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Unless you’ve been on your own one-way trip to Mars, the NewSpace industry’s efforts to democratize access to low Earth orbit and beyond will ring familiar. But even industry pros should learn something from The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos — Christian Davenport’s new book chronicling the rise of four space entrepreneurs.
Although The Space Barons touches on these entrepreneurs’ core businesses, mostly, the book deals with the inside stories behind each of their space efforts. Davenport, a reporter at the Bezos-owned Washington Post, provides a very readable NewSpace tale that weaves in accounts of spaceflight’s early days with more recent intrigue surrounding NASA’s un-actualized efforts to breathe new life into its crewed initiatives beyond low Earth orbit.
Thus, it’s no surprise that space enthusiasts would be ecstatic about any seemingly viable alternative to space politics as usual. That said, Bezos and Musk have good reason to crow. Both have successfully launched reusable rockets that may eventually bring down costs enough to revolutionize access to space.
But all four ‘barons’ can also be secretive. Bezos, in particular, has a reputation for being extraordinarily careful about what he reveals in public, Davenport notes. So, much so, that it wasn’t until Newsweek reporter Brad Stone found a coffee-stained copy of Bezos’ Blue Origin mission statement in the company trash, that the Amazon founder’s space aspirations became public.
In the process of writing a book about Amazon, Stone found out that Bezos’ new Seattle-based Zefram LLC. was, in fact, inspired by a fictional Star Trek inventor. In Trek lore, ‘Zefram Cochrane,’ Davenport writes, “created the first spaceship capable of traveling at warp speeds, or faster than the speed of light.”
As for Musk, he was inspired by the notion that we have to at least get a portion of humanity off this planet for good, perhaps himself included on a one-way trip to the nearest potentially habitable planet, which in his view remains Mars.
But after checking out NASA’s website and, at the time, not finding a schedule to get to Mars, Musk was spurred to make it his business to get there himself. To that end, in 2002 Musk created Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the formal name for SpaceX.
While Davenport includes Richard Branson and Paul Allen’s efforts at suborbital flight, The Space Barons is most compelling when it sticks with Bezos and Musk. Hardly a day goes by when Musk doesn’t give us some provocative new tidbit about his plans to send humans to Mars.
And even though Bezos rarely tips his hat before he’s ready, Musk and Bezos have both a winning mix of enough chutzpah to reassure a waiting public that their teams have enough perseverance to meet their companies’ near-term goals.
As for suborbital and lunar space tourism? Lest we forget, we’ve been this way before.
Richard Branson wasn’t the first to “try to sell the allure of space,” Davenport writes. “ During the 1960s, Pan Am started promoting trips to the Moon as a way to cash in” on the surging interest in Apollo. So, Pan Am created a waiting list of potential lunar passengers. Branson has done something similar in presales of tickets for a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic.
Now Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, however, are each separately talking about a round-trip orbital flight around the backside of the Moon. And earlier, Davenport reports, Musk even told the BBC that he would sell a round-trip ticket to Mars on one of his own launchers for a flat $500,000. That’s only a little more than twice what Branson is charging his passengers for the first flight of Virgin Galactic.
But to be fair, on the Musk flight to the Red Planet, priority boarding and checked baggage will likely cost extra.
