The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Despite the crash landing, Rutan couldn’t help but be happy—the flight had been a success. They’d broken the sound barrier. They had all these data now on the spacecraft’s performance that would help them get to space. That’s what he was focused on.

  “How was the boost?” Rutan asked Binnie after the flight.

  The pilot hesitated a moment. “Uhh,” he said. “Pretty wild. The kick and trying to keep the wings level, all of that was pretty dynamic. Just when you think you’ve got it under control, something different would happen.”

  In other words, to fly SpaceShipOne, you didn’t just need to be a pilot. It might also help to have some experience in the rodeo.

  RUTAN WAS THE public face of the program, the brash engineer who said he wanted “to go high because that’s where the view is.” But until he unveiled SpaceShipOne several months before Binnie’s flight, he had treated it like a classified program, demanding the highest level of secrecy. That was in part because he didn’t want word of what he was trying to accomplish to get out. But it was also because his newest customer—Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates—was a mysterious and reclusive figure with enough wealth to buy a cloak of anonymity.

  Like Bezos and Musk, Allen was an avid science fiction reader as a kid, fascinated by space. His father was the associate director of the University of Washington’s library, where Allen would spend hours after school. “My dad was just letting me loose in the stacks,” he said, sitting in a conference room outside his Seattle office, with a view of the Space Needle. “I loved it.” He read Willy Ley and books about Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket. He became fascinated with engines, and turbo pumps and propellants.

  Allen knew all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were the players of his favorite baseball team, and he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. But then in the sixth grade, he no longer could see the blackboard, even from his front row seat. His nearsightedness meant “my dreams of being an astronaut were over,” he said. “Somehow I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.”

  He once tried to launch the arm of an aluminum chair by packing it with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffeepot, he recalled in his memoir, Idea Man. It didn’t work.

  “Turns out the melting point of aluminum was lower than I understood,” he said.

  As an adult, his passion for space continued. In 1981, he went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the first shuttle launch. “The sound was unbelievable,” he recalled. “The air was vibrating, and you could feel compression waves going into your chest.… You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.” Allen watched it alongside the tens of thousands who had packed the Florida coastline, so many yelling, “Go! Go! Go! It was so inspiring.”

  After he had cofounded Microsoft, Allen was one of the richest men in the world, free to pursue his passions. An avid sports fan, he bought the Portland Trailblazers and the Seattle Seahawks. In Seattle, he opened the Museum of Pop Culture. He was also keenly interested in aviation and amassed a collection of historic World War II fighter planes that would eventually go on display at his Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum.

  In 1996, the year the X Prize was announced, he went to Mojave to visit Rutan and chat about his plans to build a supersonic jet that could fly over the atmosphere. They stayed in touch, and two years later, Rutan flew to see Allen in Seattle to propose something even more ambitious—his plan to develop SpaceShipOne. It would be another two years before he felt he had a design that could work.

  Allen was sold and would invest more than $20 million in a venture that, if successful, would pay out half of that.

  Rutan knew that if word of his latest project leaked, he’d inevitably be laughed at, ridiculed. And he didn’t want the distraction of anyone, not his fellow aviation engineers, not the press, not anyone, telling him what he was trying to do was impossible.

  Then again, he had a different relationship with the word than most. One of Rutan’s favorite sayings was that it’s not research unless half the people involved think what you’re trying to do is impossible. He urged his engineers to take risks and told them that “a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

  They—the doubters, the skeptics—said he couldn’t build Voyager, which in 1986 became the first airplane to circle the globe without stopping in a trip that took 9 days, 44 minutes, and 30 seconds. And that’s what they would say now.

  Rutan had become one of the most accomplished aerospace engineers of his generation—with several of his aircraft retiring to the National Air and Space Museum. But soon he was looking for the next frontier. Upset with what he saw as the retreat of America’s space program, he would tell the New York Times that “NASA has almost ground itself to a full stop.” To Rutan’s thinking, the agency had become another bloated government bureaucracy, subject to the fickle whims of Congress and ever-changing administrations.

  The space shuttle, which was supposed to fly safely and affordably, had accomplished neither, and was viewed by its skeptics as an expensive death trap that had killed fourteen astronauts in two catastrophic explosions. Worse, it had sent NASA scurrying into retreat, scaring the once bold agency into a risk-averse bureaucracy.

  As far as Rutan was concerned, the government had abdicated its monopoly in space. Only the private sector could advance spaceflight now, he thought. It could innovate and move quickly in a way no government agency could.

  So, he would build the world’s first commercial spaceship. That was the secret, the project he was keeping covert, shielded from the derision he knew it would attract. Scaled Composites, the cynics would say, a company of just a few dozen people, could not start a manned space program.

  Until it did.

  ON JUNE 21, 2004, six months after Binnie broke the sound barrier, and several test flights later, Rutan was ready to try a test flight to space.

  After the hard landing, Binnie didn’t think his chances of being picked were very good. Even though it wasn’t his fault, he was beginning to feel “benched on the sidelines,” as if the prevailing attitude at the company was that he “crashed it because I flew it like a damn navy guy into the ground. The entire undercurrent was clearly I don’t have the right stuff: ‘Just look at the mess he made of the vehicle.’ That stigma and that undercurrent was very much the persistent attitude of the company.”

  The relationship between the test pilots had grown strained as they competed for the available slots. “Instead of us working together, passing on lessons learned and because of the secrecy it pitted us all against each other,” Binnie said. “It was a very corrosive environment in that regard.”

  On the day the announcement was made, Siebold was in Binnie’s office, discussing an issue with the aircraft’s avionics, when Binnie received an e-mail from the flight test director. Binnie knew this was it—the announcement he’d been dreading.

  “Do I want to read the bad news now or wait until after lunch?” he thought to himself.

  He opened it.

  “Look at this,” he said to Siebold, trying to stay casual. “Mike’s the next guy up.”

  Siebold, normally able to retain a test pilot’s preternatural calm no matter what, “turned beet red, totally agitated,” Binnie recalled, “totally flummoxed that he somehow had lost out on an opportunity that apparently he had lobbied for quite hard.”

  The team just had a higher comfort level with Melvill, Rutan’s trusted confidant for nearly three decades. Of all the test flights, this was the big one—the first attempt to reach the 100-kilometer barrier of space. If anything went wrong, Rutan knew he could rely on the experienced pilot, despite his age. And Melvill had just recently proven, once again, that he had the right stuff to pull off a stunt as crazy, and dangerous, as this.

  On an earlier test flight of SpaceShipOne, the flight navigation system went out just as he had hit the ignition switc
h and was screaming upward, almost perfectly vertical. Everyone in mission control figured Melvill would just cut the engine, end the flight, and come back safely. Flying that fast without a navigation system would be insane.

  Instead, Melvill kept the motor on for the full fifty-five-second burn, flying 3,400 feet per second, or faster than a speeding bullet, all while flying essentially blind. His only navigation tool was to look out the window from the corner of his eye at the horizon. He nailed the flight, and the landing, leaving Rutan, a hard man to impress, in awe.

  On the ground, Rutan celebrated with his friend, telling him about what it was like watching him from mission control.

  “Everybody’s expecting you to abort,” Rutan said. “And I said, ‘He’s going to run it at least thirty seconds.’ And then I said, ‘No, he’s going to run it at least forty seconds.’ And then I said, ‘No, he’s going to run it all the way!’”

  “Damn right,” Melvill replied.

  Rutan acknowledged to Popular Science that “in some places, that would get a test pilot fired. In this case, I thought it was a positive that Mike could hang in there and press on.”

  But to Siebold, the move was evidence of unnecessary risk, not bravery, and he had misgivings about Melvill’s selection for the attempt to reach the threshold of space.

  This was going to be the big one—if Melvill was successful, he’d go down in history as the first pilot to fly a truly commercial, nongovernment vehicle to space and back. Siebold wrote in an e-mail that Melvill was a “cowboy” who flew loose and risky, according to Julian Guthrie’s book on the X Prize, How to Make a Spaceship. Rutan got ahold of the e-mail and showed it to Melvill to pump up his competitive juices against the younger rival.

  “See what you’re up against,” Rutan told his pilot, according to the book.

  Binnie didn’t know about the e-mail, but Siebold tried to convince him to join the chorus against Melvill. “He thought it was reckless and cowboylike behavior, and he tried to get me to sign up to that,” Binnie recalled.

  He refused. Stuff happens in the air, especially in experimental aircraft, and Binnie said he would have done the same thing in Melvill’s situation.

  If Binnie had been cast as the guy who crashed the plane, Siebold had been branded as too cautious. On one of his earlier test flights, he faced a dilemma. After SpaceShipOne was released, he noticed that one of the wing flaps appeared to be stalling. If he flew, he feared he wouldn’t be able to control the spacecraft. But if he didn’t, he’d land with a tank full of fuel that made the aircraft too heavy for a safe landing.

  As he talked it over with mission control, crucial seconds were ticking away—as he was falling faster and faster. Finally, mission control told him he needed to light the engine. Landing with that much fuel was just too dangerous. Siebold did, and flew safely.

  When Siebold was back on the ground, Rutan greeted him warmly and congratulated him. But because Siebold had waited so long to light the motor, he didn’t reach the altitude he was supposed to, meaning he didn’t achieve the goal Rutan had set for him. The deliberative, careful approach was perhaps the right way to handle a potentially serious problem. No one wanted a dead pilot. But it was also the opposite of how Melvill had just gone for it when he was faced with a problem.

  Still, for this first flight to space, one of the members of the team advocated for Siebold, whose flights in the simulator were impressive.

  “Yeah,” Rutan concurred. But he still had this reservation about Siebold: “He might quit.”

  “Pete didn’t achieve the goals of his first rocket-powered flight in SpaceShipOne because he couldn’t bring himself to throw the switch and light the motor at the right time,” Rutan said later. “Mike and Brian had come off the hooks and thrown the switch.”

  Melvill would be the pilot for the first launch to space. “A gutsy call,” Allen recalled in his memoir. “Despite Mike’s 6,400 hours of flight time, this would be well beyond anything he had done.”

  The decision left Siebold disappointed.

  “I think every one of us wishes that we could be on that vehicle, and fly that really challenging flight,” Siebold told a documentary film crew from the Discovery Network. “This flight is what’s going to get the attention of the world. This is the flight which says, ‘Hey, NASA, we’re here.’”

  At a press conference the day before the flight, the three pilots stood shoulder to shoulder in their flight suits, presenting a unified front. Rutan announced his lineup: Binnie would fly WhiteKnightOne, the mothership; Melvill would fly SpaceShipOne, with Siebold as his backup.

  Rutan acknowledged the danger of what they were trying to do, saying, “We are willing to seek breakthroughs by taking risks. And if the business-as-usual space developers continue their decades-long pace, they will be gazing from the slow lane as we speed into the new space age.”

  Taking the podium, Paul Allen said they were chasing history.

  “Tomorrow, we will attempt to add a new page to the aviation history books. If our attempt is successful, SpaceShipOne’s pilot will become the first civilian pilot to ever cross the boundary of space in a completely privately funded vehicle.”

  Left unsaid was the fact that he was nervous about Melvill’s safety. So was his wife, Sally, a pilot herself, who just before the flight implored her husband just to “come home to me.”

  “I’ve had any number of people, guys as well as women, come to me and say, ‘Well, how can you let him do that?’” she said in the Discovery Channel documentary Black Sky. “I don’t believe I have the right to tell him what he can and can’t do. Even if I think it is high risk and life threatening and whatever. I mean, this is his ultimate joy.”

  Melvill knew the risks—and how terrified his wife was. He’d been a test pilot for years, but he noticed how she’d be a lot more nervous the older he got. This was unlike anything he had ever done. The spacecraft would be flying three times the speed of sound, faster than it had ever flown before to a height of 62 miles. And the crew at Scaled Composites had made some last-minute adjustments to the vehicle that they hadn’t yet had a chance to test.

  Sitting in the cockpit just before the flight, Rutan came over for one last pep talk.

  “This is the big one, Burt,” Melvill told him, as the men exchanged an extended handshake. “Thanks so much for the opportunity.”

  “We’ve got the right guy,” Rutan replied. “It’s just an airplane. Don’t worry about it.”

  Along the tarmac, thousands of onlookers had gathered, many arriving in the predawn darkness to witness what they knew could be historic—or disastrous.

  In the air, Melvill seemed relaxed and ready. When he hit the ignition, Sally, watching through a pair of binoculars, yelled out, “Go, Michael! Go, babe!”

  The flight started with the usual violent jump, as Melvill fought to point SpaceShipOne straight up. But just eight seconds into the flight, he got pushed off course by the wind. As he struggled with the controls, the engine roared angrily, shaking the spacecraft. Then, he heard a series of bangs that set his imagination running wild. Had a piece of SpaceShip­One broken off?

  Still, he kept climbing and climbing until the engine shut off and he floated on. His early problem had knocked him more than 20 miles off course. But it appeared that he had—just barely—crossed the 62-mile threshold.

  “Wow,” he told mission control. “You would not believe the view. Holy mackerel.”

  Rutan turned around to congratulate Allen, shaking his hand, flashing a wide-eyed smile. But soon they realized there was another problem. A trim flap on Rutan’s feather system, the shuttlecock-like device that was to deliver him to ground safely, was malfunctioning. If the stabilizer didn’t work, SpaceShipOne would enter a violent spin, and Melvill could easily be killed on the reentry.

  This was the moment he was supposed to be celebrating. Melvill had made it to space. Outside he could see the thin layer of the atmosphere and the curvature of Earth. He could see the deep,
vast blackness of space. But instead of taking in the moment, he worried about how he’d get back to Sally.

  On the ground, she was a jumble of nerves, now huddled around a walkie-talkie, her hands clutched together as if in prayer, listening to her husband and mission control sort out the mess he was in.

  “This is not good,” someone in mission control said.

  Melvill tried to adjust the stabilizer system again, and after a few seconds it worked. He’d be okay. Relieved, now he could enjoy the little time he had left in space, before gravity pulled him back to Earth. He pulled out a couple handfuls of M&M’s that he had secretly stashed in the left shoulder pocket of his flight suit, which in the weightless environment floated through the cockpit, pinging gently off the windows. He finally allowed himself a moment to enjoy a view that only the some four hundred people who had been to space before him had ever seen.

  Moments later, as he guided SpaceShipOne to a flawless landing, Sally Melvill, her hands clutched again in front of her, was near tears. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you!” she said to no one in particular.

  After her husband emerged, she broke down in his arms.

  “Thanks for coming home,” she said, sobbing. “Can we grow old together in rocking chairs?”

  He said they could. He was, as of now, retired as a SpaceShipOne test pilot. He had made history, earning the first ever “commercial astronaut” wings from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

  Rutan was ecstatic, and said later that he was glad it was Melvill in the cockpit, and not anyone else. “The more experienced people would have aborted two or three of the flights, which would have set us back many months,” he said.

  Now, he had proven that a small band of dedicated, passionate rocketeers could pull off a feat no one thought possible. But beyond that the flight didn’t just symbolize the emergence of the commercial space industry, a New Space movement, but, he felt, the obsolescence of NASA.