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Eric Berger

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Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX Kindle Edition

by Eric Berger (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.8 3,290 ratings

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‘Just read it.’ Elon Musk

The dramatic inside story of the first four historic flights that launched SpaceX—and Elon Musk—from a shaky startup into the world's leading edge rocket company.

SpaceX has enjoyed a miraculous decade. Less than 20 years after its founding, it boasts the largest constellation of commercial satellites in orbit, has pioneered reusable rockets, and in 2020 became the first private company to launch human beings into orbit. Half a century after the space race SpaceX is pushing forward into the cosmos, laying the foundation for our exploration of other worlds.

But before it became one of the most powerful players in the aerospace industry, SpaceX was a fledgling startup, scrambling to develop a single workable rocket before the money ran dry. The engineering challenge was immense; numerous other private companies had failed similar attempts. And even if SpaceX succeeded, they would then have to compete for government contracts with titans such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who had tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. SpaceX had fewer than 200 employees and the relative pittance of $100 million in the bank.

In Liftoff, Eric Berger takes readers inside the wild early days that made SpaceX. Focusing on the company’s first four launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, he charts the bumpy journey from scrappy underdog to aerospace pioneer. drawing upon exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current engineers, designers, mechanics, and executives, including Elon Musk. The enigmatic Musk, who founded the company with the dream of one day settling Mars, is the fuel that propels the book, with his daring vision for the future of space.

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341 pages
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English
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William Collins
Publication date

March 2, 2021
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"This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it's a riveting page-turner, too!"

-- "Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times bestselling author"

About the Author

Rob Shapiro can be heard narrating audiobooks such as the bestseller The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood; Frank: The Voice; and the fantasy noir Low Town. He performed several seasons of radio comedy on Minneapolis Public Radio and voiced the titular lion in Leo the Lion.

Eric Berger is a reporter and editor based in Houston. After a long career in the Houston Chronicle, he joined Ars Technica in 2015 as the site's senior space editor, covering SpaceX, NASA, and everything beyond. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of Hurricane Ike in the Houston Chronicle in 2008.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08F28WBJD
Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (March 2, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 2, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4383 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 341 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,299,551 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #141 in Science Experiments & Projects
- #427 in Aeronautics & Astronautics (Kindle Store)
- #472 in Scientific Experiments & Projects

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4.8 3,290 ratings

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Eric Berger

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Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from new space to NASA policy. Eric has an astronomy degree from the University of Texas and a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri. He previously worked at the Houston Chronicle for 17 years, where the paper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for his coverage of Hurricane Ike. A certified meteorologist, Eric founded Space City Weather and lives in Houston.

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Jeremiah Doom

Thrilling almost sci-fi read

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2024

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Really inspiring book which shows the hardships of working under Elon Musk and developing new technologies. It gives a realistic view of the passion and toil of the SpaceX employees.

I gave the book 5 stars because of how thrilling it was, how it explains technical developments for the nerds like me and because it made the people relatable.

A definite read for enginees and entrepreneurs.

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Bill Weronko

A superbly written must know story of brilliance and determination against a world of adversity.

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2021

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Even if you are not a rocket / space nerd, Liftoff is a must read. The odyssey of Elon Musk shows how one man can change the world in a profound way. SpaceX and its brilliant hard-working employees, inspired by a genius with a vision, took on the world’s aerospace giants and state-run corporations and won. Doing what everyone told Elon was impossible, in a landscape littered with bankrupt companies that came before, Elon recruited some of the world’s best engineers to work until they dropped inspired by a common dream of the future. Eric Berger presents this beautifully written saga where grit, engineering brilliance and youthful exuberance overcame the near impossible task of starting a rocket company and then competing with established giants like Lockheed and Boeing and the European Space Agency and Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities. This is the story of the early days of SpaceX where failure was all but assured. Industry, customers, and governments first ignored them until success was possible than actively tried to sabotage their success. NASA and DARPA fed SpaceX lifesaving seed money when it appeared to their ultimate advantage. It was a near thing the survival of SpaceX and eventually it not only disrupted the industry but the world. Everyone ought to know the story.

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Jack Hicks

How one guy upended the launch busines

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2021

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LIFTOFF, Elon Musk and the Desperate early days that launched SPACEX
Eric Berger, 2021
The 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

22 people found this helpful

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D. Oppenheimer

Great job on the early history of SpaceX...more recent work seemed rushed

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2021

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As a huge fan of SpaceX I was eager to read the history of the early days and learn more about the people who made this possible. The detail on the early days is terrific and exactly what I wanted but after the fourth Falcon 1 launch everything was just rushed through. I think the author would have been better off leaving that for the next book instead of giving it such short shrift. BUT, the story telling is great and it was a pleasant read.

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F. A. R. Fh

Great Book. An instantaneous classic is space storytelling!

Reviewed in Brazil on September 20, 2021

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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!

Eduardo

An incredible true story about resilience and the importance of a higher mission.

Reviewed in Mexico on August 13, 2021

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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.

Neil S. Rieck

A must-read for Space buffs

Reviewed in Canada on May 23, 2021

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Five years ago I read "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" (by Ashlee Vance) who covered Musk's beginnings from Zip2 (which was bought by Compaq before the merger with HP) then PayPal on to Tesla and SpaceX. I've been a space buff my whole life so found the SpaceX part of this book most intriguing because very little has been previously documented. I just finished "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" and am even more blown away by the stories of how Musk kept the program going like the one where Air Force politics drove SpaceX to mover the Falcon-1 launch site from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to an Army base at Kwajalein Atoll. (all space buffs already know that it was the US Army that hosted the efforts of rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun). I am not certain what became of Zip2 after Compaq acquired it but making Musk a millionaire definitely has made the world a more interesting place. Elon Musk will go down in history as a modern day "Howard Hughes". BUY THIS BOOK!

2 people found this helpful

cidfromkerala

Great book

Reviewed in India on November 10, 2023

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Just a great book. Nothing more to say.

Mepa

Faszinierend

Reviewed in Germany on August 8, 2023

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In den frühesten Kapiteln von "Liftoff" erkundet Erik Berger die zündende Idee, die den Grundstein für das bahnbrechende Unternehmen SpaceX legte. Wie ein Philosoph des Fortschritts führt Berger den Leser in die Tiefen des Denkens von Elon Musk ein, einem Visionär, der die herkömmlichen Grenzen der Raumfahrt in Frage stellte. Musk's Beharrlichkeit, seine Fähigkeit, Konventionen zu durchbrechen, und sein unerschütterlicher Glaube an die Machbarkeit des Unmöglichen sind wie Farbtöne in Bergers stilistischer Leinwand.

Durch die präzise Verwendung rhetorischer Techniken verleiht Berger der Entstehung der Falcon 1 eine beinahe mythologische Dimension. Er beschreibt die Spannung und die Rückschläge dieses Unterfangens als eine Art epischen Kampf zwischen Mensch und Maschine, bei dem die Grenzen des menschlichen Potenzials immer weiter hinausgeschoben werden. Bergers Worte entfachen ein inneres Feuer des Entdeckungsgeistes und der Entschlossenheit, das den Leser in den Schmelztiegel des Ingenieurwesens eintauchen lässt.

Das Erzählen der historischen Anekdote von SpaceX wird zur Pilgerreise des Wissens, bei der Berger den Leser dazu ermutigt, sich in die Perspektive der Menschen einzufühlen, die die Fundamente dieses Unternehmens legten. Die rhetorische Frage, wie eine kleine Gruppe von Individuen es wagte, gegen die Schwerkraft der Konvention zu kämpfen und ihre Ideen in die Höhen der Realität zu erheben, wirft einen zarten Schleier der Reflexion über die Leser, die dazu angeregt werden, die eigene Fähigkeit zur Veränderung zu hinterfragen.

Berger zelebriert die Rettungsmissionen und bahnbrechenden Erfolge von SpaceX mit einer lyrischen Eleganz, die den Nervenkitzel des Abenteuers einfängt. Er verwebt geschickt technische Details mit philosophischen Betrachtungen über die Natur der menschlichen Neugier und unser Streben nach einem tieferen Verständnis des Universums.

In der Gesamtheit seiner Arbeit in "Liftoff" gelingt es Erik Berger, die Leser auf eine transzendente Reise durch Raum, Zeit und Gedanken mitzunehmen. Seine kühne Kombination aus philosophischer Reflexion und rhetorischer Kunst lässt uns staunen über die Menschheit's Bemühungen, den Himmel zu berühren, und erinnert uns daran, dass jeder Start eine Metapher für den Triumph des menschlichen Geistes ist.