As of April 2015 , the SpaceX manifest has five Falcon Heavy launches listed, but does not show specific dates. By September 2015, and after the failure of Falcon 9 Flight 19 in June 2015, SpaceX rescheduled the maiden Falcon Heavy flight for April/May 2016, but by February 2016 had moved that back to late 2016.
I tend to think that all of Musk's enterprises are privately owned, i.e., there is no public stock issued. The advantage for Musk is that he has more control and he does not have to inform the public where the money goes or how much money people make. The downside is that there is not enough money for expansion.
Tesla (TSLA) and Solarcity (SCTY) are publicly traded. Also, SpaceX is partly minority owned (8.33%) by Google and Fidelity, which brought in a nice round $1B just last year. That isn't the same transparency as being publicly traded, but several seats on the board are held by different venture backers, and they can often dig around with just as much detail as the SEC.
Honestly, I don't know how SpaceX could expand faster. There is only so fast you can go when testing ideas requires actually building something, and trying it out publicly at great expense. The SpaceX timelines always slip, but that isn't surprising when doing things that are hard and have not been done before. I think Musk usually reports the "If everything goes perfectly, no one gets a cold, it doesn't rain, there are no supply chain hiccups right back to the raw material source, etc...timelines. Those kind of timelines never survive, but I think he continues to report them because 1) he is setting aggressive expectations for his people, 2) he genuinely believes these timelines are theoretically possible because if the world were populated with 7B similarly driven people they would be attainable, 3) a non-inconsequential amount of pride/bluster.
I like that he sounds like a crazy man when he says "we're going to do this...". You look at him and think that can't be done man, but how many of those things do his companies then actually pull off? The success rate is quite high given the bar they are jumping over, and they do usually get over the bar even if it doesn't look smooth it usually happens. So I don't think they will get Dragon to a controlled landing on Mars in 2018. I'd put the over/under at mid 2020 (Mars is particularly close then).
Full disclosure: I am an unapologetic Elon Musk fan boy. I can't help but respect people who try hard things, are willing to fail (publicly), and will continue to try hard things.
I'd argue it already has. At least for me, where my memories of people-in-Space start with watching the Challenger on cable.I really hope some measure of success with this can re-inspire the mass public to support space exploration. Not only as a means for advancing technology in general but also for boosting domestic industry. 21st century industry that is.
Enter your email address to join: