Numlock Sunday: Eric Berger on the inside story of SpaceX
Numlock Sunday: Eric Berger on the inside story of SpaceX
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Eric Berger, author of the brand-new book Reentry and senior space editor at Ars Technica.
Eric is a stellar writer and my go-to when it comes to hearing about space industry news. I was super excited about his book. We spoke about the major players of the space industry, the inspiration behind SpaceX and its impact on geopolitics, and how Elon Musk could risk it all.
Berger can be found at Ars Technica, and the book can be found anywhere books are sold.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Eric Berger, you are the author of the brand-new book called Reentry, about SpaceX, Elon Musk and the reusable rockets that launched a second space age. You're in Numlock all the time because you are, as far as I'm concerned, the best guy writing about space right now and the industry that surrounds it. Your beat is super fascinating. Before we dive in, I'd love to hear what got you into this to begin with, because your stuff is just so good.
I was a science writer at the Houston Chronicle 20 years ago when space shuttle Columbia came back to Earth and broke apart in the atmosphere. That was really the first time I went to the Johnson Space Center as a reporter, and that was a trial by fire.
I covered the space program on and off for the next decade, but I didn't get really excited about it until the early 2010s when I saw what SpaceX was doing with the Falcon 9. Then, with the commercial space that was coming along after that, which promised so much, we're really still at the beginning of seeing where all this is going. But I think now is more of an exciting time to be following spaceflight than any time in the past, including the 1960s during the Apollo program.
Before we dive into what SpaceX has accomplished — because again, they're a really, really interesting company; we'll talk about the Musk of it all in a bit — one thing I want to put to you is, what is the space industry? I think sometimes we talk about that a lot, but who are the customers for this thing? Who pays millions of dollars to get something into orbit? And why should we care about that?
Historically, there have been three different buckets of customers. There's been civil space: that's NASA, in the United States, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and so forth. Then there's the military side of it, so the Department of Defense, in the United States that's traditionally been the Air Force, and, more recently, the Space Force. In China, a lot of their civil and military aspects are intertwined. But you’ve got civil, military, and then you have commercial space.
The last 30 years, there have been lots of satellites, current companies wanting to put satellites up for various reasons. It really started with DirecTV. A lot of it then became Earth Observation. Then, of course, the last five years we've really seen the rise of communication, particularly low Earth orbit satellite internet — including Starlink but not solely Starlink, as we start to see Project Kuiper, OneWeb and some other constellations getting going. Those are the three main customers in space.
If you're a launch company, you've got to try to diversify. So you want to launch satellites for NASA; that's a small part of your business, or maybe a medium-sized part of your business. You definitely want to launch for the military. That is really the most important customer for a lot of space companies, the Department of Defense. Interestingly, we saw with Rocket Lab that one of their cofounders was really against military activities. The core ethos of that company was they were not going to launch for the military, and eventually they had to back off from that and now they do missions for DoD.
Those are the industry customers. The industry itself has the traditional space contractors. That's Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop — the companies that were involved dating back to the space race era, involved in the space shuttle. These companies were really used to NASA or the Department of Defense coming to them with a request. They'd put in a bid and then they would build something for the government on a cost-plus basis, so they'd get all the money that it costs plus a fee.
What we've seen within the last 10 or 15 years, with SpaceX as the lead exemplar, is the rise of a different kind of space company. It's called NewSpace, or Commercial Space. There are a lot of different names for it. Basically, the idea is that they work more on a fixed-price basis. NASA will say, we don't want to tell you how to build the rocket and spacecraft, but we want you to deliver cargo or astronauts to the International Space Station. We want you to fly astronauts to the lunar surface.
That's really been the interesting trend in spaceflight, as I say, over the last 15 or 20 years. And SpaceX really has been the outstanding success of that. It remains to be seen whether other companies will be able to succeed in that kind of fixed-price environment.
That is, I think, very illuminating as to where a lot of this value comes from for SpaceX. Can you talk a little about the history of SpaceX, where it came from and how it emerged onto the scene?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. He was just generally interested in spaceflight. Honestly, he had wanted to send a small terrarium, a little globe of life, basically, and have that land on the surface of Mars. If people could see life growing on Mars in this terrarium, he thought funding for NASA would increase.
This was driven by his belief, among many others, having watched Star Trek as a kid, why aren't humans out among the stars yet? He believed that NASA was the most important agency to get us out there. As he went through the exercise of trying to find a launch vehicle for the company, he went to Russia, looked around and realized that, man, none of that was possible, because it was way too expensive to get to space. So he set out to found a company that would lower the cost of access to space. He did that with the Falcon 1 rocket, initially.
The long-term vision was always putting people on Mars. That was from day one. But before you can run, you've got to learn to walk. That meant they had to build Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy rockets and learn the rudiments of reuse before they could get to thinking about settling Mars.
The effort that they've been able to put together is phenomenally admirable. Like you mentioned, they might have that eventual goal of Mars, but the amount of expertise they've had to pick up along the way is really fascinating. You've written about how in order to recover these rockets, they've got to land them on barges on the ocean. They sometimes miss. There's a very early story about a fairly frantic search for a rocket in the ocean now.
That's right. It was Easter of 2014, and it was one of the first times they really had successfully controlled the landing of a Falcon 9 in the ocean. There was a storm coming on. They had video basically from the rocket coming down all the way to the ocean surface, and then a couple of seconds later, the video went out. Elon was like, I've got to know what happened to the rocket. Did it sink? Did it break into pieces? Is it still floating out there? Can we go recover it and see what condition it's in? At that point, they'd never recovered really any hardware that had been to space and back, so he was desperate to find out the condition of the rocket.
There was a storm coming on, so regular planes couldn't get down to see it. He and Zach Dunn and Gwynne Shotwell scrambled all weekend, running all the traps to try to scramble some Navy P-3 aircraft, which have synthetic aperture radar and can see through clouds and could find this debris. Telling the story of that frantic Easter Sunday weekend is one of the nice bits of Reentry.
What were some of the more important moments from the history of this company? There's a very good chance that some people are reading this on Starlink-empowered internet; we know they've hit the point of winning. But what were some of the more important moments that got them there? The space industry is littered with a lot of people with some very big ideas who eventually run out of money or rockets.
I think that's one reason why there are so many fans of SpaceX. Elon had this vision of settling Mars and settling the solar system, and many, many other people have had that before, but no one actually started building the stuff to do it. That's what's exciting about SpaceX.
You asked about big moments. If you look back over the last 10 to 15 years, I would say the biggest moment was the Orbcomm mission in December 2015. Recall months earlier, they'd had a launch failure on a cargo supply mission. The second stage blew up as it was flying to space, and it was their first failure in seven years. It was pretty traumatic. They came back on their very first return to flight launch in December with a brand-new, upgraded version of the rocket, a brand-new effort to densify the propellant onboard the vehicle, and for the very first time, they were going to try to land the rocket on land. All of that came together a handful of days before Christmas in 2015.
That was really the moment, when you watch that rocket land after all of that. The recovery period after the CRS-7 failure was tremendously difficult, so seeing all that come together at the end of 2015 was a lightbulb moment that showed that this company was really going places.
The other super significant moment was the first crew launch in May of 2020 with Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. That saved NASA's bacon in terms of having to rely on Russia to go to the International Space Station. It put down a marker to the rest of the space industry that SpaceX was not just this band of unruly jackasses; they were now doing the absolute most important spaceflight missions that the United States government had.
I want to take a step back and look at some of the geopolitics of this. The United States was really, for a period of time, relying on the Russians to get its astronauts into space, and SpaceX is the main reason that reliance is actually not the case anymore, right?
Yeah. The space shuttle retired in 2011 and the plan was to rely on the Russian Soyuz until the commercial crew vehicles came online. Not everyone was really onboard with that decision, but that's ultimately what NASA went with. In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX both got large contracts to do that. SpaceX was the one that got to the finish line first, by at least four years.
If you think about the onset of the war in Ukraine a couple years after that first flight, imagine NASA having to go hat in hand to the State Department to say, hey, we really need to keep partnering with Russia. That would have been a huge political chip that the Russians would've played to the hilt. And realistically, I think the U.S. segment of the Space Station would no longer be occupied. It would have just been too difficult to basically bend the knee to Russia on that issue.
Interesting. The book is very cool. Musk has never been as relevant as he is today, in a lot of different ways. Obviously his management style is unique, and you get into it in the book. What do you think people don't necessarily understand about Elon, after reporting on him for all these years?
One of the real challenges of this book was that I was writing it just as he had acquired Twitter and was doing some things that were not successful, financially at least, with that social media site: running off advertisers, declining revenues and users, that sort of thing. At the same time, he was also increasing his political involvement and basically using Twitter as a megaphone for his right-wing beliefs.
I really tried to square how someone could do a job there that did not seem like it was successful, but at the same time run this spaceflight company, which is lapping the world in terms of launches. This year, SpaceX will launch 90 percent of everything in terms of mass that goes up there to space. China's next at 6 percent, and the rest of the world is at 4 percent. The other U.S. launch companies are in that 4 percent.
It's incredible. What SpaceX has done, literally, in launch is become the global dominant. So how much of that was Elon responsible for? In the book, I basically conclude that they are successful because of Elon, not in spite of him. But I also go pretty deep into his management style — why it works, where it slows the company down. One of the big takeaways that I got from the directors and vice presidents I spoke to is that when you work for Elon at a high level with a lot of direct interface with him, you just have to be prepared to lose your job at any moment. And if you can't handle that, then you probably shouldn't be in that position.
Fascinating. Again, the space industry can be a little bit obscure to some folks. A lot of folks' main exposure to it is the whole Boeing kerfuffle right now with the ISS. Obviously, you spend a lot of years writing a book, you spend a lot of months waiting for it to come out. There's stuff that happens in between, and then there's stuff from the book that only continues to grow more relevant. What's some of the stuff in the book that you think will be crucial for the next couple years of spaceflight?
The book has a couple chapters about the development of Crew Dragon and the competition with Boeing to reach the launch pad, and, I think, some great insights into why SpaceX was ultimately successful and Boeing was not. Even at the time the contracts were awarded, everyone at NASA thought Boeing would succeed and SpaceX wouldn't. Boeing was absolutely the gold standard in spaceflight.
I think the most relevant part of the book going forward is, given all the success it's had, all of the things it's learned in 20 years, can SpaceX put that into Starship and make that a fully reusable vehicle? And can Elon continue to remain a disruptive force in the industry, but not a distraction to SpaceX? With his increasing political involvement and spread of what a lot of people think is misinformation on X, how much is that ultimately going to hurt the brand of his non-Twitter companies like SpaceX? I don't know the answer to that, but it's certainly something I worry about.
Listen, aviation has always had its swashbuckling figures, right? Howard Hughes, that kind of thing. It's not remote to that. But there is a reason the big federal contractors tend to keep a pretty staid perspective and middle-of-the-road politics. It does seem that he's potentially running into some problems that other rivals have sought to avoid.
We've already seen it in Brazil with the judge who took down Twitter. Starlink got dragged into that in a pretty ugly way. Those kinds of problems only get worse for SpaceX, depending on how Elon acts going forward. It's potentially a very significant problem.
At the same time, the irony here is that SpaceX is only the disruptive force it is because of Elon. He's the one who is pushing them forward constantly, some might say maniacally, toward this vision on Mars. If he goes away, I think they'd lose a lot of that impetus and become a lot more like other launch companies or space companies.
All right. The book is called Reentry. Eric, where can folks find the book, and where can they find you in your day-to-day work?
Thanks very much. The book is in bookstores everywhere. You can find it online, you can find it on Audible, or you can find it at your local bookstore, which is what I would recommend. It comes out September 24.
And I'm the senior space editor at Ars Technica. If you go to arstechnica.com, you can find all our great space coverage there.
Awesome. Thanks for coming on.
Thank you so much, Walt.
Edited by Susie Stark.
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