5,4,3,2,1, Lift off!
This airline SpaceX will make more rocket engines than the rest of the U.S. production combined.
That's a lot of rocket engines.
Space X has been really exciting and it has revolutionized
the public's interest in space exploration and rockets and sending humans back into space.
Yeah well it is science fiction.
I love science fiction but science fiction does sometimes come true.
Space X has become a household name in America and it's little wonder why.
Becoming a space faring civilization is one of those things that makes you excited about the future.
Founded by the eccentric and controversial Elon Musk, the rocket builder is now one of the most valuable
private companies in the world, ranking among the likes of Uber and Airbnb.
It's completed more than 67 rocket launches to date
launching north of 16 cargo missions to the International Space Station for NASA.
It successfully launched Falcon Heavy in 2018 the most
powerful rocket in the world.
It's closing in on being the first to launch American
astronauts from the U.S.
since the end of the space shuttle program and it's deep
into developing and testing a new generation of engines and
rockets to send people around the world in minutes and even to Mars.
Mean I was I think the second person Elon pitched SpaceX to and I was like 'Oh you're gonna be doing
this thing that comes off you know national government subsidies and so forth? Oh this is a disaster.'
He was right I was wrong. That's how that plays out.
But how did Space X become what it is today.
Let's go back to 2001.
Elon Musk had a dream sending an experiment to the Red Planet.
He essentially wanted to land a greenhouse with plants on the Martian surface.
But after Musk put a small team together to create plans
for the mission, he discovered U.S. rockets were very expensive.
Russian rockets were much cheaper.
But when Musk went to buy one of their rockets he was turned away and reportedly very rudely.
You could deliver the cheap designer if he was getting agitated you know.
Finally he was just so agitated he literally
spit on Elon, he spit on his shoes.
And [chuckle] Elon turns to me and goes, 'I think he spit on me.' [Jim]: 'Yeah Elon that's a sign of disrespect.' [chuckle]
Spurned by the lack of rocket options, Musk crunched the numbers and decided to build his own.
He took money that he made from the sale of Paypal.
That rocket became Falcon 1.
Truly incorporated as Space Exploration Technologies, Musk's team began building its first rocket.
So this is when SpaceX really started to elbow their way into DC.
They were starting to compete with the massive aerospace and defense contractors who held the keys
to the most viable launches for the U.S. military and NASA.
He builds a rocket and then he takes that rocket and puts it
on the back of a trailer and drives it through the National Mall up to DC
and a big FAA party to basically say, you know, put a stake in the ground and say
'I'm here. We can do this and we can do it a lot more cost effective than the existing players.'
I remember going to some of this industry space shows back
10 years, 20 years and Space X was starting to to show their face.
They would have booths and corner somewhere. They were very small.
I remember asking around some of the other bigger companies
went what they thought of SpaceX and they thought SpaceX
with their proposed launch prices, very low launch prices, .
were really mostly talk more than anything else and that they could never really produce a rocket that would be
competitive with such low low prices.
I wasn't so quick to believe that because I thought there was something unique about Mr. Musk.
He did talk big. He was a little brash but what our
industry needed with somebody like say a Steve Jobs somebody that could really push the envelope.
2004 was certainly a key moment for them.
SpaceX protested NASA awarding a $230 million contract to now defunct Kistler Aerospace.
SpaceX argued that NASA did not allow other companies to bid for the contract and the government sided with SpaceX.
I think that that really opened up the door for what came next.
It's a difficult road to orbit.
Musk has said that the company was running out of cash in 2008.
Space X had attempted to launch Falcon 1 to orbit three times but had failed three times.
Musk kept pushing. Even after the third failure, I thought maybe he would wait
for a year to investigate really carefully what happened and just to be more cautious.
But to my surprise, within a few months he was trying again.
Beyond putting his own money into SpaceX, Musk had to also convince some fellow entrepreneurs to invest in the company.
The funds that came in at that time. They're no dummies. Right?
So they had done their diligence they understand what's happening.
They saw three failures and they saw an entrepreneur who had learned a lot from that. Right?
And they had a lot of confidence in his ability to get to orbit.
The idea there is that you put your money in before you get to orbit,
lower price and benefit from what happened next and they certainly did.
Then on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, Falcon 1 did it.
In September 2008, Space X became the first to privately develop and successfully launch a liquid fueled rocket to orbit.
In 2008, they made it to orbit.
In 2009, they made it to orbit with their Falcon 1 carrying commercial payloads and paying customers.
That's when investors really started to pay attention to SpaceX and their valuation took off.
Then SpaceX got its first big NASA win.
A $1.6 billion contract to launch cargo to the International Space Station.
SpaceX was building its first Dragon capsule for the cargo
missions as was developing a rocket with nine engines instead of just one.
Called the Falcon 9, the rocket would be capable of sending satellites the size of school buses to orbit.
What we're looking at there.
That's a quarter section of the Falcon 9.
A 17 foot diameter faring its 17 foot diameter, obviously and 50 feet long.
It's capable of taking the largest satellites in the world.
And this is when SpaceX evolved from an engineering dream into a business.
[Countdown] 3. 2. 1.
Lift off. Lift off of the Falcon 9.
Procedure engines shut down.
Second Stage has separated.
Over the course of dozens of launches, SpaceX continued to
evolve the Falcon 9 rocket.
Space X has become a major provider of launch a resource to the US military.
A segment of the market which traditionally closed to all
but two companies, Boeing and Lockheed, as part of the joint venture called the ULA.
The company was able to break that monopoly.
That's that's not a small achievement. That's huge.
Space X has led a boom in private companies that now
challenge legacy contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman in the rocket business.
But other young companies, like Jeff Bezos his company Blue Origin, are beginning to aim for Space X market share.
For example, Blue Origin landed a rocket booster first.
Welcome back, Shepherd.
[cheer]
But Space X took it to the next level.
While Falcon 9 has had multiple improvements, one stood out dramatically:
Musk's vision of reusing rockets.
SpaceX's launching and landing of rockets is not something
that they invented but something that they perfected and something that they were able to bring to market.
SpaceX began working on vertically landing a rocket with a program called Grasshopper.
The prototype had several explosive failures.
Or a SpaceX called them a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."
I admire them for not being afraid to fail.
Engineers learn more from their failures than they do from incremental improvements.
In December 2015, SpaceX did it.
SpaceX landed the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on the company's landing pad in Florida.
Reusable rockets is a huge move forward.
Makes rockets a lot cheaper.
That's really revolutionized the satellite industry.
And they landed more funding too.
Google come in with a billion dollars. And then now everyone wants it right.
We're seeing retail investors come in mutual funds. That type of thing.
So you can see really the evolution of the type of investors
and the milestones that SpaceX is able to hit that convinced them that this was a good investment.
Is SpaceX profitable?
We are profitable.
Amid all of this, SpaceX also developed the Falcon Heavy rocket.
Essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together and beefed up.
Musk first announced Falcon Heavy in 2011.
Well we're super excited obviously at SpaceX to announce some of the details around the Falcon Heavy rocket
which is our large rocket development, really large rocket development.
After more than $500 million in development, SpaceX launch Falcon Heavy for the first time in a near flawless
launch in February 2018.
Musk put one of his own Tesla Roadster is on the top of the
rocket and millions watch SpaceX send a car into orbit around the sun.
Experts in the field not only admire the flashiness and the results,
but also the approach SpaceX takes to solving problems.
I remember seeing a very large composite fuel tanks that
they had build as being a bit awestruck and wondering how in the heck could they do that.
They're bold users of new materials and methods.
They approach everything with fresh ideas and they go at it very quickly and with agility.
At the same time, SpaceX was deep into work on its next milestone NASA project.
After the space shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA turned to the private sector to find a solution.
Without the capabilities to launch human beings,
the U.S. has been paying Russia $80 million per astronaut to reach the space station.
There's this really fantastic public-private partnership between SpaceX and NASA.
So NASA provided some funding to SpaceX early on to help them develop a lot of their technology.
But now NASA is getting a return on that investment by hiring SpaceX.
SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for a commercial crew.
The Dragon capsule is large and looks pretty comfortable. Right?
Astronauts have gone for a long periods of time in much smaller space ships.
So, they could also go to the moon, around the moon.
They can go to the space station. They can take individuals to the space station.
The commercial crew program after a number of delays is now set to see SpaceX launch its first astronauts in 2019.
The capsule represents the company's first attempt at launching human beings.
If Space X is going to fulfill Musk's dream of making humanity a multi-planetary species,
the company must be able to reliably and safely launch astronauts.
They completed their first successful launch, with dummies sitting in for a crew, in early 2019.
Here in Southern California, sometimes we occasionally see the SpaceX rockets in the night sky.
That's really exciting.
I think it's having a really big impact.
SpaceX today has more than 6000 employees.
It represents a majority of all American launches.
But as space travel becomes more mainstream, so do the questions facing the company.
There are a lot more women astronauts.
There are a lot more astronauts of color. A lot more people of color or astronauts.
NASA's been paying attention to this for a while and it just, again, from the outside it feels like SpaceX hasn't
been prioritizing because if they had we would just see different demographics at their company.
SpaceX hasn't published their diversity numbers.
There was an unofficial report from 2016 that estimated that 14 percent of SpaceX employees are women.
That's a very low number. That's a low number even for science and engineering.
That's lower than the fraction of undergraduate who are
women who are getting degrees in math and engineering and physics and relevant fields.
Space X declined to comment on diversity but in 2018 we spoke to President Gwynne Shotwell about women in the industry.
I speak to groups of women, both teeny women, tiny girls,
through college and professionals whenever I have the opportunity to do so.
I became an engineer and followed this career path because of a role model.
So I think it's important to be as public as I can afford
to be and hopefully inspire women to kind of join me in this incredible field.
Of course, it's great that there is a woman essentially
running Space X but that doesn't mean by itself that the climate is inclusive for everybody.
There's lots of data and studies that show that the more diverse your workforce, the better your outcomes.
And after Musk appeared to smoke pot during an interview, the U.S. Air Force reviewed his security clearance.
What's next for Musk's space company?
SpaceX is facing its most important test in commercial crew
and Musk is aiming to have SpaceX launch the same Falcon 9
rocket twice within 24 hours as the company aims to make spaceflight more akin to air travel.
I'd like to introduce the first paying customer of BFR: Yusaku Maezawa, please come forward.
[cheer]
Thank you, Elon.
Thank you everyone.
In August 2018, SpaceX signed Japanese billionaire
Yusaku Maezawa as the first passenger for starship, with a planned tourism flight around the moon.
That flight is planned for 2023.
Several years down the road will be the launches of Starship:
the enormous rocket SpaceX is building to send as many as one hundred humans to the moon, Mars and more.
In general, Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to be a self-sustaining civilization.
It's one thing to send humans to Mars. It's another thing to colonize Mars.
And there is a perspective by which maybe before we go to
colonize other planets, we should figure out how to land on this planet without destroying it.
Which we haven't figured out yet.
He's easy to criticize, certainly.
And he, I think, you could say over promises and under delivers.
But there's no question that he inspires.
I think that might be part of what works for his companies
It is that he makes very bold and aggressive projections.
He lays out a target and then tries to meet it.
He often falls short but you know raise your hand if you don't occasionally fall short yourself.
Yeah. I would categorize him as the leader at this point.
This is a company that in a very short time I would say in
about 10 years has come the farthest I've ever seen any company in this industry come.
So when is Elon Musk going to space?
I asked him
When do you think that's going to happen?
You mean like me personally.
As far as me going, I'm not sure.
He suggested that maybe that I would join on this trip. [chuckle]
I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Maybe we'll both be on it.
[cheer]