How Elon Musk’s SpaceX started a new ‘space race’

In 2005, three years before its first successful orbital launch, a fledgling space startup called SpaceX asked the US government to allow it to use the famous Cape Canaveral launch pad once home to the Apollo space program.

Old-school space companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin opposed the idea and lobbied aggressively to block the deal.

Executives at those firms took a dim view of the company and were angry with founder Elon Musk. “He was not respectable, but brave,” writes Eric Berger in his new book “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age,” summing up the sentiment at the time, “A do you really want to leave this guy in the hallowed territory of the largest and oldest spaceport in America?”

Their efforts failed and SpaceX gained access to the Cape.

Less than two decades later, Berger writes, “Elon Musk and his rocket company now stand alone at the top of the spaceflight hierarchy.” The company’s Falcon launch vehicle, the first commercial reusable rocket and the inspiration for the book’s title, now delivers more orbital payloads than the governments of Russia, China and private-sector competitors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined.

NASA relies almost exclusively on SpaceX to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The company’s Starlink satellites can provide Internet to almost anyone anywhere in the world, including on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Its Starship rocket is the largest ever to fly and could one day carry astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

SpaceX recently completed the world’s first commercial spacewalk, and in some poetic justice, when Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft ran into technical difficulties in August of this year on its journey to the ISS, SpaceX took the call to rescue and bring the astronauts home safely.

SpaceX has pulled them all. David has become Goliath, says Berger.

Over the decades, writes Berger, the world has changed its mind about Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. He began as an oddball curiosity, then a widely admired entrepreneur, and today he is now a deeply divisive figure whose political views and business connections, Berger says, could eventually put him at odds with the U.S. government, forcing an “account”.

How did this all happen?

re-entry raises Berger’s first book LODGING stopped, before the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. The book reveals much about what made SpaceX so successful.

The first reason is Elon Musk, whose singular vision and strong leadership pushed SpaceX through many ups and downs. It was Musk, for example, who pushed relentlessly for SpaceX to own reusable rockets, despite the doubts of the industry and the complaining of its engineers. It was Musk who decided to announce the Starship project (aka the Mars mission) and launch the Starlink satellite network at the same time.

It was also Musk who revolutionized the economics of space. Before, it was a “cost-plus” industry, Berger says, where companies bid on projects and got paid even if the work was too much or too late. SpaceX changed that model by bringing a startup mentality to the industry. As former SpaceX executive John Couluris recounts, “we were bad.”

The second reason for its success is the people. SpaceX’s many brilliant engineers and business leaders would spend mornings negotiating with NASA and afternoons, nights and weekends solving endless technical problems. Gwynne Shotwell, one of SpaceX’s first employees and a senior executive, negotiated and won a payload development contract from NASA in 2006 that saved SpaceX financially, setting it on a path to future success.

Then there was Holly Ridings, a NASA flight director who oversaw the first docking of the SpaceX Dragon capsule with the ISS in May 2012, making a bold mid-flight call with everything on the line that paid off. She later became NASA’s first female flight director. The list goes on.

As the company amassed pioneering firsts, it became the number one destination for aspiring rocket geeks who both wanted to build things—and were motivated by SpaceX’s mission to make humanity an interplanetary species.

The ultimate reason for the company’s success was its relationship with NASA. While SpaceX relied on NASA in the early days for its first contracts, NASA was also relying on them. With the dismantling of the Space Shuttle, the new Obama administration made a bet to believe that SpaceX could do things better. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said of the first Falcon 9 launch in 2010, “I was aware that not only my reputation, but the success or failure of the Obama administration’s space policy, would be largely determined by the outcome of launch of SpaceX.”

NASA’s support extended beyond funding. NASA engineers worked in close partnership with SpaceX from the first Falcon 9 launch to the first unmanned Dragon capsule to the Dragon Crew that carried astronauts to the ISS. NASA and SpaceX have a “fantastically fruitful relationship” that has spanned decades, Berger says.

In the second half of the book, the company really starts to hit its stride. Of course, there were obstacles, especially two (non-fatal) disasters that grounded its Falcon 9 for more than a year, but overall, the rate of progress from 2012 to today was remarkable: In the last decade, the company mastered the reuse of rockets , launched Starlink, built and flew the largest rocket ever, and began transporting astronauts to the ISS.

Musk remains at the center throughout, pushing his team and reminding them of the larger mission. “We’re not going to Mars in my lifetime, or yours, if we don’t get our act together and take this first step,” Musk said after another failed reentry attempt.

For all of Musk’s well-earned controversy, there’s no questioning his sincerity about space. It’s clearly driven by a larger goal: If SpaceX makes a boatload of money but doesn’t make it to Mars, the company has failed, in Musk’s eyes. Nothing feels out of reach at SpaceX, which is perhaps why it seems capable of doing the impossible.

Berger is a veteran space reporter and senior space editor at the science-minded tech news site Ars Technica, who clearly enjoys rocket tech nuts. Readers will learn how SpaceX keeps rocket fuel in a stable state so it doesn’t explode on the launch pad and how to recover a capsule from the ocean without losing the spacecraft overboard.

You’ll learn how adjustable Grid-fins help stabilize the spacecraft during re-entry and how laser guidance systems (LIDARs) can help two spacecraft dock smoothly as they move through space. Or how to 3D print a space helmet and how to make rocket fuel on Mars.

re-entry it’s a blast (pun intended), but it ends on a cautionary note. SpaceX hasn’t lost its founding mindset, Berger writes, but he worries that Musk could be distracted from the larger mission.

Referring to Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his recent inflammatory political comments, Berger asks, “What the hell are you doing, Elon?” After reading what Musk was able to accomplish in the two decades before he bought Twitter, you may find yourself asking the same thing.

Alex Tapscott, author of Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier and Managing Director of Digital Asset Group, a division of Ninepoint Partners LP (edited)