When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance

WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE by Ashlee Vance is subtitled “The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach.” One could easily assume that Vance, a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of the New Your Times bestseller Elon Musk, would be writing about companies like Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Branson’s Virgin Galactic. He does comment on those companies but focuses this text on four others: Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace. Vance is adept at combining stories of pivotal events (e.g., the Indian launch resulting in near simultaneous deployment of 88 satellites for Planet Labs) and unusual facts (e.g., from the 1960s to 2020, the number of machines orbiting Earth had increased to roughly 2,500 and “From 2020 to 2022, something astonishing happened: the number of satellites doubled to 5000.”). Readers will learn a great deal from this well-written text, particularly as Vance introduces many of the key founders and players, saying, “it was important to me to let them tell their own stories and for you to hear how they talk and think in their own words.” WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE is full of dreams fulfilled and dreams dashed; it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“Vance’s feels-like-you’re-there storytelling captures the ‘spectacular madness’ of the moonshots. It’s The Right Stuff for the silicon age.”).