THE STORY OF SPACEX'S path to human spacenight begins, of course, with Elon Musk, who is now deep in the design and testing of a spaceship to colonize Mars. That project may sound audacious, but 12 years ago, watching Musk's Falcon 1 rockets blow up over Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands' Kwajalein Atoll, it would have seemed similarly far-fetched that two veteran NASA astronauts would be blasting off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a week to test its new Crew Dragon capsule. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of making humanity an interplanetary species. The first step was to design a safe, reliable rocket that was easier and less expensive to manufacture and operate than currently available systems. Musk and a team of about 30 employees set about developing the Falcon 1, a 68-ft-tall, two-stage, liquid-oxygen and RP-1 kerosene-fueled booster.
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