Reentry by Eric Berger: When SpaceX Turned Rockets into Infrastructure
Eric Berger’s Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age begins where Liftoff ended: with SpaceX no longer quite dead, but not yet inevitable. Liftoff had the cleaner shape. A small company, a nearly exhausted fortune, a remote island launch site, three failed Falcon 1 launches and then the fourth flight that kept the company alive. As I wrote in my earlier review of Eric Berger’s Liftoff , the first book works partly because it has the structure of a startup survival story. SpaceX was still small enough that every launch seemed to carry the company’s future in its fuel tanks. Reentry is harder to love in quite the same way, but it may describe the greater achievement. Survival is dramatic; scale is harder. Reaching orbit proves that the apparently impossible can be done once. Recovering and reflying boosters, increasing launch cadence, delivering cargo, carrying astronauts and turning spectacular engineering into operational rhythm re...