This book tells the story of the ongoing competition between Jeff Bezos (Amazon/Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (Tesla/Space X)as they compete against each other and the remnants of the embedded military industrial complex. The contrast between the old way and the new way of building rockets reminds me of nothing so much as a Ben Bova novel where the inevitably brilliant, always libertarian, hero bucks the system and fights the government bureaucracy to achieve greatness.

This book was provided to me as an eArc by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

I picked this up thinking it was an examination of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos's space race, but there is so much more to the story. It is essentially a history of space flight up to the present day. The focus is on the number of agencies creating their own space force. Elon Musk is the most famous. The world watches as the Space X rockets get on the launch pad. Bezos' force has less flare, but have shown to be very reliable and simple.

In a more contemporary sense, the one part that got my attention was ULA. This is a Boeing operation, but it uses Russian rockets and part to get into space. One of the items that have become more urgent since the 2016 election is the United States traveling into space. They were sharing rockets with the Russian and relied on Russian flights to get American astronauts into space. It would be interesting to see how that is playing out now with things getting so complicated. Fascinating and eye-opening back story.

Nonfiction
Adult
For most of my life, NASA has been the leader in space exploration – sending my beloved Voyager craft into the solar system in 1977, then developing the space shuttle program, with its high-profile disasters in 1986 and 2003, and of course the amazing Mars exploration program that continues today. (Sorry boomers, I don’t remember the moon landings.) Early in this millennium, however, I started to hear interesting news about privately funded space travel, starting with the X Prize and the Antari Prize competitions. Not long afterward, NASA retired its shuttle program but had nothing to put in its place, relying instead on Russia’s Soyuz capsules to deliver astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. (Check out Chris Hadfield’s book to find out more about this.) Today we regularly see tests of “reusable rockets” that can launch a satellite into orbit and then return to earth and land for later reuse, saving a LOT of time and money. Blue Horizon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic – how did these efforts get their start? This book tells the stories of two men in particular, Silicon Valley billionaires Elon Musk of Tesla fame and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, and their decisions to plow personal fortunes into rocket development. It’s a difficult task, a road littered with explosions and mishaps but it’s a fascinating story that will lead to, perhaps as early as this year, humans heading into space on a privately-funded rocket. Fernholz is a former Washington D.C. reporter, and the book benefits from his strong writing, well-organized approach, and meticulous research. His opinion occasionally bleeds through – while Fernholz is obviously interested in this shift from government to entrepreneurial space development, I get the sense his first draft at the title might have been Space Dilettantes instead of Rocket Billionaires. He calls Musk the “rock star of dorks, whose ambition knows no bounds.” He uses a lot of quotes from personal interviews as well as citations from documents, but there’s no numbered footnote or endnote system. Instead, he organizes endnotes by chapter using short excerpts (e.g. “no money to continue”) to reference his source. In the Kindle version I used, the e-book embeds links within the short excerpts back to the original reference in the chapter. By not using numbered notes, I am guessing Fernholz intends to make the book more populist in its appearance, knowing that dedicated researchers can quickly figure it out. A fascinating read that will appeal to those interested in the current rocket research activity. It’s a good candidate for sharing with teen tech and space geeks, too. My thanks to publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the digital reading copy provided through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
More discussion and reviews of this title: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35721160

An absorbing novel that oscillated between absolutely enthralling to being rather dry in its delivery.

As the title attests, the main focus of the novel is upon rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as SpaceX and Blue Origins battle each other and the entrenched behemoths, Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

In Rocket Billionaires, there is a greater focus on Elon Musk and SpaceX, which is understandable considering the enigmatic nature of Blue Origins and Jeff Bezos, while the novel, The Space Barons, apparently focuses more on Blue Origins.

The cutthroat nature of the rocket industry and the lobbying of government for open chequebooks with bloated budgets and rampant expenditure is an industry that completely underestimated the likes of upstarts Musk and Bezos, who with their contrasting styles of business acumen defied the odds and wrote a new rule book based on simplicity of design and unfettered control over design and manufacturing to keep costs on a tight rein.

I look forward to following the continued exploits of Musk, Bezos and others in the pursuit of Mars and beyond.

The book is enjoyable to read and I'm sure fascinating for some people, but I couldn't make myself read this.

I love futurism in general, but this is a great book for anyone thinking about our collective future.

A fascinating story highlighting amazing people who are doing remarkable work.