Excerpts

"Elon's the risk. Gwynne's the reliability." For all her reputation as a problem solver, she was anything but staid; she had a sly sense of humor, wore stiletto heels at corporate events, and, at this hearing, sported a bold tartan blazer and the de rigueur American flag pin.
Arguments for sending humans to Mars or colonizing the moon have a tendency to ultimately boil down to "because it's there." And while that may not be sophisticated, it's a more powerful argument than it might initially appear. Alexander MacDonald, a NASA economist who has studied the history of space exploration funding, recalls a chemistry professor who criticized the nascent Apollo program to a reporter in the 1960s and retracted his comments the next day: "When men are able to do a striking bit of discovery, such as going above the atmosphere of the Earth and on to the Moon, men somewhere would do this regardless of whether I thought that it was a sensible idea or not. All history shows that men have this characteristic." Women have it too, of course, and in this book I do my best to refer only to human space exploration, not manned space exploration, even if the intelligentsia of the 1960s were not so enlightened.
It goes back to what [Admiral Hyman] Rickover used to say about nuclear submarines: the devil is in the details, and so is salvation.