Now to space where the modern-day fight for the skies could turn science fiction into reality.

It is the tech boom that promises to take over as a new generation of entrepreneurs manage to navigate the wild West of Aerospace engineering and private companies compete in the race to commercialize space.

It is all chronicled in Ashlee Vance's new book.

He's joining Walter Isaacson to explain this new era of exploration.

Walter: Thank you, and Ashlee, welcome to the show.

>> Thank you so much.

Walter: Congratulations on this new book about all of the people getting into the private space industry in lower orbit.

It starts with Elon Musk and SpaceX doing its first three failed lunches, and finally a successful one.

You wrote a biography.

Tell me why you start with Musk since he is not the main character in the book?

>> Yeah, well, one of the big arguments I am trying to make is we are in this new era of space.

This is the dawn of commercial space in a really meaningful way and since the 1960s, that obviously was not the case.

This was a very government-backed slightly military driven enterprise, and if you rich people have tried in the past to make commercial rockets, and they had had some success, but nothing major.

In 2008 when SpaceX gets this Falcon One rocket, this privately funded rocket from this dot-com billionaire into orbit, I see this as this exciting incident in the moment.

It was not immediately clear this would kick off a huge commercial space race, and I think a lot of people look at what SpaceX had done, and as I argue in the book, a lot of people's imagination and passion and this pent-up interest in space that's been a dead-end over the decades.

Walter: This is about a bunch of companies people have not heard of, and they seem to be creating or trying to create an economy in low Earth orbit.

It seems like this new frontier.

What are they trying to create?

>> Another central argument in my book is that going to Mars and setting up an economy is fascinating.

People want to do something similar on the moon.

There is space tourism, if you take a step back the immediate action taking place right now is in low-earth orbit, the bit of space that is right above our head where thousands of satellites:, and the SpaceX is a major player in that space-- the major player, but there are now hundreds of rocket startups and satellite startups that are looking to build a type of competing shell around the earth, one data point from people.

From 1960 until 2020 we put up 2500 satellites into low Earth orbit.

That number doubled over the last two years to 5000.

It is expected to go from anywhere between 100,000 to 200,000 satellites.

Walter: Tell me what they are to do?

>> I do not think people realize what is going on.

There are a couple of buckets what is happening.

We have hundreds of imaging satellites.

One of the companies in my book is called planet labs.

They make these tiny, shoebox-sized satellites.

Take a picture of every spot on earth every day, multiple pictures, and that even the U.S. government, Russia, China as this capability.

The second major bucket is communications.

We see Space X, a company called One Web, and Amazon heading this direction to make a space Internet that is delivered from low-earth orbit.

The central premise with this is really -- it is twofold I suppose.

You connect the 3.5 billion people on earth that cannot be reached by fiber-optic cable, you bring them into the modern economy, and at the same time you create an always-on Internet for the first time that is just persistent and watching over the earth, and these are just the beginning steps of what people are gambling is a much bigger space economy in low-earth orbit.

Walter: You said something fascinating right now and it is in your book, the marshal of planet labs of the ability to take a picture of every single spot on earth every day.

Why could that be a really good economic business model?

>> Is fascinating.

It has kind of flown under the radar.

It is impossible not to make space puns as you go.

Imaging satellites, people would think of them as spy satellites, but that is not the case here.

These are satellites that are photographing the sum total of human activity taking place below us.

It could be something like literally counting every tree on planet Earth, their biomass, how much carbon dioxide they pull in.

This is something you could use to put actual tricks around things like carbon credits as we try to solve climate change.

Walter: Do they do it with infrared so you can say here are the people emitting carbon this day?

>> Absolutely, they do that.

They also do it for methane.

They have different sensors on the satellites.

One of their biggest customers is agriculture.

Farmers use headlights to look from space to see a much chlorophyll is in their crops and decide when to harvest them, how healthy their crops are, what their yield is going to be?

I think of it is this almost Google search engine for the earth sitting above us.

Walter: Could a company like Walmart say I want to know how many trucks are coming to Target every day, and I want to be able to calculate their exact supply chain?

>> Absolutely, you will have these satellites going over Walmart parking lots during back to school season and you have people in hedge funds counting cars in parking lots.

If they do the same thing... storage tanks.

There is this fascinating technique where these tanks have these lids that depress depending on how much oil is in them, and the satellites look at the angle of the shadow that gets produced from that to count how much oil is actually in these tanks.

Walter: How could it affect warfare?

We know it played a role in Ukraine.

>> This is something where in the past if North Korea was sending up a missile, you would be dependent on government images of this to spin it whichever way they so choose.

In the case of planets, this is a private company.

Anybody can hop on their website and find these images.

It is almost this independent layer of truth about what is happening.

In Ukraine, it is fascinating when we had Russia telling us they were not going to attack Ukraine.

We had hundreds of planet images of the Russian troops amassing in Belarus at the border, and we sort of knew exactly what was going to happen, and in the early days when Russia did move into Ukraine, the satellites provided Ukraine with intelligence they never would have had before on the Russian troop movements both during the day and at night.

Walter: We have had Senator Bill Nelson the NASA administrator on the show a couple of times, and he is really into public-private partnerships.

Tell me what NASA is doing to make use of these things?

>> The United States government has a more or less all-you-can-eat contract with planet, so they can use these environmental studies from somewhere like NASA, or they can use them for some sort of espionage activity distracting what is going on in the world, for yields on crops, so the United States is already using these images quite a bit.

The interesting thing to me is if you are a country that cannot afford to set up your own rockets or put up your own satellites where you have not made that investment, for the first time you can turn to a company like planets and be like on someone of a level playing field.

Walter: Your book is wonderfully readable, because it is so character driven.

I guess one of my favorites was General Pete Worden who comes from the traditional government background.

He was a general in the military.

Tell me his story and why he is one of the driving characters in your book.

>> I am glad you picked up on Pete.

We always think of Elon because he is out there in the public and has done so much to change this industry, but if there was a figure who was lurking in the back decades pushing things in this commercial space direction, it is Pete.

He is an astrophysicist with a PhD.

He became a general in the Air Force.

He was a major figure during the Star Wars missile defense shield.

He ran black ops operations.

Pete was sort of loved and hated for pushing up against his bosses, and he more or less got banished.

Walter: Bosses in the Pentagon.

He almost got fired, right?

Or got fired?

>> He did get fired.

He got fired by Rumsfeld for a black ops campaign gone wrong.

The Silicon Valley NASA Center, it is right by Google, it has had this decade-long influence on NASA and done a lot of pioneering sites, but the center was about to be closed down before Pete got there.

And he brought in just a ton of twentysomethings who thought very differently about space.

There were the ones who wanted to make cheap rockets, cheap satellites, and Pete gave them these resources to chase after the stuff.

NASA had an allergic reaction to what they were doing, the cap pursuing that, Planet Labs is a company that came out of NASA aims.

Walter: You say Planet Labs came out of NASA aims.

I think there is a Senator, Pete Worden, he was the evil Darth Vader, and he gets introduced to a man named Marshall and others who in my reading of your book are kind of hippies.

They are not doing this for military or business reasons.

How did that end up working out?

>> They could not be more opposite.

Marshall is the CEO.

He is as idealistic as it gets.

He spent his youth writing papers about not militarizing space, and he ends up with this bar with Pete.

He says, hi, I am Darth Vader.

Let's talk.

He did not bring in people that thought exactly like him or were doing exactly what he wanted.

He brought in people with new ideas and allowed them to flourish, and will is probably the prime example of that.

Walter: He had a phrase called responsive space.

What is that all about?

>> This is something Pete and the Department of Defense have dreamed about.

You can think of it is the precursor to Space Force.

There was this idea space could be another arm of the military is the same way we do things on land and in sea and in air, where you have a conflict and we sent a satellite at a moment's notice to wherever the conflict is taken place.

DOD and spent decades trying to do this and really could not figure out how to make these small, cheap rockets, cheap satellites capable of achieving their goals, and Pete was always pushing for this and then people like Elon and when it came pull this off.

Walter: The people in your book do not seem motivated by defense means or profit.

What is motivating them to do this?

>> The book has four different major stories, and I would argue the motivations of each character is a little bit different.

One of the things I try to point out in the book is that the space economy is happening, but it is not fully clear that it makes sense.

There are business cases to be had here, but we do not know how big they are going to be.

Walter: If you want to make money, this is not why you would be going into it.

>> The satellite side tends to have quite a bit of money, but it reminds me so much of the early days, 1996 with the consumer Internet.

We have this feeling that something big is happening, we will lay a ton of fiber-optic cables, we will build a bunch of data centers and see what happens.

Nobody would have predicted all of the businesses that have come out of that since.

With space, we are placing this huge bet that if you reduce the cost of getting to space and reduce the cost of the satellites, and a whole lot of new ideas flourish, but I argue in the book we do not know for sure.

Walter: We look at Richard Branson, he has Virgin Orbit, and it just went bankrupt.

What do you make of that?

>> I do not think people realize this is what I want to write the book.

There are hundreds of rocket start-ups all over the world, so there has been this massive investment in this economy already.

We are starting to see a bit of a pullback and separating the winners from the losers.

Right now in the book bucket lab are the only two major success stories as far as commercial record companies go.

I think we have seen the first wave of investment.

I think we learned a lot of lessons, and I do think we are going to see a second wave here soon of people trying to correct these early mistakes.

Walter: Tell me what you are worried about.

>> If we move 2500 satellites to 200,000 satellites in short order, there is very real risk of these things running into themselves in order.

There was a thing called the Kessler syndrome.

If a crash takes place you have this cascading issue of debris running into each other all the time, making it uninhabitable in low-earth orbit, and people might not care, because they say these are all futuristic things anyway, but it is not true.

GPS, which is this glue of modern society, would be disrupted.

Walter: Who regulates this?

>> There is some regulation.

The FAA and FCC do a lot of regulation about when the rockets can go up, what satellites they take and what does satellites can do, and are they going to compete with each other.

Once the satellite is in orbit, you would be surprised how little regulation there is.

It is kind of like put it up there and just go for it.

There is not even much regulation at all about what you have to do to dispose of the satellite.

As far as I know, New Zealand is the only country that has laws in place that say if you put something up in orbit, you are responsible for how it gets back at what happens to it and what it does well it is in space, so there is this layer of regulation or international bodies overseeing this, but I think commercial spaces moving so much faster than what happened before that they are having trouble keeping up.

It is a bit of a land grab at the moment.

Walter: You seemed to have had an enormous amount of fun.

Tell me the most fun you had.

>> I did have a lot of fun.

I went to some very exotic places.

My favorite trip I think was going to Ukraine before the war.

I was a kid who grew up in the 1980s, kind of a child of the Cold War, and I think I am the second Western reporter and the only one who brought a video camera into the old Soviet ICBM factories in Ukraine, and it was fascinating to see.

I went to the ICBM factories, the secret rocket testing sites in the forest.

It was fascinating for me to be in this place you never imagined you would even be allowed into growing up, and also a bit sad to see the state of it all.

It felt like it was frozen in the 1960s, and there was a tiny fraction of the number of people working there that used to work there, but nonetheless, that was probably my favorite trip.

Walter: Thank you so much for joining us.