Skeptics once ridiculed Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck as a «dishwasher repairman.» Photo: Rocket Lab via AP. 10-year-old Peter Beck took apart and then reassembled entire cars in the remote farming town of Invercargill, New Zealand.
Encouraged by his versatile father, young Beck started building bikes from scratch at 14.
By the age of 18, he had developed a rocket that he tied to a bicycle. The car had no switch or steering: “You put it between your legs and prayed,” he recalled.
Beck honed his engineering skills through years of hands-on training at Fisher & Paykel, a New Zealand home appliance manufacturer. His time there culminated in upgrading both their products and the machines on the production line.
However, he devoted every free minute to developing the Electron Rocket, even brewing the deadly and dangerous hydrogen peroxide needed to power the device in his basement.
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«They were in New Zealand and had no aerospace industry and nothing but theory,» says one of the top SpaceX executives, who briefly worked at Rocket Labs, which became Beck's company.
Projectile part can be obtained by racing cars, he recalled, «because that's all they had access to and knew.»
Today, Rocket Lab ranks second in the world behind Elon Musk's SpaceX when it comes to the number of space launches it conducts each year.
The rise of Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck — once derided by skeptics simply as a «dishwasher repairman» — is perhaps the most unusual story in Ashley Vance's new book, When Heaven Goes on Sale: Losers and Geniuses Seeking to Make Space Accessible '.
Vance, a world-traveling journalist for Bloomberg, previously wrote a biography of Elon Musk, best known among the new generation of space cowboys eager to launch their homemade rockets into the atmosphere.
His latest book reveals that besides billionaire Tesla, There are many more bright characters in the industry.
More and more entrepreneurs are competing with Elon Musk in this area. race Photo: SPACEX HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Among them is Max Polyakov, a Ukrainian whose parents worked in the Soviet space program.
Polyakov made money from online businesses in the early 2000s, including a dating site that the BBC accused of using fake profiles to attract followers. (The investigation found no systematic use of fake profiles, but the company admitted it did not clearly label employee accounts.)
Polyakov spent about $150 million on his passion: space. He bought the assets of the Texas-based rocket company Firefly after bankruptcy and donated a Russian-designed turbopump, a key piece of rocket technology, to American engineers.
Because of his problems, the US government forced him to sell his shares in 2022 on national security grounds. last heard of it.
When Vance began work on his book ten years ago, there were about a thousand satellites in orbit.
Today, thanks to the falling cost of rocket technology and cheap new mini -satellites, about 9000 fly around the Earth. By the end of the decade, there will be about 30,000.
“We are at the start of the next massive infrastructure build,” says Vance.
Companies like Starlink, another Musk venture, and OneWeb are building a data connectivity network that reaches all corners of the world.
They plan to provide the entire planet with reliable and fast Internet access. If this is implemented, farmers in Africa will be able, for example, to view live photos of their fields on their phones.
Although NASA led the space revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, today the private sector is at the forefront of progress.
Over the decades, the US space agency has become very unwieldy due to bureaucracy.
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NASA failed to take advantage of the development of modern consumer electronics, which offered inexpensive off-the-shelf parts.
In the second half of the 20th century, if you wanted «brave scientists chasing the latest frontier,” says Vance, “you won’t go to NASA.
In contrast, a new breed of renegade entrepreneurial engineers like Musk and Beck readily took advantage of cheap consumer electronics parts. What's more, they threw out obsolete methods and materials still used by NASA.
«Throw away layers of bureaucracy dating back to the 1960s and level-headed thinking, and you'll be in a place where rocket design is could be upgraded and made more efficient,” says Vance. “The new has become possible.”
Their courage in trying to build new missiles should not be underestimated, as Vance points out: “This is a barely manageable bomb that needs to be maneuvered with great precision. Almost anything can go wrong.»
SpaceX's spacecraft launch was declared a success despite it exploding after the explosion. -off Credit: VERONICA G. CARDENAS/AFP via Getty Images
No clearer illustration of this is needed than the example of how SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded over Texas skies minutes after launch last month.
A new generation of rocket scientists — all men — helped save the US a reputation for space technology that looked shabby 15 years ago.
Vance says: “China was on the verge of ruin when we only had Boeing and Lockheed Martin – it was absolutely pathetic. Now the whole world is jealous of us.”
However, a key question remains unanswered: Is launching rockets into space a sustainable business?
«No one knows if any of this will be economically viable,» says Vance.
» It's like 1996, when investors were building data centers and laying fiber, but they didn't know there was business.»
Although the Internet business became huge, most of the pioneers went bankrupt when the the dot-com bubble.
“Now all businesses are in visualization or communications, with a bit of science, and we’re going to start tiny manufacturing in space,” says Vance. “This whole game is based on the fact that if you change this economy, someone can benefit from it.”
Entrepreneurs and their investors do not have to look long for a way to make money. Rocket launches are expensive, and low-orbit mini-satellites fall safely to Earth after only three to five years of operation.
Not all entrepreneurs participating in the space race are able to succeed. Vance says, «It's pretty clear we'll get our payback soon.»
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