How a Dishwasher Engineer Challenged Musk’s Dominance in Space

Elon Musk called in the evening. Or at least my evening.

It was November 2018, and I was staying in Auckland, New Zealand, for a couple of weeks. My day had been spent hanging out at the main factory of Rocket Lab, a maker of small rockets, with its founder, Peter Beck.

I hadn’t talked to Musk much since the publication of my biography of him three years earlier, mostly because he hadn’t appreciated some of the things I’d written and had thought, at one point, about suing me. I got a message from his assistant saying he ...