7/8: 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
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
1950
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 Baxter with Eric Berger, a senior space writer for Ars Technica. |
| 0:07.0 | I recommend the magazine, because it's got all these things I don't understand in it. |
| 0:12.0 | I love to read that kind of thing. |
| 0:14.0 | But also Eric's reporting keeps you up to date on space engineering. |
| 0:19.0 | Elon Musk at SpaceX is the go-to space engineering right now. |
| 0:25.1 | Didn't start out that way in the early part of the 21st century. All the sovereign powers |
| 0:30.7 | dominated space, big space, including the U.S. and Russia. China's the newcomer. |
| 0:37.4 | There are other programs, but commercial space is now so routine. |
| 0:41.8 | It's sometimes difficult to remember 10 years ago when it wasn't routine. |
| 0:46.0 | We're going now to NASA, trusting Elon Musk's innovators on the scene. |
| 0:53.4 | There's a lot of improv at SpaceX. |
| 0:56.0 | They don't have a huge number of people to assign to any particular task. |
| 1:01.0 | When they launched a red Tesla into space, they put a sheet up in the corner of the factory, |
| 1:06.0 | and that was their secret keeping of the payload. |
| 1:10.0 | So we're not looking at something like Boeing, |
| 1:12.9 | but that's important here. Boeing is a troubled company now. Once, however, it was understood |
| 1:19.7 | by NASA to be the supreme builder of anything we need to get to the moon, to get into |
| 1:25.4 | low Earth orbit. And SpaceX and NASA and another company |
| 1:30.3 | called Sierra Nevada that has a neat machine called Dream Catcher. Dream, Tracer. Thank you. We're |
| 1:39.1 | competing for the contract from NASA for a manned spacecraft. |
| 1:44.9 | Eric, you say without Boeing, this doesn't happen. |
| 1:48.1 | How is that? |
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