Early on in the new documentary film Wild Wild Space, Astra rocket company chief executive Chris Kemp offers this bit of snide commentary on his launch competitor, Rocket Lab: “I’m someone who wants to actually succeed from a business perspective, versus just make big toys.”
For better or worse—and it's better for viewers and ultimately worse for Kemp—he is the star of the documentary film now showing on the streaming network Max. The main narrative involves the race between Rocket Lab and Astra to develop, test, and fly small and commercially viable rockets. And what a compelling narrative it is, especially as the story unfolds toward its inexorable conclusion. Anyone who has paid a bit of attention to the space industry knows where this is headed: the ascent of Rocket Lab and failure of Astra. But it's a fun ride anyway.
The film is based directly on the book When the Heavens Went on Sale, by Ashlee Vance. He is the most prominent talking head in the movie, and he does a fine job contextualizing the story. But what really makes the movie sing is the narcissistic monologues by Kemp, the access to his company, and interviews with Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, who seems mostly bemused at Kemp’s aspirations to challenge him. It all offers a rare, revealing, and intimate look into startup culture.
A rivalry becomes one-sided
There is love lost between the two men. As the film reveals, Kemp spent six months in the mid-2010s as a consultant for the satellite company Planet. His job was to visit launch startups around the world to find low-cost rides to space for Planet’s CubeSats. As part of this, Kemp spent considerable time at Rocket Lab’s facilities in New Zealand, where Beck gave this potential customer a VIP tour and went into depth about his company’s engineering.
Ultimately, Kemp recommended that Planet purchase some launches on Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle. But then, only a few months later, Kemp started his own launch company in the United States to beat Rocket Lab at its own game with an even lower-cost booster. Kemp felt that Rocket Lab’s operations were too exquisite. If Electrons were a Ferrari, Kemp reasoned, he would build Fords. Hence his quote about wanting to succeed from a business perspective rather than make toys.
Beck’s response to this in the film is pithy and characteristic of the New Zealander: “I’m not built to build shit."
Some of the best moments of the documentary concern Beck’s improbable rise from a rocket hobbyist to the founder of a launch startup that, 15 years later, is second only to SpaceX in the commercial space race. There is some tremendous footage of Beck's rocket-powered bike, as well as the entrepreneur with a jetpack strapped to his back while wearing Rollerblades. Later, while conducting his first real rocket launch with the Atea-1 booster, Beck is seen wearing a white lab coat, befitting the mad scientist he is. Beck emerges as a brilliant, genuine, and incredibly driven engineer.
Ultimately, Kemp fares poorly in the comparison. Whereas the movie’s relationship with Beck and Rocket Lab is characteristic of a standard documentary, Kemp seems to have offered unfettered access. He took a gamble by letting Vance and the filmmakers into his world and behind the scenes of his successes and failures. There are some pretty raw moments in here, such as when Kemp appears to be speaking with an investor by telephone and is heard saying questionable things about the “success” of a clearly failed launch attempt. I haven’t asked Kemp why he provided this access, but it seems he was betting on Astra becoming a huge success, with this footage helping build the myth of him as a rocketman in the league of SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
This failed. The viewer is left with the impression of Kemp as an intelligent and gifted salesman but also someone who is not very good at rockets.
Lunches are eaten
An example comes later in the film, during footage from 2023. By this time, it's clear that Astra’s initial rocket was a failure across many attempts. As it turns out, the company's fast-and-loose approach to building rockets quickly and cheaply did not work in an industry where the smallest problem can cause spectacular explosions. Astra could have used a little more of the gold-plating and quality control of Rocket Lab. In the documentary, Kemp vows to institute these practices in a new booster, Rocket 4.
At the time, Rocket Lab had launched dozens of Electrons successfully and had begun work on a larger vehicle, Neutron, to compete directly with SpaceX’s industry-leading Falcon 9 booster. Yet even at this late hour, when it's more likely than not that Astra will never launch another rocket again, Kemp could not help himself. Rocket Lab, he says, will pivot away from small launch because Astra is about to “eat their lunch.” In reality, Rocket Lab ended up stealing Astra’s lunch money.
There’s more to the film than the Rocket Lab-Astra rivalry. A third company, Planet, and its co-founders are profiled. This is insightful stuff about the revolution in commercial optical data in commerce and war. But it’s secondary to the main narrative, and it feels a bit shoe-horned in. Similarly, the Pete Worden material is fascinating but also ancillary.
The bottom line is that this is a fine film for anyone interested in the small rocket wars and taking more than a peek behind the curtain of how the rocket sausage gets made.
