By chance, Bezos and Weinstein just happened to both be visiting the nation’s capital at the same time. Growing up outside of Miami, they’d lived a block apart. “I grew up in his house, and he in mine,” Weinstein said. But now they lived on separate coasts—Bezos in Seattle, where he ran Amazon; Weinstein in Maine, where he was a reporter at the Portland Press-Herald.
Given his lifelong passion for space, it was natural that Bezos played the role of docent at the museum that day.
“He already knew everything about everything,” Weinstein said.
Weinstein kept waiting for people to recognize his companion. He was rich and famous, and had been Time magazine’s person of the year five years before. But amazingly, no one seemed to recognize him. Or if people did, they left him alone, allowing him to wander around like any other tourist.
Years later, as his fame and fortune grew, Bezos would be followed around by security, men in suits with squiggly wires in their ears, part of the $1.6 million Amazon spent annually to keep him safe. But now he blended in with the midweek crowd, quiet and unassuming, comfortably anonymous.
There were the massive F-1 engines on display that powered the Saturn V rocket to the moon. The lunar roving vehicle. There was also a series of Russian space paraphernalia, donated by the anonymous buyer who had outbid Bezos a decade before on the chess set.
Now a few of the artifacts were at the museum, and the donor had revealed himself: former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. “He didn’t let me win anything,” Bezos said years later. Years later, Sotheby’s came into possession of another recoilless hammer. This time, the auction house gave it to Bezos as a present.
AS THEY TOURED the museum, Bezos didn’t mention his unsuccessful foray into space antiquities. Nor did he mention that he had started a space company of his own. He kept it under wraps, as secretive as when he purchased all that property in West Texas.
Blue Origin’s website at the time was low-key, revealing little. Bezos’s name didn’t appear anywhere on it, though it did give away that the company’s goal was creating an O’Neillian “enduring human presence in space.”
By mid-2004, the company had more than doubled the size of its design team, hiring some of the country’s best aerospace engineers from the space shuttle program, Kistler, and the DC-X program, the government’s attempt to build a rocket that could take off and land.
“If you have a genuine passion for space and are excited by the prospect of building space hardware, we’d like to hear from you,” the site said.
But its “Jobs” page ad was less welcoming, even arrogant. Applicants needed to be “highly qualified and dedicated individuals who meet the following criteria:
“You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we’re trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs.
“You must want to work in a small company. If you can happily work at a large aerospace company, you’re probably not the right person.
“Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme. We insist on keeping our team size small (measured in the dozens), which means each person occupying a spot must be among the most technically gifted in his or her field.
“We are building real hardware—not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder.”
For years, Bezos had been limited to being merely a dreamer lost in science fiction books, O’Neill’s teachings, his grandfather’s stories. But now he had decided to see what he could do about making those fantasies reality. About one day a week, he was stealing away from his day job at Amazon to quietly indulge his other passion—Blue Origin, where his team was quietly pursuing the hard work of building a transportation network to the stars, creating the heavy-lifting infrastructure that would open the cosmos the way the railroads helped open the American West.
Except for a few flights a year, human spaceflight was as difficult as it had ever been. In the course of Bezos’s life, it had advanced very little, if at all. His goal with Blue Origin, then, was to create the infrastructure that finally would allow for humanity to stretch out to the stars.
Once that was in place, “then we get to see Gerard O’Neill’s ideas start to come to life, and many of the other ideas from science fiction,” he said at a speech years later. “The dreamers come first. It’s always the science-fiction guys: They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and they make it happen.
“But it takes time.”
He was patient, willing to take his time. “You have to be very long-term oriented,” he told Charlie Rose. “People who complained that we invested in Amazon for seven years would be horrified by Blue Origin.”
At Amazon, Bezos had been obsessive for years about maintaining its startup culture, even as the company grew, reminding employees that it would always be Day 1 there. In a 1997 letter to shareholders, he wrote that it was “Day 1 for the Internet, and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com.” Twenty years later, “Day 1,” the name of the Amazon headquarters building, was still a rallying cry. “Day 2 is stasis,” he wrote in 2017. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
On June 12, 2004, he wrote a “Day 1” letter for Blue Origin—“blue” for “the pale blue dot” that is Earth, “origin” for where humanity began—a vision statement outlining the principles that would guide the company:
“We are a small team committed to seeding an enduring human presence in space,” he wrote. “Blue will pursue this long-term objective patiently, step by step. By dividing our work into small but meaningful increments, we hope to generate as many useful intermediate results as possible. Each step, even our first and simplest, will be challenging. And each step will lay the technical and organizational foundation for the next.”
The first suborbital vehicle would be called New Shepard, he wrote, after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. But even then, Bezos had larger ambitions. “At some point, Blue will shift its focus from New Shepard to a crewed orbital vehicle program. Orbital vehicles are significantly more complex than suborbital vehicles, and the transition to orbital systems will stretch Blue’s organization and capabilities.”
Given the enormity of the challenge, “we believe local hill climbing is our best way forward.”
That would require a steady approach, into unknown terrain. “We have been dropped off on an unexplored mountain, without maps, and the visibility is poor,” he wrote. “Every once in a while, the weather clears up enough for us to glimpse the peak, but the intervening terrain remains largely obscured.”
But there would be some bedrock principles to guide them. “Don’t start and stop—keep climbing at a steady pace. Be the tortoise and not the hare. Keep expenditures at sustainable levels. Assume spending will be flat to monotonically increasing. Do not fall for the unreasonable hope that the path will get easier as we go up.”
Bezos was both a dreamer and a builder, and had created Blue Origin as a laboratory where the two could meld together. In 2005, an interviewer from Time magazine asked what he was reading.
He replied that he’d just finished an Alastair Reynolds science fiction novel “about Earth being destroyed by nanobots.” That was the dreamer answering. The builder in him was focused on something else: “I’ve been reading about rocket-engine development.”
BLUE ORIGIN’S FIRST test vehicle was an odd contraption, a sort of science fair experiment gone wild. Named Charon, after the Pluto moon, it consisted of four Rolls-Royce Viper Mk. 301 jet engines that the company had acquired from the South African Air Force.
“They were ancient,” Bezos said. “I think they were literally 1960s engines. I remember when they arrived at Blue, and the team opened the crates that they were in. Huge spiders came out. Huge South African spiders. And they were like, ‘AHHHH!’”
Charon looked like a massive drone and stood on four legs each equipped with a saucer-shaped disk at the foo
t to help it touch down softly on landing. The engines were pointed down, not sideways, to provide vertical lift—and landing.
On March 5, 2005, at Moses Lake, nearly a three-hour drive east of Seattle, Charon flew. Not particularly high, just 316 feet, or just over half the height of the Seattle Space Needle.
The launch wasn’t the main goal. It was the landing Blue Origin was trying to perfect. The vehicle was fully autonomous, meaning it had been preprogrammed with software that allowed it to fly on its own. After hovering at a few hundred feet, Charon descended back to the ground, where it touched down softly, while kicking up a cloud of dust.
It was a small first step. But for the first time, Blue had left Earth—and returned.
5
“SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero”
BURT RUTAN CHOSE the day carefully—December 17, 2003, the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight—to send a signal about the importance of what he planned to accomplish. The same day that Elon Musk was parading his Falcon 1 rocket down Independence Avenue in Washington, DC, Rutan was getting ready for the first powered flight of the spaceplane he had been building in secret.
He had a cadre of three test pilots working for him to choose from. All with different backgrounds and experiences. All eager to fly. All fiercely competitive in what had become an extraordinary race to become the first commercial mission to reach space.
There was Brian Binnie, the former navy fighter pilot who had experience conducting combat missions over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s and held degrees from two Ivy League universities. He had a runner’s trim build and a calm, soft-spoken nature that endured even when things got hairy in the sky.
Mike Melvill was in many ways Binnie’s opposite. At sixty-three, he was eyeing retirement. A native of South Africa, he had dropped out of high school and had largely taught himself how to fly. But he was one of Rutan’s very first employees. They had known each other for decades. Melvill was a natural in the air. The man’s instincts in the cockpit were so incredible that Rutan trusted him completely.
Then there was Peter Siebold, the young Generation Xer, who had a round, innocent face that made him look a little like an adult version of Beaver Cleaver, the chipmunk-toothed boy who starred in the 1950s-era sitcom. But he was ambitious and supersmart, and combined his aerospace experience with his engineering background to develop the simulator they were using for Rutan’s latest invention, a spaceplane called SpaceShipOne.
“You could not get any more different,” Rutan recalled years later. “I wanted all three of these guys to be astronauts.”
The curious-looking vehicle was Rutan’s entrant in the contest known as the Ansari X Prize, which was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won for his epic, across-the-Atlantic flight in 1927. Instead of crossing an ocean, the finish line of the X Prize would be reaching an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the barrier considered the edge of space.
The winner of the $10 million contest would have to fly a manned spacecraft to that height, land it safely, and then do it again within two weeks. Another rule was that the spacecraft had to be built with private funds—not government money.
The organizers of the X Prize hoped that just as Lindbergh’s flight had touched off a revolution in commercial aviation, their contest would spark a new commercial space movement, one that finally would end the government’s monopoly on space.
Rutan’s spaceship design was, of course, unconventional. All of his planes were. A blunt eccentric with Elvis-like sideburns, Rutan had founded his curious little company, Scaled Composites, in 1982 in Mojave, where his experimental designs often had multiple wings, which sometimes went out and then curved up, making a U shape. Sometimes they had not one fuselage, but three. It was as if his inspiration came not just from the laws of aerodynamics but from Picasso. Rutan had assembled a team of some of the most innovative airplane engineers, who were designing, testing, and then flying the planes they had built, usually within a year.
Instead of launching vertically from a launchpad, SpaceShipOne would be tethered to the belly of a mothership that would fly to nearly 50,000 feet. Once aloft, the mothership, known as WhiteKnightOne, would drop the spacecraft, which would send it plummeting like a baby bird taking what appears to be a suicide dive from its mother’s nest. The free fall would last just a few seconds, until the pilot ignited the engines and the spacecraft took off.
The concept, known as air launch, had been around for years, a technique used mostly by the military. Perhaps most famously, Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 was air launched from a Boeing B-29 before he became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947 over the same Mojave Desert where SpaceShipOne would fly.
But unlike other air-launched vehicles, Rutan had a special design for SpaceShipOne, an idea that had come to him in the middle of the night. Essentially, the spaceplane’s wings would be able to detach from the body of the plane and fold upward in what he called a “feather” maneuver. The upright wings would act like the feathers of a badminton shuttlecock, centering the plane by creating drag for a reentry into Earth’s atmosphere so soft that it eliminated the need for a heat shield. Once SpaceShipOne was safely back in the dense air of the atmosphere, the wings would fold back down, and the aircraft would glide back to the ground.
It was a brilliant, revolutionary design that could make the fall back to Earth safer. But if the feather was unlocked at the wrong time, when the spaceplane was screaming upward, for example, it could have devastating consequences.
RUTAN HAD FACED a difficult decision in picking the pilot for the first powered flight. Up to now, the pilots had been flying SpaceShipOne like a glider, floating back to the ground. But on this flight, the plan was to not only light the engine for the first time, but break the sound barrier in what would be one of the most significant tests of Rutan’s vehicle.
Rutan was like a baseball manager deciding who should pitch on opening day. Melvill was a trusted friend and accomplished pilot. Siebold had the smarts. But after weighing his options, Rutan went with Binnie. How could you go wrong with a war veteran, who had landed his F/A-18 Hornet on aircraft carriers?
The day of the flight was a beautiful morning in Mojave. The air was still and crisp. If Binnie was nervous, he didn’t show it, even though he knew that this was an audition of sorts. If he flew well, then perhaps he’d get the chance to become the first commercial pilot to fly to space.
Binnie, trim and tall in his flight suit, looked as if he was ready for Top Gun. As he climbed aboard the spaceplane, he sat patiently while WhiteKnightOne escorted him to altitude. Then, when it was time, he calmly told mission control, “Go for release.”
After SpaceShipOne dropped, he lit the ignition and was off. The motor blast pinned him back into his seat, and the engine burned for just fifteen white-knuckled seconds. Still, it was “quite the insult to your senses,” he said. “It’s a cascade of noise and vibrations. The ship almost immediately complains. You open the gate and you’re on this bucking bronco.”
Those fifteen seconds were enough. The flight was a success, and Binnie handled the violent force of going Mach 1.2 like a pro, producing a sonic boom that signaled mission accomplished: SpaceShipOne had broken the sound barrier.
“That was a pretty wild ride, Mr. Rutan,” he told the ground crew below, as he prepared to come back to Earth.
But as he approached the runway, Binnie was having difficulty keeping the spacecraft level. He was coming in low. Finally he slammed into the ground—hard.
The landing gear splayed outward, like a gymnast doing a split. The bottom of the plane hit the ground like a belly flop, and it tipped over so that the left wing dragged along the tarmac. After skidding a few hundred feet, SpaceShipOne careened off the runway into the brown desert dirt, kicking up an ignominious dust plume.
In the mission control room, Rutan jumped out of his seat and then bolted out to the runway. First responders rushed to th
e crash site.
Binnie wasn’t hurt. But he was furious.
“Damn it,” Binnie said, again. And then again. He ripped off his oxygen mask, and went to smack the ceiling of the cockpit before controlling himself.
Rutan was there within moments, trying to calm down his pilot, who was now standing, embarrassed, next to the aircraft he had just crashed.
“Hey, other than that, how was the flight?” Rutan said, trying to soften the blow with humor.
But the former navy fighter pilot was inconsolable.
“Words cannot describe how disappointed—” he began.
Rutan wouldn’t hear of it.
“You did a super job,” he said. “All we’ve got there is real minor stuff. It’s not a big deal.”
The crash was a setback, and, for Binnie, humiliating. This was the first big milestone for the SpaceShipOne program. But now Binnie wondered whether he had just blown his chance to get to space.
The engineers at Scaled would later determine it wasn’t Binnie’s fault; the flight controls just got stuck on the reentry, overwhelmed with friction in a condition pilots call “stickiction.” This was, after all, a test flight, emphasis on “test.” The whole point was to push the envelope to see what sorts of problems emerged.
But the competition didn’t see it that way, and wasn’t afraid to say so publicly.
“He flat didn’t fly the airplane,” Melvill told Popular Science magazine, comments that infuriated Binnie. “He just flew it straight into the ground, like what you would do when flying an F-18 onto the deck.”
(Later, in a letter to the editor, Melvill said that he was “deeply hurt by your unfortunate decision to include a comment I don’t recall ever making when being interviewed for what I understood to be a completely different article. Brian Binnie is a close friend and one of the best pilots I know.” He also wrote that the magazine “used a comment out of context, simply to try to sensationalize a story that was already sensational.”)
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