The Space Barons Quotes

“What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire in space? Start out as a billionaire.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Twenty years later, “Day 1,” the name of the Amazon headquarters building, was still a rallying cry. “Day 2 is stasis,” he wrote in 2017. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“The way rockets work right now is they are all expendable. So, you fly them once, and you throw it away. You can imagine if any mode of transport was expendable, it wouldn’t be used very much. But whether it’s a plane, a boat, a car, a bicycle, or a horse—they’re all reusable. If a 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars and you need two for a round-trip, nobody is paying half a billion dollars from London to New York and back.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“It was 1995, the dawn of the Internet era. “I thought the Internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity,” he said during a speech in 2012. “It was like humanity gaining a nervous system.” So, he told his professor he was taking a deferment to see whether he could start an Internet company, and the teacher said, “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” That was the last time they ever talked.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Head down. Plow through the line.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“The company’s motto was “Gradatim Ferociter” (step by step, ferociously”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“subject of a law signed in 2015 by President Obama that gives US companies the rights to the resources they mine in space.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“The prospect of reusable rockets dramatically lowering the cost of launch fueled the growth, as did the revolution in small satellites. For decades, satellites had been big, as large as a garbage truck, and expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But now the technology had changed, and like an iPhone, they had shrunk in size, to the size of a shoebox, costing far less. Musk wasn’t the only entrepreneur”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“JEFF BEZOS BLAMED the bananas. In early March 2013, he had quietly stolen away from his growing Amazon empire for a three-week expedition at sea, with a team of some of the best deep underwater ocean explorers in the world. Yet despite its vast experience, the crew had somehow violated one of the oldest seamen’s superstitions: never bring bananas on a boat.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Musk couldn’t help but feel as though Obama were trying to divine the future. “I think he wanted to get a sense if I was dependable or a little nuts,” Musk said.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Now, he had proven that a small band of dedicated, passionate rocketeers could pull off a feat no one thought possible. But beyond that the flight didn’t just symbolize the emergence of the commercial space industry, a New Space movement, but, he felt, the obsolescence of NASA.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it’s the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It’s the most exciting thing—I couldn’t think of anything more exciting, more fun, more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars,” he once said. “It would be incredibly difficult and probably lots of people will die and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Most of us struggle with fear,” Sarsfield said. “We fret about this and that and generally dread looking dumb. I found Elon fearless in this regard. He’s not afraid to ask a question that proves he doesn’t understand something.… “I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Asteroids are nature’s way of saying, “How’s that space program going?” as astronomers like to say.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos