Open Space: From Earth to Eternity - the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos - Couverture rigide

Ariosto, David

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593535030 ISBN 13 : 9780593535035

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2026

Synopsis

The next space race has arrived—driven by rival nations, billionaire-funded ventures, and breakthrough technologies all vying to alter the balance of power on Earth and beyond.

"This isn’t science fiction; it’s the blueprint for the world we’re about to inherit.” —Ali Velshi, NBC News senior economic and business correspondent and anchor for MS NOW

In 2024, the Odysseus lander touched down near the south pole of the Moon. It was the first lunar landing by Americans in more than half a century—and the first ever by a private company. “Odie” embodied the ambitions of a new genera­tion of space entrepreneurs, as well as Washington’s bid to challenge a rising Beijing. A gateway to interplanetary explo­ration and conquest, the Moon is now also open for busi­ness, and the race to level up technology, secure resources, and build off-world infrastructure has begun.

First place isn’t just a symbolic win, but a strategic path to influence and control. The United States, although turbo­charged by tech elites, risks being outpaced by China, which increasingly aligns commercial enterprise with national secu­rity. Not far behind are Russia, India, Japan, and the Euro­pean Union.

In Open Space, journalist and space industry analyst David Ariosto gives us a front-row seat to the future. With unprecedented access, he recounts the split-second deci­sions in mission control and hold-your-breath moments on the launch pad. He travels from research labs orchestrating our planetary defense to an antimatter factory and the Mars Desert Research Station, where scientists imagine how an off-world colony might survive (it involves a diet of bugs). He probes inside the Chinese space sector itself, meeting with key figures and companies and traveling to a remote military station in South America. In this global odyssey, we meet the visionaries who are dreaming up the future and the engineers and physicists who are making science fiction a reality.

After millennia of gazing up at the stars, humanity is now forging the tools to travel among them. Propulsive, awe-inspiring, and poignant, Open Space charts this epic journey to the final frontier and looks for our place within it.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

DAVID ARIOSTO is a seasoned journalist, space industry analyst, and co-host of the podcast Space Minds on SpaceNews. He is also a columnist at Aerospace America, SpaceNews, and Noema Magazine and a visiting scholar at Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. His debut book, This Is Cuba: An American Journalist Under Castro’s Shadow, was published in 2018 by St. Martin’s Press and was highly acclaimed by The Washington Post and USA Today. He resides in Arizona with his daughter, Rosie, and their dog, Cali.

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• Chapter 1 •

Launch Day

On the eve of America’s return to the Moon, a man from Isfahan walked in from outside. He had been standing on the balcony of NASA’s Operations Support Building II at Kennedy Space Center, gazing out at the faint silhouette of a Falcon 9 rocket, just as vapor trails twisted their way up the launch tower. Inside, a crowd of NASA officials mingled between an open bar and an ever-dwindling chocolate-filled buffet. But mostly, they were just waiting. A countdown clock on the wall now showed launch was only an hour away. And Dr. Kam Ghaffarian, who had co-founded the very company responsible for that lunar lander tucked inside the rocket’s payload fairing, was about to offer up a few words.

Like many children of the 1960s, he had grown up in a time of social and technological upheaval, where dreams of spaceflight mixed with political turbulence at home. His path to become an American citizen and contractor to NASA had been an uncertain one. And yet now, hair white with age, Kam stood beside Intuitive Machines’ co-founder Steve Altemus, myself, and a small cohort of others in the cool of that Florida night, awaiting the first steps of a plan to open the Moon for business. At the time, only three national programs had ever landed there. But never this far south. Never had a private company done it. And never had a rival nation planned to build such a lasting presence. Prestige, material gain, and influence were all at stake. But there was something else, something far more influential to the future of Earth and those who governed it. Space, it seemed, had quietly become a gatekeeper to humanity’s AI-driven future, offering solar energy, abundant resources, and natural cooling for the very systems upon which future generations would rely. China, which had already surged ahead in critical industries, such as batteries, solar cells, and rare earth elements, was busy with parallel strategies in robotics and quantum technologies. But many viewed space as the arena to put it all together, with Beijing targeting the same shadowed region of the Moon’s south pole as the Texas company now poised for launch at Kennedy Space Center.

The stage had been set for a new kind of space race, where state-led ambitions in the East were colliding with commercial ventures in the West, albeit under the umbrella of governments in the United States and Europe. The Moon’s south pole, perilous and unforgiving, had become a strategic prize that fit into those ambitions, whereby future dominance would arrive through sustainable control of the kinds of resources and networks upon which others would soon depend. And so, as the Texas company’s lunar lander, Odysseus—affectionately known as Odie—geared up for launch, it did so under the weight of that broader backstory.

Tim Crain, meanwhile, was back in Houston. As the company’s third co-founder and chief technology officer, he would remain in mission control to support liftoff, staging, and separation. The effort was part of NASA’s broader shift from architect to client, funding space companies like Intuitive Machines, SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace, and Blue Origin to build the rockets, landers, and satellites it needed to compete. Still, at least one critical question remained unanswered: Could Moon landings really be made commercial?

If they couldn’t, or if China could significantly outpace its rivals and use the Moon as it envisioned, the global power balance on Earth would surely be ripe for change.

Given that, perhaps it is not surprising that all this had become quite personal for Kam. Generations earlier, he had watched his old country fall under the grip of another kind of authoritarian government, and he now wanted to “ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.”

“Decisive action will demonstrate to our allies and China that the U.S. will not cede this leadership, or domain, and will rally other countries to join us,” he wrote in a column for SpaceNews. For the moment, however, the United States still held the high ground. And it was gambling on a new generation of private space companies to maintain and expand that legacy.

But it wouldn’t be easy. Jagged peaks and pockmarked terrain littered the lunar south, with both constant light and eternal darkness. Temperature swings spanned hundreds of degrees. Navigating that would test the very limits of modern technology. Failure not only would be a setback, but would deal a strategic blow to America’s credibility and its new commercial tack, lending credence to those who questioned the strategic value of the Moon at all.

Kam knew this.

So did Steve.

But with Kam especially, who conveyed a persona both of shrewd businessman and wistful stargazer, not to mention witness to political change, I couldn’t help but wonder where his mind had drifted as Odie prepared to blast off. As a boy, he had seen Iran during its White Revolution, marked not only by a consolidation of political power but also by a series of modernization efforts that included sweeping land and literacy reforms, as well as women’s rights. Western music, film, and fashion swept Iranian society, just as investments in infrastructure and technology led to an increase in the demand for engineers. In those early years, he was learning a lot. And yet it was a moment in 1969 as an eleven-year-old boy that seemed to cement his otherworldly pursuits.

In fact, that night for much of the world had suddenly seemed to bring human society a bit closer to the stars.

His neighborhood—like those of many cities and towns across the globe—was abuzz with excitement. It was nearly midnight. And at night, Isfahan takes on a distinctly different feel from the daytime cacophony of street vendors and motorbikes that meander past tiled mosques and covered bridges. Especially during those hot summer evenings, when much of the world retreats indoors, many residents would escape the stifle by hoisting themselves onto rooftops to bask in the cool of the evening air. Up there, stargazers could be made.

In fact, the region has a special history with the night’s sky. Early Babylonian astronomers in Mesopotamia compiled the first star catalogs, while earlier Sumerians observed the movements of the planets and recorded the names of constellations. Ancient Egyptians used the stars for alignment of their temples and pyramids, and developed calendars based on lunar and solar cycles. The desert sky, with its low humidity and sparse cloud cover, tends to make celestial objects appear more visible. And by its location in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Isfahan’s comparatively higher altitude allows starlight to pass through fewer filters before reaching the observer’s eye. In the generations before modern light pollution washed out “the floor of heaven . . . inlaid with patines of bright gold,” as William Shakespeare once described it, rooftops were thought to be a choice spot for amateur astronomers.

“I was mesmerized by the stars,” Kam explained. And during our conversation he wondered aloud if humanity could actually “go there.”

That night, however, in the summer of 1969, Kam wasn’t sprawled out across his rooftop. Instead, he had edged his way down to just outside his neighbor’s house, where he peered through dusty windowpanes to witness a first for humankind. There, broadcasting on a small television, were images of Neil Armstrong’s initial steps on the Moon.

“My eyes were this big,” he told me. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

And yet shortly after he had begun college in the United States, his country would enter the tumult of revolution, eventually culminating in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty. In its aftermath, bearded revolutionary guards roamed the streets, enforcing a new constitution and religious government. Kam, who had left two years earlier on a student visa, would watch from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as his country transformed. Gone for good, he became an American citizen and earned a computer systems job at Lockheed, or, as he saw it, a prime chance to work with NASA. Then, in 1994, he took a risk, borrowing $250,000 against the value of his home to start his own engineering services firm as an adviser to the agency.

“It was an all-in gamble,” he explained. “If I was not successful with that business, I wouldn’t have a home.”

Ultimately, it seemed to work. And Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies would prove lucrative, offering IT, engineering, and mission operations to NASA—and thus transforming the boy from Isfahan into one of the world’s richest men. Three decades later, he had amassed not only a billionaire’s fortune but also a portfolio of moon shots devoted to lunar landers, commercial space stations, modular nuclear reactors, space suits, and even a research lab dedicated to the physics of interstellar travel. It was big-picture stuff. But unlike Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who had each built space behemoths of their own, most of Kam’s efforts tended to focus on what those humans and machines could do once in space. He also seemed to relish a far lower profile than that of those like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, even though his outlook seemed no less grand. And on that February night in 2024, he sought to lay out the broader vision in a speech not made public until this very book.

Clad in a blue blazer and coral shirt, Kam approached the lectern. “I want us to go forward in time within the next thirty, forty years,” he began. “Imagine that you would have hourly launches to a space city, outside Earth. Imagine that we will have daily launches to the Moon where we have a habitat, and that it’s a platform for future human space exploration, not only within our solar system, but outside to interstellar space within our galaxy,” he described.

Today, the Moon was the goal. But with a few upgrades, there was little reason the lander inside that payload fairing could not be modified for the harsh realities of the Red Planet.

Kam knew that.

“Imagine that we have weekly trips to Mars, where we also have many people living, [where] we have a colony, and people actually live and work there,” he continued. “Imagine that you also have launches, maybe monthly or quarterly, for interstellar travel outside our solar system to other places in our galaxy. . . . My personal belief is that the destiny for human beings, for humankind, is to go to other stars and find new homes in those stars. And the new chapter of that journey starts tonight.”

Much was now riding on this moment, not just for the company that Kam, Steve, and Tim had built, but also for the nation at large. U.S. preeminence was no longer preordained. Intuitive Machines seemed to be at the tip of an American spear into space. And Kam, Steve, and Tim represented the company’s public face. But there was a bigger team—many now back in Houston—who also were collectively holding their breaths.

To understand their story, and to truly grasp the moment at hand, one must rewind the clocks three years earlier to a sunbaked tarmac in Texas, where a team of engineers were testing the very propulsion system they hoped would bring Odie to the Moon.

• Chapter 2 •

Building Landers

There was a problem in Houston. Deep inside the engine of what could be America’s first lunar lander in more than fifty years, liquid methane and oxygen were now mixing on the edge of ignition. Once sparked, the cocktail would unleash a torrent of energy that would propel the craft through space and toward the Moon. But landing would be just the beginning. If they could do it, they’d also need to build the very systems that future missions—and future astronauts—would rely on to survive and operate. To do that, they’d have to mine the Moon for water, iron, titanium, and a curious isotope with tantalizing potential.

Sown into the Moon’s surface by solar wind, helium-3 is thought to be a near-ideal fuel source for fusion reactors, though its more immediate value lay in its ability to absorb heat from quantum computers to protect the delicate information they stored. Extracting the isotope, processing it, and transporting from Moon to market, however, left many skeptical.

But that wasn’t the problem. Not today at least.

First, Odie would have to get there. It was 2022—two full years before that moon shot from Cape Canaveral—and this Texas crew of engineers now faced a critical issue with the craft’s propulsion system. Propellant was now funneling through the metal channels of a heat-defying alloy known as columbium, where—upon ignition—temperatures half as hot as the surface of the Sun cooked inside. Cryogenic cooling would keep the engine itself from vaporizing, just as that powerful blue flame roared to life, bursting out the back of the craft. To the untrained eye, it all looked good. The vehicle thundered and rattled. Yet the metal composite was holding, a triumph of the 3D-printed engine that was now working as intended.

In truth, however, it wasn’t.

And Rob Morehead knew it.

Having served as engineering lead on a similar NASA prototype, known as Project Morpheus, he could sense something was off. A decade earlier, Rob had watched Morpheus erupt into a ball of flames during a test flight at Kennedy Space Center, thus fortifying the arguments of the old hands at the agency who still preferred those presumably safer, tried-and-true hypergolic propellants. And for good reason. They were generally easier to work with. The mix ignited on contact. And the fuel could be stored at room temperature.

So, why mess with that?

There were a few reasons: cost, toxicity, complexity to produce, and especially efficiency. In commercial space, where cargo is king, smaller, more efficient engines could be the difference between a profitable craft and one destined for the back of the line. Of course, none of that mattered if the engine didn’t ignite. And in the near vacuum of space, methane was still largely untested.

If it didn’t, Odie’s mission would be over before it began.

Still, the risks seemed surmountable. And so Rob would turn in his old NASA badge to join the private sector, where presumably he’d be given more leeway. Yet questions of time and money also now took center stage. Unlike the old days, where cost-plus contracts could effectively incentivize bloated budgets and yawning delays, this new era of fixed-cost contracts meant company margins depended on the ability to squeeze out more with less. The idea was to move quickly, reduce costs, and nudge into existence the beginnings of a lunar services market, even if many privately wondered whether such a market—devoid of taxpayer subsidies—could ever really exist on its own. Then again, now was a scrappier time. Barriers to entry were dropping. Engineers no longer needed fortunes to put their machines in space. Plus, in business, availability often mattered just as much as ambition.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0593535030
• ISBN 13: 9780593535035
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 400
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Royaume-Uni
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