First commercial space taxi a pit stop on Musk's Mars quest

It all started with dream of growing a rose on Mars. That vision, Elon Musk’s vision, morphed into a shake-up of old industry, and a fleet of new private rockets. w, those rockets will launch NASA astronauts from Florida to International Station -- first time a for-profit company will carry astronauts into cosmos.

It’s a milestone in effort to commercialize . But for Musk’s company, X, it’s also latest milestone in a wild ride that began with epic failures and threat of bankruptcy.

If company’s eccentric founder and CEO has his way, this is just beginning: He’s planning to build a city on red planet, and live re.

“What I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go,” Musk told a cheering congress of professionals in Mexico in 2016.

Musk “is a revolutionary change” in world, says Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, whose Jonathan’s Report has tracked launches and failures for deces.

Ex-astronaut and former Commercial flight Federation chief Michael Lopez-Alegria says, “I think history will look back at him like a da Vinci figure.”

Musk has become best kwn for Tesla, his audacious effort to build an electric vehicle company. But X predates it.

At 30, Musk was alrey wildly rich from selling his internet financial company PayPal and its predecessor Zip2. He arranged a series of lunches in Silicon Valley in 2001 with G. Scott Hubbard, who h been NASA’s Mars czar and was n running ncy’s Ames Research Center.

Musk wanted to somehow grow a rose on red planet, show it to world and inspire school children, recalls Hubbard.

“His real focus was having life on Mars,” says Hubbard, a Stanford University professor who w chairs X’s crew safety visory panel.

big problem, Hubbard told him, was building a rocket affordable eugh to go to Mars. Less than a year later Exploration Techlogies, called X, was born.

re are many companies and like all of m, X is designed for profit. But what’s different is that behind that profit motive is a goal, which is simply to “Get Elon to Mars,” McDowell says. “By having that longer-term vision, that’s pushed m to be more ambitious and really changed things.”

Everyone at X, from senior vice presidents to barista who offers its in-house cappuccis and FroYo, “will tell you y are working to make humans multi-planetary,” says former X Director of Operations Garrett Reisman, an ex-astronaut w at University of Sourn California.

Musk founded company just before NASA ramped up tion of commercial .

Tritionally, private firms built things or provided services for NASA, which remained boss and owned equipment. idea of bigger roles for private companies has been around for more than 50 years, but market and techlogy weren’t yet right.

NASA’s two dely shuttle accidents -- Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 -- were pivotal, says W. Henry Lambright, a professor of public policy at Syracuse University.

When Columbia disintegrated, NASA h to contemplate a post- shuttle world. That’s where private companies came in, Lambright says.

After Columbia, ncy focused on returning astronauts to moon, but still h to get cargo and astronauts to station, says Sean O’Keefe, who was NASA’s ministrator at time. A 2005 pilot project helped private companies develop ships to bring cargo to station.

X got some of that initial funding. company’s first three launches failed. company could have just as easily failed too, but NASA stuck by X and it started to pay off, Lambright says.

“You can’t explain X without really understanding how NASA really kind of nurtured it in early days,” Lambright says. “In a way, X is kind of a child of NASA.”

Since 2010, NASA has spent $6 billion to help private companies get people into orbit, with X and Boeing biggest recipients, says Phil McAlister, NASA’s commercial flight director.

NASA plans to spend ar $2.5 billion to purchase 48 astronaut seats to station in 12 different flights, he says. At a little more than $50 million a ride, it’s much cheaper than what NASA has paid Russia for flights to station.

Starting from scratch has given X an vant over older firms and NASA that are stuck using legacy techlogy and infrastructure, O’Keefe says.

And X tries to build everything itself, giving firm more control, Reisman says. company saves money by reusing rockets, and it has customers aside from NASA.

California company w has 6,000 employees. Its workers are young, highly caffeinated and put in 60- to 90-hour weeks, Hubbard and Reisman say. y also embrace risk more than ir NASA counterparts.

Decisions that can take a year at NASA can be me in one or two meetings at X, says Reisman, who still vises firm.

In 2010, a Falcon 9 rocket on launch p h a cracked zzle extension on an engine. rmally that would mean rolling rocket off p and a fix that would delay launch more than a month.

But with NASA’s permission, X engineer Florence Li was hoisted into rocket zzle with a crane and harness. n, using what were essentially garden shears, she “cut thing, we launched next day and it worked,” Reisman says.

Musk is X’s public and unconventional face -- smoking marijuana on a popular podcast, feuding with local officials about opening his Tesla plant during pandemic, naming his newborn child “X Æ A-12.” But insiders say aero industry veteran Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer, is also key to company’s success.

“ X way is actually a combination of Musk’s imagination and creativity and drive and Shotwell’s sound manment and responsible engineering,” McDowell says.

But it all comes back to Musk’s dream. Former NASA chief O’Keefe says Musk has his eccentricities, huge doses of self-confidence and persistence, and that last part is key: “You have capacity to get through a setback and look ... toward where you’re trying to go.”

For Musk, it’s Mars.