His managerial work behind the award-winning musical acts Nina Hagen Band, Interzone, Nena and Die Ärzte made Rakete a decisive figure in the burgeoning German New Wave.

[4] Rakete continued photographing throughout his school years; fascinated by the mechanisms of photography, he spent a good part of his youth working in the darkroom.

At age seventeen, he began to work as a photojournalist for local dailies, agencies and magazines,[3] while still delivering newspapers to raise the money to buy his first drum kit.

As the student movement extended to West Germany in the late 1960s, Rakete brought his eye and camera to document the people, settings and discussions emerging at the time; he was a photojournalist by day and a musicians' photographer by night.

The new band (which also included members of rock theater group Lok Kreuzberg) and Rakete embarked on the writing of a small rock opera in the form of a radio show,[11] using the AFN legend Rik Delisle as host, Aussie performer Alf Klimek "Klimax" as singer, and with the later addition of Dutch singer Josee van Irsel.

In the meantime, Spliff and the Fabrik doubled in size the roster of artists: the studios were slowly transforming into a veritable Rock ‘n’ Roll hot shop, with new releases by Interzone and the Edo Zanki Band.

An instant hit, the Nena Band toured countless European TVs and live stages, while the album's second single 99 Luftballons peaked #1 in music charts worldwide including Australia, Japan, Austria, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The resulting single record was written by Herbert Grönemeyer and Wolfgang Niedeken and performed by 27 different West German bands and musicians, including Alphaville, BAP, Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Nena, Peter Maffay, Spliff and Udo Lindenberg.

Rakete left the producing desk to fully focus on writing and photography full-time except in 1988–89, when he funded label ACT Music along with former president of Warner Bros. Europe Siegfried Loch and Ideal's lead singer Annette Humpe.

Rakete's first reportage for Cicero was of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's trip to the White House to express his stance against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Rakete shot for Cicero for five more editions; personalities included Angela Merkel, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Mikhail Gorbachev, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Otto Schily.In 2005, Rakete collaborated with designer Ulf Meyer zu Küindorf and curator Mark Gisbourne on the catalogue Berlin Art Now, published by Thames and Hudson.

[18] The English publication includes artists as John Bock, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese, Monica Bonvicini, Bernhard Martin and Yehudit Sasportas.

Over the years, his work has captured social and political events, and he has most notably portrayed personalities such as: Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, David Byrne, Kraftwerk, Bono, Deep Purple, Joe Jackson, Sean Connery, Samuel Beckett, Bruno Ganz, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ute Lemper, Martin Sheen, Claude Chabrol, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert, John Malkovitch, John Lurie, Philip Johnson, Anthony Perkins, Sam Shepard, Willem Dafoe, Isabelle Huppert, Julie Delpy, Klaus-Maria Brandauer, Götz George, Sebastian Koch, Gérard Depardieu, Christoph Waltz, Emmanuelle Béart, Liza Minnelli, Sean Penn, Isabella Rossellini, Nina Hoss, Otto Sander, Natalie Portman, Tangerine Dream, Quentin Tarantino, Precious Wilson and Wim Wenders[4]