Coding Your Way To Orbit How Musk Dominated Spaceflight

In 1984 when Elon Musk was just 12 years old he created a video game called "Blastar," and sold the code for the game to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500. In 1995, Elon Musk along with his brother Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri co-founded Zip2 which provided online city guide software to newspapers, offering maps, directions, and business directories. Elon did the coding, Kimbal focused on sales, and Greg Couri was an Angel investor. Four years later in 1999 Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash and Elon Musk's share of the sale resulted in him receiving $22 million which he used to found X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company where again Musk was the main or only coder.

X.com later merged with Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal and the merged company adopted that name. At PayPay he tried to influence the coding and the software but was removed from being CEO for it and all of his code from X.com was deleted, but he was still a significant shareholder. Then 3 years later in October of 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion and Elon Musk made roughly $175 million from the sale of his shares of PayPal. Six months earlier Elon Musk had founded his space company SpaceX in March of 2002, joining the billionaire space race with Jeff Bezos who had founded Blue Origin in 2000.

In 2004 billionaire Paul Allen was the first to make the edge of space twice in 2 weeks with Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, and later that year Richard Branson licensed Paul Allen’s tech and founded Virgin Galactic. Also in 2004 Musk became involved with Tesla and Musk used his 175 million from PayPay, his 22 million from Zip2, plus any money he could leverage from Tesla to fund SpaceX. In 2006 both Blue Origin and SpaceX built and launched their first rockets, for Blue Origin it was the Goddard test vehicle and for SpaceX it was the Falcon rocket, where it is assumed that Musk was involved from the very beginning with writing the launch and control code.

Then in 2008 when Musk was almost out of money he became CEO of Tesla and after only two years and three failed attempts a Falcon rocket reached orbit in 2008 on the fourth try, the first time a privately funded liquid fueled rocket made orbit. Then just 7 years later SpaceX also landed a rocket butt-down Buck Rogers style and began reusing their boosters up to 20 times, which shaved their costs per launch down every time they reused a booster. After SpaceX landed their first booster they flexed and landed 2 boosters simultaneously, then they started landing boosters on drone ships at sea, and they have been doing that for the last 9 years as Elon Musk used his launch, navigation and landing code to pilot the rocket boosters, land them on autonomous drone ships, and dock dragon capsules with the International Space Station. And while Bezos and Blue Origin were also able to land New Shepard test vehicle boosters in 2015 they were only about 5% of the rocket needed to make orbit.

Which begs the question, why has no one replicated landing orbital booster rockets? I mean, isn't it prior art now that Musk did it? We know the size and shape of the Falcon 9, the fuel, the fins and the legs, and SpaceX live streams the entire thing. So why hasn't anyone else been able to replicate landing orbital boosters? The only answer that I can think of is because they don't have the code to do it. All of the SpaceX code is air gapped from the rest of the world with military grade servers in Starbase Texas, with code that Musk controls and may have written himself, he is said to be a coding machine, and that is the only logical answer to why the Chinese haven't reverse engineered landing rockets for reuse. They can reverse engineer a fighter jet but they can't replicate or steal Musk’s code. Many companies and countries can launch a rocket, but no one else has been able to adapt their launch code to landing orbital rocket boosters.

Apparently Elon Musk coded his way to orbit in only 2 years, to landing orbital rocket boosters 7 years later, and now because he reuses his boosters and no one can write code to match his, he has dominated space launches with 91% of all launches to Low Earth Orbit being provided by SpaceX in 2024 on a total of 132 launches of Falcon 9s, often ride-sharing with StarLink satellites. While their website says they charge over $4,000 a kilo SpaceX actually charged $1,500 to $3,000 per kilo to many customers in 2024, since their cost to launch with boosters being reused 20 times is only around $1,000 a kilo to LEO. No one else can land boosters so their 2 legacy “competitors” United Launch Alliance ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, and the European Space Agency ESA’s Ariane 6 both have to charge $4,000 - $5,500 per kilo to LEO because of their legacy disposable boosters, which is why SpaceX cornered the market on spaceflight and being a launch provider in 2024.

It is not just the fact that no one else can land an orbital rocket booster that offers a stark difference, the billionaire space race had Musk in orbit in 2008 after just 2 years of trying, while Branson gave up after 20 years and stopped funding Virgin Galactic in 2024 after only ever being able to make it to the edge of space called the Karman line (which Paul Allen had already done in 2004) requiring about 5% of the rocket, fuel and boost needed to make orbit. And after 15 years of trying in July of 2021 Bezos finally made it to the Karman Line himself in New Shepard as one of the first passengers in his new space tourism company, then he made orbit in January of 2025, more than 17 years after SpaceX with the New Glenn. Since Bezos, Musk, Allen, and Branson all had access to former NASA engineers, they should have all been able to at least make orbit, but they didn't, and it took Bezos nearly 10 times as long as Musk to do it.

Making it to orbit is something that many country’s space programs have done, but if no one can ever land a rocket then no one can ever compete with SpaceX, and after more than 9 years of trying, it appears that no one will ever be able to land rockets. If engineers alone could land rockets, then they would have already done it somewhere on Earth. Blue Origin claims that that will do everything that SpaceX does, maybe, but it did take them 15 years to get people to the Karman Line and 19 years to make orbit, while SpaceX made orbit in only 2 years, so maybe Blue Origin will be able to land boosters in another 9 years, or maybe no one other than Musk will ever be able to land boosters because he is a one-of-a-kind genius coder, the special sauce, so to speak, that separates SpaceX from all others.