Dot-commer puts profits into reliable, cheap rocket

One of the earliest press portraits of Musk as a space entrepreneur. He had pocketed roughly $150 million in eBay shares when the auction giant bought PayPal, the payment company he had co-founded three years earlier, and had committed $50 million of it to Space Exploration Technologies. The article describes the Falcon: a two-stage, 68-foot, 28-ton launcher meant to carry small payloads for about $6 million a flight — under half the going rate — deliberately kept simple, with no wings and fewer moving parts than rival rockets. SpaceX was then a converted 25,000-square-foot warehouse with open cubicles, free cappuccino and a half-built rocket on the factory floor, and Musk hoped for a first flight as early as December. The piece also gives voice to the sceptics, who wondered whether he would become a space visionary or merely the latest in a long line of ruined dreamers — the industry adage being that the way to become a millionaire in launch is to start out a billionaire.