Many innovations have progressed along that path. The ENIAC computer funded by the United States Army and built at the University of Pennsylvania was the genesis for UNIVAC and then most other electronic computers. The network funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and designed by a consortium of academic and private labs led eventually to today’s internet. The National Science Foundation, started based on Vannevar Bush’s paper, created a multiagency Digital Library Initiative that funded the academic research of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which led to Google. The sequencing of the human genome, largely funded by the National Institutes of Health, planted the seeds for the biotech industry.

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Now space endeavors are following this “innovation progression,” as we can call it. “Just as Darpa served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the internet in the beginning, it may be the case that NASA has essentially done the same thing by spending the money to build sort of fundamental technologies,” Musk said a year after launching SpaceX. “Once we can bring the sort of commercial, free enterprise sector into it, then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we saw in the internet.”

One of the first private pioneers was Burt Rutan, a mutton-chopped aircraft designer who regarded NASA as a bloated and unimaginative bureaucracy and in 1982 founded a company called Scaled Composites that designed aircraft so innovative that, as Davenport writes, “it was as if his inspiration came not just from the laws of aerodynamics but from Picasso.” One of his ideas was for a manned aircraft that could reach the edge of space and then fold its wings upward to act as a feather allowing the craft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, land on a runway, and be reused. It would become his entry in the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private company that could launch a reusable vehicle to space twice within two weeks.

Rutan attracted two billionaire partners. The first was the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who as a schoolboy in Seattle yearned to become an astronaut but, being nearsighted, realized that was impossible so spent his time coding in the school’s computer room with his friend Bill Gates. Rutan’s second partner was the toothy goldilocked Richard Branson, a thrill-addicted serial adventurer and entrepreneur who was as enthusiastic about publicity as Allen was averse to it. Branson’s personal motto for his company, Virgin, was “Screw it, let’s do it,” which was no longer a guiding principle at NASA, and he created Virgin Galactic with the goal of taking tourists into space. “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Branson asked Allen during one test flight as the spaceship climbed higher.

In 2004, Rutan’s craft (with a Virgin logo on its tail) flew twice to space and back to win the X Prize. At the celebration, Rutan took a shot at NASA. “I was thinking a little bit about that other space agency, the big guys,” he said. “I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.’” Branson began selling tickets at prices that started at $200,000 to those who wanted to ride in a similar plane he began building, the launch date of which always seems to be about a year away.

Elon Musk’s love of adventure came partly from his maternal grandfather, an accomplished amateur pilot in South Africa who in 1952 completed a 22,000-mile journey across the globe with no electronic instruments. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the eventual goal of colonizing Mars. “The more Musk studied, the more he realized that there had been very little advancement in rocket technology in the past 40 years,” Davenport writes. “To a self-made Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, this was stunning.” His company’s mantra was, “Set audacious, nearly impossible goals and don’t get dissuaded.”

Musk’s entrepreneurship had a social purpose. SpaceX, Tesla, his electric car company, and SolarCity, his renewable energy company, Fernholz writes, “were explicitly intended to further human civilization.” Along the way, he developed a cultlike following. When SpaceX managed to launch a space capsule into orbit and dock it at the International Space Station in 2012, something NASA could no longer do on its own, the employees at his headquarters broke into a chant, “We love Elon!”