In 2005, three years before its first successful orbital launch, a fledgling space startup called SpaceX petitioned the US government to let it use the storied Cape Canaveral launchpad once home to the Apollo space program.
Old-school space companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin bristled at the idea and lobbied aggressively to block the deal.
Executives at those firms had a dim view of the company and resented founder Elon Musk. “He was not deferential, but brash,” writes Eric Berger in his new book “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age,” summing up the feeling at the time, “Do you really want to let this guy onto the holy grounds of America’s largest and oldest spaceport?”
Their efforts failed, and SpaceX got access to the Cape.
Less than two decades later, Berger writes, “Elon Musk and his rocket company now stand alone, atop the hierarchy of spaceflight.” The company’s workhorse Falcon launch vehicle, the first commercial reusable rocket and the inspiration for the book’s title, now delivers more orbital payloads than the governments of Russia, China and private-sector competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined.
NASA relies almost exclusively on SpaceX to ferry astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The company’s Starlink satellites can deliver internet to almost anyone anywhere in the world, including to the battlefields of Ukraine.
Its Starship rocket is the largest to ever fly and may someday ferry astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
SpaceX recently completed the world’s first ever commercial spacewalk, and in a bit of poetic justice, when Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft ran into technical difficulties in August of this year on its own journey to the ISS, SpaceX got the call to bail them out and bring the astronauts safely home.
SpaceX has steamrolled everyone. David has become Goliath, says Berger.
Over the decades, Berger writes, the world has changed its mind about Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder. He began as a strange curiosity, then a widely admired entrepreneur, and today he is now a deeply divisive figure whose political views and business ties, says Berger, might eventually put him at odds with the U.S. government, forcing a “reckoning.”
How did this all happen?
Reentry picks up where Berger’s first book Liftoff left off, in the lead up to the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. The book reveals much about what made SpaceX so successful.
The first reason is Elon Musk, whose singular vision and hard-driving leadership propelled SpaceX through its many ups and downs. It was Musk, for example, who pushed relentlessly for SpaceX to master reusable rockets, despite industry doubters and the grumblings of his own engineers. It was Musk who decided to announce the Starship project (a k a the Mars mission) and launch the Starlink satellite network at the same time.
It was also Musk who revolutionized the economics of space. Previously, it was a “cost-plus” industry, Berger says, where companies bid on projects and got paid even if the work was massively over budget or overdue. SpaceX changed that model by bringing a startup mentality to the industry. As former SpaceX executive John Couluris recounts, “we were scrappy.”
The second reason for its success is the people. SpaceX’s many brilliant engineers and business leaders would spend mornings negotiating with NASA, and afternoons, nights and weekends troubleshooting endless technical challenges. Gwynne Shotwell, one of SpaceX’s first employees and a senior executive, negotiated and won a cargo development contract from NASA in 2006, which financially saved SpaceX, setting it on a path for future success.
Then there was Holly Ridings, a NASA flight director who oversaw the SpaceX capsule Dragon’s first docking with ISS in May of 2012, making a gutsy call in the middle of the flight with everything on the line that paid off. She later became NASA’s first female chief flight director. The list goes on.
As the company racked up pioneering firsts, it became the number one destination for brilliant and aspiring rocketeers who both wanted to build stuff — and were motivated by SpaceX’s mission to make humanity an interplanetary species.
The final reason for the company’s success was its relationship with NASA. While SpaceX relied on NASA in the early days for its first contracts, NASA was relying on them too. With the Shuttle spacecraft being decommissioned, the new Obama administration placed a bet on believing SpaceX could do things better. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said of the first Falcon 9 launch in 2010, “I was well aware that not only my own reputation, but the success or failure of the Obama Administration’s space policy, would be largely determined by the outcome of the SpaceX launch.”
NASA’s support extended beyond funding. NASA engineers worked in close partnership with SpaceX from the first Falcon 9 launch to the first unmanned Dragon capsule to the Dragon Crew which ferried astronauts to the ISS. NASA and SpaceX have a “fantastically fruitful relationship” that’s lasted decades, says Berger.
In the second half of the book, the company really starts hitting its stride. To be sure, there were setbacks, notably two (non-fatal) disasters that grounded its Falcon 9 for more than a year, but overall, the rate of progress from 2012 until today was remarkable: In the last decade, the company mastered reusable rockets, launched Starlink, built and flew the biggest rocket ever, and began ferrying astronauts to the ISS.
Musk remains at center stage throughout, pushing his team and reminding them of the bigger mission. “We are not going to Mars in my lifetime, or yours, if we don’t get our act together and take this first step,” Musk said after another failed attempt at re-entry..
For all the well-earned controversy about Musk, one can’t question his sincerity around space. He is clearly driven by a bigger purpose: if SpaceX makes a boatload of money, but doesn’t reach Mars, the company has failed, in Musk’s eyes. Nothing feels unachievable at SpaceX, which is perhaps why it appears capable of doing the impossible.
Berger is a veteran space reporter and the senior space editor at the tech news site Ars Technica with a scientific mind who clearly relishes the technical nuts and bolts of rocketry. Readers will learn how SpaceX keeps rocket fuel in a stable state, so it doesn’t explode on the launchpad and how to recover a capsule from the ocean without losing the spacecraft at sea.
You’ll learn how adjustable “Grid-fins” help stabilize the spacecraft on re-entry and how laser guidance systems (LIDAR) can help two spacecraft dock seamlessly as they hurtle through space. Or how to 3D print a space helmet and how to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars.
Reentry is a blast (pun intended), but it ends on a cautionary note. SpaceX has not lost its founder mentality, Berger writes, but he worries Musk may be getting distracted from the bigger mission.
Referring to Musk’s Twitter purchase and his recent inflammatory political comments, Berger asks, “What the hell are you doing, Elon?” After reading about what Musk was able to achieve in the two decades before buying Twitter, you may find yourself asking the same thing.
Alex Tapscott, author of Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier and Managing Director of the Digital Asset Group, a division of Ninepoint Partners LP (edited)
