![]() (An investigation found no systematic use of fake profiles but the company admitted it had not clearly labelled staff accounts). Polyakov made his money from online businesses in the early 2000s, including a dating website that was accused by the BBC of using fake profiles to lure subscribers. His latest book shows there are plenty more colourful characters in the industry beyond just the Tesla billionaire.Īmong them is Max Polyakov, a Ukrainian whose parents worked in the Soviet space programme. Vance, a globe-trotting journalist at Bloomberg, previously wrote a biography of Elon Musk, the best known among the new crop of space cowboys seeking to put their homemade rockets into the atmosphere. The rise of the Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck – once derided by sceptics as simply a “dishwasher repairman” – is perhaps the most extraordinary tale in Ashlee Vance’s new book, When The Heavens Went On Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. Today, Rocket Lab is second in the world only behind Elon Musk's SpaceX when it comes to the number of space launches it conducts each year. “They were in New Zealand and didn’t have an aerospace industry and didn’t have anything beyond theory,” says one leading executive from SpaceX who spent time working at what became Beck’s company, Rocket Labs.Ī part for a projectile might be sourced from racing cars, he recalled “because that’s all they had access to and knew”. However, he devoted every spare moment of free time to developing the Electron Rocket, even brewing the deadly and dangerous hydrogen peroxide needed to fuel the device in his basement. His time there culminated in redesigning both their products and production line machines. The machine had no off switch or steering: “You put it between your legs and prayed,” he recalled.īeck honed his engineering skills on what became a multi-year practical apprenticeship at Fisher & Paykel, New Zealand’s appliance manufacturer. The reference is also interesting because of its notable omission of Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos: This other space entrepreneur is such a big fan of Star Trek that he pitched and succeeded in landing a cameo in Star Trek Beyond as an alien being, but he doesn’t rate a mention from Lorca among the spaceflight pantheon.By the age of 10, Peter Beck was dismantling and then reassembling entire cars in the remote farming town of Invercargill, New Zealand.Įncouraged by his polymathic father, the young Beck was building bikes from scratch at 14.īy the age of 18, he had developed a rocket that he strapped to a bicycle. ![]() Musk’s SpaceX has also been refining its reusable rocket approach to launches, which could indeed result in a paradigm shift for how we work in space. The SpaceX founder has ambitions to make humans an interplanetary species, of course, with an initial target of establishing a colony on Mars. Musk, a noted sci-fi fan, will probably be thrilled with the comparison and the name drop. On last night’s episode of the new CBS All-Access show, Captain Gabriel Lorca (portrayed by Jason Isaacs) listed Musk alongside the Wrights, and fictional warp drive inventor Zefram Cochrane as peers in space flight technological innovation. Elon Musk ranks alongside the Wright Brothers and the scientist who brought warp speed light to humanity, according to Star Trek: Discovery.
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