Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 345 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Christian Davenport.

He's been a staff writer at the Washington Post since 2000,

and he currently covers the space and defense industries for the financial desk and will be speaking

with him today about his new book the space barons which explores the world of

private space flight through the eyes of four billionaires you on musk Jeff

bassos Richard Branson, and Paul Allen.

And this interview will focus mostly on Jeff Baysos,

since we've previously discussed Elon Musk back in episode 154

and Richard Branson and Paul Allen back in episode 221.

So definitely check those out if you miss them.

And there is a bit of background noise on this call from the Washington Post Newsroom,

but it mostly disappears after about 10 minutes, so definitely stick with it.

And so now here's an interview with Christian Davenport.

All right, so we're here with Christian Davenport.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, and so your new book is called The Space Barons.

So how did this book come about?

Well, I've been covering, you know, the commercial space industry for the Washington Post,

you know, for several years and, you know, the more you wrote wrote about it the more I kind of came to believe

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