Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Christian Davenport
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davenport, Christian, author.
Title: The space barons : Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the quest to colonize the cosmos/Christian Davenport.
Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053089 ISBN 9781610398299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781610398305 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Space industrialization—United States. | Industrialists—United States—Biography. | Aerospace engineers—United States—Biography. | Bezos, Jeffrey. | Musk, Elon. | Blue Origen (Firm) | SpaceX (Firm) | Aerospace industries—United States. | Outer space—Civilian use.
Classification: LCC TL789.85.A1 D38 2018 | DDC 338.7/6294092273 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053089
ISBNs: 978-1-61039-829-9 (hardcover); 978-1-61039-830-5 (e-book)
E3-20180227-JV-PC
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION “Touchdown”
TIMELINE
PART I IMPOSSIBLE CHAPTER 1 “A Silly Way to Die”
CHAPTER 2 The Gamble
CHAPTER 3 “Ankle Biter”
CHAPTER 4 “Somewhere Else Entirely”
CHAPTER 5 “SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero”
PART II IMPROBABLE CHAPTER 6 “Screw It, Let’s Do It”
CHAPTER 7 The Risk
CHAPTER 8 A Four-Leaf Clover
CHAPTER 9 “Dependable or a Little Nuts?”
CHAPTER 10 “Unicorns Dancing in the Flame Duct”
PART III INEVITABLE CHAPTER 11 Magic Sculpture Garden
CHAPTER 12 “Space Is Hard”
CHAPTER 13 “The Eagle Has Landed”
CHAPTER 14 Mars
CHAPTER 15 “The Great Inversion”
EPILOGUE Again, the Moon
PHOTOS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
For Heather
All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.
—NORMAN MACLEAN, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
INTRODUCTION
“Touchdown”
THEY CAUGHT THEIR first glimpse of it at 25,000 feet and falling fast. Normally, a rocket dropping like a bomb would be cause for panic. But instead, the four hundred or so people gathered in the employee lounge at Blue Origin’s headquarters outside Seattle were thrilled to see the booster plummeting toward Earth.
“Estimate ten seconds to engine start,” the flight controller announced.
The employees, mostly engineers, were packed in, watching the rocket in free fall on a giant screen. Some had their hands over their mouth. Others sat forward with fists clenched. Mostly, they were silent, waiting for what would happen next.
“Engine start,” said the flight controller. “We have thrust.”
At that, the employees started cheering wildly. Just minutes before on this morning three days before Thanksgiving in 2015, the engine had fired to lift the rocket off the launchpad at Blue Origin’s West Texas test site, flying it faster than the speed of sound past the 62-mile threshold that’s considered the edge of space. But now that the rocket was falling back, the thrust had the opposite effect: it was slowing the rocket down, preventing it from slamming into the ground and exploding.
Soon the rocket’s altitude was 2,000 feet.
Then 1,000.
500.
As the ground came into view, fire from the engine kicked up a plume of dust. The employees at Blue Origin rose to their feet in unison. The rocket was under control, descending gently, like a hot-air balloon coming in for a landing.
“One hundred and fifty feet,” the flight controller called out.
“Seventy feet.”
“Fifty feet. Velocity steady.”
There was one last flash of the engines, a bright orange glow shining through the dust and smoke. Then, it went out.
“Touchdown.”
The room broke out in pandemonium. The employees celebrated wildly, hugging one another, giving high fives. The rocket booster stood in the center of the pad like a giant trophy.
Jeff Bezos had watched from the control room of his company’s West Texas launch site. It was “one of the greatest moments of my life,” he would later say. “I was misty-eyed.”
Twenty-eight days later, another rocket was falling from the sky. This time, it was a much bigger booster that had been flying at a much greater velocity, a speed capable of crossing not just the threshold of space but of getting its payload to orbit Earth. For this landing attempt, the chances of success were even more improbable, the chance of disaster, far greater.
About ten minutes after blasting off into the dark, evening skies over Cape Canaveral, Florida, the fire from the rocket engine suddenly appeared like a streetlight in the distance, a shimmering, ethereal beacon lowering through the clouds.
As they watched on television screens, the SpaceX employees who had gathered at the company’s headquarters outside Los Angeles on this evening just before Christmas 2015 cheered it just as their rivals at Blue Origin had done—and then some.
Elon Musk watched the rocket reappear from outside on a causeway. Then, he sprinted back into the control room to see the image of the rocket standing proudly on the landing pad. Like Bezos, he would say this was one of the greatest days of his life. A “revolutionary moment,” he called it, one that “quite dramatically improves my confidence that a city on Mars is possible.”
SOME FIFTY YEARS after the advent of the Space Age, no one ever had flown a rocket past the edge of space and landed it vertically. Now, it had been performed twice in less than a month.
For generations, spaceflight had been celebrated largely for the takeoffs. But the landings were reminiscent of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s touching down on the surface of the moon in the lunar module. Or the “seven-minutes of terror” landing of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The sight of the boosters standing on terra firma, scorched but triumphant, portended a sense of arrival, and offered hope for another Apollo 11 moment, the next giant leap many had felt they were promised but had never come.
Even more impressive was that the landings had been accomplished not by nations—not even NASA had pulled off
such a feat—but by a pair of private companies. Backed by billionaires intent on developing reusable rockets, which could fly, land, then fly again, they were pursuing a holy grail—a technology with the potential to dramatically lower the cost of space travel.
For decades, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean after powering their payloads to space. To Musk and Bezos, that was an incredible waste, like throwing away an airplane after flying from New York to Los Angeles. Now they had shown that rockets could fly not just up, but back down, landing with precision and reigniting interest in human space travel in a way not seen in decades.
The landings had touched off celebrations not just at Blue Origin and SpaceX, but among their legions of growing fans, who watched the viral videos by the millions. It was the 1960s revisited, but on YouTube and Reddit, where the new space fans congregated the way enthusiasts once crowded Cocoa Beach along the cape. With unbridled enthusiasm, they cheered this new Space Age, just as their parents cheered John Glenn blasting off to orbit in a moment that eroded Walter Cronkite’s steely, newsman’s detachment. “Oh, go baby!” he had gushed, live on air, as that rocket tore a hole in the sky.
MUSK AND BEZOS were the leaders of this resurrection of the American space program, a pair of billionaires with vastly different styles and temperaments. Always audacious, Musk had plowed far ahead, his triumphs and failures commanding center stage. Bezos remained quiet and clandestine, his mysterious rocket venture kept hidden behind the curtain.
But there were others. Like Bezos, Richard Branson was promising to fly tourists past the edge of space to get glimpses of Earth from above and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, who had backed the first commercial spacecraft to reach space, was now building the largest airplane the world had ever seen. Bigger than Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, it would be able to “air launch” rockets from 35,000 feet—and perhaps even a new space shuttle, called “Black Ice,” it was developing in secret.
Together these Space Barons were behind some of the biggest brands in the world—Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal—that have disrupted industries ranging from retail to credit cards to air travel. And now they were betting vast swaths of their enormous fortunes that they could make space available to the masses, and push human space travel past where governments had gone.
The story of their dramatic struggle to open the frontier was an improbable one, full of risk and high adventure, a crash that cost the life of a test pilot, a rocket explosion, and suspicions of sabotage. There were lawsuits pitting an underdog upstart against the nation’s military-industrial complex, a political fight that went all the way to the White House, visions to put humans on the moon and Mars, and, of course, the historic landings that heralded what Bezos was calling a new “golden age of space exploration.”
At its heart, the story was fueled by a budding rivalry between the two leaders of this new space movement. The tension would play out in legal briefs and on Twitter, skirmishes over the significance of their respective landings and the thrust of their rockets, and even a dispute over the pad that would launch them. Musk, the brash hare, was blazing a trail for others to follow, while Bezos, the secretive and slow tortoise, who was content to take it step by step in a race that was only just beginning.
TIMELINE
September 2000 Jeff Bezos founds Blue Operations LLC, the precursor to Blue Origin.
March 2002 Elon Musk incorporates Space Exploration Technologies.
December 2003 First powered flight of SpaceShipOne.
December 2003 Musk shows off the Falcon 1 rocket in Washington, DC.
September 2004 Richard Branson acquires technology behind SpaceShipOne and vows to create the world’s first commercial spaceline with first flights in 2007.
October 2004 SpaceShipOne wins the Ansari X Prize.
March 2005 Blue Origin flies Charon, its first test vehicle, to 316 feet.
March 2006 SpaceX attempts first launch of Falcon 1, which fails.
August 2006 NASA awards SpaceX a $278 million contract as part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.
November 2006 Blue Origin launches Goddard, a test rocket, to 285 feet.
September 2008 SpaceX’s Falcon 1 successfully reaches orbit for the first time.
December 2008 NASA awards SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
January 2010 President Barack Obama releases NASA budget proposal that kills the George W. Bush–era Constellation program.
April 2010 Obama gives speech at the Kennedy Space Center and visits with Musk at pad 40.
June 2010 First flight of the Falcon 9 launches successfully.
July 2011 NASA’s space shuttle flies for the last time, leaving the United States with no way to launch astronauts to space.
August 2011 Blue Origin’s PM-2 test rocket crashes in West Texas.
December 2011 Paul Allen announces plans to build Stratolaunch, the largest plane ever built, which would be used to “air launch” rockets.
May 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft becomes first commercial vehicle to reach the International Space Station.
March 2013 Bezos’s deep-sea expedition recovers the F-1 engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
September 2013 Tensions between SpaceX and Blue Origin heighten over Launch Complex 39A. Musk says chances of “unicorns dancing in the flame duct” are greater than Bezos building a NASA-qualified rocket that can reach orbit.
April 2014 SpaceX sues the US Air Force over right to compete for Pentagon launch contracts.
September 2014 SpaceX and Boeing win contracts to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s contract is worth up to $2.6 billion; Boeing’s, $4.2 billion.
October 2014 Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashes in the Mojave Desert.
April 2015 Blue Origin successfully launches New Shepard to the edge of space for the first time.
June 2015 Falcon 9 explodes during launch to resupply the space station with cargo.
September 2015 Bezos announces that Blue Origin will launch its new orbital rocket from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral.
November 2015 New Shepard lands successfully for the first time.
December 2015 Falcon 9 lands successfully for the first time.
February 2016 Richard Branson unveils new SpaceShipTwo spacecraft.
September 2016 Falcon 9 explodes on the launchpad during fueling.
September 2016 Musk reveals plan to get to Mars during speech at the International Astronautical Congress.
October 2016 Blue Origin retires its first New Shepard booster after it flies and lands for the fifth time in a row.
January 2017 Blue Origin pitches NASA on a plan to fly cargo to the surface of the moon.
February 2017 Musk announces plan to fly two paying citizens around the moon.
September 2017 Musk announces plan to create a base on the moon.
PART I
IMPOSSIBLE
1
“A Silly Way to Die”
MARCH 6, 2003.
This was not how Jeff Bezos wanted to die.
He was seated in the passenger seat of a ruby-red helicopter, surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters—a cowboy, an attorney, and a pilot nicknamed “Cheater” who was best known for being forced at gunpoint to fly into the grounds of the New Mexico state penitentiary to bust out three inmates. It was a little after ten a.m. The sun had burned off the last of the morning chill as the day was heating up fast. The breeze had picked up, and with four passengers, the fully loaded helicopter struggled to lift off out of a canyon near Cathedral Mountain in the warm, thin, high-altitude air of West Texas.
Instead of going up, the helicopter began cruising along the floor of the clearing, moving faster and faster but unable to gain lift above the tree line.
“Oh, shit!” Cheater exclaimed.
In the backseat, Ty Hollan
d, the cowboy who was serving as a guide to take Bezos around the backcountry, looked up from the topographical map he’d been studying. Bezos was sitting directly in front of him in the passenger seat, holding on; Bezos’s attorney, Elizabeth Korrell, was seated next to Holland, behind the pilot. Cheater was jostling the controls, a grimace on his face, as he was “weaving and dodging between the trees,” Bezos recalled.
Holland had been worried about this. The wind picks up at this time of year, swirling across the dead, desiccated desert, scattering the tumbleweed and blowing great plumes of dust. It could be especially bad up here, some 5,000 feet above the desert floor, near Cathedral Mountain, a gradual, barren incline that rises into a towering butte that from a distance looks like an elephant. But it wasn’t so much the wind that was giving them difficulty. It was their weight, and the altitude, and the warm, thin air, all of which had conspired against them.
Just a few minutes earlier, Holland had urged them to get going to the next stop. But Bezos had wanted to walk around, take another look at the land, the view that carries some 80 miles to the Mexican border. The vista, miles upon miles of empty Texas desert, must have been soothing, especially for someone who led as hectic a life as Bezos. The run of the mountainside down into the desert plain, as desolate and dead brown as his hometown of Seattle was dense and lush green. The quiet of the vast expanse. Bezos had said something that morning about how he had spent summers as a kid at his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas. He clearly had an appreciation for this rugged, barren country.
Holland knew little of his charge other than he was a billionaire, and that he had made his money selling books and who knows what else over the Internet on a site known as Amazon.com. He also knew that Bezos’s quiet moment here at the base of Cathedral Mountain was being disturbed by a gathering breeze in the cedar trees with a sinister pitch that was making Holland nervous.
The Space Barons Page 1
