Off-Nominal - 167 - Bechtold (with Eric Berger)

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, to talk about his newest book, Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 167 - Bechtold (with Eric Berger) - YouTubeReentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age | West Houston's Neighborhood BookshopReentry by Eric Berger - Audiobook - Audible.comReentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age Kindle EditionFor the first time in more than three years, SpaceX misses a booster landing | Ars TechnicaFollow EricEric Berger | Ars TechnicaEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake. Hey, Anthony. It's me again. You're re-entering from the past to break up your break is what's happening right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, yeah, it's a great point. I have no idea how far into this whole thing I am.

We are, this is the longest gap between recording and posting ever, but we've had to do it for none other than our boy, Eric Berger, and the book tour. We love being on the book junket, so thanks, Eric, for hanging out with us this far in advance of the actual release date. You're quite welcome. This is the summer of extended releases, right? I mean, we had Starliner going from eight days to 90 days. It's 90s, we hope.

We'll find out between when we record this and when it releases, we will have found out if 90 is the accurate number. So that's a fun checker. Tell us in the chat, everybody. Tell us how many days it was. I'm pumped, Jake. I put the book jacket back on for this. shot here because I hate book jackets. I always take them off. And then I just put this on my shelf

so I could look at it while I'm reading the book in its hardcover form. That's my style. But I think you read the e-book. Yeah, yeah. I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in a shipping firewall and so only digital products can get to me. Yeah, you got to jump the divide to get down there. Thankfully, the book is just as good digitally. So, yeah. There you go. Did you get a pretty pictures in it, though? I did. Yeah. Maybe not the color ones, though. Because you had mentioned to me that there was like color stuff maybe in the middle, and I just had like the inline shots.

So maybe you do have to show them when we get to it. Yeah, there's color inserts in the hardcover. Ah, okay. No, I didn't get those. Yeah. All right. There's pictures in flow of the book, too. I feel like we're getting into the book review already before anything.

But am I misremembering Lyftoff having in the flow pictures as well? No, no, this is something this publisher wanted. Okay. All right, we need to talk about that, too. A little different publisher situation. I'm curious about that. Yeah. Anyway, Jake, what are you drinking over there?

Well, I'm keeping it tropical today. Just got a little bit of a mix of, you know, tropical fruit juices, granitein, little rum, little triple sick. Wow. Nice and spicy, you know. That's fair. I got to be honest, I stayed up way too late reading this book last night. So I'm drinking coffee because I'm very sleepy, but that fits my, wherever I may be on this day in actual time, probably also drinking some coffee.

Coffee still on bread. Did not sleep last night, yes. Eric, you're early on the book tour right now, so you probably have not started the heavy drinking period. I've not started the heavy drinking period. I'm drinking water today because I have an interview with a rocket company CEO to be named later that may be confrontational. So, wow. I feel like you're going to stop that sentence halfway through. You're going to stay sober.

Is it potable water? Is that joke still relevant? I don't think so. Maybe. Not to this story, though. Oh, wow. All right. Okay.

All right. Where should we start, Jake? Oh, yeah. I was going to say, where do we start? Do you want to previously on this? Because I'm curious, like, where in your life, Eric, where did lift off end and reentry begin? Was there any gap?

between those or did you just keep going? So there wasn't a whole lot of a gap. I certainly should have taken one, I think, in retrospect, because I started working on reentry pretty quickly after liftoff was published. And then I realized that, wait a minute, I kind of need to take a break. So then I took a break. And I'll be honest with you, the project became more difficult because, you know, Elon bought Twitter and then, you know, really started doing.

some things that made me a little bit uncomfortable. Certainly, his attacks on the media. I mean, I am a journalist. And that sort of prompts me to take like another six months off, at which point I, like, would have missed the deadline for my publisher. And so I said, hey, I need a little more time and they were pretty cool about that. And so, you know, I really worked very, very hard on it in 2023. Okay.

Yeah, that's a good year for paying attention to SpaceX. A lot of stuff happened in 2020. Yeah. Not a lot of time to write. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. The other aspect is that at least on the early portions of reentry, there's a lot of familiar names from Lyftoff, right?

And it's been a couple years since I read Lyftoff at this point because pandemic brain has compressed all when that came out. They came out in 2020, by the way. I would have totally guessed. March of 2021. 21? Okay, I thought it was 20. Not March 2020, but I don't know.

Yeah, March of 2020. Check. All right. Well, it feels like it was way more recently than that, I guess is the thing. Because I felt like, oh, I remember, it got right back in where all these people were when we left them last. So, and I thought you structured the book an interesting way in terms of it's not exactly chronological. It's kind of, you know, there's a lot of arcs going on in this time period of SpaceX's life. So when you were approaching it.

And you know, Lyftoff was very much, you had a story to tell that was pretty clean in the chronological sense. This has so many branches to it between Falcon 9 and Dragon and Crew Dragon. Was that mapping process, like an important first step? Or what was the idea behind the organization? Fundamental challenge of the book, right? Leptoff was fundamentally about the origin of SpaceX and the first four Falcon 1 launches. And that was basically it. You had a cast, a pretty small cast of characters, relatively speaking.

whereas in this book, which roughly goes from the end of 2008 through 2020, there's, you know, SpaceX grows to 10,000 employees, and, you know, they have all these different crazy things they're doing. And so the question is, how do you encapsulate that into a narrative and not lose the reader? So it still does kind of go chronological, you know, but it does, you know, it does jump around a little bit from, It sort of takes the crew dragon program, which began, you know, in the early 2010s and sort of moves that to the end of the book. And it takes kind of the first launch of the Falcon 9 and puts those at the front of the book. But yeah, it was a challenge.

And I'll tell you, like if this had been my first book, I think I would have really struggled not having the experience of lift off. Yeah. Yeah. It seems challenging. I kind of it did throw me sometimes because I was like trying to remember like oh we bounce back again and like there was especially when we were talking about um God which one was it was it somewhere where the the launch pads and their their the reusability paths were you know those those streams were all kind of like happening at the same time and there was people who like had one bad decision on one side of the story and then you had to rewind to go tell it from the other perspective and then you know it does get pretty convoluted in there but I think that probably it probably like is showing what's actually happening with this organization too, because compared to liftoff where it's a nice tight group, you know, the SpaceX is also growing not just narrative paths,

but in departments and sites and all these kind of things where you're going to start to see those different storylines happen in isolation. And I think that did a strangely good job of doing that. Right. Well, I have to say that, you know, the highest compliment you can give any authors to say that their work is convoluted. It's at least true to the source material is what Jake means.

You know, if you look at the period of like 2014, 2015, 2015, 2016, there's just so much happening, right? You've got, they're taking the first steps toward attempting to land rockets successfully. They're bidding for commercial crew and starting the serious development of crew dragon. they're actually landing rockets and then you've got like the CRS 7 failure and then several months later you've got the AMO6 failure and they're blowing up launch pads they're they're acquiring new launch pads and then they're you know the origins of Starlink and Starship are in sort of the 2015 to 2016 period so it's just incredible just you're right there's just so much happening and I and I really worked hard to try to make and try to make that narrative flow but you know you sort of you sort of map

these timelines on top of one other and you think about how much crap that they were trying to process and work through to make all of this come together and it's just it's really incredible actually in that retrospect that they did manage to persevere and and be so successful yeah i mean i think the thing that that highlighted that that to me most was the when the iac people called Elon said like do you want to cancel because like obviously there's a lot on your plate right now because the Amos Sixth is just blown up and all that kind of stuff right so yeah i mean of course he says no but uh that that that's the microcosm of that whole narrative right there i think yeah i do love there's a this book reading it was like um i don't know if there's an affection that i have

for this time period because it's just the origin story of me being a space nerd in so many ways from going to college in Orlando while they were getting the first Falcon 9s flying and I remember like you tell the story of the snipping off the end of the engine bell and that decision and I remember distinctly being like

oh shit this is totally different than the boring space industry that there was and being I felt like that was my uh the scene from Star Wars where Ray like here's the lightsaber down to the basement and it's like these are your first steps that was that moment for me.

It was like, oh, man, that's like a totally different thing happening. And then, you know, a couple with that, with Jake and I, starting all this stuff while, I think, like, you bought the domain for We Martians the day after they landed the booster or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I was very shortly behind that. So it was so tied to our origin stories as space nerds that it was fun to then step back and, like, read it as a narrative because we were,

you get too swept up in how much stuff was going on and how slow some of those years felt. You know, there's the cadence of the first part of the book where they're getting this stuff going, I kept flipping back. I mean, like, wait, it was how long between these two incidents? Because you're not used to how long things took. But it was, you know, months between major pivotal moments of those first couple Falcon 9 launches. And at the same time, you know, the people that we were following from the liftoff era have, you know, when you're talking to these people about both different timelines, did they feel that difference in, pace or was it even more frenetic because there was more to do on Falcon 9, even if the time

gaps were longer? Well, it's interesting, like Zach Dunn, August who's a major character in Lufth and is in this book as well, actually said that the hardest he ever worked at SpaceX was the summer of 2009 when they were sort of finalizing the build of the very first flight one Falcon 9 rocket. And that shocked me because this is a guy who had been through Quadrilleen and the crazy crazy times there and actually also the aftermath of CR7 CR7 was just this intense

intense period during the second half of 2015 so I think that you know I think Tim Buzzah maybe said it best he talked about how you know after they did Falcon 1 they got Falcon 9 off the ground he sort of flying dragons to the space station with cargo he thought that maybe it might slow down a little bit so they might be able to catch their breasts but in fact

it just kind of kept accelerating So I think the fact is that one of the really special and different things about SpaceX is that like there is they don't slow down, right? Elon essentially keeps his foot pressed to the accelerator like down down to the ground. And it really wears through people, but it also delivers, you know, these fantastic results that we've come to appreciate. And you know, you mentioned the book is about, you know, you guys sort of started your careers. right in the middle of this, just really exciting period, 2015, 2016. The fact of the matter of one of the challenges this book is, you know, almost a lot of people reading it will have seen that first landing.

We'll have seen the dual booster landings of Falcon Heavy. We'll have seen a lot of these things that would be familiar with it. So the goal with the book really was to kind of go behind the scenes and tell the story of what was actually happening behind the press releases and the webcasts to just show how hard and how much stuff had to be done to make, you know, to make these things happen. Yeah. Yeah.

And I, I like the, how there was like, we talked about how things are like sort of segmenting and branching off into different parts of SpaceX. And now we start to see, like, you come under this from Lyftoff thinking like, that is the hardest anyone's ever worked in their life. And then you hear these stories. And then, you know, like you talked about the parachute team and where other SpaceXers were like, oh, yeah, those parachute people, man, they work hard. Like, I could, I couldn't hack it on the parachute team.

It's like, people that were like doing the wildest shit. And then they're like, yeah, I wouldn't go. when you're the parachute team because like they're just insane right yeah like comparing workloads that we could not even fathom yeah that's different that's different work for 20 hours party for two hours two hours was basically like their life for a while and you're you were that's the thing that you were caught up on jake right was like the uh the the the burnouty aspects of this and i appreciate how much of the book is dedicated to not only the Elon stuff that you were talking about which I'm sure we'll get into, but the, the, like, human cost of it all.

And it's always something that has been talked about is that, you know, people go and they go really hard at SpaceX and they burn out. And then how many of people that we know, Jake, that have left SpaceX to, like, start families or whatever, right? It's pretty consistent across the board. Yeah. And there's, but there's a couple that are still there, still doing it, that are just, like, fiends for that intensity.

But it's, I mean, I don't know if you've calculated a percentage, Eric, of, like, the amount of people that that you talk to that are current and former and what that looked like from the liftoff crew sent through to reentry. If you go back and look at, if you go back and look at the liftoff crew, like the only people that are still there from that era really are Gwen Shotwell and Florence Lee. Everyone else is, everyone else is left. Yeah. And, you know, it's they're kind of on like the second and third and fourth generation of leaders at this point.

at SpaceX if you take away Elon and Glenn. Yeah. It's almost like, they've absorbed people of others though. They got gursed in the fold and Kathy leaders. Happy leaders, yeah, yeah. In a weird way, it was almost like a sad part of the book

because like you come into it from Liftoff and then like all these characters that you kind of fall in love with in Lyft off for the amazing things you do. You just watch them all like burnout or get fired in this book, you know? I was kind of like, oh man. That's not what I wanted to do for that their end. their story to look like.

I mean, I think one of the most sort of powerful ideas to me is that anyone who worked as a director, but especially as a vice president at SpaceX, kind of had to accept the fact that they could be fired at any time. And to be successful

at SpaceX, you kind of had to come to peace with that to really thrive. And that's, you know, I don't know whether that is, I don't think it's good for those people at all, certainly mentally. But again, it's pretty hard to argue with the results that the organizational,

the culture of SpaceX ultimately produced. And it's still producing. My favorite story in the whole book was the driving the first stage across the country the very first time when they had the truck was the wrong size that they couldn't fit under any bridges. And so it was like this whole meandering route and talking about the firing part, were the one, I can't remember of all the names. I'm terrible with names, but Elon was mad, so he called whoever was in charge.

Chris Thompson and told him to fire someone on the team and Chris said, yeah, okay, and then just like didn't do it. That is like exempt. I don't know. I just, that one sticks out to me as a interesting. Jay, tell me you used to be a manager without telling me you used to be a manager. The most relatable part of the story is not firing someone that a higher up told you to fire. I've never been able to get away with that but yeah Roger Carlson who was the person who was supposed to be fired told me he didn't know

for like years that he was supposed to be fired after that there's a similar story too right with I'm also going to forget who this was that was in charge of the deluge system at Van deringberg that ended up flooding what was that? Ben Kelly yeah Ben Kelly there you go

and flooded the whole pad and I think it was Zach Dunn right that he went over and offered his resignation and he was like, F that, like, you just broke everything. Fix it. You can't quit. He just broke the whole thing. It was, it is funny, right? Because there's a balance too, right?

If there's always an urge of like, this person screwed up royally, you should fire them. But it's also like, name me a person that will never make that mistake again. It's that person in particular. So finding the balance between that was a fireable thing and I should get rid of this person versus, all right, they'll take that and they'll run with it. and I know their character and I know they're work ethic and they'll be fine. I don't know how you tune into the right thing. And if it's like a total one-off situation where you got to base it on who the person is or whatever,

what kind of work it is. But it is interesting and so many of the great stories are like, oh, that thing went wrong or the engine bell story that I told, right? It was nitrogen that was like impinging on the bell that actually broke it in some way. Yeah. Yeah, there's just stories where the people that got through the incident are then like the best person to handle that from now on. So, you know, that's, I don't know, do you find that that is, what are the unique parts after talking to like SpaceXers? Like, how are they still the outlier is a thing that I'm on for 2024 of how do they remain? Because you said, we're on the second and third generation of these leaders at this point.

You know, what are the intangibles? You mentioned one to talk about the epilogue, and I write about that in the epilogue. When I talk about this, the concept called the Founders Mentality. And it's the idea that you have an outside disruptor come in, starts a company. They sort of succeed in whatever their initial phase of disruption was. In SpaceX's case, you could say it was the Falcon 9 rocket or crew gun against spacecraft. And then sort of after you become the dominant, player in that industry, you sort of mature, you bring in a board of directors, and you know,

you kind of the old CEO goes out and you bring in a new CEO to, you know, and what has not happened at SpaceX, you know, so like, look at Blue Origin, like clearly like they were pretty disruptive for a while after they got out of their hobby phase and then they bring in the mature CEO, Bob Smith, and that that is what it is, right? Elon has always run SpaceX and he has kept that founder's mentality even today, right, where you cannot argue that SpaceX is the most important space actor in the world in terms of launch, in terms of satellite operation, in terms of, you know, communications. And they are the leader in all of those areas.

They are, they are, they are, they are Goliath. but they're you know they don't have a board of directors right or like a fortune 500 CEO they have you know Elon still out there being Elon for better or for worse and and he is the innervating force that keeps that going forward I mean there's I could not find any other explanation for other than sort of his determination and like relentless bribe yeah and the ability or the desire to continue to destroy their own products like that's the that's the thing that You know, even outside of space, that's the, when Apple's at top of their game with iPod, they could have just sat on that and milked that.

But they were like, nope, screw that. We're going to completely get destroyed that project by the introduction of this phone. Turns out that went great. And the desire to actually do that and keep on that is something that, you know, when a company stops doing that, then you know, like, all right, that's been hollowed out at this point. But SpaceX is doing that with Starship, I would, this may be a back half, back half of the episode question, but I would, I am curious as somebody who probably is going to write a trilogy of books, no spoilers, is Starship going as well as these two programs went?

That's a question I would ponder, and I ponder it more the later into 2024 we get. I think it is, from the standpoint of it is such an order of magnitude more challenging problem than what they've done before. I don't know if you would disagree with that, but, you know, They're trying to build a larger Saturn Fiber rocket as a private company and bring everything back to the launch pad. That's, I don't know, it's, it's, I don't think it's hyperbole when Elon says this is one of the hardest engineering challenges of humans ever undertaken. So from that standpoint, I think they're, yeah, I think they're making progress. That last flight was pretty damn impressive.

I mean, this is now, you could argue that start. ship super heavy is now an or is now a operational rocket right you could really start putting payloads on that vehicle the questions remain are how challenging is it going to be to get the first stage back and hopefully we'll find out next month or excuse me in September and then in mere days hopefully as you listen to this and then you know how challenging is is it going to be to land starship and how challenging is the tile problem going to be? And then you've got the whole huge challenge of, you know, a few in-flight refueling and propellant storage on orbit, which, you know, has never been done before.

And hopefully we'll get a critical test of this sometime in 2025. So I think they're going slow, slower than some people would have expected, right? I mean, we've heard the predictions of humans on Mars in 2024. But for what they're trying to accomplish, I think they're going pretty fast. And I will say one of the interesting things when you think about Starship is, you know, they had no money. They were desperate for survival in the Falcon 1 era. The Falcon 9, for people who read this book, I think will get a sense of just how scrappy they had to be even in 2010. Like they were still very short of funding sort of and like trying to save money wherever possible.

And that has only changed in the last few years. And so if you go to Boca Chica today, this is really the first time SpaceX has been unleashed with not unlimited funding, but where you don't have to worry about money as much. And so you see them building like the second launch tower. They have, they're extremely hardware rich. And what are like, they're up to Raptor engine 378 or something mind boggling like that? It would be like 600 by the time people hear this. Yeah. It's like, so they're able to invest in all the areas where they think they need to invest in.

And so I think they're going to get there. You think that's good, though? What? Do I think what's good? Do you think the scrappiness had something to do with why they were so good in those early days? And do you think, I mean, you're giving me reasons why people have criticized Blue Wall origin. Yeah.

This is that old history analogy, right? You go upstairs with wooden clogs and down the stairs with silks. But I think the scrappiness drove a sense of urgency. And I don't see that sense of urgency going away, right? I think there have been there's a lack of urgency other places in the aerospace industry. Right. But while SpaceX has more money now, I don't see a lack of urgency in their actions. I mean, my colleague Stephen Clark had a story this week about, you know, them welding on the launch tower at like 1 a.m. in the morning at 5.30 a.m. in the morning.

Like, they're working 24 hours a day in South Texas to try to get ready to catch a rocket. I think about this sometimes, and this kind of goes, Anthony, what you said, like how do they continue, did that urgency, right? And will they continue to scrap products? And maybe this question, Eric, for you would be an interesting one, is like, will they, and if so, when will they cancel Falcon 9, right? Does the Starship ever get to a place where there's like, okay, we don't need Falcon anymore? And they just shut it down and, like, you know, quit on the most successful rocket we have ever seen in our entire lives. I'm on record as saying, I think Falcon 9 flies into the 2040s. Yeah.

So it's, it's, even then. It's going to have to lift all those Starliner. lights. I don't think we'll ever see a launch of Starliner, but that would certainly be something. You know, it just, it's hard to see like there being a competitor that's cheaper and faster and better than the Falcon 9 in 2040. I mean, we're already in 2024. That's just 16 years from now. So I think Starship will come along and will gradually supplant Falcon 9, but I think they're going to continue to fly for a long time. And so, but why is that, though? Do you think that's because they, you know, why throw away a good thing?

Or is it, is it actually a different product that Starship can't serve? I think it's going to be the gold standard for human spaceflight for quite a while, right? Eventually, we're going to get humans on Starship probably maybe a decade from now, maybe a little bit sooner than that launching on Starship. But that's still a ways in the future. So I just think that NASA and other customers, probably going to be more comfortable flying on dragon, especially if it continues to have a,

you know, a great safety record. If they, you know, God forbid if they start having some accidents, then that all bets are off, of course. Yeah. Anthony, same question. What do you think? I've never really thought about it that much, to be honest. 2040s, that's so fucking far away.

That's so far away. That's 16 years ago. 16 years. I mean, 16 years ago, was 2008 was the first time they flew Falcon 1 and they test fired, they test fired the Falcon 9 16 years ago for the first time. It's not that long. That's my point. That's so far away.

Yeah, but they're, but yeah, but to your point, they're like accelerating. I mean, the Ryan spacecraft program was three years old 16 years ago. Yeah, that's was I. Humans have a phone out of you. Just a little perspective. Well, okay. I mean, it's funny that we're, I was just telling you that like

SpaceX isn't scrappy enough and going fast enough on Starship and also I think they're going to ditch Falcon 9 before you do which is funny that two minutes we've totally switched sides on this that's number one I mean tactically right they're going to be winning contracts from the Department of Defense to fly payloads out that far because they they tend to work

almost 10 years out on launch contracts so I think functionally they will be doing that. There's also stuff that I'm not I'm not sold on the whole like one vehicle designed to rule them all thing in the way that the SpaceX has talked about. I don't even think they are, to be honest, because I think that's one of those, you know, things where you say it because it's what you're working on right now, but, you know, they fly different vehicles in support of their vehicles based on the jobs they need to do. They have a, whatever they've got, 737 or something,

where they fly a bunch of people down to Boca Chico whenever they need it, but Elon's got a private plane. They personally know the advantages of specialized transport. So I do think there's a, there's something that they need to solve in the 2030s, which is what do they do with other payloads on Starship, you know, when they're going to launch something on Starship that's going to go out to the outer planets.

What are those like kick stages or third stages or in-space transport pieces of this architecture? I do think there's a architecture piece there that would totally supplant Falcon 9, that they're not going to get to by necessity until the 2030s. Exactly. There are these, yeah, the extended tech tree of SpaceX

is working out that direction. So if they, and, you know, I would bet on Mueller making that successful in the way that SpaceX could totally glom onto it. But, yeah, I think there's, there are plenty of questions to be answered in the 2020s for Starship, and there's a bunch that I know they won't get to until they need to, which is in the 2030s.

So I feel like Eric's on to something about the 2040s. It just feels so far away. I always remember, remember that brief moment in time when they canceled Dragon? And then they uncanceled it like a month later. We're like, oh, yeah, customers still want this. Like, you know, there is that mentality there sometimes. But I don't know, maybe there is a point where it just, the organization grows so much and things are so calcified.

And the markets are so, like, comfortable with stuff that that scrappiness does. sort of dissipate a little bit, right? Also, the markets they're serving have to mature, right? There's, we are in deep shit on the commercial space station market right now, and the timelines on that are terrible. Like, those are our projects

that are going to take very long. We've got very little movement in that direction in the way that we would need to see something flying before 2030. So if those aren't even really up there until 2031, 32, then, yeah, there's so much work to be done there on Falcon 9.

And those markets existing, SpaceX needs that market to exist to be able to have customers to serve. You know, in the same way that they need SLS to keep going, if it's getting funding, they need that market to, they don't seem interested in operating their own space station, but they do need it to be there to be able to do what they want to do in the space industry at large. So there is a little bit of like a symbiotic relationship, and if SpaceX is working faster than the rest of the industry like they are, that's okay, assuming that they don't run into, you know, what you will allow.

they ran into when they wanted to get rid of these old product lines for personnel reasons, right? Is that a consideration with, you know, Eric, maybe you have some insight into this with the people you're talking to, but, you know, are the people we know from the book? Are they off working on Starship now and there's a new generation working on Falcon 9? Are they still going to want to operate these things in the way they are? Is that, is there longevity there as well on the personnel side? I mean, I think that you could always find people to run the Falcon 9 program. And a lot of the people running a Falcon 9 program and people like John Edwards have been at SpaceX for a long time, right?

So there's a mixture of new and old. So I don't know that that comes into it. I think ultimately what will drive the end of the Falcon 9 will be when you no longer need to launch crew on crew dragon. Because launch is a fungible commodity for lots of things, but not humans. That's a good way to look at it. They're going to want to, you know, the safest option to get crew into space.

And certainly for NASA, it's going to be a long time before they put NASA astronauts on. That was one of the things about the landing failure this week, right? Or last month, depending on coming out, right? The B-1062 landing failure, you know, when I first saw that, I was like, oh, man, you know, crews are going to have to land that way, right, inside Starship. So if you can still have a failure for 266 successful landings in a row, how do you account for that with the starship program? That's a little scary.

Yeah, yeah. Same way you get back when you launch an any spaceship, Eric, you just fly back on Dragon. That's what you do. Well, that's why it's flying into the 2040s. It's a purely crew return in the 2040s, but they'll still be funny. It's the downmass special, the Dragon's here. Oh, geez. Okay.

All right. What didn't make the book? What did you cut? In retrospect, I would have liked to have had more on Starlink because it's clear that Starlink is such an essential part of SpaceX's business. Not just financially. It's a huge part financially, but just in terms of, you know, if you want to demonstrate that you're making the world a better place as part of your Space Flight program, it's sort of, hard to argue with the success of Starlink. It is changing the lives with millions of people around the world in a meaningful, very meaningful way. For example, my dad, you know, he's in the

70s. He lives in rural Alabama and has had like, you know, one one megabit internet. It's like very, very slow internet. And I said this summer we're having to talk to us, dad, why don't you just get Starlink installed. And so he did. And it's like 200 to 300 megabits a second now. It's like it's a factor of 100 to 200 times faster than what he was, he had before. And that's to say nothing of like school children in Alaska or wherever who

haven't had this kind of connectivity before. It really is an important product. I would like to have written a little bit more about that. But kind of like if I do ever write about Starship and that, And such a book would be pretty far down the road, certainly now within the next five years, I don't think. I think Starlink and Starship kind of go pat-in-hand, right? Because they were the two big bets the company made, Elon made in 2016.

And both have to succeed for the company to ultimately succeed. I think it's hard. I think you could tell both of those stories together in the next book. That's an interesting way to think about it. There's even a nice way that they're intertwined where they both started off with like a technical dead end, right? They both hit a point where there was a major, and we never heard the story about the carbon fiber days of, that's like the Jake and I always talk about if we ever got an Elon interview, number one, we don't think he'd be a vibe for the show, but we'll find out about that. But like the one question I have is hearing about the day where they canceled the carbon fiber starship and, you know, what was there this faction internally that was like carbon fiber's a mess? We're not going to do it.

It's got to be stainless steel and they finally won out. But Starlink had that as well with the Tintin A and B satellites and then what's the name got fired? Yeah. John Glenn flew up there and cleaned house. Yeah. Right. So they had a very similar kind of start to them, both in the Seattle area. Right?

Is all that carbon fiber stuff that was up in Anna Cortez or whatever? Or what's it called? Is that what's called? Yeah, that sounds right. That's your neck of the woods shake. So. I can't wait for that chapter. I didn't, yeah.

I didn't want to go too deep into Starship, really. I kind of viewed this book as setting this. Like, if people were looking at the Starship launch and wondering, how's the private company doing what NASA did in the 1960s, this sort of book explains sort of how they got to that point. But, I mean, there is some Starship stuff, but not the, it's more of like why they went with methane as a fuel, as opposed to the momentous decision to go to stainless steel.

around 2018. I think there's some really relevant bits about Starship in here of like this sort of stood out to me as another way that it kind of shows how this company is staying the same, right? Is when Elon was like, you know, directing effort, right? And Brian Stein called him out on not paying enough attention to Crew Dragon because he was focused on the Starship. And like, you know, it was like that.

Elon said everyone to Dragon right now. And like, you know, the walls fell down and that team was able to move forward. Like, and then, again, that's kind of a mood back by now, right? Like, you know, now the focus is not on Dragon anymore as a company. You know, the company priority is all all in on Starship right now. And I think that was kind of an interesting anecdote to sort of illustrate how that company operates, right? I think that, yeah, that's one of the things that's kind of unique about SpaceX is that the middle managers, the layer of management's relatively thin, and they are literally, you know, they're not building

their own fiefdoms like you would find in like the government or like at a big conglomerate. Like when the CEO snaps his fingers, you know, you either move along with that direction or you move along, period, right? It's, it's, I kind of explain that a little bit through Buellan Altan who left SpaceX to go to work Airbus, right, in Europe, which is a pretty big difference. And he said he made it about six months. And like the leadership team couldn't affect any change because the middle managers had too much power. I think that's a similar kind of thing that you see, you know, kind of in the federal government. And especially at NASA, like the center directors and the program managers and the people below them,

like have a lot of power and can really gum up the works of people who come in and try to make changes to programs or things like that. I think it's one of the reasons, one of the several reasons why NASA is kind of hamstrung and moves slower than a lot of people were like. Whereas it's SpaceX, like, when Elon changes his mind in the middle of the night on something, like, that's it, you know. But there is no, like, committee meeting to finalize it. It's like, and he did that, he did that right after Jim Bridenstein, you know, who tweeted his time to deliver when we kind of laughed at it. But like, that was actually surprisingly effective. Yeah. And then after.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but it's true. And then like after demo two, uh, you know, we did it. We got America back in the space and that's great. But now we're all going to work on Starship tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That really, I did not know that part. Like I remember the tweet happening and I remember us laughing at it like, come on. Like it's SpaceX. They can do two things at once. But then, but then you know, you have this email and then you, you interviewed people on the dragon team who

told you, like, yeah, it got way easier once Elon said, everyone focused on Dragon. Like, we were moving slow and then we could move fast. So, like, that kind of shocked me that that ended up being, you know, the story of that tweet from Jim Brynstein was actually like pretty bang on. Like, that's exactly what had to have happened. You know, he should have tweeted about Boeing. We're coming up on a fifth year anniversary of that tweet and we still have to hear from Jim about whether it's time for Boeing to deliver. Mike Pence tried that, I think. he did you're right and nothing happened yeah yeah bill nelson tried uh bech betchel beck tell whatever was

their name tell yeah tried that with them he got becktold um the nelson they got the show title right now yeah the nelson stand on this show we're still going to have that fight with you but we're about we're about three or four months off from that yeah i'm looking forward to that yeah they Day after inauguration when we have you on. A Christmas party kind of thing. I'll definitely have to bring some beer for that one. Yeah, yeah.

Actually, if you want to book it right now, Eric, that Thursday after Election Day, we've been trying to figure out who to have on. I think you're the perfect guest. So pencil us in for that. That's like a plan, man. Speaking of which, we should talk more, it was actually the prologue and epilogue were the Elon of it all. And actually, you wrote that bit, longer in advance.

that we're recording this show from when people are going to see it. And I thought that was interesting if you want to, I don't know if Jake knows the timeline here. Yeah, like, you know, you sort of have to turn in like the first draft, but not really first draft, like a good draft about 12 months before publication. And then you can make changes over the next few months. But like about eight or nine months before publication, your text is pretty well locked in. You can make grammatical changes in smaller fixes. So, you know, I was, I had to write the prolog and epilogue.

And I always wanted to, I wanted to make the book about the employees. And Elon is certainly in the story, but, you know, he's not the main character. Like, the book is about the people at SpaceX who made it happen. But I did want to, I did want to, you know, let readers know that I was clearly thinking about Elon's behavior, good and bad. and that went into writing the book. And so I really addressed that, especially in the epilogue. But it was challenging because I had to write a lot of this stuff, you know, almost a year before the book comes out. But I basically just said, look, you know, I'm a true believer in space settlement.

Elon and SpaceX clearly have the best plan for this we're going to see in my lifetime. I believe strongly in it. But, you know, it's troubling some of the. the things that he's done. And especially politically, you know, he's certainly entitled to be a Republican, a Democrat, a libertarian, or whatever. Everyone is. But he's really alienating people who don't agree politically with where he's at. And some of the conspiracy theories that he's espousing on Twitter or X. So I do think that really is, if you look into the future of SpaceX and a time at which Gwen Chattelwell retires, hopefully not soon, but she's in her 60s,

and it's been taught for a while now that she's been kind of looking to do something else. And so what happens, you know, if Elon upsets 55, 50% of the political class in this country and, you know, Gwen Chowahua has always been there to smooth things over with NASA and the Department of Defense, leaves, you know, that you start to worry kind of about the future of SpaceX to some extent at that point. Yeah. Well, you don't even need to look like into the future because, I mean, just this week. So I finished your book three days ago and two days ago we got this news about Brazil, right? Where Brazil, you know, them, the judicial system there, this particular judge, whoever, is upset over, you know, over what's that's something Elon's done with X. You know, there's a, there's a fight

between them and Elon over Twitter X, and now that's spilling over onto the SpaceX side, you know, where they're freezing financial transactions from Starlink, which is vindictive and maybe not legal, I don't know, but the point is, is that it's actually happening, right? And that's not a small thing because they've got, I think what is the numbers? They got a quarter million Starlink subscribers in Brazil, which is like 8, 9% of all Starlink customers. Like that's a significant thing for that organization to deal with financially, right? And so that is because of some of the stuff that's happening.

And so we are now entering the era where SpaceX has to deal with that, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's very difficult to predict where this all, you know, ends up. But clearly, you know, clearly Elon has been pretty soft on his outlook toward China, right? Because it is Tesla business interest there, right? And, you know, geopolitically, he's done what he's done in Ukraine with access good and bad to Starlink for Ukrainian troops. And, you know, he's played in – he's been involved in the Gaza, you know, Israel conflict. And all of this is going to spill over into SpaceX eventually because as Elon becomes more political,

this future of SpaceX and its involvement with government contracts becomes more political. And it's always something that's kind of been a concern, right? Because if you really like commercial space, which I do, you look and you see like, for a certain political group like liberals in this country, they're uncomfortable with like the richest people in the world having significant influence on spaceflight in this country. Like, why isn't NASA doing this? Why is Jeff Bezos?

Why is Elon Musk doing it? But it's just gotten worse, right? It's basic, you know, it's one thing to view space is like the play area, the space tourism, billionaire is going to space and blah, blah, blah. It's another thing to sort of say that Elon is using his power as CEO of SpaceX to affect, you know, international affairs. I think that's troubling to a lot of people in the government. Yeah.

And as you say, Jake, in governments abroad too, right? Like, you know, Elon is involved with Brazil. He's been courting India, Miranda Modi, to try to get Starlink into India, Indonesia. Similarly, I mean, so it's like it's just kind of, and then Tesla is another layer as well. It's very, it's very complicated. And things could go sideways from SpaceX, you know, in the near term, maybe in the long term, potentially more likely. Yeah.

Yeah, this Brazil news actually like just a little bit worries me because I'm a Starlink customer in a Latin American country, right? And I've got, you know, Mexico's got an incoming president who is a left-wing socialist. She's Jewish. She's a woman. Like that is not a character that does well on Twitter, you know? Like that is not the kind of person that does well on Twitter. And it's like, it's just not hard for me to imagine a series of events where the exact same thing

happens here, right? And it's very interesting to see that happen. Eric, you said you had some, like, some segment that we thought would age like milk that you wanted to roll out on the show. So we're going to give you a shot to stick the landing on this one, three weeks out or two weeks out from when people are going to hear this. It was just a, it was a Starliner question. And I'd love to get you all thoughts on this, because I don't think there's, I don't know the answer. But, you know, think back to 2017, I think it was. 2018 when NASA named the first crew for the crew flight test, right? It was Nicole Mann, Eric Boe from NASA, and Chris Ferguson from Boeing. So it's three people. So only two people

really nominally can come back in Crew Dragon, right? But let's say that Chris Ferguson did fly with two astronauts. Boeing says their spacecraft is safe. He is a Boeing astronaut. So do you think he would be coming back in Starliner and the two NASA astronauts would be staying behind on the International Space Station? Wow. That's what I wanted to ask you. Whoa. What were you doing last night when you thought about this? Damn, that's a scenario.

That is a scenario. Yeah, 100% he would be riding in that thing. I mean, all right, if you're going on the call that we were on the, the other day when they told us that the astronauts have no say or agency over it and they would follow their orders, I think he would have corporate orders to get on that goddamn spaceship and get home. I think that's probably what would happen. I don't know that for sure, but it would have been an interesting wrinkle in an already

fascinating story. I don't like that. I don't like thinking about that. I think you're right. I think that's, I mean, it would have had to have happened that way because, like, we can't throw another person into the dragon like there's just not going to be that much room i guess you could like in the in the trunk you know like another emergency you know it's like not in the unchargerized trunk you mean whatever the in the on the cargo palette what do they call it the bottom of

the spacecraft here in the trunk on the truck the cargo about the other two sitting there i don't know this whole thing about riding on the on the cargo is interesting to me as well yeah but it's it's dark yeah it's this is going to be really dark though because at i at this point when this episode air is theoretically Starliner will have come home and we'll know the outcome of that. Maybe the conversation will be, we'll be in different context. We'll see. I don't, I'm not, I just, I just wondered how, you know, Bowen would handle that. Well, just to delve into that a little bit more, do we, do you think it would have gotten to this point if Chris Ferguson was on board? With, like, that's the other angle of this, right? Would, would Boeing have flown not, at this point, we know,

not having found the root cause of thrust issues from the last time, having all these helium leaks, would there have been any extra? I don't know. I don't think that whole thing is probably not, right? I think it would have flown, but I think we would have seen maybe, like we saw that pretty passive aggressive release from Boeing about how safe the spacecraft was and how much testing they'd done. Like we might not have seen that if there was a Boeing employee on board.

That's maybe something I would predict it, would have changed in that timeline. you know yeah did he just bail because it was going to take so long to get the flight like i forget the ferguson storyline he at the point at the straw liners mission was slipping and he his daughter was getting married the next year and you know she wanted to walk her down on the aisle and he couldn't be sure that the schedules wouldn't conflict and so that was one of the reasons why why he stepped away and decided not to fly i haven't i don't have all of the reasons It was also just weird, I think, is another reason.

That was just weird, some weird shit. Well, you know, there is some background on this in that book you're holding in your hand. I was going to say, this is one we can tease for a good reason to watch this book, or read this book, the story of Chris Ferguson and Starliner and Dragon and stuff. That was, that was new information for me that I really enjoyed. Doug kind of put it all out there. Yeah, he sure did. It's fun having this, the character, the cast of characters involved coming full circle in this book is really fun with like, we mentioned Girst and leaders being at SpaceX now.

I think even the number of names that are involved with the very first Dragon to ISS mission that are currently on station is kind of shocking. It's like three of, I think three of the astronauts that were there for Dragon's first mission of the ISS are either at or heading to the ISS within the next few weeks. which is kind of amazing. Phil McAllister makes an appearance in the book. Has now, I don't know if any of us have talked to him since he's been reassigned a senior advisor. That's curious. Anyone know what's going on there?

He got the Girst promotion there, I think is what happened. I've talked to him, yeah, a little bit. Okay. You want to fill us in on how Phil's doing? We can visit that a future date if you want. He's more available for this show, which is good. Yeah, yeah, we'll have to schedule him. Yeah.

Yeah. It's fun, too. That portion of the book is fun to read and match up with Lori Garver's account from the other side of thing. Not the other side necessarily, but like, you know, these two in tandem really fill out that whole era in a pleasing way. Yeah, and, you know, like Holly Rodings went on to be chief flight director and then now is deputy director of the Gateway Program and John Colores is heading up all of the origin's lunar efforts, including. you know, the cargo and crew versions of the lunar lander. And so, like, some of these people, you know, are going to go on to play important parts in the Artemis program.

However, however, it, you know, works out. Jake didn't bring up his big criticism of the book, though, that he told me the other day, that there's not enough Dragon XL in the book. So that's his main issue with the thing. The theory just gets confirmation after confirmation. after confirmation that this program is not real. Didn't make one appearance in the Eric Berger book.

That was one of the hard things, right? Just because there were so many things I could have written about that I didn't have the time or, you know, like programs like Dragon XL. I mentioned briefly mentioned Red Dragon, you know, that plan. But there were, you know, I don't really mention the second Grasshopper. test program. Like I said, it was just so much going on. The book is like about 50% longer than lift off. But, you know, it's...

Yeah, yeah. You don't really want to write a 600-page book. It's not like... This isn't like a reference man. This is trying to, you know, keep people's attention. I mean, I think most of the listeners would disagree with that. They would be happy for you to write a 600-page. You can write a 600-page addendum with all the stuff you cut out and they'll buy that too.

But... Yeah, you do have to have to make sacrifices. Yeah. Where should people buy it? You have preferences? Yeah, yeah. You got to do the plug now. Oh, you can buy it anywhere.

Anywhere you buy books. If you go to Blue Willow Bookshop, you can find out, there's a Houston bookstore, local bookstore, friends of mine in Houston, but you can go online and if you pre-order the book through them, I'll sign it and personalize it for you. If you fill out that form. you have to do that by September 20th. I have listened to a preview version of the audiobook,

which will be on Audible, and it's fantastic. It's the same guy, Rob Shapiro, who narrated Liftoff. So I'm excited about that. And there you go. Perfect. So, yeah, I mean, you buy anywhere anywhere you like, and it's coming out soon. Yeah, I'll do my typical plug when we have people come on that write books

that we are posting this before the book comes out because pre-orders are still like magic sauce to authors. If you pre-order the book, all of your orders get credited to launch day, so it drives Eric way up the charts of any store. So if you're going to read this, which you

should, pre-order it, so it can go way up the, yeah, juice it. Juice the algorithm. Yeah. It's also just directly down the center line of people that are listening to this show. Like this is just completely written for us.

Someone was to see the show not enjoying or getting something out of range. Yeah. Like even like I, you know, there were a half dozen people at SpaceX who were pretty much at the company for the whole time of the book.

And so I let them, I gave it to them sort of an earlier draft for fact checking purposes. And, you know, Sam Williams said, oh my goodness, I had no idea this was happening or this was happening. I just learned so much about the company

I was working. at. Yeah. Yeah. Are you, you mentioned it's going to be a couple years before you get around to the Starship one because we need to let the flow of time happen. Are there other projects that, like, do you like writing books so much that you are finding other projects or thinking of other projects? Or are you like, I'm going to take some years off from that? I've got something I'm sort of, it's a slow burn project that I don't really want to talk about yet that I'm working on that is sort of SpaceX adjacent. And I've got a couple other ideas, but honestly, after my experience with Lyftop where I realized I made a mistake by sort of getting right back into the

process, I'm going to take some time off. And just focus on my other two jobs for a little while. It's a smart, smart plan. That's very, yeah, good call. Hang on. I thought I had one more thing, but I don't know if I have any more things, Jake. No, I think we nailed it. To you have anything.

I mean, it's, I like it better than Lyft off, to be honest. because it's just my favorite SpaceX. I was wondering. Yeah. I was really wondering how people would, what that, what that opinion would be. There's a,

liftoff is a pleasing read because of the story. This is a chaotically pleasing read because there's so much going on. And I love the, I love the, how many times in the book here, like, this person,

who you may remember that was working on this other complete thing that ended up working on this thing and being like, completely fundamental to the success of it. Yeah, the sea world guy. That guy pops up and like, you know.

It's just like moments where, I don't know. I don't know if it's because, like I said, because I, you know, I read Lyftoff as somebody who was aware of Falcon 1 at the time, but I wasn't as deeply into things as I was in this era. So I'm wondering if it's like when you watch a series the second time and you notice all the little, all the little bits, right? Like I said, the trimming the engine bell was like, it just in me as a story. that was fundamental to me.

So reading all the other aspects to it, filled out things that I didn't know at the time. I don't know. I appreciated it at a different level because of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I buy that for sure. It's the story behind the story.

Also, Liftall sucked. No, I'm just kidding. That's why I liked this better. Lift all's great. It's still behind me over here. I liked how the, let's start a new topic here, but well, the beginning of reentry, it transitions from liftoff,

like the same kinds of stories at the beginning of reentry, which are like very scrappy, like, yeah, we had to like, you know, we had this like trashy, like first model that like didn't really work very well, but we had to like, we had to make it work because it was the only thing we had and Elon had made all these promises. So we just like wrapped it and duct tape and hit it with a hammer and off it goes and launches some, you know, some dragon space scrapers. And like that was very like liftoffy.

And you got to kind of watch the, as the book went, went through it like really transformed into kind of the SpaceX that we know today. That part I thought was very, very interesting. And that's what stands out to me is, you know, what makes it good. I think related to that, though, there was, because Falcon 1 was the thing at the time, like, there weren't as many undiscovered pieces as, as there are with this story. Like, I don't think I've ever read anything about the faring situation when they were trying to get the fairing to cost $1 million.

And they were like, it's just straight up not possible, so we have to reuse them. I don't know if I've ever encountered any detail on that. Yeah. And that was little nuggets like that that are just beautiful because their faring is $1 million more expensive than Rueg was going to be. But I think you have a story to get to right now, Eric. I think you have an interview to do. Jake, I don't know if you know.

I'm going to ask you about Rueg fairings. Yeah, it seems like that's coming up in a second. I think this is coming out like right before a pre-order, so go pre-order, get the signed copy because that would be fun. Jake, we don't know what's going on. next week because we don't know what next week is yet. Yeah, I have a hunch what's going on, but it's too far out to be confident. So it's a surprise anomalies.

Stay tuned. I may or may not be there. Anthony might be there. Who knows? Starliner might still be on the station. It might be safe when they don't. It may be a ball of fire somewhere. We just don't know what the future looks like.

Eric, thanks again for hanging out. And we look forward to our election day arguments. Well, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Can't wait until after election day as well. We'll see what happens. You're not even in a swing state, so. No.

So we think. It might be. See later. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.