Wired.com presents the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr Curtley.

Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of Geeks 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 we'll be speaking with him today about his new book, The Space Barons, which explores

the world of private spaceflight through the eyes of four billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson,

and Paul Allen. And this interview will focus mostly on Jeff Bezos, 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 her 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 Barrens.

So how'd 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 I wrote about it, the more I kind of came to believe that what we were witnessing or what I was, you know,

putting in the paper every day really amounted to, you know, something bigger.

I mean, just sort of transcended the coverage of the, you know, that I could do for the Washington Post.

And to me, this did all, if you put it together, what, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and the late Paul Allen were doing,

you know, sort of amounted to the beginning or the beginnings of a new era in space.

And so I thought I wanted to try to capture that in a book, you know,

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