Rocket Billionaires

by Tim Fernholz

  Sercel’s estimates of the potential space tourism market are bigger than you might think. “There are nearly 250,000 people on planet earth who have more than $30 million in spare change,” he says. “If we can get 4 percent of them to spend $10 million each on space vacations, that’s $100 billion.” He expects suborbital tickets to fall from the current market level—Virgin Galactic’s $250,000-a-seat ride—to just $30,000 to $50,000 per person within five years. He predicts orbital tourism will be $3 to $5 million a flight when it matures. Indeed, SpaceX announced in 2017 that two wealthy individuals had put down a deposit to fly around the moon in a Dragon space capsule.

  Yet SpaceX’s real bet, on satellite internet, is tailored to Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial approach. He finds an existing market for products like rockets or cars, then takes it over by pushing that technology to the limit. If eighty satellites could be a successful business, why not four thousand? Blue Origin’s ambitions to build out the lunar economy are, in turn, very much in the vein of Jeff Bezos’s approach to business: envision something entirely fantastic—like an invisible store where you can buy everything, or mining water to produce energy on the moon—and figure out how to make it real. As always, however, they find a way to converge: both companies are focusing their next-generation rocket engines to be built to run on natural gas, not only because of its power but also because scientists believe it could be manufactured in space, unlike kerosene.

  “If you don’t have disruptive innovation in your DNA, you’re not going to understand space resources,” Sercel says.

  Still, there are skeptics who question whether all this effort will catalyze ambitious space projects. “This is our third wave of launch developers, but we’ve never seen them with pockets like this, and we’ve never seen them with business experience like this—that’s different,” Carissa Carlson, an economic analyst who specializes in space business, told me. “That said, I think there is no guarantee that we’re going to see a massive growth in space activity.” Still, for all the wild ideas that are embraced by both companies, competition between two well-funded space technology giants is going to be the path forward for the American space program—even if it can be hard to discern the greed from the humanism from the sheer love of big, powerful machinery.

  “Bezos’s seriousness, just for me, was the fit that said, ‘We’re going to be okay,’” Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, told me. She—and many others in the space community—see the Blue Origin and SpaceX competition as a retelling of the tortoise and the hare. “Maybe in this case the hare will win—and I consider SpaceX the hare; they are also the flashier. Bezos is serious; he wouldn’t—and, by the way, neither would Elon—be in there if there wasn’t money to be made. I love the ‘I want to advance humanity and save the species,’ but it’s boys and their toys. And Jeff will at least tell you that straight.”

  A few weeks after Bezos announced that he would build a reusable orbital rocket, SpaceX set out to actually reuse its own.

  It would be only the fourth launch since the Amos-6 fire had grounded the company. After that, engineers torture-tested the Falcon 9’s carbon-wrapped tanks and found an approach to fueling the vehicle that satisfied the FAA, NASA, and the Air Force. SpaceX returned to flight, after a four-month break, in January 2017, launching ten satellites into low earth orbit for Iridium, delivering another load of supplies and science experiments to the International Space Station, and plunking a satellite into geostationary orbit for EchoStar. While the last satellite was too heavy to allow a landing, the first two missions ended with the Falcon 9 booster returning to earth.

  The landings were becoming routine. Between its first successful landing, in December 2015, and March 2017, SpaceX had brought back eight of its Falcon 9 rocket boosters to floating landing barges or to the ground pad at Cape Canaveral. Each time one of the 130-foot-tall, twenty-ton metal tubes came plummeting through the clouds before landing in a plume of smoke and dust, SpaceX’s biggest fans cheered. Yet bringing all that metal back from space was worthwhile only if you could reuse it, and often. As Sowers had told me, “It’s not the technology that’s the showstopper; it’s the money side. Can you actually bring it back and refurbish it for lower cost than to build a new one?”

  SpaceX couldn’t answer that question until it actually reflew one of its boosters, and the morning of opportunity dawned clear and bright at Cape Canaveral. Executives from SES, the Luxembourg satellite giant, did an interview with a CBS affiliate on an earthen berm a few hundred yards from the rocket as their satellite on top waited patiently to fly. SES had backed SpaceX for many years, including being the first customer for a geostationary satellite launch. Now it would be the first to fly on what SpaceX had branded a “flight-proven” rocket booster, which sounds much better than “slightly used.” One of the execs insisted to me that he wasn’t nervous about the launch; his engineering team had satisfied themselves that the refurbished rocket met the same criteria they used when evaluating new rockets. While they demanded a discount for the debut flight, chief technology officer Martin Halliwell told reporters that the company’s main goal was to boost the development of cheaper ways to go to space.

  This rocket had previously launched a Dragon full of supplies to the space station, just under a year before. Ahead of its reuse, SpaceX was “incredibly paranoid about everything,” in Musk’s words, and took four months to switch out any components its engineers felt might be questionable, as well as run it through a series of tests at the McGregor test site. Gwynne Shotwell, the redoubtable company president, said the process still cost far less than manufacturing a new vehicle. Members of SpaceX’s team would admit to nerves, and for all the import of the event, the company declined to promote it as anything other than a normal launch. Still, Shotwell told viewers tuning into the launch livestream that the “historic” mission “is the fundamental key demonstration that our technology is capable of reflight.”

  As the operations team proceeded through the preflight checklist, everything seemed fine. No fast fires broke out during propellant loading. There were no last-minute pressure fluctuations or stuck valves to complicate the countdown. Just before 6:30 in the evening, with the sun setting behind it, Falcon 9’s flight computers took control and the rocket ignited. It pushed up through the atmosphere, producing the familiar tearing sound of rocket flight, as if the sky were being ripped open. Over a minute into flight, going more than a thousand miles per hour and still accelerating, the rocket passed through “max Q,” the moment when the thickness of the atmosphere put the highest stress on the rocket. If a strut were to tear loose or some other vital machinery were to give way, it would be now.

  The Falcon 9 didn’t stop.

  At SpaceX’s headquarters, in Hawthorne, the watching crowd cheered and clapped. At the appointed time, the two stages separated, with the upper rocket carrying SES’s satellite further up on its way to a high-altitude orbit. The first stage began to fall back toward the Florida coast, the grid fins that guide it down popping out from their folded position. “All systems continue to be go,” a SpaceX engineer told observers.

  While the second stage coasted through space, the first stage met the atmosphere again. It was aiming for a drone ship, and its engines ignited again to slow its descent. On the video stream, viewers could see one of the grid fins burst into flames, and small pieces breaking off. As the booster plunged through the clouds, condensation covered the camera. Would the flames compromise the rocket’s ability to return to the drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You, waiting a few hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean? The camera on the vessel cut out as the rocket approached. It could have been that the satellite link was broken because of too much vibration from the descending rocket, or it might have been another disaster.

  But when the feed resumed, there it was: a twice-flown booster rocket, standing alone on a calm ocean, as if on a sunset cruise. History had been made. SpaceX—and the private space industry—were no longer simply
replicating the successes of the government space programs that came before them. They had taken the risk of doing what no one had done before.

  “I did have like two boxes of Xanax; I think that might have helped,” Musk joked after the flight. “I was actually, oddly enough, nervous that I wasn’t nervous enough.”

  He had brought his five sons to witness the launch, one sign of how much he valued the moment. I asked Musk if he felt vindicated by the successful mission, the product of the past fifteen years of work at SpaceX, a company that had begun as a dozen geeks and a mariachi band in low-rent office space.

  “From a mariachi band to here . . . yes, it’s a huge day,” he said. “My mind is blown, frankly. I’m really quite speechless. It’s a culmination of a tremendous amount of work by a very talented team.”

  Halliwell, the garrulous CTO of SES, interrupted. “After SES-8, which is the first GTO mission that we did with SpaceX, I made the comment that the industry will be shaking in its boots. Oh, it is shaking now.”

  “It’ll spur change for the better,” Musk concluded. And he was not wrong: that same year, not just Blue Origin but also United Launch Alliance and Arianespace announced plans to develop reusable rockets. With the flight of SES-10, SpaceX was forcing its competitors not just to cut costs but also to join it in the pursuit of an entirely new approach to spaceflight. “We were ridiculed by the other big companies in the launch business. At first they ignored us, and then they fought us, and then they found they really couldn’t win in a fair fight,” Mueller, the engineer Musk found in the desert and unleashed, said after the flight. “And then at some point, they figure out they have to deal with what you’re doing. There’s a lot of talk about how they’re going to make [rockets] reusable, recover the engines, recover the stages, come up with a much lower-cost rocket so they can compete.”

  At the post-launch press conference, Musk was asked about Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket. It was clear that his staff was expecting comparisons with the New Shepard, because they were drilled into constantly mentioning that the Falcon 9 was an “orbital class” rocket.

  “What’s that saying about the best form of flattery?” he said wryly. “Frankly, if a company shows that a path is working, then other companies should copy that. It would be silly not to. We wouldn’t want to not do the right thing simply because some other company has.”

  SpaceX, Musk admitted, still had a way to go to reach its ultimate goal: true reusability, with zero hardware changes and a twenty-four-hour turnaround, which he hoped to achieve within a year. Over the rest of 2017, his company would break ULA’s record for most launches in a year, flying two more flight-proven boosters, as well as ten brand-new rockets. It recovered all but two, which were carrying satellites too heavy to allow the rocket sufficient fuel to return. The company was making launch and landing routine, and pushing to do the same with reusability. It was now the dominant player in the commercial launch market. “As an operator, my belief is that within twenty-four months, SpaceX will offer a service to orbit, and it’ll be irrelevant if it’s new or preflown,” Halliwell said. “That’s what this means today.”

  For Musk, though, the meaning of the day was far bigger. “The key is going to be reduction of the cost of access to space,” he said. “I’m highly confident that it is possible to achieve a one-hundred-fold reduction in the cost of space transport, or maybe more. With the same budget, we do a hundred times more things.” At first, he explained, the reusable Falcon 9 will allow for a dramatic reduction in cost, especially once the company has earned back the enormous funds it expended to develop the vehicle and could price them closer to cost. More important, the vehicle would provide critical learning for the huge Big Falcon Rocket he envisions as the key to reaching the moon and Mars. In Mueller’s words, “Once we’re flying that, all other rockets will be obsolete.”

  “Rapid and complete reusability of rockets is really the key to opening up space and becoming a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species,” Musk said.

  And now he had proof of the concept. It was a day to celebrate. And he was already more interested in the next big thing, of course, because that’s what Elon does. Why couldn’t the SpaceX team reuse the fairing that protected the satellite during launch? After all, it cost $8 million. When will they reuse the second stage? Could they launch the Falcon Heavy, with its three cores and twenty-seven engines, before the end of the year? “I want to emphasize that’s a high-risk flight,” he noted, eager to push the envelope again. His head was stuck in the future. The vehicle he and his team had designed, now floating its way back to land after a brief round-trip to the vacuum, was interesting only so long as it was considered impossible.

  “The goal is to make this normal,” Musk says—of his rocket and, perhaps, of his approach to life. “It’s just normal. Of course, the thing comes back and lands. Why wouldn’t it?”

  Epilogue

  A Spacefaring Civilization

  Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.

  —Senator Lyndon B. Johnson

  By the time you finish this book, it’s entirely possible that a private company will have flown a human into space again. When they do, and particularly when a private company wins the race to carry astronauts into orbit, the new space race will truly be in motion.

  SpaceX and Boeing are approaching critical test flights in their quest to be the first company to fly astronauts to the ISS. NASA expects them to begin in 2018, and though delays are likely, the pressure to return human spaceflight to the United States will likely lead both to receive sufficient resources so that Americans can get to orbit without a layover in Kazakhstan. In 2016, NASA issued new contracts to SpaceX, Orbital, and Sierra Nevada for cargo missions to the station through the end of its life.

  Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are expected to begin crewed test flights of their suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo. Their goal of providing regular and safe recreational space tourism, barnstorming past the Kármán line, could be realized in the years ahead, exposing thousands of people to a life-changing perspective of the planet they call home.

  The real test, however, will come after the inevitable first accident, the tragedy that takes lives. When lives are lost, will the leaders at these various private companies have the mettle, and the resources, to keep going? Musk has said he will not take his company public—diluting his control over it and exposing it to more scrutiny—until his flights to Mars begin. That may be because only a single-minded desire to move humanity off this planet can propel something as risky as a plan to colonize Mars.

  In the years ahead, regular human spaceflight and enormous satellite constellations could reshape the space industry. If Blue Origin and SpaceX can realize their visions of giant, reusable rockets that make space a hundred times cheaper than it is today, they will indeed change our society. Private investment in space startups has soared, thanks to the promise of these two companies.

  Is space truly the new internet? Will the first trillionaires be made in orbit, or on the moon, or even on Mars, as the most ambitious space entrepreneurs tell me? I wouldn’t risk a prediction; whenever a lunar business plan seems too attractive, I recall the projections at the beginning of this century, or the 1970s, or the 1920s, to remember that our reach often outstrips our grasp.

  Yet the largest trends that are driving the push toward cheap spaceflight—the increasingly apparent vulnerability of our ecosystem and the growing power and importance of global digital communication networks to the worldwide economy—are not going away.

  Nor are geopolitical conflicts likely to subside. While this book has focused primarily on American companies, their methods and the technology they use are not limited to the United States. Emerging economic powers like China and India are already investing resources in space technology and aiming to outcompete their American and European predecessors. Once one nation seizes t
he high ground, the rest can be expected to follow.

  The veterans of the Strategic Defense Initiative who poured into private space at the close of the Cold War are experiencing a sense of déjà vu today as North Korea’s nuclear program and renewed Russian antagonism prompt interest in space-based defenses. China has announced that it wants to build a base on the moon, and American space entrepreneurs are already using their ambitions to spur American envy—and earn public funding for their own goals. US lawmakers talk of creating a “Space Corps” and militarizing space. Sowers, the former ULA engineer, says he tells military planners that the moon is “the next Persian Gulf.”

  Space wars, Martian colonies, lunar mines—it all sounds preposterous. Critics of the rocket billionaires’ hubris often note that they haven’t answered basic questions about what life will be like in space: How will people earn money? How will they live? Can they even survive constant cosmic radiation?

  The billionaires funding these efforts don’t worry about the answers to these questions. “Any ‘reasons’ we may give for wanting to cross space are afterthoughts, excuses tacked on because we feel we ought, rationally, to have them,” Arthur C. Clarke wrote, and it remains true. The US economic system has put enormous resources in the hands of a few space geeks, and they intend to unleash low-cost access to space. Like their peers building social networks and search indexes, they haven’t necessarily thought through the potential downsides.