SpaceX founded

Elon Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies Corp. on 14 March 2002. The spark was a failed attempt to buy refurbished Russian rockets for a "Mars Oasis" demonstration; concluding that launch was simply too expensive, Musk decided to build rockets himself and attack the cost problem at its root.

He seeded the company with roughly $100 million from his PayPal proceeds — a staggering personal bet that most observers expected to fail. The thesis was simple and radical: rockets had always been thrown away after one flight, like scrapping a 747 after a single trip. Make them reusable, and the cost of reaching orbit could fall by orders of magnitude.

That single idea — dismissed by much of the aerospace establishment — would, within two decades, be vindicated by the most-flown, most-reliable rocket in history and reshape the entire global launch market.