What happened to the high-tech space race?

When the rocket company Blue Origin didn't get a lunar lander contract with NASA in April 2021, its founder, Jeff Bezos, was fuming.

- REBECCA BOYLE

Blue Origin had been working for years on a prototype lander, hoping to wrest funding—and some fame—from Elon Musk's SpaceX, by then a trusted partner to the American space agency. Just four months into the Biden administration, Bezos began assembling attorneys to file a formal protest with the federal government.

According to the journalist Christian Davenport's latest dispatch from the high-tech space race, Rocket Dreams, Bezos also posed a question: "How would we go about this if NASA did not exist?" The answer: Build big rockets that can get people to the moon (and Mars) anyway. Billionaires just really want to do that. They have plenty of money to spend and nobody is stopping them; in fact, NASA is welcoming their ideas and their designs. What no one asks, including in this book, is why this is something we should encourage the billionaires to do, let alone why we should praise them for it.

As the space exploration beat writer at The Washington Post, Davenport is in frequent contact with the government space officials, tech bros and billionaires who are transforming the industry—including Bezos, who owns Davenport's employer. Rocket Dreams offers a fly-on-the-wall account from launchpads and flight decks across nearly a decade of space exploration, from the early days of the first Trump administration to the beginning of the second.