Reentry, Eric Berger's New Book on SpaceX

 

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

Eric Berger

BenBella, 2024  

In this second book on SpaceX, Berger continues his role as outside historian of the company: that is, he does not work for SpaceX but has official inside access. (I once suggested to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell that SpaceX should make that arrangement with me: I didn’t know they were already talking to Berger.) Berger mentions Musk’s very controversial public image at the beginning but does not return to it until the last chapter: his focus is on how the launch company developed and succeeded, with a great deal of emphasis on its relationship with NASA.

Berger’s prose is clear and crisp throughout the book. He knows his stuff, technically, and explains it in terms suitable for smart high schoolers on up. I didn’t see any errors in the technology sections, though I thought there were points that needed elaboration. Berger also describes the personalities well, and dips into the work environment several times. He mentions the work-related controversies even-handedly, if too briefly. He writes that VPs at SpaceX knew they would last only a few years at that level before they were burned out or fired, yet there was no lack of competitors for such jobs or any SpaceX job.

The media narrative of SpaceX’s sometimes-difficult partnership with NASA is, not surprisingly, oversimplified. That’s sometimes because Elon Musk oversimplified it in comments to the press and sometimes because the media lacked expertise or didn’t do the research. NASA contracts, some of them awarded before the space agency could be certain the company could deliver, saved SpaceX from bankruptcy at least twice. When the Air Force and the Department of Defense (DoD) in general balked at the very idea of letting the upstart upset the cozy but costly relationship with its sole launch partner, United Launch Alliance (ULA), NASA money let SpaceX prove itself.

While it’s not something Berger explains in detail, SpaceX’s old-fashioned rapid fly-fail-fix development approach drew some admiration but a great deal of caution from NASA ranks. A famous example, fixing an engine nozzle on a ready-to-launch Falcon 9 by cutting off the bottom ring of metal rather than pulling the engine, investigating the cause, and replacing the nozzle, startled government and old-line company engineers. SpaceX’s view was that there was plenty of time to diagnose the problem later: if the rocket could fly safely, then speed was more important.

There were a lot of times, especially with respect to the Dragon capsule, where SpaceX wanted to move faster than NASA would let them. Berger recounts incidents when SpaceX’s speed-first approach came back to take very expensive bites out of the company’s collective butt, also he also tells the lesser-known story of how accommodating NASA could be.  NASA officials, including ISS program manager Mike Suffredini, flight director Holly Ridings, human spaceflight chief Bill Gerstenmaier (now at SpaceX), and especially Kathy Leuders, did everything possible to meld SpaceX’s way of doing things to NASA’s, maintaining the critical requirements and making re-interpretations or exceptions when warranted. SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell sometimes told the Dragon teams to make a change because “we need to do this for Kathy” so Leuders could convince the conservative establishment at JSC that SpaceX was doing things right. SpaceX often gave NASA good reasons for headshaking. I was thoroughly surprised to learn SpaceX didn’t hire someone dedicated to making sure Dragon met all of NASA’s specs until the first capsule was mostly built.

Sometimes NASA applauded the SpaceX approach. When a rocket was lost because a helium pressurization bottle exploded inside the oxidizer tank, SpaceX took 30 of the bottles into the desert and overstressed them in every way imaginable, blowing them up until they replicated the failure. Gerstenmaier applauded the speed with which SpaceX got to work and found the answer, noting it would have taken NASA six months just to get the tests started.

NASA was a cakewalk compared to the DoD, a story Berger should have spent more time on. The Air Force, which purchased DoD launches including those for the intelligence agencies, had a fixed model of giving ULA sole-source contracts, paying very high prices for proven, reliable expendable boosters. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was investing almost nothing in improving technology or cutting costs. DoD reasonably demanded new rockets be flight-proven, but it had no interest in looking at such entrants. SpaceX had to combine launch success with lawsuits, lobbying, and Musk’s relentless and successful PR campaign to open up the national security market.

To flesh out what Berger does not, my work at the time gave me a front-row-seat to the military side, and I remember both the excitement of the junior officers and the dismissal by most senior officers, reinforced by constant objections and considerable ridicule from ULA and the in-house tax-funded support contractor Aerospace. To be fair, DoD had seen new rocket companies appear and vanish, including Beal Aerospace, which was better funded and more conventional than SpaceX: to use a military metaphor, Musk and company had to climb over many bodies of previous casualties just to reach the front lines.

SpaceX is most famous for making boosters reusable. This wasn’t part of Musk’s original vision but was added as he and his people wrestled with long-term cost reduction. The investment cost of making a launcher reusable was not something NASA or DoD felt was worth dedicated funding, although some NASA technology development money awarded to SpaceX went into it. NASA had looked at reusability many times in addition to the Space Shuttle and always found it not worth the cost and development risk. NASA felt the same way about densifying propellant by chilling it to supercold temperatures so a tank could hold more, a worthwhile improvement but a very difficult technical feat. Seeing SpaceX develop both technologies impressed the agency.

Berger writes the biggest NASA crisis came when SpaceX’s desire to “load and go” – to load the densified propellants once the astronauts were already in the Dragon to speed the process and lengthen the launch window – drew instant and near-universal negative response from NASA experts. It took dozens of safe uncrewed Falcon 9 flights and a mountain of studies and test results to get NASA to declare the concept safe.

Musk’s greatest strength – his ability to lay out ever-grander visions and inspire people to work insane hours to make them come true – was also a weakness when dealing with NASA. Musk’s vision of a civilization on Mars was one thing: devoting SpaceX to two huge projects, the Starship vehicle to make Mars possible and the Starlink constellation to pay for it, while he had NASA work on contract, led to trouble. NASA leaders pointed out, acidly in a public tweet from Gerstenmaier in 2019, that Commercial Crew was two years behind schedule and Musk needed to get Dragon flying first. Usually, this prodding had the right effect. Musk had (and has) a bad habit of announcing projects with timelines even SpaceX could not approach, but in the end, SpaceX delivered much faster than any other company or agency could, and for less money: when that happened, the troubles were generally forgiven.

The idea of the Commercial Crew program to let companies take astronauts to the ISS never sat well with NASA’s Apollo- and Shuttle-era veterans, even innovators like Administrator Mike Griffin. It was first funded in 2009, but the contracts were not awarded until 2014. NASA Commercial Crew head Phil McAlister just barely convinced a skeptical committee that wanted to rely on Boeing that funding only Boeing when SpaceX was 60 percent cheaper was not only bad policy but was going to create massive lawsuits. The resulting dual awards served NASA very well, as SpaceX missed the original timeline but delivered the capability much faster and cheaper than its rival. SpaceX won another round with NASA when it received permission to lease launch pads at Cape Canaveral over Boeing’s vociferous objections.

Musk’s idea that Dragon should land using only thrusters was part of the delay. His team simply couldn’t make it happen reliably. It became clear NASA was never going to sign off on the contract waiver needed to use such a risky option, and let SpaceX know it. SpaceX had to give it up and go to parachutes and water landings after a great deal of wasted investment. Then Crew Dragon parachute failures cost most time and money. SpaceX did convince NASA to buy off on a capsule controlled mainly by touchscreens, something veteran astronauts were initially very leery of. 

Once Crew Dragon was flying, Musk had to sell NASA and DoD on his next vehicle, the Falcon Heavy. NASA declined to put a payload on the first flight of such a massive, innovative rocket, even for free, so Musk’s Tesla roadster went up instead. NASA was convinced, moving its Europa probe from SLS to FH at what Berger estimates was $2B in savings. DoD came on board as the alternative, the Delta IV Heavy, was being phased out.

SpaceX’s unprecedented launch cadence has made NASA and DoD drastically overhaul range operations. So far, it’s worked out. The success of the NASA-SpaceX partnership helped the latter win the 2021 Artemis contract for the lunar lander. SpaceX’s radical mission architecture and lander design would never have passed NASA reviews a decade earlier. Now, Berger points out, NASA can only afford Artemis and other exploration programs because of the cost savings SpaceX provides for its non-SLS launches.

NASA is tied ever more closely to SpaceX and has no real alternatives until and unless ULA, Rocket Lab, and/or Blue Origin can provide similar capabilities in the same price range. Both pragmatic and political concerns will likely drive NASA and DoD to diversify their launch options. The ever-dominant issue of cost, however, may keep SpaceX in the lead for a long time.

Berger closes by musing on SpaceX’s indispensable strength and its biggest weakness – Musk. Musk is, to some American politicians, radioactive, and having the more diplomatic Gwynne Shotwell run SpaceX only goes so far. Musk’s image as a man singularly focused on moving humanity into the technological future and taking us to Mars was gone once he bought Twitter/X, which does none of those things and is enmeshed in a storm of controversy about everything from allowing hate speech to organizational turmoil.

As Berger explains, a conventional workforce can’t be managed like SpaceX, whose employees all sign up knowing the pace will be murderous, and Musk never took this into account with Twitter. Berger describes an interview with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson where he asked about Musk’s behavior: Nelson changed the subject to praise Shotwell. Berger wonders what will happen when Shotwell eventually retires (she is 60) and whether Musk’s future activities will make working with his companies even more fraught for government and private partners.

The one thing that disappointed me about this book is that Berger does not go into any of the details about how NASA/DoD and SpaceX work together on the front lines: he keeps it to the major players. The day-to-day workings of the partnership in the many locations they take place, between workers at low and mid levels, could at least have a chapter or two here. But it’s clear NASA and DoD have succeeded in making things work with a company whose culture is radically different from their traditional contractors.

In summary, the story Berger tells about Space X and the government is one of sometimes-fractious partners who made it work. There’s no question the partnership will continue, for decades at least. It may even take us to Mars. Berger’s first-rate book is indispensable to anyone who wants to understand how that partnership was born and nurtured along with the technology to make it worth pursuing. A good photo section and an index round out the book.

Matt Bille is a historian and writer in Colorado Springs. His 2004 book The First Space Race chronicled the Sputnik-Explorer-Vanguard competition of the 1950s See www.mattbilleauthor.com.