Liftoff Quotes

“But most of all, he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“It did not matter that Kassouf was just twenty-one, or that he lacked a college degree. He could do the job.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Kevin Miller, took time to explain the Merlin’s inner workings to Dunn.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“But those achievements pale next to the audacity of trying to send humans to Mars, which remains far beyond the present-day capability of NASA or any other space agency around the world. Even with an annual budget approaching $25 billion a year, and some of the smartest scientists and engineers anywhere, the space agency that landed humans on the Moon remains several giant leaps away from sending a few astronauts to Mars.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Just FYI. It’s not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw their rockets away all the time. It’s fucking hard to make something like this. One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket. Nobody has succeeded. For a good reason. Our gravity is a bit heavy. On Mars this would be no problem. Moon, piece of cake. On Earth, fucking hard. Just barely possible. It’s stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system. It would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of humanity. That’s why it’s hard. Why does this hurt my brain? It’s because of that. Really, we’re just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“But in the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.” Too often in the modern aerospace world, he added, bureaucracy, rules, and a morbid fear of failure “poisoned” the workplace.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Not surprisingly, Musk offered Shotwell a promotion that fall. He had gone with a conventional hire for the company’s first president two years earlier, choosing the seasoned aerospace leader Jim Maser. That experiment had failed. Perhaps, Musk reasoned, the best person for the job already worked for him. So he asked Shotwell if she wanted to manage more than just business development and legal affairs. And in December of that year, she became president of SpaceX.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head,” he said. “Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Whereas I’m making the engineering decisions and spending decisions. So I know, already, that my brain trusts itself.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Here was her first real taste of Musk’s management style. Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Musk differed from his competitors in another, important way—failure was an option. At most other aerospace companies, no employee wanted to make a mistake, lest it reflect badly on an annual performance review. Musk, by contrast, urged his team to move fast, build things, and break things. At some government labs and large aerospace firms, an engineer may devote a career to creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware. The engineers designing the Falcon 1 rocket spent much of their time on the factory floor, testing ideas, rather than debating them. Talk less, do more.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX engineers and technicians did on the factory floor in El Segundo, and it allowed them to capture basic flaws with early prototypes, fix their designs, and build successively more “finished” iterations.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first three thousand employees. It required late nights and weekends, but he felt it important to get the right people for his company.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“When Musk decided that Spincraft could make good tanks for a fair price, that was it. No committees. No reports. Just, done.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“The last thing Musk ever wanted to hear from an employee was “But that’s how it’s always been done.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“Failure was an option at SpaceX, partly because the boss often asked the impossible of his team. In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd. When they protested that it was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, “What would it take?”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“We fight for mass especially with a reusable upper stage, which nobody has ever succeeded in,” he said. “Just FYI. It’s not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw their rockets away all the time. It’s fucking hard to make something like this. One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket. Nobody has succeeded. For a good reason. Our gravity is a bit heavy. On Mars this would be no problem. Moon, piece of cake. On Earth, fucking hard. Just barely possible. It’s stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system. It would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of humanity. That’s why it’s hard. Why does this hurt my brain? It’s because of that. Really, we’re just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“As his kids tumbled into the waiting black SUV, Musk paused to look up at the towering Starship under construction. It appeared as much a skyscraper as a spaceship. Taking it all in, a childlike smile broke out over his face. “Hey,” Musk said, turning to me. “Can you believe that thing, or something like it, is going to take people to another planet for the first time in 4.5 billion years? I mean, probably. It may not work. But it probably will.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“The growing team also bonded over computer games. Following a long day of work, most of the employees in the office would put the phones on their desks into conference mode. The office would come alive with banter and bravado as the SpaceX employees loaded the computer game Quake III Arena, a first-person shooter that allowed multiple players to join, and battle one another in death matches. Each participant would choose a playable character and a weapon, and look for targets on the virtual playing field.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“In his article for the aerospace publication, Zurbuchen wrote about how SpaceX had succeeded in the battle for talent with an inspiring goal. “I was a little bit nervous about betting on the immediate success of Falcon 9,” he wrote. “But in the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.” Too often in the modern aerospace world, he added, bureaucracy, rules, and a morbid fear of failure “poisoned” the workplace.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“So I heard you don’t want to move to L.A., and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google. Well, I just talked to Larry, and they’re going”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

“It felt like I had been taken out to the firing squad, and been blindfolded,” Musk said. “Then they fired the guns, which went click. No bullets came out. And then they let you free. Sure, it feels great. But you’re pretty fucking nervous.”
― Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX