This is John Batchelor. Conversation with Eric Berger, the author of Reentry. Eric is a senior

space correspondent at Ars Technica magazine. He's written Liftoff. That was the beginning of the

SpaceX genius. To build the Falcon One, to test it at Quadulent Island and the Marshals and win a NASA contract.

Now SpaceX is on to the moon and Mars. However, along the way, Eric Berger chronicles the transformation from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 to Heavy, to Super Heavy.

What we're looking at here is a transformation of not only the rockets,

but the whole company under Elon Musk and his lieutenants.

All the details, all the names, the personalities, the risk-taking,

subtitled the book, SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the names, the personalities, the risk-taking, subtitled the book,

SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the reusable rockets that launched a second space age.

Indeed.

In this part, Eric describes a contract that SpaceX won, competed for in one, from NASA, not to build a booster, but to build a spacecraft, a cargo

craft called Dragon, to and from the ISS, because after shuttle went, they needed something,

they needed more than one thing, because they were depending on the Russians to resupply.

Here, Eric tells the thinking behind Dragon and how SpaceX responded so quickly and so ably.

Not just boosters, everything.

A full service scramble.

Everything.

I do. They do try to reuse just about everything. A full service scramble. Everything. I do. They too try to reuse just about everything.

You know, for NASA it was important too, actually, because the space shuttle retired, as you know,

John, in 2011. And after that point, NASA really had no way of getting cargo back from the International Space Station. And that was really important because the whole idea of sending astronauts up into space was for them to do research, right?

Biological research on themselves, research on plants, animals, all these other things.

And when you do research, you like to sometimes bring those experiments back so that people on the ground can study, you know, the product of that experiment. And when the shuttle went away, there was no capability to do that. Well, Dragon promised it had freezers on board, refrigerator, so you could keep materials cold or frozen. and it was recoverable.

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