Video released by spacecraft maker Area, X celebrating its Dragon pill, which on May 25, 2012, ended up being the very first business spacecraft to dock with the International Area Station. Space, 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, Friend and formed Area, X, maker of launch cars and spacecraft. He was also one of the first considerable financiers in, in addition to primary executive officer of, the electrical automobile manufacturer Tesla. Top Concerns, Elon Musk was born upon June 28, 1971. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment firm Pay, Friend and established the spacecraft company Space, X.
Elon Musk founded Space, X, a business that makes rockets and spacecraft. He became the president and a major funder of Tesla, which makes electrical cars. Musk was born to a South African dad and a Canadian mother. He showed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he produced a video game and offered it to a computer publication. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa due to the fact that he was reluctant to support apartheid through required military service and because he looked for the greater economic chances available 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 got bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997.
In 1995 he established Zip2, a company that offered maps and service directory sites to online papers. In 1999 Zip2 was purchased by the computer system maker Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services business, X.com, which later became Pay, Buddy, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction e, Bay purchased Pay, Pal in 2002 for $1. 5 billion. Musk was long convinced that for life to make it through, humankind has to end up being a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he established Area Expedition Technologies (Space, X) to make more inexpensive rockets.
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first introduced in 2018), was created to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company's Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. Area, X has revealed the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy, Starship system. The Super Heavy first phase would can 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 on Earth and constructing bases on the Moon and Mars.
Dragon can carry as lots of as 7 astronauts, and it had a crewed flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. Musk sought to minimize the expense of spaceflight by establishing a fully reusable rocket that might take off and return to the pad it released from. Beginning in 2012, Space, X's Grasshopper rocket made several short flights to evaluate such technology. In addition to being CEO of Space, X, Musk was likewise chief designer in constructing the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Insect. Get a Britannica Premium membership and gain access to unique content. Subscribe Now Musk had actually long been interested in the possibilities of electrical vehicles, and in 2004 he ended up being one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later relabelled Tesla), an electrical automobile company established by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.