4/4: #Countdown to Starship: the backstory: 4/4: Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 17 April 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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4/4: #Countdown to Starship: the backstory: 4/4: Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger (Author)
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 Bashler. This is Eric Burgers Lift Off. Elon Musk and the desperate early days |
| 0:11.4 | at launch SpaceX. It is now 2008. The markets have collapsed. The dollar is damaged. |
| 0:19.6 | The money markets are damaged. There's no money anywhere and we're not clear that Wall |
| 0:24.1 | Street can stay open. I'm just mentioning that that's at the same time that Elon Musk |
| 0:29.2 | says I have enough money to make one more test if you can put it together. So very quickly |
| 0:34.7 | the whole team gathers. This is very much again like Tom Swift Jr. We all gather together |
| 0:41.2 | and we're going to build that rocket and go to the moon. Okay, fine. They have a limited |
| 0:45.2 | amount of time. They assemble the first and second stage, but they don't have the |
| 0:49.2 | time that it takes to get it by barge out to Omelac, which would take a month. So how |
| 0:56.1 | do they convince the Air Force to give them a C-17? What's the magic, Eric? The magic |
| 1:02.5 | was they had contacts in the Air Force and they had a guy named Brian Belady and others |
| 1:08.0 | were calling around to try to find a transportation. And it was about half a million dollars for |
| 1:15.0 | the trip. But as you say, they didn't have four weeks to ship it out there. They needed |
| 1:18.7 | it there in days. And so they were able to get a C-17 military transport hired and it flew |
| 1:25.4 | right over their headquarters in LA and landed at LAX and they took the rocket down to the |
| 1:30.4 | airport and loaded it on board. And as one of the employees told me, they could see these |
| 1:35.0 | international jets, like sort of it was a face of every window watching them as they were |
| 1:40.5 | putting this rocket on the C-17. And they thought that maybe the passengers on board, the |
| 1:45.4 | commercial jets thought that there was a start of a war somewhere because they were taking |
| 1:49.4 | this big rocket to launch somewhere in a military jet. |
| 1:52.4 | Yes. And at this point in the story, I thought we're going to have a happy ending. But no, there's |
| 1:57.3 | no happy ending. We pile onto the C-17 and because there's so many employees that have helped |
... |
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