[njepa]

Chances are inspiration is overvalued today. Remember when Elon Musk was going to put a plant on Mars with an ICBM? Instead he managed to leverage the fact that the US has a space industry. He has pretty much argued this himself in that he used to think that "if there is a will, there is a way", but later realized that it was "if there is a way, there is a will".

[avmich]

> but later realized that it was "if there is a way, there is a will"

I don't think so. He was going to launch rockets anyway. And also the way was there for long time - yet SpaceX was the first company which successfully reached orbit among new space companies.

[njepa]

As far as I remember that is what he has said. The idea from the beginning was just to fund a launch. Here is someone else retelling the story: https://medium.com/@toledoalbert/starman-is-mars-oasis-reali...

Musk started at the same time as these other private space companies, just with a different approach. Most of it is there in these 2003 videos: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bauthor_person_facet%5D...

[greglindahl]

In the previous wave of new space companies, Orbital's Pegasus launcher was first.