Rocket Billionaires

by Tim Fernholz

  If SpaceX wanted dramatic acceleration, it only had to build a rocket.

  As it turned out, Musk was not the only internet guy seeking tutorials from veteran aerospace engineers, reading up on rocketry, and plunging into arguments for exploring the solar system.

  By 2000, just six years into its existence, Amazon.com wasn’t just a bookstore but a juggernaut, and Jeff Bezos was worth more than $2 billion. At age thirty-six, he, like Musk, was devoting more time to his personal passions.

  Two years before Musk opened SpaceX’s doors in El Segundo, Bezos had registered Blue Origin, listing its address as Amazon’s headquarters. No one outside the space community really noticed. The company was very notional in its early years, but by 2003 journalist Brad Stone had managed to break the story about it for his employers at Newsweek. Tipped off to the existence of the company, Stone used a records request to discover its address, which by this time was a nondescript warehouse. Sifting through the trash cans, he found drafts of a mission statement talking about the long-term goal of an enduring human presence in space and plans to build a suborbital spacecraft named after Alan Shepard.

  When Stone asked if Bezos was motivated by frustration with NASA, the entrepreneur delivered a paean to the space agency’s virtues: “The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. . . . The only reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing anything is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.” (The first rule of American space entrepreneurship is: Don’t piss off NASA.) He told Stone that any comment about Blue Origin was “way premature,” because “we haven’t done anything worthy of comment.”

  Bezos had also been an avid consumer of science fiction as a young man, and he harbored a lifelong interest in space exploration. A former girlfriend told reporters in the nineties that his business success was driven by his desire to go to the stars himself; according to Stone, Bezos’s high school valedictory address had proposed the idea of “saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.” You get the idea.

  The vision that captivated Bezos still drives him now. It is a different strain of space economic utopianism than the one that drives those who propose colonizing Mars, and it holds itself out as the more pragmatic approach. In this narrative, kick-started by Gerard O’Neill’s 1976 book The High Frontier, the fragility of the human species on earth is intimately connected to industrialization—the way the massive use of fossil fuels to drive the economy has altered the ecosystem. Instead of taking humans away from the planet and into space, why shouldn’t the space industry develop the ability to put heavy industry up there in the cosmos? The vast renewable energy of the sun, the raw materials found on asteroids, and the ability to protect the earth from pollution present an attractive argument for a zoning rewrite on a planetary scale. Beyond the resources, there is also the advantage of microgravity, which allows for advances in materials not available on earth; already, firms are experimenting with making ultra-fast fiber-optic cable in space because it can be constructed with fewer impurities in orbit.

  “It’s not rocket science; it’s simply straightforward industry,” argues Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist and former NASA engineer. “We have centuries of experience now in developing the machines of industry. So all we have to do is adapt those machines to another environment, and we already know how to do that, too.”

  When the International Space Station was not yet complete, ideas for megaprojects in space were beyond far-fetched. Undaunted, Bezos began to fly groups of space experts up to his home base, outside Seattle, for private symposiums on the Apollo program, rocket design, and space economics.

  “We all were working with Jeff in secret, in this ‘Friday afternoon space club,’ as we called it,” Cantrell told me. Bezos, too, looped into a crew of outside-the-box space engineers, many of whom overlapped with the crowd around Musk. Some were more outside the box than others: the science fiction author Neal Stephenson worked for Blue Origin, claiming to have been its sole employee for a time. His primary effort was thinking up ways to reach space that didn’t involve rockets. These were ideas like propelling spacecraft with ground-based lasers or using space elevators, which would link the earth to an orbiting counterweight by a cable that could then be climbed. The scientific consensus is still that we don’t yet have materials strong enough to build such a chain, and Stephenson would eventually leave the company when it settled on a more conventional direction. He didn’t leave without a little inspiration; his 2015 novel Seveneves featured a familiar character—a visionary billionaire with his own rocket company.

  The Amazon founder took a particular interest in a team of engineers from McDonnell Douglas, who had built and tested a prototype reusable orbital rocket called the DC-X at White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. It was designed to be the all-action reusable satellite launcher that the shuttle never was, but when NASA absorbed the DC-X program, the agency lost patience and canceled it when a prototype was destroyed in a test flight. The team included numerous engineers who would go on to play important roles in commercial space. “That’s where I learned rockets, out in the desert there,” said Garvey, the former Boeing engineer. “You made things work with duct tape and wrenches and hammers.” Their vehicle used rocket engines to take off vertically, maneuver thousands of feet above the desert, and lower itself to earth tail-first to land vertically again. The veterans of the program were proud of what they had accomplished and were frustrated that the promising technology had been scrapped. Ironically, several DC-X veterans started off with SpaceX before joining Blue Origin; Cantrell says Musk had him fire several members of the team.

  Bezos’s skill in exploring new markets, identifying the weaknesses in the biggest competitors, and exploiting them ruthlessly was already legendary in the business world. As he immersed himself in the space industry, his analysis identified the same central challenge that Musk would: the sheer financial cost of getting anything into space. Developing a cheap and reusable system to break free of earth’s gravity was a must for anyone with space dreams. “[Bezos] will not deviate, he will not equivocate, and he fundamentally has this vision of Blue as millions of people living and working in space,” Bob Smith, a veteran aerospace executive who became Blue’s first CEO in 2017, told me. “How do you do that? There’s a very logical trail. Well, the way you do that is you have to get operational reusability. Why? Because it lowers the cost, it makes it more available, it makes it more reliable, makes it safe.”

  The two entrepreneurs’ visions of space affordability were similar enough that Svitek, who consulted for both Musk and Bezos and spent a year working at Blue Origin, encouraged them to meet and consider combining forces to avoid duplicating each other’s efforts. In the summer of 2003, both flew to San Francisco for a sit-down. “I talked afterwards to both of them independently. They both said, ‘Cool meeting—the guy is fun, we enjoyed it. We decided in the end to go our own ways,’” Svitek told me.

  Both Musk and Bezos have an aversion to the press. But Musk has an appreciation for how publicity can attract beneficial attention—interest from experts, public support, and investment. Though he had given up on his stunt probe to Mars for now, he still planned to use SpaceX to attract attention to the cause of space exploration and would begin making outlandish predictions about its flight schedule almost immediately. Bezos preferred for his space company to stay quiet and shared little with the outside world, a practice that would endure for almost a decade.

  In its early years, Blue Origin appeared to be very much a company in the vanity project mode. Though it hired engineers and technicians, its staff didn’t grow beyond a few dozen. It developed little hardware and had no product to sell. While his space company moved in fits and starts, Bezos himself was busy with Amazon. Unlike Musk, who early on was the chief manager of his space company, pushing
it forward by strength of will, the similarly hard-charging Bezos was still running Amazon full-time.

  It was a period of huge expansion for the online company, as it went from national retailer to global force. In the years ahead, Amazon would begin releasing physical products like the Kindle, a short-lived phone, and smart speakers for its AI assistant. It would be an early adopter of the growth in cloud computing and deploy its own proprietary servers, optimized to allow other digital entrepreneurs to scale up their own services. Amazon Web Services became a huge moneymaker that undergirded a new generation of internet companies. Amazon established its own distribution centers and began investing in robotic technology to automate deliveries, even experimenting with drones for airborne package drop-offs.

  This period may have been a distraction from the work of making space cheaper to access, but it would pay off in literal dividends in the years ahead. The two rocket billionaires were similarly wealthy at the beginning of the century, but today Amazon has allowed Bezos, depending on the vicissitudes of the markets, to vie for the title of richest person on earth. His personal net worth is estimated to be nearly $100 billion.

  “There’s a very real sense in which Amazon, which is an amazing, fun, interesting company to have started and lead, is a lottery winning for me,” Bezos would say later. “I’m taking those lottery winnings and investing them in Blue Origin.”

  Lottery winners like Musk and Bezos aren’t necessarily known for their follow-through. For years, Silicon Valley wags and space geeks alike wondered: When would they give up, like everyone else?

  6

  The Tyranny of the Rocket

  Technology does not automatically improve.

  —Elon Musk

  The year 2003 began with a brutal object lesson in the difficulties of flying human beings into space.

  Early on the morning of February 1, the space shuttle Columbia appeared to observers at the Los Angeles headquarters of SpaceX as a white streak across the sky. It flew at twenty-three times the speed of sound, more than 200,000 feet above the earth. The seven people on board had just completed a two-week scientific mission in orbit. But their attempt to return to earth would be a death sentence.

  Returning from space, the shuttle orbiter must glide through the atmosphere, relying on its aerodynamic shape and stubby wings to remain aloft. The incredible velocity it reaches in these moments compresses the air in front of it, making the vehicle enormously hot—particularly on the front edge of the wings, which reach 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The aluminum structure of the orbiter is protected by special heat-resistant tiles so that it does not melt. But on Columbia, several of these tiles were missing or cracked. Superheated air insidiously pushed through the gap and ate away at the bones of the vehicle.

  On the ground, in the control room at Cape Canaveral, the NASA team awaiting the returning mission watched as heat sensors in the wing failed—it could have been a typical malfunction. Next, sensors monitoring the landing gear inside the wing blinked out. Flight control then lost all signals from the orbiter.

  In truth, all of this wasn’t uncommon during reentry. Minutes passed. The flight controllers assumed that the sensors were just on the fritz. They looked for radar evidence of the orbiter. It should have begun its descent toward the enormous runway at Kennedy Space Center by now. A cell phone rang. Cable news was showing imagery of the white streak across the sky becoming multiple streaks. Columbia was lost. The flight director turned to a roomful of NASA staffers and invoked the dreaded words that begin the evidence quarantine process following any aerospace disaster: “Lock the doors.”

  The inquiry board that examined the Columbia disaster didn’t mince words in assessing the explosion, which left debris scattered across two states and two thousand square miles. More than just an engineering failure and a tragic accident, Columbia was a blinking red warning signal for an institution that had seemingly lost its way. NASA itself was failing.

  The physical culprit behind the destruction of the orbiter was not a meteoroid or errant space hardware encountered while in orbit. Because the crew included Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, some observers feverishly speculated about terrorist attacks or sabotage. In fact, the cause of death was a piece of foam, about the size of a beer cooler. It weighed perhaps two pounds.

  The foam was part of the space shuttle itself. One of the design compromises in the creation of the shuttle was an enormous orange external tank that carried the fuel and liquid oxygen used to power the orbiter into space, before being jettisoned. In flight, the shuttle would roll and effectively fly upside down, with the tank “above” and in front of it. This was controversial, since it exposed the astronauts to danger. “I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen,” one future NASA administrator said of the shuttle’s rollout. When planning this maneuver, NASA engineers worried that the ice that formed on the metal surfaces of the external tank when it was filled with supercooled liquid propellants could fall on the orbiter and damage it. To prevent ice damage, they covered the fuel tank with spray-on foam insulation. Where the tank was joined to the rocket with aluminum spars, they sprayed over the joints with foam and cut it to form an aerodynamic shape. Experience had taught NASA that these “foam ramps” could break off during launch, but the launch managers initially didn’t see this as a flight risk. Instead, it was something they had to remember to replace while refurbishing the reusable vehicle.

  This was an enormous mistake.

  When Columbia took off in January 2003, the foam ramp broke off its external tank almost a minute and a half into flight. It hit the left wing moving about five hundred miles per hour and tore through the protective heat shielding. Exactly how deeply, we have no idea—NASA officials refused to ask their colleagues at the Pentagon to peek at the wings with a spy satellite or a ground telescope, and no astronauts were sent on a space walk to assess the damage. Despite serious misgivings among the engineers on the ground, the mission’s managers did little to address the problem or even warn the astronauts about the enormous risks they were taking simply by coming home. They crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. Even if an effort to inspect the damage had been made, there was little that could have been done to repair the problem in flight. During its investigation, NASA concluded that a hasty rescue mission with another orbiter might have saved Columbia’s crew in time—though it would have faced the same risk from falling foam.

  Foremost among the reasons that NASA didn’t go into full rescue mode was that the mission manager for Columbia was also in charge of preparations for the next mission. Investigators judged that this was a major conflict of interest, since any delay to address the debris damage or recognize the threat of the foam ramps would halt preparations for the next mission. The space shuttle team was reluctant to adopt any new delays at a time when the space agency was under intense pressure to complete its share of the ISS.

  For all the thousands of hours spent inspecting engines, worrying about filters to keep the mix of breathable air right in the orbiter, and even stationing extra security around the launch site in case of a terrorist attack, NASA had missed the danger posed by the anti-ice foam. And not just missed it, but forgotten about it, according to the accident investigation board: early in the life of the space shuttle, foam debris was considered a serious problem.

  As flight after flight went off without a hitch, engineers got complacent and didn’t investigate what might happen in a worst-case scenario. The investigators identified a disturbing number of parallels between the destruction of Columbia and the Challenger disaster, seventeen years earlier, where a rubber ring had been the cause. In both cases, worried engineers were challenged by managers to prove conclusively that their vehicle was unsafe, without being given the resources to do so. Building an institution that performed the complex engineering tasks of spaceflight, on budget and on schedule, while avoiding complacency and buck-passing, still remained beyond the reach of the US space program.

  Amazin
gly, while this tragedy registered at the moment, it also seemed to fade quickly from the country’s collective memory. In comparison with the Challenger disaster, the loss of the Columbia had less of a cultural impact—perhaps because it was the second such tragedy, but surely also because of national distraction: four days after the accident, Secretary of State Colin Powell would present his flawed case for an invasion of Iraq to the United Nations General Assembly. American and coalition military forces would enter the country in mid-March, and coverage of the war and the protests surrounding it dominated the national consciousness in the months ahead.

  At NASA, however, there was little else to discuss. Heads rolled at the space shuttle program that year after the investigation was completed. The space community shared a collective sadness, tinged with a fear that the tragedy would also sour the public on expensive human spaceflight programs. But though Columbia was the final nail in the space shuttle program’s coffin, ensuring that there would be no appeal of cancellation in 2010, it didn’t change the shape of the industry. In a sense, the lessons of 1986 and 2003 were the same: NASA simply did not have a cheap, reliable space vehicle. Nor did it seem likely that one would appear soon: as the accident investigators noted, “The changes we recommend will be difficult to accomplish—and will be internally resisted.”

  The place to be in America if you wanted to solve the problem of cheap access to space was SpaceX’s small factory in El Segundo, California.

  Rockets are the fastest vehicles ever to have carried humans; the spacecraft they have launched are the fastest-moving objects built by humanity. This is by necessity. Escaping earth’s gravity, establishing a sustainable position in orbit comes down to a mathematical expression that can be summarized as: Fly faster than you are falling. The magic number to reach orbit is about 17,500 miles per hour; at that speed, you are flying away from earth fast enough that its gravity carries you around the planet, but not into it. For comparison, a 747 jetliner’s cruising speed is about 550 miles an hour, and the record for the fastest manned aircraft comes in at just over 4,000 miles per hour—and that was set in the X-15, an experimental rocket plane. Orbital velocity is just the beginning, since you must go even faster if you wish to leave earth entirely and visit the moon or other planets. The human speed record is still held by the three astronauts on the Apollo 10 moon mission, who returned to earth at a speed of 24,791 miles an hour.