Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion Dollar Space Race

Join the Duke SPACE Initiative for a conversation with Washington Post writer, Christian Davenport about his new book, Rocket Dreams (Crown Currency, on sale September 16), a chronicle of the mad scramble to shape humanity's off-planet future. The author will sit for a book signing before the event starting at 5:00 pm. Books will be available for purchase.  Seating is limited. Registration is highly encouraged. https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1LVvlA02nOjv4bk Event Description:  Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public's attention, but for past several decades, the U.S. space enterprise has felt moribund. Not anymore. 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. Space has entered a golden age, and this is just the beginning.   Christian Davenport has drawn on years of reporting and interviews with more than a hundred sources, including Space X's Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos along with several of his top executives at Blue Origin, to write the book. Many of Davenport's sources shared emails, text messages, documents, transcripts of meetings, and personal journals with him. The result is a gripping account that 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? Will the U.S. finally make a real push to the moon and eventually toward Mars?   About the Author: 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.