Rocket Dreams
Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion Dollar Space Race
Christian Davenport . Multco . 919.904 D2471r . 2025
- p001 Introduction
Part I: Earth, 2016-2018
p011 Ch.01 - "I Get This Angry Twice in a Year"
- p011 2017 March 1 Oscar - Manchester by the Sea
- p012 "study hall", 6 page document, 30 minutes reading
p014 Moon not cold dead rock, instead potential oasis, water in shadowed south pole craters
wp hydrates, est. 10 to 1000 ppm, 2025 PRIME-1 mission
- actually IM-2 mission, PRIME-1 payload of a drill and mass spectrometer ... failed landing, no useful data
p015 Pence National Space Council
p017 Shenzhou "Divine" capsule
p017 Shenzhou 5 mission claimed flawless, actually injurous gees
- p017 cleanup, fake second hatch opening
p018 Chang'e-1 mapped lunar surface
p018 Chang'e 3 lander 2023/12
- p023 Musk wanted for NASA Mars plan
- p025 Bezos wanted NASA Moon plan
p026 Ch.02 - Elon's Real Superpower
- p026 Musk taunts Bezos, Blue Origin not moving fast enough
- uh ... Gradatim Ferociter
- p026 2013 SpaceX granted right to lease Launch Complex 39A
- p027 Musk mantra focus on customers, not competitors
- yet it seems Davenport focuses on a "competition" with SpaceX already the winner
- p027 Amazon "Get Big Fast", compares 2016 Blue Origin 700 to (NASA funded) SpaceX with 5500
- p028 Blue Origin before 2016 bid as subcontractor, "from now go after SpaceX bids"
p029 Charles Miller "What can you do relative to the moon by 2020?"
p029 Brett Alexander
- p029 "Landing on the moon was far more difficult than landing on Earth"
- no, different, but easier with proper infrastructure. Earth escape energy is 63 MJ/kg, lunar escape velocity energy is 2.8 MJ/kg ... 22 times less energy to dissipate, with no atmosphere to constrain the solution. An "inverse launch loop" track could shed that lunar arrival kinetic energy in d=E/a distance; for acceleration a=20 m/s², d=140 km, time =. Decelerating a few incoming vehicles wouldn't pay for the track, but one vehicle per minute is half a million per year. A complex trajectory and traffic management problem, but staging hundreds of thousands of vehicles into multiple-cycle Hohmann loops, sorting vehicles into multiple "arrival runways" at multiple locations.
- p029 Bezos (born 1964) childhood heros were Apollo astronauts ... hmm. Apollo 11 to 17 was 1969 to 1972; how much would a 5 to 8 year old understand?
p030 New Shepard and "Very Big Brother" -> New Glenn
wp mentions New Glenn 7x2 followed by New Glenn 9x4 "as early as 2027". Launch Complex 36 also Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 9
p031 also a landing at Shackleton Crater at lunar south pole.
- p032 "I started Amazon just to feed my space habit"
p033 proposal 24 pages marked "Blue Origin Proprietary & Confidential"
p034 BE-7 engine using hydrogen extracted from south pole craters.
- I'm skeptical - how much will this plant weigh (including photovoltaics, and replacement parts?)
p035 Thomas Zurbuchen Swiss-American, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA
- p036 Bezos: "If you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, you can get to Mars more easily"
- Solar-grade silicon requires 99.9999% purity or better
Blue Alchemist molten regolith electrolysis, 99.999%
Blue Origin to Pause New Shepard Flights for No Less Than Two Years
- p036 "... if Bezos was worth $78B ... that would be like a parent with $78 in their pocket"
- nonsense. If Bezos sold a few percent of his Amazon shares, the share price would plummet.
- p037 Author grousing about delayed March 2 2017 article "An Exclusive Look at Jeff Bezo's Plan to Set Up Amazon-like Delivery for Future Settlement of the Moon", WP paywall
- perhaps that delay fueled journalist author's seeming dislike of Bezos
p038 Ch.03 - Converting the Impossible to Late
- p038 "NO WHISKEY? NO BACON? NO THANKS" is a snarky anonymous sneer at Bezos' true statement that Mars, a dusty wasteland, is missing almost everything that Earth-dwellers take for granted. Bezos said that Mars is missing waterfalls, nature, blue skies, restaurants, friends, family, bacon, and whiskey. Antarctica is a garden paradise compared to Mars. “People haven’t really thought this through,” he said.
.p039 "Mars as Musk imagined it could be transformed: an Earth-like planet of blues and greens, even clouds, budding with life." |
.Illumination inverse-square function of distance, black body temperature inverse 4th power of energy flux, hence temperature inverse-square-root of distance. The Earth's black body temperature is 255K; it is warmer at the surface because Earth's thick insulating atmosphere, 287K. |
.Mars distance varies from 1.666 AU to 1.381 AU, hence top-of-atmosphere temperature will range from 255K/sqrt(1.666) to 255K/sqrt(1.381) or 198K to 229K, -75C to -44C. Those cold temperatures are why Mars retains its 0.6% earth pressure CO₂ atmosphere. A somehow-heated-to temperate atmosphere of lighter-molecule O₂/N₂ gas would soon boil away in the shallow (14% escape energy) gravity well of Mars. |
.Bezos is correct. Musk is smoking rope (or investor hopes and money). |
p054 Ch.04 - On a Jihad
p070 Ch.05 - The Dark Side of Space
p083 Ch.06 - "I'll Say You're Fired in Two Minutes"
Part II: Earth Orbit, 2018-2020
p101 Ch.07 - Starman
p113 Ch.08 - Flying by Swipe
p128 Ch.09 - Question Everything
p144 Ch.10 - By Amy Means Necessary
p160 Ch.11 - Artemis
p177 Ch.12 - "We Just Blew It to Smithereens"
p195 Ch.13 - "Thank You for Flying SpaceX"
Part III: Beyond, 2020-2025
p215 Ch.14 - Super Hardcore
p231 Ch.15 - A Chinese Flag in the Lunar Soil
p246 Ch.16 - Can't Get it Up (to Orbit)
p265 Ch.17 - The Gremlins of Unknown Unknowns
p279 Ch.18 - Toxic, Limping, Abysmal
p296 Ch.19 - Corporate Alchemy
p319 Epilogue - Plant the Flag