I just received Berger’s Reentry and am delighted to see our DQ binger immortalized in these annals of aerospace advancement.
August 2014. McGregor, TX. Final ice cream before the final flight of the F9R test vehicle. F9R was flying with three engines that day, a test run for the vertical landing of a Falcon 9 class booster.
Mastering rocket reentry and reuse are essential for colonizing Mars… and lowering launch costs on Earth. Only SpaceX was pursuing this path, and incumbents dismissed it as folly. But the SpaceX engineers were determined.
As we drove out to the launch site, I joked about the big bada boom to come. Not sure why. We watched it climb from a tent out in the fields. We watched it arch over in a visceral swan song… the aching arc of a doom loop… a failure to launch made manifest.
💥 video clip here.
Elon was deep in thought. We tried to cheer him up with a quote about learning from life’s failures. Elon replied: “Given the options, I prefer to learn from success.”
My last shot, below, is ElonMusk later that day out on the battlefield…. with the fires still burning.
Oh, Scott Manley comments on the DQ ice cream episode here.
Berger’s book lands Sept 24 (with a bunch of my photos originally posted here on flickr).
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