About 25 years ago, Adeo Ressi, a former college roommate of Elon Musk’s, begged the tech entrepreneur not to start a rocket company.
Mr. Musk had just reaped millions of dollars from the sale of PayPal, which he helped create, to eBay. He and Mr. Ressi were looking at ways to send terrestrial plant life to Mars. They had a $50 million budget, but soon found it was not enough to cover the cost of a rocket. So Mr. Musk told his friend that he was going to build his own.
Mr. Ressi said he had organized a panel of space experts one day in a conference room of a hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., and brought Mr. Musk in to hear why the idea was a fool’s errand. Private spaceflight was expensive, and the economics made little sense, the dozen or so people there said. But Mr. Musk did not heed them.
“I really want to congratulate him for the incredible perseverance,” Mr. Ressi said in an interview. “For making it happen.”
Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has come a long way since Mr. Ressi’s failed intervention. On Friday, SpaceX debuted on the stock market as the world’s largest initial public offering, a $2 trillion juggernaut that has launched hundreds of rockets into space; operates a dominant satellite internet service, Starlink; and oversees Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence efforts and social network, X. The company’s I.P.O. was so huge that Mr. Musk became the world’s first trillionaire.
Yet SpaceX’s success was never a sure thing. Mr. Musk and his team of executives and engineers overcame numerous hurdles, solving problems as varied as the physics of rockets and the connection of multiple satellites in orbit.
Mr. Musk acknowledged how far-fetched SpaceX’s achievements were. At the company’s Starbase headquarters in Texas on Friday for the I.P.O., the 54-year-old said he had given SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of succeeding.
“I told people this: ‘It’s probably going to fail. But we should give it a try,’” he said.
Mr. Musk’s space dreams were initially modest, and centered on sending some seeds to Mars in a small greenhouse through a venture he had started with Mr. Ressi, Life to Mars. He thought that if people on Earth saw green sprouts pushing up on Mars, they would be excited enough to push Congress to give more money to NASA.
So Mr. Musk traveled to Russia, hoping to find an old intercontinental ballistic missile that could cheaply launch the greenhouse into space. The Russians spurned him. On the flight back to the United States, Mr. Musk turned to Jim Cantrell, a space industry veteran, and a few other colleagues and said he would build one himself.
“It’s a stunning story,” said Mr. Cantrell, who became SpaceX’s fourth employee. “Now we see today what it’s become, but at the time it seemed rather inconsequential.”
In SpaceX’s early years, it alternated between eye-catching failures and resounding successes. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, was small. Its first two launches, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, failed. SpaceX was starting to run out of money.
At that point, Mr. Musk said he would try one more time to make the rocket work, recalled Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and a former friend of Mr. Musk’s.
The third try also failed. But Mr. Musk then said he would try again. If it failed a fourth time, he might have given up entirely, Mr. Zubrin said.
“That would have been the end of SpaceX,” he said.
In September 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 launch made it to orbit. So did a fifth nearly a year later.
By then, SpaceX had won a key contract from NASA to develop the much larger Falcon 9 rocket and the accompanying Dragon capsule to take cargo to the International Space Station. The first Falcon 9 launch, in 2010, reached orbit, as did the second six months later. In 2014, SpaceX won another major NASA contract to take astronauts, not just cargo, to the space station.
By charging less to launch satellites, SpaceX grew to dominate the rocket business. SpaceX also used its ability to launch quickly and cheaply to deploy Starlink internet satellites starting in 2019. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth to beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. That idea went back a couple of decades, but Starlink, now SpaceX’s biggest business, was the first to not end in bankruptcy.
Mr. Musk, who simultaneously runs the electric carmaker Tesla, also turned his attention to getting people to Mars with a spaceship large enough to carry colonists. (Sending seeds was no longer the main goal.)
In 2016, Mr. Musk revealed the initial plans for SpaceX’s biggest rocket, now known as Starship, at a meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. Earlier that year, he said at a different conference that the company would launch a mission to Mars by 2025.
Since then, SpaceX’s test flights have included failures and hopeful progress, although almost never as quickly as Mr. Musk promises. In March 2024, he said Starship would arrive on Mars “within five years.” A year later, he said the spaceship would depart for Mars “at the end of next year.” NASA has said the best-case scenario would be humans reaching Mars in the mid-2030s.
In May, the 12th Starship test flight was largely successful, as the upper-stage spacecraft made it halfway across the world and performed the maneuvers to simulate a landing. But the booster stage malfunctioned as Starship returned to Earth, stalling future flights for now.
Even if there are future failures, Mr. Musk has stoked a generation of space enthusiasts, especially with SpaceX’s stratospheric I.P.O. this week.
“What SpaceX is doing, really, is building the infrastructure that can support and sustain this brilliant new promise of a new space economy,” said Royden D’Souza, 49, an independent journalist and podcast host in Doha, Qatar, who has focused on the cosmos for nearly three decades. “When you build a highway to space, when you build a highway to a new place, you have the potential for whole new economies to come up.”
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.
