New book dissects hardcore work at SpaceX, its success, and what's next

Eric Berger's 'Reentry' chronicles Musk's odyssey and wonders how his obsession with his social media platform X threatens SpaceX and his dreams of settling on Mars.

Like a colleague who inserts themselves into every conversation, Elon Musk just has to put his two cents on every day’s debate, alienating more and more people.

Eric Berger, a space journalism pioneer, is worried about how Musk's X-inspired shift towards far-right conservatism might affect SpaceX. After all, it was Musk who brought us the second space age and closer to multi-planetary life.

This September, Berger published Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age – a comprehensive book on Musk's journey to space based on over 100 interviews with industry insiders. It’s also a sequel to another book on SpaceX – Liftoff – which details the birth of SpaceX and its ambitious missions.

Now, depending on a reader's worldview, this book can read either as a job ad or a terrible testimony of the high cost that people had to pay to make the once reserved-for-sci-fi space travel come true.

At times, an illustration of slaves building pyramids in Egypt for Pharaohs flashed in my imagination. The book talks about devoted people working 24/7, sleeping in the office, fearing being slacked, and dealing with Musk, who'd be "pissed" at them quite often.

At the same time, SpaceX has changed the course of history, being, as Berger described, a disruptive force. For many, this has been the dream job, even if it would be temporary and require sacrificing their social lives.

"If you are a director at Space X, and certainly if you are a VP, you need to mentally accept that you are already dead," said Abdi Tripathi, who worked as mission director at SpaceX.

But this book is not about how SpaceX employees staged some corporate coup d'état against their evil boss. If anything, many of them actually admired Musk, if not the difficult job they were doing and the impossible they were making a reality.

"It was literally fiction until we did it. So you were watching science fiction." That's how Tom Mueller, an engineer behind the Merlin engines that roar on the Falcon 9, described the liftoff of Falcon Heavy, made of 27 Merlin engines.

Essentially, this book is a good entry point to understanding space innovation and the future that might lie ahead. It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that SpaceX has ushered in the second space age, making reusable rockets and innovating to cut costs and make space travel affordable.

Yes, it's not without personal sacrifices, bold business decisions, failures, and Musk's flamboyance that space is, as Berger describes, fun and full of promise again.

The most significant promise of them all is a multi-planetary life.

"We're confined to one planet until an extinction event," Musk once said.

Given how his company innovates and cuts costs simultaneously, Musk will be the one to bring us to Mars in our lifetimes.

"To remain on a glidepath for success, therefore, Musk faces huge challenges in the years ahead. He must remain an agent of change and description while not becoming an agent of chaos and distraction," Berger concludes.

It's rather hard to pick up a book about Musk. He is constantly in the spotlight, mostly not for things one could be proud of, so we all have preconceived notions about his persona.

You might even want to wait for the election fever to pass to pick this book up. It's quite balanced, I'd say – written by an experienced journalist and based on over 100 interviews, after all – and both the Musk fan girl and Musk loather in me had plenty of food for thought.

And I believe you will, too.