The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
FORTHCOMING TITLES
LIFTOFF The Fall, Fall, Fall, and Rise of SpaceX ERIC BERGER
Photo credit: Lee Hutchinson
The little-known story of SpaceX’s first four rocket launches, and the engineers, mathematicians and visionaries that gave everything they had to usher in a new age of space exploration. From 2006 to 2008, on a remote atoll in the Pacific, the private US rocketry company SpaceX struggled to get its homemade single-engine rocket, the Falcon 1, into orbit. The first rocket exploded about 30 seconds into its flight. The second reached space… for all of eight minutes, when its engine sputtered out. The third was looking more promising until its just-separated first stage actually caught up with the second stage, triggering an explosive collision at the edge of space. With one rocket remaining, SpaceX’s young team knew its fate was tied to the fourth attempt. ‘If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist’, the company’s founder Elon Musk himself acknowledged in a statement in 2018. (Spoiler alert: the fourth rocket operated like a dream, of course, and SpaceX has spent the past 10 years building a leading position in humanity’s space exploration efforts.) Yet owing to the reclusive nature of SpaceX, the full story of these early years, far from the gleaming headquarters and high-profile successes of today, is largely unknown. In LIFTOFF, Eric Berger draws on his unprecedented access to SpaceX to reveal the full narrative of this foundational generation, profiling the pioneering team that grew SpaceX from nothing, survived three straight failures and lifted SpaceX from mockery to ascendancy in space exploration. LIFTOFF is the story, not of Elon Musk, but of the people who gave up safe jobs elsewhere to build the future of space exploration. ERIC BERGER has been a reporter and editor in Houston for more than two decades. With a background in astronomy and a master’s degree in journalism, he has written mostly about science and, more recently, spaceflight. After a long career at the Houston Chronicle, he joined Ars Technica in 2015 as the website’s senior space editor, covering SpaceX, NASA and everything beyond. For his reporting since then, he won the 2015 NewSpace Journalism award from the Space Frontier Foundation and a 2015 Space Pioneer award from the National Space Society. A certified meteorologist, he also maintains a widely read weather forecasting website for the greater Houston area, Space City Weather. He was a Pulitzer prize finalist for his coverage of Hurricane Ike at the Houston Chronicle in 2008. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Wiliam Morrow (Harper Collins US) Publication: Spring 2021 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 75,000–85,000 words words All rights available excluding World English Language (Morrow), China (Guomai Culture and Media), Korea (3rd Moon Book), Russia (Eksmo)
9
