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[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/spacex.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
to:
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 1 (click to see context) from:
[[redirect:UsefulNotes/SpaceExplorationTechnologiesCorporation]]
to:
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 1,46 (click to see context) from:
[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/spacex.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
to:
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
-->-- '''Elon Musk'''
'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
The primary purpose of Falcon 9 is the Dragon spacecraft. First launched in December 2010, it is capable of delivering over 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. More importantly, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the limited capacity of the Soyuz spacecraft, it is now the only spacecraft capable of returning bulk cargo to Earth from the ISS. The capsule typically returns by splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
Since 2014, [=SpaceX=] gives the Falcon 9 first stage the capability to be reused. After making a "soft" water landing tests (in April 2014; the rocket sunk before they could retrieve it) and a few unsuccessful attempts at landing on an ocean-going barge, the evening of 21 December 2015 (the first launch after the loss of flight 19 in June that year), successfully landed the rocket on a landing-pad on dry-land at Cape Canaveral. They finally nailed their first barge landing on April 8, 2016, and successfully performed their second barge-landing ''in a row'' just under a month later, with the landing on May 6, 2016 being the more difficult ballistic-reentry trajectory landing, requiring the use of three engines to slow the first-stage on final descent, instead of just one. With this third landing, [=SpaceX=] has successfully landed one rocket from each of their 3 reentry trajectories: Return-to-launch-site on the [=OrbComm=] 2 launch, vertical reentry on the CRS-8 launch, and ballistic reentry on the JCSAT 14 launch. The ballistic-reentry trajectory is especially important since that's the type of reentry that the majority of Falcon Heavy center cores will need to land from, with the two side-boosters using the return-to-launch-site trajectory to touch down on dry-land.
[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
They are also operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program.
[=SpaceX=] currently conducts launches from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and Pad 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Their mission control center is located at their headquarters in Hawthorne. In December 2013, they entered negotiations to take over the famed Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (the pad used by most Apollo and Space Shuttle missions), where they will launch all the Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rockets as well as their manned missions. Their inaugural Pad 39A launch was the CRS-10 mission delivering supplies to the International Space Station on 19 February 2017, which also marked their first daytime landing of a booster at their dry-land landing-zone. They are also building a launch center in Brownsville, Texas, with sights on conducting their commercial payload launches from there.
----
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
----
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
I think we might soon need to transfer all of this to a Creator.Elon Musk page to disambiguate it from the Space "X" trope, but for now, here's a new example.
Changed line(s) 44 (click to see context) from:
to:
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': TheTag of Season 1 episode [[Recap/YoungSheldonS1E06APatchAModemAndAZantac "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac"]] has a modern-day Elon Musk quickly stuff Sheldon's old notebook into a desk drawer right before he's interviewed about the program's inspiration.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 34,35 (click to see context) from:
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital SpaceX refueling stations.
to:
* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital SpaceX [=SpaceX=] refueling stations.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 4 (click to see context) from:
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who wish to go to Mars and people who can afford to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
to:
->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who wish ''wish'' to go to Mars and people who can afford ''afford'' to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution."''
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The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 50 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
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The Falcon 9 is also now being used to lift satellites for commercial customers. The first such launch occurred on December 3, 2013, when it lifted a communications satellite for an European customer. The launch vehicle has had over 50 150 flights since its debut, with flight 19 as its first loss in June, 2015 when it exploded minutes after launch due to an unexpected over-pressurization of the second stage. Another "anomaly" occurred on September 1, 2016 when the rocket spontaneously blew up eight minutes prior to an engine test, destroying the payload and inflicting significant damage to the launch pad. The cause of this second failure was a buckled liner in several of the helium tanks, creating pockets that allowed liquid and/or solid oxygen to accumulate underneath the lining, which was ignited by friction. Following the explosion, [=SpaceX=] has switched to performing engine tests only without attached payloads.
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[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "rapid unscheduled disassembly," when such an event occurs.
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[=SpaceX=] typically releases videos of both successes and spectacular landing failures, to many a space fan's merriment, not just to show the technological challenges of landing a rocket, but because StuffBlowingUp is also pretty cool. Musk often uses the term "RUD," or "rapid "[[ExpospeakGag rapid unscheduled disassembly," disassembly]]," when such an event occurs.
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* ''Film/{{Moonfall}}'' mentions orbital SpaceX refueling stations.
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* In ''Series/ForAllMankind'''s third season, set in TheNineties of an AlternateHistory in which UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace continued, Dev Ayesa and Helios Aerospace are {{exp|y}}ies of Elon Musk and [=SpaceX=], respectively. Dev announces plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 1994, which shocks NASA and the Soviet Union, who had planned their first missions for 1996.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
* ''Series/{{Salvation}}'', like ''For All Mankind'', has an Elon expy in the form of Darius Tanz, and the titular [[TheArk ark ship]] is clearly based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#Interplanetary_Transport_System ITS]], the original design for [=SpaceX=]'s Starship.
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* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
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* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a SpaceX [=SpaceX=] Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
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[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': NASA's crewed mission to Europa in 2024 apparently makes use of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, judging from the posters seen in Los Angeles, although in practice that role would be better served by a Starship vehicle.
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* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship.
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* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'', set in 2045, is based on the [=SpaceX=] Starship.
Starship. A company called [[BlandNameProduct Space Z]] landed humans on Mars in 2018.
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* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' is based on the SpaceX Starship.
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* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' is based on the SpaceX [=SpaceX=] Starship.
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[[AC:Anime and Manga]]
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' is based on the SpaceX Starship.
* The shuttle in ''Anime/TheOrbitalChildren'' is based on the SpaceX Starship.
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He was not a founder
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Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
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Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the founders of [=PayPal=] and chairman Tesla Motors, it committed itself to creating its own equipment in-house. Their earliest rocket, the Falcon 1, went through a long series of trial-and-error in a series of launch attempts from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, until it finally successfully orbited a satellite on September 28, 2008. It completed its first launch for an outside entity on July 14, 2009, with the launch of [=RazakSAT=], an imaging satellite, for Malaysia.
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->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who wish to go to Mars and people who can afford to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution.'"''
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->''"There has to be an intersection of sets of people who wish to go to Mars and people who can afford to go to Mars, and if that intersection of sets equals a number of people necessary to make Mars self-sustaining, that’s the critical solution.'"''"''
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From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by NASA: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
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From there, they moved up to the Falcon 9 rocket, a rocket intended to compete with the workhorses used by NASA: UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}: the Lockheed Martin Atlas V and Boeing Delta IV. The first stage of the rocket uses nine Merlin 1 engines (currently Merlin 1D, specifically), and is capable of compensating if one engine fails. This is something only two other launchers have ever been able to do: the Saturn V, and the Space Shuttle. This was demonstrated on a launch in October 2012, when one of the first stage engines exploded. Its Dragon capsule made it to orbit, but NASA refused to allow [=SpaceX=] to try to orbit the secondary payloads on the rocket.
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!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
!! Appearances in Media and Fiction
[[AC:Film - Live-Action]]
* One sequence in ''Film/EvacuateEarth'' uses StockFootage of rocket launches, including at least one Falcon 9.
[[AC:Literature]]
* In ''Literature/ProjectHailMary'', some components of the titular starship are launched on Falcon Heavy rockets, along with "[[Music/TheBeatles Pete]]", the prototype Beetle probe.
* In ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'', every space agency in the world, including private groups like [=SpaceX=], scramble to launch just about everything they can into orbit for the [[TheArk Cloud Ark]] to use after the Earth is wiped out.
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They are also creating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis Program. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
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They are also creating operating a human-rated version of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. Originally known as "Dragon V2", it's developmental name is "Crew Dragon" when NASA discusses it, probably to avoid an unintended association with the first mass-produced ballistic missile from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo World War II]]. Since the first launch in May 2020, Crew Dragon has carried humans to the ISS as well as cargo and is large enough to carry seven astronauts.
astronauts. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's ArtemisProgram. They had plans to use Dragon to explore Mars, but this was cancelled.
Program.
As to the company's central objectives, [=SpaceX=] is developing a fully reusable giant rocket known as Starship to eventually send people and heavy payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations. It is a [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Looking Spaceship]] made out of stainless steel, which works for both the [[ReentryScare heat of re-entry]] and storing cold methane and liquid oxygen propellant, which can be manufactured on Mars. The development method tends to involve a lot of trial-and-error, failing relatively cheaply and learning from the mistakes. In April 2021, Starship was selected to be the lunar lander of NASA's Artemis
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[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/spacex.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Privatizing UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace since 2002.]]
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'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of [[UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace spaceflight]] in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
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'''Space Exploration Technologies Corporation''', or '''[=SpaceX=]''' for short, is a private corporation based in Hawthorne, California, United States. They have catapulted to the forefront of the privatization of [[UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace spaceflight]] spaceflight in recent years with their Falcon rocket series, and the Dragon spacecraft. [=SpaceX=]'s main goal is the perfection of launch vehicles and spacecraft necessary to accomplish not only a manned landing of Mars, but its ''colonization''.
