I'm John Batchel with Eric Berger, the senior staff writer at Ars Technica, most importantly the author of the new book, Reentry, SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the reusable rockets that launched a second space age.

This is volume two in Eric's chronicling of the trip to Mars.

To anticipate, in the first book, we got to the launch from Quadolin Island.

It's an elaborate story, but on the fourth try, rolling the dice with the last of the money,

they satisfy the demands of NASA and launch into orbit Falcon 1, one engine, the Merlin engine,

older version.

Now we're going to go to Musk's idea, which is nine Merlins in a booster.

And in the summer of 2009, there's a whole crew of young people who enjoy partying and the demands of a Texas

summer with crickets and rattlesnakes and heat and squalls and they are getting ready for

the first stage to go to Florida. What is it that they have to do that summer to prepare

the first stage? How are they working this, Eric? Well, they have kind of the first stage, the

booster, they have the engines, but there's so much more that goes into a rocket than just kind

of the outward appearance, right?

You've got all of the guts in it, the computers, the flight computers that help the vehicle fly,

because once a rocket launches, no one is controlling the flight of that rocket.

It's making all of the calculations on its own.

You've got to wire up all of the plumbing to get the propellant from the liquid oxygen and liquid

hydro, excuse me, liquid kerosene tanks down to the engines. You've got all of the electrical

connections running up and down the vehicle. And just putting that all together for the first

time, I mean, this was a much more complex rocket than any of the engineers had worked on before

at SpaceX.

And so it was just a long, hot summer.

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