S8 Ep302: RISKY BUSINESS: DRAGON, NASA, AND REUSABILITY Colleague Eric Berger. To fund its Mars ambitions, SpaceX relied on NASA cargo contracts, which required the development of the Dragon spacecraft. Berger highlights a pivotal moment in 2012 when SpaceX combine

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John Batchelor

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

RISKY BUSINESS: DRAGON, NASA, AND REUSABILITY Colleague Eric Berger. To fund its Mars ambitions, SpaceX relied on NASA cargo contracts, which required the development of the Dragon spacecraft. Berger highlights a pivotal moment in 2012 when SpaceX combined two test missions (C2 and C3) to save time, a risky move that required rewriting flight software while the vehicle was near the International Space Station to fix a sensor glitch. Simultaneously, the company faced an "existential" crisis following the 2015 CRS-7 launch failure. Berger details the difficult evolution of reusability, moving from failed parachute concepts to the complex engineering required to land a booster vertically. NUMBER 3
1917 "THE OLD MAN SAT AND TALKED WITH ME FOR HOURS."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBS.
0:02.0	Eye of the World.
0:03.0	I'm John Batchler.
0:05.0	With Eric Berger, the author of the new book, Reentry, SpaceX Elon Musk and the reusable rockets that launched a second space age.
0:13.0	Not a reusable rocket yet, soon, soon.
0:16.0	However, what it needs SpaceX is a source of income to fund all of these madcap adventurers to get to Mars to live there.
0:24.9	Now, no one lives plushly for SpaceX.
0:28.7	Eric goes through a long list of people who give up a great deal of their young lives.
0:34.7	I think the average age at this point of the SpaceX employees is at 26.
0:40.4	Yeah.
0:40.6	And when they say party, that means they go to bed a little inebriated and wake up a little
0:46.5	hungover and go back to work for 40 or 80 hours that day.
0:50.3	And yet they need a source of income to maintain the California headquarters,
0:57.1	McGregor test site, and the ability to move back and forth with boosters.
1:02.4	Along comes NASA to say, perhaps you can build a spacecraft to go to and from the ISS.
1:14.8	This is necessary because one Russia and two shuttle.
1:22.2	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,
1:28.5	Europe had been doing some of that, but they were retiring those vehicles, and there was the
1:31.6	potential the space shuttle was going to stop flying as well. And so it went into industry and said,
1:36.5	hey, you know, we'd like several tons of cargo delivered each year to the International Space Station.
1:42.5	That's water, food, science experiments, and so forth for the astronauts on board.
1:47.0	You know, do you think you can step up?
	...

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