NEW YORK – Entrepreneur Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the lofty goal of ferrying humans to Mars and setting up colonies on the neighbouring planet.
Today the rocket company is sprawling – a major NASA contractor and satellite internet provider, it has also absorbed Musk’s AI start-up, which owns the social media site formerly called Twitter.
With a regulatory filing on June 3, the rocket and tech company announced it was aiming for lift-off of the largest IPO in history, raising US$75 billion (S$96 billion) on a total valuation of US$1.77 trillion.
The company will put more than 555 million shares up for sale at a price of US$135 each, according to US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
The offering could take place as soon as June 12, and would shatter the US$25.6 billion fund-raising record for an IPO, held until now by Gulf giant Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company.
Musk, the South African-born serial entrepreneur, founded SpaceX when he was 30 years old.
His venture followed the sale of his dot-com business Zip2, after which he founded the online payments company that merged into the entity that would become PayPal – later acquired by eBay.
He found himself flush with cash and disappointed that NASA did not have a Mars mission on deck.
In an effort meant in part to excite the public about space travel, Musk developed a plan to send seeds in a glass-enclosed greenhouse to the surface of Mars and grow plants, but was thwarted in his bid to find a means to send it there.
So he founded a rocket company.
The early days were rife with failure and the operation haemorrhaged money.
In 2008, SpaceX finally got its Falcon 1 rocket off the ground.
The company eventually created partially reusable rockets and landed contracts, including with NASA.
The Falcon 9 rocket became the company’s workhorse, and has carried out hundreds of missions.
The company’s next milestone was space station delivery: Its Dragon spacecraft reached the International Space Station in 2012, later becoming the first private spaceflight company to send a crew to space.
And the enormous Starship rocket is under development with the ambitious goal of becoming the first reusable orbital rocket, with an upper stage that could carry both crew and cargo.
The company recently showcased its third-generation Starship model in a mostly successful flight test.
If ultimately completed as designed, it would require complicated and still unproven in-orbit refuelling.
SpaceX is under contract with NASA to produce a modified variant of Starship that would serve as a human landing system.
And ultimately, colonising Mars is still the SpaceX dream.
The company is not afraid of breezing past deadlines. It is also used to fiery explosions, which several of its Starship test flights have ended in.
Yet SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn fast” ethos has helped it become the world’s dominant launch services provider.
But with a blockbuster IPO and a lucrative commitment to NASA to deliver on, astronautics expert G. Scott Hubbard said the ante is up.
“I think swashbuckling, you know ‘move fast and break things’, has kind of come out of favour,” the physicist told AFP.
It is one thing when “you’re not risking anybody’s life” with spaceflight and “you’re doing it on your own nickel, more or less”, he said.
But when NASA comes into play, it “means you’ve got to be very rigorous”, said Hubbard, who formerly directed the space agency’s Ames Research centre.
Experts across government and industry have already voiced concern that Starship will not be ready on NASA’s timeline, and some even question whether the system would ever be feasible.
With that in mind, NASA raised the possibility last autumn of reopening the contract awarded to SpaceX and using Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s lunar lander first, sending shockwaves through the rival companies.
But Blue Origin just saw its plans go up in flames during a ground test explosion of its flagship New Glenn rocket, which damaged their launch platform and heralded delays.
NASA hopes to perform an in-orbit rendezvous between its Orion spacecraft and at least one lunar lander in 2027 – but it remains far from clear whether either SpaceX or Blue Origin will be prepared.
Hubbard emphasised that SpaceX has “fantastic people working for them” from top universities.
But the pressure is on.
“If you take risks in the space business, it needs to be understood and mitigated risk,” Hubbard said. “It can’t be stupid risk.” AFP
