When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach

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

With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA or nation states, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe—ungoverned and infinite—was open for business. Welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering.

When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab. Through his trademark immersive reporting, Ashlee Vance follows 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. While the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, these new 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—and setting it up as the next playing field for humankind's technological evolution, where we can connect, analyze, and monitor everything on Earth.