History in the making

Brad Bergan began work on SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier during the dark days of the pandemic. The book, which is richly illustrated with images of rocket launches and landings, is an eloquent overview of the ongoing history of space exploration and commercialization from the early days of the space race to Elon Musk’s phenomenal success with SpaceX. We sat down with Bergan to find out how and why he put this must-read chronicle together.

Crispin Littlehales, Executive Editor, Satellite Evolution Group

Question: You have a fascinating background as a writer and executive editor with your work appearing in or on VICE, the National Book Critics Circle, the World Economic Forum, NBC News Business Insider, and more. You also lived in Ho Chi Minh City and founded Sonder Q. What was that all about?

Brad Bergan: I grew up in Iowa City, where the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded. The thing about that town in 2012 is that everybody and their mother wanted to be a writer. I was just starting out and found it hard to focus there and learn the craft in private, with everyone watching. So, I decided to go somewhere where no one would speak my language, and no one would care if I was learning to write. Plus, I wanted some kind of worldly experience. I thought Vietnam might be a lot of fun and affordable for a young bachelor, so I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, also called Saigon. I made my money teaching English as a second language and also founded a magazine called Sonder Q, which was multilingual and multidisciplinary. We published some poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, but mostly photography, which felt like a common language between the different expats and the natives there. After two years, I had published some fiction in the States, so I figured I should go somewhere more literary. I moved to New York.

Question: What prompted you to author SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier?

Brad Bergan: The quick answer is that I was approached by a publisher to write books during the pandemic. The longer version is that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and with world events increasingly suggesting that a lot of the grand institutions that Americans used to trust in might not be around forever, I thought it might be useful to look at the entities doing things that might surpass what’s been done by older, more traditional institutions.

In addition, power in the space industry is switching hands, and I wanted to investigate its impact. Many people like to hate Elon Musk. I understand the impulse because we have a finite economy. If one person has abundance, other people won’t have so much. But compared to the global effects of a fossil fuel corporation, SpaceX appears to me almost like a monument to humanistic endeavors.

Brad Bergan Author of SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier

Question: While researching the book, were there discoveries that you found particularly interesting?

Brad Bergan: Musk is a very loud and larger-than-life character and there are pros and cons to that. But despite public criticisms, his private aerospace firm, SpaceX, has held fast to its mission of putting humans on Mars. Even though some of the early estimates of that happening in the mid-2020s are definitely not accurate, and despite SpaceX’s participation in a return to the Moon as part of the Artemis mission with NASA, the company has proven that it’s highly adaptable, very nimble, and laser-focused on getting to Mars. I was surprised to see that when I went past the short memory time horizon and looked at its entire story. I admire how true the firm has been to its mission statement, especially because going to Mars isn’t an immediately profitable idea. It could have been far greedier.

Another thing that surprised me was that Musk had a pretty difficult childhood. He didn’t have a perfect home environment and was bullied. Think about how boys roughhoused 20 years ago — it was some fun. But 40 to 60 years ago, I imagine it was more serious. And taking a step back, it’s worthwhile to consider how hard that could be for a cerebral boy who likes to read a lot in a place as politically volatile as South Africa.

Question: What surprised me was Canadian Researcher Aaron Boley’s statement about Starlink satellites producing aluminum oxide (alumina) on reentry which contributes to ozone depletion. Couple that with launch pollution and SpaceX looks like a bad actor from an environmental perspective, don’t you think?

Brad Bergan: There are some environmental costs, but other, more acutely felt costs also exist that are far more harmful to the world and its ecosystems. I gave a talk at the New York Skeptics nonprofit club when my first book, Space Race 2.0, came out. Many people asked, “Why is my tax money going to this? It’s too expensive!” I clarified that the lion’s share of our tax dollars isn’t going to SpaceX and space ventures. NASA’s funding is less than one percent of the congressional budget. SpaceX’s is even lower. Compare that to the roughly 13 percent spent on defense. A better place to cut spending might be our role in funding foreign wars.

On pollution, I think there’s an analogous proportional relationship between the congressional budget spent on space travel vs. defense and the environmental effects of space travel versus industrial production.

The energy sector, especially the fossil fuel industry, is the biggest polluter. Then there’s agriculture and industrial production of clothing and things like lithium-ion for renewable batteries, waste management, and so on. Pollution caused by space ventures isn’t even close to the level of pollution committed by 20th-century industries. Moreover, what we’re likely to see from those industries in the decades ahead far outweighs any damage that SpaceX might contribute to.

Space junk is an issue for which no one yet has a proven solution. The sheer volume of the objects — moving faster than a speeding bullet — is frightening, especially in low Earth orbit. It’s good that SpaceX’s recent higher-orbit spacewalk positions the company as capable of lifting humans deeper into space than we’ve been in decades. It also sets the firm up to thrust satellites and other spacecraft farther out than the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit.

Question: You have written insightfully on the history of the space race and the United States’ space programs. What was it like working with NASA?

Brad Bergan: Just to clarify, I’ve never worked for or received payment from NASA. But the first time I worked with NASA was in 2016, when I wrote for VICE. It’s always something of a bottomless pit of surrealism when interviewing NASA because, as a kid, I was lucky enough to visit the Kennedy Space Center and see my first shuttle launch with my grandpa. Since then, I’ve been face-to-face with NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough, ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet, and JAXA Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide. Great people. Regarding crewed missions, I think NASA will continue to play a preeminent role in partnerships with other space companies going forward.

Question: Did you interact directly with SpaceX on this book or were you just privy to what the company released to the media?

Brad Bergan: Everything you’ll find in the book is all public information. I knew someone who worked at SpaceX, but that person was an anonymous contact with whom I would spitball some things to see if they were accurate. For the most part, the real meat of the book takes readers past the short memory span of our social media’s eternal “current moment.” My source was simply reading old literature all the way back to the 1950s and tracing useful narrative threads in space exploration — how and why they came to be, and what led to comparatively threadbare arcs.

Question: Did you get a chance to meet with Elon Musk and if so, what was the most memorable thing about him?

Brad Bergan: Not in person, but in a weird parasocial way of following someone closely on the internet. I feel like I know him a little bit. It’s easy to feel connected to a largerthan-life character, but I’m sure that feeling will change when I meet him.

Question: Throughout the book you mention the risks versus benefits of the space economy that’s now emerging. What are some of the key takeaways our readers should know about?

Brad Bergan: People can imagine the obvious risks. Musk has said that for us to settle on Mars, a lot of people are going to die. Think about the scale of what it will take, not just in terms of numbers, materials, or bodies on a chart of statistically dangerous jobs, but all the life events of so many talented people who will be sacrificed. It’s not the number of human bodies; it’s the loss of people with great minds and full hearts going to space and devoting their lives to developing the psychological wherewithal, the tested ambition, and the enormous skillsets needed to settle Mars. Then, imagine they don’t make it back, or lose a lot of people and experience survivors’ guilt, or worse — they get there and realize all too late that they’ve sacrificed everything for a dream that just doesn’t work. That gives me pause, but it also feels like the ultimate challenge.

And there’s a more immediate – although boring — risk involving the logistical trajectory to Mars in development right now. What if SpaceX and other private companies develop space hotels and set up shop on the Moon only to make space travel seem like an elites-only club while humanistic and scientific goals take a back seat?

Some useful studies written by astronomers propose adding a profit motive to science missions. This would incentivize corporate funding and systematize a way for scientists to piggyback exploratory goals on company missions targeting the Moon and beyond. For now, I think that’s pragmatic. But in several decades, maybe even a century, the barrier to entry for space will lower even more — and the window to Mars might be larger than we ever dreamed.

Question: If the way is led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, does that mean that these and other billionaires are going to have control over exploration and scientific advancement rather than government agencies?

Brad Bergan: They may have a larger say initially. A private consortium also funds Artemis, and most Moon-based operations will be primarily for-profit. The reason corporate money is stopping at the Moon is so they can expand the global economy into space. Hundreds of quintillions of dollars await us, but the idea that cosmic riches will trickle down to the average global citizen is unsubstantiated by history.

In the future, as other startups gain capabilities and are not just tagging along but operate their own missions, that will force more established firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin to cooperate because if they don’t, they may face difficulties launching rockets from national territories. Elon Musk knows how easily federal agencies like the FAA can hold space travel back, and doing so for punitive reasons isn’t unheard of.

Question: Your book is not only visually exciting, but it also makes the reader think about the future. What kind of impact do you hope this book will have on shaping how we move forward?

Brad Bergan: I wanted to find the best lynchpin with which to build grand narratives to depict the long arc of human space ventures. I hope the book immerses readers in a world of humans so alive they might soon settle new worlds. On a subtler note, I feel a civic duty to help readers understand what humanity is doing at its best outside of the noise of daily events. SpaceX is a household name, but Musk’s firm is a living shrine compared to other large corporations — like fossil fuels or e-commerce and the supply chains fueling modern consumerism. Much of SpaceX’s core technology isn’t even patented, although practical reasons exist for this.

In many ways, the last decade has felt like a free-fall descent into chaos, like a global reading of Brave New World meets Dante’s Inferno. It’s nice to know there’s a flip side to that. There will be a cost, but space ventures are becoming more advanced and robust and promise a brighter future.