Book of the week The Space Barons
Public Affairs 320pp £20 The Week Bookshop £18 Nearly 50 years after the first Apollo landings, the world is in the grip of a new space race, said Manjit Kumar in The Times. This time round, it is based not on competition between nations, but on an intense rivalry between two Silicon Valley billionaires: Tesla owner Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Temperamentally, the two are very different: the famously “brash” Musk talks of building a “Big F***ing Rocket” that will enable humanity to colonise Mars; the “quieter, more patient” Bezos is famously secretive about his Blue Origin space company, and speaks of being “the tortoise and not the hare”. But both share a conviction that humanity is unlikely to survive unless it embraces space travel’s possibilities. In this entertaining, skilfully narrated book, Christian Davenport, a Washington Post journalist, describes their early attempts to make this happen.
Davenport, who interviewed both Musk and Bezos, reveals a fundamental difference in the two men’s visions of space colonisation, said John Thornhill in the Financial Times. Musk sees Mars as an alternative home in the event of a world-ending disaster: he calls it a “fixer-upper of a planet”. Bezos wants humanity to stay on Earth and thinks space travel will make this possible by allowing “dirty industries” to be shifted elsewhere. (“Space is a much better place to do heavy manufacturing,” he claims.) At present, neither man is remotely close to realising his ambition, said Walter Isaacson in The New York Times. Yet they’ve already made startling progress: in 2015, within a month of each other, both achieved something Nasa never has, which is to launch rockets that “returned safely to Earth and were reusable”. Davenport’s book is a “fascinating” account of how the “torch of space exploration” is passing from a “onceglorious” federal agency to a “new breed of boyish billionaires”.
But there’s a problem with framing the story as one of private ingenuity triumphing over state inertia, said Jack Stilgoe in the Literary Review: it ignores the fact that Musk, Bezos et al, far from being autonomous operators, are almost entirely dependent on contracts from government space and satellite agencies to keep their companies afloat. It’s not a “battle”, it’s a “love-in”. And Davenport faces a further difficulty, which is that the second space age is “just not as interesting as the first”. The original story was one of “exploration”, competing ideologies and personal heroism. Its sequel is all about big business and “robotic rockets”. One thing is certain: “it is not The Right Stuff”.