It is impossible to overstate what happened on the shores of Texas, or what’s happened for two decades in El Segundo, the little industrial town south of Los Angeles where SpaceX was born. In its infancy, the country was reeling from horror. Only months before SpaceX’s inception in March 2002, terrorists had flown commercial jets into two crown jewels of New York City engineering, murdering thousands.
While fire and ash were still on our minds and on our screens, a quirky man on the other coast was talking about rocket tests and making humans multiplanetary—as though he wasn’t watching the news along with the rest of us, but instead focused on the future.
His dreams should have died the year after, when we watched more horror as the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere over Texas, killing seven astronauts and hastening the end of the shuttle program for good.
It also could have ended America’s long-held obsession with reaching the stars. But 22 years later, that is not our fate. Failed rocket after failed rocket, critic after critic led to bigger and more calculated risks that in turn made the beacon for the best engineering minds in America—and the world.
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