Space Exploration Technologies Corp., doing business as SpaceX, is an American aviation manufacture and space transport services organization headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was established in 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk with the objective of lessening space transportation costs and empowering the colonization of Mars.
Space X has since developed the Falcon launch vehicle family and the Dragon spacecraft family, which both currently deliver payloads into Earth orbit. Space X’s accomplishments includes the principal funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1 in 2008); the first secretly financed organization to effectively launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft (Dragon in 2010); the first privately owned business to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (Dragon in 2012);the first propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015); and the first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 of every 2017).
As of March 2017, SpaceX has since flown ten missions to the International Space Station (ISS) under a cargo resupply contract. NASA additionally granted SpaceX a further development contract in 2011 to create and exhibit a human-evaluated Dragon, which would be utilized to transport space travelers to the ISS and return them securely to Earth.
In 2017, SpaceX successfully achieved the first reflight of an orbital class rocket – a historic milestone on the road to full and rapid rocket reusability. In September 2016, CEO Elon Musk uncovered the mission architecture of the Interplanetary Transport System program, ambitious privately funded initiative to develop spaceflight technology for use in manned interplanetary spaceflight, and which, if demand emerges, could lead to sustainable human settlements on Mars over the long term. This is the main purpose this System was planned for.
In 2017, Elon Musk declared that the organization had been contracted by two private people to send them in a Dragon shuttle on a free return direction around the Moon.Provisionally launching in 2018, this could become the first instance of lunar tourism. SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to at first build up the innovation and subsequently carry out the task of resupplying the International Space Station (ISS).
SpaceX is also certified for US military launches of Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle-class (EELV) payloads. Also, SpaceX has (as of January 2013) a simply business dispatch show of “23 missions scheduled over the next 4 years, exclusive of US government flights,” of a total of 40 flights booked through 2017.” In September 2015, SpaceX expressed that they had more than 60 missions on manifest representing over $7B under contract.
In 2014, SpaceX had won nine contracts out of 20 tthat were openly competed worldwide in 2014 at commercial launch service providers. Space media revealed that SpaceX had “just started to take piece of the overall industry” from Arianespace. Also in 2014, SpaceX capacities and valuing had likewise started to influence the market for launch of US military payloads.
For nearly a decade the large US launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) had faced no competition for military launches . Anticipating a droop in domestic military and spy launches, ULA stated that it would go out of business unless it won commercial satellite launch orders. To that end, ULA announced a major restructuring of processes and workforce in order to decrease launch costs by half.