Video launched by spacecraft maker Space, X celebrating its Dragon pill, which on May 25, 2012, ended up being the very first business spacecraft to dock with the International Spaceport Station. Area, X (A Britannica Publishing Partner), (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria, South Africa), South African-born American business owner who cofounded the electronic-payment company Pay, Friend and formed Area, X, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also among the very first considerable investors in, in addition to ceo of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Top Concerns, Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment firm Pay, Friend and founded the spacecraft company Area, X.
Elon Musk founded Area, X, a company that makes rockets and spacecraft. He ended up being the primary executive officer and a significant funder of Tesla, which makes electrical vehicles. Musk was born to a South African dad and a Canadian mother. He displayed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he developed a video game and sold it to a computer system publication. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he hesitated to support apartheid through obligatory military service and due to the fact that he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States. Musk went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he got bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997.
In 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that offered maps and organization directory sites to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was purchased by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online monetary services business, X.com, which later on became Pay, Pal, which specialized in transferring cash online. The online auction e, Bay purchased Pay, Friend in 2002 for $1. 5 billion. Musk was long persuaded that for life to survive, humanity needs to become a multiplanet species. Nevertheless, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (Area, X) to make more cost effective rockets.
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, almost twice as much as its largest rival, the Boeing Business's Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the expense. Space, X has announced the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy, Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would can raising 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for providing fast transport in between cities in the world and developing bases on the Moon and Mars.
Dragon can carry as lots of as 7 astronauts, and it had a crewed flight bring astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. Musk looked for to minimize the expense of spaceflight by establishing a totally multiple-use rocket that might raise off and go back to the pad it introduced from. Beginning in 2012, Area, X's Insect rocket made several short flights to evaluate such technology. In addition to being CEO of Area, X, Musk was also chief designer in developing the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Insect. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to special content. Subscribe Now Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric automobiles, and in 2004 he ended up being one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later on renamed Tesla), an electric cars and truck business founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.