I'm John Batch with Eric Berger. His new book is Liftoff.

Elon Musk and the desperate early days that launched SpaceX. The word desperate is applicable here because we're

looking at a privately funded company by a man who has an idea while driving on

the Long Island Expressway. Let this be a lesson to the future. If you're on the Long Island Expressway and you think why not go to Mars

It might require your whole fortune and most of your life to devote yourself to that concept but that's exactly the way you tell the story Aaron

Eric is that the way must tells the story on the Long Island Express way

I mean I think, I think he thought he would go faster than he did. It's been 20 years, more than 20 years since he had that idea in 2001.

But yeah, I mean, that's how he tells the story. He's like I was just thinking

about what I was going to do next. You know, he kind of ended his relationship with PayPal and he was sitting on a few

hundred million dollars and he was young guy you know about 30 years old and

bright obviously and ambitious and was trying to figure out what he was going to do

next and he looked around and thought that the space industry was right for

disruption. The disruption though required

Elon must to educate himself. So it sometimes I think he's sitting in his

cubicle reading fundamental books about being an astrophysicist or a mechanical engineer and

electronics engineer. Is he a quick study? Does he talk about being a quick study?

Yeah, and other people around him say that as well.

Like, it's not unheard of for people to come into the space industry

and really immersed themselves.

They read fundamental books like ignition, and other things like that to get a

fundamentals of rocket science and try to pick it up because one of the one of the

interesting things about building rockets is that you learn by doing rather than reading about it and so you know you can jump in and get a pretty good education.

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