SpaceX is a private company that produces cutting-edge rockets founded by Elon Musk, who used much of the money he obtained from the sale of PayPal to do so. However, Musk's idea, at the beginning, was not to create a rocket manufacturing company to reach and perhaps colonize Mars. After selling PayPal, in fact, his idea was only to finance an experiment to see if plants could survive, in an automatic closed greenhouse to be sent to the planet, with the gravity and magnetic field of Mars. To begin with, he turned to Kosmotras, a Russian company that at the time was one of the very few companies in the world with which he could launch rockets for private missions. The prices they were asking for were very high, so Musk tried to get a significant discount, basically asking to halve the price since his was a research project and not a commercial one. However, at his request, the representatives of Kosmotras practically mocked Musk. However, he did not give up. By carefully studying the production costs of rockets, he realized that the profit margins between the various companies operating in the supply chain were very high. Furthermore, that there were several technical limits that, in his opinion, could be overcome. And so he came to the conclusion that, by modifying the production chain and financing the right research, he could reduce costs and become a competitive reality. So that he could not only build rockets to Mars by himself, but that he could also make money from it. So in 2002 he founded SpaceX with 100 million dollars. At the time, more than half of his entire assets, obtained mostly from PayPal. In addition to research projects, the revolutionary idea for the aerospace sector will be to internalize the production processes as much as possible. Previously, they tended to be divided between a huge number of contractors and subcontractors. But at the beginning his idea seemed crazy to almost everyone and destined to fail from the start. The costs of producing and, above all, developing rockets are enormous. It seemed impossible for a private and non-public reality to sustain such expenses. So much so that even after the first significant results, NASA wasn't even interested in letting anyone read the documents sent by Musk's company. To compete for the first contract, SpaceX had to turn to the antitrust. At least to force the space agency to examine its projects. So NASA, practically forced by the court, examined SpaceX's results and its plans. Perhaps at the beginning with the idea of ​​quickly finding out what was wrong with the company's work so they could trash it once and for all. But instead, the engineers who study what SpaceX is doing are amazed. The ideas are good and, even if revolutionary, not absurd. In the end, NASA gives SpaceX the money it needs to continue its research. Then the prototypes of the Falcon 1, the Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 arrive. The latter will be used, in another contract, to bring supplies to the International Space Station, where for the first time a vehicle owned by a private company docks. The company had always been on the brink of bankruptcy until that point. But after NASA's support, investors started coming. And above all, SpaceX started selling launches for commercial use, thus starting to cash in, and going into business. In the years that followed, it started and successfully completed the development of one of SpaceX's major hallmarks. That is, rockets capable of landing and then being partially reused. Since building a space rocket alone costs millions of dollars, this would have allowed it to reduce costs even further. After the Falcon 9, SpaceX created the Falcon Heavy, which maximized the potential of the basic technologies introduced with the Falcon 1. After the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is launching a new revolutionary rocket. This time it uses different basic technologies than the Falcon 1 and is completely new. The vehicle called Starship, spaceship in English, would reduce launch costs to levels never seen before. INDEX: 00:00 Intro 00:32 The birth of SpaceX 08:28 The Falcon 1 challenge 16:40 Falcon 9: the landing 20:48 From Falcon Heavy to Starlink SOURCES: SpaceX Britannica official website NASA CNBC official website Author: Cosimo Volpe Text revision: Valerio Ribeca Editing: Daniele Ponzi Animations: Dario Bozzi Coordination: Edoardo Scirè #StartingFinance #Finance #Economy Starting Finance Masterclasses: https://bit.ly/SF-MasterclassYT Starting Finance T-shirts: http://bit.ly/shopSFyoutube STARTING FINANCE CHANNELS: Instagram: / startingfinance Facebook: / startingfinance TikTok: / startingfinance Linkedin: / starting-finance Telegram: https://t.me/StartingFinance Website: https://www.startingfinance.com/