flâneur

Founders: #38 The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

podscripts.co · 16,961 words · saved by 1 readers

What I learned from reading The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport. --- [0:54] Musk and Bezos were the leaders of this resurrection of the American space program, a pair of billionaires with vastly different styles and temperaments. Always audacious, Musk had plowed far ahead, his triumphs and failures commanding center stage. Bezos remained quiet and clandestine, his mysterious rocket venture kept hidden behind the curtain. [1:36] Musk, the brash hare, was blazing a trail for others to follow, while Bezos, the secretive and slow tortoise, who was content to take it step by step in a race that was only just beginning. [13:46] “How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960? What has changed?” he said. “The engines can be somewhat better, but they’re still chemical rocket engines. What’s different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by those technologies that existed in 2000 that didn’t exist in 1960.” [17:33] He started a company called Zip2 that would help print newspapers get their content online, and it immediately had customers

[00:00:00] Some 50 years after the advent of the space age, no one had ever flown a rocket past the edge of space and landed it vertically. Now it had been performed twice in less than a month. The sight of the boosters standing on terra firma, scorched but triumphant, portended a sense of arrival and offered a hope for another Apollo 11 moment, the next giant leap many had felt they were promised but had never come. For decades the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean after powering their payloads to space. To Musk and Bezos this [00:00:36] was an incredible waste, like…

related reading