Author Topic: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)  (Read 38464 times)

Offline Oersted

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #60 on: 09/06/2024 04:08 pm »
Everybody is probably biased to a smaller or larger extent. The important thing is whether you are conscious of your bias and whether you are transparent about it.

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #61 on: 09/13/2024 09:05 pm »


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Episode 167 - Bechtold (with Eric Berger)

Off-Nominal
19 Sept 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.

Find us at https://offnom.com
Find Anthony Colangelo at https://mainenginecutoff.com/
Find Jake Robins at   / jakeonorbit 

Find Eric Berger at    / sciguyspace 

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #62 on: 09/17/2024 10:28 am »


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#103 Eric Berger on his new book 'Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and Reusable Rockets

The Astro Ben Podcast
12 Aug 2024

(Episode first aired 8th August 2024 - audio only)

In this episode, Ben sits down (again) with Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of the upcoming book 'Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age'

They discuss the Polaris Dawn mission, the state of the space industry, NASA's Crew-9 launch delay, and the latest breaking stories in the space industry. Eric shares his thoughts on Elon Musk's current focus and vision at SpaceX, as well as the critical role billionaires are playing in space exploration.

Subjects Discussed:

Interviewing NASA administrator
Starliner date pushed back
Polaris Dawn
Why is it significant?
Billionaires in Space
NEW BOOK: “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age”
The Technical Challenges of SpaceX 2008-2020
Importance of Gwynne Shotwell
Significance of Falcon Heavy
The emotion of launches
Artemis
China
New Glenn
First mover advantage for reusable rocket companies?
Stoke Space
SpaceX
Vision of SpaceX
Elon and politics
Elon’s Musks Plans too ambitious?

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #63 on: 09/18/2024 08:10 pm »
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If you enjoyed Liftoff, Reentry carries the story of SpaceX forward over the next decade. What surprised me, as I reported this book, is how scrappy the company remained through much of the 2010s. The money was always tight. The pressure was always intense.

https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1836114642600436177

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I worked really hard to write a compelling and engaging story, to put readers in the middle of the action. There are so many wild stories here. This one, set in late 2009 while driving the first Falcon 9 from Texas to Florida, is one of my favorites:

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #64 on: 09/23/2024 03:41 pm »
https://twitter.com/alextapscott/status/1838234281413333222

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I just read a terrific new book called "Reentry" by @SciGuySpace about SpaceX's ascent from fledgling startup to the top of the space industry.

I also wrote a review about it in the @nypost

Link below:

https://nypost.com/2024/09/21/tech/elon-musks-spacex-began-a-new-space-race/

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #65 on: 09/24/2024 06:37 pm »
https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1838648604086370655

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An excerpt from Reentry: Inside the room where NASA officials made the fateful decision on commercial crew a decade ago.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2024/09/in-the-room-where-it-happened-when-nasa-nearly-gave-boeing-all-the-crew-funding/

Offline Oersted

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #66 on: 09/24/2024 08:48 pm »
Finally available, just bought the Kindle version. Will post my thoughts here soon.
« Last Edit: 09/24/2024 08:49 pm by Oersted »

Offline dondar

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #67 on: 09/25/2024 01:57 pm »
[Blackstar] is making the much more tendentious claim without evidence given that Berger suppreses the bad stories he knows about SpaceX to maintain journalistic access with the company.

I don't think this is entirely without evidence.  As one relevant example, Berger himself has said that he is not going to say anything about the Falcon 9 full-reuse program.  Now, whether or not you would call SpaceX's decision to cancel this project a "failure" (personally I wouldn't), it is a failure for the F9 reuse project - which is what the book is about.  Instead of recognising it's relevance, Berger has called it a "loose end."

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I hope you wrote something about the designs for full reuse on Falcon…

https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1757619552190431707

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Alas, I must say I did not. There were about 10 million different loose ends I could have written about. As it is, the book is already quite long, more than 110,000 words.

Perhaps this is just a minor omission, but similarly minor-but-relevant omissions seem to appear often in Berger's work, and very frequently they favour SpaceX.

Regardless, I'm sure this will be a great read filled with many interesting details I did not know about Falcon and SpaceX.  Berger is good at writing!
full re-usability in the weight range of Falcon 9 is a pipe dream (re-usability brings massive penalty for useful payload and this penalty scales badly down, lesser total weight worse the relative penalty.
The "loose ends" are obvious numerous discussions pointing this in very numerous ways to each other and correspondingly  contradicting points which could look contradicting to the untrained eye. Engineers don't like to discuss openly about fringe cases.

Offline wbianco

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #68 on: 09/25/2024 03:05 pm »
So what?
I loved Dorothy Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, and learned a lot from it, but she makes absolutely no pretense of being objective.  It’s still a great, informative, and moving book.

So we are both agreeing that he is biased and not objective.

What an angry and kind of pointless distinction to make.  As though bias and objectivity are entirely separate things, black and white, and people go exclusively in buckets.  Just say you dislike his perspective on things and think he gets some things wrong.  This "agree he is biased" business is childish.

Blackstar is a serious player in the space policy world and is not easily dismissed.

FWIW, I read the book and liked it a lot.  Just like Berger's earlier book, it is emphatically built on insider accounts, which are obviously not going to be objective.  It's not the last word on the development of F9, Dragon, or anything else.  I don't see Berger making those claims anywhere. 

With that said, Blackstar has a point.  Having done a great deal of interviewing with people at NASA and SpaceX, working to keep your sources willing to talk with you is a real-world thing that all authors and researchers have to deal with.  There are places where I wanted Berger to ask of his interviewees, "wasn't that thing you did absolutely nuts/dangerous/counter-productive?"  You do get a good sense of where things either went off the rails or were in real danger of doing so.  It's not a sin to split the difference.




Offline StraumliBlight

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #69 on: 09/25/2024 03:57 pm »
From the reddit AMA:

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Q: What do you respond to comments that say you have pro SpaceX bias?

Eric Berger: I would say, hell yes I'm biased. I'm biased toward progress. I just missed the Apollo landings as a kid (born in 1973) and I would like to see humans get out there and explore and settle the Solar System, and beyond. Looking at the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, we didn't go very far or fast. I chalk that up to a couple of things, including a lack of geopolitical need for deep space exploration, and large contractors doing only what the government asked and seeking to maximize profits over progress. I've been a critic of the SLS rocket because it exemplifies the way of doing things that is so slow, and so expensive, that you never really get anywhere.

What excites me about commercial space is that you've got entrepreneurs and private capital seeking to do interesting things in space that could push humanity out there. A company like Astro Forge may well fail, but they're giving asteroid-mining-on-the-cheap a go. Intuitive Machines is landing on the Moon. Astrolab is trying to build autonomous lunar rovers. I'm biased toward these new and innovative approaches to spaceflight. And yes, I'm biased toward SpaceX, because they are the greatest exemplar of progress in spaceflight in the 21st century. As a thought exercise, imagine what the US spaceflight enterprise looks like today if the fourth flight of the Falcon 1 fails, and SpaceX goes under. It's kind of scary.

Offline thespacecow

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #70 on: 09/29/2024 02:36 am »
With that said, Blackstar has a point.  Having done a great deal of interviewing with people at NASA and SpaceX, working to keep your sources willing to talk with you is a real-world thing that all authors and researchers have to deal with.  There are places where I wanted Berger to ask of his interviewees, "wasn't that thing you did absolutely nuts/dangerous/counter-productive?"  You do get a good sense of where things either went off the rails or were in real danger of doing so.  It's not a sin to split the difference.

That's the whole point of this book, because we know for a FACT that it didn't go off the rails, in fact it achieved something unthinkably great, so clearly they did something right. The book is here to tell you how they did it so that you can learn from a real success story instead of listening to "experts" who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Reality trumps any pontification from armchair space policy "experts", this is especially true when such experts' predictions have routinely been proven wrong.

Offline wbianco

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #71 on: 09/29/2024 02:44 am »

*quote*
That's the whole point of this book, because we know for a FACT that it didn't go off the rails, in fact it achieved something unthinkably great, so clearly they did something right. The book is here to tell you how they did it so that you can learn from a real success story instead of listening to "experts" who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Reality trumps any pontification from armchair space policy "experts", this is especially true when such experts' predictions have routinely been proven wrong.
*quote*

I disagree. Yes, SpaceX has succeeded.  How much was skill and how much luck?  The experts are usually right, which is why we regard them as experts.  "All the experts will say that I am asking the impossible - but I tell you we can do it" -- that generally does not end well. 

Offline thespacecow

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #72 on: 09/29/2024 03:25 am »
I disagree. Yes, SpaceX has succeeded.  How much was skill and how much luck?  The experts are usually right, which is why we regard them as experts.  "All the experts will say that I am asking the impossible - but I tell you we can do it" -- that generally does not end well.

SpaceX succeeding is not a single event, it's thousands or maybe millions of events, most of which they have to get right in order to reach their dominance today. Just for a single launch, you have "a thousand ways for a rocket launch to go wrong and only one way for it to go right". So luck doesn't explain this at all.

"All the experts will say that I am asking the impossible - but I tell you we can do it": This literally describes how Elon runs SpaceX: "At SpaceX we specialize at converting the impossible to late".

And today's "experts" are not rated on whether their predictions are right at all, I have better batting average than your so called expert on this forum.

Offline Jarnis

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #73 on: 09/29/2024 09:07 am »
Great book. Just wish it was about 5x longer. :P

Offline Oersted

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #74 on: 09/29/2024 11:50 am »
Two-thirds through and I have read with great interest all the stories about crises and near-disasters. Really brings it home how it takes real human beings stressed witless and suffering immensely to accomplish great things.

Unfortunately I have to say that I miss a lot of technical info about the groundbreaking actual work that it took to make the wonder that is Falcon 9. The technical side is very reduced and very dumbed-down. Berger clearly aimed at a general audience, hoping for big sales, but I think he shouldn't think so little of the capacity for understanding (and being fascinated by) technical stuff by the general reader.

There is basically nothing about Blackmore's guidance work, nothing about the landing legs, not much about the intricacies of Merlin development. I really bought the book hoping for that. Instead there is a lot, really a lot, about people working long days and burning out. It gets a bit samey after a while. Clearly Berger had a lot of access to those SpaceX'ers. I guess the present-day staff is too busy building rockets.

Maybe Berger just understands his audience better, but I think we deserve much more info about what actually makes Falcon 9 great, and why it has broken old paradigms so effectively.

Offline StraumliBlight

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #75 on: 09/29/2024 01:48 pm »
Two-thirds through and I have read with great interest all the stories about crises and near-disasters. Really brings it home how it takes real human beings stressed witless and suffering immensely to accomplish great things.

Unfortunately I have to say that I miss a lot of technical info about the groundbreaking actual work that it took to make the wonder that is Falcon 9. The technical side is very reduced and very dumbed-down. Berger clearly aimed at a general audience, hoping for big sales, but I think he shouldn't think so little of the capacity for understanding (and being fascinated by) technical stuff by the general reader.

There is basically nothing about Blackmore's guidance work, nothing about the landing legs, not much about the intricacies of Merlin development. I really bought the book hoping for that. Instead there is a lot, really a lot, about people working long days and burning out. It gets a bit samey after a while. Clearly Berger had a lot of access to those SpaceX'ers. I guess the present-day staff is too busy building rockets.

Maybe Berger just understands his audience better, but I think we deserve much more info about what actually makes Falcon 9 great, and why it has broken old paradigms so effectively.

If the Off Nominal interview [54:20], Eric mentioned some of the topics he had to cut (e.g Dragon XL, Red Dragon, 2nd Grasshopper program, etc) so that it didn't become a 600 page book (Reentry is already longer than Liftoff at 384 pages vs 288 pages).

Offline Oersted

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #76 on: 09/29/2024 10:04 pm »
My beef is not about omissions. There are many quite similar stories about overworked staff who end up quitting. And when the author does venture into technical matters they are told in a very dumbed-down way.

The human interest stories are very valuable in explaining what a huge effort has been behind SpaceX' many triumphs. I wasn't quite aware of the pain level and the financial tightrope.

Just would have liked much more tech stuff in a story about a tremendous machine. As it is, the book is more the human story of the workers who made Falcon 9 possible.

Offline Comga

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #77 on: 09/29/2024 10:16 pm »
So what?
I loved Dorothy Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, and learned a lot from it, but she makes absolutely no pretense of being objective.  It’s still a great, informative, and moving book.

So we are both agreeing that he is biased and not objective.

Not really.
Perhaps my use of "objective" and yours are different.
My statement is about the subjects.  Yours seems to be about the facts.
Both authors are fans of their subjects, approving and enthusiastic.
That doesn't mean they get the facts wrong.
Using glowing terms, instead of neutral and "objective" adjectives? 
Sure
To me, that doesn't mean he is "biased" as currently used to dismiss the reporting of news that differs from ones perspective.
That it doesn't meet the standard you must maintain in the reports you write and have written is hardly surprising.
They are for different purposes.
We are not making consequential decisions based on Berger's books.
We are consumers of a good story about a successful engineering endeavor.
What kind of wastrels would dump a perfectly good booster in the ocean after just one use?

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #78 on: 09/30/2024 07:51 pm »
https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1840839012275126450

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Had an unforgettable night with some of the key people in Reentry this weekend. Thanks to @lrocket for hosting a terrific party.

Offline brahmanknight

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Re: Reentry - Eric Berger SpaceX F9 book (24 Sep 2024)
« Reply #79 on: 10/01/2024 01:51 pm »
To add what other have posted, I love these stories so far, but I really wanted more technical info, especially on the first stage reentry and reuse.  It is something that engineers have wanted to do for decades and SpaceX figured it out.   

 

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