by Tim Fernholz
A few months before SpaceX’s mission to the space station went so wrong, the two companies faced off before a panel of lawmakers in a wood-paneled Capitol Hill hearing room. While the Pentagon technically makes its own decisions about what rockets to buy, the billions it spends on space access have to be approved by the politicians in this room. It was a divided audience: many lawmakers on the committee hailed from districts where ULA or its parent companies had facilities that supported jobs, investment, and tax revenue. They were not eager to see their gravy train displaced. And, though some saw the growing cost of ULA rockets as a huge problem at a time of budget stress, others prioritized a guaranteed supply of reliable rockets.
“I love it when billionaires want to spend their own money to do cool things that help the country, but it’s still a business,” observed the committee chairman, an Alabama representative named Mike Rogers, whose district is home to both Boeing factories and NASA facilities.
A timely new wrinkle was putting pressure on ULA. America’s top rocket company relied on Russian-made rocket engines to keep its vehicles flying. After strongman Vladimir Putin, in 2014, invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, defying the international community, even the most die-hard traditional defenders of ULA couldn’t justify pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Russia’s defense industry.
SpaceX’s representative at the hearing wasn’t about to let anyone forget about the Russian bear.
“The head of Russia’s space enterprise, Dmitry Rogozin, has publicly stated that funds received from the United States for the [Atlas rocket engine] is free money that goes to the Russian missile program,” SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell said in her opening statement. “How do we justify buying more and funding the Russian military?”
If Musk empowered his team with a willingness to try anything, work differently, and do the impossible, Shotwell made sure that they had the resources, time, and funding to accomplish it. When SpaceX hit its lowest point, before the first Falcon 9 even flew, it was Shotwell who had leveraged her personal credibility in the industry with a global sales tour that netted enough deposits to keep the lights on at the company.
Once, at a meeting with the chief executive of a satellite company, one of SpaceX’s clients, I wondered aloud how the relationship between the impulsive Musk and the steady Shotwell affected the company’s approach. “Oh, that’s easy,” he told me. “Elon’s the risk. Gwynne’s the reliability.” For all her reputation as a problem solver, she was anything but staid; she had a sly sense of humor, wore stiletto heels at corporate events, and, at this hearing, sported a bold tartan blazer and the de rigueur American flag pin.
She also had plenty of competitive spirit. Asked about the vast difference in price between ULA’s rockets, which were estimated at $400 million per launch, versus about $100 million for a SpaceX rocket, Shotwell scoffed. “I don’t know how to build a $400 million rocket,” she said with a smile.
Her opposite number, ULA chief executive Salvatore “Tory” Bruno, faced a harder sell. He, too, was a longtime aerospace leader, a Lockheed engineer who had spent much of his career building missile systems for the military. Bruno had been in this job for only a year, and he had SpaceX to thank for the privilege. When it became apparent that the upstarts were about to price ULA out of the market, ULA’s parent companies swept out their old CEO.
They brought in Bruno with a mandate to cut costs, fix the company, and ultimately build a new rocket to compete with SpaceX. It was no easy task, but in Bruno the company had found a unique leader. Beyond his experience in the industry, he had also written two books about the Knights Templar, the medieval military-religious order that has inspired centuries of conspiracy theories. Bruno believed that the Templars, an international financial power in the twelfth century, had management lessons to offer the modern business, though he assures me that he has no chain mail in his office. But he was willing to take a project on faith, and showed no small part of discipline: weeks later, he would force out a dozen ULA executives as part of his housecleaning.
Before Congress, however, he was just buying time. The economics of his rockets, which were simply more expensive than those made by SpaceX, meant that he needed a new rocket that was just as effective but cheaper. That meant designing a new rocket engine. And he had a solution in mind.
“I would like to say a couple of words about our path to an American rocket engine,” Bruno began. “We entered into a strategic partnership with Blue Origin late last year, a company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”
Blue Origin had gone back underground after its big land purchase a decade before, though it was hiring engineers and working on closely held projects. “Good people would disappear, for years, and you’d have no idea what they were working on,” one Virgin Galactic executive told me of the Blue Origin operation. It was a rarity in the close-knit aerospace industry, where ostensible rivals frequently wind up as partners and everyone knows one another’s business. In 2011, Bezos’s space company re-emerged: Blue had a short-lived deal with NASA to begin development of its first full-scale rocket engine and launch vehicle, though it still shared little about its work with the public.
Now it was acting as the savior for SpaceX’s biggest competitor. Instead of investing its own money to develop a new engine, ULA could rely on Bezos’s wealth to develop one. And Bezos now had access to the know-how and experience at the most successful American launch company. If battle lines hadn’t been drawn before, they were now: SpaceX had partnered with NASA to make an entrance to the space industry. Blue Origin was now linking up with SpaceX’s biggest rival to do the same.
To underscore Bezos’s return to the stage, a month after the hearing, Blue Origin revealed its first launch of a space vehicle, at the scrubby Van Horn ranch. The rocket in question was small, just fifty feet tall, and looked something like a child’s toy, with its rounded edges and stubby silhouette. It was called the New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. In an unmanned test, the New Shepard flew fifty-eight miles up, to the very edge of space.
Now Bezos had skin in the game. He was a member of the most exclusive club in the world: billionaires with their own rockets.
The weeks after Musk’s ruined birthday were hectic. His team of engineers launched an internal investigation to determine what exactly had gone wrong with the exploding CRS-7 rocket, working 24/7 and poring over reams of data from more than three thousand sensors on the vehicle. The Federal Aviation Administration, which supervises commercial rocket launches, had its own investigation under way. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s critics were now armed with dramatic evidence to support their allegations of shoddy work, and the company’s efforts to convince Air Force officials of its vehicle’s reliability had clearly been set back.
NASA officials, though publicly supportive of Musk’s team, wanted answers and guarantees that this wouldn’t happen again. While he had once threatened to charge extra for every additional requirement imposed by the government space agency, he was now reorganizing his engineering team to adopt the kind of structured, reviews-based process that NASA preferred. He had to please NASA, his biggest client, at a time when SpaceX was being paid billions of dollars to fly cargo to the space station and design a spacecraft to take astronauts there within the next two years.
When he spoke to reporters in July to share the preliminary results of the investigation, it sounded as if the stress had taken its toll on SpaceX’s chief designer. Exhausted and a bit glum, Musk seemed as though he wanted to discuss anything other than the loss of his rocket less than a month before. He lamented the fact that the Dragon space capsule carrying the NASA supplies hadn’t been equipped with the emergency escape rockets that his engineers were developing for the human-crewed variant—it would have been able to escape the mid-flight explosion and, presumably, have saved the cargo.
The tale Musk told of the rocket’s failure was emblematic of how the smallest details matter when dealing with the extreme forces a r
ocket experiences during flight. What went wrong was this: as the nine engines power the rocket into orbit, the vehicle experiences massive forces—the equivalent of more than three times normal gravity—from pushing through the atmosphere so quickly. Inside the rocket, bottles that store helium used to pressurize the engine are held in place by steel struts. Under those heavy forces, a strut snapped. The helium bottle broke loose inside a rocket going more than 4,300 miles an hour, ricocheting around inside a tank full of liquid oxygen. The helium now pouring from the rogue tank was inert, but it expanded to overpressurize the oxygen vessel, which burst. Liquid oxygen is not inert, and it ignited, exploding the rocket. The whole process, from snapped strut to total destruction, took just 0.893 seconds, according to Musk.
But even as he described an event that clearly pained him, the technical explanation—and the forensic engineering work that went into determining it—had Musk feeling more engaged. “It’s a really, really odd failure mode,” he observed, in his jargony way. Musk was precise about whose fault the rocket loss was, too: the unnamed supplier that had provided those steel struts. That supplier would not be used again. Homegrown solutions would be found. “Seven years ago, when we had our first failure, we were about four hundred people. Now we are about four thousand people,” he said. “I think, to some degree, the company as a whole maybe became complacent.”
A month after the mishap, Musk promised a return to flight no later than September. But by the end of October, it wasn’t clear when the next SpaceX flight would lift off. The scuttlebutt was that the FAA wasn’t signing off on SpaceX’s reasoning for the rocket loss. The strut was a red herring, so these theories went, and the real problem would be found in the advanced materials used to build the helium tank itself. SpaceX used a technique to build tanks out of carbon fiber that most space engineers thought was too risky—keeping carbon fiber, an organic material, around liquid oxygen was asking for an ugly chemical reaction.
It was the most trying time in the company’s history. No one outside SpaceX was sure how much money they were losing as they missed upcoming dates for flights—Musk estimated hundreds of millions of dollars—and insiders were suddenly second-guessing themselves. And, though they didn’t know it, SpaceX was about to be beaten to the punch by Blue Origin.
If you needed a signal that Jeff Bezos was excited about the news that he wanted to reveal, the medium was the message: the secretive Amazon tycoon joined the social media platform Twitter in November 2015 to reveal the biggest step forward in what had been Blue Origin’s so far unremarkable history as a rocket company.
“The rarest of beasts—a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy,” the online mogul tweeted to his rapidly growing entourage of followers, sharing a link to a video posted on Blue Origin’s website.
The company had launched its New Shepard rocket again days before, and this time it had landed the booster rocket successfully. The video showed the rocket lifting off from the Texas desert, lofting a space capsule on a ballistic arc to the edge of space, and then successfully returning to earth. The stubby booster slowly approached the desert landing pad on a rocket engine that switched just after it touched the ground. The presentation ended with Bezos, in a wide-brimmed hat and reflective sunglasses, popping open a bottle of champagne on the landing pad with his celebrating team.
Though it hadn’t demonstrated the accomplishment live and in public, in the manner of SpaceX, it appeared that Blue Origin had done what Musk had been promising for years, the feat he hoped to demonstrate on his birthday: landing a reusable rocket stage after flight. But what’s more, in Musk’s eyes, SpaceX had already done what Blue Origin was getting applause for—it had demonstrated vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) at its own Texas test facility with a prototype rocket called the Grasshopper, though none of those flights ever went higher than a kilometer above the earth.
Musk, unlike Bezos, was a longtime Twitter user and well used to the mores of the platform. Points are given for aggression, and for sarcasm.
“Not quite ‘rarest.’ SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around,” Musk snapped at Bezos directly. Later he tweeted, “Jeff maybe unaware SpaceX suborbital [vertical takeoff and landing] flight began 2013. Orbital water landing 2014. Orbital land landing next.”
He wasn’t done. “Credit for 1st reusable suborbital rocket goes to X-15,” Musk wrote, referring to an experimental US Air Force rocket plane developed in the 1960s. “And Burt Rutan for commercial,” referring to SpaceShipOne, whose groundbreaking flight had occurred just nine years earlier.
A fellow wealthy rocket enthusiast, the video-game pioneer John Carmack, chimed in to mediate all the tweets. Carmack, who made millions creating classic games like Commander Keen, Doom, and Quake, had founded his own rocket company in 2000 to compete for the X Prize, only to put it into hibernation in 2013 after several costly failures. Whatever had been done previously on a suborbital scale, he told Musk, Blue Origin’s feat was impressive.
Among rocket engineers, Blue Origin’s takeoff and landing were seen as unique in the world of space. Bezos’s team had now demonstrated an original engine design and mastery of the tricky task of controlling a rocket and guiding it back to the ground safely. But they also agreed with Musk’s distinction, drawing a line between rockets that fly to the edge of space, that nebulous one-hundred-kilometer line, and those that fly to altitudes higher than 160 kilometers (100 miles), where objects can remain in space for extended periods. Suborbital rocketry can loft modest science projects and give people a nice view, but orbital rockets can launch lucrative satellite constellations, do exploration work for NASA, and more. Conventional wisdom had it that tourism was not the kind of business that would be sustainable without a billionaire patron—one reason why Musk had instead begun SpaceX with flying cargo to orbit.
Getting into orbit requires a vehicle that can generate orders of magnitude more power and force than flying to the edge of space. It’s not a matter of getting to a certain height, but of getting to a certain speed. The key is to go so fast that you’re moving forward as fast as you are falling down, thereby remaining at a constant height above the earth. For the lowest orbits, this speed is about 17,500 miles an hour. To reach the edge of space, Blue Origin’s rockets needed to go only about 2,125 miles an hour. Relatively speaking, that’s about the difference between a fast road cyclist and a sports car.
And that was the detail that pained Musk: his rocket had exploded performing one of the most extreme maneuvers humans can ask of a mechanical device, while Bezos was getting plaudits for child’s play, and seemingly nobody on earth could tell the difference.
SpaceX would have to show them the difference. The news went out: We’re returning to flight in one month. And we’re landing our first orbital rocket booster.
2
The Rocket-Industrial Complex
I believe we can place men on Mars before 1980. At the same time we can develop economical space transportation which will permit extensive exploration of the Moon.
— Francis Clauser, California Institute of Technology, 1969
The year 2015 brought moments of tragedy and triumph for Musk and Bezos, but the groundwork for their exercises in rocket capitalism had begun decades earlier, before their space companies formed.
In the nineties, PayPal and Amazon began as small start-ups, but the two entrepreneurs would build them into fast-growing companies that fueled the global economy. At the same time, the US space program was trying—and failing—to gear up for the new century ahead. At Cape Canaveral in 1997, the first satellite launch of the new year would signal change. Its sponsor, the Air Force, looked to private companies to bolster American space power.
The Delta II rocket that would fly that morning was a venerable design. Its manufacturer, the veteran but now flagging aerospace firm McDonnell Douglas, had been acquired by Boeing, the aviation giant, in a $13 billion deal announced just weeks before.
The transaction united two of the leading makers of fighter jets and airliners.
Yet Boeing’s purchase of McDonnell and its rocket technology came the same year as a $3 billion acquisition of the space division of Rockwell International, which helped build the space shuttle and the Apollo Lunar Module. This suggested a bigger vision at the legendary maker of 747s: a fully integrated space division that would offset losses faced by military contractors in the post–Cold War drawdown then under way. Boeing was effectively buying a second chance from the government: shortly before McDonnell was acquired, the smaller company had won a contract with the Department of Defense that awarded the company $500 million to design a new orbital rocket. Boeing had competed for the contract and lost.
Pursuing rocket business made sense to these companies because of the shifting trends in global communication networks. Consider the cargo the Delta II planned to launch that day: the first of twelve planned satellites to replenish and expand the still newfangled Global Positioning System.
