Why I Love SpaceX

Probably my favourite company of all time, SpaceX, is a manufacturer of rockets and satellites. They inspire people around the whole world and are a great showcase of what is good about US.

1 - Making life multi planetary

SpaceX’s mission is nothing less than making sure that humanity can survive a mass extinction event on Earth. It’s the whole way Elon Musk, the influential founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX evaluates his priorities when faced between two options: Which option is going to get us humans faster to having a self-sustained colony on Mars.

One of the major reasons for keeping the company privately owned is that SpaceX doesn’t want to be forced by shareholders to prioritize short-term profit driven goals over colonization of other planets.

2 - I can relive the 70s space program

SpaceX is incredibly open about what they are doing and what their plans are. You can even watch their rocket launches in real-time on their YouTube channel.

The event that will always be written in my memory is when SpaceX launched the first (and to this day last) Falcon Heavy. I remember watching the launch first thing in the morning, seeing the notoriously famous simultaneous landing of two boosters and being for a short moment really proud to be human.

3 - Starship and #dearmoon

The idea of this vehicle was part of the SpaceX since the very beginning, but they needed to start being profitable first. The real Starship manufacturing and planning started with the #dearmoon project announcement on 17th of September 2018. Where Yusaku Maezawa, Japanese business owner and arts patron, sponsored part of the Starship development and bought the first commercial manned flight around the Moon.

Since then SpaceX has been focusing on coming up with a design and mainly manufacturing process to build a factory line for these largest flown rockets. They are planned to be fully reusable, capable of orbital refuelling and being able to make a trip to Mars and back.

Looking at the concept videos for this spacecraft and seeing how serious SpaceX is about the mission is inspiring.

Without a doubt, exploring our Solar system with manned missions is the thing that I’m most excited about. The only drawback is that as soon as a human lives and health is concerned, the speed of innovation slows down to a pace of severely drunk snail. The amount of certification and tests needed to use vehicle for transferring humans is unimaginable. That’s the reason why the Dragon 2 Crew capsule slips the delivery timelines so much. Compared to the intended missions of Starship, Dragon is very simple and small vehicle.

For this reason, I don’t believe SpaceX is going to be able to send humans to Mars in the 20s. But fingers crossed for the first launch window of 2030.