Reentry
Sequel covering Falcon 9, reuse and Dragon crew flights.
Summary
Eric Berger covers spaceflight for Ars Technica and wrote this as the sequel to Liftoff, which had covered SpaceX to the first Falcon 1 successes. Reentry takes the story from 2008 through the Falcon 9, the Dragon capsule, the development of reusable boosters, and the crewed flights.
The engineering narrative is the substance. Berger reconstructs the development of the Falcon 9 and the Merlin engine, the difficulties with the first Dragon missions to the International Space Station, the sequence of landing attempts that failed before the December 2015 return to land and the April 2016 droneship landing, the two vehicle losses in 2015 and 2016 and the investigations into each, and the decision to reuse boosters commercially. He is detailed about the technical problems and about who solved them, drawing on interviews with a large number of engineers.
The management material covers Musk's methods as the engineers experienced them: the compressed schedules, the willingness to accept failures that produce data, the direct involvement in technical decisions, and the personal cost to people who worked there. Berger is sympathetic to the company and to the engineers, and the sourcing is heavily from current and former employees, which shapes what appears. The book is the best available technical history of how reusable orbital rockets were actually developed.
Key takeaways 7
- SpaceX developed booster reuse through a sequence of failed landing attempts that were treated as data-gathering rather than as failures.
- Vertical integration of engine, structure and avionics manufacturing allowed iteration speeds that contractor-based programmes cannot match.
- The two Falcon 9 losses in 2015 and 2016 came from component failures whose investigation changed the company's supplier and testing practices.
- Commercial resupply contracts from NASA supplied the revenue that funded reusability development, which no private market would have paid for.
- Berger argues that SpaceX's engineering speed came from accepting risk of failure on hardware that competitors would have tested longer.
- Crewed flight imposed documentation and verification requirements that forced substantial changes to how the company worked.
- Employee attrition at SpaceX was severe throughout, and Berger documents the personal cost alongside the technical achievement.
Who should read it
Founders and investors in hardware businesses who want a detailed account of iterative development against a difficult engineering target, and readers of spaceflight history.
Where it sits in the reference 2
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