The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  The visits to the library “started a love affair for me with people like [Robert] Heinlein and [Isaac] Asimov, and all the well-known science fiction authors that persists to this day.”

  The ranch, where the big sky opened up dark and deep, was an ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.

  AT HOME, BEZOS spent a lot of time watching Star Trek, his favorite. But in the fourth grade, when he was nine years old, he figured out how to play a Star Trek game on a computer at school. It was 1974, before the advent of the personal computer; his elementary school had one mainframe with a teletype connected to an acoustic modem. Not that anyone at the school knew how to use it. “But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing,” he recalled, eventually figuring out that it had been preprogrammed with the Star Trek game.

  “And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek,” he said.

  Later, he’d even named his dog Kamala, after the character on Star Trek.

  By the time he got to high school, Bezos’s passion for space merged with his prodigious intellect and curiosity. In high school, he wrote an essay titled “The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Aging Rate of the Common Housefly” that won him a trip to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

  His idea was to test how the weightless environment in space reduced stress on the body’s systems. Bezos thought to start out with a creature with a very short life span—the common housefly—to test whether you could see any biological changes in a short amount of time aboard the space shuttle, compared with a control group of flies kept on the ground.

  He was a finalist, not a winner, so NASA never did fly his experiment to space. But he and his physics professor got to spend a couple of days at Marshall. It didn’t have the cachet of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the astronauts launched into space, or the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they trained. Rather, it was where NASA built its rockets, the home to many of its most accomplished engineers and sharpest minds.

  When he was “really young I wanted to be an astronaut,” he said. “I went through many phases and wanted to do many different things. I wanted to be an archaeologist—and this was pre–Indiana Jones. I didn’t have Indy on the mind. Many kids sort of have ideas of what you want to do and so on and the thing that never went away was my fascination with space. And then I realized I didn’t want to be an astronaut. I was really more interested in the engineering side of it.”

  Marshall was the perfect place, then, for someone as eager and inquisitive as Bezos, an inveterate tinkerer who said that “our garage was basically science fair central.” His mother joked that she was singlehandedly keeping Radio Shack in business by buying him parts for the projects he was building in the garage.

  “Will you please get your parts list straight before we go?” she’d chastise him. “I can’t handle more than one trip to Radio Shack per day.” He had such concentration that as a toddler in Montessori School, his teachers would have to pick him up—in his chair—to keep him moving from task to task.

  Under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, one of the fathers of rocketry, the Marshall Space Flight Center was where NASA built the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn V rocket to the moon. The engines were massive, towering nearly 20 feet high and more than 12 feet wide, and weighed 18,000 pounds. They were monuments to engineering that in a cluster of five burned through liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants at more than 15 metric tons per second. Bezos was in awe of their power, 1.5 million pounds of thrust, and the intricate mechanics that went into the most powerful liquid fuel engine ever to fly.

  The trip only strengthened his enthusiasm for space. If he’d fed himself a steady diet of science fiction fantasy in the books he’d devoured as a kid, now he was exposed to actual hardware—the equipment that made space dreams real.

  “He raved about it,” said Joshua Weinstein, a friend from high school.

  At Miami Palmetto High, their class was full of exceptionally talented kids who would go on to great things. “It was a hard class to stand out in, but Jeff did,” Weinstein said. Bezos did so academically, graduating first in his class. He enjoyed school, was a voracious reader, and wanted to please his teachers.

  “I was very difficult to punish for my parents because they would send me to my room, and I was always happy to go to my room because I would just read,” he said. Once he was laughing too loudly, and lost his library privileges, which he said “was really inconvenient for me.”

  But he also had a cunning, rebellious wit, laying booby traps across the house. “I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have 30 pounds of nails drop on their heads or something,” he said.

  Weinstein remembered how Bezos had been carrying on—loudly—when a stern teacher named Bill Henderson chastised him.

  “Mr. Bezos!” he bellowed.

  “It’s Jeff to you,” Bezos bellowed back. “Only my friends call me Mr. Bezos!”

  The class broke out into laughter—and the teacher did, too.

  As valedictorian, his speech at graduation was about space. For even a brilliant eighteen-year-old, it was a precocious glimpse into the future. He talked about plans to colonize space, to build habitats like space hotels, and the day when millions of people were living among the stars. Earth had limited resources and so his idea was to get humanity off its surface, into space so as to protect the planet. He concluded by saying, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”

  “The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he told the Miami Herald at the time, saying it should be designated as a national park.

  Space, and humanity’s future in it, was something he had been thinking and reading about for some time.

  “He said the future of mankind is not on this planet, because we might be struck by something, and we better have a spaceship out there,” Rudolph Werner, the father of Bezos’s high school girlfriend, told Wired magazine.

  THE TALK OF space hotels, with amusement parks, yachts, and colonies for 2 to 3 million people in orbit—all a way to help preserve Earth—these were not the elements of a normal high school graduation speech. They were the science fiction–fueled musings of one of “Gerry’s kids”—the devotees of Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton physics professor and space visionary, whose book The High Frontier became a manifesto for such enthusiasts as Bezos.

  Years before Bezos gave his graduation speech, the professor had gained widespread attention for his plans to colonize space. In 1974, the New York Times had covered a conference O’Neill hosted at Princeton, gathering some of the nation’s leading engineers. The article came in the post-Apollo hangover, when NASA’s budget had been gutted and interest in space waned. But the piece carried a sensational headline: “Proposal for Human Colonies in Space Is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now.” It helped put O’Neill, and his ideas, on the map.

  “The initial goal would be construction of a small colony of about 2,000 people at a site, along with the orbital path of the moon, known as the L-5 libration point,” the article read. It quoted O’Neill as saying that most “dirty” industry could move into space, allowing the preservation of Earth, which, O’Neill said, would become a “worldwide park, a beautiful place to visit for vacation”—words that Bezos would echo in his graduation speech years later.

  In 1977, the year The High Frontier was published, O’Neill appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk about the possibility of space colonies. That year, Dan Rather also profiled O’Neill on 60 Minutes, offering up the professor as the father of the next Space Age.

  “Now some serious scientists are talking about whole colonies in space,” Rather said during his opening. “Not on the moon, Mars or Jupiter, but on man-made planets. And populated not by scientists and astronauts alone, but by hundreds of thousands of jus
t plain folks looking to get away from an overcrowded Earth running short of energy, water and clean air.

  “Far-fetched? That’s what we said twenty years ago about walking on the moon. Today, nothing seems far-fetched.”

  O’Neill offered a special kind of hope at a time of despair over limited resources. His ideas were fantastic, hard to believe and easy to deride. Colonies in space were outlandish, ridiculous. But O’Neill showed they could be real. He had done the math. He had drawn the designs. He even made them part of his curriculum.

  On campus, O’Neill was a popular professor, who was warm and welcoming with students, if eccentric, with severely cut bangs and a thin, angular face that made him look a little like Star Trek’s Spock, one of Bezos’s favorite characters. O’Neill strove to make his introductory course, Physics 112, applicable “to contemporary (your lifetime) problems,” he wrote in the notes for his first-day-of-classes lecture. “Not historical. Emphasis on physics relevant to present-day civilization.”

  For O’Neill, there was no greater question than how to move civilization into space. He had focused his career on this challenge, and this was the problem he wanted his students to wrestle with. And so his exams were peppered with questions asking them to calculate the escape velocity for Phobos, a moon of Mars, how to turn asteroids into habitats, and the energy requirements for space colonies:

  “Assume that a small colony of 5,000 people is located in the asteroid belt, 2.7 times as far from the Sun as is the Earth. What must be the diameter of the parabolic mirror used by the colony to bring its land area of 3×105 m2 up to the same sunlight intensity that the Earth receives on a clear day?”

  Even though Bezos arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1982 wanting to major in physics, he never took O’Neill’s introductory class. Bezos was on the advanced track right from the beginning. He switched to computer science and electrical engineering after he got to quantum mechanics and realized that he was “never going to be a great physicist,” he said. “There were three or four people in the class whose brains were so clearly wired differently to process these highly abstract concepts.”

  But at Princeton, his interest in space was as strong as ever, and he was a regular at O’Neill’s seminars, which were open to anyone on campus. O’Neill would “encourage those very capable students who weren’t excited by ordinary coursework, inviting them to extra seminars that looked at applying physics to large-scale projects for the benefit of humanity,” O’Neill’s friend Morris Hornik recalled.

  At those seminars, O’Neill posed a pointed question to the students: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”

  After Apollo, many thought Mars should be the next destination, and that humans should tick off visiting the planets of the solar system like racking up states on a cross-country road trip. But O’Neill rejected this idea.

  “We are so used to living on a planetary surface that it is a wrench for us to even consider continuing our normal human activities in another location,” he wrote in The High Frontier.

  The key question was “whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable: the best site is ‘somewhere else entirely.’”

  BY THE TIME Bezos was a senior, he became the president of the Princeton chapter of a student organization called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. SEDS, as it was known, was started a few years before at MIT by Peter Diamandis, who wanted to increase awareness of space—and would eventually go on to found the Ansari X Prize, a 2004 contest between private companies to launch the first-ever commercial vehicle into space.

  At Princeton, SEDS was a small and somewhat lonely group. Despite the popularity of Star Wars, which had come out a few years before, space was not high on anyone’s list. So the kinds of people it attracted were die-hard space geeks, who did not always fit into the rigid social hierarchy of one of the nation’s most exclusive schools.

  Karl Stapelfeldt, who became the chapter’s president, was two years ahead of Bezos at Princeton and remembered him as being an “interested, loyal SEDS member.” The group would meet once or twice a month, raise money for field trips to museums.

  “We’d get together and watch shuttle launches, all gathered around the TV,” Stapelfeldt recalled. “I always liked to say it was kind of a NASA ROTC. We were all interested in being involved in the space program in some way.”

  Stapelfeldt did. After receiving a doctorate at Caltech, he eventually became the chief scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program.

  SEDS, and its relentlessly forward-looking, positive message, was just the sort of thing that interested Kevin Polk, who was a year behind Bezos at Princeton. An inquisitive and thoughtful student, Polk was a devotee of O’Neill and science fiction author Robert Heinlein.

  “It seemed to me we had an infinite future in space,” he said.

  When Polk showed up at a SEDS meeting in the spring of 1985, Bezos had become the group’s president and could tell how enthusiastic Polk was about space.

  “Jeff and two other guys just sort of looked at one another and said, “Great! You’re vice president.”

  Polk wanted to prove himself by fueling interest in the group and attracting a large crowd to the group’s meetings. He had a friend, an accomplished illustrator, design posters advertising SEDS’s first meeting of the school year. The posters depicted the tower of Nassau Hall, the university’s venerable administration building, blasting off into space with the Princeton Tiger mascot waving in the foreground.

  For a student-run group, the fliers were “lavishly rendered,” Polk recalled, and Bezos was touched by it—and the note from the illustrator saying she hoped it would suit their needs.

  “His jaw dropped and he said, ‘What a service-oriented individual your friend is,’” Polk recalled.

  The posters worked. More than thirty people came to the meeting. Bezos was pleased to be holding court in the front of the room, talking excitedly about the mission of SEDS and O’Neillian notions of spanning out into space by the millions. Years of reading science fiction came pouring out in a soliloquy that was even further out there than his high school graduation speech.

  One way to colonize space, he said, was to transform asteroids into habitats. Yes, he said, people could hollow out the giant rocks, and then live in them. All you had to do, he explained, was use solar mirrors to melt and soften the asteroid, then once it had turned to lava, you injected a massive tungsten tube into the center and flood it with water.

  Hitting the molten core, the water would immediately turn to steam, inflating the asteroid like a balloon—and, voilà, there was your habitat. The idea had been around for some time, since futurist Dandridge Cole wrote about turning asteroids into habitats in the 1950s. But as Bezos carried on, a student in the back of the class interrupted Bezos, jumping to her feet with anger.

  “How dare you rape the universe!” she shouted. She then stormed out. All eyes turned to Bezos, who didn’t miss a beat.

  “Did I hear her right?” he said. “Did she really just defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?”

  O’NEILL DIED IN 1992, and never saw his vision get close to becoming reality. But he had touched off a movement by offering hope, his friend Morris Hornik recalled during his memorial service:

  “That vast, almost Earth-like colonies could be constructed out of the materials and energy always available in space. That these could become self-sufficient, and that, in his words, ‘The human race stands now on the threshold of a new frontier, whose richness surpasses a thousand fold that of the western world 500 years ago.’”

  By then, Bezos had left Princeton, moved to New York, where he worked in finance. He eventually took a job at D. E. Shaw & Co., a Manhattan-based hedge fund. Being mired in the cutthroat world of Wall Street didn’t leave a lot of time to ruminate about space
or to carry on his O’Neillian dreams.

  But in 1993, when he was twenty-nine, he went to an auction at Soth­eby’s that was selling artifacts from Russia’s space program. Amazon didn’t yet exist, and Bezos couldn’t keep up with the deep-pocketed collectors that Sotheby’s attracted. Still, he had his eye on a chess set designed to be played in zero gravity. The set, which the catalog described as “a specially-designed mechanical (non-magnetic) chess-set for use in spaceflight,” had flown on Russian missions in 1968 and 1969. Sotheby’s expected it to sell for between $1,500 and $2,000.

  It was a relatively low-cost item in a catalog that featured the first eating utensils used in space, which sold for $6,900, a trio of moon rocks that went for $442,500, and a space capsule that brought in $1.7 million.

  Bezos bid on the chess set, but lost out to an anonymous buyer who was vacuuming up many of the items. Still, there was another item that caught Bezos’s eye—a hammer that, according to the catalog, was designed “for no rebound of the striking part of the hammer after the stroke, which is extremely important for its use under weightless conditions.”

  It “was a really cool object,” Bezos said later, “because they hollowed out and put metal filings inside the head of the hammer so that when you strike something it doesn’t recoil as much.”

  But he lost out on that, too. Bezos simply didn’t have the money to keep pace with more moneyed bidders. Space, and even its artifacts, seemed as far away and inaccessible as ever.

  AFTER STUDYING THE staggering growth of the Internet, Bezos left New York for Seattle in 1994 to start Amazon. The company’s success was like hitting the lottery; at least that’s how Bezos described it. And with his blitzkrieg through the ranks of the Fortune billionaire’s list, he was freed to pursue almost anything. To those who knew him well it came as no surprise that what he wanted to do more than anything was to start a space company.

  Not that he talked about it much. Even his high school friend Joshua Weinstein knew nothing about Blue Origin until reading about it in the news in 2004. Which was odd. Because he had just spent an afternoon in Washington with his old buddy Bezos at the National Air and Space Museum, who said not a word about his ambitions in space.