Ashlee Vance on the Race “to Put Space Within Reach”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, to space where the modern-day fight for the skies could turn science fiction into reality, is the tech boom that promises to take over as a new

generation of entrepreneurs navigates the wild west of aerospace engineering. And private companies compete in the race to commercialize

space. It’s all chronicles in Ashlee Vance’s new book, “When the Heavens Went on Sale.” And he is joining Walter Isaacson to explain this new era of

exploration.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Ashlee Vance, welcome to the show.

ASHLEE VANCE, AUTHOR, “WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE”: Thank you so much.

ISAACSON: Hey, congratulations on this new book, “When the Heavens Went on Sale,” about all of the people getting into the private space industry and lower earth orbit. It starts on Kwajalein Atoll with Elon Musk and SpaceX doing his first three failed launches and finally, a successful one. You were (INAUDIBLE) Elon Musk, as you know, I’m doing one. Tell me why you start with Musk, since he is not the main character in the book?

VANCE: Yes. Well, you know, one of the big arguments I’m trying to make in this book is that we are in this new era of space. We’ve — this is the dawn of commercial space in a really meaningful way. And since the 1960s, that obviously was not the case. This was a very government-backed, slightly military driven enterprise. And a few rich people had tried in the past to make commercial rockets and they’ve had some success, but nothing major. And so, in 2008, when SpaceX gets this Falcon 1 rocket, this privately funded rocket from this dotcom (ph) millionaire into orbit, you know, I see this as this exciting incident. In the moment, it wasn’t immediately clear that this was going to kick off a huge commercial space race. But I think a lot of people looked at what SpaceX had done and that, as I argue in the book, a lot of people’s imagination and passion of sort of this pent-up interest in space that had been sort of deadened over the decades.

ISAACSON: This is about a whole bunch of companies, most people haven’t heard of, and they seem to be creating or trying to create an economy in the low earth orbit. Explain that to me, because it seems like this new frontier, what are they trying to create in orbit?

VANCE: Yes. I mean, another central argument in my book is that going to mars and setting up a colony, like Elon wants to do is fascinating. People want to do something similar on the moon. There’s space tourism, but if you take a step back, the immediate action that’s taking place right now is in the lower earth orbit, the bit of space that’s right above her head where thousands of satellites go. And SpaceX is a major player in that space, the major player. But there are now hundreds of rockets start-ups and satellite start-ups that are looking to build what I described as a type of computing shell around the earth, just like one data point for people from 1960 to about 2020, we had put up 2,500 satellites into the lower earth orbit. That number doubled over the last two years to 5,000. And it is expected to go anywhere from 100,000 satellites to 200,000 satellites in the next decade.

ISAACSON: Whoa, whoa, whoa. 100,000 satellites. Tell me that what they’re going to do.

VANCE: Yes. I don’t think most people realize what’s going on here. The — you know, there’s a couple obvious buckets of what’s already happening. So, we have hundreds of imaging satellites. One of the companies in my book is called Planet Labs. They make these tiny shoe box size satellites. They’ve surrounded the globe with them. They take a picture of every spot on earth, every day, multiple pictures, and not even the U.S. government, China, Russia has this capability. The second major bucket is communications. So, we see SpaceX, we see a company called OneWeb, we see Amazon heading in this direction to make a space internet that’s delivered from lower earth orbit. The central premise with this is really — it’s twofold, I suppose. You connect the 3.5 billion people on earth that can’t be reached by fiber optic cable, you bring them into the modern economy. And then, at the same time, you create this always on internet for the first time, that is persistent and sort of washing over the earth. And this are just the beginning steps of what people are gambling as a much bigger space economy in lower earth orbit.

ISAACSON: Well, you said something fascinating just now and it’s in your book, it’s Will Marshall and Planet Labs, of the ability to take a picture of every single spot on earth every day. Why could that be a really good economic business model?

VANCE: Yes, it’s fascinating. I mean, Planet — this company that’s kind of flown under the radar. Sorry, it’s impossible not to make space patents as you go, but they’ve done something incredible. Like I said, this was — these imaging satellites, people would think of them maybe as spy satellites, but that is not the case here. These are satellites that are essentially photographing the sum total of human activity that’s taking place below us. So, it could be something like literally counting every tree, on planet earth, their biomass, how much carbon dioxide they pull in. This is something you could use to put actual metrics around things like carbon credits as we are trying to solve climate change. They’re counting —

ISAACSON: Could you do it with infrared so you could say, here are the people emitting carbon this day?

VANCE: Absolutely. So, they do that. They also do it for methane. They have all sorts of different sensors on the satellites. Another thing they do — one of their biggest customers is actually agriculture. So, farmers use these satellites to look from space to see how much chlorophyll is in their crops and decide when to harvest them, how healthy their crops are, what their yield is going to be. It’s — I think of it as almost like this Google search engine for the earth that’s sitting above us.

ISAACSON: Could a company like a Walmart say, I want to know how many trucks are going into Target every day and I want to be able to calculate their exact supply chain?

VANCE: Absolutely. You know, you’ll these satellites going over Walmart parking lots during the back-to-school shopping season and you’ve got people in hedge funds that are sitting there having an A.I. count the number of cars that are in the parking lot to figure out how busy it is. They do the same thing for oil storage tanks. There’s this kind of fascinating technique where the tanks have these lids that sort of suppress depending how much oil is in them, and the satellites look at the angle of the shadow that gets produced from that to count how much oil is actually in these tanks.

ISAACSON: How could it affect warfare? We know it’s already played a role in Ukraine.

VANCE: Yes. I mean, again, this is something where, in the past, if North Korea was sending up a missile, you would be dependent on government images of this to spin it whichever way they so choose. In the case of Planet, this is a private company, anybody can hop on their website and find these images. And so, you have this, even though they’re a company, it’s almost this independent layer of truth about what’s happening. In Ukraine, it was fascinating. The — when we have Russia telling us that they were not going to attack Ukraine, we have and hundreds of Planet images of the Russian troops amassing on — in Belarus, at the border, and we sort of knew exactly what was going to happen. And in the early days of — when Russia did move into Ukraine, these satellites provided Ukraine with intelligence they never would have had before on the Russian troop movements, both during the day and at night.

ISAACSON: We’ve had Senator Bill Nelson and NASA administrate on the show a couple times, and he is really into public private partnerships. Tell me what NASA is doing to make use of these things?

VANCE: Well, the United States government has more or less like an all you can eat contract with Planet. So, they can use these for environmental studies from somewhere like NASA or they can use them for some sort of espionage activities, just tracking what’s going on in the world for yields on crops. So, the United States is already using these images quite a bit. The interesting thing to me is if you’re a country that cannot afford to send up your own rockets and put up your own satellites or you haven’t made that investment, for the first time, you can turn to a country like Planet and be on somewhat of a level playing field with the traditional space superpowers who have dominated for decades

ISAACSON: Your book is wonderfully readable because it’s so character driven. It’s got a lot of colorful characters. I guess one of my favorites was General Pete Wardon who comes from the traditional government background. I mean, he’s a general in the military. Tell me his story and why he is one of the driving characters in your book.

VANCE: I’m glad you picked that up on Pete. He’s one of my favorites as well. He’s — you know, we always think of Elon, because he is out there in the public and he has done so much to change this industry, but if there’s a figure who is lurking in the back for decades, pushing things in this commercial space direction, it is Pete. He is an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. He became a general in the air force and was something of a — he was a major figure during the Star Wars Missile Defense Shield. He ran some black ops operations. Pete was both beloved and sort of hated for always pushing up against his bosses, and he more or less got banished.

ISAACSON: The bosses in the Pentagon, you are talking about —

VANCE: In the Pentagon, correct.

ISAACSON: — in the government. Yes. While he’s still in government. And you say he got banished? He almost got fired, right, or did get fired?

VANCE: He did get fired. He got fired by Rumsfeld for this of black ops campaign gone wrong. And then was sent to NASA Ames, which is the Silicon Valley NASA center. That’s Amess, it’s right by Google. It’s had this decades-long influence on NASA and done a lot of pioneering science. But the center was about to be closed down before Pete got there. And he brought in just a ton of twenty somethings who thought very differently about space. They were the ones that wanted to make cheap rockets. They wanted to make cheap satellites. And Pete gave them these resources to go chase after this stuff. NASA really had an allergic reaction to what they were doing, but they kept pursuing it. Pete gave them some cover. And Planet Labs, as an example, is a company that came out of NASA Ames along with several rocket companies.

ISAACSON: You say Planet Labs came out of NASA Ames. I think there’s a scene in your book, maybe it was in Houston, Texas where Pete Wardon is there and he is sort of the evil Darth Vader who’d done “Star Wars” and defense missiles.

VANCE: Yes.

ISAACSON: And he gets introduced to — I think it’s Will Marshall and others who were running Planet Labs who, in my reading of your book, are kind of hippies. You know, they are not — they are doing this for military or business reasons. How did that end up working out?

VANCE: Well, they could not be more opposite people. Will Marshall, the guy you mentioned, is the CEO and co-founder of Planet. He is as idealistic as it gets. He is a space hippie. He’d spent his youth writing papers about not militarizing space and he ends up in this bar with Pete, and Pete strolls over and does say, you know, well, you know, hi, I’m Darth Vader. Let’s have a talk. And to both their credit, I mean, this is the amazing thing about what Pete did at NASA Ames, he didn’t bring in people that thought exactly like him or we’re doing exactly what he wanted, he brought in people with new ideas and allowed them to flourish, and Will’s probably the prime example of that.

ISAACSON: And he had a phrase called response of space. What’s that all about?

VANCE: Well, this is something Pete and the Department of Defense have dreamed about for years. You could think about it as the precursor to space force. There was this idea that space could be another arm of the military in the same way as we do things on land and in sea and in air where you have a conflict and we send up a rocket at a moment’s notice to put a satellite over wherever this conflict is taking place. The DOD had spent decades trying to do this. And really, just could not figure out how to make these small cheap rockets, these small cheap satellites capable of achieving their goals. And Pete was always pushing for this, and then people like Elon and Planet came along that have pulled this off.

ISAACSON: The people in your book don’t really seem motivated, either by defense means or profit. What is motivating them to do this?

VANCE: Well, you know, this book has kind of four major stories that I would argue that the motivations of each group of characters is a little bit different. One of the things I try to point out in the book is that space — the space economy is happening, but it’s not fully clear that it makes sense. You know, there are business cases to be had here, but we don’t know how big they are going to be and yet —

ISAACSON: So, in other words, if you really want to make money, this is not where you’d be going into it?

VANCE: Maybe not. Definitely on the rocket side. The satellite side tends to have quite a bit of money. But the — it’s really this — it reminds me so much of the early days, like 1996, with the consumer internet. We have this feeling that something big is happening. We’re going to lay a ton of fiber optic cables. We’re going to build a bunch of data centers and see what happens, but if you’ve — nobody would’ve predicted all the businesses that have come out of that sense. And I think with space, we’re placing this huge bet that if you reduce the cost of getting to space and you reduce the cost of these satellites that a whole lot of new ideas flourish. But I argue in the book that we just do not know for sure at all.

ISAACSON: Well, one reason we don’t, I mean, we look at Richard Branson, he has a Virgin Orbit, which — not one that sends people up as tourist missions, but does orbiting like you’re talking about, and it just went bankrupt. What do you make of that?

VANCE: Well, absolutely. So, I don’t think people realize, this is kind of why I wanted to write the book. I mean, there are hundreds of rocket start-ups all over the world. And so, there’s been this massive investment in this economy already. We’re starting to see a bit of a pullback and separating the winners from the losers. Right now, SpaceX and another company in the book, Rocket Lab, are the only two major success stories as far as commercial rocket companies go. So, these are — I think we’ve seen this first wave of investment. I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons. And I do think we’re going to see a second wave here soon of people trying to correct these early mistakes.

ISAACSON: Tell me what you are worried about.

VANCE: Well, you know, if we move from 2,500 satellites to 100,000 satellites in short order, there’s very real risks of these things running into each other in orbits. And there’s a thing called the Kessler Syndrome where you have — if a crash takes place in orbit, you have this kind of cascading issue of debris just running into each other all the time and creating — making it sort of uninhabitable, unworkable in lower earth orbits. And people might not care, because they say, oh, these are all futuristic things anyway, but it’s not true. You know, something like GPS, which is this glue of modern society would be completely disrupted if something like that happened.

ISAACSON: So, who regulates this? Any national entity doing it?

VANCE: There’s some regulation. You know, there’s the FAA and the FCC do a lot of regulation around when the rockets could go up, what satellites they take and what those satellites can do and are they going to compete with each other. Once the satellite is actually in orbit, you would be surprised how little regulation there is. It’s kind of like, put it up there and then, just go for it. There’s not really much regulation at all about what you have to do to dispose of the satellite. As far as I know, New Zealand is the only country that has laws in place that say, if you put something up in orbit, you are responsible for how it gets back and what happens to it and what it does while it’s in space. So, there is this layer of regulation. There are international bodies overseeing all of this. But I think commercial space is now moving so much faster than what happened before that they are having trouble keeping up. It is — it’s a bit of a land grab at the moment.

ISAACSON: You seem to have had an enormous amount of fun doing this book. I mean, you just barrel all over the place, get into anything. Tell me what’s the most fun you had.

VANCE: You know, I did have a lot of fun. I want to some very exotic places. My favorite trip, I think, was going to Ukraine before the war. And I was a kid who grew up in the ’80s, kind of a child of the Cold War. And I think I am the second western reporter and the only one who brought a video camera into the old Soviet ICBM factories in Ukraine. And it was fascinating to see. I went to the ICBM factories. I want to the secret rocket testing sites in the forest, and it was just fascinating for me to be in this place that you never imagine you’d even be allowed into when you were growing up. And also, a bit sad to see the state of it all. I mean, it felt like it was frozen in the 1960s, and there was a tiny fraction of the number of people working there that used to work there. But nonetheless, that was probably my favorite trip.

ISAACSON: Ashlee Vance, thank you so much for joining us.

VANCE: Thank you, Walter.