Eric Berger’s Liftoff focuses on the early days of SpaceX, a smart choice, since it offers a vivid window into Elon Musk’s brinksmanship ... Berger chooses to do his reporting through the lens of SpaceX insiders, whose lives are sketched in capsule biographies ... Berger does a good job of sketching the cozy world of rocket science ... Berger does a great job here of not only profiling SpaceX, but also capturing the total brinksmanship of its swashbuckling founder.
Eric Berger, senior space editor at the Ars Technica website, does a fine job of telling the white-knuckle story of how SpaceX was created in 2002 and came close to collapse several times. Although Liftoff recounts the experiences of many of SpaceX’s brilliant engineers, the near-maniacal Musk is almost always at the heart of the story.
A visionary and his scrappy engineers weather rocket explosions and financial crises to revolutionize the space-launch industry in this exuberant debut from Ars Technica editor Berger ... Berger’s colorful portrait shows Musk as a 'preternatural force' of 'burning intensity,' driving employees toward his goal of colonizing Mars ... Berger vividly weaves a tale of technology development at its most heroic, done on near-impossible deadlines in the broiling environs of southern Texas or the Marshall Islands. The result is a rousing—and hopeful—saga of hard-won innovation succeeding on an epic scale.
