“If we die, we want people to accept it,” he said. “We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
But that was then. The swashbuckling era of Mercury and Apollo had passed, like poor, lonesome cowboys riding off into the sunset. It was replaced by the solemn rectitude of the parents who spent too much time at the funerals of their offspring, who knew the consequences and were rightfully chastened and scared.
During the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the average age in mission control was just twenty-six. Gene Kranz, the flight director with the flat-top and steely nerves, was thirty-five, the senior statesman, “the old man in the room,” he said.
They were young and invincible, full of so many romantic illusions that they didn’t know that the task President Kennedy had given them was impossible.
Since then, NASA had continued to pioneer, sending rovers to Mars and robots that scoured the far reaches of the solar system in one amazing feat after another. The Hubble Space Telescope had unlocked mysteries of the universe. Forty years after it was launched, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had reached interstellar space, traveling more than 13 billion miles from the sun. Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is the only spacecraft to fly by all four of the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Both continued to communicate with NASA daily. The Cassini spacecraft became the first ever to orbit Saturn, while making new discoveries about its mysterious rings and moons.
But nothing quite had the cachet or the thrill that came when a human being was aboard the rocket.
Decades later, as NASA’s average age grew to nearly fifty by the height of the shuttle era, its aversion to risk grew. After the Challenger disaster killed all seven on board; then Columbia, another seven, the investigations and accusations piled up and the youthful invincibility was gone.
Now the commercial space industry that was trying to pick up where NASA had left off feared that if “crew were lost” in an “anomaly”—the formal, anesthetized language used for “people” and “killed” and “explosion”—then there would be real trouble. Congressional and FAA investigations. Subpoenas and reports and hearings. All of which could bring the federation’s nascent efforts crashing down.
THE FREEDOM TO kill yourself in all manner of stupid ways was part of the American way, and it’s partly what made it appealing to Musk, a South African immigrant drawn to the United States for its free markets, its can-do spirit, and its entrepreneurial bent. He had moved to California, by way of Pretoria, Ontario, and Philadelphia, finally out west, following the Silicon Valley gold rush.
Musk had always had a bit of wanderlust, asking his father as a young boy, “Where is the whole world?” He came from a family of adventurers. His maternal grandparents, Joshua and Wyn Haldeman, had emigrated from Canada to Pretoria to escape what they considered a repressive political climate but also seeking “a base for exploration,” Musk said.
Haldeman wasn’t a barnstormer but an accomplished amateur pilot who was handy; he flew all over North America and Africa and Asia, and once in 1952, on a 22,000-mile journey across the globe. He also was believed to be the first person to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane, and as Musk pointed out, “he did this in a plane with no electronic instruments. In some places they had diesel and in some places they had gasoline and so he had to rebuild the engine according to whatever fuel they had.”
An inspiration to his grandson, Haldeman, who was born in Minnesota, was also an “amateur archaeologist,” Musk said, who was fascinated with the Lost City in the Kalahari Desert. He made a dozen expeditions there with his children, including Musk’s mother, Maye, in tow.
They were searching for the mythical city supposedly discovered by Guillermo Farini in the late 1800s. Starting in 1957, Haldeman retraced the explorer’s steps, into territory rarely visited, using maps with little information, while sometimes writing their own. Year after year, Haldeman plunged into deep, barren country, sometimes flying just a couple hundred feet aboveground so that his guide could navigate by studying the landmarks on the ground.
“There is something particularly fascinating about traveling through country which is unknown, untamed and untouched by man,” he wrote.
The family brought tents but rarely used them. Their guide slept by the fire feet first, so that when “his feet got cold he knew it was time to put some more wood on the fire,” Haldeman wrote. However, Lee, the youngest child, who was four on his first trip, did sleep with a roof over his head—“on the front seat of the car, as he is too tempting a morsel for any hungry night prowlers.”
Those included all sorts of predators, including leopards and a pair of lions, which Haldeman once bumped into, almost inadvertently, and backed away from slowly, saying to his wife, “Look, Wyn, a lion.” They scared them away with frantic shouts and a torch until the lions “went up on to the hill and watched us until dawn.”
Musk was three years old when his grandfather died, so “my only exposure to it was my grandmother showing slideshows of the various adventures,” he recalled. “When I was a kid I found the slideshows kind of tedious, but maybe it stuck in some way. Now I’d like to see the slideshow. But as a kid I was, like, ‘I want to go play with my friends. Why are you showing me these slides of the desert?’”
In founding SpaceX, Musk believed that in addition to trying to make humans a multiplanetary species—with the ultimate goal of sending people to Mars—he saw space travel as the greatest adventure ever, even greater than the quixotic searches for the Lost City.
Although there was, as he said, the “defensive reason” to go to Mars to colonize another planet—so that humanity would have another place to go in case anything happened to Earth—this was not what inspired him to go to Mars.
“The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it’s the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It’s the most exciting thing—I couldn’t think of anything more exciting, more fun, more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars,” he once said. “It would be incredibly difficult and probably lots of people will die and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States.”
Just as his grandfather had been free to take off in his airplane and go wherever he wanted—the Kalahari Desert, Australia, South Africa—Musk also enjoyed the thrill, and risks, of flying. For a short while he even owned a Soviet L-39 fighter jet. “I’d do acrobatics in it and fly at tree top level, fly up a mountain invert and fly back down the other side,” he said. “But then I was like, man, this was made by some Soviet technician and maybe they tightened the bolt right, or maybe they didn’t. Not a lot of redundancy. It was like, ‘This is crazy. I’ve got kids. I have to stop doing this.’”
He felt that humanity’s exploration of space should be as unencumbered as the opening of thousands of other frontiers, from the bottom of the ocean to the peaks of mountains.
Once, in the early days of SpaceX, Musk asked a space industry executive: “Do you know how many people have died on Mount Everest?”
A few hundred. Many of the bodies lying there, entombed, frozen reminders of the perils of exploration all the way to the top.
THE GOVERNMENT REGULATORS were already circulating, and some members of Congress were looking askance at this new industry that wanted to be able to fly people into space with little oversight.
A year before the Valentine’s Day meeting, a congressional hearing titled “Commercial Space Transportation: Beyond the X Prize” gave the members of the federation a jolt. James Oberstar, a longtime member of Congress, said he was “watching this process like a hawk.”
While he said he was “a convert to the cause” after once viewing commercial space “as, quite frankly, a distraction,” he also called for more robust regulations, ones that would not only protect the people on the ground, but the passeng
ers who had chosen to fly. The FAA had what he called a “tombstone mentality—wait until someone dies, then regulate.…
“That is not safety,” he continued. “That is being reactive, and that is what offends me.”
Under its regulations, the FAA protected the “uninvolved public and property” on the ground. But it offered no such protection to the actual passengers of the aircraft. Oberstar thought this was ludicrous, and that it needed to be changed.
“We ought to worry about the people on the plane,” he said.
But others at the hearing praised the accomplishments of the X Prize and the enthusiasm it generated. Congressman John Mica said that the flight of SpaceShipOne had “launched a whole new era in space.” The flight heralded an exciting future and “altered our vision of what the aviation system of the future will look like,” he said. “We now see the possibilities, including the development of space tourism, US spaceports, rapid global transportation.”
The testimony of the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, was perhaps most important. If she called for Congress to crack down on the enterprise, the companies in the Personal Spaceflight Federation could be in real trouble.
Instead, she came out strongly for the industry, equating the moment of commercial space to where commercial aviation was a hundred years earlier, when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. She applauded the efforts of entrepreneurs, such as Musk, Branson, and Allen, who were betting their fortunes on the industry, calling them “astropreneurs.”
“The space you and I grew up knowing dealt largely with final countdowns, and Jules Bergman,” she said, referring to the ABC news broadcaster who covered the space program during the 1960s. “Space was a place where you saw flickering black-and-white photographs, images with leaps of mankind. Not anymore. America’s love affair with space is vicarious no more. There is a bold new group of people—astropreneurs—and their aim is to bring space flight into everyone’s grasp.”
Coming from the head of the nation’s aerospace regulatory agency, it was a strong endorsement that gave the entrepreneurs reason to feel optimistic. They could, at least for a moment, breathe a sigh of relief.
But for all the enthusiasm for this new industry and the future it heralded, there were, however, tough questions about how it should be regulated.
In her testimony, Blakey confessed that keeping up with the fast-moving industry “is going to be a real challenge.”
The Personal Spaceflight Federation had a pair of representatives on the hearing panel, ready to push back against calls for what it perceived as cumbersome rules. Michael Kelly, a member of the federation who also served on an FAA advisory committee, said that they were in unprecedented territory. No one had ever tried to fly into space commercially. And therefore no one had tried to regulate it. If the government came in too forcefully it “would be tantamount to prohibiting personal spaceflight as an activity,” he said.
Instead, the industry needed to come up with its own standards, ones that it would develop as it gained experience, bit by bit. “The only people who are gaining the experience that can be applied quickly and in the time required to support this industry are people who are in it themselves,” said Kelly.
Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, was also at the congressional hearing, and he pointed out that killing your customers is generally not a good business practice.
“Given that we have had eighteen hundred people who have now approached us wishing to fly in the early years, and given that they read like a textbook of Hollywood, Congress itself, international stardom, we are hardly likely to launch space flights which will kill these people,” he told the committee. “It will not be our intention to operate in anything but the safest way possible.”
The hearing went as well as they could have hoped. But they’d have to be vigilant.
AFTER THE MEETING on Valentine’s Day adjourned, Musk offered to give the group a tour of his facility. To this group of engineers and entrepreneurs, it was like an invitation to a six-year-old to visit a chocolate factory.
As Musk guided them through the factory floor, the group “let loose with detailed, technical questions, and he answered all of them,” Gedmark said. “Not once did he say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that because it’s proprietary.’… It was certainly impressive.”
At one point, John Carmack, the video game programmer who had started a rocket company, wandered off on his own, curious about a wiring diagram splayed out on a table. After studying it intensely, he looked up at Musk and said, “I have a question. What gauge of wire did you use right here?”
With that, Musk, who had been taking detailed, rapid-fire engineering questions, was finally stumped.
The team was already working on the company’s next rocket—the Falcon 9. (It had abandoned plans to build the five-engine Falcon 5 that Musk had promised years before at the FAA reception.)
But something was missing from the factory. The very first rocket that SpaceX would attempt to fly was down at a launch site thousands of miles away, in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean. The maiden launch had been delayed and delayed. But the company was now getting close to its first attempt at lighting its engines.
SpaceX couldn’t be sure, though, whether it would fly or explode.
8
A Four-Leaf Clover
ON JULY 29, 2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued an announcement that it was looking for a “transformational capability.” Which was not unusual since the mysterious Pentagon agency was always looking for transformational capabilities. But even by DARPA standards, this solicitation—for a space weapon—stood out.
The Pentagon wanted to develop “a means of delivering a substantial payload from within the continental United States (CONUS) to anywhere on Earth in less than two hours,” the announcement read.
This was no benign delivery service, however. The “substantial payload” would be a deadly arsenal—missiles, bombs, and a mysterious spacecraft capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds, or at least Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, some 3,800 mph. Launched from the East Coast, the strike would be able to hit Baghdad in just over an hour and a half.
Like many Pentagon programs, this one was given a clunky acronym, FALCON—which stood for “Force Application and Launch from CONUS.” And it was born from necessity, or at least a wish list coming out of the top reaches of the Pentagon.
Although United States forces were able to hit Afghanistan with a punishing wave of ordnance in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and then light up Baghdad in 2003 with a devastating “shock and awe campaign,” those attacks required a substantial buildup of forces in the region, which consumed precious time in the heat of war.
“While advancements in target identification and precision strike have been abundantly demonstrated, deficiencies in engaging and defeating time-critical and high value, hard and deeply buried targets (HDBT) have also been revealed,” the FALCON solicitation read.
In other words, the Pentagon needed to act fast if it got word that someone such as Osama bin Laden was hunkered down in a bunker somewhere.
Now the Pentagon was looking for a way to strike targets thousands of miles away without having to rely on forward operating bases or aircraft carriers. The way to do that was to go into space.
“It was clear to leadership at the Pentagon that we had no quick way to reach out and touch somebody, so to speak—a Saddam Hussein or somebody that we needed to take care of quickly,” said Steven Walker, then FALCON’s program manager. “If you didn’t have bases already prepositioned close to where action needed to occur, there’s no quick way for the US to respond.”
Developing a system that could be up and running quickly and hit anywhere in the world within a couple of hours was just the sort of near-impossible challenge that DARPA took on all the time. It was, as they liked to say at the agency, “DARPA-hard.” Since its creation in 1958, wh
en Bezos’s grandfather, Lawrence Gise, was hired, DARPA had come a long way. Although Gise was worried that the agency would go “up in blue smoke” because of the threatening political pressure, it instead solidified itself as an indispensable, if mysterious, part of the defense establishment. With a relatively small budget, it advanced all sorts of military technology, with the goal of staying a step or two ahead of the enemy and preventing another Sputnik-like surprise.
DARPA was tasked with looking into the future to envision what sorts of technologies the United States would need for the future of war: “To cast a javelin into the infinite spaces of the future” was its motto, a quote from Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. Walled off from the rest of the giant Pentagon bureaucracy so that it could innovate freely, the agency strove for nothing short of revolutionary advancement and “engineering alchemy” that would pierce the realm of science fiction. It had been given the authority to hire as it needed, as it sought “extraordinary individuals who are at the top of their fields and are hungry for the opportunity to push the limits of their disciplines.”
During Gise’s time, DARPA, then known as ARPA, was focused on preventing nuclear war and winning the space race. It even helped develop NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Since then, its reach and influence had broadened. In the late 1960s it started work on what would become ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a network of computers in different geographic locations that became a precursor to the Internet.
Over the years, it helped develop all sorts of technological advancements that have transformed war, and, in some cases, everyday life. DARPA helped give birth to the Global Positioning System (GPS), stealth technology, cloud computing, early versions of artificial intelligence, and autonomous aerial vehicles. As early as the late 1970s, it was working on a “surrogate travel system” that created something like a Google Street View map of Aspen, Colorado. More recently, its work was focused on underwater drones, geckolike gloves designed to enable soldiers to climb walls, humanoid robots, bullets that can change direction, and a blood-cleansing “artificial spleen” to help treat sepsis.
The Space Barons Page 14
