In twenty years, SpaceX has revolutionized the space industry. Yet when the company was founded in 2002, its founder, Elon Musk, had neither the best technology nor the most experienced engineers in the industry. Those engineers were working at Boeing and Lockheed Martin, heirs to sixty years of expertise dating back to Mercury and Apollo. But that expertise operated within a mindset so ingrained that it had become invisible: a rocket is single-use, a launch costs hundreds of millions, and that’s just the way it is. Musk, however, asked a seemingly naive question: why couldn’t a rocket be reusable, like an airplane? His resounding success shows that in disruptive innovation, the factor that makes the difference is not technical resources, but the mental model. This touches on the very essence of entrepreneurship.
On September 28, 2008, after several failures, the Falcon 1 rocket from SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, became the first private liquid-fueled launch vehicle to successfully reach orbit. SpaceX has since established unprecedented dominance in the space sector thanks to its Falcon family of launch vehicles, which now accounts for nearly all U.S. orbital launches. As of May 9, 2026, the company had surpassed 648 launches for the Falcon 9 family, with a mission success rate exceeding 99%. This reliability is accompanied by an industrial-scale launch frequency: SpaceX set a record with 170 launches in 2025 and is maintaining a pace of over 15 missions per month in 2026. But SpaceX’s transformation is primarily economic, as it has reduced the cost of putting payloads into orbit by a factor of ten compared to traditional launch vehicles. While the cost per kilogram was approximately $54,500 with the Space Shuttle, it has fallen below $3,000 thanks to the Falcon 9.
A Fresh Look at Industry Models
How was Elon Musk able to radically reinvent the space industry when he was a complete outsider to the field, with no prior experience or knowledge in aerospace—a highly demanding scientific field—and while serving as both CEO and CTO? He was asked this question during a seminar in 2022. His answer? It was precisely because he was a newcomer that he was able to look at the problems to be solved with fresh eyes and see things that the old guard hadn’t seen in a long time.
When Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, he had neither the best technology nor the most experienced engineers in the industry. Those engineers worked at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or within their joint venture ULA (United Launch Alliance), which at the time operated a virtual monopoly on U.S. launches. These companies employed thousands of highly qualified engineers, heirs to six decades of expertise accumulated since the Mercury and Apollo programs. Technically speaking, they were the cream of the crop.
But that is precisely where the problem lay. This expertise operated within a mindset inherited from the 1960s that had never been questioned: a rocket was a single-use object, built by hand; the cost of a launch run into the hundreds of millions of dollars; and that was normal, because space was such a complex field that there was no other way to do it. This mental model was so deeply ingrained that it was no longer even up for discussion. It had become invisible.
But for Musk, this was not normal. His fundamental question was not “how do we build a reliable rocket?” but “why couldn’t a rocket be reusable, like an airplane?” The industry had already answered that question in the negative. The space shuttle project, which cost nearly $200 billion and spanned 40 years, from 1972 to 2011, ended in failure. The industry therefore concluded, after 40 years of attempts, that reusability was not possible.
Yet that was precisely Musk’s gamble. How could he succeed where the world’s top experts have failed? The industry was unimpressed by the newcomer, whom it viewed—not entirely without reason—as an arrogant upstart. “SpaceX seems above all to be selling a dream… which is a good thing, because we should all dream,” said Richard Bowles, a director at Arianespace, in 2013; “personally, I think reusability is a dream.”
Musk’s question therefore seemed silly at first glance; it appeared to betray a beginner’s lack of knowledge, but it was precisely his naivety that made it powerful: it forced him to start from scratch, to question every inherited assumption. That is exactly what Musk did: every assumption, from the biggest to the smallest, was questioned. And while he was a novice, he nevertheless spent months studying rocket propulsion and design manuals before founding SpaceX. He didn’t hesitate to make complete about-faces. Initially, he simply planned to assemble components already available on the market. He quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible. Suppliers offered him components compliant with space standards—and thus at very high prices. A single bolt, for example, cost 20 times the price at the local hardware store. He therefore decided to integrate everything and manufacture it himself, once again going against the industry model. The industry, after having long mocked SpaceX, is now in panic mode trying to catch up, but that won’t happen overnight. The ESA isn’t considering reusability until the 2030s.
What this story shows is that in disruptive innovation, technical expertise isn’t the crucial factor. The crucial factor is the mental model. It’s the ability to challenge an industry’s fundamental beliefs—those that are so widely shared they become invisible. SpaceX’s competitors had excellent engineers. What they lacked was an entrepreneurial approach capable of thinking outside the box they had built themselves. Their engineers were trapped in an obsolete model. No matter how talented they were, they could only produce continuity. In this context, the whole is not really greater than the sum of its parts; it is often even less. Musk, on the other hand, invented a new model that allowed his engineers to achieve extraordinary feats. What matters, therefore, is not the resource—which has no value in itself—but what is done with that resource. Traditional industry wasted the talent of its engineers; Musk multiplied their impact by offering them a vast playground. The whole is vastly greater than the sum of its parts: 1+1=1,000. Inventing new models and bringing them to life to create a whole that is vastly greater than the sum of its parts (resources)—that is the true work of the entrepreneur.
Your playground
Beyond highlighting the need to rethink models to truly leverage one’s talents, this story also raises a personal question: to what extent is the company that employs you capable of questioning its own models? Does it offer you a playground, or does it simply ask you to improve the existing framework? Is it wasting your talent? If changing the world is what interests you, perhaps you’re not in the right place.
🇫🇷 A version in French of this article is available here.