Space Barons

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

Jeremy Rosenberg, interview with Tom Mueller, KCET Public Radio, May 3, 2012; Michael Belfiore, “Behind the Scenes with the World’s Most Ambitious Rocket Makers,” Popular Mechanics, Sept. 1, 2009; Doug McInnis, “Rocket Man,” Loyola Marymount Alumni Magazine, Aug. 31, 2011; Katwala, “What’s Driving Elon Musk?”; Junod, “Triumph of His Will”; Davenport, Space Barons; Berger, Liftoff; Vance, Elon Musk. 18. Musk’s Rules for Rocket-Building: Author’s interviews with Tim Buzza, Tom Mueller, Elon Musk. Davenport, Space Barons; Berger, Liftoff; Vance, Elon Musk. 19. Mr. Musk Goes to Washington: Author’s interviews with Gwynne Shotwell, Elon Musk, Tom Mueller, Hans Koenigsmann. Gwynne Shotwell, Graduation speech at Northwestern University, June 14, 2021; Chad Anderson, “Rethinking Public-Private Space Travel,” Space Policy, Nov. 2013. 20.

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Brian Mosdell, “Untold Stories from the Rocket Ranch,” Kennedy Space Center archives, Mar. 5, 2015; Brian Mosdell, “SpaceX Stories: How SpaceX Built SLC-40 on a Shoestring Budget,” ElonX, Apr. 15, 2019; Irene Klotz, “SpaceX Secret? Bash Bureaucracy, Simplify Technology,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 15, 2009; Garver, Space Pirates; Berger, Liftoff; Davenport, Space Barons. 34. Falcon 9 Liftoff: Author’s interviews with Tim Buzza, Elon Musk, Lori Garver. Brian Vastag, “SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule Docks with International Space Station,” Washington Post, May 25, 2012; Garver, Space Pirates; Berger, Liftoff; Davenport, Space Barons. 35. Marrying Talulah: Author’s interviews with Talulah Riley, Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Bill Lee, Navaid Farooq. Hermione Eyre, “How to Marry a Billionaire,” The Evening Standard (London), Apr. 10, 2012. 36.

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Findlay, “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles,” Patent application US8678321B2, June 14, 2010; Trung Phan, Twitter thread, July 17, 2021; Davenport, Space Barons; Berger, Liftoff; Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires. 38. The Falcon Hears the Falconer: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Sam Teller, Steve Jurvetson, Antonio Gracias, Mark Juncosa, Jeff Bezos, Kiko Dontchev. Calia Cofield, “Blue Origin Makes Historic Reusable Rocket Landing in Epic Test Flight,” Space.com, Nov. 24, 2015; Davenport, Space Barons. 39. The Talulah Roller Coaster: Author’s interviews with Talulah Riley, Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Kimbal Musk, Navaid Farooq, Bill Lee.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Davenport, Christian, author. Title: The space barons : Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the quest to colonize the cosmos/Christian Davenport. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017053089 ISBN 9781610398299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781610398305 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Space industrialization—United States. | Industrialists—United States—Biography. | Aerospace engineers—United States—Biography. | Bezos, Jeffrey. | Musk, Elon. | Blue Origen (Firm) | SpaceX (Firm) | Aerospace industries—United States. | Outer space—Civilian use.

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Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, who had backed the first commercial spacecraft to reach space, was now building the largest airplane the world had ever seen. Bigger than Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, it would be able to “air launch” rockets from 35,000 feet—and perhaps even a new space shuttle, called “Black Ice,” it was developing in secret. Together these Space Barons were behind some of the biggest brands in the world—Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal—that have disrupted industries ranging from retail to credit cards to air travel. And now they were betting vast swaths of their enormous fortunes that they could make space available to the masses, and push human space travel past where governments had gone.

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“I was trying to understand how things worked—how things were put together, everything from airplane engines to rockets and nuclear power plants. I was just intrigued by the complexity and the power and the grace of these things flying.” Now he was building a plane as powerful and complex as any of them, built for opening up the cosmos. Allen’s vision was like that of his fellow Space Barons—to lower the cost of space travel and make it more accessible. Bezos had said that inexpensive, reliable access to space would touch off the kind of “dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last twenty-one years on the Internet.” Allen also saw parallels between the space frontier and the Internet.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

In congressional testimony a month prior, a commercial space booster had hailed “the first ripples that will be caused by the new Alt.Space ‘barons’ and their own rocketship projects,” among them Musk and the amusingly erroneous “Scott Bezos of Amazon.com’s Blue Horizons.” Yet if overpromising was a cardinal sin in the space world, it was also an original sin: everyone shared it. The space shuttle would not fly again until more than two years after the Columbia disaster. Most of the projects attributed to the so-called alt.space barons would be defunct or delayed for more than a decade. Musk, now past his first flight goal, told reporters that the Falcon 1 would launch just four months later, in March 2004.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

And in the fall of 2017, Jeff Bezos finally: Tom Metcalf, “Jeff Bezos Passes Bill Gates to Become the World’s Richest Person,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/bezos-seizes-title-of-world-s-richest-person-after-amazon-soars (January 25, 2021). CHAPTER 11: GRADATIM FEROCITER Two books were valuable resources for this chapter: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), and Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). the firm landed a Falcon 9 booster: Loren Grush, “SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket on a Floating Drone Ship for the First Time,” The Verge, April 8, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/8/11392138/spacex-landing-success-falcon-9-rocket-barge-at-sea (January 24, 2021).

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lang=en (January 24, 2021). 300,000-square-foot former factory: Eric Berger, “Behind the Curtain: Ars Goes Inside Blue Origin’s Secretive Rocket Factory,” Ars Technica, March 9, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/behind-the-curtain-ars-goes-inside-blue-origins-secretive-rocket-factory/ (January 24, 2021). their helicopter crashed into a shallow creek: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), 11–13 “avoid helicopters whenever possible”: Alan Deutschman, “Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos,” Fast Company, August 1, 2004, https://www.fastcompany.com/50541/inside-mind-jeff-bezos-4 (January 24, 2021).

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

Reaching for the Stars: A Biography of the Great Pioneer in Space Exploration, Wernher von Braun. New York: Doubleday, 1960. Bradbury, Ray, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. Mars and the Mind of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Broad, William. Star Warriors. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. New York: Public Affairs, 2018. Deudney, Daniel. Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Elvis, Martin. Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

It seems that Jeff Bezos inherited: “Jeff Bezos Talks Amazon, Blue Origin, Family, and Wealth,” video (5:00). As Bezos later recalled his first summer: Ibid. (6:00). Bezos’s grandfather was: Chip Bayers, “The Inner Bezos,” Wired, March 1, 1999. Gise was also a top manager: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons, (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), 59–62. Among other things, DARPA created: Ibid., 60–61. During those summers: Mark Liebovich, “Child Prodigy, Online Pioneer,” Washington Post, September 3, 2000. The significance of that business: Mimi Montgomery, “Here Are the Floor Plans for Jeff Bezos’s $23 Million DC Home,” Washingtonian, April 22, 2018.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

Finding My Virginity (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2017). ______. Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life (London: Virgin Books, 2006). Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini (New York: Random House, 1976). Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Esposito, Joseph A. Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2018).

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

Systemizing is “the drive to analyse the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of the system.”14 If you are good at reading maps and instruction manuals, or if you enjoy figuring out how machines work, you are probably above average on systemizing. If we cross these two traits, we get a two-dimensional space (see figure 6.1), and each person can be placed at a particular spot in that space. Baron-Cohen has shown that autism is what you get when genes and prenatal factors combine to produce a brain that is exceptionally low on empathizing and exceptionally high on systemizing. Autism, including Asperger’s syndrome (a subtype of high-functioning autism), is better thought of as a region of personality-space—the lower right corner of the lower right quadrant—than as a discrete disease.15 The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.

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
Published 6 Nov 2023

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, VA, 2012. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2012-3417. Dapremont, Angela M. “Mars Land Use Policy Implementation: Approaches and Best Methods.” Space Policy 57 (2021): 101442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.2021.101442. Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. David, Leonard. Moon Rush: The New Space Race. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2019. Davila, Alfonso F., David Willson, John D. Coates, and Christopher P. McKay. “Perchlorate on Mars: A Chemical Hazard and a Resource for Humans.”

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts
by Loren Grush
Published 11 Sep 2023

—Jason Fagone, bestselling author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies “Compellingly intimofate portraits of a group of brave astronauts who changed the face of NASA—and exploration… Well-researched and gripping, The Six is an inspiring and, at times, maddening tale that reminds us what the definition of hero is.” —Christian Davenport, Peabody Award–winning staff writer at the Washington Post and author of The Space Barons “Today there is nothing unusual about a woman flying in space, walking in space, or living in space, which makes it difficult to imagine what it was like forty-five years ago for the six women who broke the highest of all glass ceilings to become astronauts. As Loren Grush shows in this illuminating book, they overcame daunting obstacles to make their indelible marks on Earth and in space.”