Reentry
We learned in LiftOff, the first book about the early days of SpaceX that it takes an intense amount of hours and focus and finding the right people for the job who align with the mission, to just get off the ground. Falcon 1 was the culmination of those efforts that almost went nowhere. The risk of failure was looming large, but the slim chance of success made it all worth it.
In book 2, 'Reentry' David becomes Goliath, the rockets get bigger, the failure costlier, the competition with the incumbent(ULA) intensifies, and the plans for the future become crazier. The contracts had to be won, the cashflow had to be positive. There needed to be a way to finance a sustainable city on Mars. Starlink had to be born.
Reentry looks at the technical challenges and innovations necessary on the way to Starship, the ship that will take people to Mars. The ingredients are obvious, in hindsight: A players willing to sacrifice everything for the mission, a boss whose mentality seeps into the culture--constantly scraping bureaucratic soot that accretes by default, owning the risk of trying new(dangerous)things like densification or propulsive landing of Dragon, moving the goalposts the moment they're hit, going the extra mile to keep costs low, marshaling all the companies' resources to get any data from Debris that might be useful for future launches, and never getting complacent, even after making history.
How do we explain how United launch Alliance fell behind in launch cadence and was relegated to a footnote in history, despite all its might and resources? Is Blue Origin what we get when the mission and the people who believe in it are there, but the culture is that of making sure everything works perfectly? Is the only way to innovate like SpaceX is to have a unrelenting founder whose demands are impossible and whose standards keep escalating? Or can we find a way around that so that the culture of innovating in such a way doesn't fade with its founder and things slowly disintegrate into managerial layers of friction?