'Rocket Dreams' review: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and their space race

Christian Davenport’s second book, "Rocket Dreams," is a thorough accounting of the growing friction between space billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with insights from private jets and secret meetings, Twitter spats and battles for government contracts.

The book may not endear readers to either man; if anything, both come across as business titans who have volunteered their time and money to an absurd fight, as Bezos’ Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX have jockeyed for supremacy. The detailed reporting highlights the vast chasm between what both men say — that their goal is to benefit humankind — and the seeming reality that they are simply fighting for the glory of winning.

At times, the saga feels like a hilarious space soap opera. There was the time Musk took a hit off a joint while on Joe Rogan’s podcast, sending the head of NASA at the time, Jim Bridenstine, into a spiral. After all, "NASA had a zero-tolerance policy on drugs," Davenport writes, "and that applied to contractors as well." Then there was the near-mutiny against the SpaceX Dragon capsule because astronauts couldn’t imagine flying without a control stick: "In the agency’s male-dominated culture, it had become a phallic appendage, an extension of themselves," Davenport writes.

But the drama became more serious in 2017, when President Donald Trump, then-Vice President Mike Pence and China got involved. Davenport, who writes about space for The Washington Post, reiterates many times that this was the era when Trump shifted the space program’s focus from the moon to Mars. That about-face, announced in a tweet, created tension between Musk, who is notoriously all about Mars, and Bezos, who has different dreams — to be the man who shuttles people to and from the moon; to create hotels in low Earth orbit; to see his childhood science fiction dreams come to life. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)

Davenport paints a clear portrait of the tortoise-and-hare-style race that ensued, pitting Musk — a mercurial, tempestuous, spontaneous, often childish innovator — against Bezos, a slow, calculating, shrewd and patient corporate black belt. But "Rocket Dreams" is more than just an accounting of what happened to the U.S. space program and the competition between billionaires; it’s a story about what happens when certain kinds of men hold power, when a shared purpose of national unity morphs into a battle for individual dominance. In some cases, Davenport gently and powerfully illustrates the absurdity of certain events simply by straightforwardly describing them.

In 2018, for example, Musk launched a rocket into space that was carrying a red Tesla. Before the launch, Davenport writes, Musk became obsessed with capturing the perfect photo of the moment, and he decided to add a passenger: He "chose a mannequin, named him Starman, and outfitted him with one of the space suits SpaceX had designed for the astronauts it would soon be flying." It was a PR stunt reeking of entitlement and hubris, yet Musk was convinced that it would inspire the same awe as the 1968 Earthrise image.

Davenport does a nice job of recounting the burgeoning Chinese space program and the reaction of Trump’s administration to China’s plans to maintain a presence on the moon. What’s especially evident is how chaotic things became for NASA as each administration moved the pendulum based on different goals. The whiplash was exacerbated as NASA shifted away from its long-term partner Boeing and began planning trips to the International Space Station with SpaceX. Many astronauts were not on board with the change. "Few believed SpaceX would ever fly," Davenport writes. "Some assumed that the astronauts assigned to SpaceX were in purgatory. They’d spend years training on a spacecraft that would never lift off, while their colleagues got to actually go to space with Boeing." While SpaceX ultimately got it together, tensions remained: Lifelong NASA experts didn’t appreciate the arrogance of Musk and his team.

Years on, SpaceX is successfully, so far, taking astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Bezos is successfully, so far, taking celebrities and the rich to space for a few minutes at a time. We are still nowhere near their ultimate goals. Who knows what will happen, how much their desires will be regulated, or if their money and rocket dreams will really get them where they want to go, on Earth or otherwise?