Liftoff and the Four Launches That Made SpaceX

SpaceX was once a small company trying to get a privately developed rocket into orbit. The distance from that shop floor to the company people know today is what gives Eric Berger’s Liftoff its scale.

Starlink offers one measure of how far the company went. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the satellite internet service became part of the public discussion about keeping the country connected. Berger takes us back to a time when SpaceX had yet to get a single rocket into orbit.

Before the first launch

The story opens with Musk deciding to start a rocket company and trying to persuade the people who would help him build it. The failures come later. Recruiting is the first test.

One early candidate worried that a startup might vanish before it could pay him. As Berger tells it, Musk responded by offering two years of pay up front. The episode tells you something about the uncertainty of the job and the lengths he would go to fill it.

Four chances to get to orbit

SpaceX was founded in 2002. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 reached orbit on its fourth attempt. Berger spends most of the book inside those six years.

There is a little about what came after. The tension comes from getting to the first success at all, with three attempts already lost and one rocket left for another try.

The Korean edition runs to roughly 400 pages. I expected a slower read. Berger can explain why a component matters and still keep you wondering whether the team will get through the next countdown.

Some of the aerospace language was new to me. The detail still made sense at the level I needed: a launch required a long chain of people, supplies and decisions to come together on a remote island.

The ending is public record. Falcon 1 finally reached orbit on flight four. By then the book has made you feel the time and work represented by that number.

The way Musk worked

I kept watching how Musk worked with the early team. It is easy to read decisive leadership back into a project after it succeeds. Berger also gives enough room to the uncertainty the people involved had to live with at the time.

The recruiting stories show how personally Musk pursued the people he wanted. The company could offer an engineer the chance to build something unusually ambitious, but sometimes that still meant addressing a very practical worry about pay or where the person would have to live.

Once people joined, what stood out to me was the speed with which they could get a decision. A team might need a launch site, a shipment of material or a piece of machinery. Delay had a cost, and so did making the wrong purchase. He was prepared to move quickly anyway.

Berger also describes a founder deeply involved in interviews and a young team working very long weeks. For some staff, the job meant long stretches on Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands. The commitment that makes the story absorbing also gives you a sense of what the work demanded of them.

Musk can be sharp in these accounts. I was more interested in the occasions when his urgency took the form of finding the people and equipment the project needed.

Why engineers signed up

SpaceX was drawing talented graduates before it had much of a track record. The book suggests that the appeal lay partly in how close an engineer could get to the work and how quickly a decision might turn into a test.

A salary is one reason to take a job. The chance to see something you helped design fly is another. I can see why people early in their careers would want that experience.

Berger’s team could build, test, learn from a failure and try again. That loop is where the company’s early culture comes through most clearly.

What changed after Falcon 1

Those early Falcon 1 launches began to change what a commercial launch company could plausibly take on. The process Berger describes was fast and uneven, with decisions made by people who expected to find out quickly whether they were right.

SpaceX later made recovery and reflight routine for Falcon 9 first stages. Earlier spacecraft and components had been reused, including parts of the Space Shuttle system. What changed with Falcon 9 was how regularly a commercial orbital launcher could fly a booster again.

Where was I in the early 2000s?

Berger takes his time on the years leading to that September evening in 2008. I kept thinking about where I had been during those same years.

In 2002, South Korea co-hosted the World Cup. After high school, I did my military service. Before returning to university, I took odd jobs, studied and spent a while trying to work out what I wanted.

It was startling to think that in roughly the same years someone else was making a plan to send people to Mars and taking the first practical steps toward it. I remember how hard it was just to pick a direction for myself.

I was going through another unsettled stretch when I wrote about Liftoff. The book made me think about what I could do with the pause I had been given.

What stayed with me was the urge to get back to the work I cared about and see how far I could take it, in my own way.

Book details

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

Author

Eric Berger (Korean translation by Jeong Hyeon-chang, reviewed by Seo Seong-hyeon)

Korean edition published

March 21, 2022

ISBN-13

9791197739705

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