Elon Musk's SpaceX faces the biggest challenge in its history
On May 27th, the Space X Dragon capsule will be manned and will dock with the International Space Station. This will be the first private sector space flight. The beginning of the future.
The company was never supposed to succeed. Even its founder gave it odds few gamblers would take - 1 in 10.But Elon Musk decided to go all in anyway, investing some $100 million of his own money, over the protests of his friends, family and the basic logic that said a private entrepreneur with no experience in spaceflight shouldn't start a rocket company.
The result - Space Exploration Technologies - has become one of the most improbable stories in the history of American enterprise, a combination of disruption, failure and triumph that has transformed it from a spunky start-up to an industry powerhouse with some 7,000 employees.
Now, SpaceX, as it's commonly known, faces the most significant test since it was founded in 2002. On May 27, the California-based company is scheduled to launch two veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the International Space Station from the same launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 to the moon.
If all goes according to plan, the mission would herald a monumental moment in human space exploration: the first launch by a private company of people into orbit. The two astronauts will be lifted to the space station by a booster and spacecraft owned and operated by SpaceX, marking the end of the era where only government-owned spacecraft achieved such heights and adding another major step in the privatization of space. It also would become a victory for SpaceX over rival Boeing, the other company working to fly NASA's astronauts to the space station, which has stumbled badly along the way.
If, however, SpaceX's mission fails, it would be a tragic setback that would derail NASA's plan to restore human spaceflight from American soil and fuel criticism that the space agency never should have outsourced such a sacred mission to the private sector.
The flight - the first of NASA astronauts from the United States since the space shuttle was retired nearly a decade ago - is the culmination of years of work by SpaceX and NASA to end America's reliance on Russia to fly astronauts to the space station. Without a way to get astronauts to orbit, NASA has had to rely on the Russians to get to space - a fact that has embarrassed the agency but could soon come to an end if SpaceX is successful.