2/4: READY WITH STARSHIP #25: Countdown to Starship: the backstory: 4/4: Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 2 July 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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2/4: READY WITH STARSHIP #25: Countdown to Starship: the backstory: 4/4: Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger
https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
In Liftoff, Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, takes readers inside the wild early days that made SpaceX. Focusing on the company’s first four launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, he charts the bumpy journey from scrappy underdog to aerospace pioneer. We travel from company headquarters in El Segundo, to the isolated Texas ranchland where they performed engine tests, to Kwajalein, the tiny atoll in the Pacific where SpaceX launched the Falcon 1. Berger has reported on SpaceX for more than a decade, enjoying unparalleled journalistic access to the company’s inner workings. Liftoff is the culmination of these efforts, drawing upon exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current engineers, designers, mechanics, and executives, including Elon Musk. The enigmatic Musk, who founded the company with the dream of one day settling Mars, is the fuel that propels the book, with his daring vision for the future of space.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Dots with Eric Berger. His new book is Lift Off. Elon Musk and the desperate early |
| 0:10.5 | days that launch SpaceX. The word desperate is applicable here because we're looking at |
| 0:15.1 | a privately funded company by a man who has an idea while driving on the Long Island |
| 0:19.9 | Expressway. Let this be a lesson to the future. If you're on the Long Island Expressway |
| 0:25.9 | and you think why not go to Mars, it might require your whole fortune and most of your |
| 0:32.2 | life to devote yourself to that concept. But that's exactly the way you tell the story, |
| 0:36.8 | Aaron. Eric, is that the way Musk tells the story on the Long Island Expressway? |
| 0:42.9 | I mean, I think he thought he would go faster than he did. It's been 20 years, more than |
| 0:49.1 | 20 years since he had that idea in 2001. But yeah, I mean, that's how he tells the story. |
| 0:53.6 | He's like, I was just thinking about what I was going to do next. He kind of ended his |
| 0:57.0 | relationship with PayPal and he was sitting on a few hundred million dollars and he was |
| 1:01.6 | young guy, about 30 years old and bright, obviously, and ambitious and was trying to figure |
| 1:07.3 | out what he was going to do next. And he looked around and thought that the space industry |
| 1:12.0 | was right for disruption. |
| 1:14.0 | The disruption though required Elon Musk to educate himself. So sometimes I think he's |
| 1:19.9 | sitting in his cubicle reading fundamental books about being an astrophysicist or a mechanical |
| 1:25.6 | engineer and electronics engineer. Is he a quick study? Does he talk about being a quick |
| 1:30.6 | study? |
| 1:31.6 | Yeah, and other people around him say that as well. It's not unheard of for people to come |
| 1:38.1 | into this space industry and really immerse themselves. They read fundamental books like |
| 1:41.2 | Ignition and other things like that to get a fundamentals of rocket science and try to |
| 1:47.0 | pick it up because one of the interesting things about building rockets is that you learn |
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