Space Exploration Technology Corp., the company created by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk and better-known as SpaceX, has raised $20 million from The Founders Fund.

This is the first time SpaceX has raised outside funding, according to the Wall Street Journal; Musk previously invested $100 million of his own money. The news follows right behind the Hawthorne, Calif. company’s third attempted launch. The launch ended in failure last weekend, when the first-stage engine didn’t separate as required. The Falcon 1 (pictured left) carried three satellites — one for the U.S. Department of Defense, two for NASA — as well as the remains of 208 people who paid to have their remains shot into space, including astronaut Gordon Cooper and actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek.

But Musk says a fourth launch is “almost ready” to go, and that the new funding is just a “precautionary measure.” Musk already has a connection with The Founders Fund, which was established by his PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The Journal reports that SpaceX also held unsuccessful talks with aerospace company Northrop Grumman about a possible investment.

SpaceX has big goals — to make space travel, including missions to other planets, more reliable and affordable by a factor of 10. With three failed launches, it clearly has a way to go on when it comes to reliability, but apparently it’s not unusual to see these kinds of problems during the early stages of a rocket’s developent. SpaceX already has plans for 11 missions.

The Mountain View, Calif., company bathes its logo in stars and stripes every Independence Day, but last week’s decision to honor the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch — the second “g” in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite — is being blasted by some conservatives. Not only did Google honor an achievement by a totalitarian regime that was our Cold War enemy, they griped, but it did so without having ever altered its logo to commemorate U.S. military personnel on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

A Google spokeswoman said that Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted and often scientific in nature “We do not believe we can convey the appropriate somber tone through this medium to mark holidays like Memorial Day.” More on this silly controversy can be found in the L.A. Times report.

Google Inc. said Thursday it will sponsor a $30 million robot race to the moon. Mountain View-based Google said the race is being organized by Santa Monica-based X Prize Foundation, which is known for its multimillion-dollar scientific challenges. The grand prize of $20 million will go to the first team to get a privately funded spacecraft on the moon. Some specific tasks are also included in the challenge. Second prize is $5 million and a bonus of $5 million will go to the team that carries out other specific challenges, such as locating ice on the lunar surface. In a statement, Peter Diamandis, X Prize CEO, said the use of space “has dramatically enhanced the quality of life and may ultimately lead to solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on earth – energy independence and climate change.”

Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group that owns 25 per cent of Virgin America and licenses the Virgin brand, will jet into town. Virgin America Chief Executive Officer Fred Reid, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and possibly Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger will be in attendance. Newsom and Schwarzenegger lobbied Branson to have Virgin America set up its headquarters in the Bay Area. The state also put up nearly $13 million in job-training funds as inducements for the carrier to open its corporate headquarters in Frisco.

Virgin America first set up office operations in 2004, promising to create excitement, offer jobs and create an economic ripple in the Bay Area. It took three years, but funding has fallen into place, and the Transportation Department has overcome its fright of foreign ownership and given a green signal to Virgin America’s flight plans. The airline has hired about 500 of the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 employees it expects to eventually have on its rolls. About 100 are pilots and another 100 are flight attendants. Most staffers will be based in the Bay Area.

Not all of Virgin America’s employees are in the Bay Area. The carrier uses reservations agents who work from their homes around the US. Virgin America also outsources many of its IT needs to CSS Corp, a San Jose company that further farms out the work to its outfit in Chennai, India. Justifying these practices, CSS chief marketing officer Ajmal Noorani says: “Virgin America is offering a very high-quality service at a cut-throat price, and it needs to keep its IT lean and mean.

A 10-year-old company, CSS employs just 45 people in San Jose, and 5,000 worldwide in its offices in New York, Washington, Singapore and India. It is also setting up operations in Poland and Ireland. In 2004, Virgin America received nearly $13 million in job development funding from the Employment Training Panel, associated with the California Employment Development Department, to create Bay Area jobs. Officials expect the company will use the money to retrain some of the thousands of Bay Area aviation industry workers laid off in the post-9 / 11 US airline meltdown.