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Reentry : SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age (2024) by Eric Berger is a marvelous book about SpaceX. Berger is a longtime writer for Ars Technica, a website that has long had in depth articles on technical subjects. Reentry is a follow up to Liftoff, his first book about SpaceX.

Reentry is about SpaceX from 2008 onward. Berger has been covering SpaceX for many years and has fantastic access to the people involved, including Musk. Berger has a background in Astronomy. He demonstrates a real understanding of many of the technical issues that SpaceX has faced. He also explains them very well.

The book also conveys just how hard the people at SpaceX have worked. It is clearly not a company that does work life balance. The book mentions divorces. There are many people who leave after a years. Berger also writes about how this is viable for SpaceX. This is because it’s working on something that is so hard and yet so important. There are also people who come back because they miss the mission. Berger contrasts this to working at Twitter where delivering short messages just isn’t as important.

Reentry covers the period when SpaceX started to get launch contracts from 2008. There is a lot of detail on how they worked incredibly hard to improve their rockets as well. This reaches a crescendo when they manage to land a rocket again and are able to re-use rockets.

There are many engineers and characters involved, they become a bit hard to remember. However, Berger does a really good job in showing how people came in from various backgrounds to work for SpaceX. Some were from games companies, some from working at Sea world and other places.

Reentry does a really good job of conveying the tension involved with SpaceX. Various launches and important milestones had to be reached. The company could really have failed.

It is really interesting to read about how serious Musk is about getting to Mars. This has quite an impact and drives the company as well.

The book does a good job of conveying how SpaceX operates. People work really, really hard and solve problems fast. They repeatedly manage to do things much more cheaply than other companies. Musk drives the company and really pushes people to work super hard and solve their problems. It also clearly burns people out. For most normal companies this would be a disaster but it works for SpaceX.

The stories of the failures and the SpaceX investigations are also really interesting. When SpaceX has lost rockets they have quickly managed to find the faults and fix them.

The book illustrates what very smart, hard working people can achieve. Hopefully in a decade or so something similar will be written about Commonwealth Fusion or another similar company. Hopefully the books on SpaceX also continue and there is a third book about SpaceX getting to the moon.

Reentry is an excellent book for anyone interested in space flight and how SpaceX has managed to cut the cost of putting objects in orbit by so much. Berger knows his subject really well, had really good access and writes well.