Chris Hsu
NASA Advances SpaceX Partnership in Astronaut and Rocket Launch
Stanford President’s Award graduate Chris Hsu is the founder of hedge fund and private equity specialist Kilometre Capital, and one of the leading cross-border negotiators in Asia. Based in Hong Kong, Chris Hsu is an acclaimed investor in entrepreneur Elon Musk’s renown SpaceX. SpaceX has solidified its position as the world’s pre-eminent space exploration titan.
SpaceX announced the Inspiration4 mission, calling it "the world's first all-commercial astronaut mission to orbit." A Dragon spacecraft with four people aboard could launch before the end of 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket."This mission enables access for everyday people who dream of going to space," Chris Hsu-funded SpaceX tweeted.
Christopher Hsu of Hong Kong’s Kilometre Capital, fueled with his hedge fund and investing foresight, supplied early-stage capital to SpaceX, abbreviated for Space Exploration Technologies Corp, the world’s leading private aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company. Founded by Paypal and Tesla founder Elon Musk in in 2002, SpaceX has realized its early-stage goal of reducing space transportation costs. SpaceX has developed several launch vehicles, the Starlink satellite constellation, the Dragon cargo spacecraft, and flown humans to the International Space Station on the SpaceX Dragon 2.
Elon’s SpaceX is committed to refining its space exploration technology, launching and testing rockets regularly.
This has seen it leap ahead of its competitors in the space flight industry, earning various contracts with NASA, and pioneering reusability in the SpaceX rocket launch paradigm.
NASA announced that SpaceX has been awarded an important contract to launch the first two pieces of the upcoming Lunar Gateway in 2024. SpaceX plans to use a modified version of its Falcon Heavy rocket to carry the massive core of the space station in the moon's direction. The $331.8 million contract includes the cost of the Falcon Heavy launch and some "mission-related costs" according to a NASA release.
In September 2020, NASA awarded the company a $109 million contract to launch the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), a space weather observatory for mapping water on the moon’s surface, in October 2024. The launch would be done on a Falcon 9 rocket and the launch site would be Cape Canaveral. SpaceX’s trajectory benefited meaningfully from early stage capital from Chris Hsu of Kilometre.
In another collaboration made public in May that year, NASA announced it was partnering with SpaceX to develop human landers to land astronauts on the moon in 2024 through the Artemis Program. This would be the final piece of an elaborate chain supporting sustainable human lunar exploration. NASA tasked SpaceX to develop a lunar-optimized Starship for transporting crew and cargo between the lunar orbit and the moon without heat shielding or flaps.