INSIDE SPACEX’S NEW ULTRA FACTORY

As we all know, Space Exploration Technologies Corp commonly known as SpaceX is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. Space X was the first private company to successfully launch and return a spacecraft from Earth orbit and the first to launch a crewed spacecraft and dock it with the International Space Station (ISS). With its headquarters in Hawthorne, California, SpaceX was formed by Musk in the hopes of revolutionizing the aerospace industry by making affordable spaceflight a reality to enable colonization of Mars. Musk believed that human survival depends on its ability to become a multi-planetary species, so he made it one of his life goals to make spacecraft affordable. Thanks to the developments in SpaceX, Musk has managed to reduce the cost of traveling to the space station by up to 90 percent. What then cost $1 billion per mission now costs $60 million.
Today we will take a look inside SpaceX’s rocket factory, how it started, and its plans for the future.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with little more than a handful of staff, an empty office in Los Angeles, and a mariachi band… Yes, mariachi band :D. Today, SpaceX has footholds in California, Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Washington DC, and has employed over 5,000 people. These locations host offices, launch pads, factories, and test facilities.
SpaceX manufactures the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, several rocket engines, Dragon cargo, and crew spacecraft, and Starlink satellites.
The company entered the space arena with the Falcon 1 rocket, a two-stage liquid-fueled craft designed to send small satellites into orbit. The Falcon 1 was vastly cheaper to build and operate than its competitors, a field largely populated by spacecraft built by publicly owned and government-funded companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Part of the rocket’s cost-effectiveness was made possible by the SpaceX-developed Merlin engine, a cheaper alternative to those used by other companies. SpaceX also focused on making reusable rockets in place of other launch vehicles that are generally made for one-time use.
In 2005, SpaceX announced plans to pursue a human-rated commercial space program through the end of the decade, a program which would later become the Dragon spacecraft.
The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures. The first successful launch was achieved in 2008, and the Falcon 1 was retired after its second successful launch in 2009, which allowed SpaceX to focus on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9.
In 2010 SpaceX first launched its Falcon 9, a reusable bigger craft so named for its use of nine engines, and the following year it broke ground on a launch site for the Falcon Heavy, a craft the company hoped would be the first to break the $1,000-per-pound-to-orbit cost barrier and that might one day be used to transport astronauts into deep space. The Falcon 9 was designed so that its first stage could be reused. In December 2010 the company reached another milestone, becoming the first commercial company to release a spacecraft—the Dragon capsule into orbit and successfully return it to Earth. Dragon again made history on May 25, 2012, when it became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS, to which it successfully delivered cargo. In August that year, SpaceX announced that it had won a contract from NASA to develop a successor to the space shuttle that would transport astronauts into space.