The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Then the countdown to release, a brief moment of quiet before a wave of unimaginable but controlled power surges through the craft. You are instantly pinned back in your seat, overwhelmed but enthralled by the howl of the rocket motor and the eye-watering acceleration, which as you watch the read-out, has you traveling in a matter of seconds, at almost 2,500 mph, over three times the speed of sound.

  As you hurtle through the edges of the atmosphere, the large windows show the cobalt blue sky turning to mauve and indigo and finally to black. You’re on a high, this is really happening, you’re loving it and coping well. You start to relax; but in an instant your senses are back on full alert, the world contained in your spaceship has completely transformed.

  The rocket motor has been switched off and it is quiet. But it’s not just quiet, it’s QUIET. The silence of space is as awe inspiring as was the noise of the rocket just moments earlier. What’s really getting your senses screaming now though is that the gravity which has dominated every movement you’ve made since the day you were born is not there any more. There is no up and no down and you’re out of your seat experiencing the freedom that even your dreams underestimated. After a graceful mid-space summersault [sic] you find yourself at a large window and what you see would make your hair stand on end if the zero gravity hadn’t already achieved that effect. Below you (or is it above you?) is a view that you’ve seen in countless images but the reality is so much more beautiful, so much more vivid and produces emotions that are strong but hard to define. The blue map, curving into the black distance, is familiar but has none of the usual marked boundaries. The incredibly narrow ribbon of atmosphere looks worryingly fragile. What you are looking at is the source of everything it means to be human, and it is home. You see that your fellow astronauts are equally spellbound, all lost in their own thoughts and storing away the memories.

  And best of all, the trips were right around the corner—just a few short years away.

  “In your dreams no more!” the company proclaimed.

  It worked. People signed up, just as they had for the Pan Am trips to the moon, plopping down $200,000 for their seat. Branson’s version of space was cool and sexy, with a Hollywood appeal, and by early 2006 Virgin Galactic already had $13 million in deposits. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought tickets. So did Ashton Kutcher and Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford. But it wasn’t just celebrities. Ken Baxter, a Las Vegas real estate developer who signed up after watching a 60 Minutes profile of Burt Rutan, claimed he was the first customer.

  But that distinction may very well go to Trevor Beattie, a London advertising executive, who was behind Wonderbra’s “Hello boys” ad campaign that caused a stir in the United Kingdom. As a boy he’d been a fan of space, and shortly before SpaceShipOne’s final flight, Beattie called Branson, whom he knew casually. Branson dared him to come to the Mojave Desert for the last flight of the X Prize.

  “And I said, ‘Right. I’m going to call your bluff.’ Instead Branson called my bluff, saying, ‘We’re going tomorrow.’ And I found myself on a plane to L.A. I hadn’t told anyone I was going. I just up and went.”

  After Brian Binnie’s successful flight, Beattie vowed to be the first to buy a ticket with Virgin Galactic. If he could do it, almost anyone could. With a mop of near-shoulder-length curls, a pasty Englishman’s demeanor, and a slight paunch, he was about as far from an astronaut as could be. But that’s what he liked about it. Many of his fellow ticket holders were “a group of self-selecting Herberts,” he said, using cockney slang for “fool.” “We’re the opposite of the right stuff. We’re the kind of wrong stuff. But so be it.”

  The first hundred to sign up were known as the Founders, and while other ticket holders would be allowed to put down a 10 percent deposit, they’d have to come up with the whole $200,000 up front.

  IN EARLY 2007, Virgin broadcast in a press release, “Sir Richard Trains for Spaceflight,” detailing how Branson was strapped into a centrifuge that spun around to simulate the g-forces of spaceflight. With him was James Lovelock, a scientist and author whom Branson admired for his work studying climate.

  Branson had called him up and offered him a ticket. “My reaction was, ‘Oh, I’m sure they’d never send me into space because in a few years I’ll be ninety,’” he recalled. But Branson said that age was not a barrier: “My father is the same age as you, and he’s going.”

  In the simulator, Lovelock recalled how a voice came on that said the spaceship was about to be released from the mothership. There was a countdown, “and you feel a jerk of it dropping off.” Then, the voice came on again, this time to say that the rockets would fire soon. “And then you feel this enormous thrust and noise of the rockets firing, and then you feel the g-force come on. It’s all rather fun.”

  Beattie trained by taking a ride in the “vomit comet,” an airplane that flies in parabolas and gives passengers the feeling of weightlessness for a few minutes at a time. Floating through the cabin was an amazing experience—the feeling of flying.

  It was extraordinary, right up until another passenger, a fat man, fell on him, breaking his toe. “I’ve had my first space injury,” he said.

  And a reminder of how when the gravity comes back on, things can come crashing down. The reality of getting to space was going to be a lot more difficult, and dangerous, than Branson made it appear. People were trusting him with their lives.

  7

  The Risk

  THERE WERE so many big egos—such outsize personalities that could, like rocket fuel, combust—it was difficult to decide who should sit next to whom at the conference room table. The seating chart for this team of rivals—all big names in commercial space and therefore competitors—was a delicate piece of social choreography. The participants had to get along. They were trying to figure out how to start a new industry.

  At least they had a place to meet. Elon Musk had graciously offered to host the meeting at SpaceX’s El Segundo factory. Even though he was still far from being a household name, he was known and respected by this group. And his gesture gave the meeting credibility, making it easier for people to RSVP in the affirmative. Getting everyone’s calendar in sync, however, was a nightmare. But, finally, they settled on a date—February 14, 2006.

  Valentine’s Day. Apparently romance isn’t foremost on the mind of these space tycoons, John Gedmark thought. Just out of graduate school, the twenty-three-year-old intern at the X Prize Foundation had the unenviable task of arranging the seating in SpaceX’s cramped conference room.

  Gedmark had sketched out the seating by hand on a yellow legal pad. Elon was at the head of the table; as host, he earned that right. To his left was Peter Diamandis, the organizer of the Ansari X Prize.

  Robert Bigelow, the multimillionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, who wanted to build hotels in space, sat across from the Virgin Galactic representatives. John Carmack, the programmer behind such video games as Quake and Doom, sat near the middle.

  Stu Witt, a former navy pilot who ran the Mojave Air and Space Port, was at the far end near Alex Tai and George Whittinghill, who were representing Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which was designing SpaceShipOne’s successor, SpaceShipTwo.

  Everyone who was anyone in the industry was here. Everyone, that is, except Jeff Bezos, or anyone from Blue Origin.

  In 2006, Blue was still an obscure outfit, shrouded in secrecy, keeping many, even its industry brethren, at bay.

  “It wasn’t clear what their plans were,” Gedmark said. “For all we knew, they were more of a small sort of R and D [research and development] shop.”

  Still, the members reached out to Blue Origin, inviting it to send someone to the meeting. But they couldn’t get anyone to come out.

  BURT RUTAN SAT at the far end of the table, still believing that the flights of SpaceShipOne were only the beginning, even though the famed spaceplane would never fly again.

  After its historic flights, it was retired to the National Air and Space Museum, where i
t was put on display, hanging from the rafters between Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Yeager’s X-1.

  But while it would be preserved for future generations to see, the folks at the X Prize, and the industry in general, didn’t want its enshrinement to signal the end of what they were trying to accomplish, which was nothing short of a viable industry that could take ordinary people to space.

  Commercial space was having its “Lindbergh moment,” the one giant leap Peter Diamandis and the people at X Prize hoped would spark a revolution in human space travel. Lindbergh had helped touch off a revolution in aviation, such that by 1955, more people were traveling on commercial airliners than taking the train. Lindbergh’s flight had an immediate effect: ticket sales on commercial flights soared, as did the number of licensed aircraft.

  IF THE INDUSTRY was going to have a real impact, the insurgency that had started with SpaceShipOne needed a second act. But some worried that the public’s attention would soon wane, as it did after the Apollo moon landings. After achieving the impossible of putting a man on the lunar surface, NASA’s human spaceflight program had struggled to re-create that magic.

  Now after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, costing the lives of fourteen astronauts, many feared that the agency had become too bureaucratic and risk-averse to push humans deeper into space. That the drawdown after Apollo would become permanent. That Apollo would be an anomaly, a fluke, never to be repeated again. And that Eugene Cernan’s hopeful promise—“We shall return”—made in 1972 as he became the last man to walk on the moon, was eroding from prophecy to fallacy.

  This was the country of Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers and Lewis and Clark. Opening frontiers has long been part of the American DNA, from the Mayflower, to Manifest Destiny, to the moon. Musk saw the discovery of adventure as an inherently American ideal.

  “The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he once said. “Almost everyone came here from somewhere else. You couldn’t ask for a group of people that are more interested in exploring the frontier.”

  If NASA, or Congress, or any president wouldn’t stand up as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 when he promised to send a man to the moon within a decade, then this class of entrepreneurs would attempt it.

  Instead of hoping Kennedy would rise from the grave and give them the space program they wanted, maybe they were, themselves, the people they’d been waiting for.

  THEY WERE AT SpaceX’s headquarters to officially band together and call themselves the “Personal Spaceflight Federation.” They wanted their movement to catch fire and spread, and thought that the industry needed to form an industry association, to keep the momentum going and show Washington, DC, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that they were for real.

  Like Musk, several of the members were Silicon Valley types, and so “personal” was chosen to mimic the “personal computer.” They wanted to signal that just as computing went from industrial mainframes to small desktops, so would space, too, become an individual experience.

  In addition to that quixotic goal, there was a real immediate concern. SpaceShipOne’s thrilling, white-knuckled flight not only captured the attention of the world, but Congress and the FAA as well. As some in the industry had feared, the federal government was now weighing how to best regulate this emerging industry.

  To the group, many of whom had a libertarian bent, the words congressional oversight and federal regulation were, at best, anathema to their core beliefs. At worst, such government involvement could lead to the demise of their companies. By speaking with one voice, they could help craft the regulations, ensuring that Washington didn’t stifle a fledgling industry before it had left the nest.

  In preparation for the Valentine’s Day meeting, Gedmark realized that the Personal Spaceflight Federation was really a federation in name only. Yes, the group had put out a press release announcing its formation. But it didn’t have any money or legal standing as a nonprofit organization. Gedmark knew it would need both.

  He took care of setting it up as a nonprofit, getting the California secretary of state’s office to certify its articles of incorporation a week before the Valentine’s Day meeting. And he put together a draft memo for his boss that outlined the regulatory hurdles the industry could face.

  It began: “The Personal Spaceflight Federation is a non-profit organization, incorporated in the State of California, dedicated to resolving the regulatory, legal, political and broad strategic challenges the personal spaceflight industry faces moving forward.”

  Gedmark’s memo warned that “the danger of overly burdensome regulations continues to be a significant risk. Almost as critical is the danger of muddy, chaotic, or inconsistent regulations, as an atmosphere of uncertainty or chaos in an industry can quickly dry up badly needed sources of capital.”

  He acknowledged the difficulties of the marketplace they were trying to disrupt, writing, “The entrenched aerospace industry is not only increasingly monopolistic, but is heavily subsidized by the federal government.”

  He outlined plans to develop “informed consent” standards, an attempt to have the industry treated like a thrill sport, the same as bungee jumping or skydiving—if you’re crazy enough to jump out of a plane, be our guest, but know that death is one of the possible outcomes. Just remember to pull the rip cord.

  Finally, the industry also had to prepare for the worst, Gedmark warned.

  “Unfortunately, the personal spaceflight industry must proceed assuming that a fatal accident is inevitable,” he wrote.

  DEATH WAS MORE likely a “when, not if” outcome, an unavoidable fact that they should confront and plan for. But death shouldn’t stop them. It shouldn’t get in the way. Progress was not possible without it. That was true in space as it was in all manner of expeditions, from crossing the Atlantic, to exploring the poles, to opening up the West.

  When Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica in 1914, he was said to have placed a newspaper advertisement that read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” (Some have cast doubt as to whether this advertisement was ever actually placed. Still, it was clearly a harrowing and dangerous journey.)

  Similarly, an avalanche center warning to the backcountry skiers who flock to Tuckerman Ravine, the glacial cirque just below the peak of Mount Washington in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, read: “Visitors to the Ravine should never come expecting to be rescued when something bad happens. Don’t rely on other people being around to help you; ultimately your party may be the only rescue team available to respond.”

  As a guidebook pointed out, Tuckerman wasn’t just a ravine but a culture clash—it subscribed to an ethos that was “anathema to many of the values of modern society. It takes hard work to get there, there are no rules, dire consequences can follow from mistakes and you have nothing to show for your courageous efforts save for a fleeting track in the snow.”

  The act of embracing that death was a likely outcome in the quest to open up the space frontier might seem like a macabre exercise. But it was liberating and, in a way, even optimistic, a view beyond the grave to a point on the horizon where the sacrifice would be worth it. Forays into the unknown had to be met with a steely mix of thorough preparation and blind hope, like Magellan’s crossing the strait through the southern tip of Chile that would one day be named for him, and entering the Pacific for the first time, unaware of how vast it stretched out ahead of him, not knowing when he’d hit land.

  Mike Melvill had escaped death during his harrowing SpaceShipOne flights—one flying blind, the other in an uncontrolled spin. But he had held on and gutted it out, and in the process had earned the glory, the “honor and recognition” that Shackleton was said to have promised nearly a century earlier.

  In modern society, there were few places that allowed such freedoms—duly warned, bu
t uninhibited. Nobody told Lincoln Beachey, one of the barnstormers in the early days of aviation, that he couldn’t break the altitude record of 10,466 feet by strapping on an extra 10-gallon tank to his Curtiss D plane, flying until it ran out of fuel and then gliding back to the ground. No one told him he couldn’t fly over the edge of Niagara Falls as if he were part of the waterfall itself, getting so close to the bottom that it appeared his plane had been lost in the misty whirlpools below until he pulled up in a dramatic escape while being watched by a crowd of 150,000. And no one told him he couldn’t perform the dangerous bit of aerial acrobatics that ultimately killed him—flying in a vertical S that ended up with a crash in the San Francisco Bay in 1915.

  Lots of pilots were pushing the edge at the time, seen not just as daredevils, but also—and especially by those hoping to open up space—as martyrs to a greater cause, one worthy of sacrifice. By definition, exploration—a foray into the unfamiliar—demanded a high tolerance of risk, a willingness, as Joseph Conrad wrote in Lord Jim, to “in the destructive element immerse.”

  Outside of the battlefield, there was perhaps no more destructive element than being strapped in on the top of a rocket, a controlled explosion of highly flammable propellant. There is a reason why NASA chose so many of its astronauts from the US Navy and Marine Corps, courageous battle-tested fighter pilots all with the Right Stuff.

  Astronauts and test pilots talk openly of death, for the same reason marines talk openly about killing—to desensitize it, make it real, and eventually come to accept it as the inevitable fact of life. Their will had been written and signed long ago. When they’d lose their life—at a ripe old age, or triggered far too early by a sniper’s bullet or a blown rocket engine—was a risky game of Russian roulette, a matter of chance.

  Before he was killed in the fire that engulfed the crew of Apollo 1 on the ground during a preflight test, Gus Grissom had prepared himself for an outcome he knew was highly probable.