2014, SpaceX won another major NASA contract to transport astronauts, not just cargo, to the space station.

Thanks to lower fees for launching satellites, SpaceX has grown and dominated the rocket business. SpaceX also used its fast and low-cost launch capability to deploy Starlink Internet satellites starting in 2019. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth and carry high-speed Internet to nearly every corner of the planet. The idea dates back a few decades, but Starlink, now SpaceX’s biggest business, was the first to not end up bankrupt.

Mr Musk, who also runs electric car maker Tesla, has also turned his attention to getting humans to Mars in a spacecraft big enough to carry colonists. (Sending seeds was no longer the main goal.)

In 2016, Mr. Musk unveiled initial plans for SpaceX’s largest rocket, now known as Starship, at a meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. Earlier that year, he said at another conference that he would launch the company mission to Mars by 2025.

Since then, SpaceX’s test flights have included setbacks and promising progress, though almost never as quickly as Mr. Musk promises. In March 2024, he said Starship would reach Mars “within five years”. A year later, he said the spacecraft would fly to Mars “at the end of next year.” NASA said the best case scenario would be for humans to reach Mars by the mid-2030s.

In May, the starship’s 12th test flight was largely successful, as the upper stage spacecraft flew halfway around the world and performed simulated landing maneuvers. But the auxiliary stage failed when the starship returned to Earth, halting future flights for the time being.

While there will be setbacks in the future, Mr. Musk has fired up a generation of space enthusiasts, most notably with SpaceX’s stratospheric IPO this week.

“What SpaceX is really doing is building the infrastructure that can support and sustain this great new promise of a new space economy,” said Royden D’Souza, 49, a freelance journalist and podcast host in Doha, Qatar, who has focused on space for nearly three decades. “When you build a highway into space, when you build a highway into a new place, you have the potential for whole new economies to emerge.”

Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.