TheSeed

Elon Musk’s rocket-building company SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos’s similar Blue Origins have grabbed the headlines in the space race. But there is a fascinating backstory about how the private space industry came into being. It is the tale of a renegade entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPrize Foundation to encourage rocket-building in order to find a way into space himself.

Journalist Julian Guthrie tells the story in a new book, “How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight” (Penguin, Sept. 20, 2016). It reads like a thriller — and reveals many secrets.  http://www.diamandis.com/blog/mediapress