Elon Musk’s once said that sooner or later life will have to go beyond our blue-green earth ball or we will go extinct” and for this, in 2001, he introduced, a concept named the Mars Oasis, a project of Mars, an experimental greenhouse and grow plants on Mars. Musk concept attracts public interest in space exploration and also attracts the attention of NASA. To start his project Musk wanted the Russian rockets, twice coming to Russia to buy them, but the price of the rocket did not satisfy the entrepreneur. Next year in 2002, SpaceX introduced, in which the Musk invested his own.
Musk immediately calculated that to create a reliable and cheap rocket all components for it must be produced by him. In fact, the implementation of such a project without the participation of the state, the main customer of services in the space sphere, was impossible. The 2003 was the year when Musk talked about the rocket Falcon 1.
The first launch of the company's first Falcon 1 rocket lasted only one minute, the next and the next attempts were also unsuccessful. In September 2008, the fourth launch went according to plan and the Falcon 1 successfully entered orbit, becoming the first private liquid-propellant rocket to reach Earth's orbit. Musk’s SpaceX is developing the next level of rocket named Falcon 9, which includes 9 Merlin engines and this will make a difference that if 1 of the rocket's engines fails, it can still finish its mission. This makes SpaceX rockets not only cheap, but also unique. The company produces 85% most of the all components for both rockets, and in the future for the spacecraft Dragon, while sometimes inventing equipment for their manufacture.
In 2010, SpaceX made history again as the first private company to return its spacecraft from orbit, the unmanned Dragon landed in the Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles off the coast of Mexico. Two years later, SpaceX became the first private company to dock with the International Space Station. After that mission, Musk’s company sent its craft to the International Space Station several times to resupply the station. In 2015, this company made history with the first unmanned vertical landing of the first stage of a Falcon 9 orbital rocket. Developing technology to land and reuse launch vehicles and spacecraft was one of the main reasons Elon Musk founded this SpaceX, because only such technology could make more accessible the flights to Mars.
SapceX has flown more than 80 Falcon 9 missions in the last nine years. It’s the May 2018, when the company launched its first Block 5 Falcon 9 rocket, a "definitive version" designed to be reused up to 100 times with periodic repairs. In 2018, company launches Falcon Heavy, a modular rocket consisting of three Falcon 9s, for the first time with 27 engines.
After the Falcon Heavy, Musk begins testing the Starhopper, a prototype of the Starship, which in the future will have to take people to Mars. The company also completed tests of the Crew Dragon passenger capsule and sent people to the International Space Station on May 30, 2020. Although the flight went smoothly, astronauts Bob Benken and Doug Hurley said that the Falcon 9 flight was a bit heavier than expected.
Crew Dragon became the first ever NASA certified commercial spacecraft and sent four people to the International Space Station on the Crew-1 mission, the spacecraft can dock with the station in automatic or manual mode. This spacecraft does not have the usual panels with many buttons and switches; it’s the first video game style touchscreen-controlled ship, while three monitors are insured by a few spare buttons underneath.
In this year on April 23, 2021 NASA certified Crew Dragon spacecraft again sent astronauts to the International Space Station. In the meantime, SpaceX's next flight, scheduled for September 15, 2021, should again go down in history as the first all-private and all-civilian mission, and called Inspiration 4. Then there will be the October 23 flight, with three astronauts and a fourth, as yet unnamed, crew member aboard the ship.
Okay coming back to the ambitious plans to conquer the planet Mars. In August 2020, the SpaceX tested a complete Starship prototype, named SN5. The test flight of the SN5 Starship prototype used a single Raptor engine, whereas the final version of the rocket will include about 41 engines. Anyways, Musk’s SpaceX plans include sending the Japanese billionaire on a Starship mission around the moon in 2023, landing humans on the moon in 2024 and landing humans on Mars in 2026.
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