In the 1970s, a young German engineer, Lutz Kayser, set out to design and then market a mass-produced rocket. Intended to launch satellites, it would be manufactured at low cost and sold to countries that requested it. Ambitious and visionary, the entrepreneur embarks on the adventure by assembling a team of scientists and raising funds through participatory financing. The Otrag, the world's first private space company, was born. But it soon became clear that Germany, too densely populated, would not be able to host the first tests. The solution: 100,000 square kilometres of land in the middle of the jungle in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), made available by President Mobutu. But at the height of the Cold War, these experiments exasperated the Americans, Russians and Europeans, the latter rejecting any competition with the Ariane programme.

Summary for official catalogues