Just when the career of the Korn Ferry Group was booming, some people on the other side of the Pacific Ocean were at a low point in their lives.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation that 99.9% of the Celestial Empire has never heard of.

It is about 3,200 kilometers southwest of Hawaii and about 4,500 kilometers southeast of Shanghai, with a land area of 181.3 square kilometers and a population of about 62,000.

Historically, the Marshall Islands were occupied by Spain, Germany, island nations and the United States, and its predecessor was one of the four political entities of the Pacific Islands Trust Territory under the United States.

Kwajalein is an even less well-known island below the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

It has a land area of only 15 square kilometers, but the lagoon is 1,684 square kilometers in size, with a population of 4,250, and is a U.S. navy, air and anti-missile base.

Two years ago, SpaceX's team of just 30 people spent months renovating the launch pad on the palm-fringed island.

The office was converted from a double-width trailer.

Since there were no roads on the island, engineers used the methods of the ancient Egyptians to carry rockets and their supporting structures, and the hot and humid jungle work was so physically demanding that the workers preferred to sleep here rather than return to the main island through the rough seas.

On March 24, 2006, the Falcon 1 was launched, and Musk watched the launch in the control room wearing shorts and flip-flops.

About 25 seconds later, the rocket suddenly began to spin and crashed uncontrollably into the ground, shattering the roof of the workshop with satellite equipment on board.

A year later, on March 21, 2007, SpaceX conducted another rocket launch here.

"Is everything ready?", Musk asked the launch team as he stood in front of the monitoring room.

"Everything is ready, enter the window time and you are ready to launch".

The so-called window time means that during this period of time, events or things can be processed or reacted to.

For example, the window time for satellite launch, it refers to the period when the weather conditions are good and the launch is allowed.

In Kwajalein, it was chosen as a rocket launch center due to the large number of annual satellite launch window options.

“9！8！7！…… 3！2！1！”。

"Launch!"

Falcon 1 leapt from a launch pad surrounded by palm trees and soared into space.

"The rocket successfully detached from the landing gear".

Trajectory Monitoring Begins.

"The disintegration of the first-stage rocket was successful".

"The second stage rocket was successfully ignited".

Watching the rockets on the monitor continue to fly into space, the tense nerves of everyone in the monitoring room began to relax.

"Elon, we're going to make it!"

"I failed once last year, and now I'm finally going to succeed."

"We will become the first private company in the world to successfully launch a rocket."

"Finally, I can confidently find venture capital financing."

"I think we're going to be famous."

Employees around Elon Musk began to babble.

Some of the enthusiastic employees even brought out the champagne and were ready to celebrate.

"The rocket began to swing"!

"Huh, are you going to change tracks?"

"No, it's not time yet."

"The swing is more intense".

"What's going on?".

"Oh no, the rocket is starting to shake violently."

……

"It's over".

"Failed again?".

"How can this be".

I saw that on the monitoring screen, the rocket had exploded into a fireworks.

This firework stung the hearts of all SpaceX employees and made Elon Musk's situation even more difficult!

The failure was a fatal blow to SpaceX's engineers.

They spent nearly two years traveling back and forth between California and Kwajalein, and the next launch, if successful, would be four years after Musk's original goal.

The wealth that Musk has accumulated through the Internet industry will soon be spent.

People inside the company know that SpaceX has only enough money for 1-2 more launches.

And SpaceX, which has not succeeded once, will have a hard time getting financing.

Although the money of venture capital is sometimes spent very willfully, it is not blindly throwing money.

"Immediately arrange personnel to analyze the cause of the loss of control of the rocket and prepare for this launch."

Although Elon Musk was also very depressed in his heart, after a few minutes of relief, he quickly adjusted his mood.

Back then, when Musk targeted space, his friends thought he was crazy.

In 2001, Musk had just entered his first year, breaking away from PayPal's fraud and starting a new chapter in his life.

Although this failure has cast a shadow on the company's development, it is nothing compared to the nuts encountered before!

At the beginning, with Musk's budget of 20 million ~ 30 million, he couldn't even complete the launch of rockets, let alone think about other things, he could only afford rockets from the Russians.

So at the end of October 2001, Musk personally went to Russia to investigate how much money was needed to launch a rocket.

In the next four months, they met with the Russians three times, and the process was very difficult, and the other party had no sincerity in doing business at all, but just wanted to knock a hard deal out of him, an Internet billionaire, so Musk left Russia angrily.

On the plane back to the United States, Musk sat silently in the front seat, fiddling with the computer. Suddenly, he turned around, showed a spreadsheet he had made, and said to his colleagues, "Brothers, I think we can build our own rockets."

It turns out that in the past few months, Musk has studied the space industry and the physics behind it with professional books such as "Principles of Rocket Propulsion", "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics", and "Aerodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion".

Sometimes, the difference between a genius and an ordinary person is greater than the difference between a man and a dog.

He came to the conclusion - it is okay to make your own rocket, and it should be cheaper than the Russians.

So, in June 2002, SpaceX was founded in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

SpaceX has hired an all-star cast of executives from Boeing, JPL, and TR who were limited by the rules and regulations of the previous company to work freely.

Musk has set an almost insane timeline for the rocket launch program — two rocket thrusters in May and June 2003, a rocket fuselage in July, everything in August, and a launch pad in September.

The first launch took place in November 2003, 15 months after the company was founded.

At the time, Musk received a sum of money from eBay's acquisition of PayPal, and he invested more than $100 million in SpaceX.

However, these budgets are only enough for 3-4 launches, and once they fail one after another, they can't start all over again.

Now that it has suffered two failures in a row, although it cannot be said that the company has reached the stage of life and death, it is already very tight on funds.

"It's time to meet the interested investors again", Elon Musk thought to himself.

(End of chapter)