An Excerpt from Open Space: From Earth to Eternity—The Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos
The next space race has arrived—driven by rival nations, billionaire-funded ventures, and breakthrough technologies all vying to alter the balance of power on Earth and beyond.
In 2024, the Odysseus lander touched down near the south pole of the Moon. It was the first lunar landing by Americans in more than half a century—and the first ever by a private company. “Odie” embodied the ambitions of a new generation of space entrepreneurs, as well as Washington’s bid to challenge a rising Beijing. A gateway to interplanetary exploration and conquest, the Moon is now also open for business, and the race to level up technology, secure resources, and build off-world infrastructure has begun.
First place isn’t just a symbolic win, but a strategic path to influence and control. The United States, although turbocharged by tech elites, risks being outpaced by China, which increasingly aligns commercial enterprise with national security. Not far behind are Russia, India, Japan, and the European Union.
In Open Space, journalist and space industry analyst David Ariosto gives us a front-row seat to the future. With unprecedented access, he recounts the split-second decisions in mission control and hold-your-breath moments on the launch pad. He travels from research labs orchestrating our planetary defense to an antimatter factory and the Mars Desert Research Station, where scientists imagine how an off-world colony might survive (it involves a diet of bugs). He probes inside the Chinese space sector itself, meeting with key figures and companies and traveling to a remote military station in South America. In this global odyssey, we meet the visionaries who are dreaming up the future and the engineers and physicists who are making science fiction a reality.
After millennia of gazing up at the stars, humanity is now forging the tools to travel among them. Propulsive, awe-inspiring, and poignant, Open Space charts this epic journey to the final frontier and looks for our place within it.
"This isn’t science fiction; it’s the blueprint for the world we’re about to inherit.” —Ali Velshi, NBC News senior economic and business correspondent and anchor for MS NOW
The author and Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, recently shared the excerpt below, which we are now pleased to be able to share with you. It is adapted from Chapter 21, "Launch from the East."
◊◊◊◊◊
The skies above the Yellow Sea were still dark when the first crowds began gathering along its western shores. They were there to witness history. It was the morning of January 11th, 2024. And out in water, atop a large barge, was soon to be a demonstration of the most powerful commercial launch vehicle a commercial Chinese company had ever assembled—a high-stakes moment both for [Yao] Song’s company, Orienspace, and Chinese commercial spaceflight.
Standing at roughly thirty meters tall with seven solid rocket motors, the Gravity-1 boasted a six-and-a-half-ton payload capacity to low Earth orbit. Still considerably smaller and less powerful than those rival Falcon workhorses, the goal was ultimately to close the gap with SpaceX. At the moment, it was bobbing up and down near the coastal city of Haiyang, where China’s main space contractor had been developing the country’s latest spaceport. With the ability to launch up to thirty satellites at once, Gravity-1 now seemed like a strategic weapon in the bid to better carve out Beijing’s own place in orbit, especially given the importance of its emerging Three-Body constellation and those AI-enabled satellites, meant to process vast amount of data on orbit.
Could this new class of rocket help in those endeavors? It wasn’t yet clear.
Still, China’s proverbial toolbelt for space had been expanding, as was its industrial base. In Yizhuang alone, a planned innovation hub southeast of Beijing, more than 20 commercial launch companies were designing their own launch vehicles, including Galactic Energy and iSpace, along with numerous satellite manufacturers, as well as companies devoted to AI, semiconductors, and other forms of advanced manufacturing. The idea seemed to be to concentrate adjacent technologies within tightly integrated clusters, where cross-sector collaborations and state-backed funding might help China leapfrog its rivals. SpaceX’s reusability and, of course, the sheer scale of its Starlink constellation remained the benchmark. But China’s emerging constellations, including “Three Body” and its “GW project,” or Guowang (or national network), now represented a calculated effort to counter that dominance with its own megaconstellations. The broader goal, according to associate professor Xu Can with the People’s Liberation Army’s Space Engineering University in Beijing, was to “prevent the Starlink constellation from excessively pre-empting low-orbit resources.”
The problem was scale. To really compete on orbit, these rockets would really have to be reusable. “For China to establish its own Starlink, the key is to master reusable rocket technologies,” emphasized Qu Wei of the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics in Beijing.
And yet the country’s space sector wasn’t quite there.
Song’s plan was to eventually fly nearly a hundred reusable rockets per year to support those constellations, while undercutting SpaceX launch and payload costs. Musk’s Hawthrone based by now had roughly seven thousand Starlink satellites in orbit and aimed to eventually deploy forty-two thousand. More concerning for China, perhaps, was Starlink’s national security derivative, Starshield, which aimed to provide secure communications, as well as target tracking, reconnaissance, and surveillance to U.S. national security sectors—seemingly in line with the Trump administration’s later push of its “Golden Dome” missile defense shield.
“Our target is to go lower than Falcon 9,” Song told me. For context, a SpaceX Falcon 9’s payload cost at the time just over $2,700 per kilogram, compared to $20,000 per kilogram by expendable means. A comparable Galaxy-1 price tag was roughly $4,000 per kilogram, largely because it wasn’t reusable. Plans for the Galaxy-2, however, were meant to change that, as well as at least six other Chinese companies, including Space Pioneer, which by 2024, had added $207 million in a blend of private equity and state-tied investment for a reusable medium-lift launch vehicle known as the Tianlong-3. China’s main state-owned aerospace company—China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation—not to be outdone, had also unveiled plans for its own super-heavy-lift launch vehicles, including the Long March 9 . . . which had a strikingly curious resemblance to the SpaceX Starship.
The difference lay in the approach.
Where SpaceX focused on rapid innovation and iterative design driven initially by private capital, China’s state-led, large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing support focused on build industrial base. And yet, in truth, each enjoyed national support. Whereas Chinese authorities tended to also support the supply-side of a company’s development, which included the building of factories, companies like SpaceX enjoyed massive federal contracts as service providers. Chinese companies, therefore, may be harder to start, but once established, those firms stood to benefit from immense and patient sources of capital, backstopped and overseen by centralized authorities. This quasi-commercial shift seemed to begin in earnest in the mid 2010s. Before then, China had almost exclusively relied on state-owned entities. And yet leadership now seemed to recognize the important of commercial ecosystems that could initiate innovations at a more competitive tempo. Authorities were looking to those like Song to fill the gap, with a clear push toward dual civilian and military applications. To succeed, particularly on the military ledger, it had to able to launch within twenty-four hours of an “emergency” mission request. And yet for now, at least, it had still yet to reach orbit.
Roughly three kilometers away from the launchpad, meanwhile, Song was starting to get nervous. Until that moment, he had been relatively confident about his company’s inaugural launch and had even invited colleagues and former professors to attend. But as the countdown began, his stomach churned.
“Once you hear 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . you get really nervous in your mind.” And yet as he described the events, and where he was positioned, something just didn’t add up.
Finally, I asked the question that now seemed obvious.
“Were you in the launch control center?”
“No,” he replied. “I was at the stage. There’s a stage to watch the launch with thousands of people. The control center in China actually requires high-level confidential qualification. And I was not enough to get into that control center.”
“Really?” I replied. “So, this is your own rocket, and you couldn’t get in?”
“Yeah,” he responded. “A lot of the operation actually is conducted by the military, not by us. This area is not a mature industry in China. So, once you get to launch your own rocket, there actually will be some technical experts to check everything. And there will be some military officers to check every process, doing tests, and finally counting down to see everything, and see whether it’s a red light or a green light.” It was a remarkable revelation. For all of China’s commercial growth, there was a clear limit to private enterprise and the limited sense of autonomy it could glean from the state.
Song, the company’s founder, would nonetheless have to watch from afar as a spectator.
Then, it happened.
As the countdown ticked to zero, two massive plumes of gray and black smoke could be seen bursting from either side of the vehicle. The goal was to deliver in to orbit three Yunyao-1 commercial weather satellites. But “for the first three or four seconds, you couldn’t find the rocket,” Song explained, referring to the exhaust and water vapor that by now had fully enveloped the vehicle. “I was really in a panic. Those seconds felt like a thousand years. But then I saw the rocket go straight up through the clouds and into space. People were applauding, and they hugged me. And then I heard the voice from the broadcast say clearly, stage one . . . stage two. Eventually, I heard that the launch mission was completely successful. It was a huge moment.” The rocket had also hit a financial milestone by becoming the “lowest launch cost in China, especially for commercial,” Song explained, quickly pivoting to again discuss the company’s broader purpose, and the need—as he put it—to “expand the circle.”
This was a recurring concept for him and relates back to that broader sense of the existential that always seemed to be lingering in the recesses of his mind. The so-called circle, in his estimation, reflected Earth’s finite resources, and the limited availability of habitable territory relative to population growth and increasing energy demands. A wider circle, derived through humanity’s space-borne expansion, he posited, would therefore ultimately translate into more land and resources to effectively support that growth. For him, that was a compelling enough case for the kinds of launch capabilities and infrastructure that might ultimately yield asteroid mining and settlements atop other celestial bodies. Humanity would depend on it. If, however, the circumference of that circle remained fixed, and competition for terrain and resources continued to swell, “there will definitely be a war,” he predicted.
Adapted from Open Space: From Earth to Eternity—The Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos by David Ariosto. Published by Knopf. Copyright © 2026 by David Ariosto. All rights reserved.
About the Author
DAVID ARIOSTO is a seasoned journalist, space industry analyst, and co-host of the podcast Space Minds on SpaceNews. He is also a columnist at Aerospace America, SpaceNews, and Noema Magazine and a visiting scholar at Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. His debut book, This Is Cuba: An American Journalist Under Castro’s Shadow, was published in 2018 by St. Martin’s Press and was highly acclaimed by The Washington Post and USA Today. He resides in Arizona with his daughter, Rosie, and their dog, Cali.
