Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

by Berns, Gregory

  Although nobody knew it at the time, Scaled was to become Rutan’s launching platform for space. In 1986, Rutan’s brother, Dick, piloted a Burt-designed aircraft called Voyager around the world without stopping or refueling—a feat never accomplished before. With such highprofile success, Scaled grew to more than one hundred employees by the mid 1990s with loads of corporate and government contracts. But Rutan continued to think about loftier goals. Unwilling to divert Scaled resources into such a risky venture, the Tier One project remained little more than sketches on Rutan’s drawing pad.

  The Tier One design was all Rutan. Reflecting his preternatural ability to perceive engineering problems differently, Rutan came up with an unconventional solution based on an old airplane flying trick. The trick involved reconfiguring the tail assembly at the apex of the craft’s trajectory. Rutan designed pneumatic actuators to pop up tail booms that would change the tail surface from a low-drag supersonic configuration to a high-drag feather shape. In this configuration, the aircraft would float to the ground like a shuttlecock with its nose pointed almost straight down. Because the feather configuration resulted in a more leisurely descent, Rutan’s design solved the problem of both high g-forces and high temperatures during reentry.

  The rocket itself would be carried up to 50,000 feet by an equally strange Rutan-vehicle. Dubbed the White Knight, the transport aircraft was a spindly thing with a fuselage dangling from a delicate wing. The rocket and its pilot would hang from the underside of the center fuselage, and a wing runner to each side gave the craft the appearance of a crab. When dropped from the White Knight, the rocket pilot would arm the engine with one switch and fire it with another. There was no throttle.

  Rutan kept the project secret until April 2003, when Rutan shocked the aerospace community by unveiling both the rocket and the White Knight. Having notified the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Pentagon only two weeks earlier, Rutan made a point of the absence of government involvement. “I believe the government is the reason it’s unaffordable to fly into space,” he said in his press conference. “We didn’t want them to know. Their help causes problems.”4 Paul Allen, formerly of Microsoft, finally revealed himself as Tier One’s financial backer in December 2003, after the rocket, now called SpaceShipOne, had passed several test milestones. At that point, Richard Branson’s group struck a deal to license the technology to Virgin for the development of a spaceliner.

  SpaceShipOne reached an altitude of 212,000 feet in May 2004, but it was the flight on June 21, 2004, that made history by reaching the edge of space. On September 29, SpaceShipOne completed the first of three trips into space. But about thirty seconds after rocket ignition, the vehicle entered a harrowing series of rolls, throwing both the spaceship and its pilot into a dizzying upward spiral. A spiraling reentry could well have exceeded the g-force limit of the feather configuration and resulted in a total breakup. Fortunately, the pilot was able to gain control before reentry. Even with Rutan’s intuition for safe designs, at Mach 3.5 the slightest deviation of forces can result in unexpected results, fortunately none fatal in this case. But they are a reminder of the risks that will always be lurking in mankind’s quest to get into space. It is not a quest for the squeamish. It is a quest for only the most iconoclastic.

  Principle 2: The Iconoclasts Who Face Down Fear of Failure

  An endeavor as risky and daunting as the commercialization of personal spaceflight requires a wide cast of characters that includes not just the engineers building the rockets but iconoclasts who play a different role. These are the catalysts—the people who, by virtue of their passion, rally others to stay the course, overcome the risks of failure, and basically devote their lives to putting people into space. More than a cheerleader, the catalyst marshals financial and political resources to bring about the solution to problems that people are typically afraid of. The creation of an industry with substantial risks—risks of financial failure as well as the possibility of loss of life—demands individuals who can bring together the multiple companies to speak as one voice so that the regulatory agencies, such as NASA and the FAA, realize that private spaceflight is more than a pipe dream. This type of person confronts the great limiter to iconoclasm: fear.

  For private spaceflight, Peter Diamandis, forty-five years old, is that iconoclast. A graduate of MIT and a medical doctor from Harvard, Diamandis created the X PRIZE Foundation in 1994 to foster the privatization of spaceflight. His inspiration was a $25,000 prize offered in 1919 by the real estate magnate Raymond Orteig to the first person to fly nonstop between New York and Paris, which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927. Diamandis realized that the prize was primarily symbolic. At least nine teams vied for the Orteig prize and collectively spent $400,000. The rewards came later as the competition spawned the modern aerospace industry and ultimately passenger air travel. As Diamandis states, the number of U.S. air passengers increased from 5,782 in 1926 to 173,405 in 1929, which he attributes more to the public perception of the feasibility of air travel than to any technological breakthrough.5 This is an amazing example of how individual iconoclasts, like Lindbergh, became immediate icons simply by achieving a goal that most people thought impossible at the time, and in the process changed the public’s perception, removing the first roadblock to action.

  So it was with the Spirit of St. Louis in mind that Diamandis created the X PRIZE for the first privately built spacecraft to carry a person into space and back (space being defined as 100 km in altitude). Although similar in spirit, the X PRIZE suffered from a lack of visibility. In 1927, nobody had flown nonstop across the Atlantic, so the Orteig prize threw down the gauntlet for a goal that was previously unattainable. The X PRIZE was not quite the same, because in 1994, everyone knew that people could get into space. The prize, though, was about getting citizens into space. Although the prize was widely known in aerospace circles, it took Diamandis a decade to achieve real public visibility for the prize. In 2004, the Iranian-born entrepreneurs Amir and Anousheh Ansari made a multimillion-dollar donation that was also matched by several corporations, and the purse jumped to $10 million.

  For Diamandis, it was the motivation to do what everyone thought couldn’t be done and to reward risk taking through competition. Speaking about the fear of failure, he says, “We are killing ourselves in this country by how risk averse we have gotten. It is destroying our ability to make breakthroughs.” Speaking to entrepreneurs and CEOs and venture capitalists, Diamandis exhorts, “You have to take risks, because the governments can’t, and the large corporations cannot. The governments can’t withstand the Congressional investigations every time something goes wrong. The large corporations can’t stand the plummeting stock prices.”6

  Diamandis is not blind to the risks of spaceflight, but he implores the rocketeers and would-be passengers not to be paralyzed by risk: “There is only one group left. It is the individual who says, ‘I can’t afford not to! This is my dream! If I won’t do it, no one else will.’ That’s what this program [the X PRIZE] is about. That’s who you are. It’s the dreamers. It’s the doers. It’s about those furry mammals who are evolved to take the risks, or die.”

  So who are these iconoclasts who are wresting away the wings from NASA? The companies have names that evoke a sense of infinite possibilities, such as Space Adventures, SpaceX, Rocketplane, Starchaser Industries, Dreamspace, and Virgin Galactic. Although not known widely outside the aerospace industry, the people backing and running these companies are cut from the same cloth that gave rise to the biggest Internet success stories. In fact, many are the same people. John Carmack, the video game guru who founded id Software and who wrote Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, formed a company called Armadillo Aerospace, which is developing vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for landing on the moon. Elon Musk formed an online financial services company called X.com in 1999 that ultimately acquired the technology to become PayPal. When PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk rolled the money into SpaceX, with the i
nitial goal of developing conventional two-stage vehicles for lifting heavy payloads into orbit. His ultimate goal, however, is the SpaceX Dragon, which is a reusable container for carrying a crew into space. Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin empire, teamed up with Burt Rutan to build the first commercial passenger space vehicle, dubbed SpaceShipTwo. Branson plans to fly groups of four passengers up to 100 km in altitude under the brand Virgin Galactic. And Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, has thrown his hat into the spaceflight ring with the formation of Blue Origin.

  It is, of course, no coincidence that the private space industry reads like a who’s who of Internet success stories. On a practical level, only the CEOs of companies that were successful have the capital to invest in space. Many, like Musk and Bezos, were trained as engineers or physicists and have a gut sense of what will work and what won’t. But they have also navigated commercial environments with significant unknowns. Each of them has already conquered fears of the unknown in their own domains. So it is natural that these iconoclasts should look to space for the next big thing. Shepherding a start-up Internet company to a multibillion-dollar, multinational enterprise requires exactly the skills needed to get people into space safely and, just as importantly, make a profit. It only makes sense to send people into space if, as Diamandis says, there is money to be made. Only governments can do it without a profit imperative.

  Potential for profit is everything. Safety will follow profit, because every one of these CEOs knows that if anyone dies, all bets are off. Because of the profit incentive, it is likely that these privately built vehicles may become more reliable and safer than anything NASA has ever built. They have to be. Volunteering to be an astronaut in a federal space program is one thing. As Mike Mullane, a space shuttle astronaut, wrote, “If [it had been] explained exactly what we had just signed up to do—to be some of the first humans to ride uncontrollable solid-fueled rocket boosters … without an in-flight escape system … on a schedule that would stretch manpower and resources to their limits—it wouldn’t have diminished our enthusiasm one iota.”7 But this will not be the general sentiment of the ten thousand or so citizens who pay big money to ride a private rocket. They will expect safety and reliability on a scale never achieved before in rocketry.

  The Iconoclast as Passenger

  Who would want to go into space, and what would they hope to accomplish? But most importantly, how much would they be willing to pay? These were the questions posed by the Futron Corporation in a 2002 marketing study of the commercial potential for space tourism.8 The answers to these questions determine whether personal spaceflight makes for a viable business model. As NASA demonstrated, with both Apollo and the space shuttle, the fixed costs of mounting a space program are enormous. It is not enough to be an iconoclast and think that with the proper technology, spaceflight could become routine. There is tremendous financial risk, not to mention the potential for a catastrophic failure and the loss of life. Framing these questions from an economic perspective can provide a guide for the development of the technology, which from a business standpoint, must be reasonably assured of providing a profit.

  The Futron study was critical for two reasons. First, it remains the only systematic analysis of the commercial potential of space tourism. As such, it continues to form the basis of most business models in the industry.9 Second, the conclusion of the report was surprisingly optimistic. Futron projected total revenues of $1 billion through 2021. Like the shot heard ’round the world, the Futron study provided the economic incentive for the rocket men to press forward with their dreams. The study also provided the grease to get the necessary political machinery moving that would ultimately have to green-light any spaceflights. More than any other entrepreneurial industry, personal spaceflight requires the cooperation of a wide cast of characters. As we shall see, social intelligence becomes as important as technological wizardry.

  Futron reasoned that the first space tourists would be wealthy. At the time of the study, only one private citizen had made it into space. In 2001, the American businessman Dennis Tito paid $20 million to ride a Russian Soyuz rocket and dock with the International Space Station (ISS). He spent a total of eight days in space, including six aboard the ISS. More recently, in 2006, the Iranian Anousheh Ansari became the first female citizen to make the journey (for a similar price). Because of the steep costs associated with space tourism, Futron contracted Zogby International to conduct a telephone survey of 450 people who might have the financial means to pay for a trip into space. The respondents were restricted to people with an annual household income of $250,000 or a minimum net worth of $1 million.

  Futron examined the likelihood and the amount of money these people would be willing to pay for two types of spaceflights. The first type, an orbital trip, is the kind that Tito and Ansari made. Thirty-five percent of the respondents said that they would be interested in an orbital trip, and the most common reason for doing so was the chance to be a pioneer, which was followed closely by the chance to see Earth from space and to fulfill a lifelong dream.

  But achieving orbit is technologically complicated and expensive, so Futron examined the appeal of a second type of space trip called a suborbital flight. This is simply an up-and-down trip to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. At an altitude of 100 km, you are high enough to see the curvature of the Earth and experience a sense of weightlessness. These are short trips, with perhaps two minutes at this altitude. The advantage, however, is that the energy required to reach this height is only one-tenth that of reaching orbit. The rockets can be smaller, more efficient, and technologically simpler than an orbital craft. And the cost of such a trip could be a fraction of an orbital flight. Despite the rather short duration, 28 percent of the Futron respondents said they were either “definitely likely” or “very likely” to make such a trip were it available. On the basis of its survey, Futron concluded that $100,000 was the ticket price the market would bear, although there was clearly a demand at even higher prices.

  One such person is Reda Anderson, a sixty-nine-year-old woman from Los Angeles and a natural-born iconoclast. Posing in front of Rocketplane Global’s prototype spaceship and wearing a flight suit, Anderson looks more like an astronaut than a space tourist. Eschewing the moniker “space tourist” in favor of “explorer,” Anderson embodies the can-do spirit of what will be the first wave of citizens who reach space. Her natural gregariousness, coupled with a shrewd mind for business, served Anderson well in real estate, and because of her success, landed her in the care of George French, CEO and president of Rocketplane Global, one of the companies racing to get citizens into space. With a twinkle in her eye and looking a fair bit younger than her age, Anderson has made the most of her post-real estate life. Calling Anderson an explorer may be the most accurate description, since she has trekked through Machu Picchu, journeyed to Antarctica, led four-wheel-drive trips to Mongolia, and been one of only twelve women to have dived to the Titanic. For the record, the Titanic lies 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic, and to make the ten-hour dive, a pilot and two divers must squeeze into the MIR, a 6-foot-wide Russian submersible. Given her résumé of exploration, space was the next logical goal.

  “When I heard about the X-Prize flights and what Burt Rutan was doing at Mojave, I had to see it for myself,” says Anderson.10 After witnessing the historic flight of SpaceShipOne and the winning of the $10 million Ansari X-PRIZE, Anderson struck up a conversation with Chuck Lauer, the business director of Rocketplane.

  “After the Rutan flight,” says Anderson, “I wrote on the back of Chuck Lauer’s business card ‘Reda Anderson to be Rocketplane’s 1st customer.’ I signed it, wrapped a dollar bill around it, and handed it back to Chuck.” Lauer, with a shocked expression, examined the offering, and said, “This looks like it has all the elements of a business contract.” And with a handshake, he had signed up Rocketplane’s first passenger, making Anderson the first person to sign a contract to go into space on a commercial vehicle.

&nb
sp; Anderson’s motivations are complex but generally mirror what Futron predicted. Above all, Anderson values the experience of doing things that other people say can’t be done. “I like world-class events,” she says. Since she has already taken the ride on the Vomit Comet, it’s not the weightlessness that draws her to space. “I am mad that I am born with this short time frame. That irritates the hell out of me. My first question to God when I get to Heaven if there is such a place, I will ask he, she or it, ‘What is this 70-year life span? There is so much to do and only 70 years to do it.’” Anderson points out, “And I have to sleep one third of the time and bathe. What a waste of time!”11

  As two of the first space explorers of the twenty-first century, Anderson and Ansari are iconoclasts by virtue of their willingness to challenge conventional notions of what people can do. They see challenges differently than most people and do not let the fear of uncertainty (or failure) prevent them from taking risks. That they are women—and in Ansari’s case, a woman from an Islamic country—underscores the uniqueness of what they are doing. Anderson, however, does not wear the feminist badge. For her, life is too short and the universe too large to waste a minute worrying about cultural or religious hang-ups. But she is not blind to the risks of this endeavor. When pushed on the issue of the possibility of death, she said, “I can’t really think of it that way. I don’t want to die. I want to come back in better shape than when I left.” Referring to the relativistic time dilatation of spaceflight, she says, “At the speed I’ll be going, I will pick up a few nanoseconds of time relative to the folks on the ground.” But what if the odds of crashing were fifty-fifty? “I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t think the odds will be that bad.”