"Alone in a spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required...

Will humans ever be able to live on other planets? Former NASA astronaut Dr. Dave Williams is the person to ask. It turns out that Earth is a pretty good place to live. Finding other habitable environments in space is no easy task: temperatures on Mercury are ten times hotter than on Earth; winter on Neptune lasts about forty years, and Uranus is ten billion miles (sixteen billion kilometers) away. But there is one planet that looks promising: Mars....

The historic quest to rekindle the human exploration and colonization of space led by two rivals and their vast fortunes, egos, and visions of space as the next entrepreneurial frontier. The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk...