How companies like SpaceX transformed space travel into the Wild West

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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.

“Planet would have pictures of those day-to-day machinations available for a modest fee and instant download,” Vance writes. 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.

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.” To get a New Zealand launch site, Beck needed to woo local Maori leaders with traditional songs and dance, which he awkwardly managed.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.”

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.Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov’s modest plan for Firefly was to “take over a huge swath of the aerospace industry.”Still, by early 2020 Astra had also succeeded “in flying satellites into orbit on behalf of paying customers.

 

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