The Consequential Frontier

Challenging the Privatization of Space

De: Peter Ward

Narrado por: Gary Galone

This in-depth work of reportage dares to ask what’s at stake in privatizing outer space.

Earth is in trouble - so dramatically that we’re now scrambling to explore space for valuable resources and a home for permanent colonization. With the era of NASA’s dominance now behind us, the private sector is winning this new space race. But if humans and their private wealth have made such a mess of Earth, who can say we won’t do the same in space?

In The Consequential Frontier, business and technology journalist Peter Ward is raising this vital question before it’s too late. Interviewing tech CEOs, inventors, scientists, lobbyists, politicians, and future civilian astronauts, Ward sheds light on a whole industry beyond headline-grabbing rocket billionaires like Bezos and Musk and introduces the new generation of activists trying to keep it from rushing recklessly into the cosmos.

With optimism for what humans might accomplish in space if we could leave our tendency toward deregulation, inequality, and environmental destruction behind, Ward shows just how much cooperation it will take to protect our universal resource and how beneficial it could be for all of us.

©2019 Peter Ward (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

Play it on 1.5 to 2x speed

The book: This is a fairly decent state of the industry book that unfortunately waits until the conclusion to actually dive into its main topic of the long term effects of capitalism on expansion and settlement of space

The performance: this guy speaks not only in a slow, extremely stilted manner that requires the listener to play the book on a faster speed just to hear something approaching natural speech (and I’m southern so yeah, it’s slooooooow) but puts on the weirdest voices when giving actual quotes. He makes Elon Musk sound like a cross between Dracula and Steve Martin’s “Wild and crazy guy”. Extremely frustrating to listen to.

Bottom line: just buy the actual book unless you absolutely have to have your hands free

I rated 4 stars because I don’t believe the author should suffer just because he got a bad narrator.