Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX

A visionary and his scrappy engineers weather rocket explosions and financial crises to revolutionize the space-launch industry in this exuberant debut from Ars Technica editor Berger. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX was founded in 2002, and its first orbital flight was in 2008 with the Falcon 1 rocket. Now, SpaceX dominates the space-launch market with its reusable rockets and (relatively) low costs. Berger describes the white-knuckle test flights that rode on complex, finicky equipment: the first three Falcon 1 launches failed catastrophically because of a leaky valve, sloshing fuel, and a first stage that separated four seconds early (the latter mishap was almost the company’s demise). Berger’s colorful portrait shows Musk as a “preternatural force” of “burning intensity,” driving employees toward his goal of colonizing Mars. More soberly, Berger offers a detailed account of SpaceX’s “iterative design” philosophy, which emphasizes rapid prototype testing and tolerates failures as learning experiences and, he argues, avoids the bureaucracy of NASA’s risk-averse process. Berger vividly weaves a tale of technology development at its most heroic, done on near-impossible deadlines in the broiling environs of southern Texas or the Marshall Islands. The result is a rousing—and hopeful—saga of hard-won innovation succeeding on an epic scale. (Mar.)