Billionaire’s rocket dreams
Two of the richest men in the world are trying to send Americans back to the moon.
The commercial space industry has exploded over the past decades. But heavy hitters like SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos want to go beyond launching things to space – they want to send the next astronauts to the lunar surface.
Christian Davenport, staff writer at The Washington Post, said that the growth of the commercial space sector started to feel “real” slowly, but surely, overtime.
“The moments [you realize it’s real] build up over time when they have increased capability. Yeah, they can launch these rockets. Yeah, they can be trusted to fly to the International Space Station. Yeah, they can be trusted to fly humans,” Davenport said. “Now we're seeing that paradigm grow with NASA's ambitions. Now, we're talking about going to the moon under the Artemis program. It's going to be the commercial sector, i.e. SpaceX or Blue Origin, that's building the spacecraft that are going to land the astronauts on there.”
Davenport’s new book looks at how space moguls Musk and Bezos have worked their way up out of the atmosphere and the key players along the way in “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion Dollar Space Race.”
Despite their fierce competition, the two are united in a broader effort to advance U.S. space ambitions.
“The fact of the matter is, I think they both want to push the art of the possible, push innovation technologies, drive down the cost, to make space more accessible, to open up space to more people, to, you know, hurry up,” Davenport said. “I think they're both frustrated with the pace of progress.”
SpaceX is the current leader in commercial space, unlike in 2021, when it was awarded a contract to build a human landing system -- a contract many thought would go to Blue Origin. SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft was unconventional and ambitious, leading those in the space community to doubt the decision, according to Davenport.
“That loss forced Blue Origin to say, ‘well, they won with that innovative concept. Maybe that's what we should be doing,’ and they did,” Davenport said. “They went back to the drawing board and scrapped their old proposal and came up with a lunar landing system that has reusability, and being able to refuel the spacecraft, and having a space tug that would go back and forth between the Earth and the Moon. It was a much more innovative design.”
The larger landscape of space ambitions
The story of the rise of commercial space would be incomplete by just looking at Musk and Bezos.
Jim Bridenstine was the NASA administrator under the first Trump administration and a former House of Representatives member from Oklahoma. He gained an interest in space following a tornado in Moore, Okla.
“He went down there, [Moore] was absolutely devastated by this tornado. [It was] harrowing. Children plucked from their parents' arms, that sort of thing. He was looking at that they had, like, 10 to 15 minutes notice. He said, looking again at the commercial sector and the satellite technology, ‘can't we do better than that?’” Davenport said.
Bridenstine’s by-the-rules attitude clashed with Musk. Still, SpaceX became a leader in the commercial space industry faster than any other company. It goes by a ‘break now, fix later” model of innovation, bettering their product with real-time adaptation.
“He wanted to beat Boeing, and he wanted to show them that these kids, they may have a tattoo, and they may wear T-shirts and jeans to work, and they don't wear jackets and ties, but they're really good at what they do. I think there was a competitiveness with him to do it,” Davenport said.
China’s space program is cutting edge. They have impressive marks with a continuously inhabited space station, Mars rover and a probe on the south pole of the moon.
What symbolizes the nation’s ambition most to Davenport are the flags waving on the moon. The United States’ flags fly white, bleached from the harsh conditions. China planted two flags meant to look red -- long after it left.
“They took the basalt, turned it into lava, heated it up to something like 3700 degrees Fahrenheit, and from the lava, somehow, they’re able to extract these threads one-third the diameter of a human hair, and that's what they wove the flag out of,” Davenport said. “To me, it's clear they're demonstrating that they can take the resources of the moon and use them for our own purposes.”
