The employees at Blue Origin rose to their feet in unison. Soon the rocket’s altitude was 2,000 feet.Īs the ground came into view, fire from the engine kicked up a plume of dust. But now that the rocket was falling back, the thrust had the opposite effect: it was slowing the rocket down, preventing it from slamming into the ground and exploding. Just minutes before on this morning three days before Thanksgiving in 2015, the engine had fired to lift the rocket off the launchpad at Blue Origin’s West Texas test site, flying it faster than the speed of sound past the 62-mile threshold that’s considered the edge of space. “We have thrust.”Īt that, the employees started cheering wildly. “Engine start,” said the flight controller. Mostly, they were silent, waiting for what would happen next. The employees, mostly engineers, were packed in, watching the rocket in free fall on a giant screen. “Estimate ten seconds to engine start,” the flight controller announced. But instead, the four hundred or so people gathered in the employee lounge at Blue Origin’s headquarters outside Seattle were thrilled to see the booster plummeting toward Earth. Normally, a rocket dropping like a bomb would be cause for panic. T HEY CAUGHT THEIR first glimpse of it at 25,000 feet and falling fast. The Space Barons is also a story of rivalry-hard-charging startups warring with established contractors, and the personal clashes of the leaders of this new space movement, particularly Musk and Bezos, as they aim for the moon and Mars and beyond.
Now they are pursuing the biggest disruption of all: space.īased on years of reporting and exclusive interviews with all four billionaires, this authoritative account is a dramatic tale of risk and high adventure, the birth of a new Space Age, fueled by some of the world’s richest men as they struggle to end governments’ monopoly on the cosmos.
These entrepreneurs have founded some of the biggest brands in the world-Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal-and upended industry after industry. Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen-are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, and send humans even further than NASA has gone. The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. The historic quest to rekindle the human exploration and colonization of space led by two rivals and their vast fortunes, egos, and visions of space as the next entrepreneurial frontier
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