Elon Musk of SpaceX of SpaceX this week on planetary radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the

final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. My guest for this special

edition of the program is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology

Officer of Space Exploration Technologies. You probably know the company as SpaceX,

where they have just received an initial 1.6 billion dollar contract from NASA.

We're giving Bill Nye and Emily Lockwala the week off so

that we can bring you an extended conversation with Elon Musk. They'll be

back next time. We'll still let you know who won the latest space trivia contest

when we get to this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts.

37-year-old Elon Musk started SpaceX even before he sold the PayPal online payment system to eBay.

That sale came in handy. Building rockets, really big rockets, takes big bucks.

And Elon wanted to build them in a new way, one that would allow him to

equal or surpass the performance and reliability of the rockets whose names are synonymous with the American space program.

Names like Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Saturn.

And he wanted his Falcon series to be cheaper, much cheaper, than anything else currently available.

A Falcon One has completed one entirely successful test flight.

The much larger Falcon Nine may fly as soon as this summer. I visited Elon at SpaceX

headquarters in Southern California. We spoke at a conference room, one of the few

private areas in the cavernous facility, which also happens to contain the

design center for Tesla Motors, builder of Elon's all-electric sports car.

I don't know where to start congratulating you whether it's on the successful

...