NEW YORK – Entrepreneur Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the lofty goal of ferrying humans to Mars and setting up colonies on the neighbouring planet.

Today the rocket company is sprawling – a major NASA contractor and satellite internet provider, it has also absorbed Musk’s AI start-up, which owns the social media site formerly called Twitter.

With a regulatory filing on June 3, the rocket and tech company announced it was aiming for lift-off of the largest IPO in history, raising US$75 billion (S$96 billion) on a total valuation of US$1.77 trillion.

The company will put more than 555 million shares up for sale at a price of US$135 each, according to US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

The offering could take place as soon as June 12, and would shatter the US$25.6 billion fund-raising record for an IPO, held until now by Gulf giant Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company.

Musk, the South African-born serial entrepreneur, founded SpaceX when he was 30 years old.

His venture followed the sale of his dot-com business Zip2, after which he founded the online payments company that merged into the entity that would become PayPal – later acquired by eBay.

He found himself flush with cash and disappointed that NASA did not have a Mars mission on deck.

In an effort meant in part to excite the public about space travel, Musk developed a plan to send seeds in a glass-enclosed greenhouse to the surface of Mars and grow plants, but was thwarted in his bid to find a means to send it there.

So he founded a rocket company.

The early days were rife with failure and the operation haemorrhaged money.

In 2008, SpaceX finally got its Falcon 1 rocket off the ground.

The company eventually created partially reusable rockets and landed contracts, including with NASA.