Christian Davenport (1)

The latest iPhone is great, but the real buzz in science and technology is the plight to colonize Mars. Perhaps still too far-fetched for some, the race to be the first commercial shuttle between Earth and Mars is a very real and burgeoning enterprise, with unthinkable funds being expended (and sometimes exploded) along the way. Recent movies and books such as Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2011; 2014), and The Terranauts (2016) have begun to imbue collective popular consciousness with the rather old space ambitions, but it is often hard to separate fact from fiction when they are so tightly coupled. This is where Christian Davenport’s forthcoming book, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, fills a rapidly widening void. A reporter for the Washington Post, Davenport has extensive material and history from which to work, and a reporter’s knack for stating facts and extracting the perfect array of material to tell the story.

Read full review: http://www.chrisviabookreviews.com/2017/12/05/the-space-barons-elon-musk-jeff-be...… (plus d'informations)

Great overview and current summary of one of the most interesting engineering and business achievements going on right now — the new space race, in particular Elon Musk and SpaceX as well as Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic, and some earlier (Beal) and more ancillary companies. In the 1990s if I’d thought space would someday be something other than NASA dead end shuttle bullshit, I probably would have gone into aerospace rather than computing and computer security. While computing and networks are one of the big engineering achievements in their own right (and in the form of AI, possibly greater than space, and on par with life extension as most important area of development), there is just something about space which makes it appealing.… (plus d'informations)