Video released by spacecraft maker Area, X celebrating its Dragon pill, which on May 25, 2012, ended up being the first industrial 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 entrepreneur who cofounded the electronic-payment company Pay, Buddy and formed Area, X, maker of launch automobiles and spacecraft. He was likewise among the very first considerable investors in, along with president of, the electric automobile maker Tesla. Top Questions, Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment company Pay, Pal and founded the spacecraft business Area, X.
Elon Musk established Space, X, a business that makes rockets and spacecraft. He ended up being the ceo and a significant funder of Tesla, that makes electrical cars. Musk was born to a South African dad and a Canadian mother. He displayed an early talent for computer systems and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he created a video game and offered it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after acquiring a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa since he was unwilling to support apartheid through required military service and due to the fact that he looked for the greater economic chances readily available in the United States. Musk participated in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he moved 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 supplied maps and company directory sites to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer system producer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then established an online monetary services business, X.com, which later ended up being Pay, Buddy, which specialized in moving money online. The online auction e, Bay bought Pay, Friend in 2002 for $1. 5 billion. Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity needs to end up being a multiplanet species. However, he was disappointed with the excellent expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Area Exploration Technologies (Area, X) to make more inexpensive rockets.
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first released in 2018), was created to bring 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, almost two times as much as its biggest competitor, the Boeing Company's Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. Space, X has revealed the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy, Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would can lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for supplying fast transportation between cities in the world and constructing bases on the Moon and Mars.
Dragon can bring as many 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 minimize the cost of spaceflight by establishing a completely multiple-use rocket that might raise off and go back to the pad it released from. Beginning in 2012, Area, X's Grasshopper rocket made a number of brief flights to evaluate such technology. In addition to being CEO of Area, X, Musk was likewise chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper. Get a Britannica Premium membership and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Musk had actually long been interested in the possibilities of electric vehicles, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later relabelled Tesla), an electrical cars and truck business founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.