The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  SpaceX soon outgrew the modest footprint it had rented from the city, and then rented more. Soon it grew from 197 acres to 256. Then 631, then to more than 1,000 acres. Finally, SpaceX took over virtually the entire facility, some 4,000 acres, an amphitheater for the growing cacophony Musk was producing 4 miles west of the high school. More room for bigger engines. More smoke and fire. More noise.

  While the company’s headquarters were out in California, “I tell folks if they really want to see the exciting stuff, they should come to Texas,” Musk said. “That’s where we light the fires and where most of our advanced engines are.”

  At a nearby state park, rangers put up signs warning visitors that the roar they would occasionally hear was not, in fact, the end of the world, just SpaceX firing off another engine. “While at Mother Neff State Park you may hear a ‘thunderous’ sound throughout the day or night. If the skies are clear, then no need for concern. The continual thunderous sound is coming from the SpaceX rocket research and development center 6 miles north of the park.”

  Musk’s engineers in Central Texas were making as much of a ruckus as the lawyers he had hired to take on the establishment in Washington. Musk was putting on quite a show—the high-profile lawsuits, the police-escorted parade down Independence Avenue, the congressional hearing, and the crescendo of the fiery rocket tests—hosted by Silicon Valley’s newest boy wonder.

  The company had yet to fly, and it wasn’t clear whether the company would ever amount to anything. Early on, Musk pegged his chance of success at 10 percent. But his full-throttle performance was at least beginning to achieve one of his early goals—to reinvigorate interest in space.

  If nothing else, he was getting people’s attention.

  NEARLY 500 MILES to the west, on the land he had purchased clandestinely, Bezos was quietly building his own rocket company. Obsessed with secrecy, he was as quiet and slow as Musk was loud and fast. While Musk thrust his rocket under the spotlight on Independence Avenue, Bezos kept his company’s work hidden.

  Musk had heard that Bezos had started a rocket company as well, and was curious to learn more. “I think he was concerned that Amazon investors would think he sort of has this weird distraction,” Musk later recalled. The pair had dinner in about 2004, Musk said.

  “We talked about rocket architectures,” Musk later recalled. “It was very clear technically he was barking up the wrong tree, and I tried to give the best advice I could.… Some of the engine architectures they were pursuing were the wrong evolutionary path.”

  Some of the ideas that Bezos proposed, SpaceX had already been tested, Musk said. “Dude, we tried that and that turned out to be really dumb, so I’m telling you don’t do the dumb thing we did,” he recalled saying. “I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored.”

  Unlike Musk, Bezos wasn’t in a rush. He was happy to experiment and fail, to try new ideas, even if they had been tried before and went nowhere. Bezos had vast amounts of patience. This was a man who was, after all, building a ten-thousand-year clock inside of a mountain on his West Texas property that would be “a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” he had written. It would have “a century hand [that] advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out in the millennium” as it kept time for ten thousand years.

  In addition to its logo, a feather, Blue Origin had a coat of arms that it would eventually showcase on the wall of its headquarters in Kent, Washington, outside Seattle. It was an involved piece of art, loaded with symbolism, from Earth to the stars to the velocities needed to reach various altitudes in space. There was also a winged hourglass, representing human mortality.

  “Time is fleeting,” Bezos said once on a tour of the facility. Despite the seemingly plodding steps he would take, he had a sense of urgency and a direction. Only, as he said, “you get there faster when you take one step at a time.”

  The company’s motto was “Gradatim Ferociter” (step by step, ferociously). The phrase appeared across the bottom of the coat of arms. But perhaps none of its symbols was more important than a pair of turtles reaching up toward the stars—an homage to the winner of the race between the tortoise and the hare.

  The turtle was Blue Origin’s mascot, the embodiment of another of Bezos’s favorite sayings, one derived from US Navy SEAL training: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” It was the opposite of SpaceX’s “Head down. Plow through the line.”

  Now Musk and Bezos were playing the parts in a modern version of Aesop’s fable. The hare had burst forward, dashing ahead, kicking up a tumultuous plume of dust, while the tortoise creaked slowly, uttering softly in an I-think-I-can cadence:

  Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

  4

  “Somewhere Else Entirely”

  ON OCTOBER 9, 1957, five days after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first ever satellite into orbit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before an unusually hostile press corps in the Old Executive Office Building. For days, his administration had downplayed the significance of the Soviets’ feat. But by now the country had grown increasingly alarmed, and he needed to respond.

  Eisenhower entered the room at 10:31 a.m., and decided to get right to it, asking, “Do you have any questions for me?”

  The very first question he faced, from United Press International, was blunter than he was used to: “Mr. President, Russia has launched an Earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, none of which this country has done. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do about it?”

  In the midst of the Cold War, the Soviets’ launches were seen as acts of aggression, expressions of military superiority. In a memo to the White House, C. D. Jackson, a former special assistant to the president who had served in the Office of Strategic Services, wrote that it was “an overwhelming important event—against our side.… This will be the first time they have achieved a big scientific jump on us, ostensibly for peaceful scientific purposes, yet with tremendous military overtones. Up to now, it has generally been the other way around.”

  If the Soviet Union could put a satellite into orbit, it’s hold the ultimate high ground and could, many feared, rain down missiles on American cities from space. Life magazine compared Sputnik to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged the country to “respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Then Texas senator Lyndon Johnson fretted that “soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”

  Eisenhower’s answer to the reporter’s pointed question was, in essence, that the country was working on it. The real response to the Soviets would come a few months later, when during his 1958 State of the Union address, he talked about the creation of a new agency within the Defense Department that would have “single control in some of our most advanced development projects.” This agency would be in charge of “anti-missile and satellite technology” at a time when “some of the important new weapons which technology has produced do not fit into any existing service pattern.”

  The Soviets’ launch of Sputnik opened a new frontier—space—one that “creates new difficulties, reminiscent of those attending the advent of the airplane a half century ago,” he said.

  The new organization would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Born from what the secretive agency now calls the “traumatic experience of technological surprise,” ARPA would be a sort of elite special force within the Pentagon made of its best and brightest scientists and engineers. But because it would transcend the traditional services—the army, navy, air force—many in the defense establishment looked askance at it.

  Eisenhower didn’t care. To keep up with the Soviets, the nation needed to move past “harmful service rivalries,” he said.

  Some of the top brass in the Pentagon were charged with single-handedly picking top talent for ARPA, renamed DARPA in 197
2—the “D” for “Defense.” Successful candidates would have to not only be smart and efficient, but they’d also have to be morally strong and confident, able to stand up to generals and admirals that might resent their very presence and consider them outsiders.

  They were encouraged to push boundaries, and create new, futuristic technologies that aimed at keeping the nation several steps ahead.

  “In the 1960s you could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it wasn’t against the law or immoral,” Charles Herzfeld, who directed ARPA from 1965 to 1967, told the Los Angeles Times.

  WILFRED MCNEIL, THE Pentagon’s comptroller, helped recruit top talent to help run the agency. One of his top choices was Lawrence Preston Gise, a stolid and principled former navy lieutenant commander. Born in Texas, Gise had served during World War II, and service records show he was assigned to the USS Neunzer, a destroyer, and then to various administrative jobs. He also served as an assistant director at the Atomic Energy Commission, starting in 1949, and was promoted to assistant director in 1955.

  By the height of the Cold War, Gise found himself in the middle of an agency that was developing the hydrogen bomb. As a young employee, he had participated in a secret meeting in 1950 to discuss the development of the bomb with some of the agency’s top officials, including its then-chairman Gordon Dean.

  Gise was intrigued by the possibilities of ARPA, and what it represented at the dawn of the Space Age. But he was also aware that political pressure was mounting against its formation. With a family to support, he hedged his bets, making sure he would have a landing spot, just in case this experimental agency didn’t work out.

  “So the agency was controversial even before it was formed,” Gise said in a 1975 history of ARPA. “My deal with McNeil was I would come over and handle the administrative side of the business with the assurance that if the agency went up in blue smoke that he would absorb me in his immediate office, and he had a job set up for that purpose. But it was that tenuous back in those days.”

  Gise was well respected by the agency’s director, Roy Johnson, who had left a high-paying job as an executive at General Electric for the post at ARPA. His goal was to ensure the country caught up and passed the Soviets, focusing much of his energy on space.

  “Johnson believed that he had personally been given unlimited authority by the Secretary to produce results,” according to the ARPA history. “He really thought that he was supposed to be the czar of the space program.… Johnson perceived that ARPA’s job was to put up satellites. The space program became his principal interest.”

  After three years at ARPA, Gise was lured back to the Atomic Energy Commission, which offered him a job in top management. But he continued to work alongside the agency, collaborating on an endeavor known as the Vela Project, which was designed to detect nuclear explosions from space through a high-altitude satellite system. In a message to his colleagues, Gise reported that “ARPA is implementing on a very urgent basis a program to establish its capability for detection of Argus effects”—an apparent reference to Operation Argus, three high-altitude nuclear test explosions over the South Atlantic Ocean in 1958.

  Gise would continue to serve at the Atomic Energy Commission until 1968, when he wanted to close a factory that politicians wanted to keep open. The politicians prevailed, and Gise retired to his ranch in South Texas.

  He was young, just fifty-three years old. But he was looking forward to life on the ranch. Plus, he had a young grandson to tend to, a remarkable little boy with big ears and a wide smile, who shared his middle name:

  Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

  IN ADDITION TO being a top defense official, Gise was a dedicated family man, who looked after Bezos’s mother, Jackie, after she got pregnant with Jeff. She was just seventeen when Jeff was born and Jackie married his father, Ted Jorgensen. Gise supported them, flying the couple to Mexico to get married, then hosting another ceremony at their house.

  He paid his son-in-law’s tuition at the University of New Mexico, but Jorgensen dropped out. Then, Gise tried to land him a police department job, but that didn’t work out, either.

  Neither did the marriage. The young parents soon got divorced, and Jackie took her son and moved back in with her parents in Albuquerque.

  Jackie got a job at the bank of New Mexico and met a hardworking man there named Miguel Bezos, known as Mike, who had fled Cuba shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. They fell in love and got married when Jeff was four. Mike Bezos adopted him and raised him as his own. Gise made Jorgensen promise to stay away.

  “I’ve never been curious about him,” Bezos told Time about his biological father. “My real father is the guy who raised me.”

  Bezos’s passion for space started when he was five years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As young as he was, he could tell he was watching something historic.

  “It really was a seminal moment for me,” he said. “I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents. Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement. They know something extraordinary is happening. That definitely became a passion of mine.”

  The family lived in New Mexico and Texas and later in Florida. But after school got out for the year, Bezos was shipped off to the ranch, where he spent every summer from the ages of four to sixteen.

  Located in Cotulla, a small town about 90 miles south of San Antonio, it was rural and isolated, a place where Bezos learned the value of self-reliance from his grandfather. “Pop,” as Bezos called him, was patient and gentle and taught his grandson to live a rancher’s life, fixing windmills and laying pipe. On the ranch, Bezos learned to vaccinate and castrate cattle, and brand them with the ranch’s Lazy G logo. And when the D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer broke, Pop and his eager grandson built a crane to lift the huge gears out.

  It was, Bezos recalled in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit, “an incredible, incredible experience. Ranchers, and anybody I think who works in rural areas, they learn how to be very self-reliant. And whether they’re farmers, whatever it is they’re doing, they have to rely on themselves for a lot of things.”

  Bezos spent a lot of time with his grandfather, who he said was “always incredibly respectful of me even when I was a little kid. And would entertain long conversations with me about technology and space and anything I was interested in.”

  His grandparents were also members of a “Caravan Club,” striking out across the United States and Canada, sometimes taking their inquisitive grandson along for the ride.

  “We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers,” Bezos said in 2010 during a graduation speech at Princeton. “I loved and worshipped my grandparents, and I really looked forward to these trips.”

  He recalled one trip, when he was about ten, “rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car.” Pop Gise was at the wheel. Bezos’s grandmother, Mattie, was beside him, smoking as she always did on these trips, filling the car with a smell that Bezos couldn’t stand.

  Bezos remembered an antismoking campaign advertisement he’d recently heard about the perils of smoking that said that every puff takes about two minutes off your life. Even at age ten, Bezos loved coming up with math calculations in his head, estimating how far they’d be able to travel on a tank of gas, what they’d spend at the grocery store. And with his grandmother puffing away on the front passenger seat, and an open road with little else to occupy his expansive mind, Bezos decided to do the math.

  “I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on,” he told the Princeton graduates. “When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, ‘At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!’”

  He expec
ted his grandparents would be awed by his precociousness. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.”

  But instead the car was silent, except for the sound of his grandmother’s sobs.

  “While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway,” Bezos said. “He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow.

  “Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be.

  “We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’”

  Bezos spent his summers on the ranch, even though the stifling heat would often drive them to huddle indoors. They’d watch soap operas. Days of Our Lives was a favorite. His grandparents encouraged playing board games and reading, and Bezos discovered that the county library, which was not much larger than a one-room schoolhouse, had an extensive science fiction collection that had been donated by a town resident.

  The library “had maybe a few hundred science fiction novels. All of the classics,” Bezos recalled. “There was a whole shelf of them there, and over several summers I worked my way through that collection.”