FREE IN-STORE EVENT: Bestselling author Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk) will be in conversation with award-winning journalist Charles Duhigg about Vance's book When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach, a momentous look at the private companies building a revolutionary new economy in space.
"The frenzied race by stargazing entrepreneurs to build a new economy in space is one of the most exciting tales of our time. Ashlee Vance, with his immersive reporting and exuberant writing, has captured the ambition and idealism of the colorful characters who are not only transforming our world, but our heavens. It's the next tech frontier, and Vance turns it into a thriller." —Walter Isaacson
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In When the Heavens Went on Sale, Ashlee Vance illuminates our future and unveils the next big technology story of our time: welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering and its unprecedented impact on our lives.
With the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Silicon Valley began to realize that the universe itself was open for business. Now, Vance tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab by following 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.
With the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, these new, scrappy 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. Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history, and he chronicles it all in full color: the top-secret launch locations, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.
Through immersive and intimate reporting, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the tale of technology's most pressing and controversial revolution, as told through fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes in the race to space.
Ashlee Vance is the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk and a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s also the host of Hello World, a travel show that centers on inventors and scientists all over the planet. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the New York Times, the Economist, and The Register.
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into over 40 languages, and Smarter Faster Better, also a bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker Magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, PBS’s NewsHour and Frontline. He was also, for one terrifying day, a bike messenger in San Francisco.
