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 becaushttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Spacee 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).
- p039 Musk cubicle like others in office space
- p039 Musk horrendously late, not punctual
- p040 "At SpaceX, we specialize inc converting the impossible to late."
p040 Musk made WiBhavya Lallliam Shatner wait four hours
- p041 interview overran "45 minute interview" to 105 minute
- p041 Big Fucking Rocket = Mars Colonial Transporter
- p041 spoke at Guadalajara conference, hoping for critical feedback, instead ridiculous
- p042 smaller BFR, replacing Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, "astonishing once a week"
- p042 Brownsville bedrock as far down as 25,000 to 50,000 feet, no solid foundation
p043 Boca Chica west of Florida and Cuba
- p044 bank right to avoid Florida and Cuba
p046 piping plover
p046 Steve Davis
p049 Lauren Dreyer
p051 310,000 cubic yards of "dirt", man-made mesa, soil surcharging
p052 Moon Base Alpha
p054 Ch.04 - On a Jihad
- p056 SpaceX churned through employees. Musk worked insane hours, didn't sleep much, allnighters in office
p062 Russian RD-180
- p062 rendezvous proximity operations, seen as potentially aggressive
p068 Bob Smith Blue Origin
p068 The Onset of Chaotic Motion in the Restricted Problems of Three Bodies
p069 Rob Meyerson left after Smith hindered access to Bezos
p070 Ch.05 - The Dark Side of Space
- p071 Trump understood little about space except political value
p074 GPS jammers
p075 Starfish Prime 1962, EMP damage in Hawaii, satellites disabled
https://www.gearbrain.com/amazon-robot-jeff-bezos-2322322141
p076 NRO existence classified from 1960 to 1992
p081 Gwynne Shotwell 2017 13 rockets, more than any other nation
p082 Jim Bridenstine Trump pick for NASA administator
p083 Ch.06 - "I'll Say You're Fired in Two Minutes"
p085 GPS Radio Occultation signal beams between satellites
p090 Rubio attacks Bridenstine, retribution for 2016 support of Ted Cruz
- p095 mis-spelling surpise
- p096 STS-1 loss risk estimated 1/500, years later recalculated as 1/12
- p097 Dragon escape engines hypergolic. Musk: "There's a lot that can go wrong"
Part II: Earth Orbit, 2018-2020
p101 Ch.07 - Starman
p102 Falcon Heavy twice Space Shuttle capacity
- p103 Monty Python Flying Circus favorite Musk TV show
- p107 Author at KSC press site lawn, 2018, distance from pad (39A?) about three miles
- p110 SLS development cost $10B, $1B per flight. Falcon Heavy development cost $500M, $150M per flight
- p111 Chinese say Falcon Heavy 10 years ahead of them
- p111 1996 Long March crashed into a village, more than 6 killed and 57 injured
p113 Ch.08 - Flying by Swipe
p113 The Boring Company Musk
- p116 Musk and marijuana on TV, NASA Bridenstine imposes Organizational Safety Assessment on SpaceX
- p118 Two catastrophic Falcon 9 failures
- p118 SpaceX superchilled propellants, LOX -340F ( 66K) for more density, fueling with astronauts aboard, contrary to 50 years of booster safety criteria
- p119 NASA slogan: If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going
- p120 astronauts told SpaceX how to design systems, rename GUI as "display"
- p123 capsule did not have control stick
- p124 fly by swipe
- p125 ideal docking speed 0.2 m/s
p128 Ch.09 - Question Everything
p129 Jaret Matthews
p129 Gwynne Shotwell "Question everything. Everything. That's what innovation is ... Nothing is sacrosanct. Nothing."
p130 NASA soft capture ring, complex, heavy. SpaceX Craig Western design, springs and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarindampers and bicycle parts, McDocker
- p131 There's always time to gain, go faster
- p131 Musk looked at it, "let's go with this" (presumably with testing)
- p133 Musk's young son docked the spacecraft simulation on the first try
p133 Behnken and Hurley advised changes, learned the new virtual button system, the new normal
- p135 Landing Soyuz a "train wreck followed by a car crash followed by falling off your bike"
- p137 Behnken: Shuttle "3000 switches ... touch screen more automated" . Bridenstein: "It's like flying an !iPhone"
- p139 Hurley: "I'm not in this business to be posthumously awarded anything."
- p141 Russians kvetched that SpaceX might crash into ISS ... perhaps to keep earning $80M per Soyuz seat
p142 Aarti Matthews Demo-1 mission manager
p144 Ch.10 - By Any Means Necessary
p144 Space Launch System 10y development
p148 Senator Richard Shelby, SLS $2.4B and 13k jobs for Alabama
- p149 SLS $2B/y spread across many states
- p149 Orion and Ares V rebranded as Space Launch System ... critics: Senate Launch System
- p150 lobbyist: "Shelby doesn't go after the quarterback. He goes after the quarterback's family."
- p152 Pence: "there's no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting"
- p154 Pence was going to Huntsville to kick some ass, not inspire a nation
- p155 "urgency"; "The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil ... by any means necessary. ... If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will."
p157 Anne McClain
p160 Ch.11 - Artemis
p160 New Glenn assigned to Launch Complex 36
p161 2017 Musk says BFR fully reusable, biggest rocket ever
p163 Bezos bought Washington Post in 2013 because he admired former owner Katherine Graham
- p163 Trump derided the press as the "enemy of the people" ... book "maybe"s hypothetical Trump motivations
p166 Bezos "... talk, set for May 9, 2019 at the Washington D.C. Convention Centehttps://www.gearbrain.com/amazon-robot-jeff-bezos-2322322141r"
Book does not specify which convention, but probably the annual SATELLITE Conference & Exhibition
- p166 Bezos goal of "millions of people living and working in space"
p167 Bezos (b 1964) read O'Neill's 1976 The High Frontier "as child" ... er, high school teenager?
p167 2017 MARS conference The audience ... several dozen
- p168 O'Neill - Mars is too far away, 1/3 gee (and poisonous, cold, no magnetic field, no plate tectonics, probably no beneficiated ores)
p169 Amazon warehouses provided ambulances rather than air conditioning
Air conditioning is expensive, more than $1M/month per fulfillment center. Assuming 5000 workers per day shift, that's $200 per month per employee. Would those workers prefer the AC or the $200 per month?
- p170 Bezos: "I want my grandchildren to be using more energy per capita than I do ...only way is to expand out into the solar system."
- p170 author: "The colonies in space were all still hundreds of years away, he [Bezos] conceded during his presentation"
- citation needed, author Davenport probably misheard or misunderstood
- "Jeff Bezos expects millions of people to be living in space by 2045, based on his vision presented at Italian Tech Week 2025."
- p170 Earlier in "the presentation" Bezos unveiled mockup of lunar lander
- first unveiled 2019 May 9
p170 abundant reserves of lunar ice [[ https://science.nasa.gov/missions/mini-rf/nasa-radar-finds-ice-deposits-at-moons-north-pole/ | 6e11 kg estimated from "circular polarization ratio". Must be at least 2 meters thick.
- p170 "Only a true space nerd got excited about rocket fuel" Only an ignorant misanthrope could write that perjorative sentence.
- p171 Bezos: "It's time to go back to the Moon, this time to stay" Bezos said "in lockstep with the White House"
- more perjoratives
- p172 Caroline Kennedy 5yo, would rather meet the monkey than John Glenn. Bezos hadn't heard the story and laughed.
- Davenport writes like Bezos should have known the story.
p173 NASA's Bridenstine did not know Artemis was goddess of the moon. Greek mythology probably wasn't emphasized during the Cornell MBA program
p177 Ch.12 - "We Just Blew It to Smithereens"
p178 2019 April 20 Dragon C204 capsule explosion
p179 launch escape system "100 mph in 1.2 seconds" -> approx 4 gees
- p180 Mark 2 parachutes safe, Mark 3 stronger but much less test data. Author "Stronger lines seemed like a no-brainer".
seemed stronger, not proven stronger ... yet. The author is NOT an engineer
- NASA team felt like they weren't getting responses. For instance?
- p181 "Musk seemed distracted" - focused on Starship. SpaceX had 6000 employees in 2019; presumably most could do their routine jobs and work with NASA without full time CEO oversight.
- p181 Starship stainless steel rather than carbon fiber.
- p182 Not as strong, but -170C to 800C, and $3/kg rather than $135/kg for carbon fiber, better for reentry
p183 Starlink announced 2015, launch began 2019, 10,000 satellites in March 2026
- p186 Musk and Bridenstine argue split resource priorities; mostly Dragon/Falcon, not much to Starship ... yet
- p187 cross-dressing: NASA wore polos and khakis, SpaceX wore dark suits and dress shirts
- p190 Musk: Parachutes are hard.
- p190 called Bridenstine Christmas eve for parachute manufacturer priority
p190 Airborne Systems parachute company
p191 Abhi Tripathi
- p192 Bridenstine "There's not a drug at SpaceX. ... People felt they could report problems. The could raise the red flag."
- p193 Dragon ejection spun and destroyed Falcon
p195 Ch.13 - "Thank ]] You for Flying SpaceX"
p195 Doug Hurley flew the last Shuttle mission and first SpaceX mission
p196 Boeing CST-100 Starliner almost failed TWICE on 2019 December first unmanned test flight
- p196 onboard computers off by 11 hours, other thrusters wasted fuel
- p196 A second major flaw would collide service module with capsule just before reentry
- p196 Boeing cut short a software test (which would have caught problem) just before service module separation
- p198 Trump wanted to attend SpaceX launch, might balk at safety delay and fire NASA chief
- p199 Secret Service agents showed up at astronaut beach house unannounced, told to get lost
p201 SpaceX Benji Reed
- p201 paranoia reviews
p201 room where Space Shuttle astronaut families waited ... drawings by children of lost Columbia crew still on the whiteboard
- p201 NASA dictated Commercial Crew loss risk must be less than 1 in 270
- p202 Astronaut class of 2000 "The Bugs" because many feared Y2K bug computer shutdowns
- Unix date bug is 04/07/2032 12:00:00 AM
- p203 After Columbia disaster, Hurley and Behnken gather Columbia family items, find welcome home letter written by astronaut's child
- p204 Bridenstine to Trump, weather hold stopped launch to space station, "Why don't you wait 5 or 10 minutes?"
- p205 2020 May 30, 15 minutes to T-0, Trump wanted to speak to astronauts
- p207 Dragon fully automated, pilots Hurley and Behnken bystanders for 19 hour flight to space station
- p207 reentry, heat shield 3500°F ( 1930°C )
- p208 Behnken: roar of plasma and thrusters "like an animal coming through the atmosphere"
- p208 Hurley: "Dragon has you loud and clear. We're about 3.9 Gs"
- p209 Behnken: parachute deploy "like getting hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat -- just a crack"
p209 comms engineer Michael Heiman " ... welcome back to planet Earth, and thanks for flying SpaceX"
- p209 Musk: "My entire adrenaline just dumped. Like, thank God. I'm not very religious, but I prayed for this one,"
- p209 founded SpaceX 18 years earlier with the goal of flying people.
Part III: Beyond, 2020-2025
p215 Ch.14 - Super Hardcore
p228 August 2020 SpaceX SN-5 150 meter launch and landing test
p229 Hurley's wife Karen Nyberg video used for Trump campaign ad; taken down after complaint
- p230 During COVID, Bezos focused on Amazon, absent from Blue Origin for a year
p231 Ch.15 - A Chinese Flag in the Lunar Soil
p232 Chang'e-5 lunar lander
p233 Tiangong space station
p236 Artemis Accords between US and 60 other countries as of 2026 Jan
- p237 made deep space exploration more attractive to Democrats
- p239 Pence warned of a new space race with China
p239 NASA budget $19B in Trump's first year (2017), budget request "jumped" to $25B in last year (for 2021)
cumulative inflation 10.55%, $19B->$21B, so four year "jump" at most 4.4% per year.
- p239 "Since Apollo, presidents looked at Mars as the next giant leap"
- which is sad, the Moon is vastly more useful, and far less lethal
p240 Stephen Colbert: “Hello, citizens of Earth. And if this is a rerun from two years from now, hello, all our fighting boys in the Asteroid Belt. Go give the Astro-Kaiser hell! Because there’s big news tonight about Space Force!
- p241 "Space Force - and the threats it was tasked with deterring"
- deter how? Very cheap "bullets" can intercept billion dollar spacecraft. There is no "supremacy" in space.
p242 Bhavya Lal acting chief of NASA 2021 (for 100 days?) followed by Bill Nelson 2021 May 3
p246 Ch.16 - Can't Get it Up (to Orbit)
- p246 National Enquirer extortion attempt, Bezos publically publishes what they sent him
p247 NASA Human (lunar) Landing System
- three bidders, NASA indicated choosing two from Blue (together with Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Draper), SpaceX, and Dynetics
- NASA chose just SpaceX
- p248 SpaceX bid $2.9B, Blue $6B
- p249 SpaceX had years of NASA collaboration, Blue Origin did not
p250 Orbital Reef to replace Space Station, moving asteroids, lunar elevators
- p251 Blue stretched too thin
- p251 Bezos to team: "How would we do this if NASA did not exist?"
- p252 NASA lawyers: Blue gambled and lost, now misusing GAO procurement oversight
p252 Blue Origin first orbital flight New Glenn 2025 January 16
p253 2023 White House criticises Elon Musk over 'hideous' antisemitic lie
- p254 December 2020 SpaceX test, no FAA signoff, crash and fireball
p254 Hans Koenigsmann felt it was clear !SpaceX did not have permission to launch, and shouldn't have.
p255 Amazon complains Elon Musk's companies don't play by the rules 2021/9/9
- p256 Dec 2020 rocket fireball: "The engines worked great, the fireball in the right spot was epic!!"
- p257 Musk 4pm interview delayed multiple times to 11pm
- p257 The Starship booster could be ready to fly again an hour after landing
- p258 24 hour operations at !SpaceX were the norm
- p261 2021 July, GAO denies Blue Origin protest of single contract award to !SpaceX
p263 China National Space Administration 2021 June announces Russian partnership for 2030s International Lunar Research Station
p265 Ch.17 - The Gremlins of Unknown Unknowns
p267 Virgin GalacticSpaceShipTwo Richard Branson politely tormenting Bezos
- p272 3 gees for two minutes ascent, 5.5 gees re-entry
- p272 passenger trips not FAA regulated, only protecting the ground
- p272 Blue Origin ticket auction, 7600 bidders from 159 countries, database of potential customers and what they will pay. Winning bid $28M
- p273 Michael Collins after 1986 Challenger explosion: "A thin and fragile barrier separates combustion from explosion"
p274 Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai "is it safe enough to put my own children on it?
p276 Yuri Gagarin 1961: "Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it."
p276 Bill Shatner to Bezos: "What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine"
- p277 Jeff Bezps before liftoff " ... think about what we're doing. It is an adventure, it is fun -- but it's also important."
p279 Ch.18 - Toxic, Limping, Abysmal
- p288 Bezos memo about living on the Moon ... snarkily dismissed by author Davenport, though Musk and Mars get a pass
Moon versus Mars |
Moon |
Mars |
launch window rate |
25 hours |
26 months |
Hohmann travel time, one way |
4 days |
260 days |
Hohmann round trip time |
8 days |
1040 days |
Landing/Return ΔV |
2.7 km/s |
7 km/s |
Poisonous soil |
no |
yes |
Breathable atmosphere |
no |
no |
Sunlight |
1.37 kW/m² |
0.59 kW/m² |
- p289 SpaceX Raptor "production crisis"
p290 Bill Nelson fund a second lunar lander, Blue Origin clear favorite
p290 Bernie Sanders measure to strip funding failed, 17 to 78
p291 Perseverance parachute binary code pattern for "dare mighty things" and the lat/long for JPL
p292 SLS launch 2022 Nov 16, four RS-25 (Space Shuttle Main) engines
p293 2022 Orion mission day 20, second pass
around Moon, 30 minute far side comms blackout p294 Lunar Landers: US, Soviet Union, China, India, Japan, Failed Israel
p294 Artemis II
p295 skip re-entry
p295 heat shield concerns
- note: highest Soviet crewed mission was Mir at 374 km, Gagarin was 327 km
p296 Ch.19 - Corporate Alchemy
p319 Epilogue - Plant the Flag