From Startup to Industry Standard

Over the last fifteen years, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has redefined the space industry. Launching rockets has changed from a stodgy plodding business mired in the 20th century to a dynamic 21st-century multiple-weekly-launch industry. It has reduced launch costs by a factor of 100.

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age by Eric Berger tells how SpaceX accomplished it. The book follows the history of SpaceX from the start of the Falcon 9 project to the present.

Berger opens after the successful launches of Falcon 1. Berger picks up where his previous history of SpaceX, Liftoff, ended. Berger shows how and why Musk chose to abandon the successful but commercially questionable Falcon 1 and leapfrogged past the next development planned: the five-engine Falcon 5. Instead, Musk shifted to the Falcon 9, capable of putting 23,000 pounds into orbit as compared to Falcon 1’s 1,000 pounds. He also insisted Falcon 9 was to be fully reusable and launch multiple times, a vision then mocked as unachievable.

Berger shows how SpaceX achieved Musk’s vision. Berger follows the decisions made by Musk and the gambles taken by SpaceX to make Falcon 9 the world’s dominant launch vehicle — reusable and capable of making over 100 launches a year. Through interviews with SpaceX, NASA and competitors personnel Berber takes readers into the process, showing how SpaceX transformed from a scrappy startup to an industry giant. Reentry is as much about people as about hardware.

He also shows how Musk retained SpaceX’s startup culture. The jump from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 was only the first leap taken. Musk kept adding projects, including the Cargo and Manned Dragon, Starlink, and Starship, along with the Twitter takeover. Some, like a propulsive landing system on the Dragon capsule, proved dead ends. More often they yielded revolutionary successes. No one previously made a reusable liquid-fueled booster. Starlink became a money machine.

The book’s only flaw is the epilogue. Berger lays out a vision for SpaceX with recommendations revealing he understands neither Musk’s vision nor SpaceX, despite 20 years of close association with both.

But Reentry is too good to be undone by its flawed epilogue. Whatever his weaknesses as a prognosticator, Berger is a first-rate reporter and historian. Reentry offers an insightful and detailed look at SpaceX’s rise in the space industry. It is also a fascinating look at Elon Musk, who repeatedly proves to be Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena.” Skip the epilogue. The rest of Reentry is a must-read.

“Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age,” by Eric Berger, BenBella Books, September 2024,‎ 400 pages, $31.95 (Hardcover), $15.99 (E-book)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.