Space Barons

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

Christian Davenport, Central 338.76294 D2471s 2018

This is the best "space luminary" book I have read so far; the author's research and interviews reveals motivation, not myths.

Elon Musk and !SpaceX are the current media darlings; building a new space launch family from scratch, cleverly avoiding unnecessary expense, re-using an orbit-enabling first stage are admirable accomplishments. Davenport does not delve into !SpaceX money raising, beyond the semi-successful fight for fair access to the US government feed trough; besides Musk's personal wealth and Uncle Sam, where do the dollars come from, and why will the dollars keep flowing?

The answer is clearer for Jeff Bezos; he funds Blue Origin as his personal hobby from his Amazon earnings. A swell hobby to be sure, but Blue Origin stops the day Bezos does. Bezos seems more likeable, perhaps because Davenport had more time with him, and portrays a man who behaves like I hope I would in his position. But he remains responsible for Amazon, a wealthy target for scamster vendors. His funding source can evaporate, along with a sizeable chunk of the global economy, if he doesn't continually develop clever new defenses against emerging threats. Does he have enough defensive depth for both of his chosen missions?

I may have met Jeff Bezos long ago; I attended a space conference at Princeton in the mid-1980s, when he was a space-activist student there, and chapter president of SEDS, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

If Musk fails (health, sanity, accident), can SpaceX survive? And what about all Musk's other distractions - Tesla electric cars, Batteries, Hyperloop, Tunnels, Solar City, AI cars, and Mars ... do these make Musk a better rocket builder? If Musk attempts movies and television shows ... game over, he can't complete a project and delegate to successors. I'm far more worried about Musk's vulnerabilities, mostly to the corrosive effect of adulation on ego. Musk (and perhaps Bezos) needs someone like the clappers in Jonathan Swift's Laputa, who smack their patrons with pebble-filled bladders to restore their attention to reality.

A few chapters focus on Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and Richard Branson, and their quixotic quest for wings to orbit. Wings can reduce dependence on launch sites - there are a lot of runways out there. That makes a space-capable solid rocket ( like Pegasus ) launched from a 747 a survivable military option in a global conflict. But Stratolaunch can only be built and maintained in a single Mohave hangar. Solid rockets are less efficient and more expensive and polluting than liquid fuel rockets like Falcon and Blue. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I can't imagine carrying a liquid-fuel-laden rocket first stage horizontally under an aircraft, in a compression-heated and turbulent airstream near wings and flaming jet engines.

I appreciate that Paul Allen wants to do good, and wants to share the fun he can create with his billions. I very very much appreciate his contributions to Seattle, the University of Washington, and the Suzallo-Allen Library in particular.

• p84 "My dad was just letting me loose in the stacks," he said, sitting in a conference room outside his Seattle office ... He read Willy Ley... This is amusing. A couple of years ago, before a medical procedure in Seattle, I spent a day in Allen library, I specifically looked at the 1968 edtion of Willy Ley's Rockets, Missiles, and Men In Space (I own an older edition), and decided to purchase a used copy through Amazon. That is probably the very same copy that Paul Allen looked at as a teenager.