A Puffery of the Space-Race Among Profit-Driven Billionaires
Christian Davenport, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race (New York: Crown, September 16, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-59411-7.
**
“Musk versus Bezos. China versus the United States. The government versus the private sector. Welcome to the rivalries and alliances defining the New Space Age. At stake? Billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public’s attention… A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before.” This is an incredible over-puffery of this industry. The big rockets that are supposed to go further keep blowing up on-exit, and nobody has landed a human on the Moon (if not ever) than not across the past 50 years. “A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations.” China is the main moon-landing operation at this time, not anybody in the US. “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.” Is anybody in the US “ambitious” to go into space at the snail-pace we are inching there and back? The ambition is mostly with the billionaires who profit from failing to get anywhere while “trying”. “Space has entered a golden age, and this is just the beginning.” If this is the “golden age”; it might be the ending of space-travel attempts because repeatedly failing is not going to help the public have reasons to support a failing-mission. “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…” What? The only thing to worry about regarding China’s plans is that they are going to succeed in proving the US faked its “moon-landing”, such as by finding and bringing back rocks that prove US’s moon-rocks are fakes, or meteors that might have been chipped off the moon and brought to Earth, or the like. Inside the book, there is a mention that China’s plan to mine for “helium-3” is what’s troubling. This is an energy-source that apparently can be “worth $1,400 per gram”. The US seems to be lobbying to stop this attempt to actually profit from space-travel by evoking the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that claimed “no nation could claim sovereignty over the moon.” Though noting that the Moon’s “resources” are available for exploitation. The remaining worry then is that being able to mine helium-3 would alter the “balance of power on Earth”. Readers are instructed to be afraid that China does not separate “civil and military space efforts”. Why would mining for an energy-source be militarily dangerous? Apparently, Trump voiced this concern, while claiming “NASA alone could not match China”, and so the administration had to sponsor billionaire space-racers. It seems they are inventing a motive to give billions to billionaires who openly sponsored Trump’s reelection. If China manages to take its space-program further this would finally make real progress in this field that has stagnated while the US has been writing fictions about its superiority in technology because of this ancient “achievement”.
“…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.’” This is a cryptic set of phrases. Why are iPhones flying? Searching for these torturous 100-hour workweeks, I found numerous exaggerations that Musk’s company is “running at ‘100 percent’”. I also found a reference to Musk’s claim that he “worked insane hours, didn’t sleep much, and often spent nights at the office.” This is used to explain why “SpaceX was notorious for churning through employees…” Musk has not quiet, so it seems likely that it’s his employees who are working these hours, while he might not be doing much besides what’s visible in the press. There certainly needed to be some documented proof beyond Musk’s own claims to support this statement, and yet the paragraph ends here.
“…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?”
I do not recommend this book. It’s a puffery of the US side of this space-race, when humanity really should be cheering for all other players.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/