To keep good things running, I’ll post here about the book I read throughout the year:

  • “Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age” , by Eric Berger: 4/5, great successor to “Liftoff” on the time at SpaceX that created the Falcon 9 and Starlink, with early preview into Starship. Crazy company, motivating anyone to grind until success. Reversed the paradigm in space flight to try launching a perfect rocket, versus getting better incrementally. And they are still flying strong.
  • “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed” , by Ben Rich and Leo Janos: 5/5, really inspiring how a rather small group of specialists created amazing technical progress in a time well before modern computing, namely stealth technology. They created the flying origami, which eventually became the F-117A, as well as the SR-71 Blackbird. Back in the days, they were able to finish highly complex projects both on time, and under budget.
  • “Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft” , by Dr. Peter Westwick: 4/5, perfect follow-up on Ben Rich’s book on Skunk Works. Includes the view of Northrop on how the B-2 became to be, and how the development team worked very differntely compared to Lockheed (less computers, more experimental). Still flying today, but absurdly expensive. Now I’m only lacking books on how F-22 and F-35 came to be, as well as rest-of-the-world planes.
  • “Focus - The ASML Way” , by Marc Hijink: 3/5, on how the global dominance of ASML on litography systems came to be, albeit a bit thin for my taste on the technical details. Great in combination with this really exquisite presentation on the topic from the CCC congress in 2024.
  • “Androids” , by Chet Haase: 3/5, on how Android was initially built in late 2008-ish. Bit repetitive on the history of all the different people involved, and how the team moved between Microsoft, Danger to then Google. Really short chapters, but plenty of them - felt a bit like it was written and then shortened by corporate message control, or written without clear content strategy.
  • “Challenger” , by Adam Higginbotham: 5/5, on the disaster of the Challenger in 1986 and the overall Space Shuttle program by NASA. After reading his previous book Midnight in Chernobyl, this was a must-read for me. Truely excellent!

Last update on 2026-06-03, thanks for listening!

Bookshelf