The SpaceX Archive

The Book

SpaceX Foundation

SpaceX wrote down its first decade as it happened. We printed it.

SpaceX Foundation, a navy cloth hardcover with a foil star field and title, on a wooden table

Between 2002 and 2013, SpaceX posted an update nearly every time something happened: an engine fired, a stage shipped, a rocket fell in the Pacific. Musk wrote most of the first five years himself. Many of those pages now sit behind dead links and retired sites.

SpaceX Foundation puts every company update we could find back in order, unedited, from September 2002 to an email to employees in June 2013. Around them sit the launch reports, the congressional testimony, the press clippings and the photographs from the same years. The updates and articles in this museum are the ones in the book.

The best part is what the writers did not know. By August 2008, three Falcon 1 flights had failed, and the company had money for one more attempt. The updates from those months were written by people with no idea how it ends. You read the decade forward.

"For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."

Elon Musk, SpaceX update, August 2, 2008, after the third Falcon 1 failure

The fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit on September 28, 2008.

428 pages, 8.5 by 11 inches. Navy cloth hardcover, with the star field and the title in silver foil. An introductory essay, a map of Omelek Island and a launch chart. Printed in September 2026.

Read a chapter: "Creating Falcon 9," the August 2007 update, set as it is in the book. PDF, sample pages

The essay that opens the book is free to read. "Atoms Are Cheap, Process Is Pricey": why building a rocket cheaply is a manufacturing problem before it is a physics one.

Read the essay

Interested in the book?

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