This book immediately grabbed my attention on the shelf. I had known of Elon’s SpaceX and the gargantuan task he set forth of colonizing Mars, but who hadn’t heard about that? Elon’s tweets, press releases and brash existence in media made it hard to miss. What I loved about this book is that it takes the reader back to beginning of the NASA program and why our quest for space travel had been stalled for decades after the Apollo missions. Davenport explains how complex and expensive it is to build a rocket while highlighting the nuance of creating a private industry focused on human space transportation. The herculean effort is reserved for those who have billions of dollars in the bank and years worth of patience. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been the face of this effort due to his raucous behavior, but other players are in the game. Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin outfit had been toiling away in the background for years, using his billions from Amazon to pour into an eccentric interest in space travel and a reusable rocket. Then there is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic promising suborbital trips open to the public using Paul Allen’s rockets built by Scaled Composites. After billions of dollars, multiple lawsuits with government agencies and horrific rocket explosions they all are getting closer to allowing humans to a world of interplanetary space travel. But more importantly they have injected a new interest in the possibility of colonizing the stars.