This is CBS.

Eye of the World.

I'm John Batchler.

With Eric Berger, the author of the new book, Reentry, SpaceX Elon Musk and the reusable rockets that launched a second space age.

Not a reusable rocket yet, soon, soon.

However, what it needs SpaceX is a source of income to fund all of these madcap adventurers to get to Mars to live there.

Now, no one lives plushly for SpaceX.

Eric goes through a long list of people who give up a great deal of their young lives.

I think the average age at this point of the SpaceX employees is at 26.

Yeah.

And when they say party, that means they go to bed a little inebriated and wake up a little

hungover and go back to work for 40 or 80 hours that day.

And yet they need a source of income to maintain the California headquarters,

McGregor test site, and the ability to move back and forth with boosters.

Along comes NASA to say, perhaps you can build a spacecraft to go to and from the ISS.

This is necessary because one Russia and two shuttle.

Explain, Eric, why did they need SpaceX? NASA. Why did NASA need SpaceX? So NASA at the time was looking for other providers of cargo services at the International Space Station. Japan had been doing some of that,

Europe had been doing some of that, but they were retiring those vehicles, and there was the

potential the space shuttle was going to stop flying as well. And so it went into industry and said,

hey, you know, we'd like several tons of cargo delivered each year to the International Space Station.

That's water, food, science experiments, and so forth for the astronauts on board.

You know, do you think you can step up?

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