The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  At the time, the notion of reaching the moon seemed as far-fetched as it was ridiculous. Goddard was derided as “moony” and “crackpot,” and even the New York Times wrote a scathing editorial in 1920 under the headline “A Severe Strain on Credulity,” which scoffed at the idea, saying a rocket could not work in the vacuum of space.

  “That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd,” declared the Times. “Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

  Goddard responded by saying that “every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized it becomes commonplace.”

  But the ridicule led Goddard, a shy man who preferred working alone, to an even greater measure of reclusiveness and dedication to a long-term vision of spaceflight that he knew would take many decades to fulfill.

  “How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem I do not know,” he wrote in 1932. “I hope as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for aiming at the stars, both literally and figuratively, is the work of generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.”

  He died in 1945, without having lived to see humans go to space. But just before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, he received a belated, postmortem vindication. By then, it was abundantly clear that rockets could indeed work in space, and the Times issued a correction to its editorial, a half-century after it was published.

  “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” it read. “The Times regrets the error.”

  FROM A PURELY chronological standpoint, it made sense that Bezos named his first rocket after the father of rocketry. But they were also kindred spirits. Like Goddard, Bezos was dedicated to taking the long view, with Blue seeing it as an enterprise that would take generations to complete. Like Goddard, Bezos believed that the impossible could be made routine. And like Goddard, Bezos’s company shunned the press, keeping its work secret, carefully protected from scrutiny and the criticism that would surely follow.

  In fact, Bezos was such a fan that he chose “Goddard” as the middle name for one of his sons.

  After years of work, Bezos and Blue Origin had arrived at the debut of its first launch, modest though it would be. Still, there was indeed a feeling of the “thrill of just beginning,” and the company made it festive. A cowboy cooked biscuits over an open fire. For the kids, there was a bouncy castle.

  The countdown played over a loudspeaker. Goddard lifted off, flying to 285 feet and then touching back down in a flight that lasted all of thirty seconds. Bezos celebrated with a giant bottle of champagne, and joked that his only job during the launch was to pop the cork. The launch was more successful than the uncorking, though. Bezos broke off the top of the cork, leaving the rest still in the bottle.

  Goddard’s short hop was another small and modest step forward for the company, and it stood in stark contrast to the giant leap Musk had taken. SpaceX’s first successful launch wasn’t just a couple hundred feet. It wasn’t even a suborbital spaceflight. SpaceX instead went straight to orbit, achieving an extraordinarily difficult task that requires the rocket to go so fast that it essentially is continually falling around Earth. It was typical SpaceX: Head down. Plow through the line.

  SpaceX was now looking ahead to its more powerful Falcon 9 rocket, which would launch from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. But Blue Origin remained steadfastly committed to its approach, even if it seemed the company was barely leaving the gate.

  In following this deliberative path, Goddard would be followed by New Shepard, a rocket named for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. The company’s progress, then, would mimic the step-by-step evolution of American spaceflight. Goddard’s rocket design helped lead to Shepard’s suborbital, up-and-down flight in 1961, which lasted just 15 minutes and 28 seconds. NASA didn’t put a man into orbit until John Glenn circled Earth the following year.

  Blue Origin didn’t say anything publicly about its launch or its next steps, until two months later. In a blog post, Bezos wrote:

  “Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we’re working on it methodically. We believe in incremental improvement and in keeping investments at a pace that’s sustainable. Slow and steady is the way to achieve results, and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along. Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner.”

  It didn’t matter how far ahead the hare was; the tortoise was content to keep the methodical pace Bezos had outlined for the company in his 2004 letter: “Be the tortoise and not the hare.” It would stay true to its motto, “Gradatim Ferociter,” or “Step by Step, Ferociously,” while repeating over and over:

  Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

  9

  “Dependable or a Little Nuts?”

  IT WAS JUST lying there, like a piece of used furniture left out on the curb for anyone to take. A massive 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank as big as one of those water storage bubbles with the name of the town it supplies painted across it. A SpaceX employee just happened to spot it while driving past an abandoned launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and thought, Maybe we could use this?

  The company had signed a lease for its own launch complex there, Pad 40, which since the 1960s had been used for the military’s Titan rockets. SpaceX had just knocked down the old structure that had been there for years. Now, in 2008, SpaceX was rebuilding the facility—on the cheap—for its new Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

  Despite having sat outside for years, the liquid nitrogen tank seemed in decent shape, and Brian Mosdell, who was leading the small team of ten SpaceX employees tasked with rebuilding the launchpad at the Cape, wanted it.

  They called the US Air Force again and again, seeking permission to take it. But no one there could be bothered; to the air force, the thing was a hunk of junk, not worth wasting any time on. Finally, Mosdell’s crew got a response, and was put in touch with a company that had been hired to haul away the tank and destroy it. The company was willing to part with it for $1 over the cost of scrapping it—$86,000.

  Mosdell bought it, and then spent about a quarter of a million dollars refurbishing it. Even with that, the cost was far lower than building a new tank from scratch, which he estimated would have cost more than $2 million. Musk was thrilled with the team’s ingenuity, showing off the tank on a video tour of the pad. “Here we are on top of our giant ball of liquid oxygen,” he said. “They say SpaceX has big balls, and it’s true.”

  An engineer, Mosdell had spent twenty years working at various launch facilities on the Cape, serving in a variety of roles with major defense contractors, including General Dynamics and Boeing/McDonnell Douglas. But when SpaceX hired him in 2008 after he had been working at its rival, the United Launch Alliance, he quickly realized this startup of a space company was unlike any other. When he was at Boeing years before, he’d actually tried to salvage the used liquid nitrogen tank.

  “But everybody shot that down,” he said. “Nobody was interested. It was too difficult.” His bosses wanted to know, “Who would we even call to get it?”

  When he worked for large defense contractors, “there was never a mind-set or interest in reusing things,” he said. “Everything needed to be built from the ground up. It’s government contracts and government money.”

  The rules were the rules, and the price was th
e price. No one questioned the cost, or the regulations, or the system. That’s how it was done.

  Until SpaceX. It had an altogether different mind-set, an obsession with finding ways to do things cheaply and efficiently, and an almost instinctive contrarian bent that questioned everything—the price, the rules, the old way of doing things. If Cape Canaveral and its leaders were the adults, SpaceX was the child, constantly curious, always asking why.

  When Mosdell got a call “out of the blue” from SpaceX, he wasn’t sure what to think. He had a safe, comfortable job at the Alliance, and like many there, he didn’t think SpaceX was a serious player. “I thought they had a PowerPoint and paper rocket,” or one that just existed in theory, he said. His colleagues at the Alliance wondered why he’d want to go work at a company like SpaceX, which had accomplished relatively little.

  “Like me, they didn’t see any threat coming out of SpaceX,” he said.

  Or any future.

  But when he went out to California for his interview, “everything really changed my mind,” Mosdell recalled. “I saw at least $25 million of flight hardware in various stages of fabrication. That’s when my head snapped and I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is the real deal.’”

  In interview after interview, the executives stressed that SpaceX was different than any of the companies listed on his resume. “This is not heritage aerospace,” he was told. “We’re lean and mean. If you come work for us, you’re going to have a lot of creative license. You’re not going to get stifled by bureaucracy.”

  The corporate culture was freewheeling and hard charging, with a mix of industry veterans and young kids with virtually no experience in building rockets, but who were brilliant and willing to devote themselves to the cause with abandon.

  It wasn’t a place for everyone. The whole enterprise of building rockets seemed a little crazy. The hours were ridiculously long; the work, challenging. It was great for young, energetic, and brilliant workaholics, but not so great for those seeking a “work-life balance.” Elon Musk was demanding and known to yell at employees on the middle of the factory floor. A former executive at Lockheed who got to know Musk and the culture at SpaceX couldn’t believe how relentless and demanding they were. “If I did that, at a public company, the HR person and the lawyers would be in my office within ten minutes to ship me off to eighteen months of sensitivity training,” he said.

  Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of mission assurance, praised Musk for the alchemy he performed at the company: “The way Elon turns the future into reality is pretty amazing,” he said. “The whole enterprise is pretty much against the odds.” But he also didn’t think he’d grow old at the company; he just didn’t have the energy. “It takes a toll on you, and it’s hard to do a half job at SpaceX.”

  Musk was aware of how demanding he and SpaceX could be. “Some of the guys kind of got burned out,” he said. “They just got fried after too much intensity.”

  Musk hired very smart people who had to prove their proficiency in personal interviews with him. Engineers stood atop the corporate totem pole, with everyone else behind. “SpaceX had what Elon called a high signal-to-noise ratio, meaning that people who added value were engineers. They were signal,” said Tim Hughes, the company’s general counsel. “And people who were nonengineers for the most part were noise.”

  One of the early hires was Mark Juncosa, who came to the company right out of graduate school, lured by Musk’s smarts and passion and the whole wild vibe of the company, which included Musk’s edict allowing employees to get up and leave meetings they didn’t need to attend. No questions asked.

  “There were a lot of people that were quite bright,” said Juncosa, who would become the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering. “And not boring. They all had a big fire under their ass and were quite crazy.”

  Juncosa wasn’t sure that the company would ever be successful. “How are we going to figure out how to make a spaceship that took an incredible amount of people in the sixties, when we didn’t have those resources?” he wondered.

  But here they were “fighting our fucking hardest,” all following Musk, believing that he always “figures out how to make the magic happen.”

  BY THE TIME Mosdell showed up, the company had moved into a new, bigger facility in Hawthorne, a former Boeing 747 fuselage factory not far from the Los Angeles airport. For an aerospace engineer, it was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Massive rockets were being built from scratch, long cylindrical cores stretching along the factory floor like the hulls of great ships. Engines—new, American-made engines—were being manufactured in-house. And hundreds of workers, many of them so young it seemed as if they should still be in college, fanned out across a floor humming with what Mosdell saw as a sense of let’s-get-it-done urgency.

  The company often warned job applicants that their interview with Musk could be short and awkward because he might be multitasking through it, or take long pauses to think during which he said nothing for minutes on end. Mosdell found Musk a touch awkward and abrupt, but smart. Mosdell had showed up prepared to talk about his experience building launchpads, which, after all, was what SpaceX wanted him to do. But instead, Musk wanted to talk hard-core rocketry. Specifically the Delta IV rocket and its RS-68 engines, which Mosdell had some experience with when at Boeing.

  Over the course of the interview, they discussed “labyrinth purges” and “pump shaft seal design” and “the science behind using helium as opposed to nitrogen.” Mosdell didn’t know whether Musk was testing his knowledge or genuinely curious. And then it was over.

  “He abruptly said, ‘Okay, great, thanks for coming in.’ And spun his chair around and went back to his computer,” Mosdell said. “I couldn’t tell if it went well or not.”

  When he was hired, Mosdell became SpaceX’s tenth employee at the Cape, and was put to work almost immediately, rebuilding Pad 40. Eager to show he could be resourceful, Mosdell and his team became the scavengers of Cape Canaveral, going around looking for leftover hardware as if they were on a treasure hunt.

  So, the old railcars from the 1960s that had once been used to ferry helium between New Orleans and Cape Canaveral became new storage tanks. “We took off the wheels and basically set them up on fixed pedestals,” Mosdell said.

  Instead of spending $75,000 on new air-conditioning chillers for the ground equipment building, someone found a deal on eBay for $10,000.

  In addition to recycling old material, they pushed back on regulations they saw as anachronistic leftovers from an earlier era.

  When the company was told it would cost $2 million for a pair of cranes to lift the Falcon 9, for example, it questioned the price, wanting to know why it was so expensive. The reason was that the air force required the cranes to meet a series of safety requirements to prevent, say, a hook from suddenly dropping too fast. But modern technology had rendered many of those requirements, some decades old, unnecessary.

  Mosdell and the SpaceX team lobbied the air force officials at Cape Canaveral, ultimately convincing them to strip out many of the old regulations that were driving up the price. They did, and SpaceX was able to purchase the cranes for $300,000.

  Then, the air force said that Pad 40’s flame duct needed to be extended with a water system. Bids for a traditional concrete trench to guide the rocket flames out and away from the pad came in at about $3 million. Mosdell thought they could do better.

  “Ultimately, the engineering team designed, and the pad crew built, a flame duct extension using steel box beams, which also carried cooling and acoustic suppression water inside the beams,” he said.

  The result: a system that met the air force’s requirements, for a tenth of the cost.

  “We had to be superscrappy,” Musk said. “If we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: those were our
two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, and make them work.”

  Cost drove lots of decisions, even how the company would build its rockets. Although some companies assembled their rockets vertically on the pad, that required what was known as a mobile service tower. They were giant structures that would surround the rocket while it was being built and then get wheeled away.

  “Elon is, like, ‘That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of ever,’” Gwynne Shotwell recalled. “‘Like, how expensive and inefficient is that?’”

  SpaceX built its rockets in its California factory “where it’s all clean and neat and nice anyhow,” said Shotwell. By building them horizontally, you reduce the risk of having employees as they work high off the ground, she explained.

  When it was building Falcon 1, the company bought a theodolite, a tool used to align the rocket, on eBay, saving the company $25,000.

  In the same frugal manner, the Dragon spacecraft looks the way it does because it’s the simplest design.

  “If someone says design a reentry capsule, and you give it to NASA or someone else, they are going to spend, like, a year designing its shape,” said Steve Davis, SpaceX’s director of advanced projects. “For us it was, the bottom is the diameter of the Falcon 9. Because it was on the Falcon 9. The top is the diameter of the [port where it would dock with the space station]. The design is now complete. That was it. Connect two lines.”

  The rocket’s avionics were powered by a $5,000 computer instead of the much more expensive aerospace hardware. One employee even found a piece of metal in a junkyard that he thought might be used as part of the rocket’s fairing, the protective cone on the top of the rocket that shields the payload, such as a satellite.