When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach - Ashlee Vance
Published in 2023 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, New York, NY
528 pages
ISBN: 9780062998873
As a kid, I was always fascinated with outer space. Staring up at the stars, I would imagine soaring through the galaxy, exploring life on other planets. Throughout middle school, I participated in the Science Olympiad after-school program and competitions, where I consistently performed well in two main categories: Rocks and Minerals and Astronomy. Naturally, I was also an avid consumer of science fiction novels, which fed my curiosity and fascination with the seemingly endless possibilities that the outer limits of space promised. There seemed to be so much potential among the stars, a feeling widely shared among many space enthusiasts.
In the past decade, there has been a new Space Race afoot. While pundits of all stripes might deem this race to be between the US and China, the Space Race I’m referring to is between private companies vying to attain supremacy in the aerospace industry. Most famously, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have dominated the discourse around the privatization of the aerospace industry in recent years. While their motivations for space exploration are vastly different, they both are prominent examples of how building rockets and satellites has shifted from public government projects to private enterprises.
Yet, Musk and Bezos are far from alone in their private space ventures. The past several years have seen an enormous rise in the number of private companies that want in on the aerospace market. What seemed impossible only a few decades ago has become a reality as companies are building dozens of rockets and satellites much quicker and far cheaper than in the past. In his new book When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach, Ashlee Vance (Bloomberg Businessweek writer and Elon Musk biographer) follows the story of four of these companies as they struggle and compete with one another to gain predominance in the industry.
Overview:
When writing about the emerging privatization of the aerospace industry, all too often the focus goes to Elon Musk and his exploits at SpaceX. Vance instead draws our attention to four other ambitious entrepreneurs and inventors who are also fervently competing in the privatized space race. When the Heavens Went on Sale is essentially a set of biographies of these four tech entrepreneurs and the aerospace companies that they founded. Vance chronicles the founding and ongoing projects of satellite company Planet Labs and rocket companies Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace as they struggle to stay afloat in an unstable and risky, yet potentially lucrative industry.
With unique inside access to interview these subjects and observe their daily operations, Vance takes the reader along for a whirlwind ride across continents as these colorful personalities clash with the realities and difficulties of aerospace engineering. As a relatively character-driven account of the New Space phenomena, Vance notes that “most often the folks working in aerospace, be they astronauts or engineers, are portrayed as our bravest geniuses who face and then conquer seemingly insurmountable challenges in their day-to-day work. The truth these days is actually much more colorful” (284).
These figures follow a familiar formula to anyone savvy to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and VC projects: pitch big promises, receive significant financial investments, and provide mixed results (almost always on a slower timeline than pitched). Despite these setbacks, Vance illustrates how the privatization of space has radically changed the landscape of the aerospace industry. From the fervent passion and Dark Vader aesthetics of Peter Beck in New Zealand to the money-driven, “move-fast-and-break-things” Silicon Valley ideology of Chris Kemp, Vance follows these figures and their mixed attempts to put space into closer reach.
Commendations:
Vance’s account has several prominent strengths. Most readily apparent of these strengths is Vance’s seemingly unfettered access to the book's subjects. Each chapter gives us an insider view of how these technology industries operate, even in their failures. Vance had unprecedented access to these figures and the inner workings of these companies, including attending several rocket launches (some of which went awry). He also spent an immense amount of time with Chris Kemp and his rocket company Astra, having access to their operations from Day One. As such, Vance gives us a valuable inside view of the rapidly changing aerospace industry.
Additionally, Vance is a gifted storyteller, as he seamlessly weaves together biographies, personal travel anecdotes, and the basics of aerospace engineering to provide the reader with a broad snapshot of the industry. Instead of getting bogged down in the hard-nosed specifics of rocket science, Vance places the bulk of his focus on the wide array of colorful characters within the field, sprinkling a healthy dose of humor to keep the narrative light. Vance’s constant travels around the world are also entertaining, as he bounces around the globe (India, New Zealand, the Kwajalein Atoll (Marshall Islands), Kodiak Island (Alaska), California, Ukraine, etc.) in order to meet the founders of these companies and witness the exciting events of their rocket launches (or failures, as is the most often the case with Astra).
This makes the book easily accessible to the general public, as he clearly and simply explains the various complications that arise within rocketry and the world of VC investments in the tech sector. Even if I don’t quite share Vance’s optimism regarding the future of space, such a perspective can be refreshing after so much doom and gloom regarding the dangers of technology. All of these make the book a quick and relatively breezy read for the average reader.
I learned a lot from this book, even if I am less sympathetic to these CEOs and their rising and falling fortunes. It is incredibly fascinating to see how the aerospace industry has rapidly evolved in the past few decades, as well as the sheer amount of satellites that have been put into orbit in the past few years. While I don’t necessarily share the same type of techno-optimism that Vance and his subjects tend to pitch, it is still important to pay attention to these developments and how they will shape the future of surveillance and space exploration.
Critique:
On the other hand, Vance’s proximity to the subjects he writes about makes the work seem a bit one-sided. Vance comes across as a bit too sympathetic with the subjects he’s writing about, as he tends to get enraptured by their idealism. This is not surprising considering Vance’s biography on Elon Musk, though, to his credit, Vance does attempt to put a bit of distance between himself and Musk after Elon’s recent antics. There is a reason he has this seemingly unfettered insider access to all of these Silicon Valley executives and their interstellar exploits. He is obviously on friendly terms with them, so it makes sense that he is largely uncritical, but a little bit of critical analysis might have made Vance’s account a bit more nuanced and even-handed.
Furthermore, Vance’s account, while informative on a surface level, rarely digs any deeper into the technology behind these companies and what makes them innovative (aside from simply aiming for more rockets/satellites at lower prices). The narrative arch of these four companies, while highly detailed, is told in a more or less conventional manner. While Vance’s breezy writing style helps to make this book accessible to a general audience, it also significantly simplifies the complexity of the technology so that one doesn’t get to know much more than the surface-level basics of rocketry.
As such, Vance is much more focused on the larger-than-life personalities behind these companies (the eponymous “geniuses”). Vance often publishes his interviews with these subjects without any critical analysis, taking them exactly at their word instead of probing deeper into their motivations, which often reads more like PR statements rather than hard-hitting journalism. When paired with Vance’s unbounded optimism, this turns the book more into a series of rose-colored biographies rather than a serious interrogation of the future of the aerospace industry in this era of privatization and its implications for humanity. Vance repeats their talking points about their companies ultimately serving humanity and making life on Earth better, which comes across as incredibly naîve. While Vance’s prose leads to an undoubtedly entertaining read, it also comes across as overly sympathetic and unserious in places.
Relatedly, since Vance too often takes his subjects at their word, he is optimistic about the future of space and technology. He sees the ability of Planet Labs to take continual photographs of any spot on Earth as a tool to sort out political disputes, as it democratizes access to geographical information and military actions (such as the gathering of Russian troops at the border of Ukraine). Vance also views the fact that there will be thousands of satellites in lower orbit to be an unmitigated good, providing photographic data (Planet Labs) and Wifi (SpaceX’s Starlink) on every inch of the Earth’s surface. Yet, there is not much critical reflection on the immense dangers of a private company holding this massive amount of data and information, let alone the Kessler Syndrome scenario that could likely result from launching so many objects and debris into orbit.
Finally, Vance too often frames this New Space narrative as a simplified binary by portraying the public sector as largely ineffective and bureaucratic, while these private companies are written as subversive and groundbreaking disrupters of the status quo. Vance portrays his subjects as renegades, daring to break the bureaucratic nature of space travel and its regulatory red tape to move humanity forward in technological progress. This becomes apparent early in the book, as Vance profiles the life of former NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden.
Worden was a key component of the Strategic Defense Initiative program (aka. “Star Wars” program) in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and he turned into a staunch critic of NASA. He brought together a group of young aerospace engineers at NASA Ames (including Chris Kemp), hoping to bring a bit of private sector energy into what he saw as a stagnant and bloated bureaucratic institution. Worden was known to be quite a character, and he became infamous in the industry for his idiosyncratic behaviors and costume parties, earning him more than a few enemies.
Vance is particularly fond of Worden, painting a flattering portrait of the man and thus validating his and his proteges’ pro-privatization perspective. While Vance gives a nod to the fact that SpaceX relied on NASA’s heritage of technology, Vance still underplays the parasitic nature of these private companies on state institutions as they have historically relied heavily on technological developments that are funded by the public sector. While it is true that much of the public sector is filled with bureaucratic red tape and a glacial pace when it comes to completing projects, the example of Astra’s “cheap and quick” business plan should be a huge red flag when it comes to a field as complicated and time-consuming as aerospace engineering. Vance too often naively glamorizes the philosophical underpinnings of these figures, who often arrogantly deride regulation as a stifling force against innovation and entrepreneurship, often at the expense of worker safety. After the recent OceanGate tragedy that grabbed headlines this summer, in which a privately-owned submersible company elided regulatory safety measures and blithely dismissed safety warnings in pursuit of “innovation” and profit which led to the sudden implosion of the craft and the death of its CEO and four other men, it should be apparent that this worldview is myopic and downright dangerous.
Conclusion:
Overall, When the Heavens Went on Sale is a fascinating, if one-dimensional, chronicle of the New Space phenomena. While Vance is overly-optimistic about the privatization of space exploration and surveillance, his perspective is important to keep in mind as we contemplate the future of the aerospace industry. In their attempts to develop low-cost spaceflight technology, some of these companies are more or less successful (Marshall’s Planet Labs and Beck’s Rocket Labs come to mind) while others struggle to lift off of the ground (quite literally in the case of Kemp’s Astra).
For those who share in Vance’s optimism, this book will serve as a fun and exciting romp around the globe as Vance extolls the DIY attitudes of these emerging private space companies. For those who are much more skeptical about the privatization of space, Vance’s brimming optimism might not resonate with you or address your more fundamental concerns with the prospects of these companies.
Yet, while Vance’s account might not inspire the utmost confidence in these enterprises to those who are most wary, his exceptional storytelling and vivid accounts of these colorful, unconventional, and idiosyncratic characters will undoubtedly entertain as he provides a window into the backgrounds, creations, and seemingly insurmountable challenges that face the New Space movement and the commercialization of space. Whether this shift in space power proves to be paradigm-shifting or a passing, foolhardy endeavor, however, remains to be seen.
Thank you to Ecco for sending an advanced reader copy for me to read and review.