OPEN SPACE

One small step for corporate America.

“An uneasy silence washed over both mission control and nearby observation rooms. It was almost as if the entire building, and indeed much of the viewing global audience, were now collectively holding its breath.” Journalist Ariosto’s description of the IM-1 moon mission reads like the cigar smoke-filled scenes from the tense days of Apollo, but with decidedly lower stakes. As Texas-based Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander—affectionately known as Odie—hurtled toward the lunar surface in February 2024, the only people likely holding their breaths were shareholders. This was the race to be “the first company on the Moon.” The privatization of the space industry took off after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts and the government’s urge to fund missions. America’s billionaires rushed to fill the vacuum, declaring the moon open for business. “Space entrepreneurs” want to mine the moon for rare earth elements or turn it into “a kind of gas station and launchpad” for spaceships en route to Mars. They envision millions of people (and robots) moving to the Martian equivalent of an early American company town—minus the breathable air. Meanwhile, China has kept its eye on the sky, creating “a new kind of space race”: Eastern socialism versus Western capitalism. Ariosto’s account of these intersections of space science, business, and global politics is deeply reported and well written. It also reads like a techno-optimist’s fever dream. He ties the future of privatized space travel to the possibility of large-scale quantum computers, which are needed, apparently, to run the ultra-intelligent AI that will send fully autonomous robotic probes—powered, perhaps, by vacuum energy—to distant solar systems, where they’ll seed the cosmos with synthetic life complete with “quantum brains.” Sober scientists question whether any of these things are likely to happen in our lifetimes—or at all. But according to Ariosto, “humans are capable of engineering just about anything.” As for Odie, it touched down near the lunar south pole on Feb. 22, 2024, tipped onto its side, and shut down six days later.

A doggedly reported, starry-eyed take on the CEOs who gaze upon the cosmos and see dollar signs twinkling in the dark.