The Space Barons and the Commercialization of Space

Meet the Faculty: James S. O'Rourke

Teaching Professor, Management & Organization, Mendoza College of Business

James S. O’Rourke is an American rhetorician who teaches management and corporate communication, as well as business writing and speaking, at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Teaching Professor of Management and, from 1990 to 2017 was the Arthur F. and Mary J. O’Neil Director of the Fanning Center for Business Communication. He earned a BBA in Management from Notre Dame, an MS in Mass Communication from Temple University, an MA in Speech Communication from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in Public Communication from Syracuse University. He is the author of 23 prominent textbooks, including Management Communication, 6/e Routledge (Abingdon, Oxfordshire) and The Truth About Confident Presenting, 2/e Anthem Press (London). He is principal author or directing editor of more than 375 case studies in management and corporate communication. O’Rourke is a former trustee of both the Arthur W. Page Society and the Institute for Public Relations. He is also a member of the Management Communication Association, and a regular consultant to Fortune 500 and mid-size businesses throughout North America. During Spring 2018, he served as faculty-in-residence in Notre Dame’s M.K. Fischer Hall in London.

Meet the Speaker: Christian Davenport

Correspondent, The Washington Post

Christian Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post covering space for the Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and was on a team that won the Peabody award in 2010 for its work on veterans with Traumatic Brain Injury and has been on reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize three times. Davenport is the author of two books: The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (2018) and As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard (2009). A frequent commentator on television and radio, he was a producer of Space: The Private Frontier, a two-hour documentary that aired on the Discovery and Science Channels, and a producer and co-host of Space Launch Live, the network’s live broadcast of SpaceX’s first crewed mission, which won an Emmy award in 2021 and was the highest rated, non-primetime telecast in Discovery’s history. served as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation. He is a graduate of Colby College and lives in Washington, D.C.

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Featured Speakers: 

• James S. O’Rourke, Teaching Professor, Management & Organization, Mendoza College of Business
• Christian Davenport, Correspondent, The Washington Post