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Welcome to the reboot of The Weekly Weinersmith, celebrating the paperback release of our book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

In this podcast series, we’re going to revisit each of the 10 technologies discussed in Soonish, expanding on topics touched on in the book, exploring related matters, and checking out new advances since the book came out.

That is – the stuff in the podcast will be different from the book, so go buy it.

The first chapter in Soonish is on Cheap Access to Space, and it was one of the hardest ones to write, because private launch companies were making advances so quickly it was hard to keep up.

But at some point, we had to put our pencils down, and we submitted the book to our editor in 2016.

A few months before our book came out in hardback in 2017 a company called Rocket Lab completed a test flight of its Electron rocket.

They’ve now entered high frequency launch operations, and as of May 5, 2019, they’ve launched 28 satellites into space.

Amazingly, Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab (!), took the time to talk to me about how his company is democratizing space launch.