The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Bezos had a scoop for the Van Horn Advocate and its circulation of one thousand: he was buying all the land for his space company, a little-known venture called Blue Origin, based outside Seattle. Since its founding in 2000, Bezos had kept the company extremely secret, telling virtually no one what its plans were. The company wasn’t listed in the phone book. Its employees told neighbors they were working on scientific research. And one industry official told the Economist magazine that “everyone I know who knows anything about it isn’t allowed to talk about it. And please, please don’t quote me on that.”

  After reports of the helicopter crash, Brad Stone, then a young reporter at Newsweek, became interested in what Bezos was up to. He found filings for Blue Operations LLC in Washington state records and visited a warehouse in Seattle’s industrial area late one evening, as he wrote in The Everything Store, his book about Amazon. After sitting outside the facility for an hour, he scooped up a bunch of documents from a trash bin, which included a coffee-stained mission statement to create, as Stone wrote, “an enduring presence in space.”

  Stone reached out to Bezos for comment, but Bezos declined to elaborate on Blue Origin’s goals for Stone’s Newsweek story, titled “Bezos in Space.”

  “It’s way too premature for Blue to say anything or comment on anything because we haven’t done anything worthy of comment,” Bezos wrote in an e-mail. He did, however, seek to dispel one falsehood—that somehow he was doing this out of a frustration with NASA, which many had criticized for going backward after the Apollo moon missions.

  “NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA,” he wrote. “The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds?” Bezos was five when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969.

  FOR A WHILE, the company’s only employee was Bezos’s friend Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author. They had met in the mid-1990s at a dinner party, where they had started talking about rockets. While the pair may have “bored everyone else at the table,” Stephenson said, they hit it off. “It was super obvious he knew a lot.”

  As their friendship grew, they spent time launching model rockets in Seattle’s Magnuson Park overlooking Lake Washington. Once, one of the rocket’s parachutes got tangled in a tree as it fell back down, “and before I knew it, he had scampered into the tree and had literally gone out on a limb,” Stephenson recalled. It wasn’t very strong, so Bezos tried “shaking the limb with his body weight.” His wife, MacKenzie, was pleading with him to come down, when a dog walker came by and knocked it out with a stick.

  In 1999, Bezos and Stephenson went to see a matinee of October Sky, the film about writer and NASA engineer Homer Hickam. Bezos smuggled peanut butter sandwiches into the theater by hiding them in his jacket, and afterward, in a coffee shop, he said that he had always wanted to start a space company.

  “And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you start it today?’” Stephenson recalled.

  Why not start it today? What was he waiting for? He’d been fascinated with space his whole life and now he was finally in a position to do something about it.

  “Things started immediately after that,” Stephenson said.

  Stephenson would be the first hire, and he introduced some friends to Bezos, who hired them as well. They were “the sorts of people who would be good at rapidly getting their heads around weird applied physicist ideas and evaluating them,” Stephenson recalled. Their titles were simple and egalitarian: “member, technical staff.” Stephenson held a variety of roles “as prosaic as punching down Ethernet cable, operating a plate grinder, and passivating rocket parts (which means making sure they don’t have any residue that would react with hydrogen peroxide),” he wrote on his website.

  Bezos acquired the building at 13 South Nevada Street in Seattle’s industrial section, where they formed a sort of think tank dedicated to space. Stephenson worked part-time, writing in the mornings and then working at the facility during the afternoons. Bezos kept tabs on the group, consulting with them frequently and coming in for meetings one Saturday a month. Their first goal was to explore other ways of getting to space besides using chemical rockets, a technology that hadn’t improved much in the four previous decades. For the first three years “we exhaustively looked at every known alternative to chemical rockets and we even invented some previously unthought-of alternatives to chemical rockets,” Bezos said.

  To develop a whole new technology, they’d consider any possibility, no matter how crazy it sounded. “When you’re brainstorming you have to accept wild ideas,” Bezos said.

  The wildest idea was probably the bullwhip. An ancient technology but an amazing one: as the loop of the whip unfurled into the distance, it would generate so much velocity that it could actually break the sound barrier.

  “How are you able with just your arm to get something moving above the speed of sound, well, it’s conservation of momentum,” Bezos said later. Momentum is mass times velocity. As the whip gradually got thinner from the handle to the tip, its mass decreased, meaning that to conserve its momentum, the velocity would have to increase. So much so that the whip’s trademark crack was actually a sonic boom.

  “And so we said, ‘Why don’t we just make a giant one of those?’” Bezos continued. “It would be a gigantic bull whip where you would put the thing you wanted to fling into orbit at the tip of the whip. So, picture a space capsule or a payload or whatever you wanted to put on the tip of the whip.”

  There would still need to be a rocket engine on whatever was being flung into space, to give it the velocity needed to reach orbit. But the speed of the whip would allow the spacecraft to carry more mass, and farther. The whip would obviously have to be gigantic—“freight trains would have to whip this thing,” he explained. “It had all sorts of practical problems. It’s the kind of thing you could dispose of as a credible idea in a few hours of analysis. So as far as we know, nobody had ever considered that.”

  So, instead, they then studied what Bezos called “much more reasonable things with much more seriousness.”

  Such as lasers.

  There would be a field of lasers on the ground that would keep a constant beam on the rocket as it raced across the sky, heating the liquid hydrogen propellant, which has a very high specific impulse, or efficiency. The company was serious enough about it that it hired a consultant, Jordin Kare, who prepared a study. The problem was that to generate the necessary energy, you’d need a massive field of lasers, “so, this is a little impractical from a cost point of view,” Bezos said.

  But, in theory, it would work. And maybe if laser technology improves there could be laser-beamed rockets shooting off into space. But not now.

  If lasers didn’t work, maybe giant space cannons would—“ballistic solutions where you have big gun barrels of various kinds,” Bezos said, blasting objects into space as if in a Jules Verne novel. This, obviously, would not be good “for humans because the G [gravitational] forces are too big,” he said. But it could work for “getting cargo up to space.”

  So, they looked at railgun technology, which was being researched by the Pentagon for weapons that could fire projectiles at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound. (For comparison, a Hellfire missile travels at Mach 1.) Instead of using gunpowder, railguns use electromagnetic pulses; the projectiles hit with such force that they don’t need to be armed with explosives.

  After three years of research, Bezos and his small team ultimately decided that “chemical rockets actually are the best solution,” he said. “They’re not just a good solution, they’re actually an awesome solution for launch.”

  But there was a caveat: they had to be reusable. Rockets had been to this point largely expendable. The first stages would boost their payloads into space, separate, and fall back to Earth where they would crash into the ocean, never to be used again. Each launc
h would require an entirely new rocket, and rocket engines, crafted carefully for a single launch. They were like honeybees sacrificing their lives to use their stinger a single glorious time. All in to the death. But what if rockets didn’t need to be that way? What if they could fly again and again, like airplanes, instead of ditching into the depth of the ocean, where they would corrode and waste away?

  This, Bezos thought, was the solution they had been searching for.

  “When the company made a decision to stick with a more tried-and-true approach,” Stephenson wrote, “I found other ways to make myself semi-useful, largely in the realm of trajectory analysis, until I decided to make an amicable withdrawal in late 2006.”

  In his novel Seveneves, he even wrote Blue Origin and the bullwhip concept into the narrative, and he dedicated the book “To Jeff,” among others.

  FOR ITS FIRST few years, Bezos had said virtually nothing publicly about Blue. Until this sudden trip to the Van Horn Advocate. Sitting across from Simpson, the editor, Bezos laid out the company’s plans. The news broke when the Advocate published its story on January 13, 2005, under the headline “Blue Origin Picks Culberson County for Space Site.”

  “Blue Origin, the Seattle-based business venture today announced its plans to build and operate a privately funded aerospace testing and operations center on the Corn Ranch, north of Van Horn,” Simpson’s report began. The front-page story ran next to an ad for the 56th Annual County Livestock Show.

  It quoted Bezos as giving a canned corporate line that Texas “has been a long-standing leader in the aerospace industry, and we are very excited about the possibility of locating here.”

  But Simpson’s article also contained some insight into Blue’s goals, especially its desire to develop “vehicles and technologies that will help enable an enduring human presence in space.” Blue intended to build rockets that would take three passengers or more on suborbital flights to the edge of space. The story didn’t use the phrase space tourism, but that’s what Bezos was describing, and what he had in mind.

  Blue’s rockets would also do something different—something no rocket had ever done before. After blasting off from the launchpad, they would, as Simpson wrote, “land vertically.”

  Reusable rockets were a dream that had eluded the space community for years. The government had tried this, and failed. Its Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, rocket had flown several times in the 1990s, flying to several thousand feet, before touching down softly. But never had they flown to space and then landed.

  Stephenson was convinced it was achievable. “How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960? What has changed?” he said. “The engines can be somewhat better, but they’re still chemical rocket engines. What’s different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by those technologies that existed in 2000 that didn’t exist in 1960. So the story added up on that level.”

  In the interview with the Van Horn Advocate, Bezos made it clear that “it may take several years for this project to get in high gear.” But his team was patient, and had hired some of the best engineers in the country, some of whom had been involved in the DC-X program and other private space ventures that had failed. He also stressed that the money for the venture was coming out of his pocket—not the taxpayers’.

  “This is a privately funded, non-governmental enterprise,” he told Simpson.

  By now he was worth $1.7 billion, climbing higher on the Forbes list of the country’s richest people. Earlier, scientists at the California Institute of Technology had invited Bezos and Stephenson to lunch, as part of a fund-raising drive for a new telescope. But they were not successful in getting Bezos to open his wallet.

  “It became obvious that Blue Origin was where Bezos was putting his money,” said Richard Ellis, a Caltech scientist at the time, who had sat next to Blue Origin employees at the lunch. “Those guys wanted to sell the concept of human space travel. They said, ‘If we think outside the box, there’s going to be a revolution.’”

  The revolution would begin in West Texas, where Bezos would eventually acquire 331,859 acres, according to land records. That’s nearly half the landmass of the state of Rhode Island. “When you are building rockets and launching rockets, it’s nice to have a bit of a buffer,” he once told the television host Charlie Rose.

  He had that and more now. A ranch for his family, not unlike his grandfather’s in South Texas where he’d spent summers and learned the value of self-reliance. A place to launch and land rockets, large enough to hold even the biggest of dreams. A place to stretch out toward the stars.

  2

  The Gamble

  THE DEEP-POCKETED SUCKERS who show up on the Las Vegas strip with more money than skill and view poker as mere entertainment rather than big business, are known to the serious players as whales. Fat, fleshy targets. A chance to score big. So when one wades unsuspecting into the shark-filled strip, word spreads.

  When Andy Beal arrived at the Bellagio in early 2001, Vegas had never seen a whale quite like him. Tall and broad with bright eyes and a gentle smile, he sat down at the high-stakes poker table with a tall stack of chips, eager to play. The blinds were $80 and $160, meaning the minimum bet to stay in the hand was $160. After a few raises, the pot would quickly grow to well over a thousand dollars.

  Beal played a few hands and grew bored. He had flown in from Dallas to gamble big, and was itching for some action. “Doesn’t anybody play higher around here?” he asked.

  With that, the whale made himself known. Fresh meat at the Bellagio. The next day, the professional players were waiting for him to show up, including some who had competed in the World Series of Poker. They started with a $2,000 minimum bet. But after about a half-hour, Beal was getting itchy.

  “Can we play bigger?” he asked.

  So, they raised the stakes to $6,000. That was fine for a while, then Beal asked to go higher, this time to $8,000.

  At the table, Jennifer Harman was starting to sweat. She was a pro who would go on to win two World Series of Poker bracelets, but she had never played such high stakes. This whale was aggressive, his style unrestrained, and he rarely folded, driving up the pot every time. With so much money at stake, the pressure got to even the veteran players who couldn’t keep pace.

  “This was not a comfort zone for anyone in the game,” Harman recalled later. “Because this is the highest that anyone has ever played.”

  This whale was smart and cunning and relentless. He pressed the one advantage he had, his immense wealth, until the exorbitant piles on the table stretched them thin. They were beginning to think maybe he was not a whale after all.

  In fact, he was a billionaire real estate investor whose Texas bank was one of the most lucrative in the country. Beal had dropped out of college but was a genius who dabbled in number theory as an amateur mathematician. After studying Fermat’s Last Theorem, a problem that has baffled mathematicians since 1637, Beal came up with a problem of his own. Given its complexity, it eventually got the attention of scholars in the field, who dubbed it the Beal Conjecture and were stunned that someone with no formal training could devise such a problem. (The conjecture was to prove that if Ax +By = Cz, where A, B, C, x, y, and z are positive integers and x, y, and z are all greater than 2, then A, B, and C must have a common prime factor.)

  “It is remarkable that occasionally someone working in isolation and with no connections to the mathematical world formulates a problem so close to current research activity,” wrote R. Daniel Mauldin, a professor of mathematics at North Texas University.

  In 1997, the American Mathematical Society sponsored a contest for whoever could solve the problem, and Beal offered a $5,000 prize. The pot grew to $10,000, then $15,000, as Beal pledged to increase it by $5,000 every year it went unsolved up to $50,000. In 2013, the problem was still unsolved and Beal upped the jackpot to $1 million.

  At the Bellagio, the pros, who included s
ome of the biggest names in poker, such as Doyle Brunson and Ted Forrest, had decided that to afford to compete against him, they’d have to pool their resources and take turns playing the Dallas banker one-on-one. Together they formed what they called the Corporation. But during their first match, Beal wiped them out, winning some $5 million.

  “We’re broke,” Brunson said. “Congratulations. Go back to Texas. Come back another time, and maybe we’ll have some money to play you.”

  But Beal didn’t want to go home. He had come to Vegas to play.

  After losing $5 million, most people would have thought better about taking the bait. But the Corporation was made up of people who gambled for a living, and they couldn’t resist the possible upside. They reached out to their contacts, and soon were able to borrow tens of thousands of dollars each from people who knew they were good for it. Within the hour, $1 million was delivered to the Bellagio high-stakes poker room. The Corporation was back in business—now more familiar with Beal’s particular brand of play, his style and cadence. After an epic all-nighter, the Corporation won back its $5 million.

  Over the years, Beal would return to Las Vegas again and again, taking on the Corporation in some of the most legendary games in Vegas history. During one trip, in 2004, Beal won $11.7 million. On another run, he took $13.6 million from the pros. But later lost $16.6 million in a game.

  What the Corporation didn’t know was that the games were a form of catharsis for Beal, a balm against a much bigger loss, where the stakes had been far higher and more significant. Beal had recently started a space company—without any experience in aerospace or engineering or rocket science. Skeptics said he was crazy. That starting a space company from scratch couldn’t be done. That he was going to waste a fortune on what was little more than a midlife crisis.