The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  After Melvill landed safely, Rutan grabbed a sign from the cheering crowd that summed up exactly what he was thinking and waved it proudly:

  “SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero.”

  WHILE ALLEN WAS a space enthusiast, he made an uncomfortable pioneer. The SpaceShipOne flights made him realize that he did not have the stomach for the risk of human spaceflight, and instead of enjoying the historic feats, he was petrified that the pilots flying his spacecraft would be killed.

  During Binnie’s first powered flight, Allen was overcome by “a wave of dread,” he wrote. When developing computer software, “your worst outcome is an error message. Now I knew the person whose life hung in the balance, and I found that hard to handle.” And when Binnie crashed, he felt as if his “heart was in my throat,” wondering whether Binnie was hurt.

  Just before the X Prize flights, Allen had received a call from Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic, who had begun a space venture of his own and was looking for a vehicle to acquire. If Allen was a recluse who valued secrecy and shuddered at the dangers of spaceflight, Branson was his opposite, a thrill-seeking, media-savvy marketer who pursued one adventure after the next.

  Branson, who started an airline and a train company, and had been on several daredevil, record-setting hot-air balloon rides, was desperate to start a company that could help push what he saw as the ultimate frontier of space. Smitten with SpaceShipOne, and confident that Rutan could build him an even bigger and better spacecraft, one capable of taking fleets of tourists into the cosmos, Branson made Allen a generous offer for the rights to the technology behind SpaceShipOne.

  “Flying test pilots, I understand,” Allen recalled. “But paying-man-on-the-street-type passengers, I wanted to leave that to someone else.”

  Allen would see the X Prize through, but then he was eager to move on to other ventures. So, he sold the rights in a deal worth up to $25 million over fifteen years. Branson, who had added Virgin Galactic to the list of companies he ran under the Virgin brand, quickly had the Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne just in time for its X Prize flights.

  BY SEPTEMBER, RUTAN’S team was done with test flights and was ready to go for the money. To win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, SpaceShip­One would have to fly to space twice in two weeks, while reusing at least 80 percent of the vehicle.

  Rutan decided to go with Siebold for the first prize flight. Binnie would be the backup—and was beginning to fear that because of the crash landing they’d never let him fly again. “I understand the concept of 3 strikes you’re out,” he wrote in an angry e-mail to the flight director. “I just don’t know what the count is anymore.”

  Melvill had done his part. And it wasn’t clear that his wife, Sally, could take his flying another harrowing ride like that, no matter how thrilling it was. Siebold had been upset that he wasn’t chosen for the first space attempt, and had been training for this mission for more than three years.

  But suddenly Siebold was getting second thoughts. His wife had just had a baby, and in the weeks leading up to the flight, he had a brush with a potentially serious illness. But he also felt the plane was unsafe and needed further testing.

  There were plenty of signs that the engineers were still working out the kinks of the aircraft. Melvill had gone 20 miles off course on one flight, and had trouble with the stabilizer on the other. The flight controls froze up on Binnie, causing his crash landing. A new father, Siebold had a tough decision to make. As hard as it was to disappoint Rutan and the rest of the team at Scaled Composites, he couldn’t go through with it. The flight was just too dangerous.

  “Peter to his credit had lost faith in all the haste to light a wick under the rocket motor,” Binnie wrote in an unpublished memoir titled “The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne.” “He felt that it was unsafe, insufficiently tested and poorly understood. To him, that was three strikes in a critical spaceship system and not worth the risk.”

  Scaled Composites would tell the public that Siebold was merely sick, and never let on about his concerns that the spacecraft was unsafe and not fully tested. It was already mid-September. The first flight was just days away, and the whole point of the exercise, after all, was to convince the public that spaceflight could be made so safe it would be routine.

  With days to go before the flight, Rutan had to again ask his trusted and tested friend Mike Melvill. After the last harrowing flight, Rutan knew Melvill had a “feeling of relief that I didn’t die today, and that I won’t die in the program because I’m done.” But then the team “had to go to him to fly another spaceflight.”

  Binnie was furious and stormed into the flight director’s office, demanding to know “when is the backup not the backup.”

  The flight director “cut to the chase and said that the landing from last year did not sit well with the Boss and suggested his attempts to work me back into the lineup were thwarted,” Binnie wrote in his memoir. “So there it was. And it was worse than I had ever imagined. I felt defeated.”

  While Rutan said that the controls had frozen up on Binnie during the landing, he said “we were not able to go to Brian because Brian had been so tied up with rocket development and everyone questioned his proficiency when he made the hard landing.… We couldn’t put Brian into the flight because we didn’t think he was ready.”

  Sally Melvill burst into tears when she got the news that her husband would fly again.

  “To be honest, I was very irritated,” she told the Discovery Channel. “I had settled my mind that he was not going to do another flight. So I had my emotions really where I needed them to be. And to start working and trying to get mentally prepared—and Michael had the same problem.”

  It wasn’t just the mental adjustment that concerned them. He hadn’t been preparing physically. To get ready for the violent churns of the flight—the increased gravitational forces that would strain their body—the pilots had trained hard in test airplanes. They put themselves into dizzying tailspins, banked hard, flew upside down—all in an effort to get their body ready.

  Melvill hadn’t had time to train properly, and superstitious as he was, he wondered whether this flight might be one too many. Shortly after Rutan said he needed him, he told his wife that he “wondered if I was pushing my luck doing a second flight. Am I asking too much?”

  Sally Melvill wondered that, too.

  THE FLIGHT ON September 29 started as expected. WhiteKnightOne climbed into the early morning Mojave sky. It released SpaceShipOne, and then a few seconds later the rocket engine ignited, pinning Melvill back into his seat as he screamed almost straight up in a picture-perfect beginning.

  From the ground, it looked just as it should. “He’s straight!” Sally Melvill yelled. “He’s straight! He’s absolutely dead straight.”

  But then SpaceShipOne started to roll. It was slow at first, but the higher he climbed, the faster the spacecraft spun, until soon it was whirling uncontrollably. The nose of the craft was still pointed toward the sky, but the wings were whipping around so quickly that the sun was flickering in the cabin, as if someone was turning a light switch on and off.

  Melvill kept his head straight, focusing only on the control panel in front of him. He didn’t dare look out the window. Seeing the world spin below him would only rattle his nerves—and make him sick. Just as he had on the earlier flight when his navigation system went out, he kept the engine firing. Spinning be damned. He was still climbing toward space.

  Finally, he crossed the 62-mile boundary and by firing thrusters on the spacecraft, was able to slow the rate of the spin, just in time for reentry.

  Once again, it had been a harrowing ride. But once again, Melvill stayed in the saddle all the way to space.

  One flight down for the $10 million prize, one to go.

  THE NEXT DAY, a Thursday, the team gathered for a meeting. Everything seemed a go for the second flight, which they’d push ahead for the following Monday. Despite not having flown sin
ce the crash, ten months earlier, Binnie tried to remain sharp, spending hours in the simulator, hoping he’d have a chance, even if he felt he was a long shot.

  They went through the logistics. The avionics looked good. Everyone was happy with the flight profile. The rocket seemed good. They were all set, and about to wrap up, when the crew chief raised his hand.

  “Burt, I need one last piece of information,” he said. “And that’s the pilot.”

  After an uncomfortable silence, the test flight director said, “Well, Brian is, of course.”

  Melvill was done. Siebold had pulled himself out of the program. Binnie was really the only one left. He felt he was the pilot of last resort, as if, as he said, everyone in the meeting was thinking, “We have nowhere else to turn but to the guy who crashes spaceships.”

  With the flight just days away, he didn’t have time to brood. And the former navy pilot wanted to redeem himself.

  Now out of the running, Melvill generously helped prepare him, taking him up for test flights in his plane.

  On the morning of the flight on October 4, Binnie made his way toward the spacecraft and saw his mother-in-law. Carrying a cup of coffee, she came to give him a good-luck hug. But as she reached her arms around him, she ended up spilling coffee down his back. Binnie didn’t have any time to change—and didn’t have another flight suit anyway, “so I manned up with this sticky mess all over me.”

  He was wet, and the smell of sugary coffee overwhelmed the cockpit. But he was ready.

  The WhiteKnightOne mothership released SpaceShipOne. Instead of waiting for mission control to give the all clear before igniting the engines, Binnie flipped the switches almost immediately, not wanting to lose too much altitude, and zoomed right by the mothership, where a surprised engineer on board yelped, “Holy crap! That was close!”

  But other than that, the flight went as smooth as could be. He reached higher than Melvill had gone in his two earlier flights, setting a new rec­ord for a commercial spacecraft.

  Now partners, Allen and Branson came to the Mojave Desert to witness Binnie clinch the victory, and could not have made a more different pair. Here was Branson with his gilded flowing hair, Virgin Islands tan, standing next to Allen, pale and pasty in baggy jeans.

  “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Branson asked him, as the spaceship climbed higher.

  “If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much,” Allen thought.

  Binnie nailed the landing—no belly flops this time—a nice soft touchdown right in the middle of the runway.

  “He greased it on like an air force pilot, not a navy pilot,” Rutan said. “He flew the only perfect flight of SpaceShipOne. I was very proud of him.”

  During the celebration, Rutan once again took aim at NASA.

  “I was thinking a little bit about that other space agency, the big guys,” he said. “I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.’”

  To underscore the point, NASA wasn’t flying at all at the time. Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated years before, killing another seven astronauts. The shuttle program was grounded while investigators tried to figure out what went wrong. In all of 2004, the US government did not fly a single spaceflight.

  In fact there were only five trips to space that year. The Russians flew two. Burt Rutan flew the other three.

  This was the triumph of the little guy, the individual, a uniquely American moment. “I just thank God that I live in a country where this is possible,” Binnie said.

  For their flights, the FAA had largely stayed out of the way. Since no one but the government had ever even attempted to fly to space, there weren’t any laws preventing what they were doing. And what regulations were in place were lax. For now. Congress would surely take notice, and hold hearings to discuss what regulations should govern this new industry.

  But all that was for a later day. Now was a time to celebrate. Rutan gathered the Scaled Composites team in front of the hangar.

  “The important thing about today’s accomplishment is this is not an end,” he said, as Allen stood next to him. “It’s just a very good beginning.”

  Rutan and Allen then popped champagne, letting the bubbly flow. Rutan took a big swig directly from the bottle.

  At the same time, Branson was already dreaming of the next spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo. Rutan was on board to build it. But this time he’d be doing so for Sir Richard, the playboy who always liked a splash. Their new spaceship wouldn’t be built so that it could win a prize. It would be designed for luxury, for as many as six passengers and two pilots, with the kind of first-class touches that Branson was known for at Virgin Atlantic, his airline.

  At the moment, the spacecraft was still just a vision in his head. But he couldn’t wait to show it off.

  PART II

  IMPROBABLE

  6

  “Screw It, Let’s Do It”

  FOR HOURS ON end there had been nothing but the perilous Atlantic below, but now they could see the inviting shoreline and the lush and verdant Irish countryside just beyond. They had made it more than 3,000 miles, crossing an ocean in a hot-air balloon.

  Some twenty-four hours earlier, Richard Branson, then thirty-six years old, and his pilot, Per Lindstrand, a ballooning expert and aeronautical engineer, had taken off from near Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, then crossed the ocean for a first-of-its-kind transatlantic flight that would land them in the record books. All they had to do now was land.

  It was a foggy day, July 3, 1987. The towering, twenty-two-story-high balloon, with its Virgin logo, emerging from the clouds and now hovering over the most pastoral of settings, made for something of a surreal scene. It only got more bizarre when the wind picked up, swirling in punishing gusts. Instead of touching down softly, the balloon’s pressurized capsule crashed in a field next to a quaint country cottage, dragging along the ground so hard that the fuel tanks ripped off. Then, the balloon suddenly lifted off again, just missing the cottage and some nearby power lines.

  “With no fuel tanks we were utterly out of control,” Branson recalled in his memoir, Losing My Virginity.

  As they headed back toward the sea, Lindstrand decided to try to land on the beach. But once again the wind had other plans, ushering the balloon back out over the water. They came down with an unsettling splash, as the balloon tilted sideways, acting like a giant sail that dragged the capsule through the water.

  Lindstrand pulled the lever that was supposed to release the balloon from the capsule, but nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing.

  “The next thing, we found ourselves being hurtled through the water at something like 100 miles per hour with water coming into the capsule,” Branson said at the time. “We climbed out on to the roof, and the capsule started rising, and Per threw himself off at about 60 feet.”

  As Lindstrand prepared to jump, he yelled at Branson to do the same. Just then, the wind lifted the balloon up, pulling the capsule off the sea surface. Lindstrand jumped.

  Branson watched him plunge into the cold water off the Northern Ireland coast, and realized “with horror” that it was too late for him to jump. The balloon was flying upward again. He was alone in a balloon he hardly knew how to fly. Frantic, he tried to call for help, but the radio was dead. He tried to collect himself and figure out how to get out of this mess.

  “Standing amid the swirling white cloud, I felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness,” Branson wrote.

  And dread. He scribbled a quick note to his young family, telling them he loved them. Standing atop the capsule, riding a runaway balloon, all alone, he felt it was quite possible he’d never see them again.

  THE IDEA TO cross the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon had been Lindstrand’s idea. But Branson had immediately warmed to the adventure. He was young and impulsive, following what would become a mantra for his life and career (and even the title of one of his books): “Screw it, let�
��s do it.” But he had a genuine itch for adventure, which had been shaped in large part by his mother, Eve, who always promoted self-reliance in her children.

  Eve Branson had an independent streak of her own that stretched back to her childhood, growing up during World War II. She had been training as a dancer, but as the war broke out, she felt she needed to contribute in some way. She heard Britain’s Air Training Corps was looking for glide flight instructors, and so she signed up. There were only a couple of sticky problems: she had no idea how to fly a glider, and she was a woman seeking a job that was restricted to men. Undeterred, she disguised herself as a man, showed up, and eventually was allowed to fly.

  Her first flight, however, almost ended with a crash. And when she did finally successfully land, “I stepped out of the glider, shaking, and was met by an ashen-faced crowd of officers and cadets who had run across the airfield to greet me,” she wrote in her memoir, Mum’s the Word.

  Another of Branson’s heroes was Douglas Bader, a famous World War II Royal Air Force pilot who had lost his legs in a crash but continued to fly during the war, eventually commanding a squadron. In 1941, he was forced to parachute out of his Spitfire during combat and was taken prisoner by the Germans. Released after the war in 1945, he was greeted as a hero and eventually was knighted for his service to the disabled.

  Bader had become close friends with Branson’s aunt, and to Branson, he was like an uncle. As a child, Branson enjoyed stealing Bader’s prosthetic limbs when he would take them off to go swimming. The former fighter pilot would chase after him, running on his hands.

  “He was a hero of my childhood days,” Branson recalled. “He was a larger than life character.… He, my aunt and my mother would all go off flying planes and take off in the field near the house and do acrobatics above us. And some of my yearning for flying and adventure came from him.”