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Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk, feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, and host of the science travel show, Hello World, has written a new book on the aerospace industry titled When the Heavens Went On Sale.
This work presents the recent history of the aerospace industry focusing on the evolution of the "new space" movement, which is typified by private industry's drive to reduce costs, increase the frequency of launches, and generally abandon the zero-defects policy of NASA.
It follows four of the hundreds of new aerospace companies-Astra, Planet Labs, Firefly, and Rocket Lab-through backstory and inter-personal dialog to show their quest to remake the industry.
Planet Labs focused on decreasing the size of imaging satellites, and used the method of "differential drag" to correctly place them in orbit. Rocket Lab reduced the size of rockets through the use of carbon fiber, and developed the hybrid rocket fuel known as VLM (viscous liquid monopropellant). Astra grew out of other companies, Ventions and Stealth Space. One of its goals was to launch small rockets from a barge, and it eventually was the first to become a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company). Firefly had a Ukrainian investor whose parents were connected to the Soviet aerospace industry. He was eventually removed from the company by the U.S. government.
While awareness of the aerospace industry and its many launches is hardly new, the intimacy of this work reveals the character and actions of many of its participants. These fascinating stories broadly illustrate the evolution of humanity's recent challenges and goals in making space a part of our environment.
Equally fascinating, and sometimes disconcerting, are the surprising takeaways that give the reader a more detailed sense of our actions in space: Orbital Insight is a company that uses satellite images and artificial intelligence to develop data on the entire planet, which it then sells to investors and others. Military actions, crop yield, oil supply- anything on the Earth that is visible from space can be imaged and assessed. And this data can be corroborated with GPS signals from smart phones. LeoLabs is another company that uses radar to track everything in low Earth orbit, then provides collision alerts to other companies that have satellites in jeopardy of a collision, enabling them to adjust course. In 2022, LeoLabs was sending out about 400 million alerts per month.
Steve Brehm
March 7, 2023
