4/8: THERE WAS A REPORTED PUSH TO GET STARSHIP TEST #8 TO ORBIT:.Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age Hardcover – by Eric Berger (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
NOVEMBER 1952
https://www.amazon.com/Reentry-SpaceX-Reusable-Rockets-Launched/dp/1637745273/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
One company dominates the modern space industry: SpaceX, founded by controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002, now sending more payloads into orbit than the rest of the world combined. But Musk didn’t do it alone—the saga of SpaceX is the story of a diverse cadre of true believers in the limitless potential of space travel.
For the first time, Reentry relates the definitive chronicle of how this daring team was able to redefine what it takes to reach the stars.
With Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Eric Berger, author of Liftoff, as your guide, you’ll accompany SpaceX’s innovative thinkers during their toughest trials and most audacious moments, including:
- Creating the first orbital rockets that land by themselves and fly again
- Transporting a 120-foot rocket from Texas to Florida
- Recovering from a “Hell’s Bells” accident before the first Falcon Heavy launch
- Frantically searching the ocean for the first rocket that splashed down intact
- Identifying the $20 part that led to a rocket exploding in flight
- Slicing up an engine days before it launched into space
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel with Eric Berger, a senior space writer for Ars Technica. |
| 0:08.7 | I recommend following the reporting very carefully because SpaceX rolls on. However, right now we're getting to where we are with the book reentry that Eric publishes to help us understand after Falcon won success in the |
| 0:22.0 | Pacific after Elon Musk becomes a success with Tesla. SpaceX is punching way above |
| 0:30.3 | its weight. However, it knows in order to win to get to Mars. That's the idea here, not to get |
| 0:37.1 | to the low Earth orbit, not even to get to the moon, to get to Mars. That's the idea here, not to get to low Earth orbit, not even to get to the |
| 0:39.0 | moon, to get to Mars with colony, a million tons. It needs power. And one of the ways you get power |
| 0:45.7 | in a space engine is something called densification. What is that, Eric? Well, densification is the |
| 0:52.9 | idea that you take your liquid oxygen, which is |
| 0:54.8 | you're already, you know, so liquid oxygen is oxidizer, right? To make a fire, you need oxygen. |
| 0:59.3 | And so as part of a rocket engine combustion, you need oxygen. And long ago, you know, it was |
| 1:05.3 | realized that if you could take oxygen and cool it down to be a liquid, it would be much more efficient because you'd get much more bang for your buck in terms of the amount of oxidizer you could put on your rocket in terms of mass and volume. |
| 1:17.6 | What Elon wanted to do, and really this was his vision, he was driving this forward against the recommendations of almost everyone in the industry was to take that |
| 1:27.8 | liquid oxygen and chill it further and so we're talking about you know almost minus |
| 1:33.9 | three hundred degrees Fahrenheit and if you chilled it further you could actually |
| 1:38.9 | make it more dense so you could put 10 to 12 percent more liquid oxygen, densified liquid oxygen on the |
| 1:47.0 | rocket than you could like a traditional rocket. Now, 10 or 12 percent may not sound like much, |
| 1:52.0 | but that makes a big difference in terms of the efficiency of your rocket and the payload |
| 1:56.3 | it can get to, because you're shaving, you know, thousands or tons, literally tons of mass off |
| 2:04.1 | the propellant side that you can then put into payload into orbit. And so, you know, no one had |
| 2:11.0 | really tried to do this densification. NASA had looked at it several times in the past and rejected |
| 2:15.5 | it as being too impractical or unsafe. |
| 2:18.0 | But here was SpaceX coming along. Now, they just had the failure in June of 2015, and they |
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