Video released by spacecraft maker Area, X celebrating its Dragon capsule, which on May 25, 2012, ended up being the very first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Spaceport Station. Area, X (A Britannica Publishing Partner), (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria, South Africa), South African-born American business owner who cofounded the electronic-payment firm Pay, Buddy and formed Area, X, maker of launch lorries and spacecraft. He was also among the very first considerable investors in, along with ceo of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Leading Concerns, Elon Musk was born upon June 28, 1971. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment company Pay, Pal and founded the spacecraft business Space, X.
Elon Musk established Area, X, a company that makes rockets and spacecraft. He became the primary executive officer and a significant funder of Tesla, which makes electric vehicles. Musk was born to a South African dad and a Canadian mom. He showed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he produced a computer game and offered it to a computer system magazine. In 1988, after acquiring a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he hesitated to support apartheid through compulsory military service and since he sought the greater economic chances offered in the United States. Musk participated in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997.
In 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and company directory sites to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was purchased by the computer system maker Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online monetary services company, X.com, which later became Pay, Buddy, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction e, Bay bought Pay, Buddy in 2002 for $1. 5 billion. Musk was long persuaded that for life to make it through, humankind has to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expenditure of rocket launchers. In 2002 he established Area Exploration Technologies (Area, X) to make more inexpensive rockets.
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first introduced in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, almost two times as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company's Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the expense. Space, X has actually revealed the follower to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy, Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would be capable of raising 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft developed for offering quick transportation between cities in the world and building bases on the Moon and Mars.
Dragon can carry as numerous as 7 astronauts, and it had a crewed flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. Musk looked for to reduce the cost of spaceflight by establishing a completely multiple-use rocket that might take off and go back to the pad it launched from. Beginning in 2012, Space, X's Insect rocket made several brief flights to evaluate such innovation. In addition to being CEO of Space, X, Musk was also chief designer in developing the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to unique content. Subscribe Now Musk had long had an interest in the possibilities of electrical vehicles, and in 2004 he became one of the significant funders of Tesla Motors (later on relabelled Tesla), an electrical cars and truck business founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.