SpaceX Starship

Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Trillion-Dollar Space Race

by Christian Davenport  · 6 Sep 2025  · 441pp  · 127,950 words

in the presidential race. FEBRUARY 2021: The White House announces that Artemis will continue under President Biden. APRIL 2021: SpaceX wins the moon lander contract over Blue Origin. MAY 2021: SpaceX lands its Starship SN15 prototype. MAY 2021: China lands a spacecraft on Mars. JUNE 2021: China launches the first crew to inhabit

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. NOVEMBER 2022: NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launches the un-crewed Orion spacecraft around the moon in the Artemis I mission. APRIL 2023: SpaceX launches the Starship Super Heavy booster and spacecraft for the first time. MAY 2023: Blue Origin wins a NASA contract to build a lunar lander. SEPTEMBER 2023

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at sea or designated landing pads with such frequency that it was considered routine. This was different. On this day, October 13, 2024, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket would instead attempt to fly back to its launch pad, where it would be caught with a pair of mechanical chopstick-like arms

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taking humans farther into space than ever before. As it sought to compete with SpaceX, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin wanted to know whether Starship could indeed become a next-generation vehicle that might lead to SpaceX further dominating the space industry, or was a delusion that only Musk could see

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in Boca Chica and wouldn’t have gone if he had been. All this attention on Starship was distracting from what should be SpaceX’s top priority, he felt: NASA’s Commercial Crew program to launch American astronauts from American soil. The president had said in his State of

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continued. In fact, most of the company’s resources were dedicated to that mission, not to Starship. “You have no right to do this,” he said. Bridenstine stood his ground and reminded Musk of how SpaceX’s Dragon capsule had just exploded. “Elon, you told me when we met in Hawthorne that

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well, keeping its proposal alive for the final round. While Blue Origin and Dynetics were developing landers that resembled the ones used during Apollo, SpaceX’s Starship was entirely different. It was massive and massively complicated, a fully reusable system that would require multiple refuelings in Earth orbit before going to the

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launched Behnken and Hurley to the International Space Station. When Bridenstine had publicly chastised Musk for spending too much attention on Starship and not enough on Dragon, Musk had argued that SpaceX could focus on both simultaneously. It appeared Musk was right. Despite Bridenstine’s public castigation and the subsequent meeting at

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sped up. On a Saturday less than a week after Hurley and Behnken successfully lifted off—but before SpaceX had flown them home safely— SpaceX employees received an email from Musk. “We need to accelerate Starship progress,” he wrote, adding that it needed to happen “dramatically and immediately.” He urged employees working at

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wanted white cones, so the security teams used those instead, especially when they knew the boss was going to be around. SPACEX’S URGENCY WAS not just about making Starship a viable candidate for NASA’s Artemis program. There was an election coming up, and there were no assurances that, if

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spacecraft. Its design still seemed to mimic the architecture of agriculture more than aerospace. “No, This Isn’t a Flying Grain Silo. It’s SpaceX’s Starship Prototype,” was CNN’s headline. However seemingly unfit to leave terra firma as it may have been, the silo did fly. It was only a

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tweeted. Even Trump noticed. Although NASA had nothing to do with the test, he took credit for SpaceX’s success. Trump retweeted NASAspaceflight.com, a group of SpaceX and space enthusiasts who had been diligently chronicling Starship’s progression, perhaps confusing the account with NASA’s official Twitter handle. “NASA was Closed & Dead

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my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.” The ad soon came down. WHILE SPACEX HAD been publicly showing off its Starship testing campaign—fireballs and all—Blue Origin was keeping a lower profile. Despite the size of the “national team,” the companies worked

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brief. The protest also irritated Musk, who took Blue Origin’s criticism of NASA as criticism of SpaceX. His company’s victory wasn’t some sort of fluke. SpaceX had been making real progress with Starship, flying the prototypes in Texas one after the other. Blue had done almost nothing by comparison. Its

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people and property on the ground. In December 2020, with Musk pushing his engineers to work ever faster, SpaceX planned to launch a Starship prototype. The FAA had not signed off on the flight, but SpaceX launched anyway—a short hop, several miles high, that ended in a crash landing and fireball. No

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that same night, after 1:00 A.M., he demanded: “Anyone who is not working on obviously critical path projects at SpaceX should shift immediately to work on the first Starship orbit. Please fly, drive, or get here by any means possible.” Were Blue Origin’s employees working in shifts around the

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the first round of the contracts, Bezos wrote, and since then the company had developed a spacecraft “that could achieve a human landing in 2024.” SpaceX’s Starship, by contrast, was a far riskier bet because it would be refueled in Earth orbit, requiring a fleet of tanker spacecraft. That approach “locks

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pushing to get the White House’s budget office to give the agency the resources it needed to fund a second lander. As impressive as SpaceX was, Starship was a risky, unproven rocket, and Nelson disagreed with the decision to award it a solo contract. He wanted another option in case it

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fly back and forth between the Earth and moon. The key to the entire system was the ability to store propellant in space, something SpaceX would need for Starship as well. As Bezos told me later, the design was “completely different” than the one in its previous bid. “There’s no

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longer, flying back and forth between destinations, like the Earth and the moon, or even Mars. Now, with Starship and Blue Moon, two companies were working on it. Having already won a contract, SpaceX was ineligible to bid, meaning Blue’s only competition was Dynetics, which had finished third in the previous

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mission that recalled the early, swash-buckling days of space exploration. At the same time, SpaceX’s army in South Texas was continuing to develop Starship, pushing it through an intense test campaign that encapsulated the force SpaceX had become: explosions and fiery failures mixed with seemingly impossible triumphs, all while Musk continued

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they went. With a newly installed water deluge system, the following flights didn’t blow up the pad, and SpaceX continued to make progress until it felt it could finally try to land the Starship booster. Unlike the Falcon 9, which touched down on a ship at sea or on landing pads

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a Goliathan projectile, laden with millions of gallons of combustible propellant, the FAA had diverted all air traffic well to the north and south of SpaceX’s Starship launch site, like an invisible dam disrupting the flow of a river. In the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard had been

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and proclaimed, “The Eagle has landed.” In the darkness over the Indian Ocean, a camera that SpaceX had positioned on a buoy at the spacecraft’s intended landing site captured the final moments of Starship’s descent. The ship flipped itself to vertical and, firing its engines to slow itself to a

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first attempt! @jeffbezos” he wrote on X, his social media platform. “Thank you,” Bezos responded, adding an emoji of gratitude. Musk and SpaceX were preparing for the next Starship test flight, scheduled for later that day. Now it was Bezos’s turn to demonstrate goodwill on Musk’s X. “Good luck today

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NASA needed “an off-ramp for reliance” on SLS. If SLS was no longer NASA’s main heavy-lift rocket, that would directly benefit SpaceX with its Starship rocket. And now that New Glenn had flown, it could help Blue Origin as well. Bezos had been quick to appease the Trump White

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seemed that success—and keeping pace with Musk—would come not just through engineering but politics as well. In the months to follow, SpaceX would continue to sprint forward. Starship, already the largest rocket in the world, would grow taller and able to hold even more propellant, making it even more powerful

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would she plant, and what would be her name? NOTES INTRODUCTION 2 China has paid SpaceX: Andrew Jones, “China Unveils Fully Reusable Starship-Like Rocket Concept,” SpaceNews, November 14, 2024, https://spacenews.com/china-unveils-fully-reusable-starship-like-rocket-concept/. 3 Assembling the International Space Station: NASA, “Station Facts,” https://www.

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april/. 182 Steel could handle both: Ryan D’Agostino, “Elon Musk: Why I’m Building the Starship Out of Stainless Steel,” Popular Mechanics, January 22, 2019, https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a25953663/elon-musk-spacex-bfr-stainless-steel/. 182 Starlink satellites: Caleb Henry, “Musk: We’re Not Spinning Off Starlink,” Space

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a Year,” CNN, September 29, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2019/09/29/elon-musk-starship-interview-orig.cnn. 188 “drogue parachutes”: Anna C. Heiney, “Top 10 Things to Know For NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 Return,” NASA, July 24, 2020, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/top-10

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Proposal,” Spaceflight Now, May 1, 2020, https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/05/01/nasa-identifies-risks-in-spacexs-starship-lunar-lander-proposal/. 221 It burst: Jeff Foust, “SpaceX Starship Suffers Testing Setback,” SpaceNews, November 20, 2019, https://spacenews.com/spacex-starship-suffers-testing-setback/. 221 “It will definitely get fancier”: Dave Mosher, “Inside the ‘Awkward,’ ‘Tense,’ and

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‘Heated’ Private Meeting Between Elon Musk and Texans Whom SpaceX Is Trying to Buy Out to Fully Realize

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Its Vision to Reach Mars,” Business Insider, October 15, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex

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-than-getting-space/. 223 The first, SN-1: Tariq Malik, “SpaceX’s Starship SN1 Prototype Appears to Burst During Pressure Test,” Space.com, March 1, 2020, https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-sn1-prototype-bursts-videos.html. 223 SN-3 collapsed: Jeff Foust, “Third Starship Prototype Destroyed in Tanking Test,” SpaceNews, April 3, 2020, https

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://spacenews.com/third-starship-prototype-destroyed-in-tanking-test/. 223 “We need to accelerate”: Michael Sheetz, “Elon

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June 7, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/07/elon-musk-email-to-spacex-employees-starship-is-the-top-priority.html#:~:text=%22We%20need%20to%20accelerate%20Starship,SpaceX%20unveiled%20the%20latest%20prototype. 225 more than $30 billion: Michael Sheetz, “SpaceX Valuation Rises to $33.3 Billion as Investors Look to Satellite Opportunity,” CNBC

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/2023/11/15/media/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-people/index.html. 254 “exceed the maximum”: Jeff Foust, “SpaceX Violated Launch License in Starship SN8 Launch,” SpaceNews, February 2, 2021, https://spacenews.com/spacex-violated-launch-license-in-starship-sn8-launch/. 255 “You did an awesome job”: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023),

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https://www.engadget.com/amazon-elon-musk-rules-are-for-other-people-fcc-filing-084518762.html. 256 Finally, in May: Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Lands Starship Spacecraft in First Full Successful Test Flight,” The Washington Post, May 5, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/elon-musks

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-spacex-lands-starship-spacecraft-first-time/. 257 “I think we’re close”: Christian Davenport, “2021 Was a Huge Year for Space Exploration. 2022 Could Be Even Bigger,” The

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Crisis Is Creating a ‘Risk of Bankruptcy,’ ” CNBC, November 30, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-to-spacex-starships-raptor-engine-crisis-risks-bankruptcy.html#:~:text=%22The%20Raptor%20production%20crisis%20is,every%20two%20weeks%20next%20year.%22. 289 “Physics does not care”: Walter Isaacson,

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-dawn-spacewalk-astronauts/. 304 “could turn out to be”: Mike Wall, “Why Did SpaceX’s Starship Debut Launch Cause So Much Damage to the Pad?,” Space.com, April 24, 2023, https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-damage-starbase-launch-pad. 305 “the pressure that was built”: B. Dotson, P. Metzger, J. Hafner, A. Shackelford

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lnms/LNM0840g2024.pdf. 306 “thousands of distinct”: Will Robinson-Smith, “Live Updates: SpaceX to Attempt First Booster Catch During the Starship 5 Mission,” October 13, 2024, https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/13/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-5th-flight-test-of-starship-from-starbase-in-southern-texas/. 306 “We’re only going to attempt

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”: Starship’s Fifth Flight Test, SpaceX, October 13, 2024, https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-5. 307 “Vehicle is pitching downrange”: Starship: Fifth Flight Test, SpaceX, November 6, 2024, https

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI9HQfCAw64. 310 SpaceX won them all: Stephen Clark, “SpaceX Prevails over ULA, Wins Military

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Built Exploded Over a Populated Island. Residents Are Still Dealing with the Fallout,” CNN, February 1, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/science/spacex-starship-explosion-debris-turks-caicos/index.html. EPILOGUE 319 In late 2024: Jeff Foust, “NASA Further Delays Next Artemis Missions,” Space-News, December 5, 2024, https

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space exploration focus of, 5–6, 250–51, 286–88, 315 (See also Blue Origin) space travel by, 265–69, 271, 274–78, 286 on SpaceX’s Starship, 4, 5 on Trump, 21–22, 162–63 Trump administration (2024) ingratiation by, 313, 314–15, 316 vision for space, 7, 11–13, 25

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160–61, 162–63, 164–65, 247, 248, 251 leadership duties, 68–69, 81–82, 216 leadership style, 279–83, 303 on SpaceX’s developments, 4–5 on Starship by Space X, 4–5 successes at Blue Origin, 300 Washington Post ad, 218–19 Space Corps, 77, 93 Space Council. See National

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age

by Eric Berger  · 23 Sep 2024  · 375pp  · 113,230 words

life, ready to burst into the sky above and noisily proclaim a new era of spaceflight. This was Starship. After two decades of relentless toil, Elon Musk had pushed and cajoled and bullied and single-mindedly driven SpaceX to the precipice of history. His company had launched hundreds of rockets. But

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Starship was its first that might, one day, make good on Musk’s fever dream of sending humans to Mars

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the ocean and empty space. Only the cramped Apollo crew compartment came home, and these capsules went into museums after each flight. With Starship, Musk and his company SpaceX sought to build an entirely reusable rocket. The first stage of the rocket, named Super Heavy, would fly back to the launch

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site and hover, to be plucked from the air by large robotic arms and refueled for another flight soon after. The Starship upper stage would

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then fly again and again. That was the vision, at least. This first Starship, which triggered Musk’s anxiety, was merely a full-sized prototype. Things could go wrong. Things probably would. SpaceX had invested billions of dollars into the launch facility, building a massive spaceport in a remote corner of

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to wobble, and this triggered its self-destruct mechanism. As big things often do, the Starship era began with a bang. A few days later Musk expressed appreciation for his employees. “I thought the SpaceX team did amazing work,” he said. “And this is really one of the hardest technical projects

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did it. To know where SpaceX is going, and why they just might get there, it is critical to understand how its people built the future. This is their story. It is also the story of Elon Musk and his outsized spaceflight ambitions. Moments after Starship broke apart in the sky,

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. Musk was a fraud, had always been a fraud, and finally the world was finding out. But with equal energy, defenders pointed out that Starship was an experimental rocket, and that SpaceX was willing to fail in order to go fast. So what is the truth? It is this: Musk founded

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’s vison for traveling to Mars, as well. It is no coincidence that Diez ended up leading Starship engineering. During these years, in company-wide gatherings, Musk would deliver his usual spiel about founding SpaceX to make life multiplanetary, to settle Mars, and so on. Justin Richeson, who was helping to

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ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable.” The challenge of building thousands of Starships, and the difficulty of refueling them on Mars, reveals something fundamental about how Musk and SpaceX see their path to the stars. NASA explores. During Apollo, it sent a pair of astronauts

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expectations. Altan returned to the company just after the AMOS-6 failure and ahead of Musk’s Starship presentation in Mexico. SpaceX had its hands full with returning the Falcon 9 to flight and designing Starship. Now they were supposed to become the world’s largest satellite operator, by a factor of

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more than ten? “Elon made it clear that Starlink had to work,” Altan said. “It was going to be the moneymaker for SpaceX, and fund everything we were

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options.” To pay for Mars, then, Musk made a huge bet in the mid-2010s. SpaceX initiated not one but two massive projects, Starship and Starlink, simultaneously. Neither project had any precedent in history. Starship would be bigger and more powerful than NASA’s mighty Saturn V rocket and needed to be

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reusable many times over. Starlink was far larger and more ambitious than any satellite constellation in history. Both projects were likely to fail. “Here’s how Elon thinks about this,” Altan explained. “If SpaceX

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towns and cities with abundant restaurants, hotels, and amenities. Walt Disney World is less than an hour away. By contrast, the land SpaceX acquired for its Starship launch site in South Texas is probably the most remote beachfront property in the United States on the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico

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. In early 2019 the South Texas team began fabricating a miniature Starship prototype nicknamed Starhopper. After this stubby vehicle made short test flights in July and August 2019, SpaceX retired it. A few months later, Muratore took a break from SpaceX, and Rench found himself in the role of site director, reporting

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wrongly, there are no committees. He is a committee of one. This is a key reason why SpaceX moves so quickly. “That same weekend he asked me what we really needed to build the Starship factory,” Rench said. “So I basically started pointing at all the land around Boca Chica, and

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Crew Dragon. Three years after the Guadalajara speech, these tensions boiled over again. It was September 2019, and SpaceX employees were working feverishly to complete the very first full-size prototype of Starship, named Mk1. They faced a deadline of September 28, when Musk had scheduled a showy public unveiling in

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your brewery might have its fucking thing two weeks late but consider one versus the other.” Musk was focusing the totality of SpaceX’s effort on completing the Starship prototype for an event planned on a starry Saturday night in South Texas later that month. He was willing to spend lavishly

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that would never launch, for an arbitrary deadline and a glitzy showcase. This frantic focus on Starship rankled the NASA administrator at the time, a former fighter pilot and congressman named Jim Bridenstine. SpaceX and Boeing were two years behind their original schedules, and each still faced serious challenges before flying

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help but give vent to his emotions. On the day before Musk’s ballyhooed Starship unveiling, Bridenstine tweeted some words that reflected his frustration with what he viewed as SpaceX’s misplaced priorities. “I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow,” Bridenstine said. “In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind

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propulsion tanks had been complex, Starship would aspire to simplicity in its design. Over and over again in meetings Musk would say, “The best part is no part.” Touchscreens, space tuxedos, and other Crew Dragon concerns Powered landings were not the only sticking point in SpaceX’s contract with NASA for

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Musk’s prioritization of Starship—when Dragon was so close to being ready to fly, and the country so desperately needed its capability to break NASA’s dependence on Russia for crew transport to the space station—pushed Jim Bridenstine to tweet about it being time for SpaceX to deliver. He was

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frustrated and angry, and he wanted to get Musk’s attention. I spoke with Musk in the immediate aftermath of the tweet. He’d staged the Starship event that had sparked Bridenstine’s ire, revealing the

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he and Bridenstine reached a detente. A day or two after the Starship event, Musk called Bridenstine. Despite the ruffled feathers, the chief of NASA and the leader of SpaceX worked through their frustrations. Two weeks later Bridenstine visited the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, and Musk updated him on the company’s efforts

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light bulb went off,” she said. There have always been competing priorities at SpaceX. A decade earlier Cargo Dragon competed with the Falcon 9 rocket for resources. Then came the Grasshopper and recovery programs, followed by Starlink and Starship. There were only so many engineers, programmers, and technicians to go around,

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most valuable payloads into orbit. The Falcon Heavy had a still more profound effect on SpaceX employees, while inspiring the young engineers who would come to work on the Starship project. It marked the culmination of everything SpaceX had done during its first decade and a half. The company built a rocket

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with one engine, then nine, and now three times that. During just the previous year, SpaceX roared back from its second failure

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with eighteen successful launches. It proved that landings worked and that a private company could build the world’s largest rocket. The flawless liftoff and dual booster landing hinted that the audacious Starship project might be possible after all

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. It marked the end of the beginning for SpaceX, and the beginning of what would come next. “Nothing felt unachievable at that point,” Hansen said. What

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headquarters in Hawthorne. A Japanese businessman, Yusaku Maezawa, revealed that he had signed up to fly a sortie around the Moon on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. “I’ll tell you, it’s done a lot to restore my faith in humanity,” Musk said, seated in front of the end

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and help fund this new project that’s risky, might not succeed, and is dangerous.” Maezawa was Starship’s first paying customer, but Smith was not impressed. He viewed Starship as a distraction from SpaceX’s core business, the Falcon 9 rocket. And so Smith emailed his company the following: From: Bob

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Smith Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 7:30 AM Given the SpaceX announcement and our benchmarking of their best practices, there

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’s a lot to be inspired by here and opportunities for us to catch up and surpass them as they get distracted by BFR and Starlink. -RHS- The “BFR” mentioned is what Starship was then known as

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. Everywhere else, it simply meant Big Fucking Rocket, because that’s what it was. Smith believed Musk’s fixation on Starship and Starlink would give Blue Origin time to surpass SpaceX in the launch business. Bezos’s own large rocket, named New Glenn, was due to make its debut in 2020.

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Smith could not have been more wrong. In the first five years after Smith sent the email, SpaceX launched more than 175 additional orbital rockets, including Starship. Blue Origin has yet to launch any. Its New Glenn rocket should finally fly in 2024. Smith also fundamentally misjudged

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the commitment Musk and SpaceX made to Starship and Starlink. This backfired badly when, in April 2021, SpaceX won the much-coveted contract to land humans on the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis Program to

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return astronauts there. The next humans to walk on the gray and dusty lunar surface almost certainly will do so by stepping off Starship. Bezos and Smith were

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incensed and sued NASA for a second chance. As for Starlink, by the end of 2023 it started to turn a profit for SpaceX. Smith, who was finally fired in September 2023, is far

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the launcher market paradigm as we know it,” he wrote in a commentary. “With the dependable reliability of Falcon 9 and the captivating prospects of Starship, SpaceX continues to totally redefine the world’s access to space, pushing the boundaries of possibility as they go along. Europe, on the other hand, finds

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into orbit as the human spaceflight programs in Russia and China combined. Then there is Starship, the largest and most powerful, and potentially most disruptive, rocket ever built. SpaceX has lapped the world in spaceflight, and with Starship, the steamroller is coming around for another pass. A few weeks after remarking on

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hit send on a companywide email. Though Dragon had barely been lifted from the water, it was time to pivot. “Please consider the top SpaceX priority to be Starship,” Musk wrote. The company needed to “dramatically and immediately” accelerate progress. He urged employees to seriously consider relocating to South Texas to work

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truly sustainable deep space exploration possible. Artemis will go as far as Starship goes. And if Artemis is a success, it opens the pathway to Mars for NASA and SpaceX, and the red planet’s eventual settlement. The future is right there for the taking, and we dare not miss this

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is building a fully reusable lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Program. (It’s years behind Starship.) That effort is being led by a familiar face, John Couluris, who led the C2 mission for SpaceX in 2012. I hope he crushes it. Bezos also has a Starlink competitor called Project Kuiper

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doing business with his companies. This seems highly unlikely, at least in the near term. The Falcon rockets, Dragon spacecraft, Starlink satellite constellation, and Starship vehicle are essential to major U.S. civil and military initiatives. But decision-makers and political leaders are watching Musk and his actions, and they

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force. It is important for SpaceX and the Mars vision that this continues. The Falcon 9 is the most reliable, advanced, and cost-effective rocket in the world. And yet Musk is pushing his engineering teams every day to obsolete it as rapidly as possible with Starship. An established company does

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rockets’ horizontal velocity and Rose on rules and regulations and SES-9 launch and Shotwell and SLC-40 site and spacesuits SpaceX founded by and SpaceX philosophy and Starlink and Starship success of at Tesla on test tripod and Thompson and transporter erector Twitter acquisition by and ULA creation vision of and webcasts

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, Vladimir Python, Monty Quayle, Dan Ramamurthy, Bala Reisman, Garrett Relativity Space Rench, Phillip reusable rockets. see also Starship Delta Clipper densification needed for Falcon 9 (see Falcon 9) as goal of SpaceX hydraulic systems for maintenance on NASA’s attempts at recovery of Russia’s view of Richeson, Justin Ridings, Holly

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of United Launch Alliance rivalry with unorthodox philosophy of work culture of SR-71 “Blackbird,” Stafford, Thomas stage separation system stage telemetry Starhopper Starliner Starlink Starship Star Wars program Stewart, Cory Stoke Space Strategic Defense Initiative Stults, Sam Suffredini, Mike SuperDraco thrusters Taylor, Mike TEA-TEB flow Tenenbaum, Jason Tesla

Open Space: From Earth to Eternity--the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos

by David Ariosto  · 24 Mar 2026  · 433pp  · 116,344 words

and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2025025399 (print) | LCCN 2025025400 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593535035 (hardcover) ISBN 9780593535042 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration | SpaceX (firm) | Space tourism—Technological innovations | Space tourism—Moral and ethical aspects | Space race—Economic aspects | Space race—Moral and ethical aspects | Space flight—Technological innovations

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Chapter 22: Countdown Chapter 23: Lunar Payload Chapter 24: Huntsville Chapter 25: En Route to the Moon Chapter 26: Lunar Descent Chapter 27: The SpaceX Effect Chapter 28: The Art of War Chapter 29: Turning Point Chapter 30: Starfish Prime Chapter 31: Space Junk Part II: The Next Frontier Chapter

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its large, reusable rockets were still in their nascent stages, just as the global launch sector remained overwhelmingly dominated by the U.S.-based SpaceX. By then, SpaceX rockets were on pace to be launching every third day, and accounted for well over half of the total global launch cadence, giving American

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just one company, whose CEO was growing more powerful across multiple fronts. China’s eyes on space were accordingly trained on Musk. “On WeChat…every Starship launch, every Starlink launch, and frankly every word Elon says is covered with interest,” explained Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting. “If you

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would struggle for longevity. Still, Mars was the goal. China had a crewed Mars expedition loosely set for 2050, just as Musk planned initial Starship missions there within the decade. But there were steps that had to be taken before any of that could happen. And in this race for

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SLS was a single-use rocket. In an era where the first stages of Falcon 9s routinely made round trips, and where the far larger Starship was also being designed for reusability, expendable rocketry seemed like a relic of the past. And it certainly wasn’t the vehicle that the

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constellation was by far the world’s biggest. There was also simply no comparison to the nascent Starship, a version of which had been baked in Artemis plans to return astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX seemed almost too big to fail, a curious development in the race with Beijing given Musk’

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a backlog of some seventy missions. A year later, in January 2024, the Pentagon sought to take the reins entirely, and asked to oversee SpaceX’s Starship for its own “sensitive and potentially dangerous missions,” yet another sign of the deepening federal reliance on the Musk-led company. Vulcan Centaur had

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charged with “knocking out gremlins in the system,” Steve explained, subsisting as they had been on a steady diet of Krystal hamburgers and donuts. SpaceX launch facility at the Kennedy Space Center, 2024. In the nights before that historic Intuitive Machines IM-1 launch on February 15, 2024, executive

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idea was to concentrate adjacent technologies within tightly integrated clusters, where cross-sector collaborations and state-backed funding might help China leapfrog its rivals. SpaceX’s reusability and the sheer scale of its Starlink constellation was still the benchmark. But China’s emerging constellations, including Three Body and its GW

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plans for its own superheavy-lift launch vehicles, including the Long March 9, which had a strikingly curious resemblance to the SpaceX Starship. The difference lay in the approach. Where SpaceX focused on rapid innovation and iterative design driven initially by private capital, China’s state-led, large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing

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national support. Whereas Chinese authorities tended to also support the supply side of a company’s development, which included the building of factories, companies like SpaceX enjoyed massive federal contracts as service providers. Chinese companies, therefore, may be harder to start, but once established, those firms stood to benefit from

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be used in the design of a kind of lunar ferry, the largest of which weighing approximately 78 tons—only slightly smaller than today’s Starship upper stage (without propellant)—could be used to supply and build what was now in development: a Moon base. He envisioned a much larger

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south pole. Steve Altemus (in suit, right) celebrating following IM-1 landing at Intuitive Machines’ headquarters in Houston, Texas, February 2024. · Chapter 27 · The SpaceX Effect History had been made. The IM lander, despite an imperfect touchdown, had become the first commercial craft to reach the lunar surface, marking the

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at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Another was preparing for its third mission of the year under a National Security Space Launch contract. And Starship was gearing up for a launch from Starbase in Texas. It was a remarkable pace, even for a company that had tripled its launch

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He had an airy, affable, easygoing charm. But there was also no mistaking his technical acumen, one that he would later put to use on Starship, a skycraper-sized rocket, and the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. The team was assembling. Others like Zach Dunn, who would go on to

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with a company that was very drunk.” Frank would later move to Hawthorne, for a job as SpaceX principal engineer and launch projects manager, where he worked on the nearly four-hundred-foot-tall Starship designed to eventually take humans to Mars. “About half my time at that point was doing

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created this new, crowded, and contested reality in space, also had implications for environmental and human health impacts back on Earth. For instance, when Starship’s second test flight ended in an explosion eight minutes into the mission, with a self-destruct system on its upper stage triggered shortly thereafter

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what the long-term effects might be. Yet the very nature of accountability was also changing. When, in early March 2025, for instance, a SpaceX Starship exploded during its eighth test, roughly two months after it lost the upper stage on its previous flight, the resulting debris field prompted a series

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injuries, and yet the incidents also raised important questions more broadly for commercial space. Given SpaceX was a private company, investigations tended to work differently. After Starship explosions, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) effectively instructed SpaceX to investigate itself. FAA reviews those findings and then approves licensing for future flights when it

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action were generally made available for broader public scrutiny. Therein, perhaps, lay an Achilles’ heel of space commercialization: lack of a paper trail. During Starship’s eighth test, the FAA’s guidance was effectively the same. The agency, however, did respond with the following statement, which seemed to provide some

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impediments to overcome, given missions to Mars could take up to nine months. Nuclear-fueled propulsion and/or an Earth-to-Mars supply chain of Starships could begin to change that math, but for now those were more aspirational than reality based. Analogue astronaut and D-Orbit CEO/founder Luca

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be how the first Martian settlements are established, given it is quite plausible the commercial sector will again play an outsized role; something those at SpaceX were clearly contemplating. Consider, for instance, the promises of future off-Earth markets during early Starlink beta testing, which drew comparisons with that early

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Virginia Company. Buried in the beta software agreement of SpaceX’s Starlink app were the following sentences: For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth

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exploring. Nearly a dozen research institutions and universities across China were exploring the prospect of scaling down a megawatt nuclear reactor to fit inside a Starship-like vehicle, just as Russia’s main space agency, Roscosmos, detailed plans for its own craft to be powered by a similar reactor. The

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in the novel. Central to his ambitions, Musk was busy “mapping out a game plan to get a million people to Mars,” while the SpaceX Starship—the largest and most powerful rocket in history—would be “designed to traverse our entire solar system and beyond.” Musk also added that “civilization only

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related use cases. But his early focus seemed clearly oriented in getting those Falcon rockets, and later Starship, into space. Musk, having studied physics and economics, had no formal engineering degree. Yet he became SpaceX chief engineer, CTO, and CEO and remains heavily involved in engineering decisions at Tesla. GO TO

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as a propellant, precisely the kind of rocket fuel likely to be developed in the Martian environment, which those like Musk envisioned for his megarocket, Starship. A process called the Sabatier reaction, invented by the French chemist Paul Sabatier, uses electrolysis and a mix of carbon dioxide (which humans breathe

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more, methane-powered engines at that time had never been used in deep space. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It was a key ingredient: Starship, in terms of Mars, was the real game changer. Capable of carrying up to 150 metric tons of cargo into orbit, or roughly the

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, who often sported his signature black Occupy Mars T-shirt during rallies. Days before the election, the two men watched a Starship test flight together at SpaceX Starbase in South Texas, although relations seemed to have later soured between the two men. The company had initially planned to send five megarockets

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had grown so powerful that they had become a danger to themselves, producing vibrations so intense that they have at times been mistaken for earthquakes. SpaceX’s Starship, when it was still in development, reportedly caused windows to crack up to five miles away from the launchpad. But the damage was not

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own efforts and NASA itself was embroiled in the throes of both structural and cultural change. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 27: The SpaceX Effect a National Security Space Launch contract: National Security Space Launch contracts service the U.S. Space Force and Missile Defense Agency. GO TO

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NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It was a remarkable pace: Chengxin Zhang, “China May Need to Adjust Its Approach Toward SpaceX,” SpaceNews, June 24, 2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT As the two men waited: These quotations, and subsequent commentary derived from conversations with

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Lee Rosen and Frank Tybor, could not be independently confirmed with Elon Musk or representatives of SpaceX. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “ ‘Well, parachutes don’t really’ ”: Atmospheric density of Mars is less than 1 percent of that on Earth,

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. But the differences were stark, not just because of the heights achieved. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The two-stage rocket: A modified Starship would also be slated for NASA’s Artemis Human Landing System on the Moon. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a man named Vojtech Holub

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9 and Falcon Heavy rockets to deliver their own payloads into orbit, with senior leadership even discussing the potential for utilizing the company’s superheavy Starship as a means of rapidly deploying supplies and troops around the globe. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “well below the elevation”: David Shepardson,

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: Y. V. Yasyukevich et al., “Supersonic Waves Generated by the 18 November 2023 Starship Flight and Explosions: Unexpected Northward Propagation and a Man-Made Non-Chemical Depletion,” Geophysical Research Letters 51, no. 16 (2024); Davide Castelvecchi, “Huge SpaceX Rocket Explosion Shredded the Upper Atmosphere,” Nature, Aug. 30, 2024. GO TO NOTE

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from Water Resources,” National Library of Medicine, April 14, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “A mishap investigation”: Robert Z. Pearlman, “FAA Investigating SpaceX Starship Flight 8 Explosion That Disrupted Commercial Flights,” Space.com, March 7, 2025. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 32: Italian Entrepreneurs in the Red

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IN TEXT Chapter 33: Governing Mars “refusing any Earth-based authority”: Antonino Salmeri, “Op-ed: No, Mars Is Not a Free Planet, No Matter What SpaceX Says,” SpaceNews, Dec. 5, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “[Chinese workers] won’t even”: Wilfred Chan, “Elon Musk Praises Chinese Workers for

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Janet, 52–3, 291 Kearns, Joel, 30 Kelly, Julian, 244 Kennedy, John F., 20, 249 Kennedy Space Center, 124, 184 Columbia tragedy and, 103–5 SpaceX launch facility at, 123 Kepler, Johannes, 233 Kepler space satellite, 212, 232 Kepler space telescope, 232–3 keyhole trajectories, potential collision course with Earth and

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Technology Mission Directorate, 200 space-time, detecting ripples in, 210 space-time expansion, 275 space travel, early ideas for, 233–4 Space Weather, 200 SpaceX, 12, 19, 24, 105, 164–71, 290 crash landing and, 87 Dragon capsule, 50, 51, 98 Falcon 9 rocket, 10, 11, 49, 51, 82, 

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Moon lander, 48 promises of future off-Earth markets and, 202–3 Raptor engines, 84 Starlink internet service, 24, 51, 130, 202–3 see also Starship Spivack, Nova, 30 Standard Model fields, 280 star catalogs, 14 StarChip, 237–8 star formation: first, after Big Bang, 213 rate of, in Milky

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Way, 209 stargazing, 152, 290–2 Starlab, 52 Starliner spacecraft, 50 Starlink internet service, 24, 51, 130, 202–3 Starship, 24, 47, 49, 51, 85, 131, 145, 164, 166, 169, 193, 197, 198, 203, 246, 253 star systems, bridging vast divides between, with tiny robotic

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63 Uranus, data on moon of, 214 V ValveTech, 50 Vandenberg Air Force Base, Joint Space Operations Center at, 179–80 Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX at, 164–8 Venera 7, 39 venture capital for space technology start-ups, 24 Venus, 39, 79, 233, 234 Very Long Baseline Array, 212 Virginia

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

by Eric Berger  · 2 Mar 2021  · 304pp  · 89,879 words

5. Selling Rockets 6. Flight Two 7. Texas 8. Flight Three 9. Eight Weeks 10. Flight Four 11. Always Go to Eleven Epilogue Acknowledgments Key SpaceX Employees from 2002 to 2008 Timeline Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Prologue September 14, 2019

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the first prototype of his Mars rocket, nicknamed Starhopper. Musk traveled to his South Texas rocket factory in mid-September 2019 to track progress of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, the culmination of nearly two decades of effort to move humans from Earth to Mars. Weeks earlier, Starhopper soared into the clear skies

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settlement, Musk thinks he probably needs to ship 1 million tons to Mars. This is why he is building the massive, reusable Starship vehicle in Texas. In many ways, SpaceX is vastly different today from the company Musk started long ago. But in important ways, it remains exactly the same. With the

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Starship project, SpaceX has returned to its earliest, scrappy days when it strove to build the Falcon 1 rocket against all odds. Then, as now, Musk pushed his

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innovate, to test, and to fly. The DNA of the earliest days, of the Falcon 1 rocket, lives on in South Texas today at the Starship factory. And a huge photo of a Falcon 1 launch hangs on the wall of Musk’s personal conference room at the company’s headquarters

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hours touring his rocket shipyard in South Texas. Through the night, as a full moon rose, employees banged and welded and hefted a full-sized Starship prototype from rolls of stainless steel. The hour had reached near midnight when he and his boys emerged from a construction trailer. As his kids

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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,”

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Segundo, and it allowed them to capture basic flaws with early prototypes, fix their designs, and build successively more “finished” iterations. An independent company like SpaceX can afford the latter approach, said planetary scientist Phil Metzger. He cofounded the Swamp Works project at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in 2012 to

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returned to my hotel, preparing to fly back to Houston, when the assistant called back that evening. Musk had decided to visit the company’s Starship build site in South Texas that weekend and wanted to know if I cared to tag along. We could do the interview during the flight

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rocket. And then they were ready. In the spring of 2005, the company trucked its first complete rocket to Vandenberg. From the beginning, Musk understood SpaceX could not become a sustainable, profitable business from government launch contracts alone. Although the prospect of a low-cost, launch-on-demand rocket appealed to

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Mango said. A month or so later, discussions continued during meetings at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in northern Alabama. Musk and a few other SpaceXers flew into Huntsville, and Mango reciprocated the dinner invitation. Huntsville could not match the sophistication of Southern California’s restaurant scene, but it did have

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that day, conferencing with engineers back in California, plotting logistics, or working with Army officials to secure the necessary permissions to launch a rocket. Some SpaceXers, like Chinnery, essentially moved to the atoll and spent almost the entire second half of 2005 on Kwajalein and Omelek. Others, like Koenigsmann, with his

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dithering about stuff. If they knew they needed to ship stuff, they just shipped stuff.” When possible during the development of their Omelek launch site, SpaceX took the quick-and-dirty approach, sacrificing polish and sophistication for expediency. For example, the engineers decided they did not need a fancy “transporter” to

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program sputtered. Koenigsmann thought he might have found a solution for this problem after he first met Musk in early 2002, before the creation of SpaceX. An investment from the multimillionaire might invigorate Microcosm’s rocket program. Eager to introduce Musk to Wertz, Koenigsmann arranged a meeting to discuss Scorpius and

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million dollars each for design studies. While some awards went to established companies such as Lockheed Martin, the majority were given to smaller firms like SpaceX. Ultimately, SpaceX and AirLaunch, which aimed to drop its rocket from a C-17 aircraft, emerged as finalists. AirLaunch never reached space. D.A.R.P

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in spaceflight. “Before this there were a handful of companies serving the government and commercial launch needs, and it was more of a cartel situation.” SpaceX changed expectations with its low prices and transparency. Shotwell signed her first launch contract in 2003, to orbit a small experimental satellite named TacSat for

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his work, at times, did not meet the exacting standards needed for successful rocket flight.” Musk also expressed goodwill toward Thomas, who remained with SpaceX for about a decade afterward. “I was at his retirement party and expressed my appreciation for his contributions in the strongest possible terms,” Musk said

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take the time needed, as nearly a full year passed between the first and second flights of the rocket. Gradually, throughout the rest of 2006, SpaceX began adopting more traditional aerospace practices. During a conventional rocket assembly process, someone meticulously records the serial number of every component or part added during

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decades of Boeing aerospace heritage, Maser did indeed bring gravitas, and he helped institute some of the inventory control and quality inspection measures that spurred SpaceX’s maturation between its first and second flights. But some employees, such as Koenigsmann, interpreted Maser’s attitude as arrogance. To them, the new

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boss acted like he knew more about rockets than anyone at SpaceX. Koenigsmann had reasons for his frustrations. Maser was hard on the avionics chief, imposing rigorous qualification tests for the Falcon 1 computers that exceeded real

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the engineers would perform the prelaunch static fire test. All of this testing required copious amounts of LOX. To supply liquid oxygen to the rocket, SpaceX ordered five-thousand-gallon containers shipped from the mainland. During the monthlong transit across mostly tropical waters, about one third of each super-chilled tank

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early 1990s, in an effort to become more efficient and businesslike, NASA adopted a “Faster, Better, Cheaper” approach to space science missions. By the time SpaceX was founded, however, several high-profile NASA missions had employed this philosophy and failed. For any aerospace project, the joke became that you could never

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why we fight for mass, and we fight for every fraction of a second of ISP,” said Musk, who now wages this war with the Starship launch system, which he hopes will fulfill his goal of settling Mars. This ambitious spaceship sounds like science fiction. The monstrous first stage rocket has

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twenty-eight large Raptor engines. The second stage, Starship, may one day carry dozens of people to Mars and is designed to be reusable. Because of this it must set aside mass, already at

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but Secret Service agents remained resident at the ranch throughout his presidency. The agents asked a lot of pointed questions, and were not happy. Although SpaceX could not reorient the test stands, the company did gradually begin to get better about warning the surrounding community about future tests. Mueller’s team

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a different new space company that summer, Blue Origin, after graduating from Duke University. Although Bezos’s space company was far more secretive than SpaceX, it shared the same basic philosophy—disrupting the aerospace industry by radically reducing the cost of getting people and stuff into orbit. Following a series

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The impact threw Dunn over the cart’s steering wheel, but he walked away from the accident. The employees on the boat laughed uproariously. Some SpaceXers who stayed overnight fished the coral reefs surrounding Omelek, though they released anything they caught. Small organisms that grow on tropical coral reefs produce ciguatoxin

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everyone gathered around at dinnertime and really enjoyed just sitting down, and relaxing. We would always watch the same movies over and over again, like Starship Troopers. The most important thing is that the camaraderie was great.” The overnighters also built a wooden deck attached to the trailer. From there, they

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climbing toward a cruising altitude above thirty thousand feet. Inside, the cargo compartment took on something of a party atmosphere. Wearing jeans and jackets, the SpaceXers relaxed and soaked up the moment. Steve Cameron, a propulsion technician, broke out an acoustic guitar. They were having the time of their lives.

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the station. The backup plan moved to the front burner. As a result, NASA accelerated the process of awarding contracts for actual supply missions. Although SpaceX, with Dragon, and Orbital Sciences, with its Cygnus vehicle, won COTS development contracts, NASA had no requirement to pick them for the operational phase

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conclusion. When he spoke with engineering peers at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the University of Southern California, he heard similar things. SpaceX had juice with their students, too: the freedom to innovate and resources to go fast summoned the best engineers in the land. Competitors began to

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also won cargo and crew contracts from NASA, and now has its eyes on deep space. From these profits SpaceX has been able to invest in Musk’s ambitious Starship program, which he believes is critical to sending enough people and cargo to Mars to establish a self-sustaining settlement. The

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so. Now his company, with Musk’s constant urging and the accumulated knowledge of the last twenty years, is building the Starship vehicle to one day carry settlers to Mars. SpaceX has undeniably come a long way from its scrappy beginnings in El Segundo, and the desperation of trying to launch from

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entice Firefly to launch from Vandenberg, Air Force officials have eagerly helped, and proactively found solutions to problems. “There is just no question that without SpaceX it would not have happened,” she said. “They convinced everybody else that commercial space is a real thing. And when they did that, the

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in terms of price and performance, Musk pushed for rapid reuse, and then the Falcon Heavy, and a Starlink internet constellation as well as the Starship and Super Heavy Launch System. This incredible pressure wore down his employees, but for someone like Musk who sees only a narrow window to execute

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the bleeding edge of the possible, be it through landing rockets on boats or building interplanetary Starships. SpaceX wants to go to Mars, after all, something no company, space agency, or country has ever done. Will SpaceX get there? Maybe not. But for the adventurous it sure beats pushing a pencil at a

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company, helping to channel the talents of its mostly younger workforce. While many of the brightest engineers have turned their starry-eyed countenances on the Starship program, as vice president of mission assurance, Koenigsmann remains focused on the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. It is important to get those core

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talk with me at length about their experiences. Elon himself made plenty of time, generously inviting me to sit in on his technical meetings for Starship, Starlink, Raptor, and other projects at the company’s factory in Hawthorne. This helped me understand his leadership style. He also opened the doors

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to his factory-beneath-tents in Boca Chica where a new generation of engineers are building Starship, much in the iterative, fast-paced style of the Falcon 1 days. I interviewed many dozens of people for this book, and what surprised

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OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT David Giger, Flight One mission manager BOB REAGAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF MACHINING OPERATIONS BRANDEN SPIKES, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Timeline 2002 MAY 6 SpaceX founded by Elon Musk OCTOBER 31 First gas generator full-duration test-firing (Mojave, California) 2003 MARCH 11 First Merlin engine thrust chamber firing (McGregor

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, Texas) MAY 31 SpaceX employees visit Kwajalein for the first time JULY 2 First Merlin engine turbopump test (Mojave) DECEMBER 4 Falcon 1 displayed outside National Air and Space

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fire attempt from Kwajalein (Omelek Island) DECEMBER 20 First Falcon 1 launch attempt (Omelek Island) 2006 MARCH 24 Falcon 1, Flight One (Omelek) AUGUST 18 SpaceX wins COTS award from NASA 2007 MARCH 21 Falcon 1, Flight Two (Omelek) 2008 AUGUST 3 Falcon 1, Flight Three (Omelek) SEPTEMBER 3 C-17

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five-hundred-foot test flight (Boca Chica, Texas) 2020 MAY 30 First astronauts launch aboard Crew Dragon (Kennedy Space Center) AUGUST 4 First full-sized Starship prototype makes five-hundred-foot test flight (Boca Chica, Texas) Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash “MAKE THIS DISH ANYWHERE A DELICIOUS DINNER IS NECESSARY.” 2

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–95 International Science and Engineering Fair (1978), 30 International Space and Development Conference (1989), 63 International Space Station, 203, 217 Kistler contract, 109, 110, 114 SpaceX and Dragon, 217, 219–20, 221, 230 Iowa State University, 40 Iraq war, 145, 185 Iterative design, 24, 104 Jabwi (Marshallese native), 133 James

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Space Shuttle Atlantis, 90 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 65, 101 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 90, 107 Space Shuttle Discovery, 70–71, 102 SpaceX Dragon. See Dragon SpaceX Kestrel. See Kestrel engine SpaceX Merlin. See Merlin engine Spikes, Branden, 262 Spincraft, 19, 151 Stanford University, 21, 129, 152, 155, 160 Starhopper, 1–2,

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4, 265 Starship, 1, 3, 4, 35, 140, 235, 237, 247 Starship Troopers (movie), 168 Star Trek (TV show), 164, 176 Stock options, 15 Strategic

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whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Cover design by Owen Corrigan Cover photograph © SpaceX Photos from Shutterstock by Dima Zel and ixpert FIRST EDITION Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-297999-5 Version 12212020 Print ISBN: 978

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility

by Robert Zubrin  · 30 Apr 2019  · 452pp  · 126,310 words

several human generations since Apollo, yet nation-states have retreated from their once-bold path beyond our planet. With the amazing private efforts such as SpaceX now bearing fruit, a revolution is upon us such that space exploration is becoming the domain of private companies and citizens. Zubrin paints the picture

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Ann Zubrin, without whose patience, love, and constant support this book never could have been written. Great things are happening. On February 6, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket took flight, demonstrating a capacity to lift sixty tons to low Earth orbit and playfully sending a Tesla Roadster on a trajectory

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three-quarters reusable. This is a revolution. The moon is now within reach. Mars is now within reach. And it's just the beginning. SpaceX is developing the means to allow refueling the booster second stage after it reaches orbit. Once this technology is in hand, the Falcon's interplanetary

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giving it a capability greater than that of the mighty Saturn V rockets that sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s. SpaceX's fully reusable 150-ton-to-orbit Starship launcher, now under development, will multiply that capability nearly three times over again. With such a system, the entire inner solar

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in less than an hour. For comparison, a Boeing 737 has an empty weight of 45 tons. If the Falcon Heavy or its successor, the Starship two-stage launch system, can be made fully reusable, then an entirely new market for space launch can be created, one involving not a hundred

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the Falcon Heavy—competing to take their share of a market that will soon explode in size. They will soon have plenty of company. SpaceX has shown that it is possible for lean, hard-driving entrepreneurial ventures to do—better—what it previously was thought only the governments of major

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line, is quite large, cutting costs to less than a third of the conventional system. This is where the Falcon 9 is right now. SpaceX could advance this technology by making the Falcon 9 upper stage reusable, but since this stage is small, only a modest additional reduction in launch

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company and rents, dominate. What to do? One approach is to go to a larger launch vehicle, such as the fully reusable heavy-lift Starship launcher that SpaceX has under development. By simply increasing the payload, a lower cost per kilogram can be achieved. Indeed, the Falcon Heavy, with sixty-ton-to

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of a company planning to offer suborbital five-minute zero-gravity rides to space tourists, which would not have made it a serious competitor to SpaceX or the aerospace majors. But in September 2016, Blue Origin announced its plan to create the New Glenn, a reusable two-stage Earth-to

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the 1960s, it can punch out launches at somewhat lower costs—if significantly lower reliability—than the American aerospace majors. But Russia has nothing like SpaceX—yet. I am aware of groups over there who would like to start such an enterprise. It's possible they could pull it off.

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Launch, Firefly, and Rocket Lab. Vector Launch was founded by Jim Cantrell, the crack engineer I hooked up with Elon Musk to help him launch SpaceX. After getting that venture underway, Cantrell and his friend Jim Garvey split off to start their own outfit, focusing on the microsatellite market, which is

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$70 million in investment. First launch is expected in 2020. Firefly was founded by Tom Markusic, a veteran of NASA, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. Designed to deliver one thousand kilograms to orbit, Firefly Alpha is a two-stage booster combining traditional LOX/kerosene propulsion with innovative carbon structure technology

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and others, are at least that much again, the total gross annual bill for running the company must exceed $1.2 billion. Now, during 2018, SpaceX performed twenty-one launches. This was an incredible feat because not only were they successful every time, but the number of launches constituted 20 percent

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stage based at the destination. This is precisely the sort of system that is now emerging from the two-stage reusable booster development programs of SpaceX and Blue Origin. The reason a two-stage system is necessary is a result of the basic equations of rocketry. To obtain global reach,

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are all assumed to have a ground liftoff mass of 2,500 tons, roughly the takeoff mass of the Saturn V, space shuttle, or SpaceX's Starship booster system design, and employ methane/oxygen rockets for propulsion.1 (Methane/oxygen is the best propellant combination for rocket planes because it offers high

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constellation consisting of 4,600 satellites, orbiting at 1,557 kilometers altitude.8 Not to be outdone, in May 2017, Elon Musk announced that his SpaceX company would be fielding its own constellation, named Starlink, consisting of 4,425 small satellites orbiting at 1,200 kilometers, operating in eighty-three orbital

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sending forty tons to lunar orbit or trans-Mars injection is beyond the current capability of the Falcon Heavy or any other existing launch vehicle. SpaceX is working on creating such power, which can be obtained by refueling the Falcon Heavy second stage on orbit or by building a bigger booster

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, such as the planned Starship. But we don't have it yet. It could also be done by the NASA SLS, albeit at considerable expense (about $1 billion per

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program has continued to creep forward and now is approaching ignition is little short of remarkable. But now, in large part as a result of SpaceX's demonstration that it is possible for a hard-driving entrepreneurial organization to achieve things that previously it was believed only the governments of major

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However, Musk's plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. As described by Musk, the SpaceX ITS would consist of a very large two-stage fully reusable launch system, powered by methane/oxygen chemical bipropellant. The suborbital first stage would have

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locally produced methane/oxygen propellant, and solved the problem of landing large payloads on Mars by employing the same breakthrough supersonic retro-propulsion technique that SpaceX has demonstrated on its Falcon rockets. On the weak side, the system was way too big, and flying such a giant rocket all the

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renamed the BFR) by a factor of almost four to a much more manageable 150 tons to orbit.8 Furthermore, the new BFR (later renamed “Starship”) had a “cargo variant” allowing it to carry payloads to LEO or TLI, which could then complete missions to the moon or Mars on their

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settlers riding the freight. But best of all, now it's not just talk. As these lines are being written, the parts of the first Starship are being made. We are on our way. Exploring Mars requires no miraculous new technologies, no orbiting spaceports, and no gigantic interplanetary space cruisers. We

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building a “Mini BFR” based on the upper stage of a Falcon 9 to use as a test article to support the BFR (subsequently renamed “Starship”) development program. I was struck by the potential of such a system, so I wrote him the following memo. Elon; I saw that you are

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. That's great. I hope you take it further and make it an operational system. This would offer many advantages. 1. It would give SpaceX a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle, the first in history, which could be a very profitable workhorse for the company. 2. It would provide

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to begin the world anew. —Thomas Paine, 1776 The question of colonizing Mars is not fundamentally one of transportation. If we were to use the Starship or a comparable vehicle to launch habitats carrying settlers to Mars on one-way trips, firing them off at the same rate we launched the

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9 with a Dragon, a Spartan two-person human mission to a near-Earth asteroid in interplanetary space could be readily accomplished. However, once the SpaceX Starship is available, it could be used to fly a crew of twenty or more to a near-Earth asteroid in style. The mission would be

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off for the two-year round-trip voyage to the asteroid, with plenty of room and company aboard to enjoy the trip. (See plate 9.) Starship is not an artificial gravity spacecraft, but if two were flown, they could tether off each other nose to nose. If the tether were five

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artificial gravity enabled by tethering off a counterweight brought along for the purpose. Whether done in a small current technology hab module or a luxurious Starship cruiser, Gaiashield would be a terrific asteroid science mission, but it would be more: it would be an icebreaker mission. Two things have kept

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technical community to become cynical. “Fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be” became a common quip. But then a breakthrough happened. SpaceX demonstrated that it is possible for a well-run, lean, and creative entrepreneurial organization to achieve things—and do so much more quickly—that were

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bear fruit. A PROGRAM FOR ACTION In the beginning, there was the word. There are those who think that because the entrepreneurial space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving ahead so nicely, we no longer need NASA or other government-led efforts. They could not be more mistaken. There

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5. Mars Direct surface base. Habitation module is at left, energy recovery ventilator at right. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 6. Once SpaceX implements its plans to refuel upper stages on orbit, the nowoperational Falcon Heavy will have greater trans-Mars throw capability than a Saturn V rocket

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vision for colonizing Mars. The ITS was subsequently renamed the Big Falcon Rocket or BFR, then Starship. Image courtesy of SpaceX. Plate 8. In the course of things, children will be born and families will be raised on Mars, the first true colonists of a new

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branch of human civilization. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 9. SpaceX illustration of its proposed 2023 artists’ cruise around the moon. Provided the musicians are up to it, voyages to near-Earth asteroids could be next

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. Image courtesy of SpaceX. Plate 10. Jupiter's moon Europa is an ocean world entirely covered by sea ice. The subsurface ocean is kept liquid by heating due to

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“bar.” bipropellant: A rocket propellant combination including both a fuel and oxidizer. Examples include methane/oxygen, hydrogen/oxygen, kerosene/hydrogen peroxide, and so on. BFR: SpaceX's concept for a reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle with a payload capacity of about 150 tons to low Earth orbit. The “Big

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in judging a rocket engine's performance. Frequently abbreviated “Isp.” SSTO: Single-stage-to-orbit. Starship: A fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle with a payload capacity of 150 tons being developed by the SpaceX company. Formerly known as the BFR. telerobotic operation: Remote control of some device, such as

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rockets), 36 Ariane V (heavy-lift rocket), 107 Arrhenius, Svante, 255 artificial gravity. See gravity artificial greenhouse gases. See terraforming artist cruise around moon (2023 SpaceX plan), plate 9 Artsutanov, Y. N., 93, 94, 95 ASAT (antisatellite systems), 63–64 Ash, Robert, 147 asteroids, 125–50 claiming of, 138–40

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53 Bezos, Jeff, 12, 34–35, 57, 176, 327 BFR (“Big F…ing Rocket”) (SpaceX), plate 7, 110, 339 also known as Starship, 110, 334, 344 Mini BFR, 110–12 See also Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX); Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) bioengineering, 213, 219, 223, 230–37 bipropellant. See propellants and propulsion black holes, 252, 262

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, 265–69, 268 vision of extraterrestrials in the year 3000, 323–24 See also intelligence, search for; life, search for fairing, 340 Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX), 340 comparison of space launch systems, 36 Falcon Heavy, plate 1, plate 3, 27–28, 33, 35 as a heavy-lift booster, 11–12, 107

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Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions, 130 heavy-lift rockets, 11–12, 69–70, 102, 103, 107. See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); New Glenn booster (Blue Origin); Saturn V (rocket); Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) heliocentric orbit, 341 Helion Energy, 179 helium-3 (He3), 143 moon as a source of, 83–91, 317 outer solar system

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29 International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX), plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) interstellar communications, 257–58 use of bacteria, 258–60 interstellar travel, 181–214, 214 as indication of extraterrestrial intelligence

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329, 330 ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Itokawa (asteroid), 130 ITS. See Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX) Janhunen, Pekka, 204 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 197 Jarboe, Tom, 180 Jefferson, Thomas, 125, 128 Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), 99, 129, 130, 147, 153, 332

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system to reduce costs, 39–45 lower costs allowing for orbital industries, 49–50 See also commercial benefits of spaceflight Elon Musk and development of SpaceX, 30–37 impact of cost-plus contracts, 22–24, 330–31 need for reusable spacecraft, 21–23 rise of microlaunchers, 37–38 skyhook as

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–37 heavy-lift rockets, 107 Interplanetary Transport System plan, plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) planned 2023 artists’ cruise around, plate 9 sending Tesla Roadster past Mars, 11 size of, 39–40 Starlink satellites, 53 and two-stage systems, 41,

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45 See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); Musk, Elon SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, 177 specific impulse (Isp), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341,

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Sridhar, K. R., 147 SR-71 (Boeing), 277 ST (spherical tokamak), 175–76, 176, 180 Stapledon, Olaf, 238 Starlink (SpaceX), 53 Star Maker (Stapeldon), 238 stars, travel to. See interstellar travel Starship (rocket) (SpaceX), 11, 12, 27–28, 28, 41, 77, 112, 134–35, 344 originally known as BFR, 110, 334, 344 reducing

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launch costs of, 27 See also Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX) Star Trek (television series), 323 Steins (asteroid), 130 stellarators,

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reactor propulsion, 143 of fusion reactor propulsion, 160, 161, 168, 179 use of high thrust FRC rockets to depart Jupiter, 179 of Interplanetary Transport System (SpaceX), 108 and magnetic sails, 202, 203, 204 and Noah's Ark Eggs (seed spaceships), 210 and Nuclear Electric Propulsion systems, 343 and nuclear thermal rockets

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee  · 14 Nov 2023  · 381pp  · 113,173 words

to generate lots of models (via modularity) and lots of generations (via fast iteration) is a great way to maximize learning and improvement. Tesla and SpaceX, two companies associated with Elon Musk, are leaders in the great geek norm of speed. Their achievements are impressive. As we saw earlier in this

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testing, said, “To see something updated that quickly is quite remarkable. We’ve never seen a manufacturer do this in the course of a week.” SpaceX also stands out from the competition. It’s the world’s only maker of commercially viable reusable rockets, and now carries about two-thirds of

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all the payload that leaves Earth for space. One of the main reasons SpaceX’s market share is so high is that its costs are so low. A 2018 NASA report found that compared to the Ariane 5 rocket

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developed and launched by France’s Arianespace, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was 80 percent cheaper at putting a kilogram of payload into low-Earth orbit.11 The company’s adherence to the great

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geek norm of speed is visible throughout the development of its newest and biggest rocket, called Starship. This vessel’s mission is to take humans to the moon and beyond. Along the way it will also put a lot of communications satellites

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and other payload into orbit around the Earth. But SpaceX didn’t work on Starship by creating a thorough overall plan and then sticking to it. Instead, the company worked like kindergartners in the marshmallow challenge: it started

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building things, getting feedback on them, and making changes. The initial plan was for the main body of the Starship spaceship to be made out of a carbon fiber composite, which has an excellent strength-to-weight ratio. In a presentation Musk gave in September

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of these parts: a thin-walled hollow black cylinder, thirty feet in diameter, made out of carbon fiber. Just four months later, however, SpaceX announced that the Starship spaceship would be made out of stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. The company had learned from its experiments with carbon fiber that although

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to be scrapped. So the idea of a carbon fiber body was abandoned. Rather than seeing this switch as evidence of a flawed development process, SpaceX viewed it as proof that its process was working just as intended: the company was iterating quickly and incorporating lessons learned, even if these lessons

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were expensive. As “space enthusiast” Florian Kordina put it on the Everyday Astronaut website in May of 2020, Everything for Starship is still on the table at this moment. I mean, we are literally seeing them build a factory around a rocket instead of vice versa

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is an option here, if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” Kordina was right about future hardware failures and explosions. The eighth Starship spaceship built, labeled SN8, launched successfully but crashed and burned on its attempted landing (there was no loss of life; all SN missions were uncrewed

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never made it to the launchpad, but SN15 finally completed a successful soft landing (although with a small fire that was extinguished within twenty minutes). SpaceX felt that it had learned what it needed to from these experiments, and announced that its next test flight would be an uncrewed orbital trip

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around the Earth, featuring all of Starship’s main elements: the spaceship itself, a huge booster rocket, and a total of thirty-nine newly developed Raptor engines to propel them. By the

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spring of 2021, NASA was impressed enough with progress on Starship and other programs to award SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to land astronauts on the moon. The company will have some competition in this arena from NASA

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itself. Since 2011, the space agency has been at work on its own large rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS). Compared to SpaceX, NASA has developed the SLS in a way that’s heavy on up-front planning and low on iteration and experimentation. For example, there have

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like $8 billion. Meanwhile rocket engineer Ian Vorbach, who writes a newsletter about space startups, estimates that early Starship launches will cost $150 to $250 million each. The vast differences between NASA and SpaceX are well summarized by Musk: “I have this mantra. It’s called, ‘If a schedule is long, it

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, this apartment will quadruple in value.” 11 Compared to the US Space Shuttle, which was retired in 2011 after a second fatal in-flight accident, SpaceX was 95 percent cheaper at getting a kilogram into low-Earth orbit, and 75 percent cheaper at getting cargo and crew to the International Space

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work, we’ll be great with that.” In chapter 6 we learned that as SpaceX develops its novel rockets, it emphasizes learning rapidly instead of getting the design right from the start. Several versions of its Starship rocket exploded as they attempted to land. Elon Musk and his colleagues would have preferred

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them to alight flawlessly, but when they didn’t, SpaceX didn’t change its approach.10 Nor did the company stick to its

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original plan to make the Starship rocket out of carbon fiber. When experience showed that this manufacturing method was too unreliable and

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expensive, SpaceX simply walked away from it. Amazon draws a distinction between “one-way doors,” or decisions that

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company use the waterfall approach to developing software to write the code for its next car, or the head of a rocket development program at SpaceX who insisted that the team stick with the first design it came up with no matter what testing revealed. Both of those hypotheticals would be

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30, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/tesla-consumer-reports.html. 64 two-thirds of all the payload: Kate Duffy, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Aiming to Launch Its Most-Used Rocket Once a Week on Average This Year,” Business Insider, February 4, 2022, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk

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-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-every-week-payload-2022-2. 65 2018 NASA report: Harry Jones, “The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost,” 48th International

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Conference on Environmental Systems, 2018. 66 presentation Musk gave: Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Just Gave the Most Revealing Look Yet at the Rocket Ship SpaceX Is Building to Fly to the Moon and Mars,” Business Insider, September 22, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk

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-spacex-pictures-big-falcon-rocket-spaceship-2018-9. 67 made out of stainless steel: Ryan Whitwam, “Elon Musk Explains Why the Starship Will Be Stainless Steel,” ExtremeTech, January 24, 2019, www.extremetech.com/extreme/284346-elon-musk

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-explains-why-the-starship-will-be-stainless-steel. 68 “Everything for Starship”: Florian Kordina, “SLS vs. Starship: Why Do Both Programs Exist?,” Everyday Astronaut, May 1, 2020, https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/. 69 Kordina was right: “List of SpaceX Starship Flight Tests,” Wikipedia, February 5, 2023, https://en.wikipedia

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.org/wiki/List_of_SpaceX_Starship_flight_tests. 70 $2.9 billion

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contract: Kenneth Chang, “SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander,” New

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York Times, April 16, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html. 71 maiden flight was originally scheduled

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like $8 billion: Berger, “Finally, We Know Production Costs.” 76 $150 to $250 million: Ian Vorbach, “Is Starship Really Going to Revolutionize Launch Costs?,” SpaceDotBiz, May 19, 2022, https://newsletter.spacedotbiz.com/p/starship-really-going-revolutionize-launch-costs. 77 “‘If a schedule is long, it’s wrong’”: Elon Musk, Wikiquote, Wikimedia

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

as an entrepreneur and executive, Musk had thin skin and wanted to know everything about how the public perceived himself and his companies—Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. That morning, however, he focused on his primary addiction: Twitter. Musk had amassed more than 22 million followers on

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heavens before exploding into flaming heaps of discarded ideas. Before eBay had even completed its acquisition of PayPal, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in May 2002. He committed $100 million of his PayPal windfall to space, with the goal of getting to Mars and making humans a multiplanetary

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fired Eberhard and took on the chief executive role himself. The company soldiered on toward building a luxury sedan, losing millions of dollars a year. SpaceX also struggled, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy after three failed launches. In 2008, its Falcon 1 rocket finally reached orbit, leading the company to

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public relations staff, sometimes emailing them well past midnight, to correct the record. Reporters who constantly questioned him or wrote too critically of Tesla or SpaceX were personally blacklisted by Musk. His craving for narrative control led him to Twitter. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher had joined the 140

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AI at speaking engagements and on Twitter. It was all nonsense, Zuckerberg believed. Musk, enraged, refused to back down. Despite Musk’s disagreement with Zuckerberg, SpaceX did not turn down Facebook’s business. It needed the money and attention. The company loaded the Facebook satellite onto a Falcon 9 rocket at

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find out what had happened, when Zuckerberg posted to his Facebook page. “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” the Facebook chief wrote

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solved hard problems like building rockets and electric cars. But Musk held his fire, letting his grudge against Zuckerberg build inside him. * * * >>> At Tesla and SpaceX, Musk refused to take advice from anyone about his posts, and when one executive dared to point out that his tweets about deadlines made life

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Musk had emerged victorious in his “pedo guy” tweet lawsuit only a few weeks earlier. Over the video call, Musk, seated behind his desk at SpaceX’s headquarters, was unlike his online persona. He was reserved and sometimes barely audible, lacking the spikiness or juvenile humor that permeated his tweets. Dorsey

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knew where he stood on extraterrestrial life. * * * >>> As Musk talked with his future employees, he was also working to put down a small rebellion at SpaceX. The previous month, Business Insider had dropped a bombshell story, reporting on the existence of a settlement between Musk’s rocket company and a former

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toxic, male-dominated culture, led by a chief executive who tweeted about sex acts and starting a university with the acronym TITS. Months earlier, female SpaceX employees had already spoken up about stories of sexual harassment and discrimination, which the company brushed aside. Even after the Insider story published, Musk continued

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reflect our work, our mission, or our values.” By the following day, five of the letter’s organizers were rounded up and fired for what SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell labeled “overreaching activism.” Others were brought into meetings with managers, who had clearly been told to discipline their subordinates. In

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sometimes lionize the changemakers of the human race. Isaacson was shadowing Musk for his next project, an authorized biography of the genius behind Tesla and SpaceX. Isaacson asked Crawford for her contact information and shot her a toothy grin. “I can tell you’ll be important,” he said. Crawford eventually

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blue badges carried by employees, and instead held red visitor or green vendor keycards. Most of them were men. Some of them sported Tesla- or SpaceX-stamped apparel. To the Twitter employees, these outsiders could not be trusted, and they came up with a nickname for the intruders: “the goons.” * * * >>>

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chief executive. He said he was angry at Sundar Pichai, Google’s leader, for not putting antennas into Android phones that could connect with Starlink, SpaceX’s proprietary satellite internet service. Then Musk, riffing off his own story, offered up something else he had heard to impress the executive even more

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and other employees began to understand that Musk’s expertise in other areas didn’t necessarily translate into running or understanding Twitter. At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing challenge. But Twitter was a social and psychological problem. Beyond the engineering challenges of keeping one of

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to Austin to brood. Musk’s growing paranoia was palpable over that weekend. Led by Christopher Stanley, an information security engineer who had come from SpaceX, workers examined a spreadsheet that had been created soon after the deal and listed the names of high-skilled or long-tenured employees to determine

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accounts that were set to private, meaning that no one except their followers should have been able to see their posts. HR executives imported from SpaceX stepped in to handle some firings, fueling the paranoia among employees that Musk’s people were snooping on them. These episodes made employees fearful about

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a.m. in San Francisco, some undecided employees received invitations to meetings hosted by some combination of Musk, his advisers, and executives from Tesla or SpaceX. The meetings were a last-minute sales pitch intended to convince employees to stay. In one gathering with the corporate finance team led by Birchall

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ordered Twitter’s human resources team to start drafting a separation agreement for Baker so that Musk could fire him. Birchall claimed that workers from SpaceX’s legal and government relations teams were conducting an internal investigation into Baker’s conduct, and the result of their investigation would determine whether or

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was marked by Musk’s online harassment. * * * >>> With Spiro’s departure from Twitter, Musk needed new deputies. He imported a new raft of employees from SpaceX to fill the void, including Chris Cardaci, the company’s vice president of legal, and Tim Hughes, its senior vice president for global business and

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the congressman ammunition for his House select subcommittee on “the weaponization of the federal government.” Musk later invited staffers from Jordan’s office to visit SpaceX’s facilities in Texas. He also found a sympathetic ear in the FTC’s lone Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson. In February, he secured a

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moved for moments like this. As the sun rose over the Gulf of Mexico, the SpaceX chief watched as massive plumes of white smoke and an earth-shaking bellow emanated from the thirty-three engines on Starship. This was the rocket he promised would one day bring humans to Mars, and on

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its second test launch, SpaceX was hoping to prove its vehicle could reach orbit. With the countdown finished, the 397

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eventually reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles in its eight-minute flight, before exploding. The SpaceX engineers in the control room went berserk. The test was largely a success, showing that Starship could viably take off and separate from its booster engine. They were one step closer to Mars. While

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Musk celebrated with his family at the SpaceX facility, something else remained in the back of his mind. Within an

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hour and a half of the Starship test, Musk was already back on his phone and on X. He replied to a fan

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erupted. His supporters tweeted that McCormick was a Biden lackey and politically motivated to take down their hero. The billionaire reincorporated Neuralink in Nevada and SpaceX in Texas, pulling them out of Delaware’s jurisdiction, and called on other companies to follow suit. Some of Twitter’s former employees took extended

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who wanted to push him out. Musk and then-girlfriend Claire Boucher, better known as the singer Grimes, pose together during a 2018 event at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Elon Musk and Steve Davis, the chief executive of the Boring Company, at an event for the tunneling start-up in

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we navigated the world of book publishing. We’re also particularly grateful for Dai Wakabayashi’s mentorship, steady spirit, and searing comebacks. Reporting on Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and the wider world of Musk can be a trying endeavor. No single journalist or publication can handle it all. We’re thankful for

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on conversations and interviews totaling more than 150 hours with nearly 100 people. Those people included current and former employees for Twitter, X, Tesla, and SpaceX; lawyers, bankers, and other associates who worked for both sides during Elon Musk’s negotiations to buy Twitter; as well as friends and acquaintances of

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Workers They’re More Likely to Die in a Car Crash Than from Coronavirus.” BuzzFeed News, March 13, 2020. buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-spacex-employees-car-crash-coronavirus. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT labeled some 300,000 tweets: Fung, Brian. “Twitter Says It Labeled 300,000 Tweets around

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Shopping Spree He had a reputation for using drugs: Glazer, Emily, and Kirsten Grind. “Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX.” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2024, www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e1. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “as collateral to secure

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06/16/technology/elon-musk-twitter-employees-meeting.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Business Insider had dropped a bombshell story: McHugh, Rich. “A SpaceX Flight Attendant Said Elon Musk Exposed Himself and Propositioned Her for Sex, Documents Show. The Company Paid $250,000 for Her Silence.” Business Insider, May

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19, 2022. businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Elon is seen as

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February 8, 2023, sec. World. nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/turkey-earthquake-twitter-blocked.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk, whose SpaceX was pushing to launch its Starlink: Fernholz, Tim. “How Turkey Is Using Starlink to Win a Tesla Factory.” Quartz, September 18, 2023. qz.com/turkey

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-erdogan-elon-musk-starlink-spacex-tesla-1850849958. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Twitter had faced immense pressure from Narendra: Lyons, Kim. “Police in India Raid Twitter Offices in Probe

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I did the Twitter acquisition was not because”: Alfar, Gail. “Elon Musk’s Talk at Morgan Stanley TMT 2023 on Twitter, X.com, Tesla and Starship.” What’s up Tesla, March 13, 2023. whatsuptesla.com/2023/03/12/x-4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Three weeks later, Twitter’s

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html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 45: Tell It to Earth At 7:03 in the morning on Saturday, November 18: Chang, Kenneth. “SpaceX Starship Launch: Highlights from the 2nd Flight of Elon Musk’s Moon and Mars Rocket.” New York Times, November 19, 2023. nytimes.com/live/2023/11

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/18/science/spacex-starship-launch-elon-musk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk stood with his palms pressed together as if in prayer: Musk, Kimbal. “Focused.” Twitter,

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/wsyXJQJr3v.” Twitter, November 18, 2023. twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725926972423852296. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT With the countdown finished, the 397-foot rocket: Chang, “SpaceX Starship Launch.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This is the richest man in the world”: Kaplan, Alex. “Far-Right Figures and White Nationalists Celebrate Elon

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views and, 406, 423–29 revenue from, 294, 320, 325, 330, 339, 340, 354, 357, 365, 380, 381, 388, 401, 403, 409, 417, 419 for SpaceX, 340 Yaccarino and, 417–18 Ukraine war and, 97, 152, 325 Upfronts presentation and, 408 Africa, 35–36, 44, 45, 79 Afshar, Omead, 115, 134

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Berlin, 109 bodyguards of, 7 businesses of Boring Company, 23, 37, 134, 179, 239, 241, 267, 268, 314 Neuralink, 23, 38, 179, 205, 250, 434 SpaceX, see SpaceX Tesla, see Tesla Motors X.com (bank), 29–31, 415 Zip2, 29, 207 see also Twitter under Elon Musk; X Chappelle show incident, 375

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124, 211 Solomon, Sasha, 347, 348 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 427–30 Soros, George, 406, 408 South by Southwest, 15 Soviet Union, 37, 184, 193, 364 SpaceX, 1, 23, 24, 31–36, 47, 96, 101, 115, 137, 165, 167, 175, 181, 208, 241, 250, 256, 290, 291, 299, 316, 317, 320, 322

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loan from, 253 sexual harassment at, 200–201 Starbase facility of, 78–79 Starlink service of, 102, 103, 244–45, 280, 332, 363, 374, 400 Starship test launch of, 423–25 tunnel project of, 314 Twitter advertising of, 340 Spears, Britney, 290 special purpose vehicles (SPVs), 178 Spiegel, Evan, 199

…

views and, 406, 423–29 revenue from, 294, 320, 325, 330, 339, 340, 354, 357, 365, 380, 381, 388, 401, 403, 409, 417, 419 for SpaceX, 340 Yaccarino and, 417–18 Apple App store and, 317–19, 333, 365–66 Blue subscription service of, 285, 295, 297, 306, 310–19, 323

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come. The carbon footprint of Amazon’s shipping network or SpaceX’s rocket fleet can’t possibly matter as much as hastening the glorious immortal future of humanity in space. And if that future never comes

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close match for my philosophy” and claims that he is simply taking the actions he must take to preserve humanity.50 “Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” says Tom Moline, a

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former SpaceX engineer. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.” Moline was fired after making

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complaints about the workplace at SpaceX. A 2023 Reuters report uncovered over six hundred workplace injuries, including amputations, head wounds, and one death. Most were never reported to OSHA. According to

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Reuters, SpaceX’s “lax safety culture, more than a dozen current and former employees said, stems in part from Musk’s disdain for perceived bureaucracy and a

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belief inside SpaceX that it’s leading an urgent quest to create a refuge in space from a dying Earth.”51 Such monomania makes things simple. Rather than

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put aside questions about how exactly traveling light-years from star to star or galaxy to galaxy would work without technology straight off of the starship Enterprise. There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would

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lot, with the ultimate plan of sending a million people there by 2050.62 As of this writing, he says he plans to land a SpaceX rocket on Mars by 2029.63 While taking Musk seriously is increasingly difficult—it seems likely that he’ll say and do many bizarre or

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hurtful things in the months between the writing and publishing of this book—he still has enormous power and influence, and SpaceX is certainly a serious company, at least for now. It is the sole provider of crewed launches on US soil for NASA (as of 2024

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Starlink system is one of the few options for cell service in many truly remote areas, and future versions of SpaceX’s existing Starship launch vehicles could, theoretically, go to Mars. A SpaceX rocket even launched a Tesla out past Mars’s orbit in 2018. Musk’s timeline for Mars is probably too

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optimistic—over the years he’s given many other dates for boots on Mars and uncrewed landings, and missed them all—but a SpaceX rocket landing on Mars at some point in the next few decades seems like a reasonable possibility.64 The problem is everything else in Musk

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, meaning that everything would be far more expensive than on a remote island on Earth. All of those shipments would be coming from one supplier: SpaceX, which would have a more complete monopoly than any corporation ever enjoyed in a company town on Earth. Even the air the Mars residents breathe

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.86 Nor is an arms race the only kind of international crisis that could be precipitated by an attempt to colonize space. In 2020, Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, made headlines with a clause buried in their user agreement that stated, in part, that “the parties recognize Mars as a

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, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1011083630301536256; see also, Nick Lucchesi, “Elon Musk Calls on the Public to ‘Preserve Human Consciousness’ with Starship,” Inverse, September 28, 2019, www.inverse.com/article/59676-spacex-starship-presentation. 42 Richard Fuisz et al., “New World: Interstellar,” February 22, 2019, in Anatomy of Next, podcast, Founders Fund, foundersfund

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) saying things to this effect. 50 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (now X), August 1, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1554335028313718784. 51 Marisa Taylor, “At SpaceX, Worker Injuries Soar in Elon Musk’s Rush to Mars,” Reuters, November 10, 2023, www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report

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/spacex-musk-safety/. 52 Leonard David, “Jeff Bezos’ Vision: ‘A Trillion Humans in the Solar System,’” Space.com, July 21, 2017, www.space.com/37572-jeff-

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://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1011083630301536256. See also, Nick Lucchesi, “Elon Musk Calls on the Public to ‘Preserve Human Consciousness’ with Starship,” Inverse, September 28, 2019, www.inverse.com/article/59676-spacex-starship-presentation. 62 George Dvorsky, “Elon Musk’s Plan to Send a Million Colonists to Mars by 2050 Is Pure Delusion,” Gizmodo

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-delusion-1848839584. 63 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (now X), March 15, 2024, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1768810190718009446. 64 Kenneth Chang, “Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship’s Ambitious Launch Timeline,” New York Times, September 28, 2019, updated May 5, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk

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-spacex-starship.html. 65 Mrigakshi Dixit, “How Space Radiation Threatens Lunar Exploration,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 18, 2023, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-space-radiation-threatens-lunar-

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Earth,’” CNBC, March 9, 2020, updated January 12, 2021, www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/spacex-plans-how-elon-musk-see-life-on-mars.html; Eric Berger, “Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Build One Starship a Week—and Settle Mars,” Ars Technica, March 5, 2020, https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03

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/inside-elon-musks-plan-to-build-one-starship-a-week-and-settle-mars/; Mike Brown, “SpaceX Mars City: Elon Musk Details 1 Test Its Success Depends On,” Inverse, October 19, 2020, updated February 20, 2024, www.inverse

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.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-test. 69 Paul Krugman, “Elon Musk, Mars and the Modern Economy,” New York Times, June 7, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/

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escape velocity would reach after falling from the Moon’s orbit down to Earth’s atmosphere—just as the Apollo missions did. 87 Mike Brown, “SpaceX Mars City: Legal Experts Respond to ‘Gibberish’ Free Planet Claim,” Inverse, November 3, 2020, updated February 20, 2024, www.inverse.com/innovation

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/spacex-mars-city-legal. 88 Ibid. 89 For much, much more on the ways developing space technology can make the world less safe, see Deudney’s

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

by Zoë Schiffer  · 13 Feb 2024  · 343pp  · 92,693 words

, no one else tried to challenge Musk’s reality. Musk’s fraught takeover of Twitter had captivated the country for months. The genius behind Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink had grandly declared that his next mission was to restore free speech to the public town square. “This is a

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him a way to talk to his audience, circumventing traditional media outlets. Now, if Musk wanted to hype the accomplishments of his visionary rocket company SpaceX, or his pioneering electric vehicle company Tesla, he wouldn’t need to do it through a gatekeeping journalist. He could just pull out his phone

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was really interesting, that’s substantive. He could’ve done a lot of other things, and he didn’t.” Just ten years after its founding, SpaceX had made great progress. “Splashdown successful!! Sending fast boat to Dragon lat/long provided by P3 tracking planes #Dragon,” Musk tweeted on May 31, 2012

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. Behind the jargon was a historic announcement: SpaceX had successfully delivered cargo to the International Space Station, making it the first private company to ever do so. The post garnered only 340 retweets

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. * * * — The electric car manufacturer Tesla is so strongly associated with Elon Musk that it’s easy to forget that he didn’t start it. Like SpaceX, it was an ambitious company, attempting to combat climate change—save the planet, and thus, the human race—by shifting the world from its reliance

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sued and settled with Musk. But the drama didn’t matter. This time, Musk was the ouster, not the ousted. If people were curious about SpaceX, they were rabid about Tesla. And the best place to stay up-to-date on the company? The CEO’s Twitter feed. By 2018, eight

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-19 pandemic (“The coronavirus panic is dumb”), and shared transphobic beliefs (“Pronouns suck”), cultivating fandoms on right-wing corners of the internet. The successes of SpaceX and Tesla buoyed his reputation. Sure, he was posting in a manner that would get most other CEOs ousted, but his companies were innovative—and

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Tesla’s share price continued to reflect that. SpaceX was pushing the United States forward in an industry known for groundbreaking science and technology; Tesla had made electric cars a commercial reality. This brilliant

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told me, essentially, that if his companies didn’t make it, humanity was fucked.” Through Tesla, he was pushing the world toward clean energy. Through SpaceX, he was ensuring the human race’s survival even if Tesla failed to save Earth. Now, through Twitter, he believed he had a chance to

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leader. Twitter had seventy-five hundred employees. The sink tweet got 1.4 million Likes. Musk arrived with an entourage. Dozens of engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company were seen around the office in the days to come, along with a host of advisers: Jason Calacanis and Antonio

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for creators and anticipated Musk would be a receptive audience. “I saw [Musk] as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company,” she later said. She told Musk she wanted to

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, the notion of opening Twitter’s API was directly at odds with how Musk ran his other companies. Part of his playbook at Tesla and SpaceX involved owning nearly every aspect of the supply chain. If he could hire engineers to build a product in-house, why outsource it to another

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asked. Then he pinged a few higher-ups to see what he should do. They told him that Stanley, who worked in Information Security at SpaceX, was part of Musk’s inner circle. “If he says we have to do this, we have to do this,” one explained. Doherty did as

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a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable.” To some extent, employees had expected this announcement. Remote work wasn’t allowed at Tesla and SpaceX. But the severity and speed of the new policy made it seem like a loyalty test. For the last two years under Dorsey and Agrawal

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, and yes, the recent firings had sucked. But those who remained had a chance to make history, building a super app alongside the CEO of SpaceX. It was worth it. Then, on November 16, Lin woke up to see a new email from Musk with the subject line, “A Fork in

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was struck by the man’s bravery. But Musk brushed it off, launching into a monologue about the success he’d had at Tesla and SpaceX. “If you want to win, stick with me,” he said. No one said anything after that. The group got up and walked out of the

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nervously sweating for hours. It smelled musty. Lin steered clear of the anxious tweeps and sat down next to a group of employees from Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. James Musk, Elon’s cousin, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “It was exciting,” Lin said. These engineers understood what it meant

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in Slack moments after Trump’s account was supposed to go live. “What happened here?” asked Christopher Stanley, one of Musk’s trusted lieutenants from SpaceX. It turned out the reinstatement hadn’t worked. The team tried again. Success. Then they realized the “follow” button on Trump’s account wasn’t

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that Twitter would only pay rent over [his] dead body,” the lawsuit alleged. Steve Davis complained that Twitter had a fraction of the employees of SpaceX but paid five times the annual rent. (No one mentioned that Twitter had employed more than twice as many people when it acquired its various

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to join her in Miami for MMA Global’s POSSIBLE conference in April, a major event in the advertising industry. Initially, Musk agreed. Then SpaceX decided to launch Starship, its Mars rocket, around the time of the event. “He was going to blow it off, obviously,” Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, tells

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me. At the last minute, SpaceX postponed the launch due to a technical problem, freeing up Musk’s schedule to attend the conference. He decided to

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, it hit one million subscribers in two months.) In the days following the advertising conference, Musk was distracted by the SpaceX launch, which had been rescheduled to April 20. (The Starship rocket exploded shortly after launch, spewing rubble over miles of land.) Yaccarino grew nervous that Musk wasn’t returning her calls

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rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg, who’d been feuding on and off for seven years. Musk, who’d been cash-poor while building Tesla and SpaceX, “brooded” about how easily Zuckerberg had made money in software, while Zuckerberg longed for the entrepreneurial esteem that Musk garnered in Silicon Valley, according to

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, 2010, 2:31 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15434727182. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT His father, Errol Musk: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2017), 62. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I’ve got a million-dollar car

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Musk,” PandoDaily, July 17, 2012, YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=uegOUmgKB4E. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT partially orchestrated by Thiel: Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Tesla’s original founders, Martin Eberhard: Jay Yarow, “Tesla Settles Lawsuit—Everyone

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/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I really like computer games”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “accelerant to creating X”: Dan Milmo and Amy Hawkins, “ ‘The Everything App

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H,” Elon Musk text exhibits (Twitter v. Musk). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I came very close to dying”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I am offering to buy”: Schdule 13D, Twitter, Inc., United States Securities

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: Marina Koren, “The Messy Reality of Elon Musk’s Space City,” The Atlantic, April 27, 2023, theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/spacex-starship-explosion-dust-debris-texas/673881. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Excited to announce”: Hannah Murphy, “Why Linda Yaccarino Took on the Wildest Job in

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith  · 6 Nov 2023  · 490pp  · 132,502 words

don’t blame you—the public discourse around space settlement is full of myths, fantasies, and outright misunderstanding of basic facts. In 2020, for example, SpaceX’s internet service provider, Starlink, released a Terms of Service agreement that declared that “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

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mass in orbit for decades. That was the state of play until the 2010s when, largely as a result of a US policy shift and SpaceX in particular, the cost of putting stuff in space began to fall dramatically again. This doesn’t just mean more rocket launches, it means more

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fourteen hundred active satellites. As of 2021, there were about five thousand; and as of October 2022, around three thousand working satellites are controlled by SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink. Space tourism, long promised but rarely delivered on, appears to actually be happening. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin

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regularly sends people on 100-kilometer-high hops, and SpaceX has contracted to send tourists around the Moon. Where once there were only a few government agencies doing space launch, there is now a growing

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space-station settlements of the type advocated for by O’Neill. When Elon Musk first got rich off the sale of PayPal, before he created SpaceX, he looked into sending a mouse colony or a small greenhouse to Mars. There is no money to be made doing this sort of thing

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; Musk wanted people to see his vision for space during a time when space activity was lackluster. In our experience, a lot of people think SpaceX in particular is some kind of scam, using old government-created space technology for personal enrichment, or somehow hiding the true costs of space launch

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we can say is that it’s so contrary to the plain facts as to verge on a conspiracy theory. However you feel about Musk, SpaceX has genuinely revolutionized space launch, and every space agency on Earth, including NASA, has failed to duplicate their technology. In fairness, Musk’s

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SpaceX, Bezos’s Blue Origin, and other rocket launch companies have gotten plenty of government contracts, but that’s been the standard way space has been

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done in the United States since the early days of space flight. The revolution in pricing only arrived with SpaceX. Both Bezos and Musk overhype things, yes, but the evidence is that they actually believe in a space-settlement future. What concerns us is not

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Bezos’s Blue Origin is interested in Shackleton crater’s water, sunlight, and minerals. NASA is teaming up with SpaceX in the hope that their “Starship” can take astronauts to the Moon, and SpaceX also has a private contract to send tourists on a lunar-orbit vacation. One day, if the Moon is

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portion of metabolic waste,” only for it to turn up two weeks later in “a small gap near the return air filter.” As recently as SpaceX’s 2021 “Inspiration4” mission, which sent four intrepid private astronauts on an orbital voyage in especially cool space suits, one major problem was the busted

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and more isolated. Strangest of all, the most commonly launched rocket of 2022 is not one built by a nation, but by the private corporation SpaceX.[*] But while space launch and communication have become modern market-based enterprises, the OST remains the product of that brief moment of rivalry between nuclear

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that far away. The issue of where air ends and space begins may seem like a legalistic quibble, but it could have real consequences. Suppose SpaceX follows through on a proposal for rocket travel between, let’s say, Kiev and Tokyo. The rocket could start in airspace, but then be in

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then we will address it.’ ” This was meant as a warning, not advice, but we could certainly give it a try. We could wait for SpaceX to declare Martian freedom, or for President Gingrich to welcome the state of Moonsylvania[*] into the US fold, and suddenly many of the crazy ideas

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days of space-travel theory, when Hermann Oberth proposed a giant mirror in space, for combination agricultural and death-beam purposes. The latest example is SpaceX’s thousands of Starlink satellites. Launched originally for the purpose of transmitting internet stuff, they became integral to the Ukrainian resistance against Russian invasion after

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Books, 2018), 240. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2020, for example: Antonino Salmeri, “No, Mars Is Not a Free Planet, No Matter What SpaceX Says,” SpaceNews, December 5, 2020, https://spacenews.com/op-ed-no-mars-is-not-a-free-planet-no-matter-what

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-spacex-says/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Consider the 2015 Newsweek: Kevin Maney, “ ‘Star Wars’ Class Wars: Is Mars the Escape Hatch for the 1

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ISS: Tim Peake, Ask an Astronaut (London: Arrow Books, 2018), 90. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT details are scarce: Scott Gleeson, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Inspiration4 Crew Had ‘Challenges’ with Toilet,” USA Today, September 23, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2021/09/23/elon-musk-says

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-spacex-inspiration-4-crew-had-challenges-toilet/5825068001/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Tang sucks.”: Mark Memmott, “Now He Tells Us: ‘Tang Sucks,’ Says Apollo

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of going into space is to create new nations. That can best be done on Mars,” Reddit, September 25, 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/pv91cs/comment/he8xy4w/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Note Bene: Violence in Antarctica, or, Happy Endings to Stabby Starts So Kelly wrote: Theodore

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Space Law,” 1–9. International Astronautical Federation, 2020. https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/44630. ———. “No, Mars Is Not a Free Planet, No Matter What SpaceX Says.” SpaceNews, December 5, 2020. https://spacenews.com/op-ed-no-mars-is-not-a-free-planet-no-matter-what

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-spacex-says/. Salotti, Jean-Marc. “Minimum Number of Settlers for Survival on Another Planet.” Scientific Reports 10 (2020): 9700. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-

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-trillion-in-30-years-bank-of-america-predicts.html. ———. “Space Tourism Pioneer Dennis Tito Books Private Moon Trip on SpaceX’s Starship.” CNBC, October 12, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/12/spacex-starship-seats-space-tourism-pioneer-dennis-tito-books-private-moon-trip.html. Shelhamer, Mark. “Enabling and Enhancing Human Health and

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of Biomedical Research at the Antarctic Concordia Station.” Experimental Physiology 106 (2021): 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1113/EP088352. Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Avon Books, 2016. Vasquez, John A. The War Puzzle Revisited. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge

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Could Be Dangerous and Ridiculously Expensive. Elon Musk Wants to Do It Anyway.” CNN, September 8, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/tech/spacex-mars-profit-scn/index.html. Weeden, Brian, and Victoria Samson, eds. Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment. Broomfield, CO: Secure World Foundation, 2022. https

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International Publishing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90303-3_12. ———. “Mars Direct 2.0: How to Send Humans to Mars Using Starships.” Presentation at the 70th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Washington, D.C., October 20–26, 2019. Zubrin, Robert, and Richard Wagner. The Case for Mars: The

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, 347 and scientific research, 385 on self-sustaining Mars, 356–57 on settling Mars, 9, 11, 17, 95, 243, 307 space-states and, 326 on SpaceX’s toilet, 175 Texas city of, 335 and war in Ukraine, 362 N NASA, 18, 45, 63, 184, 269 “2020 Artemis Plan” of, 135 and

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habitat design of, 206, 207 lunar regolith sold to, 250–51 scientists, 53 SMACs list of, 77–78 and spacecraft food, 174 teams up with SpaceX, 135 and women astronauts, 213–16 See also astronauts; specific missions National Academy of Sciences, 59 National Radiation Council, 59 National Science Foundation, 329 National

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of, 322–27 territorial integrity and, 315–16, 319–20, 322 “wait-and-go-big” approach to, 326–27 spacewalks, 48–49, 99, 104, 168 SpaceX, 6 busted toilet on, 175 creation of, 17–18 and definition of space, 239 “Inspiration4” mission of, 175 and sovereignty over Mars, 1–2, 308

Elon Musk

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