'I doubted us:' Elon Musk says it took 100,000 people to launch 2 NASA astronauts into orbit — and that he wasn't sure SpaceX would ever pull off the feat
. Musk is often credited with the company's successes given his frontman status, but he highlighted the army of people who helped make the mission happen.
First, however, the nascent rocket company had to show it could even build a launcher powerful enough to send a small payload to orbit. The first three attempts failed. Musk invested the rest of his $165 million fortune from selling PayPal into the fourth — and ultimately successful — launch attempt of Falcon 1.
"To be totally frank, I doubted us, too. I thought we had maybe — when starting SpaceX — maybe had a 10% chance of reaching orbit. So to those who doubted us I was like, 'Well, I think you're probably right,'" Musk told Business Insider. "That's all the money we had for that fourth launch, and ... that wasn't even enough to save the company. We also then had to win the NASA cargo resupply contract," Musk said. "Those are the two key things that saved SpaceX, otherwise we would have not made it. So hey, I think those doubters were — their probability assessment was correct. But fortunately, fate has smiled upon us and brought us to this day.
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