ROCKET DREAMS: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, by Christian Davenport
When the rocket company Blue Origin didn’t get a lunar lander contract with NASA in April 2021, its founder, Jeff Bezos, was fuming. Blue Origin had been working for years on a prototype lander, hoping to wrest funding — and some fame — from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, by then a trusted partner to the American space agency. Just four months into the Biden administration, Bezos began assembling attorneys to file a formal protest with the federal government. According to the journalist Christian Davenport’s latest dispatch from the high-tech space race, “Rocket Dreams,” Bezos also posed a question: “How would we go about this if NASA did not exist?”
The answer: Build big rockets that can get people to the moon (and Mars) anyway. Billionaires just really want to do that. They have plenty of money to spend and nobody is stopping them; in fact, NASA is welcoming their ideas and their designs. What no one asks, including in this book, is why this is something we should encourage the billionaires to do, let alone why we should praise them for it.
As the space exploration beat writer at The Washington Post, Davenport is in frequent contact with the government space officials, tech bros and billionaires who are transforming the industry — including Bezos, who owns Davenport’s employer. “Rocket Dreams” offers a fly-on-the-wall account from launchpads and flight decks across nearly a decade of space exploration, from the early days of the first Trump administration to the beginning of the second.
Davenport is impressively sourced and his book is a fine piece of reporting; historians will be able to use this first draft of rocket history to craft deeper analyses of our first real steps as a space-faring society. “Just a few years earlier, the idea of humans building an ‘off-world’ base seemed ludicrous,” Davenport writes. But the international space scape has changed dramatically in the past decade or so, and even since Davenport’s earlier chronicle of the Musk-Bezos rivalry, “The Space Barons,” which appeared in early 2018.
It was truly remarkable when SpaceX returned the first rocket from orbit to its launchpad, in 2015, instead of crashing it in the sea; now several Falcon 9s have flown to space and landed upright back on Earth more than a dozen times. The idea of a Chinese moon program was novel in 2013, when the country’s first rover rolled onto the lunar surface; last summer, China’s latest lunar lander became the first vessel in history to bring back soil from the far side of the moon. Human settlement may be next. In 2023, Blue Origin engineers announced they had turned simulated moon dirt into solar cells and electrical wire, building blocks for a base.
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The post What Happened to the High-Tech Space Race? appeared first on New York Times.
