Rainbow Mansion

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach

by Ashlee Vance  · 8 May 2023  · 558pp  · 175,965 words

Shared Hallucination The Great Computer in the Sky Chapter One: When Doves Fly Chapter Two: Space Force Chapter Three: Welcome, Lord Vader Chapter Four: The Rainbow Mansion Chapter Five: Phoning Home Chapter Six: The Birth of a Planet Chapter Seven: The Great Computer in the Sky The Peter Beck Project Chapter Eight

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had left off with the Falcon 1. Pete’s Kids would go on to trigger the next major revolution in private space. Chapter Four The Rainbow Mansion As Pete’s Kids descended on Silicon Valley in 2006, they needed a place to live. Since several of them already knew one another, they

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everything,” Kemp said. “All I had to do was put my nerdy clothes away. It was great.”* Pete’s Kids dubbed their new home “The Rainbow Mansion” because of its location on Rainbow Drive and set to work finding more people to help pay the bills. They decided to make use of

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was certainly not new, nor was the idea of communal living at all novel for the Bay Area. It would, however, turn out that the Rainbow Mansion revived the idea for the engineers and software developers flocking to Silicon Valley. In large part thanks to Jessy Kate, so-called hacker houses were

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the New York Times with the title “Bay Area Millennials Are Flocking to Communes—No Tie-Dye Required” in which the Rainbow Mansion and Jessy Kate made a prominent appearance. The Rainbow Mansion of 2006, though, was different from the clones that followed. It had a hint of magic. At the heart of the

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by Marshall and the Schinglers, they genuinely believed they could change the world for the better and tried to infect anyone who passed through the Rainbow Mansion with the same spirit. Outside the core group, an ever-changing cast of characters lived in the house. At any given moment, there might be

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lived in their own rooms, while others lived in the makeshift hostel that had been set up replete with bunk beds. Many of the new Rainbow Mansion residents were drawn to the house by the unusual ads Marshall posted on Craigslist: “Seeking a driven, passionate, young female who wants to change the

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manage to have at least one person crumble into the fetal position in the corner of a room after a grilling. The spirit of the Rainbow Mansion aligned with what Pete’s Kids were doing at NASA. At work, they were trying to shake up the space industry and put more power

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’s a peculiar, very recent invention by humans and not a particularly smart one in my opinion.” People who lived in or just visited the Rainbow Mansion reveled in the communal energy. It felt like a permanent summer vacation. Almost every night, housemates and their guests gathered for family-style meals whipped

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break out on a wide array of topics, from the coming threats of artificial intelligence to the perils of space debris. Somewhat more formally, the Rainbow Mansion functioned as a shared research-and-development lab for artistic projects and technology. It was common to walk into the house and find new art

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hosted myriad hackathons, and coders would descend upon the mansion and take it over for an evening or an entire weekend. Celestine Schnugg, a onetime Rainbow Mansion housemate (and now venture capitalist), used to sunbathe by the koi pond only to have her tanning sessions interrupted by hordes of engineers. “People would

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sport, whom Marshall knew. What’s more, Montague was giving lessons to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who lived near enough to the Rainbow Mansion to offer Marshall and his girlfriend a ride home. As Marshall described it, “I’ll never forget that on the way back, Sergey asked, ‘So

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. “Will thinks the rules don’t apply to him,” Parkin said. “And, for the most part, they annoyingly don’t.” To the extent that the Rainbow Mansion had an archnemesis, it was the closest neighbor, Rita. She owned an even bigger house at the top of the hill. No one knew Rita

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told them she felt threatened by the flag. She also did not appreciate the ritual of the UN flag ceremonies in which members of the Rainbow Mansion would march out to the flagpole and blow a conch shell before holding a small parade to celebrate the citizens of Earth. While that could

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all sound ridiculous to some, the Rainbow Mansion housemates took their world-changing aspirations seriously. The housemates strove to codify their world-saving agendas. They held regular meetings in which they listed ways

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routines for almost every facet of his life. He built a Marshall Matrix for dating. He also tried to optimize his driving routes from the Rainbow Mansion to Ames by keeping track of his choices and journey times. More controversially, Marshall spent about five years recording nearly every conversation he had. He

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logging. “I did not approve of that,” Parkin said. “I asked him to stop.” Marshall’s peculiarities and the unconventional living taking place at the Rainbow Mansion may strike some as trivial or silly. In this case, though, they point to the mysterious underpinnings behind invention. It’s unlikely that the idea

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Flight Center, where he’d met Chris Kemp. He’d also befriended scores of future space entrepreneurs, researchers, and academics, including some of his future Rainbow Mansion roommates, at a UN conference held in Vienna. The two-week-long event brought together students from around the globe to focus on the exploration

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we decided to form a space kibbutz. We wanted to live in the same place and combine forces, and that is what eventually became the Rainbow Mansion.” In 2000, Marshall began pursuing a doctorate in physics at Oxford. He studied under Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate who conducted groundbreaking physics research alongside

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.” Pete Klupar, the aerospace veteran Worden had hired as director of engineering at Ames back in 2006, was tight with Marshall, Boshuizen, and the whole Rainbow Mansion crew. For a couple of years, he’d been ending meetings at Ames by holding up his new smartphone, waving it around, and urging the

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benefit mankind? During the day, Marshall and Boshuizen pursued the PhoneSat effort at Ames, but at night they pondered those questions with friends at the Rainbow Mansion. Marshall, being Marshall, tried to add some rigor to the pondering by creating a spreadsheet that collected and ranked people’s ideas. The spreadsheet boiled

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of what he’d set up. Us leaving was a sign of his own success.” Marshall and Boshuizen spent a couple of hours at the Rainbow Mansion brainstorming names for the new venture. Marshall wanted “Gaia” in the name to celebrate Mother Earth, and both men wanted something with a spacey flair

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worked at NASA headquarters as the right-hand man to the agency’s chief technologist. The three men had all spent countless nights at the Rainbow Mansion discussing their ideas regarding the technology and plans for the venture. For the longtime housemates Marshall and Schingler in particular, it was a chance to

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any good Silicon Valley start-up, Planet Labs sprang to life in a garage. The team would discuss their concepts in the comfort of the Rainbow Mansion and then head to their garage to try and turn their ideas into working hardware. The basic concept was to build the smallest, cheapest satellite

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Worden’s supervision. Meanwhile, Planet set up shop in the center of San Francisco. The Planet founders had been paying for their experiments at the Rainbow Mansion out of their pocket but now needed to raise money as their expenses mounted. Remembering their time in the Black Rock Desert, Marshall and Boshuizen

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much time for authority figures or their staid thinking. Many of those traits had been part of Kemp since birth, but his experiences at the Rainbow Mansion and Ames had pumped him full of increased levels of confidence and swagger. By all rights, Kemp’s time running Nebula should have been a

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assembled and in near-working shape within the next three months. In May 2017, Kemp invited Creon Levit, his old friend from Ames and the Rainbow Mansion, to come give a talk to all the Stealth Space employees. Levit spent his days working on satellites at Planet Labs but had a hobby

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years and take the effort to put ritual around it. “In my mind, Jessy is the spiritual leader of the group,” said one of the Rainbow Mansion friends who has attended 4D. “She doesn’t say a lot, but I think she pushes things in certain directions. You can see that they

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from going rogue and keep a Pete Worden from ever arising again. As you might have guessed, Ames is now quite boring. Worden and Ames/Rainbow Mansion alum Kevin Parkin have been working for Yuri Milner on projects related to deep-space exploration. “Expansion into the solar system and the beyond. That

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, 356, 357–358 media attention and, 317 moving rocket and, 305, 306 Open Lunar Foundation and, 488 OpenStack and, 250–253 Polyakov and, 468–469 Rainbow Mansion and, 72–73 recent work of, 489, 492–493 Rocket Lab and, 338 security and, 301 simplicity of design and, 279 Skyhawk space and, 310

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Kemp and, 59–60, 254, 272–273, 274 London and, 286n lunar lander and, 476 at NASA, 55–57 PhoneSat project and, 89–96, 97 Rainbow Mansion and, 71–73, 74–78 recent work of, 488–489 small satellites and, 98–100 success of, 488 on transparency, 124–125 on use of

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), 25, 27 Putin, Vladimir, 446, 457, 485 radar stations, 481–483 Raghu, Nikhil, 183–186, 188, 189, 192–193, 201–202 rain forest monitoring, 121 Rainbow Mansion, 71–80, 85, 100, 101 Raptor, 420 RD-180 engine, 449 RD-250s, 445 reaction wheels, 109–110 Reagan, Ronald, 43, 45, 47n regulatory efforts

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Planet Labs and, 101 goals of, 26 in India, 25, 27 Kemp and, 59–60, 254 launch attempts and, 28–33 at Planet Labs, 325 Rainbow Mansion and, 71, 73, 75 recent work of, 488–489 success of, 488 Ventions LLC and, 250 Whitesides and, 423 Worden and, 50, 51 Schlumberger, 166

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Mountain View, California. (NASA) Pete Worden during his time as director of NASA Ames. (NASA) The outside of the Rainbow Mansion. (Will Marshall) Planet’s founding team in the garage at the Rainbow Mansion. Will Marshall seated in center. Robbie Schingler seated on the left in front of Chris Boshuizen. (Planet) One of Planet

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Ames team were hopeful that SpaceX would succeed. * These are designations related to the civil service pay scale. * One friend described the Kemp of the Rainbow Mansion days as “Mr. Government Nerd.” He’d come from the world of information technology and looked and dressed the part. Wire glasses, slightly pudgy, buzz

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departed, the door remained unlocked, and old residents would walk right in to meet the mansion’s new inhabitants. * Like the rest of the core Rainbow Mansion crew, Parkin had been recruited to Ames by Worden. After doing his undergraduate studies in physics at Leicester, Parkin earned a doctorate in aeronautics from

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has the telescope on display. * That work evolved into the creation of the Space Generation Advisory Council and to Marshall’s meeting many of the Rainbow Mansion members. * California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and Stanford University starting in 1999. * According to Marshall, “There was a time when one of the

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr  · 14 Jun 2017  · 431pp  · 129,071 words

bicycles. Finally, the train stopped at Sunnyvale, where you alight for Cupertino, home of Apple. I took a taxi up a winding hill to the Rainbow Mansion, a large cream house with a terracotta roof that was now an ‘intentional community’ made up of bright young tech workers. My search for the

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keep you out included getting regular gifts from your parents and having been ‘prescribed anything by a psychiatrist more than once’. My contact at the Rainbow Mansion was a Spanish NASA employee called Vanesa. ‘You’re in the Mystery Room,’ she told me, leading me through the tall, shiny lobby, with its

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you don’t change the world and you don’t make a lot of money, you’re a failure.’ As we drove back to the Rainbow Mansion, I told Jeremy that there was a particular species of tech worker I was especially interested in tracking down. Just as the culture in which

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Branden killed. What was good for the self seemed to have cruel dominion over what was good for the other. Cate told me about a Rainbow Mansion tradition in which an interesting question is raised over Sunday-night dinner for debate. She had many friends at the Mansion and hung out there

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animals but we think we’re not animals. We’re products of the mud. * Before I left Silicon Valley, I accompanied some residents of the Rainbow Mansion to a rocket launch. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX had been contracted to take a NASA satellite into orbit. As we drove south out of

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