![]() ![]() 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. ![]() 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.
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