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Of Mice And Musk: A SpaceX Odyssey
Elon Musk has dreamed of a human colony on Mars since he was a young man. Today, his SpaceX company is taking the first steps toward achieving that dream.
As Ashlee Vance tells it, one wall of Elon Musk’s office at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, contains two posters of Mars. On the left is Mars as it exists today – a frozen, lifeless orb. On the right is Musk’s vision of Mars as it could be — a happy place inhabited by humans who frolic on verdant continents surrounded by oceans.
“I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he tells Vance while eating cookies and cream with sprinkles on top. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multi-planetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness— then I think that would be really good.” No one has ever accused Elon Musk of thinking too small.
At the turn of the 21st century, Musk had two Martian fantasies. One was to send a colony of mice to the Red Planet and bring them back again, along with their interplanetary babies. The other involved building a greenhouse on Mars and letting Earthlings see the plants inside grow over the internet. Each venture required at least one if not two rocket ships.
He and a coterie of friends traveled twice to Moscow, once in 2001 and again in 2002, trying to purchase surplus Russian rockets that could be refurbished for the Martian missions. The first time did not go well. Recalls Jim Cantrell, one of the team that traveled to Moscow with Musk, “One of their chief designers spit on me and Elon because he thought we were full of shit.” On the second excursion, Musk became convinced the Russians he was meeting with were only interested in fleecing a gullible American with too much money and too few brains.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk inside the Dragon V2 [Source: SpaceX]
On the way home from the second failed mission, Musk astonished his team by announcing, “Hey, guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” In June 2002, Space Exploration Technologies, popularly known as SpaceX, was formed to build a cheaper rocket that could carry small payloads into space for paying clients on an average of once a month. The only problem? It had no rocket.
Such trifles were never matters to hold Elon Musk back. He assembled a team of committed rocket engineers and set about accomplishing, with millions, what NASA spent billions doing. Musk’s principle talent, apart from concocting outrageously impossible dreams, is finding people to work for him who are ready, willing and eager to give up all semblance of a normal life in exchange for insane working hours in remote locations. One test launching area was set up in the middle of Texas and another on far away Kwajalein Island, the largest island in an atoll between Guam and Hawaii that is part of the Marshall Islands.
“I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future”
SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk
Musk is not a man without a sense of humor. He dubbed his new rocket Falcon 1, paying homage to the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame. On its first flight on March 24, 2006, it crashed back to Earth after only 25 seconds. SpaceX employees dutifully donned scuba gear to retrieve some of the pieces from the ocean and set about rebuilding for another attempt.
Musk responded by hiring more engineers and starting work on a brand new rocket, the Falcon 9, that featured one large central rocket surrounded by 8 smaller rockets. Despite the failure of Falcon 1, Musk was already busy positioning the company to bid on NASA contracts to resupply the International Space Station.
On September 1, 2008, Falcon 1 flew its first successful mission. SpaceX was a viable commercial company at last but one that was rapidly going broke. At the end of 2008, Musk knew he would have to choose between SpaceX and Tesla. Alone, one of them might survive. Together? The odds were, both would fail. Musk worried that Tesla would be bought out by one of the Big Three automakers and become just a small part of a giant company.
Later in 2008, Tesla was within hours of defaulting on its payroll obligations. If that happened, Musk’s personal fortune would be gone, along with Tesla and SpaceX. He asked for help from venture capital group VantagePoint but was rebuffed. That’s when Musk put all his chips on red and let them ride.
Source: SpaceX
With all of his dreams and aspirations on the line, Musk executed a colossal bluff. He told investors he would put in $40,000,000 of his own fortune to keep the business going — $40,000,000 he didn’t have. Based on his assurances, other investors agreed to put up $20,000,000 more in financing and the crisis passed. A few weeks later, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to do twleve ISS re-supply missions.
Antonio Gracias, a Tesla and SpaceX investor and one of Musk’s closest friends, watched all of this at close hand. He says 2008 told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met,” Gracias says. “What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets.”
Today, SpaceX launches an average of one rocket a month, carrying payloads for many companies and several nations. Its prices undercut those of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital Science by a wide margin. Many of its competitors rely on Russian and other foreign suppliers but SpaceX makes its machines from scratch in the U.S.
Its clientele includes Canadian, European, and Asian customers and it has more than 50 flights planned over the coming years worth more than $5 billion. The company remains privately owned, with Musk as the largest shareholder. SpaceX is profitable and is estimated to be worth $12 billion.
Falcon 9 discovery launch from Feb. 2014 at Cape Canaveral, FL [Image credit: SpaceX]
The Falcon 9 has gone from a fantasy to SpaceX’s workhorse. Painted pure white with only an American flag and the SpaceX logo adorning its sides, there’s nothing particularly flashy looking about the Falcon 9. It’s just an elegant, purposeful machine. And to think that for a period of weeks just a few years ago, it’s ability to lead mankind into the dawn of commercial space travel almost died before it was ever born, thanks to a bluff so bold and so daring, it would leave most of us breathless.
Jimmy Buffett once sang, “Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks, and I learned much from both of their styles.” Which one is Elon Musk? Read Ashlee Vance’s book and make up your own mind.
Source: Bloomberg
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
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Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
