Billionaires in space: ‘Rocket Dreams’ details new era in race to the stars

During the heyday of manned spaceflight, the race to space was a contest between two nations – the United States and the Soviet Union. That rivalry still exists, but the modern space race has far more competitors, including two U.S.-based billionaires with dreams of returning to the moon, or even planting a flag on Mars. 

Christian Davenport, a staff writer for the Washington Post and author of the new book, “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race” says Bezos and Musk are each advancing America’s space ambitions while competing with each other. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: This space race that you write about, covering a little less than 10 years, is profoundly different than it was during the Apollo days of the ’60s and ’70s, or even the 20 years when the space shuttle was NASA’s most visible presence in space. From a high-level vantage point – from space, if you will – what’s new about the American manned spaceflight project in the past decade? 

Christian Davenport: Well, for starters, it’s in the hands of the commercial space sector. NASA is not in the business of flying astronauts anymore, at least not as sort of the primary entity in charge of it. That would be Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has a contract from NASA to fly the astronauts. But they fly on rockets and spacecraft that are owned and operated by SpaceX.

So that is a major difference, and as you pointed out, we are in a space race with the commercialization of space, where these companies – SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others – are reprising the roles of nation-states and competing against each other for the right to win contracts from NASA and the Pentagon.

And so the privatization of space really, in a way, helped NASA and government move faster and more efficiently in a lot of different ways.

So listeners know, Christian, this is not your first space rodeo. Your first book, “Space Barons,” introduced this narrative of the privately-run version of space wars. What was happening when you wrote that book and how are things different today? 

I think that book covered the early days of the commercial space sector, early days of SpaceX and Blue Origin; how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got interested in space. And I think it posed a question. It said, “can this emerging commercial space sector, can it claw away and begin to erode the government’s long-held monopoly on space travel?”

And if that was the question in the first book, this book provides the answer, and it’s a “yes,” because we now see commercial companies flying people. We see them building and developing new, more powerful rockets. We see working on commercial space stations. We see flying and becoming a huge partner with the Pentagon, as the Pentagon and NASA, frankly, are in a new kind of space race against China.

Let me ask you a basic question here and one that gets to the crux of why we’re seeing this competition in space. The promise, of course, of private companies getting involved here was that they could do it cheaper, faster, respond to, say for instance, China or other state actors much faster than NASA could.

Is that proven to be true?

Yes and no. Because there has been some growing pains.

You’ve seen Boeing, for example, which has the other contract to fly NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station. They’re years behind schedule. They’ve blown the budget and their first mission with a pair of astronauts on board went awry and SpaceX had to come in and return them because NASA didn’t trust Boeing to do it. And you’re seeing delays with SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, which NASA desperately wants to use to return astronauts to the lunar surface in this moon race with China. 

But on the other hand, SpaceX, for example, launches a rocket every two days. Blue Origin has got its New Glenn rocket that’s launched earlier this year, and there are companies like Rocket Lab and Relativity and Stoke that are moving fast as well. 

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So much of this book is the competition between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, each a billionaire who’s used massive personal wealth to fund a space company. How are these guys alike and where do their companies stand right now? 

Well, right now, SpaceX is so far ahead and they have been ahead for a while. And a lot of the book sort of shows how they got there and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin’s attempts to catch up with them, but ultimately being unable to.

But despite the competition, despite, you know, some of the insults that have gone back and forth between them and the rivalry at the core, they both really want the same thing. They want more access to space. They want space travel to be more efficient, less cost-prohibitive, more affordable, allowing more rockets to go up and more activity to go into space to bring sort of a tech mindset to that whole enterprise.

But it seems as if Musk is much more plugged in, much more in sync with what NASA’s goals are. I mean, when we see Bezos in the news, it’s because he sent celebrities up for a brief excursion, just at the limits of space and then back down again. It’s almost as if Bezos seems to have changed his mind in terms of what his main objective is.

What is the ultimate goal for Blue Origin in space as you see it?

Yeah, that’s a very good question because SpaceX, from the very beginning, aligned itself with NASA and with the Pentagon, winning those contracts. Blue Origin initially sat out a lot of that. And Jeff said, “I’m going to fund this on my own personal vast fortune.”

In more recent years. I think there’s been some regret within the leadership at Blue Origin and trying to catch up to SpaceX and realizing that they really needed to align themselves and have the government as a partner. And they’ve been trying to do that, to compete with SpaceX. And have had some successes for sure, but also some failures. 

NASA’s Artemis project has experienced some delays and some setbacks. I have to ask, what do you think it’ll take to get back to the moon, and how important is it that we do it?

And we’re talking about basically a project that’s a partnership between NASA and SpaceX, or maybe even Bezos. How do you see it shaking out? 

Yeah, so NASA right now has given contracts to both SpaceX and Blue Origin to design the lunar landers that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon. The problem is, both of those are behind schedule – I mean, particularly SpaceX. And China is trying to get astronauts to moon by 2030.

Now whether SpaceX will be ready with their Starship vehicle to do that remains to be seen. And there’s a lot of concern and increasing concern that they’re not, and China is going to get there before the United States can return. 

And some people may look at that and say, “that’s not a big deal, we won the race in 1969 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, we’ve been there first.” But I think a lot of people look at that and see that there are a lot of stakes at a geopolitical state’s prestige, even national security.

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It’s worth mentioning here – Jeff Bezos, of course, he owns the Washington Post, your employer. Have you had any difficulties, any issues navigating reporting on these space companies in a way that preserves the independence of your journalism? And have you been asked not to report on anything or soft-pedal it in any way?

No, we treat him as we would anybody else. I’m quite proud of that and he treats The Washington Post – and me, in particular – like anyone else. I didn’t get any extraordinary access that I didn’t earn or fight to get. And it’s a very hard company to penetrate. 

They did participate in the book and I worked on it, but that’s because I had built up credibility going back years for it and even then I would say there was some frustrations and no special treatment whatsoever. I might have wished for that to some degree, but I certainly didn’t receive it and certainly didn’t give them any preferential treatment.

As you see, as you’ve read the book, you can see that that’s clear. 

Let me ask one other question. How so many companies that are involved here seem to use Texas as a kind of main locus for their business, their launches, what they’re doing with their space ambitions.

And I’m curious, why Texas, of all places? Why do you think that’s happening?

Well, you’ve got, I mean, just take SpaceX, for example. It’s got its huge facility for its Starship rocket down outside of Brownsville at Starbase. And that’s significant because you want to be able to launch rockets over water. So your coastline works.

I think it’s seen as a business-friendly environment. And finally, I think just because of NASA’s presence there at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, they see a lot of talent there, a lot of engineering talent and aerospace talent that has been there for a long time.

And of course you have great universities as well, and all of that, put that together, and that’s a pretty good aerospace destination.

So, you know, it almost makes me think that that’s part of an additional chapter here that does not get very much attention, and that is that the investments that were made back in the ’60s, when Lyndon Johnson made certain that Texas had a role to play, that in a way those are kind of bearing fruit now as we see the development of this new space industry here.

Yeah, and actually, I’ve got a chapter in the book that touches on that, where before NASA settled on Cape Canaveral for what became the Kennedy Space Center, it was looking where SpaceX is developing its facility outside of Brownsville. NASA was actually looking at that South Padre Island area to be sort of the launch site for Apollo.

They ultimately didn’t go for it, but when SpaceX said, “hey, we want to build a private space port,” that’s where they went, and there are documents showing that area was part of NASA’s consideration.

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