The inside story of the billionaires fighting for space
Christian Davenport on "Rocket Dreams"
The space race was once between the United States and the Soviet Union; now it’s between two tech billionaires trying to seize the mantle of most powerful space lord. For Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the development of SpaceX and Blue Origin respectively is the culmination of a lifetime commitment to technology growth and science fiction. It’s also increasingly a ferocious campaign, one that has turned them from experimental pioneers to aggressive businessmen hoping to seize the future of space’s GDP for themselves.
All of this is ably documented in Christian Davenport’s new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race. A follow up from his massively popular book The Space Barons, the book chronicles the last seven years of the new space race with alacrity and intimate details.
Christian and I talk about how he transitioned from covering Afghanistan and America’s home front in the War on Terror to covering the crazy billionaires at the heart of the space race. Then they talk about Musk’s fight over the United Launch Alliance, why Blue Origin has been taking on more risks in recent years, NASA and the government’s growing dependency on private companies for manned spaceflight, what the next decade of the space economy will look like, and finally, how China is entering the picture in a frenetic way.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full episode please visit our podcast.
Danny Crichton:
Christian, you just published a new book, Rocket Dreams, focused on Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their billionaire race for the stars. Tell me how you got into the space world.
Christian Davenport:
I was at the Washington Post during 9/11, and at the time, I was a metro reporter covering a suburb of Washington DC. A lot of the people in the communities I was covering were being called up to go over and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I like to say I was the first reporter to be embedded on the home front. If you’re a reserve component, you don’t go back to a huge military base where you’re surrounded with people like you, you take off your uniform and you go back to civilian life. I wrote a lot about that. But then, in 2014, I got assigned to cover this press conference at the National Press Club because some guy named Elon Musk was suing the Pentagon for the right to be able to launch national security payloads — national security satellites for the government — on his rocket. I don’t think I really knew who Elon was at the time.
Elon was filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon even as he’s trying to get the Pentagon to be his customer.
Danny Crichton:
Yeah, he had a much smaller profile back then for sure.
Christian Davenport:
Right. The whole premise of the news conference was a bit insane. He was filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon even as he’s trying to get the Pentagon to be his customer. He wants to work for them, and the way he’s trying to do that is to file a lawsuit.
But at the time, a company called ULA, the United Launch Alliance, which is made up of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had this monopoly on all national security launches and were just bringing in billions upon billions of dollars and charging the government a lot of money for that service. Elon’s point was, “Don’t give me the contract, but at least allow me or others to compete for those contracts.”
I left the press conference and I wrote my story, but then I started researching SpaceX and re-usable rockets and Elon and what they were doing and ultimately decided we needed to be paying attention to it.
Danny Crichton:
Your book centers on the competition between two big billionaires, and that’s the crux of the story. But there’s also this massive legacy of NASA going back to the 1960s and the Apollo program and everything else up to the present day. I’m curious how you balance between the government and NASA’s public mission versus that ego-driven ambition that’s coming from the private sector?
Christian Davenport:
That tension is at the heart of the book. And it’s growing and evolving. It’s a push-pull, because governments have had exclusive dominion over human space flight and space exploration for decades — since the dawn of the space age. Yeah, they’ve always used contractors, even going back to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. But now, you’re seeing this erosion, where the private sector is going in and taking parts. In part, that’s the way NASA designed it. That’s the way the government designed it. They decided to cede some of these responsibilities to the private sector.
If you’re a young engineer today, are you going to go work at NASA or are you going to go work at SpaceX?
You have it starting from outsourcing missions like flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, which evolved into flying astronauts to the International Space Station, which has now evolved to the flagship program, Artemis. We’ve outsourced the spacecraft that’s going to land astronauts on the moon to the private space sector, outsourced the spacesuits. Those are going to be built by the private sector. The rovers, some of the technologies for power generation, all these sorts of things are being outsourced.
So what is the government’s role in this? It’s setting the direction, having oversight of these companies. But I think you’re seeing a huge effect, where so much of the talent and expertise has gone into the private sector. If you’re a young engineer today, are you going to go work at NASA or are you going to go work at SpaceX?
Danny Crichton:
Right. We see this in our own portfolio. We have a bunch of space tech companies and many of them are alums of SpaceX. Theoretically, in a different generation, they would have been at NASA. Instead, they’re building rockets, they’re optimizing the fuel systems on these vessels, and they’re very effective at it. On one hand, they’re very public-minded and they really do believe in these missions. On the other, the economics, as we all know, are really tough, especially when the government shuts down, NASA is adrift with an administrator coming back and forth.
Most of Rocket Dream is focused on two companies: SpaceX and Blue Origin. SpaceX always gets 97% of the coverage. Part of that is Elon Musk, who is just a larger-than-life figure. But we just had a big breakthrough with Blue Origin a few weeks ago, where it had the successful orbital launch and booster landing of its powerful New Glenn rocket, carrying NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission and it landed the reusable first stage of the rocket on a drone ship.
In your book, you describe SpaceX as very ambitious, very experimental. Blue Origin has been this middle ground. They’re not plotting, they’re trying to slowly build up capability, they’re much less flashy, a little bit more grounded. Did the news this last week from Blue Origin fit with that narrative?
Christian Davenport:
That’s a great question. I should be thankful to Blue Origin for landing the booster, because actually, I think the book sets it up perfectly, so it’s great timing.
Blue Origin just has not been as successful. But in the last two years, you really have seen a change in their metabolism and, I think, risk tolerance.
You’re right, SpaceX gets 97% of the coverage, because they do 97% of the work. They’re launching a rocket every two days. They’re the ones winning the contracts, from the Pentagon and NASA, they’re really doing it.
Blue just has not been as successful. But in the last two years, you really have seen a change in their metabolism and, I think, risk tolerance. There were several inflection points. One came in 2016, when Jeff Bezos was saying to his team, “They’re pulling ahead of us, SpaceX. We need to catch up and we need to go after everything that they go after,” and he urges his team to do it. They were supposed to win this big moon-lander competition, but they ended up losing.
And that leads to the second inflection point. Remember, for Jeff Bezos, there are a few failures in his career at Amazon here and there, but nothing like this. No defeats like losing this contract to SpaceX. They just change, I think, as a company and they say, “Let’s forget NASA. We tried bidding and offering NASA the solution we thought they wanted, but now, we’re going to build what we want and we’re going to innovate and we’re going to come up with something completely different.”
The architecture for their moon-lander today uses all these innovative new technologies. It’s essentially a reusable spacecraft that stays in orbit around the moon and then a service spacecraft goes back in between the Earth and the moon to service it, to refuel it. The barrier to entry for that is so difficult. It’s so much more risky. But it’s also the SpaceX way.
Danny Crichton:
When you think about the venture capital industry, we generally try to invest in companies we’d want to exit in a decade — that’s the lifecycle of a fund. One of the interesting things here is that these are old companies from a Silicon Valley perspective. Blue Origin is actually older than SpaceX. It started in 2000. SpaceX, I think, was about 2002, 2003. They’re almost entering their third decade, and you have two CEOs who have many other things going on.
How much does Elon and Jeff’s attention drift onto and off of these companies, and how does that change how those companies function?
Christian Davenport:
I think you see it perhaps more at Blue Origin than at SpaceX. Famously, Jeff was working at Blue Origin on Wednesdays and one or two Saturdays a month. He has said that since he left Amazon, Blue Origin is his top priority. He moved to Florida, probably for tax reasons, but also I think he likes being closer to their Cape Canaveral facility. He’s focusing a lot more attention on Blue.
What happens to Blue Origin when Jeff goes away, retires? Or what happens to SpaceX? Can those companies exist and thrive without them?
Elon is just Elon. He could be doing a million different things, but when he’s dialed in to SpaceX, he is dialed in. I think there was a lot of discussion, particularly around the time where he was embedded in the White House and doing DOGE, whether SpaceX was a little bit distracted.
I, frankly, heard both things. I heard that there wasn’t the focus, but on the other hand, I think a lot of the people were glad to have a little reprieve from Elon. The other thing I think about with those two is what happens to Blue Origin when Jeff goes away, retires? Or what happens to SpaceX? Can those companies exist and thrive without them?
Danny Crichton:
Jeff’s 60+ years, so still spry. But there’s this balance between their time and attention and skill and recruiting and the cachet they bring these companies, and then there’s the capital aspect: they’re putting their money in, they’re putting their dollars to work.
Christian Davenport:
You’re exactly right. Blue Origin has existed essentially like a nonprofit with one benefactor, and that’s Jeff Bezos. He’s said that, every year, he cashes out a billion dollars in Amazon stock and plows it into Blue Origin. Elon funded SpaceX to the tune of about a hundred million dollars early on, but it’s been able to exist and thrive with government contracts and leveraging that alongside private investment to build the Falcon 9, build Dragon Spacecraft, and use those vehicles to then go into commercial markets and build another line of business.
That’s a very good business; it could have survived for a long time doing that. But Elon disrupts himself. Enter Starlink. If SpaceX moves from being a rocket company to becoming an internet provider and a satellite provider, then the upside could be 10x, or maybe potentially even more. They’ve launched 10,000 satellites and have 8,000 operating, but now they’ve got a satellite production line, where you can change the guts of the satellite. It doesn’t have to be internet and communications. It can be who knows what? Remote sensing? Spy cameras?
We know the National Reconnaissance Office has a contract with SpaceX to use that satellite line, whereas Blue Origin is just beginning to do that. That launch the other day, that was a launch for NASA. They have a lot more lined up, but in terms of the upside that Elon and SpaceX have, there’s no comparison.
Danny Crichton:
Two years ago, Ronan Farrow had a piece in The New Yorker. Basically, the U.S. government used to have the unique capability to put astronauts in space. Now it’s just becoming the strategic setter of the country’s direction as opposed to actually owning the operations.
Up until recently, that has basically been a monopoly on the SpaceX side. They are the only ones with the capability. Increasingly, and this was the Farrow point, SpaceX has the ability to just say no. And if it says no, so to speak, the government doesn’t really have an alternative way of solving some of these sorts of problems.
Does Blue Origin catch up and say, “Look, now there’s an oligopoly. We can form at least a duopoly, which will put pressure on SpaceX to reengage”?
Christian Davenport:
I think NASA’s idea, from the very beginning, was that if space was going to go commercial, the United States would need a growing commercial space industry. And so, the question was: Do we have a commercial space industry or do we have SpaceX? For a long time, we’ve just had SpaceX.
But now, you’ve got so much of the national space enterprise in the hands of one company, essentially one person, it’s not healthy. You saw perhaps one of the most dramatic illustrations when Elon and President Trump had their little spat. Elon threatened to take the Dragon Spacecraft away from NASA, and that’s the only way NASA can fly its astronauts anywhere.
A lot of people thought it was reckless and dangerous, and it sent off alarm bells. I know people at NASA and the government were reaching out to companies like Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity, Stoke Space, and other providers to say, like, “You guys got to hurry up.” And I think the government will bend over backwards to bring those companies in. Even if they’re not the lowest bidder, just by virtue of not being SpaceX, they’ll be able to get a foothold.
Danny Crichton:
One of the big concerns in American politics and the economy is short-termism. We’re always on this quarterly earning cycle. Yet we’re talking about companies that have been around for several decades and two individuals in particular who seem to have extensive long-termism around solving these problems. Why so much long-termism here? What sustains them on this compared to so many others?
Christian Davenport:
For Jeff, it’s a very important mantra and very key to understanding how he thinks. He’s got a thousand-year clock that chimes like once every hundred years or whatever it is, which is a symbol for long-term thinking and solving problems. Space is just hard. The barriers to entry are extreme, but they both think it’s really important, and they’re thinking about it in terms of what their legacy for their life is going to be?
There’s also this tit-for-tat and the competition between them and the rivalry, but the fact of the matter is they’re actually very similar in their thinking about space, and their long-term thinking about space and lowering the cost and increasing access.
As Jeff said, when he founded Amazon, you could found an internet company in your dorm room, because you had the infrastructure. Phone companies had laid down the cables for the internet. The Post Office could deliver books. An invention called the credit card that could take people’s money. He could build a business on that infrastructure.
But if you want to build a business in space, the infrastructure isn’t there. It is starting to get there, but I think that’s why they talk about the long-term vision and building that infrastructure. And then, once you can access space frequently, what does that open up? What about data centers in space? What about space-based solar power? Commercial space stations? Mining celestial bodies?
In space, we can explore. But when do we change from exploration to expansion, to holding the territory and commercial space station?
Danny Crichton:
Even on our side, we’ve led a $25 million series A into a company called Reflect Orbital, which is putting space mirrors into orbit. Five or ten years ago, this would have been ridiculous. Now, with the advent of Starship, hopefully in the next cycle here, the economics of space — the economics of payloads — change. This is the bet we’re making in the company and the team. On the other hand, I’m still not a complete believer of data centers in space. Chips heat up, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve found any solution to that.
To your point though, in 2025, what I am seeing is that we’re pivoting from this world of how to get stuff up. That’s increasingly a solved problem. The next 10 years to me is like, “Well, what do we do with this?” You’ve done two of these books covering basically a 20-year period of space flight and commercial space flight history. Is there a third book coming in 10 years? What do you predict is going to happen?
Christian Davenport:
I’m thinking about this a lot, and I do think of it in terms of a series. The analogy that I use is, westward expansion and the pioneers. I think we’re in the covered wagon stages. We’re going, we’re accessing the territory, we can get there, but we’re moving into homesteading. As a Space Force general put it to me, we spent the first 50–60 years of the space age trying to get to space. Now, we focus on getting through space, moving through space, maneuvering, staying there, changing orbits, traveling, refueling, creating businesses up there and doing all that.
I think once we get to that point, there will be a book there, many books there, about the homesteading aspect of it. That’s how I see it.
I was talking about my thesis with someone who’s much smarter than me and they said, “No, no, no. Before you get to homesteading, you have to have the cavalry.” You need the rules of the road. I’ve been thinking a lot about national security. A lot of people think Space Force is a joke. It is not. The threats from China and Russia and others are real. They can hold our assets in space at risk. What we have up there — GPS, just for an example — is incredibly important, and not just for Uber Eats, DoorDash and Waze. The timing signal on a GPS satellite is used for every ATM transaction, every trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
Those satellites, the 31 of them, 34 of them… they are vulnerable. China, Russia, North Korea and others have shown they can take them out. That’s a real risk. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Danny Crichton:
There’s also the cyber aspect. These are digital systems, they’re hackable. In many cases, they’re not easy to patch. And so, once a nation-state actor investigates and identifies a vulnerability, it’s not necessarily easy to close.
And also, with all these thousands of objects in orbit, there’s the issue of space debris. I think it was an MIT study that came out earlier this week that said there will be so much space debris coming back down to Earth, that one plane every decade will be hit and blown up, and we have no solution for this problem whatsoever.
So to your point, there’s a huge amount of stuff here that has come together all of a sudden that didn’t exist 5, 10 years ago.
Christian Davenport:
Yeah, and the regulations, as you pointed out, are just not there. When you talk about space debris, the U.S. government can track it and they can tell satellite operator A, like, “Hey, you may collide with satellite B,” but it can’t order them to maneuver. Some of them can’t even maneuver. We just saw a Chinese spacecraft apparently hit with a piece of debris. I joke that if the problem of space debris gets really, really bad, then it’ll be like a moat protecting Earth from any incoming aliens.
But in general, what China’s been able to do in space is remarkable. There is no differentiation between their civil space program and their national security space program. It’s not like in the United States. Really, China’s space program is run by the military. And what you are seeing now, by the way, is — and this is a Space Forces term — Chinese and American satellites “dogfighting.” Not over a 10- or 20-minute period, this is days, even weeks, where they are flying by at very close proximities, which in space is miles apart, but doing it in a way where they gain tactical advantage.
Jeff says, “Oh, you want to know what Mars is like? Go live on the peak of Mount Everest.” It’s actually like living on the peak of Mount Everest in Chernobyl.
Danny Crichton:
You titled your book “Rocket Dreams,” and I want to emphasize the word “dreams.” NASA, the intelligence community and the Pentagon — one of the reasons these were all separated is they had different dreams. NASA was focused on scientific exploration, the Pentagon focused on strategic and tactical advantage. You have space races between countries, where they are trying to gain advantages over each other. You have billionaires who are competing on ego or from a commercial perspective. There are so many different types of dreams.
But to me, there’s this balance between dreams like “Hey, we’re going to have space stations in orbit” — those already exist, it’s just scaling up — versus that long-term dream of going to Mars. We may never achieve it. Which one do you think is motivating folks better?
Christian Davenport:
On the Mars side, that’s part of what Elon does, and he’s good at it. He’s trying to make space cool again and driving this vision. That’s why he cares about aesthetics. That’s why he cares about the space suit looking cool. The spaceship has to look cool because he wants public support.
But the fact of the matter is this, as someone said to me: Imagine the first human landing on Mars, and imagine it goes perfectly. Seven minutes of terror, entry, descent and landing — this moment of absolute triumph is also a moment of pure peril in its crisis mode from day one, because Mars is just so difficult.
Jeff says, “Oh, you want to know what Mars is like? Go live on the peak of Mount Everest.” It’s actually like living on the peak of Mount Everest in Chernobyl. It’s not a pleasant place to go. I think it would be astounding.
We romanticize it so much. But spaceflight is really, really hard. It’s incredibly dangerous. To think that we’re going to go to Mars and not kill a lot of people, I think it’s foolish. I think this vision of having big space stations in orbit, where you can come back to Earth, I think that’s a long way off, but it seems potentially more suitable for human beings.
