Elon Musk Test Flight To Mars!

Hello guys, girls, and to whom this may address:

Today with the launch of the Falcon Heavy, America has once again taken a stepping stone in the ongoing space race against main competitors like Russia and French's Space Development Company, Arianespace. According to a 2015 article written by BusinessInsider, Arianespace is debatably the biggest competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX program and was founded in 1980 with their most powerful product being the Ariane 5 having the ability to carry roughly 44,000 pounds. Nobody has even come close to entering the realm of Mars though, let me explain by giving out some facts about the Falcon Heavy.

Falcon Heavy:
-Ability to Lift more than 141,000 pounds into orbit. (More weight than a current 737 Airline Jet)
-Cost roughly 90 million according to SpaceX.com payment schedule options.
-Composed of 9 main engines, totally comprised of 27 "Merlin Engines" created in house at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne Ca.
-Delivers the thrust power of roughly eighteen, yes EIGHTEEN 747 aircraft at launch, providing more than 5 million pounds of thrust.
-Equipped with Starman at the uppermost chamber(Now a flying earth-created Spaceman) driving a Tesla roadster.

After just finishing the book, Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance the launch of this state-of-the-art technology is very much heartwarming to see. At the start of the book, we the reader dive deep into Elon's rough yet instilling childhood from a child to a young adult and beyond. We learn how Musk travels from being picked on in school for being the know-it-all and loving to learn to debatably the most successful entrepreneur in history; yes more than Steve Jobs. One may ask how Elon came to be and as Carl Sagan goes onto tell, "There is no such thing as a dumb question", so lets begin.

The young self-taught coder first begin his journey when he set foot as an entrepreneur and created his first startup, Zip2 a web software company based off a 28,000$ loan from his father, Errol Musk in his later 20's. Next came the sale of Zip2 too Compaq (22 million dollar deal). The money gained from the Compaq deal led musk to fund his next venture, X.com, an email payment platform which transformed to what we know today as Paypal. It is when he meets his first love, Justine Wilson, and they are on their honeymoon when musk discovers that he is being removed as CEO of Paypal. The next period of Elon's life will be filled with curiosity and optimism as he wonders why America has stopped its innovation and improvement in space exploration. In simple terms and from what I have gathered after reading his book and multiple articles is that the technology simple cost too much too produce, from outsourcing the aircraft grade materials needed to building the housing of the rockets, and too from purchasing the computer chips, engines, and manufacturing materials needed to create such technology. Over time Musk's personality, one who will set out to learn ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that is needed to build a product decided to build rockets for fractions of the price of existing technologies.

Musk would go onto cut cost by hiring the cheapest yet most-skilled engineers straight out of college driven by passion not by paycheck to produce in house motherboards, custom made computer chips, friction welders, motors and so on. On his mission to drive cost down he would contest the reuse old rocket shells in new models to avoid remanufacturing the body, something that took money and time, Musk's most valuable possession. With his all in or nothing strategy and the soar of PayPal's stock price with the recent merger with Ebay, Musk would start his next venture to disrupt the automotive industry at it's finest. Tesla in coordination with Solar City and SpaceX contracts with NASA after multiple failed attempts at a rocket launch are only a sliver of what has crafted Elon into the man he is today, and to finish off this little blurb I would like to include one of my favorite quotes by Elon.

"Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. ... Hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful."

Sources:
-Elon Musk
-Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
-http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-biggest-competitor-2015-4
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