Moon Rush: The New Space Race

Local writer Leonard David has been writing about space for many years. His previous book was Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet and he now sets his sights on the moon with Moon Rush: The New Space Race. David says the difference with this new space race is the involvement of private corporations.  “We have the beginning of public private partnerships for the Moon that are different than maybe the space programs of the past.”

There are several big names involved in private exploration including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.   “Jeff Bezos, you know he’s the richest person on the planet but he’s also a child of Apollo. He’s a young guy, watched the Apollo program, and in my mind he’s putting his money where his mouth is, he’s very visionary he’s very futuristic. Similarly you’ve got Elon Musk with SpaceX, creator of the Tesla automobile and he’s got his sights not only on the Moon but also Mars exploration. Then there’s another kind of a person in the background here that’s really interesting is Robert Bigelow, he’s a hotel mogul and he’s put in about 200 and some odd million dollars of his own money to create inflatable space structures that he feels he can supply to NASA for a lunar base. So you’re right, this is the beginning of something unique and different. It’s still gonna take, in my mind, NASA to help fortify some of these contracts with money but not nearly like an Apollo 12 billion dollars back in 1960’s. So I wish them all well, there are still a lot of things to be determined but we’re on a roll in the united states with going back to the Moon, and we’ll see how it plays out.”

Leonard David will speak about  Moon Rush: The New Space Race on Thursday May 9 at 7.30pm at the Boulder Bookstore.

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