Book Review: Liftoff and Reentry by Eric Berger
As another summer comes to a close, I wanted to share one, well actually two, of my favorite reads from the past few months. They were also particularly timely given the recent IPO of SpaceX.
Eric Berger wrote two books on the journey of SpaceX from a scrappy startup to a dominant private company in the rocket launch business: its early days of engineering chaos in Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX and its more recent decade of commercial success in Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reuseable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age. This is both a tale of classic American entrepreneurship, at the scale of Cornelius Vanderbilt with steamships and railroads, and a story of how private industry can drive productivity miracles.
What makes the story of SpaceX so unique is the industry in which it started: rocket launches. Unlike a success story like Costco, which defined a new business model (membership warehouse and shared economies with customers) in an industry that was hundreds of years old (retail), SpaceX entered an industry in 2002 where its only competitors were governments (NASA, Russia, etc.). They created the private rocket launch business and paved the way for other competitors. It is also a story of how private industry has the potential to solve problems that governments haven’t, like creating reusable rockets and launching satellites far cheaper than the high cost structure of the protected old guard. Success required not only top-notch engineering and years of 100-hour weeks, but also a lot of luck in getting the right advocates at NASA and in government (e.g., the Obama administration had an initiative to see if private companies could return the US to space dominance) to give this little startup, at the time, a flying chance.
Love or hate Elon, no one in recent history has achieved the business success that he has. Tesla and their dominance in electric vehicles. Solar City and the growth of solar power. And now SpaceX, with its rocket launch business, its Starlink satellite internet business, and growing clout in AI as it rents out compute power like Amazon and Microsoft. The author also doesn’t shy away from Musk’s tendency toward conspiracy theories and how this impacted at least one major rocket failure investigation.
If you’re interested in a story about disruption through persistence, the engineering challenges that a startup rocket company faced, or even the unrelenting nature of wildly successful people like Musk, I thought the story of SpaceX was one of a kind.
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