Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX

By Eric Berger

‘Liftoff reads like something out of the golden age of science fiction but this isn’t a novel by Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke. This is the true, astounding story of the men and women who spun those sci-fi dreams into reality. This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it’s a riveting page-turner, too!’

– Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Rocket Boys

The little-known story of SpaceX’s first four rocket launches, and the engineers, mathematicians and visionaries that gave everything they had to usher in a new age of space exploration.

From 2006 to 2008, on a remote atoll in the Pacific, the private US rocketry company SpaceX struggled to get its homemade single-engine rocket, the Falcon 1, into orbit. The first rocket exploded about 30 seconds into its flight. The second reached space… for all of eight minutes, when its engine sputtered out. The third was looking more promising until its just-separated first stage actually caught up with the second stage, triggering an explosive collision at the edge of space. With one rocket remaining, SpaceX’s young team knew its fate was tied to the fourth attempt. ‘If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist’, the company’s founder Elon Musk himself acknowledged in a statement in 2018. (Spoiler alert: the fourth rocket operated like a dream, of course, and SpaceX has spent the past 10 years building a leading position in humanity’s space exploration efforts.)

Yet owing to the reclusive nature of SpaceX, the full story of these early years, far from the gleaming headquarters and high-profile successes of today, is largely unknown. In Liftoff, Eric Berger draws on his unprecedented access to SpaceX to reveal the full narrative of this foundational generation, profiling the pioneering team that grew SpaceX from nothing, survived three straight failures and lifted SpaceX from mockery to ascendancy in space exploration. Liftoff is the story not only of Elon Musk, but of the people who gave up safe jobs elsewhere to build the future of space exploration.