Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

(New York: William Morrow, 2021), 288

Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on 2026-06-12-Fri when SpaceX went public. Remember what he went through to get there:

"At that time I had to allocate a lot of capital to Tesla and Solar City, so I was out of money," Musk said. "We had three failures under our belt. So it's pretty hard to go raise money. The recession is starting to hit. The Tesla financing round that we tried to raise that summer had failed. I got divorced. I didn't even have a house. My ex-wife had the house. So it was a shitty summer." (182)

He dealt with unrelentingly negative headlines in the summer and fall of that year, with the third failure of the Falcon 1, the creation of web sites like "Tesla Death Watch," and his ex-wife, Justine, dragging her former husband publicly in the press. His new girlfriend, an English actress named Talulah Riley, said Musk looked like "death itself" and described him waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain. She worried he would break under the stress, or perhaps have a heart attack and die.
Even as SpaceX achieved success, both of Musk's major companies spiraled toward bankruptcy. That fall he had about $30 million cash left. Friends urged Musk to save SpaceX or Tesla, warning that he could not support both. He agonized over the decision. "It was like having two children," Musk said. "I could not bring myself to let one of the companies die." In Musk's worldview, he could not let either venture go. Tesla was needed to save Earth from climate change, helping to break humans from their fossil fuel addiction. And SpaceX would offer a backup plan by making humanity a multiplanetary species. He split his money between the two companies. (216-217)

"He channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done." (19)
North pole riddle... (20-21)
SpaceX design: failure is an option; talk less and do more; iterative design; ask "What would it take?" (24)
"Elon mostly brought on recent college graduates. Most had no significant others pulling on their time, asking when they'd be home for dinner. They lived in apartments, not houses with lawns to mow. They had no children to look after. So they worked long, hard hours as Musk squeezed everything out of them that they had to give. And most were more than willing to give SpaceX the best years of their lives. Musk was a siren, calling brilliant young minds to SpaceX with an irresistible song." (25)
Musk laughed when told about Jeff Bezos's timeline for engine development. "Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," he said. "So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And then I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I'm generally supergood at engineering, personally. Most of the design decisions are mine, good or bad." (36)
Before Falcon 1 flight 1 they fried the avionics with too much voltage (so I wasn't the first!); they fried the capacitors in the stage 2 PDB, and this was the solution: "After checking schematics for the power box, Altan realized that the capacitors used in it were not rated to carry the increased voltage the launch team had pushed to power the rocket. The power box in the first stage also had the same capacitors, meaning it could also fail at any moment. It would be a relatively simple matter to replace capacitors for both of the power boxes, but rather inconveniently there were no electronics stores on Kwajalein. The capacitors needed for the job cost only about $5, but they had to be acquired from Digi-Key Electronics in Minnesota, six thousand miles away. But these were desperate times, with just days left before the range closed. The launch team hastily devised a plan. An intern from Texas would fly on Musk's smaller Cessna Citation CJ2 from the SpaceX factory to Minnesota and pick up the capacitors. Meanwhile, as luck would have it, one of the thrice-weekly flights from Kwaj to Honolulu left later that day. If Altan scrambled, he could make that flight and arrive in Los Angeles on the afternoon of the following day, where he would meet the intern. Quickly, he and a technician removed the first- and second-stage power distribution boxes, and extricated the printed circuit boards inside. They were loaded into protective Pelican cases —Altan's only lug-gage. He raced in a boat back to Kwaj."
During the F1-1 countdown, Musk was quizzing Chris Thompson about material for the Falcon 5 fuel tanks. (86-87)
Flight 1 failure from Chinnery: "It was amazing, and then it was horrifying. Something like that, it hits you in the gut." (88)
Reading: While Kimbal played video games, his older brother spent much of the flight poring over books written about early rocket scientists and their efforts, such as the U.S. program under Wernher von Braun and the Soviet program under Sergei Korolev. Musk seemed intent to understand the mistakes they had made and learn from them. "I'm not surprised he has been successful," Lawrence said. "He was clearly dedicated." (91)
Elon: "SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work." (93)
Elon's management style: Don't talk about doing things, just do things. (98)
"I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head," he said. "Normally those are at least two people. There's some engineering guy who's trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn't understand engineering, so he can't tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Whereas I'm making the engineering decisions and spending decisions. So I know, already, that my brain trusts itself." (104)
"It was in Elon's nature, after something goes wrong, to find whoever caused the problem and vent his frustration." (119)
Flight 2 failure: Slosh was the #11 risk. (127)
- "Now I ask for the eleven top risks. Always go to eleven." (138)
Failure: "At SpaceX, the more direct solution was to simply fly the rocket, an acid test with more conclusive results than months of analysis, assumptions, and simulations." (128)
Flo Li: "Who needed friends when there was no time for a social life? It was like, this is my life. And I'm all in." (130)
LOx Machine: "That's the thing about Elon, he was willing to spend money to try things," Kassouf said. "And that's so different. Go to Boeing, and you spend money to try and figure out what your liabilities are going to be before you try anything. But Elon is like, sure, try it. If it doesn't work we can either sell it back, or it goes into our lessons-learned pile?" (133)
"One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket...Really, we're just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago." (140)
The Man in the Arena: "When he met the team there, he was dressed for the Christmas party, wearing leather shoes, designer jeans, and a nice shirt. Late into the night, he and the propulsion team smeared epoxy onto the engine chamber. By the end of their efforts, Musk and the others were covered in the sticky stuff. He'd trashed his $2,000 pair of shoes and missed the party, but hardly seemed to notice. This would be a sacrifice well worth making if Musk could save the Merlin propulsion program. And he believed he might have done just that right up until the moment the epoxy-coated engine chamber was subjected to a pressure test. It didn't take long, after pressures began to rise, for the epoxy to come undone. Soon, it flew off the interior walls of the chamber, revealing the cracks beneath. Musk had been wrong. But the filthy and exhausted engineers and technicians working with him all night did not begrudge Musk for keeping them at a task that proved fruitless. Rather, his willingness to jump into the fray, and get his hands dirty by their sides, won him admiration as a leader." (147)
They began preliminary work on Falcon Heavy before F1-3!! (164)
Flight 4: "It was fly or die." (197)
- First stage imploding on the descent into Hawaii. (187+)
- "You need to stop talking, and shut up, and listen to what I'm about to tell you," Thompson said. "You're not bringing that fucking rocket back. You're going to strip that fucking thing like a Chevy. And that rocket better be fucking disassembled by the time Buzza and I get there Monday morning." (193)
- Flying with TEA-TEB in the cabin of Elon's Falcon 900. (194)
- "Normally such a pressure test would be done by filling the tanks with an inert gas like nitrogen, which does not burn, and then slowly increasing the pressure inside. But the only commodities SpaceX had to hand on Omelek at the moment were liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel. This raised the stakes, for if the tank failed during pressurization with one of these propellants, it would do so catastrophically by blowing up." (196)
"This patch, for the first time, included two green four-leaf clovers. For every launch since—remember, rocket scientists are a superstitious bunch—the mission patch design has included at least one four-leaf clover." (208)
"There was no jubilation or anything. I was just too stressed. It's like the patient survived. Getting to orbit was just like, OK, we're not going to die now. At least we'll live a little bit longer. That's what that launch meant. I just felt relief." (215)
CRS contract: "I love NASA. You guys rock." (221)
Discontinuing Falcon 1: "I didn't see it as a problem," said Steven Walker, who served as program manager for the Falcon project during SpaceX's developmental years, and later led D.A.R.P.A. "They went on to pivot into the Falcon 9 rocket, which has changed military space for the better. They are launching costly military satellites for one-fourth of the cost of what the United States government was paying before they came along. I'd say we got our money's worth from the Falcon 1 program." (224)
"Zurbuchen made a list of his ten best students based on academics, leadership, and entrepreneurial performance during the previous decade, and researched where they had ended up. To his surprise, half of the students worked not for the industry's leading companies, but at SpaceX. The results blew him away...SpaceX had succeeded in the battle for talent with an inspiring goal...In the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage." (227)
- Musk asked a single question: "Who were the other five students?" (228)
"His argument for reuse is simple: If an airline discarded a 747 jet after every transcontinental flight, passengers would have to pay $1 million for a ticket. Similarly, if every rocket flown into space drops into the ocean, space will remain cost prohibitive for all but a few wealthy nations and a few exclusive astronauts. To make humanity a multiplanetary species, Musk sought to lower the cost of getting into space and flying onward to other worlds." (232)
- It took a good bit of tinkering and failure, but on the twenty-first flight of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015, the company brought its booster to a safe nighttime landing at a brand-new pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, just a couple of miles from the launch site. After the nighttime launch and landing, just three days before Christmas, employees at the company's factory in Hawthorne cheered raucously and then broke into chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A!" (233) >> it was a good night!
"About half of those who survived the Kwaj crucible remain with SpaceX today, but the other half have moved on, often to escape the burden of toiling under Musk after it became too much." (240)
- "There was no work-life balance. The impact was, you didn't see your kids." (241)
- "That chronic work level and stress, eventually, does a number on everybody." (244)
- "This incredible pressure wore down his employees, but for someone like Musk who sees only a narrow window to execute his sweeping vision, there is no other way." (247)
Elon on launching from Omelek: "It is way better in recollection than at the time." (257)

Topic: SpaceX

Created: 2026-05-26-Tue
Updated: 2026-06-24-Wed