Video launched by spacecraft maker Area, X celebrating its Dragon pill, which on May 25, 2012, became 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 Space, X, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was likewise among the first significant financiers in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla. Top Questions, Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment firm Pay, Buddy and established the spacecraft company Area, X.
Elon Musk founded Area, X, a business that makes rockets and spacecraft. He ended up being the primary executive officer and a significant funder of Tesla, which makes electric automobiles. Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mom. He showed an early skill for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he developed a computer game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after acquiring a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa since he was reluctant to support apartheid through compulsory military service and because he looked for the higher economic opportunities offered in the United States. Musk went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he moved 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 papers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer system maker Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then established an online monetary services business, X.com, which later on became Pay, Friend, which specialized in moving money online. The online auction e, Bay purchased Pay, Friend in 2002 for $1. 5 billion. Musk was long convinced that for life to endure, humanity needs to end up being a multiplanet types. Nevertheless, he was disappointed with the great expenditure of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Area Expedition Technologies (Area, X) to make more budget-friendly rockets.
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first released in 2018), was created to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly two times as much as its biggest rival, the Boeing Company's Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. Area, X has revealed the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy, Starship system. The Super Heavy very first stage would can lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft created for offering fast transport between cities in the world and developing bases on the Moon and Mars.
Dragon can carry as lots of as seven astronauts, and it had a crewed flight bring astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. Musk sought to reduce the expenditure of spaceflight by establishing a totally multiple-use rocket that might take off and return to the pad it introduced from. Beginning in 2012, Space, X's Grasshopper rocket made a number of brief flights to test such technology. In addition to being CEO of Area, X, Musk was likewise primary designer in constructing the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper. Get a Britannica Premium membership and gain access to exclusive material. Subscribe Now Musk had actually long had an interest in the possibilities of electrical automobiles, and in 2004 he turned into one of the significant funders of Tesla Motors (later relabelled Tesla), an electric cars and truck business founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.