Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Area Age

Great book, highly recommend
If you haven’t read Liftoff, start there first. This book will be much richer in context if you read the prequel. This is a fascinating look under the covers at the emergence of SpaceX and the crazy path the company took. I especially like the way he balanced his characterization of Musk. His insights are well documented and thought out. A must read if you like space, whether you like Musk or not. The story of SpaceX has revolutionized the space industry and it is brilliantly portrayed in this great read.

Fascinating history of the company that reinvented space launch
In this second book on SpaceX, Berger’s focus is not so much on Elon Musk as on how the launch company developed and succeeded, with emphasis on its relationship with NASA.Berger’s prose is clear and crisp throughout the book. He knows his stuff, technically, and explains it in terms suitable for smart high schoolers on up. I didn’t see any errors in the technology sections, though I thought there were points that needed elaboration.The media narrative of SpaceX’s sometimes-difficult partnership with NASA is clarified here. NASA contracts, some of them awarded before the space agency could be certain the company could deliver, saved SpaceX from bankruptcy at least twice. Berger recounts incidents when SpaceX’s speed-first approach came back to take very expensive bites out of the company’s collective butt, also he also tells the lesser-known story of how accommodating NASA could be. NASA officials, especially Kathy Leuders, did everything possible to meld SpaceX’s way of doing things to NASA’s, maintaining the critical requirements and making re-interpretations or exceptions when warranted.SpaceX is most famous for making boosters reusable. Berger details how this wasn’t part of Musk’s original vision but was added as he and his people wrestled with long-term cost reduction. The investment cost of making a launcher reusable was not something NASA or DoD felt was worth dedicated funding. Berger writes the biggest NASA crisis came when SpaceX’s desire to “load and go” – to load the densified propellants once the astronauts were already in the Dragon to speed the process and lengthen the launch window – drew instant and near-universal negative response from NASA experts. It took dozens of safe uncrewed Falcon 9 flights and a mountain of studies and test results to get NASA to declare the concept safe.Berger explains how Musk’s greatest strength – his ability to lay out ever-grander visions and inspire people to work insane hours to make them come true – was also a weakness when dealing with NASA. Musk’s vision of a civilization on Mars was one thing: devoting SpaceX to two huge projects, the Starship vehicle to make Mars possible and the Starlink constellation to pay for it, while he had NASA work on contract, led to criticism because the company was behind on delivering the Dragon capsule for the Commercial Crew program. This after NASA Commercial Crew head Phil McAlister just barely convinced a skeptical committee that wanted to rely on Boeing that they should also give the newcomer a chance.Once Crew Dragon was flying, Musk had to sell NASA and DoD on his next vehicle, the Falcon Heavy. NASA declined to put a payload on the first flight of such a massive, innovative rocket, even for free, so Musk’s Tesla roadster went up instead. NASA was convinced, moving its Europa probe from SLS to FH at what Berger estimates was $2B in savings. The success of the NASA-SpaceX partnership helped the latter win the 2021 Artemis contract for the lunar lander. Now, Berger points out, NASA can only afford Artemis and other exploration programs because of the cost savings SpaceX provides for its non-SLS launches. The ever-dominant issue of cost will likely keep SpaceX’s leading position with NASA and military launches for a long time despite rivals like Blue Origin.Berger closes by musing on SpaceX’s indispensable strength and its biggest weakness – Musk. Musk is, to some American politicians, radioactive, and having the more diplomatic Gwynne Shotwell run SpaceX only goes so far. Musk’s image as a man singularly focused on moving humanity into the technological future and taking us to Mars was gone once he bought Twitter/X, which does none of those things and is enmeshed in a storm of controversy.The one thing Berger does not do is explore the details about how NASA/DoD and SpaceX work together on the front lines: he keeps it to the major players. The day-to-day workings of the partnership in the many locations they take place, between workers at low and mid levels, could at least have a chapter or two here.In summary, the story Berger tells about Space X and the government is one of sometimes-fractious partners who made it work. There’s no question the partnership will continue, for decades at least. It may even take us to Mars. Berger’s first-rate book is indispensable to anyone who wants to understand how that partnership was born and nurtured along with the technology to make it worth pursuing. A good photo section and an index round out the book.

Great read outside the author’s political hallucinations
The book contains rip-roaring stories of derring-do and impossible feats, as well as the human cost, of SpaceX’s shake up of the space industry.After reading this book there is no doubt in my mind that none of SpaceX’s competitors will ever catch up to them. Musk has a unique combination of engineering brilliance, iron will, leadership, showmanship and marketing. Musk is the secret sauce of SpaceX.Sadly, Berger inserts his political bias at the end of the book by hallucinating that he knows Musk’s inner motivations and thoughts despite admitting he didn’t get to interview Musk for this book (maybe he’s upset about that?). For example, he asserts without evidence that Musk bought Twitter (now X) out of “vanity” in order to suppress political opinions he doesn’t like. Umm, hello? It was the prior Twitter regime who cancelled a sitting US president. As far as I know Musk hasn’t kicked any heads of state off X.It’s clear that Berger doesn’t like Musk’s politics, which is his right. But asserting as fact his random hallucinations of Musk’s inner motivations because he doesn’t agree doesn’t belong in a book about SpaceX’s achievements. It undermined the author’s credibility to me.

Very disappointong, just bravado, no technical back gound is given how the development decisions were made. Lots of chit chat dialogue.