Only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, the
US and the EU have landed anything on Mars. This week Elon Musk’s rocket
company SpaceX said it would put its Dragon spacecraft on the red planet “as soon as 2018″—making it the first private company to go interplanetary.
It’s easy to get impatient with crackpot plans to head for the red planet. (I’m guilty of it, too.) But SpaceX is unique in combining its dreams of Mars with well-funded, hard-nosed engineers.
And as it turns out, the company’s long-running quest to build reusable rockets, with the aim of making it cheaper to launch satellites into Earth’s orbit, has had a stealthier goal too. SpaceX’s
