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When the heavens went on sale : the misfits and geniuses racing to put space within reach
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2023
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Library Journal Review
In 2017, Bloomberg Businessweek features writer Vance wrote the biography Elon Musk. In his latest work, the author focuses once again on the controversial tech giant and his companies. This time, however, the book also examines Musk's past and current relationships with technology leaders such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg and how their respective companies have impacted the tech industry and the idea of consumer space travel. A big portion of this well-researched and insightful book looks at Musk's childhood, education, entrepreneurial journey, and vision for the future. Details include the history and mission of his company SpaceX, which aims to make space travel more accessible and to enable human life on other planets. The book also delves into Musk's mission with his Tesla company to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy and how that has impacted the automotive industry. Vance provides insight into Musk's personal life, including his marriages, controversial statements, obsession with colonizing Mars, and apparent tendency to be hyperbolic and to refuse to accept criticism or failure. VERDICT For readers interested in Musk or technology and innovation. This book will be an excellent addition to science or biography collections.--Jennifer Moore
Publishers Weekly Review
In this exciting account, Vance (Elon Musk), a journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek, shines light on some of the lesser known private sector efforts to capitalize on outer space, telling how aerospace companies Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab have used scrappiness and innovation in their quest to turn a profit from rockets and satellites. Vance details engineers' sometimes harebrained schemes and recounts how Planet Labs cofounders Will Marshall and Chris Boshuizen got their start in 2009 at NASA by tucking a smartphone into a rocket to see if it could take pictures from space (it could), giving them the idea to photograph the Earth with a battery of cheap satellites. The author provides finely observed portraits of the figures behind the aerospace companies, describing how Chris Kemp's disregard for the rules helped get the rocket company Astra off the ground, as well as relating how Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, "a self-taught rocket scientist who never went to college... managed to build a rocket company in New Zealand, which had no aerospace industry on which to lean." The focus on figures outside the limelight offers a fresh look at the new space race, and Vance's feels-like-you're-there storytelling captures the "spectacular madness" of the moonshots. It's The Right Stuff for the silicon age. (May)
Kirkus Review
Outer space is open for business according to this energetic account. There was a time when the space race was controlled by superpower states vying for advantage and prestige with massive rockets. These days, private companies are looking at the lucrative opportunities of space travel. Bloomberg Businessweek feature writer Vance, the author of Elon Musk, believes that the pivotal year was 2008, when Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket and launch it into low orbit. Other billionaires poured money into similar projects, and within a few years, venture capitalists had jumped onboard. The unifying theme was a belief that government space agencies had become mired in suffocating bureaucracy and were unaware of the advances made in consumer electronics and off-the-shelf equipment. "Trying out an idea in space no longer required congressional approval or some wild-eyed dreamer willing to risk his personal fortunes," writes Vance. "It just required a couple of people in a room agreeing that they're willing to spend someone else's money on a huge risk." The author follows several companies that made advances with small rockets launching minisatellites for purposes ranging from weather forecasting to advanced communications. Vance was able to visit several launch sites and interview most of the key players. Several of them are alarmingly eccentric, but they all have the sense of being part of something historic. One of the most interesting ideas is for a space-based internet to connect people without access to fiber-optic cables, which would require a network of thousands of satellites. That's a difficult proposition, but the use of the SpaceX Starlink system during the Ukraine war shows the potential. Although some of Vance's stories go on for longer than needed, he ably captures "the spectacular madness of it all." With enthusiasm and solid research, this book is an entertaining, informative look at cutting-edge technology. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

The inspiration for the HBO Original documentary Wild Wild Space, now streaming on Max

A momentous look at the private companies building a revolutionary new economy in space, from the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

In When the Heavens Went on Sale, Ashlee Vance illuminates our future and unveils the next big technology story of our time: welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering and its unprecedented impact on our lives.

With the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Silicon Valley began to realize that the universe itself was open for business. Now, Vance tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab by following four pioneering companies--Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab--as they build new space systems and attempt to launch rockets and satellites into orbit by the thousands.

With the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, these new, scrappy companies arrived with a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth's lower orbit for business. Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history, and he chronicles it all in full color: the top-secret launch locations, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.

Through immersive and intimate reporting, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the tale of technology's most pressing and controversial revolution, as told through fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes in the race to space.

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