NASA/PUBLIC FIGURES/TECHNOLOGY: “After achieving success as an Internet entrepreneur, he [Elon Musk] could have spent his fortune doing anything, including yachting, lots of things. He could do lots of things. But in 2002, he began pouring tens of millions of dollars of his own money into research and development for a new rocket…
SpaceX has become the first private company to develop and successfully launch its own rocket into orbit, the first to launch and recover its own capsule, and of course, moments ago, Space X became the first private company to put humans into orbit around the Earth.
Elon Musk, congratulations… Today, the groundbreaking partnership between NASA and SpaceX has given our nation the gift of an unmatched power: a state-of-the art spaceship to put our astronauts into orbit at a fraction of the cost of the Space Shuttle.”
-Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at Kennedy Space Center,” whitehouse.gov, May 30, 2020