Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX Hardcover – March 2, 2021

LIFTOFF, Elon Musk and the Desperate early days that launched SPACEXEric Berger, 2021The creation and subsequent success of the company SPACEX is one of the most improbable and stunning business success stories of modern times. Elon Musk started the company in 2003 with 100 million dollars of his own money, a couple dozen engineers and a rented warehouse in Hawthorne, Ca and within 18 years turned it into the preeminent worldwide leader in space launch services with over 2/3’s of the global market. This industry was dominated for decades by huge legacy aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed. The history of start-up firms that challenged this status quo is a history of a graveyard of failures. How did Elon Musk achieve this remarkable success? That is the subject of this page-turning technological thriller by Eric Berger who put this narrative together with the input of all the original engineers and employees including Musk himself.I, myself, spent the first five years of my employment after engineering school, working in this exact same industry so I have increasingly been intrigued by what SpaceX achieved. My experience allows me certain insight, although somewhat dated, but probably partially relevant today, into the obstacles Musk faced. I would say that the launch service business would be without a doubt the most difficult place to embark on a startup company. Firstly, it is technically totally unforgiving in that it requires impeccable quality control. The smallest error in installation or manufacture such as a single mistake in a line of software code, a defective nut holding a fuel line in place, a damaged O-ring, can and will lead to a catastrophic failure costing multiple tens of millions of dollars. Secondly the economics of the business are totally unforgiving. Since at launch 90% of a vehicles weight is fuel, the remaining 10% is launch vehicle structure and payload. The launch vehicle must be painstakingly engineered close to failure design specs. An additional pound of redundant structure to increase strength will cost nine pounds of fuel consumed and a subsequent loss of payload capacity. Engines must be designed to absolute, maximum thermodynamic efficiency or lose payload capacity. Thirdly the major money for this industry comes from two semi-political, large, and somewhat opaque bureaucracies, NASA, and the Airforce. The industry from its very origins has been dominated by the Legacy Aerospace contractors who over decades have greased the political skids in Washington to deliver pork to Congressional districts and provide benefits and jobs to ex-employees of the government bureaucracies. Delivering services at low cost has always been low on these contractor’s priority lists. A start-up that would deliver launch services at a dramatically lower cost would upset this status quo and would pose a direct threat not only to the legacy contractors but also many politicians, dependent on their political contributions. Considering all these obstacles, how could Musk, who had no previous experience in aerospace, achieve such an overwhelming dominance in this most bureaucratic and politically tainted industry? That is the story told here.When Musk was queried by the author of the fact that Bezos, with his Blue Origin, space launch company had been working for twenty years to develop a large launch vehicle engine, pumped billions of dollars of his own money into the effort, and still not delivered one or delivered a single pound of payload to orbit, he replied: “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank. So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I am supergood at engineering, personally. Most of the design decisions are mine, good or bad”. “Boastful? Maybe. But SpaceX built and tested its first rocket engine in less than three years with Musk leading the way”. 20 years later Bezos is still trying. Musk’s secret, I believe, was to hire the best young, hands-on, not afraid to get dirty engineers who shared his vision of human spaceflight. He then empowered them. When an engineer told him that a timeline or a design was impossible, Musk would say: “Don’t tell me it’s impossible, tell me what you need to get it done”. I was reminded of a saying someone told me in my early days as an engineer: “To try and Fail is to learn, to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been”’ Musk let his engineers push the boundaries and their own abilities and sometimes inevitably fail so in the end they could succeed. Also, very importantly, he went outside the framework of fat-cat aerospace subcontractors and developed his own in-house manufacturing capability and in this way could become a low cost competitor to the aerospace giants. Most important, he hates bureaucracy, committees, trying to avoid responsibility, CYA, and fulminating and talking about doing things rather than actually doing them.There is a great narrative plot line to this book. When Musk first started his company, he tried to secure a launch space at Vandenberg Airforce base in California. Frustrated with the Airforce bureaucracy he decided to go around the bureaucracy and moved his first launch operation to a tiny coral atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific. There, his intrepid band of engineers would labor relentlessly for four years to get his first satellite to orbit. A large part of this book covers this period where his employees would labor punishing grueling hours to make his rocket work. After four years and three launch failures, Musk was within weeks of running out of money. He had to launch his remaining fourth rocket to have access to a business saving NASA contract and money to develop a rocket to deliver supplies to the space station. With money running out and immense obstacles to get his fourth launch to orbit, the SpaceX crew 5000 miles out in the Pacific worked around the clock to pull off a successful launch and set the company on its amazing trajectory.54 years ago, I was a young mechanical systems engineer assembling Titan 3C Airforce rockets at launch pad 41, Cape Canaveral Florida. I remember remarking to my fellow workers, one day, that we were building these beautifully engineered multimillion dollars shining pieces of hardware, only to light them off and a couple of minutes later see them crash to the bottom of the ocean. I said that is crazy. Elon Musk said the same thing in 2003 and he did something about it. Now SpaceX launches about 2 Falcon 9 rockets a month from Launch pad 41, the same one where I worked 54 years ago. He not only launches but he retrieves the first stages to be refurbished and used over and over again. By doing so he has reduced the price of satellite launches to ¼ of what Boeing-Lockheed was charging before he arrived and thus totally overturned the status quo applecart of the space launch business and breathed new life into the endeavor of human space flight. And I haven’t even mentioned what he has achieved with Tesla! Even if you’re not a techy, read this book, you will be amazed. JACK

A true book that shows the early days of a rock company and a man with a vision to make the future better and never give up.

Cracking good read!Liftoff by Eric Berger is the authorized chronology of SpaceX from inception in 2002 with the Falcon 1, a single engine rocket to the 27 engine Falcon Heavy.The story highlights:A visionary entrepreneur that is both chief engineer and CFO that dreams of a reliable, reusable and affordable space delivery vehicle.Assemblage of a team of engineers that pour their hearts and souls into what is seemingly the impossible (ultimately landing a booster stage on a floating barge 200 miles down range).Private sector pure capitalism competing with government sponsored behemoths. The risks, speed and willingness to fail catapult commercial space launches and dramatically reduce the cost per pound to reach orbit.The sacrifices team members made gladly to be a part of making history. To a man/woman they were happy to make the trade and consider their time at SpaceX to the experience of their lives. (many did burnout).HIGHLY recommended, hard to put down, chillingly good story.

Insightful and jaw-dropping introspection into the magic that runs through the veins at SpaceX and how they turn the impossible into merely late.

The world needs an inspirational story today that has a spectacularly happy ending. I recall watching the film of the first stage boosters returning to the ships at sea and landing themselves successfully. I knew how significant the paradigm shift was and it’s permanent effect on space commerce.This was a great story that made it difficult to put down and did a great job of covering enough rocket science for an engineer like me but without bogging the reader down or losing them in technical details.

I wanted to know the engineering story behind SpaceX and this book gave me that. Did you know engineers literally fixed the rocket mid flight to prevent it from getting destroyed in the air. This and lots of other trivia about SpaceX is present in this book and I give it a strong recommendation to anyone interested about the engineering history of SpaceX. Thankfully this book is also not a Musk fluff piece and clearly shows the cons of working for a demanding and relentless boss that can ruin your personal life for his work. It does make me wonder, if greatness can be achieved without ruining your personal life and keeping sane work hours!

Today is 4/20/2023 writing this hours after SpaceX launched the Starship with the Super Heavy Booster. Reading the first few pages and so far I like this book. It gives you an insight in the early days of SpaceX's & Elon's vision and how things came about. SpaceX proves a major milestone 21 years later and today is one of the most historic days this company has ever seen launching Starship in Boca Chica, Texas.Can't wait to read more of this book, if you really want to acheive something big I believe the best teacher is to follow those who have achieved their first foot steps into progress.

This book is for my 12 year old grandson who loves Space X. I am sure that he and his grandfather will love reading it together

Excellent book. The best part is not focusing so much on Elon Musk and the other big guys, but all the little guys, most in their late 20s, who went to the island to make history. Elon twitted that the book is accurate, but not how we would tell this history, and I think thats the best compliment he could give!

A true life story that feels like fiction. Very well written and easy to follow, even tho there are tons of characters and life stories. I think this book made me appreciate more the work of the people behind the spotlight at SpaceX. Also great for entrepreneurs, business people and innovators.

Bem escrito, pois a pessoa fica torcendo pelo sucesso dos foguetes como se estivesse acontecendo agora.

Muito interessante e a historia/narrativa é fluída.

In the summer of 2019, I relived the moon landing through two great pieces of audiovisual media. The BBC World Service podcast "13 Minutes To The Moon", a deep dive into the entire Apollo programme, and the same story told visually in Todd Douglas Miller's astonishing "Apollo 11", which I would urge you to see on as big a screen as possible.They both reawakened a long dormant interest in space for me. I read a lot of tech news, so had vague awareness of the big milestones of SpaceX, but can't claim to have followed them.So from that point on, I immersed myself in both the spaceflight history of a half century or more ago, and the spaceflight present; where once or twice a month - sometimes once or twice a *week*, SpaceX put a payload in orbit then bring back the first stage of the rocket that did it. Kennedy may have said, "we do these things not because they were easy, but because they are hard"; yet SpaceX have made launches seem as routine as a supermarket shop.Eric Berger's book shows you, starting from zero, how they got there - through teamwork and the efforts of many individuals, many of whose stories we hear in detail as the narrative thrums along. Like so many American journalists. Berger has the ability to conjure an evocative sense of place and time; and there is one sequence in particular that cries out to be dramatised in a big budget movie one day.If there is a downside then its an inevitable one when dealing with billionaires like Musk. There's no doubt the book has benefited from astonishing levels of access to the key players, but there are only a couple of places that are less than hagiographic in their treatment of his flawed genius. But this is a minor quibble, because it's not about Musk.