How Elon Musks SpaceX began a new Space Race

In 2005, three years before its first successful orbital launch, a fledgling space startup called SpaceX petitioned the US government to let it use the storied Cape Canaveral launchpad once home to the Apollo space program.Old-school space companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin bristled at the idea and lobbied aggressively to block the deal.Executives at those firms had a dim view of the company and resented founder Elon Musk.

“He was not deferential, but brash,” writes Eric Berger in his new book “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age,” summing up the feeling at the time, “Do you really want to let this guy onto the holy grounds of America’s largest and oldest spaceport?”Their efforts failed, and SpaceX got access to the Cape.Less than two decades later, Berger writes, “Elon Musk and his rocket company now stand alone, atop the hierarchy of spaceflight.” The company’s workhorse Falcon launch vehicle, the first commercial reusable rocket and the inspiration for the book’s title, now delivers more orbital payloads than the governments of Russia, China and private-sector competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined. NASA relies almost exclusively on SpaceX to ferry astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).The company’s Starlink satellites can deliver internet to almost anyone anywhere in the world, including to the battlefields of Ukraine.  Its Starship rocket is the largest to ever fly and may someday ferry astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.SpaceX recently completed the world’s first ever commercial spacewalk, and in a bit of poetic justice, when Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft ran into technical difficulties in August of this year on its own journey to the ISS, SpaceX got the call to bail them out and bring the astronauts safely home.SpaceX has steamrolled everyone.

David has become Goliath, says Berger.Over the decades, Berger writes, the ...