Falcon 1

But the early years were a public train wreck.

The first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The third one is on video, and it's just devastating.

He had to stand in front of his employees and basically say the company was out of money.

bit.

That's Falcon 1 too, though, right? But they didn't even launch this one yet.

That's the thing, too.

If this happened after the second or third launch...

Europe is behind in a lot of key areas.

In terms of their commercial launch capabilities, Isar Aerospace, which had a lovely success this weekend with its Spectrum rocket, is essentially 18 years behind where SpaceX did with that with the Falcon 1.

And so the commercial companies are starting up there, but they've got a long ways to go.

So from a launch perspective, they're 10 or 15 years behind the United States in terms of the reusable launch revolution.

People's response was, how the heck are you going to compete with the NASA's and the space agencies, mostly government owned at the time, that have all the knowledge.

So, very few people gave it a chance, and in the next six years, SpaceX built Falcon 1, its first spaceship, and it succeeded by launching Falcon 1 in September 2008.

Now, in the early years, SpaceX flirted with disaster on the edge of bankruptcy, But it got a NASA contract for $1.6 billion in September 2008 based on the launch of Falcon 1 that rescued it and essentially allowed it to build Falcon 9, a reusable and heavier vehicle.

And the key is reusable.

I mean, in a sense that they were able to launch whatever you wanted to launch into space and come back.

So as SpaceX has kind of branched out into different businesses, it's worth looking back at its financial history as well.

Early on, as I said, SpaceX came very close to the edge.

It took a long time for revenues to shop because the Falcon 1 was still being developed.

likely.

I remember the early days of SpaceX when they were doing Falcon 1 out in modular.

So at that point, Musk was not as well known and certainly didn't command Everyone in the world paid attention to every word he says.

So he was a guest on the space show three or four times.

But it originated from the Falcon series of rockets.

And you trace it back, you go all the way back to Falcon 1.

And Falcon 1 had tried to launch three times.

It had failed all three times.

You know, it was a small rocket.

Right, when you think about SpaceX, right, their goal is to go to Mars, I guess now it's to the moon, but ultimately, you know, build an interplanetary civilization.

And so from Falcon 1 to Starship, there's a very consistent trend, right, which is max kilogram to orbit, dollar per kilogram.

and rate of launch.

And when you think about it, SpaceX effectively became a taxi service for NASA in a sense, not to denigrate anything they'd done, but essentially instead of United Launch Alliance or NASA building rockets and doing all the infrastructure build-out and launch their own payloads, NASA focused on what they know really well, which is what's the mission they're trying to accomplish in space.

Uh, but the, but the, the three launches we started off with did not.

So the, the, by far the worst, uh, em- emotional stress was the, the fourth launch of Falcon 1, because the first three launches did not make it to orbit.

They got, they got to sort of space on launches two and three, but they didn't get to full orbital velocity.

And, uh, and I, I, I ...

And those early years were brutal.

Like three Falcon 1 launches in a row fail.

2006, 2007, 2008.

Rocket failure is no small thing.

It's a GFC.

Elon Musk himself is now close to broke.

And so September 2008, SpaceX's fourth Falcon 1 launch has to work.

It works.