Elon Musk | SpaceX | The story of a dream

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.”

- Elon Musk

This is one of the widely told story of this generation. This is the story of a dream. A dream which re-wrote the history of mankind. Like all great stories, this story also has a failures heartbreaks, struggle to establish an identity and triumphing success. I am sure almost every one of us has heard this story hundreds of times but it is so powerful that it still gives us goosebumps every time we read or listen to it.

The story starts in 2001 when a young, energetic but cocky young African American with big-fat bank balance decided to take a different route than the conventional path. Unlike all his peers who also earned a huge fortune in the dot-com bubble era, he decided to leave silicon valley forever and decided to start something which no one has ever thought could be possible.

This young man has a dream to establish a colony on Mars. He was not shy to share his dream publically and whoever heard about his dream either laughed on him or assumed that he is quite immature to think that this one is even possible. And people were not wrong also. Apart from the NASA and Russian space agency, no one was able to launch a successful man mission in the space. Giant companies like Boeing and blue origin were trying to establish themselves in this arena but not with much luck. At that time, this 30-year-old man with no prior experience in the space science industry dreamed to establish humanity on mars and he was ready to risk a significant amount of his wealth for that. He could have purchased island and lived peacefully for the rest of his life. But, He was different. He wanted to pursue an impossible dream. Around the same time, he declared as a private space exploration company they could help NASA to reduce their flight cost and it is worth mentioning that neither he has a successful product or cutting edge technology and NASA was a world-renowned agency with thousands of employees at that time. People again laugh at him, made fun of him.

This man didn’t care about what people think about him and he put hours and hours working. In his own words

“If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

Brick by brick he learned rocket-science technology and found some passionate engineers like himself to work round-the-clock. The advantage for them is there was no bureaucracy in their company. If Boeing needs to change anything request will go from one department to other and it will take months to get it approved. Being a lean startup they can change design overnight and start working on a new model in the next day morning if they found an issue with the previous one.

But despite these advantages, rocket science was not the child’s game. His first 3 launches were an utter failure. His privately funded company almost got bankrupt. Company’s resources were exhausting and they have very limited fund just to try for one last possible launch. People were waiting for the day when they announce the closure of the company. He was on the verge of a breakdown.

They say that darkest before the dawn. Among all of the problems, the possibility of next mission failure and probable permanent shutdown the forth mission got success. They were able to launch a satellite into orbit successfully. And rest, as they say, is History:

After that, they became:  

• The first privately funded, liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit (28 September 2008)
• The first privately funded company to successfully launch orbit and recover a spacecraft (Dragon) (9 December 2010)
• The first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (25 May 2012)
• The first private company to send a satellite into geosynchronous orbit (3 December 2013)
• The first private company to send a probe beyond Earth orbit (Deep Space Climate Observatory, 11 February 2015)
• The first landing of a first stage orbital capable rocket (Falcon 9) (22 December 2015)
• The first water landing of a first stage orbital capable rocket (Falcon 9) (8 April 2016)
• The first private company to send a human crew into orbit (Crew Dragon Demo-2, 30 May 2020)

It took 18 years for them to send the human successfully in the orbit. But now they made a space programme cheaper and affordable for even a company like NASA. The final destination Mars is still far away for them but what they have achieved far is not a small feet. when everyone was thinking that Space Exploration is only for the government, this man has proved to the world that if you dare to go against the flow and you refuse to give up in any situation is then you can find get success in any industry.

This is the story of Elon Musk and SpaceX. The story of a dream which conceived 18 years ago. The story of sheer determination. The story of how one person can change the course of human history. The story of how one person hustled against the whole world.The story of how the universe loves the stubborn heart with a dream.  

*** Keep hustling ***