(Newswire.net — January 19, 2015) — Seattle – Inside the Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center Friday evening, Musk proclaimed “the launch of SpaceX Seattle” to a crowd of about 400 invited guests who reacted with rousing applause, Seattle Times reported.
At private invitation-only event, Elon Musk told crowd “One day I will visit Mars.” People in audience shared a few laughs, however no one really sees that as a joke. When Elon Musk says he will do something, he usually does.
In the context of his well-known obsession with Mars, Musk said he will provide high-speed internet coverage of the whole planet, and all the revenue will be used to finance the facility on the planet Mars.
Selected engineers and friends, drinking Champagne from the SpaceX branded glasses at the party, weren’t surprised when Musk told them he plans to orbit a 4,000 satellite grid that could deliver high-speed Internet access anywhere on Earth. Those satellites are to be designed by software and aerospace engineers in SpaceX’s new engineering office in Redmond.
According to Seattle Times, Alex Pietsch, director of Gov. Jay Inslee’s aerospace office cited one graduate student at the party who said, “I don’t want to move to L.A. or Florida or Texas. Having this here is really cool.”
“It’s pretty exciting for this region to have SpaceX as part of the aerospace community,” Pietsch added.
“We want to hire the smartest engineering talent in the world,” said the South African-born Musk, 43, who made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, then started the electric car company Tesla Motors and now pursues his Mars ambition with SpaceX program.
“It’s hard to hire 500 people all at once,” he said. However, earlier this week, Musk told Bloomberg News he will ultimately employ “maybe a thousand people” in Washington state.
At the event inside the Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center, Musk spoke of “slow but steady and significant growth” and cautioned the engineers to be patient and call back after a while to check if there are vacancies opened.
Musk, who had visited his new Redmond offices earlier in the afternoon, left the Seattle Center event after about an hour, Seattle Times reported.