Hugin & Munin Journal

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...

SpaceX’s early history is often compressed into a familiar story: an unusually determined founder challenges a stagnant industry, survives repeated failure, and proves the sceptics wrong. Eric Berger’s Liftoff is compelling because the reality it describes is both more dramatic and less tidy. The company’s survival depended on Elon Musk’s money and appetite for risk, but also on engineers, technicians, government facilities, NASA funding, and a public agency willing to become an anchor customer. SpaceX was not inevitable. Nor was it built outside the state. It emerged from an unusual combination of private urgency and deliberately redesigned public support. Cover image: Liftoff by Eric Berger, published by William Morrow. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. A Company Small Enough to Fail Berger concentrates on the first four Falcon 1 launch attempts, when SpaceX had fewer than two hundred employees and no guarantee that it would survive long enough...