Review — The Space Barons

Never read any of Christian Davenport of The Washington Post’s stuff before. ‘The Space Barons’ may change that. His 2018 book was insightful, interesting and certainly made me want to follow Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic even more closely than I was before.

Davenport’s book does a good job of covering the three aforementioned companies and how they got to where they are. Granted there is never a good time to end a book like this because these companies are always breaking new ground but Davenport could certainly write a follow up now all three companies have carried passengers beyond the Karman Line.

What I really found interesting was the history of Space X. I didn’t know or forgot about all of the obstacles Elon Musk and the rest of the Space X staff had to jump over just from a competitor and bureaucratic standpoint to get where they are today. They truly were disrupters and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to see a company fight against the entrenched establishment and succeed. Also, I love Musk’s RUD acronym or Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (i.e. a rocket unexpectedly blew up) like the one that happened in 2016.

Despite the fact the Davenport works for the paper owned by Jeff Bezos, getting an interview or info out of Blue Origin was, in a word, hard. Davenport eventually got an interview with Bezos that he puts in the last chapter of the book. Bezos is essentially living his childhood dream and while Musk may stop at Mars, Bezos plans to explore much, much further. How unique is Bezos pursuit? Well at Blue Origin headquarters in Kent, WA there is a Dr Seuss quote on the wall that reads, “If you want to catch beasts you don’t see every day, you have to go places quite out of the way”.

One of the themes that Davenport kept coming back to was the competition/differences between Musk and Bezos approach. Or as it is pointed out, the tortoise vs the hare. Bezos and Blue Origin are the tortoise and Musk and Space X the hare. Both have success and both don’t seem to succeed any ground to the other any time soon.

‘The Space Barons’ is a good solid read. I would recommend it to anyone looking to know more about the current privatized space race and to any business student.