This book does a great job of documenting early SpaceX, especially the first 4 launch attempts of Falcon 1 (of which only the fourth reached orbit). TThis book does a great job of documenting early SpaceX, especially the first 4 launch attempts of Falcon 1 (of which only the fourth reached orbit). The author spoke to many current and former employees and was given pretty free rein to tell the whole story. Elon's own biography by Vance also focused on the terrible time when the world financial markets had collapsed, Elon was getting divorced, Tesla and SpaceX both desperately needed funding, and the third Falcon 1 launch failed (for a very minor reason), but this book included a lot more information about the actual engineering and implementation challenges the team was facing.
There's some additional information about Falcon 9, and some passing references to Starlink, the Mars vehicle, etc., but overall it's much more focused on the first ~6-8 years of SpaceX....more
This is probably my favorite book about NASA (at least that I've read so far). While Apollo 13 was only a "successful failure", this book does a greatThis is probably my favorite book about NASA (at least that I've read so far). While Apollo 13 was only a "successful failure", this book does a great job of showing the culture of NASA, engineering issues of large-scale space systems, and the personalities of those involved -- astronauts, engineers and technicians, and their families. It also makes President Nixon look good(!!!).
The complexity of a system like Apollo (with literally millions of subassemblies produced by different vendors around the country, staff from multiple organizations, changing requirements, etc) being managed by people with only 1960s computing resources seems pretty amazing. That Apollo 13 was the closest the capsule-based programs got to killing astronauts in space even more so. It's hard to read this without thinking about Challenger and Columbia, which got even more complex and had an ultimately worse safety record, at a time when NASA had a large but proportionately smaller budget, and with future private space missions which will hopefully have a good safety record (likely due to simplification and better management of complexity)....more
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