How long spacex been around?

Elon Musk founded the company in 2002 with the stated aim of lowering the cost of access to space and, eventually, settling Mars. Its first vehicle, the small Falcon 1, failed on three consecutive attempts from Omelek Island in the Pacific before reaching orbit on the fourth, in September 2008, by most accounts with barely enough money left for another try. A NASA cargo contract signed later that year kept the company alive and set the pattern for what followed: vehicles bought as a commercial service rather than built to government order.

Falcon 9, far larger than Falcon 1, began flying in 2010, and in 2012 Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. The change that mattered most came in December 2015, when a Falcon 9 first stage returned intact to a landing pad in Florida. Recovering and re-flying boosters, and later the payload fairings, turned a single-use launcher into something closer to an airframe with a maintenance cycle, and that is the reason the flight rate climbed so steeply.

In May 2020 a Crew Dragon carried NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the space station on Demo-2, the first orbital flight of people aboard a commercially built and operated spacecraft. Since then the company has flown government crews, private crews and its own Starlink constellation, and it is developing Starship, a fully reusable super-heavy vehicle intended, among other things, for lunar landings under NASA's Artemis programme.