Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Space Barons
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Colby College, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Austin American-Statesman, TX, staff writer, 1998-2000; Washington Post, Washington, DC, staff writer, 2000—, assignment editor, 2012—. Previously, worked as a journalist for Newsday and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Has appeared on television and radio programs.
AWARDS:Peabody Award, 2010.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Christian Davenport is a journalist based in Washington, DC. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Colby College. From 1998 to 2000, he served as a staff writer at the Austin American-Statesman. In 2000, Davenport joined the Washington Post. He has held the positions of staff writer and assignment editor at that publications. Previously, Davenport worked for other publications, including Newsday and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has appeared as a guest on television and radio programs.
As You Were
In 2009, Davenport released his first book, As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard. In this volume, he tells the stories of five of the soldiers in this particular battalion. Davenport was embedded with the battalion during 2005 and 2006, while they were deployed in Iraq.
Edwin B. Burgess, reviewer in Library Journal, noted that the book offered a “positive view of citizen-soldiers.” A Reference & Research Book News writer commented on the “intimate portraits” found in the volume. A contributor to the online version of Publishers Weekly suggested that As You Were “[gives] readers a vivid sense of life before, during and after engagement in a far-off war.”
The Space Barons
Davenport profiles key figures in the new space race in his 2018 book, The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. In addition to the two included in the subtitle, Paul Allen and Richard Branson are also discussed in the volume. Davenport explains how and why they have become involved in galactic travel and discusses their future goals for that industry.
Referring to Davenport, Stephen Bayley, reviewer in Spectator, suggested: “Space Barons is fastidious and engrossing, but written in that irritating facsimile reportage style familiar to anyone who reads quality U.S. print media. On the whole he resists the very considerable temptations of satire available here: to the sceptical English ear, his voice is too slavish and adoring, and his account a bit episodic.” Other assessments of the volume were more favorable. “The author does a fine job of capturing the personalities of these famous men,” asserted David Pitt in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic commented: “Readers … will thrill at this lucid, detailed, and admiring account of wealthy space buffs who are spending their own money, making headlines, [and] producing genuine technical advances.” Chris Impey, contributor to the Washington Post, noted: “Davenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of the Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography.”
Writing on the Planetary Society website, Jason Davis remarked: “Davenport made a good call leading off with an incredible story about Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and a helicopter crash in West Texas. … I was actually a little worried the helicopter story would make the book feel front-loaded, but fortunately, it didn’t. There’s plenty of meat throughout the rest of The Space Barons to keep readers interested—even those who already know a lot about the commercial space industry.” “Unless you’ve been on your own one-way trip to Mars, the NewSpace industry’s efforts to democratize access to low Earth orbit and beyond will ring familiar. But even industry pros should learn something from The Space Barons,” asserted Bruce Dorminey on the Forbes website. Dorminey added: “Davenport … provides a very readable NewSpace tale that weaves in accounts of spaceflight’s early days with more recent intrigue surrounding NASA’s un-actualized efforts to breathe new life into its crewed initiatives beyond low Earth orbit.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2018, David Pitt, review of The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Space Barons.
Library Journal, June 15, 2009, Edwin B. Burgess, review of As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard, p. 84.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2009, review of As You Were.
Spectator, April 21, 2018, Stephen Bayley, “The Billionaire’s Toy Box,” review of The Space Barons, p. 35.
Washington Post, March 30, 2018, Chris Impey, review of The Space Barons.
ONLINE
Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/ (March 14, 2018), Bruce Dorminey, review of The Space Barons.
Planetary Society, http://www.planetary.org/ (March 21, 2018), Jason Davis, review of The Space Barons.
PublicAffairs website, https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (May 18, 2009), review of As You Were.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
CHRISTIAN DAVENPORT
THIS AUTHOR IS ON TOUR
Christian Davenport is a staff writer at the Washington Post covering the space and defense industries for the financial desk. He joined the Post in 2000, and has written about the DC-area sniper shootings, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the burial problems at Arlington National Cemetery. He is a recipient of the Peabody award for his work on veterans with Traumatic Brain Injury and has been on reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize three times.
Before joining the financial staff, Davenport was an editor on the Metro desk, overseeing coverage of local government and politics. He has also worked at Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Austin American-Statesman. As a frequent radio and television commentator, he has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and several NPR shows, including All Things Considered and Diane Rehm.
Christian Davenport
Washington, D.C.
Reporter covering the defense and space industries
Education: Colby College, B.A., American Studies
Christian Davenport covers the defense and space industries for The Washington Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has had an array of assignments, including covering the D.C.-area sniper shootings, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Fort Hood shootings and the burial problems at Arlington National Cemetery.
Before joining the Financial staff, Christian was an editor on the Metro desk, overseeing coverage of local government and politics. He has also worked at Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Austin American-Statesman and is the author of two books.
Honors & Awards:
Peabody Award, 2010. On teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, 2010 and 2011.
Books by Christian Davenport:
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (PublicAffairs, April 2018)
Buy it from Amazon
As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard
Buy it from Amazon
Christian Davenport
3rd degree connection3rd
Staff Writer at The Washington Post
Washington D.C. Metro Area
Message Send a message to Christian Davenport More actions
The Washington Post
Colby College
Colby College
See contact info
See contact info
See connections (409)
409 connections
Follow Follow
Christian’s Articles & Activity
458 followers
How SpaceX’s scrappy ethos "flabbergasted" NASA. And, what it’s like to interview with Elon Musk.
Christian Davenport on LinkedIn
See all articles
How SpaceX’s scrappy ethos "flabbergasted" NASA. And, what it’s like to interview with Elon Musk.
Christian shared this See all activity
Experience
The Washington Post
Staff Writer
Company NameThe Washington Post
Dates EmployedFeb 2014 – Present Employment Duration4 yrs 4 mos
LocationFInancial Desk
The Washington Post
Assignment Editor
Company NameThe Washington Post
Dates EmployedMay 2012 – Present Employment Duration6 yrs 1 mo
LocationWashington, DC
Washington Post
Staff Writer
Company NameWashington Post
Dates EmployedApr 2000 – May 2012 Employment Duration12 yrs 2 mos
Austin American-Statesman
Staff Writer
Company NameAustin American-Statesman
Dates Employed1998 – 2000 Employment Duration2 yrs
Philadelphia Inquirer
Two-year intern
Company NamePhiladelphia Inquirer
Dates Employed1996 – 1998 Employment Duration2 yrs
Education
Colby College
Colby College
Degree NameBS Field Of StudyAmerican Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 1991 – 1995
Skills & Endorsements
Journalism
See 13 endorsements for Journalism13
Endorsed by Ron Jones, who is highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 2 of Christian’s colleagues at The Washington Post
Breaking News
See 13 endorsements for Breaking News13
Endorsed by 2 of Christian’s colleagues at The Washington Post
AP Style
See 8 endorsements for AP Style8
Ron Jones and 7 connections have given endorsements for this skill
Interests
Colby College
Colby College
20,945 followers
Colby College
Colby College
18,751 followers
Chris Seper
Chris SeperChris Seper is a LinkedIn Influencer
Senior Director of Content Strategy at The E.W. Scripps Company
84,115 followers
The Washington Post
The Washington Post
997,917 followers
Mark Cuban
Mark CubanMark Cuban is a LinkedIn Influencer
President
4,166,046 followers
QUOTED: "The author does a fine job of capturing the personalities of these famous men."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526597200138 1/4
Print Marked Items
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos,
and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.
By Christian Davenport.
Apr. 2018. 336p. PublicAffairs, $28 (9781610398299). 338.7.
Strap in, you dreamers of space travel, you lovers of invention, you admirers of the unquenchable thirst for
exploration, for here is a book that will thrill you to your core. It's the story of four billionaires--primarily
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but also Richard Branson and Paul Allen--who have been pouring money into
the still-in-its-infancy industry of private space travel. It's a wonderful story, a thrilling adventure of literal
and metaphoric highs and lows, based on interviews with the billionaires but encompassing a much broader
range of reporting. Davenport catches us up in the breathless excitement of these men who are trying to
launch the biggest start-up in the history of the galaxy. But this is no puff piece; the author faithfully records
the heartbreaking failures and the struggles to overcome serious opposition (from the U.S. government,
among others). This is, too, a story of ego and the aggressive pursuit of number-one status, and the author
does a fine job of capturing the personalities of these famous men. A big story, told through its vividly
evoked small details.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pitt, David. "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos." Booklist,
15 Mar. 2018, p. 6. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094348/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2d0ab33. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094348
QUOTED: "Readers ... will thrill at this lucid, detailed, and admiring account of wealthy space buffs who are spending their own money, making headlines, [and] producing genuine technical advances."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526597200138 2/4
Davenport, Christian: THE SPACE
BARONS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davenport, Christian THE SPACE BARONS PublicAffairs (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-1-
61039-829-9
An enthusiastic account of the pursuit of "a holy grail--a technology with the potential to dramatically lower
the cost of space travel."
The United States no longer has a manned space program, and the government has not shown any
immediate plans to fund another. However, a quartet of billionaires has stepped in to fill the void, writes
Washington Post space and defense staff writer Davenport (As You Were: To War and Back with the Black
Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard, 2009) in this well-researched account of the efforts of Jeff
Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Paul Allen. "If NASA, or Congress, or any president wouldn't
stand up as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 when he promised to send a man to the moon within a decade,"
writes the author, "then this class of entrepreneurs would attempt it." First off the mark, in 2000, was
Amazon's Bezos, whose startup is building a reusable rocket for suborbital flights; the first manned launch
is scheduled for 2018. Microsoft billionaire Allen invested in SpaceShipOne, which, in 2004, became the
first privately funded manned craft to reach space. Virgin's Branson took over to develop SpaceShipTwo,
which will carry paying passengers on suborbital flights in a few years. Since founding SpaceX in 2002,
Tesla's Musk, "the brash hare" in this race, has focused his attention on Mars. His privately built reusable
rockets regularly supply the Space Station; soon they will deliver astronauts, and he has announced plans to
fly men around the moon this year.
Readers frustrated at the trickle of news from China (the only nation with an active manned space program)
will thrill at this lucid, detailed, and admiring account of wealthy space buffs who are spending their own
money, making headlines, producing genuine technical advances, and resurrecting the yearning to explore
the cosmos.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Davenport, Christian: THE SPACE BARONS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248053/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d39b35a6.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248053
QUOTED: "positive view of citizen-soldiers."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526597200138 3/4
Davenport, Christian. As You Were: To
War and Back with the Black Hawk
Battalion of the Virginia National Guard
Edwin B. Burgess
Library Journal.
134.11 (June 15, 2009): p84.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Davenport, Christian. As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia
National Guard. Wiley. 2009. c.272p. index. ISBN 978-0-47037361-3. $25.95. Davenport was an embedded
Washington Post reporter in Iraq. He focuses on three men and two women as exemplars of their unit, the
Virginia Army National Guard aviation regiment, suddenly called up and deployed in Iraq. He follows their
time there as well as their return home, changed by the war. This positive view of citizen-soldiers will find
readers.
Edwin B. Burgess, Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS
Burgess, Edwin B.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Burgess, Edwin B. "Davenport, Christian. As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion
of the Virginia National Guard." Library Journal, 15 June 2009, p. 84. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A202360294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=130b2d1f.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A202360294
QUOTED: "intimate portraits."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526597200138 4/4
As you were; to war and back with the
Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia
National Guard
Reference & Research Book News.
24.3 (Aug. 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780470373613
As you were; to war and back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard.
Davenport, Christian.
John Wiley & Sons
2009
260 pages
$25.95
Hardcover
UA42
Davenport, a reporter for the Washington Post, was embedded with the Virginia Army National Guard's
Second Battalion, 224th Aviation Regiment, in Iraq. Here, he follows men and women of the regiment,
from their sudden call-up and deployment, through an arduous year in some of Iraq's hottest war zones, to
their return home, where they face new battles in the struggle to resume their lives after combat. What
emerges from these intimate portraits is the tension between the soldiers' love for military life and their
desire to fit into a society that has never before been so divorced from its military.
([c]2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"As you were; to war and back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard." Reference
& Research Book News, Aug. 2009. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A205549203/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2e0dfcff.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A205549203
QUOTED: "Space Barons is fastidious and engrossing, but written in that irritating facsimile reportage style familiar to anyone who reads quality U.S. print media. On the whole he resists the very considerable temptations of satire available here: to the sceptical English ear, his voice is too slavish and adoring, and his account a bit episodic."
The billionaire's toy box
Stephen Bayley
Spectator. 336.9895 (Apr. 21, 2018): p35+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonise the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Public Affairs, 17.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 308
Today's VHNWI wants a PRSHLS. That's Very High Net-Worth Individual and Partially Reuseable Super Heavy Lift System. Or, in the demotic, the rich want space rockets.
'It's not rocket science', people say when describing the technique of making, say, an omelette--even if making an omelette requires a certain deftness of hand and nice judgment. So what is it? Rocket science is a mixture of ballistics, aeronautics, chemistry and computation, now cocktailed with extreme wealth, galactic obsessions and a faraway look in the eye.
Once, the prerogative of the rich was to assault the environment with fast cars, burning oil and cruelly crushing molecules of air as they progressed. Now, the billionaire's toy box contains rockets, which add new semantic richness to the concept of gas-guzzling. Robber Barons used iron and coal; Space Barons use liquid nitrogen and aerospace-grade titanium.
The environmental assault, however, continues. It's estimated that the last launch of Elon Musk's Space-X resulted in a 560mile-wide hole torn in the ionosphere, compromising local GPS signals and exposing us to deadly death rays from outer space--and further exposure to Elon's lethal grin.
Jan Morris calls Musk 'the most interesting man alive'; but I think he may merely be the most annoying. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is his rival, although their characters are different. Musk, according to Christian Davenport, is loud and fast, with a tendency to micromanage. Bezos is quiet and slow. He has a 'trademark maniacal laugh'. Yes, I bet he does. And let's not exclude our own Richard Branson, an eager cadet to Musk and Bezos in the matter of VHNWI rocketry.
What are the psychologies at work here? Significantly, both Bezos and Musk were interested in space before they built the businesses which made them rich enough to penetrate it. Bezos, a child maths prodigy with an unsettled background (the family name is that of his adoptive Cuban father), had made $5 billion by 2005 when he was only 41. Genius was advertised early in a high school paper called 'The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Ageing Rate of the Common House-fly'. For his part, Musk has a parallel genius for deal-making: he acquired 197 acres, a test-bed and five buildings for his space programme at an annual rent of just $45,000.
There are elements of Cold War nostalgia at work here. In 1957, Sputnik rebranded the USSR as technologically advanced, shaming Kennedy into the moon shot. In 1969, the year an American astronaut eventually took that giant step for mankind, Pan Am, in all seriousness, began selling tickets for future space rides.
Pan Am soon went bust. And after the glorious moon landing, Nasa never achieved anything of similar value either technically or in terms of PR. The Space Shuttle, for example, is now widely understood to be a dangerous, irrelevant and expensive waste of time and money. Thus, it's tempting to see Bezos and Musk as Trumpian patriots making America great again. Space exploration was once the province of sovereign nations; now it belongs to the super-rich. What does that do for your ego?
Savour the absurdities. Musk is having difficulty manufacturing his Tesla Model 3 cars in the numbers he promised, so what chance do we give him of conquering the cosmos? In any case, why name a car after someone who thought wiggling your toes increased IQ, and shared a room in a New York residential hotel with pigeons? Musk says his interest in space is insurance against an 'eventual extinction event'--something, what with conflagrations and autopilot crashes, is already a daily possibility for Tesla drivers.
Bezos's insistence on a reusable rocket, the important element in his outer-space business plan, is a rare concession to environmental responsibility. Back on earth, Amazon manages huge server farms powered by diesel generators and cooled by toxic air-con. It runs godless warehouses, creepily known in evangelical English as 'fulfilment centres', whence fuming vans are launched to clog cities, distributing made-in-China junk wrapped in too much brown corrugated cardboard.
Amazon is an environmental atrocity, yet Jeff is going to save the planet with rockets. Musk wants us to become a 'multi-planet species', while we busily muck up the only planet we have. For an apex-predator billionaire, the attraction of space may be that there is no finish line. As displacement activities go, rockets have a lot to be said for them.
Davenport is a staff writer on the Washington Post. Space Barons is fastidious and engrossing, but written in that irritating facsimile reportage style familiar to anyone who reads quality US print media. On the whole he resists the very considerable temptations of satire available here: to the sceptical English ear, his voice is too slavish and adoring, and his account a bit episodic.
Who knew that the internet was going to become an oligopoly, with the world's information and shopping controlled not by a networked democracy but by amateur rocket scientists? Mark Zuckerberg has not gone into space yet, but don't bet against it. Lunatics were disturbed people who stared wistfully at the moon. Now we need a bigger word. Galactics?
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bayley, Stephen. "The billionaire's toy box." Spectator, 21 Apr. 2018, p. 35+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537982423/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf4a58bc. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537982423
QUOTED: "Davenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of The Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography."
Book World: The tech rivals who are racing each other to the stars
Chris Impey
The Washington Post. (Mar. 30, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Chris Impey
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
By Christian Davenport
PublicAffairs. 308 pp. $28
---
Space is hard. A human can't survive for more than a few seconds in the lung-busting, frigid vacuum of space. Several dozen astronauts have died trying to escape Earth's gravity. Going to the moon was a spectacular achievement, but it was so difficult that nearly half a century has passed, and we haven't been back.
The extreme challenge of space travel is the backdrop for Christian Davenport's new book, "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos." Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post, where he covers the space and defense industries. His book documents the emergence of a commercial space industry in the past 15 years, from the first flight of SpaceShipOne to the prospect of Earth orbit as a venue for tourism and recreation.
"The Space Barons" opens in 2015, nearly 50 years after the beach-ball-size Sputnik launched the Space Age. We are introduced in turn to Bezos and Musk, the titans who aim to wrest space travel from the grip of government hegemony and open it up to entrepreneurs. They are a study in contrasts. Bezos is deliberative and secretive, the self-proclaimed tortoise, his motto translated from Latin as "Step by step, ferociously." Musk is brash and impatient, the hare, his motto "Head down. Plow through the line." Shadowing them is a third outsize character: Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic's founder, who is full of braggadocio yet disarmingly honest about his flaws. The motto that summarizes his ascent through the business world is "Screw it, let's do it."
Davenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of The Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography. The book provides few personal details about Bezos or Musk, but that's partly because men this driven don't have the time for protean pleasures of social or family life. You'd love to hear them give a talk on their exploits but would probably be exhausted if you had to spend a weekend with them.
The story arc follows Bezos and Musk as they each use personal wealth to realize childhood dreams that are too large to be contained by the Earth.
Bezos starts by upending the world of books with his startup Amazon, using the nascent internet to challenge brick-and-mortar book chains like Barnes & Noble. Methodically, he broadens the scope of the company until it sells everything to anyone, everywhere. As Amazon becomes the largest internet retailer in the world, Bezos continues to dream about space. He is disappointed that the success of Apollo was never followed up and is frustrated by the inertia and cost of the government-sponsored space program. He considers radical ideas to get into Earth orbit - bullwhips, lasers, cannons, railguns - but settles on a traditional chemical rocket, with the crucial innovation of reusing it, rather than discarding it into the ocean like a skyscraper-size piece of detritus. Amazon is a behemoth, and Bezos puts his heart and soul (and a cool $3 billion of his fortune) into his new venture, Blue Origin, one day a week. Wednesdays are for space.
Musk, meanwhile, is following a parallel path. Davenport includes a helpful timeline at the beginning of the book. Born in South Africa, with technical skills from his training in physics, Musk embraces the buccaneering culture of Silicon Valley. He pioneers getting newspapers online, and a few years later he invents the first online financial payment system. In successive years, he founds SpaceX with $100 million of his own money and joins the board of directors of the electric-car company Tesla. Even after he becomes the CEO of Tesla in 2008, he remains passionate about taking people into space and eventually to Mars.
Along the way, we meet other players in the race to space. Branson helps found a record label and an airline, and he reaches for the stratosphere with Virgin Galactic. Branson shares with Musk a showman's bravado. He shares with Bezos the craving for physical risk and adventure.
Another figure in the tale is Andy Beal, a Las Vegas high-stakes poker player who makes his fortune in real estate and starts a space company in 1997, years before Bezos and Musk. He runs into a wall of opposition from established aerospace giants and quietly folds his hand. We also meet Burt Rutan, the visionary designer of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded airplane to reach the edge of space. In winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Rutan spurs the commercial space sector the way Charles Lindbergh spurred the era of civil aviation with his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. There's a vignette of Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, who is Rutan's banker until Allen hands the reins to Branson. And we encounter the test pilots who put their lives on the line to fly these untested and highly combustible vehicles.
The narrative is drenched in testosterone. Women make up 1 in 3 professional scientists and 1 in 5 professional engineers, but there are few women to be found in the pages of "The Space Barons." Space entrepreneurs form a small priesthood where obsession squeezes out any semblance of work-life balance.
The adversary in Davenport's story is the military-industrial complex. Companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are locked into lucrative government contracts and have no motivation to innovate or cut costs. NASA has a graying workforce that has lost its appetite for risk. Two space shuttles have been lost in flight, killing 14 astronauts. Years tick by, and American astronauts cannot get into space without help from Russia. Stealthy and smooth, Bezos cozies up to the big aerospace companies to get into the game. True to type, Musk has the hubris to sue the government, even as he is trying to win its business. The aerospace titans initially see him as a nuisance, an "ankle biter," but he persists and eventually wins multibillion-dollar contracts to ship supplies to the International Space Station. Single-handedly, he cracks the cartel and nudges NASA into being more nimble.
Eerily, the tortoise and the hare end up at the same place at the same time. Bezos buys a huge tract of snake-bit desert in Texas for launching his rockets. Not far away, Musk buys several hundred acres and eventually bumps that up to 4,000. There are challenges and setbacks. Successful launches are interspersed with spectacular fireballs. Characteristically, Blue Origin failures are announced to the news media after the fact, while SpaceX failures occur under the glare of TV cameras. A pilot for Virgin Galactic dies in a test of SpaceShipTwo, which delays Branson's plan to send up paying customers by five years. Davenport chronicles the twists and turns as well as he can, but the narrative is so dense at times that it becomes a blur.
In 2014, Bezos and Musk are both guests at the Explorers Club, a more-than-100-year-old organization for adventurers. The two men had dinner once, 10 years earlier, but after that have barely spoken. They each give talks, but at the end of the evening, they are at opposite ends of the stage. Davenport sums up their tense relationship: "Rivalry, it turns out, was the best rocket fuel." One year later, within the space of a month, Blue Origin and SpaceX land their large new rockets for the first time, like pencils tossed into the air that improbably land on their flat ends. Earth orbit-half a day's drive straight up-is just the start. Our future off Earth beckons.
---
Impey is an associate dean of science and a University Distinguished Professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has written eight popular-science books, including the upcoming "Einstein's Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Impey, Chris. "Book World: The tech rivals who are racing each other to the stars." Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532798258/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d31c67c. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532798258
QUOTED: "Davenport made a good call leading off with an incredible story about Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and a helicopter crash in West Texas. ... I was actually a little worried the helicopter story would make the book feel front-loaded, but fortunately, it didn't. There's plenty of meat throughout the rest of The Space Barons to keep readers interested—even those who already know a lot about the commercial space industry."
Jason Davis • March 21, 2018
Book Review: The Space Barons
The Space Barons
PublicAffairs
THE SPACE BARONS
The first thing I'll say about Christian Davenport's new book, The Space Barons, is that Davenport made a good call leading off with an incredible story about Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and a helicopter crash in West Texas. Not just any helicopter crash, mind you: This one involves a creek named Calamity, a sketchy pilot named Cheater, and a tour guide who knew "exactly nothing" about Bezos, Amazon.com and the Internet in general. I was actually a little worried the helicopter story would make the book feel front-loaded, but fortunately, it didn't. There's plenty of meat throughout the rest of The Space Barons to keep readers interested—even those who already know a lot about the commercial space industry.
The Space Barons focuses on SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, with an emphasis on their eccentric leaders: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. There's also a lot about Paul Allen, who bankrolled SpaceShipOne, the first private vehicle to reach space. Davenport had access to all four people, as well as some of their inner circles, and this allows him to offer new insights on events both known and not well-known.
One example is from 2013, when a Dragon spacecraft suffered a stuck thruster during its second paid cargo run to the International Space Station. As engineers in SpaceX mission control frantically worked on the problem, Lori Garver (deputy NASA admin), Bill Gerstenmaier (head of NASA human spaceflight), and Michael Suffredini (ISS program manager) watched quietly. Despite having 60 years of spaceflight experience between them, Gerstenmaier and Suffredini stayed out of the way, Garver recalled, playing the role of advisors rather than pushing their way in to fix the problem.
"And it was almost like grandpa taking them fishing: 'Try over there. There might be some fish over there,'" she says in the book. Davenport adds: "A soft touch designed to let the kids learn to fish on their own, rather than an impatient dad's just grabbing the pole and catching the fish for them."
I don't fish, but as a Dad who often struggles not to grab the fishing pole, I liked the metaphor. SpaceX fixed the thruster problem, and Dragon made it to the station without a hitch. It's a nice passing-of-the-torch story that cuts against the oversimplified NASA-versus-SpaceX narrative.
Davenport's biggest contribution to the space literature, however, might be some new insights into Jeff Bezos. I had pretty much zero visibility into Bezos before reading this book. First of all, I learned he has actual cowboy credentials, having spent some of his childhood on his grandfather's farm in Texas. So when Bezos puts on his sweet Gradatim Ferociter boots, rest assured he's not just doing it for style. When you're out tramping through creosote bushes to recover your space capsule, you need a little ankle protection in case you disturb an ornery rattlesnake.
Like Elon Musk, Bezos has a long-held interest in space, dating back to childhood days watching the original Star Trek. Whereas Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup for Earth, Bezos wants to preserve the Earth by doing all our dirty work in space. He says that Earth should be like a national park, zoned residential and light industrial. And while Musk paints colonizing Mars as the ultimate adventure, Bezos is a little less excited about leaving home. In one quote, he rattles off all the things that Mars doesn't have, and won't have, for quite a long time: "no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers."
There's not a lot of insight into how Blue Origin builds its rockets, which is perhaps not surprising, given the company's secrecy. There are, however, some fascinating insights into how SpaceX keeps costs down. A chapter called "Dependable or a Little Nuts?" rattles off a long list of ways SpaceX has saved money over the years, including a $30 Dragon cargo latch to replace a $1500 latch, a rocket alignment tool purchased on eBay, and a modified commercial air-conditioning unit to keep payloads cool on the launch pad instead of the usual $3 or $4 million speciality version.
The book also has some interesting tangents beyond the major players, such as a brushup on Beal Aerospace, one of the first serious commercial rocket companies. There's a fun recap of Bezos's quest to recover Apollo 11's F-1 engines from the ocean, and a side trip to a 1920 New York Times editorial scolding Robert Goddard for believing a rocket engine would work in a vacuum.
If The Space Barons has an overall message, it's pretty straightforward: these companies and leaders changed the rocket business, and they're still changing it today. The book also reminded me of just how stunning the rise of these commercial companies has been. Less than 10 years ago, SpaceX had only reached orbit once, and Blue Origin had flown a test rocket 285 feet into the air. Now, the Falcon 9 has flown 50 times, and Blue Origin has flown the same suborbital launch vehicle rocket five times. What will the next 10 years bring?
QUOTED: "Unless you’ve been on your own one-way trip to Mars, the NewSpace industry’s efforts to democratize access to low Earth orbit and beyond will ring familiar. But even industry pros should learn something from The Space Barons."
"Davenport ... provides a very readable NewSpace tale that weaves in accounts of spaceflight’s early days with more recent intrigue surrounding NASA’s un-actualized efforts to breathe new life into its crewed initiatives beyond low Earth orbit."
Science #WhoaScience
MAR 14, 2018 @ 07:40 AM 624
New Book Chronicles Rise Of 'The Space Barons'
Bruce Dorminey , CONTRIBUTOR
I cover over-the-horizon technology, aerospace and astronomy.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
TWEET THIS
During the 1960s, Pan Am started promoting trips to the Moon
Musk even told the BBC that he would sell a round-trip ticket to Mars on one of his own launchers for a flat $500,000.
Unless you’ve been on your own one-way trip to Mars, the NewSpace industry’s efforts to democratize access to low Earth orbit and beyond will ring familiar. But even industry pros should learn something from The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos — Christian Davenport’s new book chronicling the rise of four space entrepreneurs.
Courtesy: PublicAffairs Books
The Space Barons
Although The Space Barons touches on these entrepreneurs’ core businesses, mostly, the book deals with the inside stories behind each of their space efforts. Davenport, a reporter at the Bezos-owned Washington Post, provides a very readable NewSpace tale that weaves in accounts of spaceflight’s early days with more recent intrigue surrounding NASA’s un-actualized efforts to breathe new life into its crewed initiatives beyond low Earth orbit.
Thus, it’s no surprise that space enthusiasts would be ecstatic about any seemingly viable alternative to space politics as usual. That said, Bezos and Musk have good reason to crow. Both have successfully launched reusable rockets that may eventually bring down costs enough to revolutionize access to space.
But all four ‘barons’ can also be secretive. Bezos, in particular, has a reputation for being extraordinarily careful about what he reveals in public, Davenport notes. So, much so, that it wasn’t until Newsweek reporter Brad Stone found a coffee-stained copy of Bezos’ Blue Origin mission statement in the company trash, that the Amazon founder’s space aspirations became public.
In the process of writing a book about Amazon, Stone found out that Bezos’ new Seattle-based Zefram LLC. was, in fact, inspired by a fictional Star Trek inventor. In Trek lore, ‘Zefram Cochrane,’ Davenport writes, “created the first spaceship capable of traveling at warp speeds, or faster than the speed of light.”
Recommended by Forbes
As for Musk, he was inspired by the notion that we have to at least get a portion of humanity off this planet for good, perhaps himself included on a one-way trip to the nearest potentially habitable planet, which in his view remains Mars.
But after checking out NASA’s website and, at the time, not finding a schedule to get to Mars, Musk was spurred to make it his business to get there himself. To that end, in 2002 Musk created Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the formal name for SpaceX.
While Davenport includes Richard Branson and Paul Allen’s efforts at suborbital flight, The Space Barons is most compelling when it sticks with Bezos and Musk. Hardly a day goes by when Musk doesn’t give us some provocative new tidbit about his plans to send humans to Mars.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is launched from the Space Launch Complex-4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., on Monday, Oct. 9, 2017. Its first stage successfully returned from space and set down on a landing platform floating in the Pacific Ocean as the second stage went on to deploy the satellites in orbit. (Matt Hartman via AP)
And even though Bezos rarely tips his hat before he’s ready, Musk and Bezos have both a winning mix of enough chutzpah to reassure a waiting public that their teams have enough perseverance to meet their companies’ near-term goals.
As for suborbital and lunar space tourism? Lest we forget, we’ve been this way before.
Richard Branson wasn’t the first to “try to sell the allure of space,” Davenport writes. “ During the 1960s, Pan Am started promoting trips to the Moon as a way to cash in” on the surging interest in Apollo. So, Pan Am created a waiting list of potential lunar passengers. Branson has done something similar in presales of tickets for a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic.
Now Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, however, are each separately talking about a round-trip orbital flight around the backside of the Moon. And earlier, Davenport reports, Musk even told the BBC that he would sell a round-trip ticket to Mars on one of his own launchers for a flat $500,000. That’s only a little more than twice what Branson is charging his passengers for the first flight of Virgin Galactic.
But to be fair, on the Musk flight to the Red Planet, priority boarding and checked baggage will likely cost extra.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. And like my 'Distant Wanderers' exoplanet Facebook page.
QUOTED: "[gives] readers a vivid sense of life before, during and after engagement in a far-off war."
As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard
Christian Davenport, Author John Wiley & Sons $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-470-37361-3
Following the experiences of five members of 2-224th Aviation Regiment, Virginia Army National Guard, from federal activation through a one-year deployment in Iraq and back again, Washington Post reporter Davenport reveals the heroism and sacrifice of citizen-soldiers across the country. Like thousands across the country, these five find their lives violently shaken by notice of activation, pulled from families, careers and, for Miranda Summers, a senior year at William and Mary. In Iraq, they found a war zone waiting encountering insurgent gunfire flying into Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi; on rescue missions; or flying an ""angel flight"", the first leg escorting a fallen soldier home. Davenport, embedded with the regiment on their 2005-06 deployment, follows up on his story with accounts of home-side challenges. This book honors well the citizen-soldiers of the National Guard and the Army, Navy and Marine Corps Reserves, while giving readers a vivid sense of life before, during and after engagement in a far-off war.