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The story
Founded by Elon Musk on Mar 14, 2002, in El Segundo.1
2001–2002: Founding
In early 2001, Elon Musk met Robert Zubrin and donated $100,000 to his Mars Society and briefly joined its board of directors. In August 2001, he gave a plenary talk at their fourth convention where he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a greenhouse and grow plants on Mars.
Musk initially attempted to acquire a Dnepr launch vehicle for the project through Russian contacts provided by Jim Cantrell; however, he was unsuccessful.
Musk returned with his team to Moscow, this time bringing Michael D. Griffin, who later became the 11th Administrator of NASA, but found the Russians increasingly unreceptive. On the flight home, Musk stated that he could start a company to build the affordable rockets the project required. By applying vertical integration, using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf components when possible, and adopting the modular approach of modern software engineering, Musk believed SpaceX could significantly cut launch costs.
In early 2002, Elon Musk started to look for staff for his company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached five people for the initial positions, including Griffin, who declined the position of Chief Engineer, Jim Cantrell and John Garvey (Cantrell and Garvey later founded the company Vector Launch), rocket engineer Tom Mueller, and Chris Thompson. SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Early SpaceX employees, such as Tom Mueller (CTO), Gwynne Shotwell (COO), and Chris Thompson (VP of Operations), were previously employed at TRW and Boeing. Musk personally interviewed and approved all of SpaceX's early employees.
2003–2010: Falcon 1, COTS, and Falcon 9
SpaceX developed its first orbital launch vehicle, the Falcon 1, with internal funding. The Falcon 1 was an expendable two-stage-to-orbit small-lift launch vehicle. The total development cost of Falcon 1 was approximately $90 million to $100 million. The Falcon rocket series was named after Star Wars's Millennium Falcon fictional spacecraft.
In 2004, SpaceX protested against NASA to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) because of a sole-source contract awarded to Kistler Aerospace. Before the GAO could respond, NASA withdrew the contract, and formed the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. In 2005, SpaceX announced plans to pursue a human-rated commercial space program through the end of the decade, a program that would later become the Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX originally intended to follow its light Falcon 1 launch vehicle with an intermediate capacity vehicle, the Falcon 5. The company instead decided in 2005 to proceed with the development of the Falcon 9, a medium-lift launch vehicle intended to be reusable. Development of the Falcon 9 was accelerated by NASA, which committed to purchasing several commercial flights if specific capabilities were demonstrated. In 2006, the company was selected by NASA and awarded $396 million to provide crew and cargo resupply demonstration contracts to the International Space Station (ISS) under the COTS program. The contract provided development funding for the Dragon spacecraft, Falcon 9, and demonstration launches of Falcon 9 with Dragon.
The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under the DARPA Falcon Project which evaluated new U.S. launch vehicles suitable for use in hypersonic missile delivery for Prompt Global Strike. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time. Musk was reportedly "waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain" because of the stress.
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The financial situation started to turn around with the first successful launch achieved on the fourth attempt on September 28, 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract in December, thus financially saving the company. Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009. This allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at the time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with the NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier.
As part of the COTS contract, the Falcon 9 launched for the first time in June 2010 with the Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit, using a mockup of the Dragon spacecraft.
The first operational Dragon spacecraft was launched in December 2010 aboard COTS Demo Flight 1, the Falcon 9's second flight, and safely returned to Earth after two orbits, completing all its mission objectives. By December 2010, the SpaceX production line was manufacturing one Falcon 9 and Dragon every three months.
2011–2018: Falcon 9, Dragon, and NASA contracts
In April 2011, as part of its second-round Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, NASA issued a $75 million contract for SpaceX to develop an integrated launch escape system for Dragon in preparation for human-rating it as a crew transport vehicle to the ISS. NASA awarded SpaceX a fixed-price Space Act Agreement (SAA) to produce a detailed design of the crew transportation system in August 2012.
In early 2012, approximately two-thirds of SpaceX stock was owned by Musk and his seventy million shares were then estimated to be worth $875 million on private markets, valuing SpaceX at $1.3 billion. In May 2012, with the Dragon C2+ launch, Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. After the flight, the company private equity valuation nearly doubled to $2.4 billion or $20/share. By that time, SpaceX had operated on total funding of approximately $1 billion over its first decade of operation. Of this, private equity provided approximately $200 million, with Musk investing approximately $100 million and other investors having put in about $100 million.
SpaceX's active reusability test program began in late 2012 with testing low-altitude, low-speed aspects of the landing technology. The Falcon 9 prototypes performed vertical takeoffs and landings (VTOL). High-velocity, high-altitude tests of the booster atmospheric return technology began in late 2013.
Commercial launches and rapid growth
SpaceX launched the first commercial mission for a private customer in 2013. In 2014, SpaceX won nine contracts out of the 20 that were openly competed worldwide. That year Arianespace requested that European governments provide additional subsidies to face the competition from SpaceX. Beginning in 2014, SpaceX capabilities and pricing also began to affect the market for launch of U.S. military payloads, which for nearly a decade had been dominated by the large U.S. launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA). The monopoly had allowed launch costs by the U.S. provider to rise to over $400 million over the years. In September 2014, NASA's Director of Commercial Spaceflight, Kevin Crigler, awarded SpaceX the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract to finalize the development of the Crew Transportation System. The contract included several technical and certification milestones, an uncrewed flight test, a crewed flight test, and six operational missions after certification.
In January 2015, SpaceX raised $1 billion in funding from Google and Fidelity Investments, in exchange for 8.33% of the company, establishing the company valuation at approximately $12 billion. The same month SpaceX announced the development of a new satellite constellation, called Starlink, to provide global broadband internet service with 4,000 satellites.
The Falcon 9 had its first major failure in late June 2015, when the seventh ISS resupply mission, CRS-7 exploded two minutes into the flight. The problem was traced to a failed two-foot-long steel strut that held a helium pressure vessel, which broke free due to the force of acceleration. This caused a breach and allowed high-pressure helium to escape into the low-pressure propellant tank, causing the failure.
Reusability milestones
SpaceX first achieved a successful landing and recovery of a first stage in December 2015 with Falcon 9 Flight 20. In April 2016, the company achieved the first successful landing on the autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean. By October 2016, following the successful landings, SpaceX indicated they were offering their customers a 10% price discount if they choose to fly their payload on a reused Falcon 9 first stage.
A second major rocket failure happened in early September 2016, when a Falcon 9 exploded during a propellant fill operation for a standard pre-launch static fire test. The payload, the AMOS-6 communications satellite valued at $200 million, was destroyed. The explosion was caused by the liquid oxygen that is used as propellant turning so cold that it solidified and ignited with carbon composite helium vessels. Though not considered an unsuccessful flight, the rocket explosion sent the company into a four-month launch hiatus while it worked out what went wrong. SpaceX returned to flight in January 2017.
In March 2017, SpaceX launched a returned Falcon 9 for the SES-10 satellite. This was the first time a re-launch of a payload-carrying orbital rocket went back to space. The first stage was recovered again, also making it the first landing of a reused orbital class rocket.
Leading global commercial launch provider
In 2017, SpaceX formed a subsidiary, The Boring Company, and began work to construct a short test tunnel on land adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters and manufacturing facility, using a small number of SpaceX employees, which was completed in May 2018, and opened to the public in December 2018. During 2018, The Boring Company was spun out into a separate corporate entity with 6% of the equity going to SpaceX, less than 10% to early employees, and the remainder of the equity to Elon Musk.
In July 2017, the company raised $350 million at a valuation of $21 billion. In 2017, SpaceX achieved a 45% global market share for awarded commercial launch contracts.
By March 2018, SpaceX had more than 100 launches on its manifest representing about $12 billion in contract revenue. The contracts included both commercial and government (NASA/DOD) customers. This made SpaceX the leading global commercial launch provider measured by manifested launches.
2019–2020: Raising capital, Starlink launch, and crewed launches
In January 2019, SpaceX announced it would lay off 10% of its workforce to help finance the Starlink and Starship projects. The purpose of the Starship vehicle is to enable large-scale transit of humans and cargo to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. SpaceX's Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, with a planned payload capacity of 100+ tons. Construction of initial prototypes and tests for Starship started in early 2019 in Florida and Texas. All Starship construction and testing moved to the new SpaceX South Texas launch site later that year.
In 2019 SpaceX raised $1.33 billion across three funding rounds. By May 2019, the valuation of SpaceX had risen to $33.3 billion and reached $36 billion by March 2020.
In May 2019, SpaceX launched the first large batch of 60 Starlink satellites, beginning to deploy what would become the world's largest commercial satellite constellation the following year. On August 19, 2020, after a $1.9 billion raise, one of the largest by any private company, valuation increased to $46 billion.
In May 2020, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) into orbit on a Crew Dragon spacecraft during Crew Dragon Demo-2, making SpaceX the first private company to send astronauts to the International Space Station and marking the first crewed orbital launch from American soil in 9 years. The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) in Florida.
2021–present
In February 2021, SpaceX raised an additional $1.61 billion from 99 investors at a per share value of approximately $420, lifting the valuation to ~$74 billion. By 2021, SpaceX had raised more than $6 billion. Most of the capital raised since 2019 was used to support the Starlink satellite constellation and the development and manufacture of Starship. By October 2021, the valuation grew to $100.3 billion.
On April 16, 2021, Starship HLS won a NASA contract for the Artemis program. In 2021, SpaceX entered into agreements with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to provide on-ground computer and networking services for Starlink. A funding round in 2022 valued SpaceX at $127 billion.
In July 2021, SpaceX unveiled another drone ship named A Shortfall of Gravitas, first landing CRS-23 on August 29, 2021. Within the first 130 days of 2022, SpaceX launched 18 rockets and returned two crews. On December 13, 2021, Musk announced that the company was starting a carbon dioxide removal program that would convert captured carbon into rocket fuel, after he announced a $100 million donation to the X Prize Foundation the previous February to fund a contest to develop the best carbon capture technology.
In 2022, most SpaceX launches focused on Starlink, a consumer internet business that sends batches of internet-beaming satellites and now has over 6,000 satellites in orbit. SpaceX launched a rocket approximately every six days in 2022, with 61 launches in total, the most launches ever of a single vehicle type in a single year. All but one (a Falcon Heavy in November) was a Falcon 9. In August 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) began discussions with SpaceX to substitute for Russian launches, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In November 2023, SpaceX announced it would acquire its parachute supplier Pioneer Aerospace out of bankruptcy for $2.2 million.
In 2024, SpaceX moved its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to SpaceX Starbase in Brownsville, Texas, ostensibly because California increasingly became a difficult place to operate. The Hawthorne facility continues to support the company's Falcon launch business.
SpaceX's 2024 Polaris Dawn mission featured the first-ever private spacewalk.
By July 2025, as part of a $5 billion equity raise, SpaceX agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI.
In October 2026, SpaceX agreed to acquire a nationwide portfolio of low-band 800 MHz spectrum licenses from investment firm Grain Management, subject to Federal Communications Commission approval. The spectrum, which covers nearly the entire U.S. population, is intended to support a terrestrial component of Starlink Mobile that can penetrate buildings, complementing the company’s existing satellite-based 2 GHz spectrum. Elon Musk described the acquisition as providing the remaining piece needed for “complete phone coverage in America.”
Starlink expansion
On July 16, 2021, SpaceX entered an agreement to acquire Swarm Technologies, a private company building a low Earth orbit satellite constellation for communications with Internet of things (IoT) devices, for $524 million.
In December 2022, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the launch of up to 7,500 of SpaceX's next-generation satellites in its Starlink internet network.
In September 2025, SpaceX said it would purchase the rights to use some of EchoStar's spectrum for $17 billion in a cash and stock deal. The company said it would use the spectrum as a foundation for Starlink's direct-to-cell business around the globe.
Starship
On April 20, 2023, Starship's first orbital flight test ended in a mid-air explosion over the Gulf of Mexico before booster separation. After launch, multiple engines in the booster progressively failed, causing the vehicle to reach max q later than planned. "Max q" is the point during ascent at which the vehicle experiences the maximum aerodynamic pressure, determined by the combination of air density and velocity as the rocket climbs through the atmosphere. Eventually, the vehicle lost control and spun erratically until the automated flight termination system was activated, which intentionally destroyed the rocket. Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other individuals familiar with the space industry have referred to the test flight as a success.
Musk said at the time that it would take "six to eight weeks" to get the infrastructure prepared for another launch. In October 2023, a senior SpaceX executive stated the company had been ready to launch the next test flight since September. He accused government regulators of disrupting the project's progress, adding the delay could lead to China beating U.S. astronauts back to the Moon.
On November 18, 2023, SpaceX launched Starship on its second flight test, with both vehicles flying for a few minutes before separately exploding.
In early March 2024 SpaceX announced that it was targeting March 14 as the tentative launch date for its next uncrewed Starship launch configuration flight test, pending the issuance of a "launch license" by the FAA. This license was granted on March 13, 2024. On March 14, 2024, at 13:25 UTC, Starship launched for the third time and for the first time Starship reached its planned suborbital trajectory. The flight ended with the booster experiencing a malfunction shortly before landing and the ship being lost during re-entry over the Indian Ocean.
On June 4, 2024, SpaceX received the launch license for Starship's fourth flight test. The licensure itself was notable in that it was the first time that the FAA included a clause that would allow SpaceX to launch subsequent test flights without a mishap investigation, provided that they met a similar launch profile and used the same specification of hardware. The provision could prove to speed the development timeline.
On October 12, 2024, SpaceX received FAA approval for Starship's fifth flight test. The flight was the first without engine failures, and the first successful tower catch.
SpaceX launched Starship on its sixth flight test on November 19, 2024. The booster aborted the catch attempt, while the ship conducted a relight in space.
On January 16, 2025, SpaceX launched Starship on its seventh flight test, with the first Block 2 Ship, Ship 33, standing at 403 feet (123 m). This test also carried a demonstration payload, a Starlink V3 simulator. The test launched at 22:37 UTC. The test resulted in the second catch of the Super Heavy booster, B14, but after 8 minutes, SpaceX lost contact with 'Ship', which is the upper stage of the Starship which resulted in the failure of the ship during the ascent. The spacecraft reportedly exploded around 8.5 minutes after launch over the Atlantic Ocean near the Turks and Caicos Islands. The FAA, on January 18, required a mishap investigation of the failure.
On March 7, 2025, SpaceX launched another Starship rocket, this time from Texas. Contact was lost minutes into the test flight and the spacecraft came tumbling down and broke apart, with wreckage seen across Florida's skies. As per preliminary investigation, Starship's 7th test flight was disrupted by an oxygen leak, flashes and sustained fires in its aft section, which caused the rocket's engines to shut down and turn on the spacecraft's self-destruct system.
From Wikipedia’s article on SpaceX, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7