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Among them is Max Polyakov, a Ukrainian whose parents worked in the Soviet space programme.

Polyakov made his money from online businesses in the early 2000s, including a dating website that was accused by the BBC of using fake profiles to lure subscribers. (An investigation found no systematic use of fake profiles but the company admitted it had not clearly labelled staff accounts).

Polyakov went on to spend around $150 million on his passion: space. He acquired the assets of Texas-based rocket company Firefly out of bankruptcy and gave American engineers a Russian-designed turbopump, a key piece of rocketry equipment.

For his troubles, he was pressured by the US government to sell his shares in 2022 on national security grounds.Polykov has since acquired Dragonfly, a South African satellite operation, and hes now a British citizen hopefully we havent heard the last of him.

When Vance began researching his book a decade ago, there were about a thousand satellites in orbit.

Today, thanks to the collapsing cost of rocketry and cheap new mini-satellites, almost 9,000 are circling the earth. By the end of the decade, it will be around 30,000.

We are in the early days of the next great infrastructure buildout, Vance says.

Companies such as Starlink, another Musk venture, and OneWeb are creating a fabric of data connectivity that reaches every corner of the world.

They plan to give the entire planet reliable and fast internet access. If realised, farmers in Africa could view live photos of their fields on their phones, for example.

While Nasa led the space revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, today it is private sector concerns that are on the bleeding edge of progress.

Over the decades, the US space agency grew very cumbersome with bureaucracy.

Nasa failed to take advantage of the rise of modern consumer electronics, which offered low cost parts off the shelf.

In the latter half of the 20th century, if you wanted plucky scientists chasing the final frontier, you wouldnt look to Nasa, says Vance.

By contrast, the new breed of renegade engineer-entrepreneurs such as Musk and Beck took ready advantage of cheap consumer electronics parts. What's more, they junked the outdated methods and materials still being used by Nasa.

Strip away layers of bureaucracy dating back to the 1960s, and the staid thinking and you ended up in a place where the construction of rockets could be modernised and made more efficient, Vance says. New things were possible.

Their daring in attempting to build new rockets shouldnt be underestimated, as Vance points out: Its a barely controlled bomb, that you then have to manoeuvre with great precision. Almost anything can go wrong.

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A reckoning awaits Elon Musk's renegade rocketmen (and they are ... - The Telegraph