Here it is well over 10 years since SpaceX became a household word. Many of us followed the several companies vying to become launch providers for NASA under the COTS program established by the George W. Bush administration to help "privatize" commercial spaceflight. There were a good handful of them. Only one would succeed. This book details the early years of SpaceX, the trials and tribulations they encountered as they tried to do what some said was impossible without having 4000 employees and the backing of billions from the U.S. government. Yet, SpaceX triumphed through all that to become our main "go to" launch provider for lowering costs. This book details the ins and outs of those early days, and how they nearly failed. It is a good read and provides a great background to how a company can be run to be successful despite the huge odds against them.
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX
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Last update: 12-20-2024
About this item
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.
In 2006, SpaceX - a brand-new venture with fewer than 200 employees - rolled its first, single-engine rocket onto a launch pad at Kwajalein Atoll. After a groundbreaking launch from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Falcon 1 rocket designed by Elon Musk’s engineers rose in the air for approximately 30 seconds. Then, its engine flamed out, and the rocket crashed back into the ocean.
In 2007, SpaceX undertook a second launch. This time, the rocket rose far into space, but just before reaching orbit it spun out of control. Confident of success in 2008, Musk and his team launched their third rocket with several paying customers. The first stage executed perfectly, but instead of falling away, it thudded into the second stage. Another failure. Elon Musk had only budgeted for three attempts when he founded SpaceX.
Out of money and with a single Falcon 1 rocket left in its factory, SpaceX decided to try one last, dramatic launch. Over eight weeks, engineers worked furiously to prepare this final rocket. The fate of Musk’s venture mirrored the trajectory of this slender, single-engine rocket aimed toward the skies. If it crashed and burned, so would SpaceX. In September 2008, SpaceX’s last chance for success lifted off...and accelerated like a dream, soaring into orbit flawlessly.
That success would launch a miraculous decade for the company, in which SpaceX grew from building a single-engine rocket to one with a staggering 27 engines; created two different spacecraft, and mastered reusable-rocket descents using mobile drone ships on the open seas. It marked a level of production and achievement that has not been seen since the space race of the 1960s.
But these achievements would not have been possible without SpaceX’s first four flight tests. Drawing on unparalleled access and exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current employees - engineers, designers, mechanics, and executives, including Elon Musk - Eric Berger tells the complete story of this foundational generation that transformed SpaceX into the world’s leading space company.
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Top reviews from the United States
R. Warren5.0 out of 5 stars
Great insight into how SpaceX came about
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2024Jack Hicks5.0 out of 5 stars
How one guy upended the launch busines
Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2021
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
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
Adam J. Simons5.0 out of 5 stars
Good stuff!
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2024
Very interesting. Was nice reading how it all started and all of the dedication the workers put into each project!
D. Oppenheimer4.0 out of 5 stars
Great job on the early history of SpaceX...more recent work seemed rushed
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2021
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.
Christopher Passinault5.0 out of 5 stars
I changed my mind about SpaceX after reading this book.
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2021
I was a pretty outspoken critic of SpaceX (I grew up with the Space Shuttle, and was not happy about the STS program being retired prematurely in 2011), until I followed the return to manned flight with NASA astronauts during the recent Dragon demonstration flight to the ISS. I then decided to read a book about the company.... This book.
I am still not a fan of the SpaceX branding (it reminded me too much of the X Prize branding back have I first heard of it 15 years ago, as it was confusing, and it still sounds derivative), and, although cool and a P.R. dream, am not that thrilled about vertically landing rockets (that fuel could be used to increase payload delivered into orbit. I guess that I just got excited about Reagan announcing the National Aerospaceplane program in the 80's, what he called the new Orient Express, and wanted to see an era where scramjet powered spaceplanes would fly cost-effectively into orbit on a daily basis, the ultimate SSTO, or Single Stage To Orbit That aside, I'd like to see the return to some sort of spaceplane, as recovery options are better, and not a new twist on old methods that have been used since the space program began. Capsules and parachutes do have their issues). I am also not a fan of the Falcon branding for the launch vehicles, the Starship branding for that large rocket, and the Dragon branding for the spacecraft, although that Dragon logo is awesome. Ditto for my feelings about Musk himself..... I never was much of a fan and think that he succeeded in spite of himself rather than because of anything that he did; he was smart enough to surround himself with good, talented, smarter people, and they are why he succeeded, IMO.
That said, I have changed my mind after reading this book and am kind of impressed, especially with the cost-effectiveness and frequency of the launches of their Falcon 9 workhorse, and the absolute disruption of the industry. You have to respect that, although, let's face it..... What happened had to happen eventually, and it could have with another company.
I had thought that NASA has been funding private enterprise such as SpaceX and had no idea that SpaceX almost failed. I had no idea that Musk took a big risk by financing his start-up with his own money.
Now I am glad that SpaceX succeeded.
I highly recommend this book. It's great.
I am still not a fan of the SpaceX branding (it reminded me too much of the X Prize branding back have I first heard of it 15 years ago, as it was confusing, and it still sounds derivative), and, although cool and a P.R. dream, am not that thrilled about vertically landing rockets (that fuel could be used to increase payload delivered into orbit. I guess that I just got excited about Reagan announcing the National Aerospaceplane program in the 80's, what he called the new Orient Express, and wanted to see an era where scramjet powered spaceplanes would fly cost-effectively into orbit on a daily basis, the ultimate SSTO, or Single Stage To Orbit That aside, I'd like to see the return to some sort of spaceplane, as recovery options are better, and not a new twist on old methods that have been used since the space program began. Capsules and parachutes do have their issues). I am also not a fan of the Falcon branding for the launch vehicles, the Starship branding for that large rocket, and the Dragon branding for the spacecraft, although that Dragon logo is awesome. Ditto for my feelings about Musk himself..... I never was much of a fan and think that he succeeded in spite of himself rather than because of anything that he did; he was smart enough to surround himself with good, talented, smarter people, and they are why he succeeded, IMO.
That said, I have changed my mind after reading this book and am kind of impressed, especially with the cost-effectiveness and frequency of the launches of their Falcon 9 workhorse, and the absolute disruption of the industry. You have to respect that, although, let's face it..... What happened had to happen eventually, and it could have with another company.
I had thought that NASA has been funding private enterprise such as SpaceX and had no idea that SpaceX almost failed. I had no idea that Musk took a big risk by financing his start-up with his own money.
Now I am glad that SpaceX succeeded.
I highly recommend this book. It's great.