Rocket Lab gave us exclusive access to its 50th Electron rocket launch. This episode takes you inside Mission Control, and Peter Beck's mind, for the milestone countdown.
REVIEW
You’ve heard of the space race, but a new documentary featuring Rocket Lab’s Sir Peter Beck takes you deeper into the minds of misfits who unleashed a commercial assault on low-earth orbit.
The HBO Original documentary Wild, Wild Space, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Ross Kauffman and inspired by journalistAshlee Vance’s New York Times bestselling-book When the Heavens Went on Sale, chronicles three space companies from California to the Coromandel.
Like any good action drama, there’s f-bombs, machinery blowing up, fierce rivalry with bouts of backstabbing and bankruptcy.
It’s hard to believe the storyline is fact not fiction.
The HBO Original documentary is available to watch in New Zealand exclusively on Sky's Neon streaming service.
Six-years in the making, Vance followed the personalities behind the punishing, once privately-held pursuit to defy the laws of physics (and likely the legitimate law).
Characters include the slick Silicon Valley-executive Chris Kemp, Astra co-founder and chief executive; the unqualified engineering genius, Sir Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and chief executive; and the well-meaning hippie, Will Marshall, Planet Labs co-founder and chief executive.
This a movie not solely for space nerds, but for anyone who wishes to understand how the proliferation (or pollution) of satellites in the sky is shaping society, and who is gaining existential influence as a result.
“No one knows if any of this will work, or where any of this is going, but, there is a lot of money to be made up there,” Vance’s opening monologue states.
“Whoever controls space may very well control the future of humanity.”
While the documentary demands the viewer pay attention to the scale of what’s at stake, it importantly uncovers how unlikely this industry is at all.
Behind the scenes of Rocket Lab's 50th Electron launch at its Mission Control in Auckland. Photo / Alyse Wright
With unrivalled access to closed-door meetings, private phone calls, factory floors and rocket launch rooms, Vance and Kauffman reveal the degree to which the space race is riddled with rebellion and fraught with failure (or as engineers call them, anomalies).
It also highlights how these companies operate outside the grip of governments, despite some of the entrepreneurs’ ideas rising directly from the ashes of Nasa dreams.
Governments are now in their hands with all three of the companies featured awarded military contracts.
“This is one grand regime change, from countries that used to control all this power to now individuals,” Vance says.
Astra chief executive Chris Kemp is the slick SIlicon Valley executive who exudes villain status.
Wild, Wild Space will make you question how comfortable you are with spacecraft becoming spyware.
It may make you feel nervous about use cases for these companies and their technology, as thousands of satellites observe earth and the activities of we who inhabit it.
It’s unbelievably impressive innovation, but enough to unseat even the most optimistic among us.
Sensible Sir Pete
The first sight of New Zealand’s Sir Peter Beck comes less than 10 minutes in - donned in black Rocket Lab merchandise, sunglasses and his signature pale chinos.
He’s strikingly silent on entry to the big screen, showing a sense of sensibility, in stark contrast to Astra’s fast-talking, law-defying Kemp.
Throughout the film, Kemp is followed around candlelit dinner parties, raves, and caught eating paint to impress investors.
But Beck is only filmed at one place - work.
“It’s pretty cool, eh?” are his first words on a factory floor in Auckland, before sticking his hands into the “guts” of one of his Electron rockets.
The documentary shares Peter Beck's Rocket Lab start-up story, including strapping himself to rocket-powered rollerblades and bikes.
The documentary includes rare footage of a baby-faced Beck behind his first Rocket Lab rocket launch in November 2009 from Great Mercury Island - the moment that put him, and our country, on the space race map.
“In the tradition of great New Zealand explorers... We are go for space,” a young Beck says before countdown.
Followed by, “You f***ing beauty!”
A later launch captured him wiping away what looked like tears in his eyes.
If Beck’s manner wasn’t enough to show the best of New Zealand, there’s shots of our coastal scenery, scores of sheep and a quintessential white Toyota ute too.
“There’s really hardly anything there,” Vance says about our country.
Technology journalist Ashlee Vance came to New Zealand to film the documentary Wild, Wild Space at Rocket Lab in Auckland.
Beck v Musk
Ashlee Vance’s storytelling compares the rocket manufacturing business to that of cars, with Astra as Ford and Rocket Lab as Ferrari.
“I’m not built to build s***,” Beck says in the trailer.
The storyline is wound together by the fragility of an industry in early doors and the cutthroat competition between some of its characters.
“If Peter is not right, Peter loses,” Kemp says in a firing shot.
Ultimately, they all want to achieve the same thing - to be taken seriously.
Oh, and undercut Elon Musk.
Elon Musk's company SpaceX is the most dominate player in the space race. Photo / SpaceX
Beck is to date the only entrepreneur to come close to Musk’s dominant SpaceX, according to Vance.
“That’s it.”
Wild, Wild Space is complete inside access to the people with the potential to reshape our lives.
Vance refers to it as a revolution, one the world is not acutely aware of yet, while others call it a renaissance or the next frontier - a reawakening of space innovation if you will, after Nasa’s Apollo attempts ended.
Madison Reidy is host and executive producer of the NZ Herald’s investment show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.
