Chapter 1“I Get This Angry Twice in a Year”Jeff Bezos was fuming—so angry his eyes bulged. The multibillionaire was aboard his private jet, a Gulfstream G650 with a flight attendant and a bar stocked with Tomatin thirty-year-old, single malt Scotch. The other passengers were executives from Blue Origin, the space exploration company he’d founded. They were en route to Washington, D.C., to pitch the leadership of NASA on a plan to build a spacecraft that could bring cargo and supplies to the surface of the moon. As Bezos reviewed the proposal his team had worked up, he found it so deficient as to be enraging. The wording was sloppy, the ideas timid, not fully formed. At Amazon, such a weak effort would never be tolerated, he said. “I get this angry twice in a year and it’s always because of the decisions Blue Origin makes,” Bezos said.
It was March 1, 2017, and it was hard to believe that just three days earlier Bezos had been basking in the televised limelight of the Oscars. Several Amazon-produced movies had been nominated for awards, including Manchester by the Sea, the dark but compelling feature film starring Casey Affleck. “It’s a huge honor, and we’re seriously fortunate,” Bezos said on the red carpet, wearing a custom, slim-fitting tuxedo. Nothing conferred acceptance to Hollywood society like an appearance in the Oscar host’s monologue, and cameras caught Bezos in the audience laughing after Jimmy Kimmel made a joke at his expense: “If you win tonight, you can expect your Oscar to arrive in two to five business days, possibly stolen by a Grubhub delivery man.” Amazon won three Academy Awards, among the first ever awarded to a streaming service, and Bezos later showed up in triumph at the ultimate insider event: Madonna’s after-party, where he marveled at the singer’s stamina on the dance floor.
Now, on his private jet, his Oscar glow had vanished. The document in front of him—Blue Origin’s proposal to sell its lunar lander to NASA—was all wrong.
Bezos was big on memos. At Amazon, meetings often began with “study hall,” in which a team leader passed around a six-page document outlining an idea, and the group sat quietly reading for as long as thirty minutes. Bezos valued clear writing as a means to deep thinking, and six pages was long enough to showcase both. Anything shorter and the author could get away with faking it. Six pages allowed Bezos to see ideas in full—which ones were good and which were bad. As he wrote in a 2004 email to Amazon employees, “The narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” Bezos himself spent weeks, even months, crafting a letter to Amazon shareholders each year. The title of the 2017 memo was “Building a Culture of High Standards,” and in it he discussed the value of writing well. “The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind.”
On his plane, Bezos berated three of the Blue Origin executives behind the NASA memo—Rob Meyerson, A. C. Charania, and Brett Alexander—who were falling short, he said, of the level of leadership that he had built at Amazon. “Amazon operates on a world-class level in terms of its decision-making. I want Blue Origin to be on that level.”
It wasn’t the first time the Blue Origin executives had found themselves in their boss’s crosshairs. More than one recalled him saying that meeting with them “is like shoving bamboo shoots under my fingernails.” At Amazon, as they knew, he was famous for the outbursts that could quickly turn cruel.
“I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”
“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”
“We need to apply some human intelligence to the problem.”
Along with another zinger that could have applied here on the plane: “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A-team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B-team document.”
Comparing Blue Origin to Amazon, however, wasn’t entirely fair. One of the executives, Charania, had only been at the company for a couple of months. And while Bezos had built Amazon from the ground up, shaping every aspect of its culture and ethos as it moved from books to retail to movies, he spent just one day a week—Wednesday—working at Blue Origin, a start-up that did not even have a chief executive officer. Its employees had gotten used to Bezos’s pointed criticisms. Their lunar lander was called Blue Moon, and Bezos hadn’t been happy with that, either. Couldn’t they come up with something better? Bezos had wondered at an earlier meeting. There was the Elvis Presley song with the same name, and a beer as well. The moniker felt like a cliché, not the sort of thing that would roll smoothly out of the mouth of a modern-day Walter Cronkite narrating the next lunar landing to a live audience. Ultimately, Bezos had swallowed his pride and embraced one of the mantras he had created at Amazon: Disagree and commit, allowing the project to move forward.
This time, Bezos refused to compromise. The NASA memo, particularly the first few pages, didn’t convey nearly enough vision or technical detail, he thought. Finally, he ended his diatribe, took one of his employees’ laptops, and spent the rest of the plane ride editing it himself.
The reason Bezos and his team were flying to NASA headquarters could be traced directly to the fact that Donald J. Trump had won the 2016 presidential election a few months earlier. Under his administration, NASA would be tasked with returning astronauts to the moon. If many of Trump’s initial policies were unpredictable and chaotic, the product of infighting among his hastily assembled team of advisers, the small cadre involved in space policy had rallied around the moon as NASA’s next destination.
Of course, the United States had already been to the moon—on six different Apollo missions almost a half century earlier. But the retro-sounding idea to return to the lunar surface was actually not so retro. The moon the Trump administration sought to return to was not the cold, dead rock that America chose to stop visiting after the Apollo era. Instead, it was a new moon, one that scientists now knew had been guarding precious resources for eons—a potential oasis with water hidden in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles. Since the moon’s axial tilt is only about 1.5 degrees—compared to 23.5 degrees for Earth—the sun barely rises over the lunar horizon, giving the region its most defining feature: an ethereal, curious light that casts long, jagged shadows, creating a checkered panorama of light and dark—with peaks illuminated by continuous sunlight and caverns in perpetual Stygian blackness.
Water is vital to sustain human life, but its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen, could also be used as rocket fuel, potentially making the moon a gas station on the highway to the rest of the solar system, namely Mars. Not only that, the water, which has existed in the form of ice for billions of years, is like a Rosetta Stone time capsule that scientists say could tell the story of the formation of our closest neighbor in the solar system, as well as answer vital questions about Earth itself. How it was formed. How we got here. Where we came from.
A group of Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, had been crafting a moon plan that would involve the commercial space sector and make NASA a part of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. The goal, according to a slide Gingrich helped prepare for the incoming administration, was that “America becomes the dominant power on the space frontier; and uses space to become the dominant power on Earth.”
In an op-ed that had just been published in SpaceNews, two of the Trump campaign’s advisers—Robert Walker, the former chair of the House Committe on Science, Space, and Technology; and Peter Navarro, an economist—echoed some of Gingrich’s points and said that under Trump, the White House would embrace the private space sector at a time when NASA had grown sclerotic and slow. The United States “must recognize that space is no longer the province of governments alone,” they wrote. “Public-private partnerships should be the foundation of our space efforts.”
Walker and Navarro went on to lament that NASA “has been largely reduced to a logistics agency” confined to low Earth orbit, and lacked ambitious efforts in deep space, which the United States was quickly ceding to its adversaries. The need for an “ambitious space program is existential,” they wrote. “While the American government’s space program has suffered from under-investment, both China and Russia continue to move briskly forward with military-focused initiatives. Each continues to develop weapons explicitly designed, as the Pentagon has noted, to ‘deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt or destroy’ America’s eyes and ears in space. To maintain our strategic advantage in space and defend our troops and homeland, we must reinvigorate our space program.”
Copyright © 2025 by Christian Davenport. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
