#STARSHIPTOSPACE: 4/4:: 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
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
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.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Cracken. |
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| 0:21.0 | To learn more, don't invest in as you're prepared to lose all the money you invest. |
| 0:25.6 | This is a high-risk investment and Elon Musk in the desperate early days at |
| 0:41.8 | launch SpaceX. It is now 2008. The markets have |
| 0:45.4 | collapsed. The dollar is damaged. The money markets are damaged. There's no money |
| 0:52.4 | anywhere and we're not clear that Wall Street |
| 0:54.5 | can stay open. I'm just mentioning that that's at the same time that Elon Musk says I |
| 0:59.7 | have enough money to make one more test if you can put it together. So very quickly the whole |
| 1:05.3 | team gathers. This is very much again like Tom Swift Jr. We all gather together and we're going |
| 1:12.0 | to build that rocket and go to the moon. |
| 1:13.6 | Okay, fine. |
| 1:14.8 | They have a limited amount of time. |
| 1:16.6 | They assemble the first and second stage, but they don't have the time that it takes to get |
| 1:21.4 | it by barge out to |
| 1:23.6 | Omelac, which would take a month. So how do they convince the Air Force to give them a C17? What's the magic Eric? |
| 1:31.6 | The magic was they had they had contacts in the Air Force and they a guy named Brian Belli and others were calling around to try to find a transportation and it was about half a million dollars. of transportation. |
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