WASHINGTON
— Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Chief Executive Elon Musk recently
accepted a $20 million investment from Founders Fund, a $220 million venture
capital firm managed by his fellow PayPal co-founders.
"Founders
Fund has a track record of investing in companies with the potential to
revolutionize industries. We are pleased to be included in their portfolio and
welcome [Founders Fund managing partner] Luke Nosek to our Board," Musk said
in an Aug. 4 statement. "Founders Fund shares the SpaceX vision of
creating a world-class company that will shape the future through technological
innovation."
Nosek,
like Musk and two of Founders Fund's other three managing partners, was a
co-founder of PayPal, which was sold to online auctioneer eBay in 2002 for $1.5
billion.
Musk
first mentioned an outside investment in an Aug. 2 message to employees
released shortly after the Falcon 1 rocket's latest
launch failure. The privately financed rocket has launched three times
since March 2006 but has yet to reach orbit.
In
his message, Musk said he had accepted the investment "as a precautionary
measure to guard against the possibility of flight 3 not reaching orbit."
Musk did not quantify the investment or identify the investor in that message,
but said the money, combined with existing cash reserves, would enable SpaceX
to continue launching Falcon 1 while developing the larger Falcon 9 rocket
along with Dragon, a reusable capsule designed to carry cargo
to the International Space Station.
Falcon
1's latest launch occurred at 11:34 p.m. Eastern time following an earlier
abort and appeared to be going well until a video transmission from the rocket
stopped two minutes and 11 seconds into the flight. A SpaceX announcer said
there had been a vehicle anomaly and abruptly signed off. SpaceX officials
later said the first and second stages of the rocket failed to separate. Musk
has made no public statement since the launch failure beyond the message to
employees, which was read to reporters and posted to the company's Web site.
SpaceX
spokeswoman Diane Murphy said Aug. 4 that the company would hold a media
briefing "as soon as we have definitively determined what went
wrong."
According
to U.S. Army Lt. Col. Harold A. Buhl, commander of the Army's Reagan Test Site
in the Kwajalein Atoll, the rocket safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean
"well east" of the Marshall Islands.
"There
was no command flight termination action taken as the system ceased powered
flight following the anomaly, and the track to splash was within the cleared
maritime area," Buhl said in an Aug. 4 e-mail. "There was never any
risk to personnel or property as the area was completely contained as open
ocean — no habitated islands or aviation/shipping lanes."
Lost
in the failure was Trailblazer, an experimental satellite built by Poway,
Calif.-based Space Dev for the Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space
Office, along with a NASA
solar sail experiment and a payload adapter demonstration for the Malaysian
space agency.
advertisement
