Liftoff

‘Berger vividly weaves a tale of technology development at its most heroic …The result is a rousing—and hopeful—saga of hard-won innovation succeeding on an epic scale.’PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW

‘Berger writes with the kind of hard-won insider authority that only comes through covering the nuts and bolts of the commercial space industry for the past twenty years’ FORBES

‘Eric Berger 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 at the heart of the story.’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Eric Berger’s book uses unparalleled access to Musk and all of SpaceX’s early staff to place the reader right among them. It is written with verve and polish to keep you turning the pages.’ SPECTATOR

‘The compelling story of how Elon Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Marks helped SpaceX succeed against the odds makes great reading’ NEW SCIENTIST

“This is a book that will hold your rapt attention from start to finish.” — CHARLES BOLDEN, Former NASA Administrator and Four-Time Astronaut

‘The elegant brilliance of the engineering that allows today’s space rockets to land themselves back on earth – or at sea – right way up, and on target to the inch, is all the doing of the teams assembled by Elon Musk – and the story of how he did it, and how for sure he will get us to Mars whether we like it or not, is told in appropriately stellar fashion by Eric Berger in a book that held me captive, in earth orbit, from prologue to epilogue, countdown to splashdown.’—SIMON WINCHESTER

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from new space to NASA policy. Eric has an astronomy degree from the University of Texas and a master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri. He previously worked at the Houston Chronicle for 17 years, where the paper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for his coverage of Hurricane Ike. A certified meteorologist, Eric founded Space City Weather and lives in Houston.