section_path: History/2001–2004: Founding
section_name: 2001–2004: Founding
paragraph_text: 2001–2004: Founding
  
  In early 2001, Elon Musk met Robert Zubrin and donated $100,000 to his Mars Society, joining its board of directors for a short time.: 30–31 He gave a plenary talk at their fourth convention where he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a greenhouse and grow plants on Mars. Musk initially attempted to acquire a Dnepr launch vehicle for the project through Russian contacts from Jim Cantrell.
  
  Musk returned with his team to Moscow, this time bringing Michael Griffin, who later became the 11th Administrator of NASA, but found the Russians increasingly unreceptive. On the flight home, Musk announced he could start a company to build the affordable rockets they needed instead. By applying vertical integration, using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf components when possible, and adopting the modular approach of modern software engineering, Musk believed SpaceX could significantly cut launch costs.
  
  In early 2002, Elon Musk started to look for staff for his company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached five people for the initial positions at the fledgling company, including Griffin, who declined the position of Chief Engineer,: 11 Jim Cantrell and John Garvey (Cantrell and Garvey later founded the company Vector Launch), rocket engineer Tom Mueller, and Chris Thompson. SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Early SpaceX employees, such as Tom Mueller (CTO), Gwynne Shotwell (COO), and Chris Thompson (VP of Operations), came from neighboring TRW and Boeing corporations. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees. Musk personally interviewed and approved all of SpaceX's early employees.: 22
  
  Musk has stated that one of his goals with SpaceX is to decrease the cost and improve the reliability of access to space, ultimately by a factor of ten.