The Russian Spy Who Wasn't

The US made a mistake that cost Max Polyakov billions

Firefly Aerospace went public on August 7th. It’s a rocket maker based in Texas and now has a market cap of $7 billion. The man who made the company possible - Max Polyakov - has mostly been written out of Firefly’s history. Polyakov put $200 million into Firefly and then was thrown out of the U.S. for allegedly being a Russian spy and was forced to sell his stake in Firefly, as a result.

Polyakov, who hails from Ukraine, has since received numerous awards from his country for his service during the war with Russia. In other words, he didn’t turn out to be a Russian spy. Go figure.

To help try and set the historical record straight, we’re publishing an excerpt from my book When The Heavens Went on Sale, which documents Polyakov’s life, rise as a rocket mogul and his exit from the U.S. This is how his adventure with Firefly began.

FULL ATTACK

Artiom Anisimov had been watching Firefly’s implosion. And he had a plan.

Anisimov was born in 1986 in Osipovichi, a small town in the center of Belarus afflicted by the waning fortunes of the Soviet Union. As a young child, he moved to Mongolia with his family. His father was serving in the military and participating in the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan in the hope of securing a better life back home. After four years of service in Mongolia, the Anisimovs received their reward and were granted a one-bedroom apartment back in Belarus.

Osipovichi did not offer much in the way of opportunity. The criminal element had a big presence in the city, the economy had collapsed, and the schools were run down. Anisimov, though, was smart and industrious, and in his teenage years he signed up with a student exchange program that sent him to live with a family in Tennessee. The father of the family was a surgeon, the mother was a substitute teacher, and the kids were sporty and popular. The visit provided Anisimov with a taste of the comforts the United States could offer. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “You learn that there are places where people live differently and the different things might be better.”

Anisimov went to university first in Belarus, then in Lithuania, and then in Nebraska, obtaining a couple of law degrees along the way. At the University of Nebraska, he studied under Frans von der Dunk, one of the world’s foremost experts on space law. The professor convinced Anisimov that space law was about to become a very big deal as the industry changed, and Anisimov decided to pursue it as a career.

After graduating, Anisimov traveled to Washington, DC, and tried to find a job in the aerospace industry. Naive and not sure how one would go about such a task, he’d often show up at a company headquarters unannounced and ask to speak with a recruiter. On at least one occasion, he had to hitchhike to a company campus in Virginia because he had neither a car nor the money for a taxi. Due to visa issues and a series of swings and misses with corporate jobs, he found himself working as a parking valet at a grocery store for almost two years. He used the time to study for and pass the bar exam and make contacts in the space industry.

Anisimov evolved into a space junkie. He sneaked into space conferences and talked to as many people as possible. Conversation by conversation, the strategy worked, and he managed to find a couple of jobs doing legal work for one space start- up and then another. In 2013, he moved to Silicon Valley and, after a couple of twists and turns, ended up working as Max Polyakov’s right- hand man on all things space.

Anisimov possessed a near- encyclopedic knowledge of space history, the politics governing the industry, and the major space players. He’s a relentless networker and built up a long list of contacts that were valuable to Polyakov. He also had a good sense of the undulations in the industry, charting who was up and who was down and how someone else’s weakness could be exploited for an advantage.

Back in 2016, Polyakov had dramatic space ambitions but not much experience to back them up. He’d made his money through internet sites and business software, and space was something of a sideline. He funded a company called EOS Data Analytics that took satellite images and analyzed them more or less in the spirit of Planet Labs, and he funded a few engineering projects in Ukraine. But that was the extent of his space empire.

As stories of Firefly’s financial issues became public, Anisimov saw an opportunity for Polyakov to go big. He began sending feelers to Firefly’s co-founder and CEO Tom Markusic and, after making contact, asked if he’d like to meet Polyakov and talk business. Anisimov sensed that the vulnerable Firefly could catapult Polyakov right into the rocket business and do so without needing to start from scratch. Markusic gladly met Polyakov in the fall of 2016 and then kept chatting with him through the end of the year. In January 2017, he found himself on a first- class flight to Ukraine to visit Polyakov’s homeland and hash out more details of what might be possible.

There are two versions of what happened next and of how Polyakov came to own Firefly.

In one accounting of the events, Polyakov played the role of a white knight. He stepped in with a ton of money during Firefly’s darkest hour and saved the company from certain demise. Markusic had tried his hardest to find other suitors, but they had never materialized. Partnering with Polyakov helped make sure that Firefly’s technology could live on and that all the people who had been involved with the company to date would come away with something rather than nothing. Simple.

The other version of events has a more cynical and sinister plotline. In this tale, Markusic met Polyakov and sensed an opportunity to push his cofounders and existing investors out of the company and to restart it with a clean financial slate. Rather than trying his best to keep Firefly alive in the latter part of 2016, Markusic basically let it die and go into bankruptcy, which devalued the positions of the existing stakeholders. It also made it possible for Polyakov to swoop in and buy Firefly’s assets on the cheap in an auction that was rigged so that only he could win it.

Firefly Space Systems disappeared, and so, too, did the ownership stakes of previous investors. Firefly Aerospace was born with Polyakov and Markusic as the majority owners.

The people subscribing to this version of events were Firefly’s other cofounders, who eventually sued Markusic and Polyakov for allegedly screwing them out of the company they’d help build. Polyakov and Markusic have refuted any such nefarious claims and said they were just businesspeople doing business under desperate conditions.

Whatever the case, Polyakov ended up with a rocket company and immediately put about $75 million into the venture. That allowed Firefly to rehire many of its employees, restart production of its rocket, and expand its facilities. It’s rare that someone such as Markusic would be allowed to stay on as CEO in a situation like this. Usually when a company goes belly up, the new owner brings in new management, partly because they’ll be loyal to the new owner but also because they’re supposed to be better at running things. In this case, however, Markusic remained the boss after talking a fresh investor into funding his heavenly ordained mission to space.

There’s nothing like buying a rocket company to get your blood flowing, and the Polyakov I met following the deal was filled with optimism. He had a company that analyzed satellite data. But now it was time to get serious and start making hardware. Polyakov wanted to build satellites and build the rockets to fly them. Other companies were focused on their individual slices of the market. Planet made satellites. Rocket Lab made rockets. Firefly, by contrast, would be a one- stop shop, which would give it economic advantages. It could fly its own satellites into orbit at cost, instead of paying a premium to another rocket company. And it could prioritize its satellite launches and make other customers wait for its excess rockets.

According to Polyakov, the first round of commercial space companies had all made major mistakes. Rocket Lab, Virgin, and Astra were building their rockets too small. The satellite companies were building shoddy machines that broke too quickly in orbit and were beholden to the schedules of the rocket companies. Some of the companies were ahead of Firefly with their products, but their time advantage could not make up for their strategic and technological blunders. “You just sit back and smile because it’s all fucked up,” Polyakov said.

Polyakov and Anisimov at Vandenberg Space Force Base

Polyakov calculated that it would take him “double- digit millions” to finish building Firefly’s first rocket and predicted that it would go up by the middle of 2019. “We will spend much less to get there than Rocket Lab,” he said. Firefly planned to keep its costs down, in part, by turning to the Ukrainian aerospace expertise. Polyakov had access to designs for very complex parts that had been perfected over decades and could be transferred to Texas. “We will bring this Ukrainian heritage to the USA just like SpaceX used some of NASA’s heritage,” Polyakov said. “We have good materials. Precise ballistics and guidance systems. Heritage should be reused.” The Ukrainian engineers came cheaply, too, which would help lower Firefly’s labor costs. “It’s about discipline and process,” Polyakov said.

Firefly’s rocket would also carry about ten times as much cargo as the small rocket makers’ machines. “Virgin is fucked,” Polyakov said. “Peter Beck with his 150 kilograms is no good. We look at this industry so far as a cynical business. It’s all hype. We don’t want to fly to Mars. Fuck it. We’re here to make a lot of money.”

The main source of Polyakov’s confidence in the aerospace industry appeared to derive from his upbringing. He had come from humble beginnings and battled through the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union to make a fortune. He would use the wisdom gained from his other business dealings and trample people such as Peter Beck and Chris Kemp. “Most of the people in the space business are like children,” he said. “They don’t understand what a dollar means. They never made their first hundred dollars and cried. It’s a show. It’s a circus. I love the space market.

“What’s happening right now is a bubble funded by big government money. There will be many businesses, which will die, and because we control the satellites and the data and the rockets, we will buy them and consolidate the market. Then things will continue because humanity has a passion for space. It is the final frontier.”

MAXYM POLYAKOV GREW UP IN Zaporizhzhia, a city of about 750,000 people in southeastern Ukraine. Like much of the country, Zaporizhzhia’s economy and daily life had revolved around farming for centuries. The formation of the Soviet Union, however, reshaped Zaporizhzhia into an industrial powerhouse. First came the railroads. Then a dam. Then one factory after another. The Soviets loved to create model cities that would celebrate various capabilities, and they forged Zaporizhzhia to represent industrial might. Young, strong men were hauled in from all over the Soviet empire to build the city and work in its steel, aluminum, and heavy machinery factories. They were lured by solid wages but found day- to- day life grim. Most of them lived in barracks that lacked toilets and running water. The remnants of those bustling days remain, although in tarnished form. The factories are rusted and crumbling and function now as canvases for graffiti artists. In a park that runs alongside the prominent Avenue of Metalsmiths, a statue of a muscle- bound worker with his shirt open and tools in hand stands watch over a weed- strewn pathway.

Polyakov’s parents were of a different class of worker who arrived later in Zaporizhzhia’s history. They were scientists in the Soviet aerospace program, which occupied a major position of prominence in this part of Ukraine. Polyakov’s father, Valeriy, wrote software that interconnected various systems in rockets and spacecraft, serving, in effect, as an operating system for the machines. The code ran on some of the most ambitious aerospace systems ever conceived, including the International Space Station and Mir (the Russian space station) along with the massive Energia rocket, which could carry a hundred tons of cargo into orbit, and the very short- lived Buran space shuttle. Polyakov’s mother, Ludmila, worked in the same office, helping create hardware systems that would let parts of the Soviet rockets return to Earth smoothly and be reused.

The family lived in a small house that belonged to Polyakov’s grandmother. During the heights of the Cold War and the Space Race, Polyakov’s parents enjoyed themselves and felt energized by being part of an ambitious scientific community and among relatively free- thinking like minds separated from some of the bureaucracy and controls of Moscow and Kiev. There were even occasional perks when a scientist achieved something truly remarkable. After the Energia rocket flew for the first time in 1987, for example, the Polyakovs were awarded a 650-square-foot flat in a better part of the city.

The decline and fall of the Soviet Union took Zaporizhzhia and its space centers with it. Budgets were already dwindling, and then Mother Russia pulled the plug altogether. If Ukraine wanted to have a rocket program and make use of all its talent and assets, it would need to find a way to keep it going on its own. For the Polyakovs, the immediate effect of the transition was devastating. “After the Soviet Union crashed, my father received five dollars a month to feed a family of four,” Polyakov said. “He said, ‘If I find you doing space, I will beat you.’ ”

Valeriy kept clinging to the hope that someone would find a way to revitalize the Energia rocket or Buran shuttle, but years passed without any meaningful change. Ludmila kept the family afloat by buying roses and tulips in bulk from Holland and selling them during major holidays in Ukraine. “She came from a family that always found opportunities,” Polyakov said. The family also had a dacha in the countryside, which proved to be a lifesaver. They grew potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes and stored them in a cellar to get through the winters. “Each family needed to get at least nine hundred pounds of potatoes, otherwise you didn’t survive,” Polyakov said. By 1994, Ludmila was bringing in $2,000 a year from her flower business. “My father was pushed to get out of space, get out of this shit, and make some more money, too,” Polyakov said. “It was very painful. He’d put his whole life into it.” Valeriy wound up earning $50 a month by traveling around the Middle East, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan doing engineering work on industrial controllers used in old Soviet factories.

While his parents struggled, Polyakov excelled at school. He won national competitions in math and physics and tore through his requirements. At eighteen, he enrolled in medical school and spent six years studying to become an obstetrician gynecologist. After delivering a few babies and learning how much doctors earned under the national health system, however, he dropped out in 2000 just before completing his education.

Those were the go- go days of the dot- com boom, and Polyakov noticed that no one from Ukraine had seized the moment. Large American technology companies like Intel and IBM scoured the world for math- inclined people who could write code cheaply, often hiring teams of thousands of software developers in places such as Russia and India. While still a student, Polyakov conducted his first foray into business, creating a software outsourcing company in which Ukrainian engineers were farmed out as low- cost labor to the highest bidders.

After giving up on becoming a doctor, Polyakov threw his energy into bigger technology ventures. He learned how to build software companies that made their own products and also started developing internet services. He created start- ups like HitDynamics and Maxima Group that helped other companies track their online marketing and ad campaigns. He cofounded a number of online dating sites as well, including Cupid, and ran some shadier- sounding ones such as Flirt and BeNaughty. Founded in 2005, Cupid was the breakout success of the bunch. Over the next few years, it grew to have 54 million customers and went public in 2010. During all that, Polyakov obtained a PhD in international economics from Dnipropetrovsk National University.

Dnipropetrovsk, or simply Dnipro, a city about sixty miles north of Zaporizhzhia, had become Polyakov’s stomping grounds. He’d found the talent for many of his businesses among the bright students there and had set up offices in the heart of the city. In August 2018, I made my way to Dnipro to see the city and Polyakov’s operations firsthand.

ARRIVING IN DNIPRO FELT LIKE going back in time. My plane landed at an airport straight out of the Soviet Union’s favored rectangles catalogue. There was a rectangular main terminal made out of rectangular cement blocks with rectangular windows and a rectangular roof on top. The dominant colors were white, gray, and acceptance. After hopping into a car and heading toward the city center, however, I discovered that Dnipro proper had many charms that its airport lacked. Yes, many of the buildings were brutalist Soviet- era hunks of stone, and decaying ones at that because of decades of neglect. But there were parks, markets, grand plazas, and the Dnieper River winding its way through the home to a million people.

Polyakov had offered to pay my way to Dnipro, and I had declined the offer. That, however, did not stop him from trying to exert some measures of control over my trip. He’d arranged for a group of people to accompany me based on the pretense that Dnipro sat close to the war with Russia in Crimea and I required protection. My travel companions were a pair of very pretty women named Tanya and Olga and a square- jawed bodyguard whom I’ll call Dimitry. Throughout my trip, Tanya and Olga would don form- fitting dresses and five- inch heels, while Dimitry would cruise around in drab quasi- military garb with a satchel for his gun and other essential protection items. The writer, the supermodels, and the muscle. We were like an Eastern European version of the A- Team.

Dnipro has a long, glorious history that includes lots of industry and heavy manufacturing. When the Russians arrived after World War II, the industrial base really captured their imaginations, and Dnipro was selected as a city in which to build large military machines, planes, and cars. German prisoners of war were hauled in to create new factories, and everything went so well over the next few years that Soviet premier Josef Stalin decided that Dnipro should serve as a base for secret aerospace projects, too. And so around 1950, workers refashioned a large car plant into a factory for ICBMs, and Dnipro became a closed city.

Polyakov wanted me to learn about that history, so he first sent me and my companions to the local aerospace museum. One might expect such a facility to have modern flourishes and showstopping multimedia displays celebrating the glories of the Soviet and Ukrainian weapons and space programs. That was not the case. No, the two- story aerospace museum continued the study in uninspired uses of rectangles and gray on the outside and explored the aesthetic of dark, cavernous, and dusty on the inside. There were quite a few artifacts— satellites, nozzles, fuel chambers— resting in largely empty rooms with walls lined by portraits of stern- looking former aerospace bureaucrats and engineers dressed in military uniforms.

What the museum did have going for it was my tour guide, a sedate but knowledgeable white- haired gentleman heading toward his eighties. He explained that when World War II had ended, the Americans had grabbed all the German missile experts and taken them stateside, while the Russians had obtained all the schematics and plans for the projectiles the scientists had liked to build. The plans provided the Soviets with a running start that people in Dnipro actualized.

The city’s ICBM factory opened in 1951, and by 1959, it could produce a hundred missiles a year. As time went on, it would become the busiest ICBM factory in the world, producing a smorgasbord of flying tubes of death, including the SS-18, or “Satan,” as US officials called it. Dnipro would eventually manufacture about 60 percent of the Soviets’ land- based missiles. The prodigious output prompted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to brag, “We are making rockets like sausages.” The next four decades would be spent making ever- deadlier ICBMs that could go farther and farther. “Ultimately, both the Soviets and the US got to the point where they could obliterate each other many times over,” my tour guide said.

“We could reach any part of the US in eighteen minutes and turn a four- million- person city into a desert.” In other words, success.

The museum parking lot

From there, my man got into the space side of Dnipro’s history. In 1962, the first Dnipro- made satellite went into orbit. Three years later, the country produced twenty- four satellites. One of the most famous was an imaging system that could snap surveillance pictures of the earth and get clear pictures of objects sixteen by sixteen feet in size. Following on those achievements, the engineers in Dnipro turned to rockets and produced some of the Soviet space program’s workhorses. The most famous rocket to emerge from Dnipro was the Zenit, a two- hundred- foot- tall beauty that appeared in the 1980s. Elon Musk has hailed it as one of the finest machines ever created, and the locals will remind you of this with glee. Polyakov’s parents had worked on much of the technology that was celebrated by my guide.

If you want to see some of the ICBMs, rockets, and engines, you need only go to the museum’s parking lot because they are laid out right there on the asphalt in a totally haphazard fashion like the most neglected of aerospace relics. Still, to stand among them was cool.

After the museum, my companions and I hopped into a van and continued our historic space journey. We drove to the outskirts of Dnipro where the city gave way to forests. We pulled off the highway and traveled down a bumpy side road that led to a checkpoint with an electrified, razor wire– topped gate. A couple of guys in uniform materialized and looked at my passport. Their half- assed approach to security made me think that either they didn’t love their job or that some strings had been pulled to make all of it possible, because in a matter of moments I went through the gate and right into the former top secret Soviet rocket engine testing site hidden amid four hundred acres of trees.

The star of the show was a test stand that had been used to break in some of the best rocket engines ever built. It was several stories high and about a hundred feet wide, a snarling mass of scaffolding that really did look like the brainchild of a mad scientist performing rocket experiments in the woods. Huge metallic exhaust tubes extended out from the main structure and into a cement- lined reservoir created by clearing out a couple acres of trees. During tests, technicians bolt an engine high up in the test stand, click their buttons, and then blast flames down the elephant trunk– like tubes, pushing a wall of fire and thunderous sound into the forest. The resident squirrels, foxes, and rabbits scatter.

The ole test stand

In its heyday, the compound must have been spectacular. More than a thousand people would have inhabited the aerospace fortress, which includes propellant production facilities, bulky water storage tanks, and a railway that leads straight to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a preferred Russian rocket launch site in southern Kazakhstan. But although it was still impressive in its scale and all- out oddness, the site now looked run down and from another time. All of the metal structures at the test stand were rusting. And its innards— an intricate, shockingly complex maze of wires and tubes— looked not to have changed in fifty years. There was a bunker about thirty feet from the test stand where engineers sat behind their computers and conducted the tests, and it seemed like a forgotten World War II prison with its six tiny windows poking out of a blackened, scarred cement exterior— a data center with a gulag aesthetic.

My guide there was a stocky scientist who had worked among the test equipment for more than thirty years. He was generous with his time and knowledge. The number of employees, he said, had dwindled from a peak of 1,200 to 250. There used to be three tests per day to support the Soviets’ nonstop production of missiles and spacefaring rockets. Such tests, though, had become infrequent and performed only on an as- needed basis if some country or company wanted to test out a new engine and learn from the Ukrainians. “It was a little more fun in the old days,” my guide said. “It was full of young people. Many of the former workers have since gone into business. We hope our experience will be in demand again, as maybe start- ups come here. We are open and will work with anyone.”

When the Soviet Union fell, the demand for Ukrainian rocket technology and engineering collapsed. Russia turned inward, opting to use its own rockets such as the Soyuz rather than a Zenit made in a country that it no longer really cared for or controlled. In a bid to fill the void, US officials rushed into Ukraine to try and stop decades of aerospace knowledge from falling into enemy hands. They dished out green cards to the top aerospace whizzes and set them up as professors at MIT or Caltech or tucked them away in government research labs. Ukraine, however, used to employ fifty thousand people in its aerospace industry, and that figure is now down to seven thousand. Though the United States found jobs for some of those folks, the vast majority were forced to find other work or lend their talents to any number of countries, such as India, China, and two others that people speak about only with winks and nods: Iran and North Korea. Even the engineers who still hold aerospace jobs are often suspected of selling the trade secrets learned in the Dnipro forest on the side because their wages are a fraction of what they used to be.

The company in charge of many of Ukraine’s aerospace assets is Yuzhmash Machine- Building Plant. It runs the rocket test site in the forest. It also runs a two- thousand- acre manufacturing facility at the edge of Dnipro, the very facility where the nuclear missiles and rockets were made for decades.

If you know the right people, as Polyakov does, even this facility can be made accessible for a rare visit by a reporter. In much the same drill as before, the supermodels, the muscle, and I hopped into a van, drove to the ICBM factory, were waved through a razor wire– topped fence, and presented our passports to some guards. Those guards dug in more than their friends at the test site had and dragged the process out. Hardly any journalists have ever made it inside those walls, and the security officers can decide to end a visit on a whim. I actually had to get out of the van and stand around for ten minutes or so while my Ukrainian companions and the guards talked and pointed at various papers. We were parked in the middle of an asphalt expanse with some factory buildings on one side and a row of trees on the other. As mentioned, the place was fucking huge, but it appeared almost deserted. I looked around and saw a delivery truck, a fifty- foot-long missile on its side that was part of a display, and two guys in uniform driving around on what appeared to be a small tractor built in the 1960s. That was it.

Having grown up during the tail end of the Cold War, I had consumed enough anti- Soviet propaganda to be both awed and disappointed by the visuals. A totally ridiculous set of events had placed me there at the factory, which had once had my possible annihilation as one of its main goals. I kind of wanted the surroundings to look more sinister and intimidating. But no. It was just another very large complex in a hollowed- out, tarnished state; less bringer of doom and more the depressing retirement home where doom was spending its final days.

I never got to see the old ICBM factory lines or whether there was a supercool death- and- destruction roller- coaster ride through the complex. That’s because I was escorted from the main entrance to the space rocket– manufacturing areas and introduced to another, older tour guide. He explained that Yuzhmash makes— or at least could make— Zenit rockets; the first stages of the Antares rocket flown by America’s Orbital Sciences Corporation (since acquired by Northrop Grumman); the Cyclone-4 rocket, once meant to fly satellites into orbit from a Brazilian launchpad until that deal fell apart; and a variety of rocket engines.

The optimistic plan for Yuzhmash called for the production of twenty rockets per year. “We do not have so many orders now,” my guide said. Over the past few years, Yuzhmash had gutted the rocket- making part of its workforce, and the engineers and technicians left over often saw their workweek shrink to two or three days to save money or simply went months without pay. To try to make up for the lost aerospace revenue, Yuzhmash had people producing everything from tractors and electric shavers to airplane landing gears and tools. That helped explain why, during my tour, there were rocket bodies at one end of the factory floor and buses being built at the other.

Despite the hard times, my guide exuded pride in the factory. He showed me some argon arc welding equipment and X- ray machines used to examine the precision of the welds. He loved that Elon Musk adored the Zenit rocket. He made a joke about the North Koreans getting their hands on Ukrainian engine technology. It related to an old New York Times story and subsequent reports, which noted that the North Koreans seemed able to improve their missile technology at an alarming rate and that their rocket engines resembled the RD-250s once produced in this factory. “Don’t write about North Korea,” he said with a laugh. “There is wrong information on the internet. It made inspectors come here.”

We went from one large factory floor to another, and there were rocket bodies, interstage rings, and fairings all over the place just waiting for something to do. Most of the people making their rounds in the building were in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Along the side of each factory chamber, older women in white lab coats sat behind wooden desks flanked by metal filing cabinets and watched me meander from spot to spot. A sadness hung over everything. Without question, Ukrainian engineers are exceptional. Many other countries and companies have struggled to build the products that once tumbled out of the factory with frightening efficiency. But all of the knowledge and potential had been paralyzed by politics, corruption, and the steady march of progress outside the factory walls.

WHEN I MADE MY TRIP to Dnipro, Russia had already annexed Crimea in the south. Vladimir Putin’s troops had been encroaching across the eastern part of Ukraine for years with the tension tumbling over to Dnipro, which was only about a hundred miles from the edge of the conflict. People in the city were worried about what might happen next, as Putin had long made it clear that he would like to obtain Dnipro and the surrounding area and make it part of Russia. Many of the Dnipro locals and Ukrainians in general felt as if they’d done what the West wanted by disposing of their nuclear arsenal, pursuing democracy, and trying to form deeper ties with Europe, only to be abandoned by the United States, in particular, during their moment of need. Meanwhile, the local politicians were doing the country few favors through their corrupt actions that siphoned off much- needed money meant to revitalize the Ukrainian economy.

The combination of Russia’s military presence and Ukraine’s dysfunction gave Dnipro some Wild West vibes that bordered on comical during those prewar times. I went to a restaurant with my companions, for example, and there was a metal detector at the entrance. That meant that my bodyguard had to wait in the lobby. He sat there with the other bodyguards, all of whom had their gun satchels resting on their laps. They shot the shit in their bodyguard zone while the rest of the clients and I ate.

If, say, you wanted to smoke a joint and not think about Putin coming for your land for a bit, you zipped over to the dark- web site called Hydra, picked out your weed, paid with Bitcoin, and received some GPS coordinates. You then traveled to the specified location and dug in the ground and— boom— there was the contraband with a “buried on” date and all. Or maybe you felt like shooting a pig with a bazooka. That was also possible.

Be it nurture or nature, Polyakov thrived in the environment and seemed to know exactly how to navigate it. His company had taken over two of the tallest buildings in Dnipro, and he occupied an office on the top floor. From his perch, he could look out and see the river, the forests, and his old university buildings. He often worked and drank late into the night and slept at the office, which had been equipped with a bed. The office also had security cameras in every corner and thick, soundproof doors to keep anyone from snooping on conversations.

While at his Dnipro office, I learned more about Polyakov’s companies. He’d done well with the dating sites and business software to the point that he’d built seven ventures that brought in at least $100 million in revenue each per year. He also had major plays in things such as online gaming, robotics, and artificial intelligence software. Much of the dating and gaming stuff seemed standard. Other operations in those areas were more ethically dubious. “Gaming” sometimes meant gambling. And “dating sites” sometimes meant places where fake accounts of beautiful women were created to entice men to give up their credit card numbers for subscriptions that were borderline impossible to cancel. The ownership structures of the companies were complex, and their financials nested behind offshore accounts. At the time of my visit, Polyakov’s companies employed almost five thousand people and were cash machines.

One evening, we went to a nice restaurant in Dnipro. About a dozen of Polyakov’s top lieutenants, including Anisimov, were there.

A rotund, boisterous man who had been in the Ukrainian army seemed to have been responsible for much of my access to the old Soviet sites. A couple of women who were present headed up some of the online operations. It was hard to keep track of what everyone did, mostly because the waiters at the restaurant filled our glasses with endless streams of Oban scotch. The guests commented that Polyakov had once acquired the entire Ukrainian supply of Oban and had almost acquired the distillery for $19 million before thinking better of it. Those stories may have been apocryphal, but they seemed plausible in the moment and felt all too true the next morning.

Over the course of three hours of eating and drinking, it became clear to me that these people were very loyal to Polyakov. Most of them had worked for him for decades and helped turn fledgling companies into giants. He obviously rewarded those who succeeded well, and during the meal, he called out the top performers, while also noting who could be making more money for him. Many toasts were made, as Polyakov reminded his key executives that the profits gained from software, gambling, and horny men were now being funneled into something great and glorious. Their efforts were the key to making Firefly’s rockets work.

“Sometimes I am a huge believer that you’re already built with ideas that are preprogrammed,” Polyakov said. “And then there are times that come along, and you open up and start to feel them. You should feel that passion. You should feel that passion for the idea. That’s why I came to America and didn’t touch anybody else’s money. It’s about how do you have your own money and explore your passion properly.”

AS A CHILD, POLYAKOV HAD experienced the might of Ukrainian engineering on a daily basis, and then he had felt the sting as the country had tumbled into chaos. He’d made it a personal mission to try to save what was left of Ukraine’s aerospace knowledge and inspire a new generation of engineers to feel that they could think big again. To help fulfill that quest, he had created a branch of Firefly in Dnipro with manufacturing and research- and- development facilities. He’d also been pumping large amounts of money into the local education system.

One morning, my travel companions took me to visit Firefly’s Ukrainian factory. There were veteran engineers who used to work for Yuzhmash examining machines alongside younger engineers who had come straight out of school. Polyakov had spent millions on state- of- the- art manufacturing equipment, ranging from high- end 3D printers to laser cutters and turning and milling machines. The building was a former window factory, and its exposed metal rafters and brick walls harkened back to Dnipro’s grittiness. But Polyakov had transformed the place. The factory was a bright, clean space with a palpable, youthful energy. More than a hundred people worked at the facility, and the theory was that they could produce rocket parts as cheaply as anywhere else in the world thanks to low labor and materials costs. More to the point, they could tap into decades of aerospace expertise to create technology that other rocket makers could not match.

There was reason to believe in Polyakov’s strategy. Russians, for example, have long excelled at rocket engine making and have produced hardware advances that US engineers struggle to replicate. For example, United Launch Alliance (ULA), an American rocket company that sends top secret US military satellites into space, has comically depended on the Russian- made RD-180 engine for years. Similarly, Ukrainian engineers have deep talent at making a key rocket system called a turbopump. This mechanism helps control the rate at which propellants mix as they’re fed into a rocket’s combustion chamber. Though straightforward to build in theory, good turbopumps have proved notoriously difficult to make and have slowed down many a rocket program, including SpaceX’s Falcon 1. Workers at Firefly’s Ukraine factory had designed the turbopumps that go into the company’s rockets and taught engineers in the United States how to make them. Old Space meets New Space, or, as Polyakov put it, “We have the best of both worlds.”

At a nearby R&D lab, Polyakov had a team of people working on new thrusters for use on satellites. They were ion thrusters, in which a gas is hit with electricity to produce a beam of ions that can propel a satellite and help it change orbit either to avoid a collision with something or simply to be in a better place to fulfill its mission. The crew in Ukraine claimed to have built their latest thruster prototypes from scratch in about a year. The final product would cost about $200,000 versus millions of dollars in another country, they said.

During another part of my field trip through Dnipro, we went to visit the local university. Once again, the outsides of the buildings failed to impress. The insides, however, sparkled. Polyakov had donated millions of dollars to the school, upgrading its facilities and starting a variety of engineering, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, aerospace, and robotics programs. He had paid to fix up the local planetarium and to run engineering contests. And he’d tried to use his money to keep good professors in town. “The professors still get shit salaries,” he said. “So we are paying them and doing engineering schools and trying to improve the ecosystem.”

Hoping to ape Silicon Valley, Polyakov attempted to encourage the university to set up a system in which professors and students could use the intellectual property they’d developed as the basis of new companies. He’d also tried to bring in fresh sources of venture capital and generally to coax people toward thinking in more entrepreneurial ways. With some luck, a few successes would lead to both financial rewards for the school and bigger dreams for the students, and the whole endeavor could move along without Polyakov’s aid. “We are trying to build a sustainable model,” he said. “If the situation is stable, then the passion starts to come and people have ideas. Passion and action must come together.”

Beyond his swearing and bombastic tendencies, Polyakov has a deeply intellectual side. He’s well read. He’s thoughtful and introspective. Like many people from his part of the world, he can speak about science in poetic, almost religious terms. All of his philanthropic and educational endeavors were overseen by an organization named Noosphere. That was in homage to the Russo- Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who created the concept of the noosphere in the 1930s and ’40s.

After witnessing the first few decades of the twentieth century, Vernadsky realized that through technology, humanity had started to impact the earth on a scale similar to that of geological and other natural forces. He used the word noosphere to describe the phenomenon and wrote about it as “the energy of human culture.”

One paper written in 1943, two years before Vernadsky’s death, had the scientist enthusing in rapturous tones as he imagined humanity on the verge of fulfilling its potential. He looked past the horrors of World War II to marvel at the way in which people had built machines on such a large scale, created sophisticated communication systems, and started to unlock the secrets of atoms and nuclear energy. He felt as though humanity might soon reach something akin to enlightenment and unlimited possibility. “The noosphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet,” he wrote. “In it, for the first time, man becomes a large-sc ale geological force. Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our grandchildren will approach their blossoming.” Later he added, “Fairy- tale dreams appear possible in the future; man is striving to emerge beyond the boundaries of his planet into cosmic space. And he probably will do so.”

It’s a shame that Vernadsky is not as famous worldwide as he remains to this day in Russia and Ukraine, where he founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv and fueled the country’s interest in science. Because although impressed with progress and technology, Vernadsky also called for humanity to advance itself in concert with the environment— to use our wonderful new tools to create the purest of water and the cleanest of air. He envisioned all people flourishing equally and uniting across the continents in the shared quest to perfect the earth and then spread the human species throughout the universe.

Vernadsky’s ideas provided some of the intellectual underpinnings behind the Soviet space program. It made sense, then, that Polyakov would glom onto such writings and see himself as a vehicle for helping humans push “the energy of the human culture” beyond our planetary bounds.

But it was really the underlying ideas of expanding human potential that excited Polyakov the most. He believes that people are at their best when a critical mass of bright, passionate, well- meaning humans are gathered in one place and chasing a common goal. The Renaissance might be an example of this. So, too, might the early years of the Soviet Union, when people were unified and believed in the cause. Silicon Valley, Polyakov said, also used to exhibit such qualities until it got too distracted, money hungry, and shortsighted. “We’ve all become financially greedy,” he said. “You start extracting and extracting, and it kills it.”

Polyakov wanted to put his money into Ukraine to try to reenergize it and create “passion people who want to change things and do something,” he said. The first step toward doing so was to find the people with deep aerospace smarts and have them pass their wisdom along to the next generations— not to let the skills gained from decades of toil fade. “We have already lost the grandads and some of the dads,” he said. “We don’t want to lose a third generation. It’s about transferring the knowledge. It’s about creating a different feeling. It’s about nourishing the soil. If you lose something like this place, very often you cannot recreate it.”

More broadly, he wanted to become an example to all young people for what passion could accomplish. Firefly’s rocket would be a monument to his struggle and a sign that a kid from Zaporizhzhia or any other town could do great things. “You just wake up and you feel the energy that you shall do something, right?” he said. “But you shall do something for good. For better.”

To read the rest of the tale, which only gets weirder, check out my book When The Heavens Went on Sale.