The Falcon Heavy has finally arrived!
As you watch this video, A cherry red Tesla Roadster travels in space, and Starman the mannequin sporting SpaceX sleek spacesuit is in the driver’s seat, where it will sit for millions of years.
And in a deeper sense, Starman serves as a metaphor to Elon Musk’s path to greatness.
We will get to all of that in a minute.
Our Journey starts in 2001, when everything began.
Elon Musk was 30 years old.
Musk originally didn’t set out to start an Aerospace Company.
He merely wanted to get the public excited about space again, namely, excited about going to Mars, and he was willing to spend his own money to do so!
So, he came up with an idea called the Mars Oasis, which consisted of a small greenhouse that would be sent to and land on Mars, and with that, would be the farthest that life has ever traveled.
The greenhouse would send video feedback to earth so people could watch it grow.
By getting the public excited about going to Mars, Musk hoped that such a mission would eventually lead to additional NASA funding needed for a manned Mars Mission.
Musk wanted to finance, two missions in case the first one failed, he was not a billionaire at this time but he was willing to spend up to $30 million on the missions.
But Musk ran into a big problem, finding a rocket that can send the small greenhouse to Mars within his budget.
The cheapest US rocket was $65 million and was way too expensive.
But Musk was determined to accomplish this meaningful mission, so he took a coach flight to Moscow to buy an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile at a much cheaper price than a US launch vehicle.
Musk brought along Adeo Ressi his best friend from college and Jim Cantrell who was a consultant and worked on various joint missile defense programs conducted between America and Russia in the past, and is now the co-founder of Vector Space Systems.
They set up meetings with various companies, to include Kosmotras, a commercial rocket launcher based in Moscow.
All of the meetings were unsuccessful, the Russians did not take Musk seriously, and according to Cantrell, one of the chief designers spat and him and Elon because he thought they were full of it, and Musk returned without a rocket.
And then in February 2002 Musk and his team went back to Moscow with reinforcements in the name of Mike Griffin who worked for In-Q-Tel which was the venter capital arm of the CIA and also worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Sources:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3698
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-elon-musk-spacex/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170323235120/http://milesobrien.com/elon-musk-unedited/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/elon-musk-space-car-overshoot-mars-asteroid-belt
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5g8k/spacex-is-because-elon-musk-wanted-to-grow-plants-on-mars
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-falcon-heavy-air-force-20180208-story.html
http://spacenews.com/spacex-no-longer-planning-crewed-missions-on-falcon-heavy/