When the Heavens Went on Sale
A momentous look at the private companies driving the revolutionary new space race, from the 3-million copy, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk In 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. Suddenly Silicon Valley, not NASA, was the epicentre of the new Space Age. Start-ups and investors began to realise that the heavens - ungoverned and unregulated - were open for business. When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied race to control access to outer space. Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies - Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs and Rocket Lab - as they attempt to launch thousands of low-cost rockets and satellites into orbit. While the space tourism ambitions of billionaires such as Bezos and Branson make headlines, these under-the-radar companies are striving to monetise Earth's lower orbit; to connect, analyse and monitor everything on Earth. With unprecedented access to private company headquarters, labs and top-secret launch locations - from the US to New Zealand, Ukraine to India - Vance presents a gripping account of private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations and multimillionaires guzzling booze as their fortunes disappear. This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our time, a tale of fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes. Welcome to the new Wild West above the clouds.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
10mentions
9people
2023–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For those interested, just read a great book on this topic: When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62050244-when-the-heaven...
It profiles: Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab
- If you want more entrepreneurial type stories.
When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal.
Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well
- Well here is the thing, SLS cost 20 billion $ or more. And uses lots of components that existed before SLS was around.
Vulcan still cost multiple billions to develop, the engines had to go threw a very demanding air force test and validation program first. The rocket was delayed for years because of issues with both the BE-4 and the Centaur.
ULA has established suppliers and established factory, with lots of people that build and launch rockets. Those suppliers are very expensive, but if you have the US military paying you 200+ million $ per launch, you can afford that.
To compare those to examples to a tiny startup rocket company is kind of absurd. They simply don't have lots of legacy reliable components. They can't use existing suppliers as those are far to expensive and don't have products for micro launchers.
You are comparing rockets that cost 30x or 300x of what Astra priced their rocket at.
Generally if you want to understand Astra issues, you have to understand the dynamics of the market.
The main problem with Astra was that they were always behind the market. They started with a micro rocket, that was simply to small for most sats. So before they ever made that reliable they made the rocket bigger. And once they had done that it was pretty clear that the market needed even bigger sats. So they iterated again and made their rocket bigger.
But that happened again so they gave up that rocket and (in theory) now they are building an even bigger rocket.
They never actually settled on a design. The basically launch a new rocket 1-2 times and before they had figured out all the issues were already looking at the next design and those designs had new issues.
It was more important for the CEO scam and lie about how brilliant the next rocket was gone be so nobody thought to much about why the last rocket blew up. The companies main product was selling stock to uninformed people.
When RocketLab and others strategically moved into space craft, Astra bought a Ion-Engine company just so they can say they do the same thing. When SpaceX had success with Starlink, Astra promised to have an even better global internet.
Having a good story was more the priority then having good engineering and good execution.
This book is a good read: "When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach"
Its about Planet, Astra, RocketLab and Firefly. Book doesn't make the Astra CEO look great.
- > not complete things that are being done now at scale by many others...
So its kind of wrong to suggest that what they try to do is done by 'many' others at scale. That basically isn't the case.
SpaceX and RocketLab lab are really the only companies that really do these things. Companies like ULA, Arianespace are basically government entities with deep connection into old school military-industrial complexes with decades and decades of history.
And the launch rate of anybody accept maybe Soyuz and the Falcon 9 would be nowhere close to what Astra needed to be commercially successful.
So in reality, what Astra was claiming when they were raising money was literally unprecedented. They basically proposed mass manufacture and mass launch to decrees unit price, as if it was a car. This simply hasn't ever happened. SpaceX is now at a launch every couple days but they have 3 launch pads and re-usability.
So the claims they could achieve these things with the money they raised was quite far fetched. In reality, because their technical execution was so bad that they didn't even get to Step 1, building a reliable rocket that you could mass produce. They were launching very aggressively with rockets that didn't work and constantly evolved never finding any stability or consistence.
Because they couldn't make their rocket work, they stopped working on that rocket, and attempted to build a rocket that was 3-5x larger instead. And to do this program they realistically needed even more money.
> weird to see "we signed a big contract"
They never signed a big commercial contract outside of maybe their space engines. Their rockets were never reliable enough for anything but companies seeking a barging bin price with high risk or government launches designed for risky small launchers.
> and where does that money go?
I don't know anything about real estate. Practically speaking in rocket development, salary are the primary cost, followed buy tooling up factory. Given how many people they hired and much they seem to invest in their factory, its not really a mystery where the money went.
Most people do not believe that Astra was trying to scam people. Their two founders seem really convinced by what they were selling. The Chief Engineer clearly loved the rocket he developed.
> Is there a Federal prosecution in the works here? someone bought NFT crypto ? company rivals pulling strings?
Very unlikely. This is just one more start up betting on concept that was fundamentally flawed in a market that never materialized.
This is where I really do think Astra is kind of scamy, their market projections were wild. Many other rocket companies were doing the same thing at the time. So this was really a thing that was all over the industry.
If you want to learn more:
> When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
This is a great book about many rocket startups. The journalist was deeply embedded in Astra and tells lots of good stories. Its also about RocketLab, Planet and Firefly.
Combine that with:
> Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX
And you get a pretty good understanding of the space industry since early 2000s.
- > That's part of the sadness. But it is possible to spread throughout the solar system, and so it's a matter of scale after that.
Not really. In this solar system, the off-Earth real estate is pretty bad. Worse than almost anywhere on Earth. Most of Canada and Alaska are vacant, after all, and those areas have air and water. Now that it looks like human population is peaking, there's not much pressure to inhabit low-value real estate.
Space travel belongs to machines. Small ones. Read Ashlee Vance's new book, "When the Heavens Went on Sale". All the action now is in small satellites and small to medium sized rockets. If and when Space-X gets its Starship working, it may turn out to be a white elephant, like the Space Shuttle. There just aren't that many big payloads worth launching. About once a year, somebody buys a Falcon Heavy launch, and once or twice a year. China launches a Long March 5.
- I see you didn’t pay attention to what I did and did not say in my original comment. I’ve read a biography of him and When The Heavens Went On Sale, which covers SpaceX [Edit: I'd remembered the book incorrectly. I have read that book, but it doesn't cover SpaceX. The books that I'd read that cover SpaceX are The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and The Quest To Colonize The Cosmos, by Christian Davenport, and Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger]. What you’re claiming about him is completely wrong and completely ignorant. I know you haven’t actually read anything substantial about him, because if you had you’d be fully aware of how stupid the claims you are making are.
