Julian Guthrie: Well, exactly. People think that SpaceX, Blue Origin and what Boeing is doing in the United States, and Virgin Galactic, is a new phenomenon. In terms of the largeness and the promise, it is. But my book, "How to make a Spaceship" tells this amazing, entrepreneurial story, how these people take a huge amount of risk to launch an industry … the renegades, the rocket-makers, the college-dropouts, who went after this $10 million (9.2 million euros) prize, this shared dream.
You're talking about the XPrize, which was set up by Peter Diamandis.
Right. And they were aiming for a private path to space.
USA Mojave WüsteOctober 4, 2004 (Getty Images/AFP/D. Benc)
The White Knight carries SpaceShipOne as it launches for the second time to win the 2004 XPrize
So tell us more about Peter Diamandis. Because I'm interested in whether you think we wouldn't be where we are today without him and, I suppose, like-minded people?
I think he was definitely the catalyst for this. He is like the conductor of this grand orchestra, and he was inspired to launch this $10 million XPrize in 1996, because he realized he couldn't get to space through NASA, the US government program. He needed to create another way to get himself and his friends to space.
Because he wanted to be an astronaut?
Yes, he desperately wanted to be an astronaut. The book starts with Peter as a nine-year-old boy, staring, wide-eyed as Apollo 11 lands on the moon. That was a moment that transfixed people across the globe, people who were in their formative years. And he realized he couldn't get to space through NASA, so he launched this incentive competition. So I think it would not have happened, honestly, without him. In my book, I have these great scenes where Peter is meeting with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who now has Blue Origin, he met with Elon Musk when Elon was just thinking about getting into space, and he was meeting with Richard Branson. All these people were starting to think about this in the early 2000s, and there was this kind of zeitgeist going on, where there was this inflection point in history, as I see it, where it started moving away from governmental hands and into private industry.
