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Review: Reentry, by Eric Berger

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger (BenBella Books, 2024).

The first one, Liftoff, covers the earliest days of SpaceX — starting with Elon Musk getting insulted and belittled by some Russian mobsters who refuse to sell him an old Soviet rocket, and ending with the first successful orbital flight of the Falcon 1. The engineers lived in hotels and motels, or in extended-stay housing and apartments, and when they weren’t working they played rock and roll at all hours of the night… it was not uncommon for the SpaceXers to get kicked out [of their favorite restaurant] when their antics approached Animal House-level rowdiness. Anybody who followed space policy in the early-to-mid 2010s knows what I’m talking about — politicians like the imbecilic NASA administrator Charles Bolden and the flamboyantly corrupt US Senator Richard Shelby did everything in their power to make life difficult for SpaceX and to smother the newborn company in its crib.

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