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Nonfiction
Data Centers in Space? Faster-Than-Light Spaceships? Big Dreams Abound.
“Open Space,” by David Ariosto, suggests there are few limits on human ingenuity that could prevent us from colonizing the cosmos.
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A lunar lander in 2023.
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Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
By
Adam Becker
Adam Becker is the author, most recently, of “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.”
March 24, 2026,
5:00 a.m. ET
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OPEN SPACE: From Earth to Eternity — the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos
, by David Ariosto
Space ain’t the place. The cosmos is a fascinating subject for scientific investigation, but there’s currently no plausible argument for sending large numbers of people to live and work in space. Two of the three worlds nearest our own, the moon and Mars, are desolate hellscapes of radiation and toxic dust; the third, Venus, is blanketed in a crushingly thick atmosphere that keeps its surface hot enough to melt lead.
The rest of the solar system is no more hospitable, and other stars are simply too far away. But to the modern space barons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, these are pesky details. They insist that our fate lies in the stars. And there is no shortage of media to promote this message — both the science fiction that Bezos and Musk, like a lot of us, were raised on, as well as reporting that uncritically repeats the views of these oligarchs and their business competitors.
A new entry in this latter category is “Open Space: From Earth to Eternity — the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos,” by David Ariosto
,
a journalist, media consultant and co-host of a
podcast
for SpaceNews. The book bills itself as “a front-row seat to the future,” with “unprecedented access.” Ariosto has certainly interviewed many people for this book and visited some interesting places. While he didn’t snag Musk or Bezos themselves, he did speak with other billionaires, as well as engineers and scientists working in space programs (both private and public) around the world.
Open Space
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But it’s easy to see why so many people agreed to speak with him. He asks questions and dutifully reports the replies, adding only the most cursory analysis of his own. When that analysis does come, it’s often couched in strained prose: “If we are to bask and safeguard ourselves from the many benefits and dangers of operating in orbit, we’ll need a global framework that bares the teeth of enforcement.”
By failing to cast a skeptical eye on the space industry, he becomes a cheerleader for it. “I have come to believe that humans are capable of engineering just about anything,” he declares in the prologue, dismissing doubts about going to space as contrary to “our natural explorer instincts.”
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