Christian Davenport — Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race - with Ian Shapira

Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public's attention. But, in recent decades, the U.S. space enterprise has felt moribund. Now, that's finally about to change.A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before. A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations. And the world's two richest men have engaged in escalating brinkmanship, as NASA and the U.S. government embraces Silicon Valley innovation to jump-start the nation's ambitions.Space has entered a golden age, and this is just the beginning. In this gripping work, award-winning Washington Post writer Christian Davenport chronicles the mad scramble to shape humanity's off-planet future. He takes readers behind the scenes at NASA and the Pentagon as China's aggressive moon mining plans raise alarms, onto the sprawling Cape Canaveral factory where Blue Origin is working toward Amazon-style lunar deliveries, and onto SpaceX launch pads as Musk's engineers log 100-hour weeks--leaving veteran astronauts marveling that they're now operating "flying iPhones."What will happen as human ambition outpaces governmental regulation? Which country will win the race back to the moon? Was Donald Trump's much-derided creation of the Space Force a surprising act of foresight, and will the U.S. finally make a real push to the moon and eventually toward Mars?Masterfully paced, rigorously reported, and vividly told, Rocket Dreams offers a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the grit-fueled global battle to push humankind further into the cosmos--revealing that the science fiction dreams of the last century may soon become our reality.Christian Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post covering NASA and the space industry and the author of The Space Barons. He has been on reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize three times and is a recipient of an Emmy award for his work on the Discovery and Science Channels covering SpaceX's first human spaceflight mission.Davenport is in conversation with Ian Shapira. Shapira has been a staff writer at The Washington Post since 2000. He was on the Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the paper's coverage of the Virginia Tech mass shooting. His recent stories on racism, sexism, sexual assault and hazing at the Virginia Military Institute won a George Polk award from Long Island University and the Paul Tobenkin award for reporting on discrimination from Columbia University. Over the years, he's also written extensively about the lives and deaths of CIA operatives who have died in the line of duty, especially those who perished in the Afghanistan war. Shapira lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, two daughters, and their dog Merlin. https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593594117?ic_referral=1MFwdbLVyi0s8tZ3EGQ5CppL-NuFMzifYw0HtJvRalMwMwNF_l2Qiw75EdeXKQGgVxEGnv0dhFmEKE6UmS-5fIRgfu-g1yq1iUrMWucb35_AHZX6ZdbHStJc4VGHsil8VF8d0-s