Flight Proven

About This Book

In 2008 a small California startup was one failed launch away from bankruptcy. Its rockets kept exploding; its founder had poured a PayPal fortune into a company most experts expected to fail. Then a fourth flight reached orbit, a rescue contract arrived from NASA, and everything changed. Within twenty years that company — SpaceX — would land rockets on their tails and fly them again, break America's dependence on Russia to reach the space station, build the largest satellite network in history, and launch more than half of all the mass humanity puts into orbit.

This is the sweeping, up-to-date story of how a single company rewrote the economics of spaceflight — and reopened a genuine race for the heavens. From the Falcon 1's desert failures to the first booster landing on a December night in 2015; from Crew Dragon carrying astronauts from American soil again to Starlink beaming internet to ten million customers and to a war in Ukraine; from the towering stainless-steel Starship and its fiery test campaign to the contests now unfolding — Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, a resurgent NASA Moon program, and a China racing to land on the Moon before 2030.

Clear, gripping, and honest about both the achievement and its costs — the monopoly it built, the skies it crowded, the founder whose conduct shadows it all, and the promises to Mars still unkept — this is the definitive account of the new space age, told through the company that started it, and carried right up to the largest public offering in history.