The solid consistency of HBO’s feature-length documentaries continues with Wild wild space (now streaming on Max), which follows three kids with ideas as they and their companies attempt to conquer the satellite-filled realm of low-Earth orbit. Director Ross Kauffman (2006 documentary Oscar winner) Born in brothels) features Astra’s Chris Kemp, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, and Planet Labs’ Will Marshall, all of whom are private organizations operating in such new and innovative territory that there’s no government oversight to tell them what they can and can’t do — hence the film’s title. These scrappy little companies have outpaced NASA in terms of ambition and innovation, to the point where the government agency hires them to launch satellites into orbit. Of course, their efforts have myriad implications — good and bad — and inevitably, a little scary.
WILD WILD SPACESTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Kemp is described as “Silicon Valley in human form,” which I would translate as “he’s probably Patrick Bateman.” We first meet him when the film crew climbs into his car and he reveals that he has no driver’s license, no insurance, and the car is unregistered. “Most people get confused when you do illegal things,” he says. (He’s right: is he such a “Silicon Valley disruptor”—slash-anarchist—that he gives up the very simple and relatively affordable task of driving a car legally? We’re left pondering that.) We follow Kemp over the course of a few years as he tries to make Astra—one of many startups in his career—a competitor to Elon Musk’s Space X in the realm of nongovernmental space exploration. By the end of the documentary, his hair will be significantly grayer.
Kemp is an arrogant, energetic, can-do capitalist who fights with all his might throughout the film: his rockets explode again and again, he finally manages to get one into orbit, then the next one crashes and the company’s stock follows suit. Interestingly, he is a long-time friend of one of his main competitors – he and Marshall met in college. Kemp is a man of money and success, while Marshall is a hippie nerd with environmental stewardship goals. Marshall created Planet Labs to collect data on climate change, deforestation, crop production, and other lofty, noble ideals. We watch as Planet Labs successfully launches dozens of loaf-sized satellites (the computers on satellites aren’t much more complicated than those in smartphones, Marshall notes), squadrons of which circle the planet and beam back countless photos to Earth every day. The information helps farmers and environmentalists, which is great. But it also raises significant privacy concerns, which isn’t great.
On the other side of the planet lies Beck’s Rocket Lab, based in New Zealand. Beck’s story is worthy of a hit comedy movie about dreaming and doing: he has no formal education and no money. He built homemade rockets and literally strapped them on his back, launching off on rocket bikes and jetpacks. He came to the US to try to get a job, and when that inevitably failed, he started his own business and was so good at it (43 successful rocket launches out of 47 attempts) that Rocket Lab landed NASA contracts and was valued at a few billion dollars. Planet Labs enjoyed a similar success story. Compare them to Astra, which became famous for its failure-meme-worthy “sideways rocket”; As launch after launch fails and they finally manage to get a rocket in the air for 20 seconds before it explodes, we see Kemp on the phone calling the launch “spectacular” when in reality it was nothing special.
Meanwhile, Kauffman delves into what it all means. He interviews experts and journalists; most notable among the former is Pete Worden, who headed President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program and became a mentor to Kemp and Marshall, and most notable among the latter is Ashlee Vance, whose book “When the Heavens Went on Sale” inspired the making of this documentary. Finally, the discussion turns to disturbing topics—for example, how Musk’s ability to shut down satellites on a whim may directly affect the war between Ukraine and Russia, how AI is being integrated into observation technology, how low Earth orbit is increasingly cluttered with debris and could end up being a war zone. Hooray for the disturbing repercussions of scientific innovation!
What movies will it remind you of? History will determine whether the privatization of space will be a Oppenheimer-that kind of moment, I guess.
Performance worth watching: Beck, on his first successful rocket launch, appears dressed in a white lab coat in a New Zealand field, like a genuinely nerdy, weird scientist, and the liftoff causes flocks of sheep to scatter. He’s much more endearing than Kemp, who tries to impress or shock (or baffle?) people by literally licking lead paint as he takes them on a tour of the derelict warehouse space that’s become the Astra facility.
Memorable dialogue: One commentator comments on the overall picture regarding technological innovation: “The human species’ track record is not very good. All these problems that are causing us trouble here on Earth? They’re going to export them to space.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: Wild wild space Using the story of the “celestial land grab” as, if you’ll pardon the pun, a jumping-off point for discussing ancient conflicts: where scientific innovation collides with commerce, where well-intentioned technology can be used for nefarious purposes, Kauffman puts together an entertaining, fast-paced documentary, using the trio of narratives here presented for Frogger, lily pad by lily pad, describing the details of the 21st-century space race.
We start to feel the countdown fatigue as the film cuts to scene after scene of CEOs and their employees sweating through the moments before rocket launches, followed by cheers and/or groans of dismay, depending on the results. It becomes a running joke through Astra’s many failures, and we feel Kemp’s positive modus operandi really strain under the stress (again we notice his graying hair). You might feel sorry for the guy if he weren’t so monumentally unpleasant, with his helmet-covered Aryan features and greasy redhead vibes. You kind of want to root for Kemp and especially Marshall — the latter seems like a more stable and responsible tech steward than the bigwig of this industry, Musk and Space X.
I was frustrated by Kauffman’s lack of follow-through on some of his themes — for example, what does Marshall, the “tech hippie,” think about the subversion of his inventions? What is his net worth now? Has he changed his mind now that his company is worth billions? Commentary from outsiders doesn’t quite fill in those blanks. The director does indulge in the pessimism inherent in such narratives, as technology, business, politics and the ever-problematic nature of humanity all intertwine and point to an uncertain future. But that’s just responsible journalism, isn’t it?
Our calling: Wild wild space is another good documentary from HBO’s pision. Three… Two… One… WATCH IT STREAMING.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
