In 2006, SpaceX’s first attempted rocket launch left from a former US military site on Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean.
The craft’s $7 million price tag would have been impressively inexpensive, but 30 seconds after liftoff, its rocket engines faltered — and the hunk of metal plummeted back to Earth, smashing 200 yards offshore.
In 2007, SpaceX’s second attempt also failed after 7 minutes of flight.
Military advisers watching the company’s efforts wondered about the corporate culture, doubting the SpaceX guy with the orange Mohawk was the best man to run its mission control.
They weren’t impressed by the beer and booze SpaceX engineers were found hiding everywhere — or by the drunken Space Xer who ran naked over the launch pad, trying (unsuccessfully) to get kicked off that sweltering isle.
But in September 2008, on its third try, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 reached orbit.
“The Falcon 1 made people recalibrate their sense of limitations when it came to getting to space,” writes Ashlee Vance in “When The Heavens Went On Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing To Put Space Within Reach” (Ecco).
Traditionally, space was dominated by countries, the only entities with the personnel and wealth to spend years and money building rockets big enough to reach orbit.
But with recent technological advances in consumer products like computers and cell phones, some believed space could be more accessible.
One was Pete Worden of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who was frustrated with the organization’s antiquated thinking.
Worden ran various secret programs to show space exploration could change, adhering to the philosophy “Proceed until apprehended.”
That’s how his people successfully created PhoneSAT in 2009, to “buy an off-the-shelf smartphone, blast it into space, and see if it would stay on long enough to snap some pictures and send them back to Earth.” It worked, for only $3000 and flew on an amateur rocket, bypassing NASA’s normal million-dollar costs and minimal 18-month wait time.
After SpaceX’s success, other companies leaped into action.
Planet Labs was founded in 2010 to launch smaller, cheaper satellites to take photos of every spot on Earth, every day, thus being able to spot troop movements, large-scale deforestation, or carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
“Planet would have pictures of those day-to-day machinations available for a modest fee and instant download,” Vance writes.
The company’s plan worked.
A 2019 military dispute between India and Pakistan ended when Planet Lab images definitively showed Indian jets missed the Pakistani terror camp it tried to blow up.
In 2021 rumors of activity in China’s nuclear arsenal were confirmed when an American undergrad using his personal Planet Labs account uncovered photos of 120 new missile sites.
When Russia said in 2022 it wouldn’t invade Ukraine, Planet Lab satellite images showed Russian forces already amassing on its borders.
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Rocket Lab was founded in New Zealand in 2006 by Peter Beck, whose education ended at high school. But Beck was a tinkerer, growing up doing experiments in a garden shed that looked like a “crack shed,” with a light and compressor running all day long and “valves and vents hissing and roaring.”
“Think a young Doc Brown with a perm!” Vance writes.
After Beck got interested in rocket propellants he made a rocket scooter and a rocket motorcycle. Local race officials let him take on their course — provided an ambulance followed behind.
Beck hoped Rocket Lab would one day “deliver the first cheap, reliable rocket ready to fly into space at a moment’s notice.”
To get a New Zealand launch site, Beck needed to woo local Maori leaders with traditional songs and dance, which he awkwardly managed.
(He also needed to ensure his rocket lift-offs didn’t incinerate local fishermen, although the local sheep didn’t fare as well.)
But Rocket Labs flourished, too, joining “SpaceX in the ranks of successful private rocket companies, flying one of its machines to orbit from its own spaceport.”
Founded in a San Francisco garage in 2005, Astra wanted to see “how small they could go” building rockets and satellites.
Its employees were smart but outlandish, with one engineer getting hired despite showing drunk for her interview and another ending up at the company after leaving his previous murky job at a San Francisco “secret society.”
Astra’s first attempted rocket launch on Alaska’s Kodiak Island in 2018 ended poorly when their flying machine was airborne for 30 seconds before doing a U-turn and heading right back from whence it came.
“Astra had bombed its own launch complex,” Vance writes.
Still, by early 2020 Astra had also succeeded “in flying satellites into orbit on behalf of paying customers.”
Then there is Firefly Aerospace.
Firefly went bankrupt in 2017 but was rescued by Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov, who got rich through Internet dating sites like iwantumilf.com, plentyofhoes.com, and shagaholic.com.
Max’s modest plan for Firefly was to “take over a huge swath of the aerospace industry,” not to mention “annihilate the competition and f–k them into oblivion.”
Certainly, there were questions if Polyakov was a “dodgy spy” or not, but Firefly’s plan was working until the American government said “nyet.”
Believing Max was either a Russian asset or in the process of becoming one, US authorities wouldn’t award the necessary licenses to Firefly until Max left the company.
He did and moved to Scotland, where in 2022 he might have watched Firefly’s “huge success” in launching its own rocket.
The company instantly became worth billions, none of which Max Polyakov would ever see.
