The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Only there was a problem. The Alliance was about to launch a highly classified spaceplane known as the X-37B, which would ultimately stay in orbit for 674 days. But doing what? The Pentagon wouldn’t say. That was a secret. As was the whole program. Which was why the president couldn’t just swing by for a photo op in front of a rocket carrying a highly classified payload. The National Security Council wouldn’t hear of it.

  So, the White House scrambled. Instead, Obama would visit SpaceX, a high-profile event the company gleefully welcomed. After years of their fighting uphill against the entrenched contractors, a presidential visit would represent a public relations triumph over its archrival, even if it was, as Musk said later, “a sheer accident.”

  Musk and a small team of SpaceX employees, including Mosdell, greeted the president at Pad 40. They showed him around the launch site, and walked him to the Falcon 9 rocket they had erected on the pad for the photo op. Mosdell couldn’t quite believe it. He was walking alongside the president of the United States, while Musk was showing off the pad that he had built.

  The photos of that day did everything SpaceX had hoped, and more. The images of the young president walking alongside the young entrepreneur was the greatest endorsement SpaceX could have ever received.

  Obama didn’t say a word publicly. He took no questions at the pad. And during the speech, he didn’t so much as utter the name “SpaceX.” But here he was, his jacket slung casually over his shoulder, walking in lockstep with Musk, like two pals out for a stroll. The images were powerful, their message evident: this was the future.

  It was as if the president had broken out a bottle of champagne and christened the rocket, blessed its mission, and in the process, tapped the kneeling Musk on each shoulder with his sword, knighting him as a member of the realm.

  BUT MUSK SENSED that at one point during their fifteen-minute tour, Obama was also studying him.

  The White House had bet big on the rocket now towering over them. It was going to fly cargo to the space station. And it was looking increasingly likely that it would also be one of the rockets NASA would choose to take astronauts there as well.

  While it looked majestic standing there on the pad, the fact was the Falcon 9, a much more complicated vehicle than the Falcon 1, had never flown. At the moment, it was little more than a showpiece, an unproven prop in a photo op designed, in part, to shift attention away from the criticisms of the men who had walked on the moon. Given the problems SpaceX experienced launching the Falcon 1 for the first time—and the high failure rate of the maiden flights of rockets in general—Musk couldn’t be sure that the Falcon 9’s first flight wouldn’t end in an explosion.

  The president couldn’t be sure, either. And Musk couldn’t help but feel as though Obama were trying to divine the future.

  “I think he wanted to get a sense if I was dependable or a little nuts,” Musk said.

  The truth was probably somewhere in between.

  BEFORE THE FIRST launch of the Falcon 9, Musk found himself in an unfamiliar role: trying to play down the significance of the event. After years of hyping his company, saying it could build more reliable rockets far cheaper, that the future of space lay with SpaceX and companies like it, he was now trying to deflect attention and manage expectations.

  It would be a “good day,” he said, if just the first stage worked and then the rest of the mission went off course.

  “I hope people don’t put too much emphasis on our success,” he told reporters in the days leading up to the launch. “Because it’s simply not correct to have the fate of commercial launch depend on what happens in the next few days. But it certainly does add to the pressure. There’s more weight on our shoulders because of that. I wish there weren’t.”

  It was too late for that now. With the White House making a risky gamble that companies like SpaceX could be trusted to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the space station, far more than just the fate of a single company was riding on the flight. The fate of the industry and a significant portion of the White House’s space program was, to a large degree, resting squarely on Musk’s shoulders, a burden he and his hard-charging company had put there themselves.

  “A dramatic launch failure could further undercut an already faltering campaign by the White House to persuade Congress to spend billions to help SpaceX—and perhaps two other rivals to develop commercial replacements for NASA’s retiring space shuttle fleet,” a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote.

  On June 4, 2010, less than two months after Musk had toured Obama around the pad, the Falcon 9 was standing vertical again—this time ready to launch, not as the backdrop for a photo op.

  On launch day, Mosdell was the launch conductor, in charge of orchestrating all the steps that went into the countdown, and monitoring the health of the rocket and preparing for liftoff. He had worked dozens of launches in his career, but this one was particularly nerve-racking since the rocket had never flown before.

  “It was cross your fingers, here we go,” he recalled. “In all my experience, I never felt prepared enough. I could always use another day to study this or that, and leading into the SpaceX launches it was that times a factor of ten.”

  Mosdell was in the back of the launch control room; Musk was up front in the engineering support area, with the vice presidents in charge of propulsion and avionics.

  On the pad, the Falcon 9 looked and sounded like a living, breathing animal. Leashed to the tower and its support system, the rocket inhaled vast quantities of propellant in massive heaves and exhaled huge gusts of steam as the liquid oxygen boiled off, like the angry snorts of a bull just before it charges.

  Mosdell reminded himself to stay calm and focused on the launch’s careful choreography, to take comfort in the precise sequence. To have faith in the script. And, perhaps most of all, to breathe. After every key milestone, he told himself, take a deep breath. That would help him get through this. In through the nose, out through the mouth, all the way to orbit.

  HE CALLED THE poll, before the launch director declared the Falcon 9 was “ready for launch.” There was the T-minus 10–9–8 countdown, and the engines fired. The Falcon 9 lifted off and cleared the tower.

  Mosdell took a deep breath.

  The engines were humming, shooting out a fiery tail. A little over a minute later, the rocket passed through maximum dynamic pressure, when it was under the most strain.

  Another deep breath.

  After about two minutes, the first stage engines shut down.

  Inhale. Pause. Exhale.

  Stage separation.

  Deep breath.

  Second stage engine started.

  Another.

  The fairing opened.

  One more, as the tension in Mosdell’s chest and shoulders began to slowly recede, like the tide going out.

  Now he could finally relax. Musk did, too, allowing himself to revel in the latest triumph, the most unlikely of all. While the Falcon 1 had shown SpaceX could get to orbit, it was essentially a test vehicle. And now that the far more advanced Falcon 9 had flown successfully—on its first attempt, no less—Musk declared victory, saying that the launch was “to a significant degree a vindication of what the president has proposed.”

  It was also a vindication for Musk and SpaceX, one that justified the curious design of the Dragon spacecraft, the spacecraft that ultimately would ferry supplies to the International Space Station. Musk had insisted that Dragon be built with a feature that was completely unnecessary for the passenger-less cargo flights to the station.

  The Dragon had windows.

  WHILE THE HARE was racing ahead, the tortoise was content to stay hidden in its shell, working quietly deep in the West Texas desert where its secrets were protected. But then on August 24, 2011, a thundering explosion reverberated across the plain, another sign that the supersecretive Blue Origin was up to something.

  A little digging would have found that the Federal Aviation Administration issued Experimental Per
mit Number 11-006 on April 29, 2011. It allowed “Blue Origin to conduct reusable suborbital rocket launches of a Propulsion Module 2 (PM2) launch vehicle” within a 7-mile radius centered on the company’s facility in West Texas.

  In the days leading up to the launch, it also issued a “notice to airmen” so that airplanes would steer clear of the area.

  But the company didn’t talk about the launch, and it refused to acknowledge the explosion, officially staying mum, frustrating those looking for answers. Yes, the company’s facility was huge and set far, far away from any form of civilization. Not that there was any great population center nearby anyway. But still, that explosion got people’s attention. Word spread on social media, and some even called NASA, asking about what had felt like the sky falling. Eventually a reporter from the Wall Street Journal caught wind of the explosion and published a story saying the company’s rocket had blown up, a setback “highlighting the dramatic risks of private space ventures.”

  For years, Blue Origin’s obsession with secrecy boarded on the absurd. The company was so consumed with staying covert that visitors had to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Once, even a consultant who wanted to bring his spouse to the company’s holiday party was told that, yes, she could come—as long as she signed an NDA, too. Santa himself could have shown up at the party, and the world would have remained none the wiser.

  But the rocket explosion had been witnessed—and felt—by more than a few concerned citizens in West Texas, who were beginning to wonder just what the hell was going on in the far reaches of that furtive compound, off Highway 54, where the entrance was marked only by a pair of streetlights and a collection of cameras. For all they knew, they had another Branch Davidian on their hands.

  NASA was frustrated. It was now working with Blue as part of its commercial crew program, eventually awarding it contracts worth $25.7 million. After years of being funded exclusively by Bezos, it had become insular, accountable to no one. But now it was working with the government—and blowing up rockets. It had to say something.

  David Weaver, NASA’s head of communications, called the company’s public relations representatives and urged them to make some sort of a statement about the rocket explosion. Secrecy was only fueling the speculation about the mysterious company. It wasn’t going to work here. The more time went on, the more it fueled conspiracy theories.

  Eventually, more than a week after the explosion, the company published a blog post from Bezos under the headline “Successful Short Hop, Setback and Next Vehicle.” It was the first update the company had posted on its site since its 2007 post about the test of the Goddard vehicle.

  Bezos led with the good news: “Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission,” meaning it flew to a relatively low altitude and then flew back, landing safely on the pad.

  He continued: “And then last week we lost the vehicle during a development test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet.” The news there was the company had broken the sound barrier.

  “A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle.” In other words, the rocket was diverging off course, so the engines automatically cut off and it fell back and crashed.

  “Not the outcome any of us wanted,” Bezos continued, “but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”

  He signed it “Gradatim Ferociter!”

  In November, the company posted a video of the short hop launch from May, revealing the rocket for the first time. Called Propulsion Module 2, it looked like a farmer’s grain silo, squat and primitive. It lifted off in a cloud of smoke and dust, trailed by a fiery tail. It climbed up just a few hundred feet, then momentarily stopped, hovering over the ground just before returning back down ever so slowly, as if it were a marionette being lowered to the stage by the careful hand of a puppeteer.

  For decades, the engine was the most important part of the rocket. But this rocket had something altogether different, something that had not been necessary before.

  This rocket had legs.

  LATER THAT YEAR, on December 2, 2011, Lori Garver got a rare peek behind the curtain at Blue Origin—a personal tour of the company with Jeff Bezos himself.

  As they made their way through the cavernous, 300,000-square-foot facility, it was clear Bezos was at home here. He knew people’s names, where they had gone to school, what they were working on. The staff wasn’t surprised to see him. Here, one of the richest men in the world, the King of Amazon, was Jeff, just Jeff.

  “It was a very different experience than your typical CEO tour,” Garver recalled.

  As someone who was taking heat on Capitol Hill—and within her own agency—for trusting startups like Blue Origin, Garver wanted some firsthand evidence of how the company was different. How it could disrupt the industry. How it could be cheap and reliable.

  SpaceX had demonstrated it—Pad 40 alone was a master class in creativity, not to mention the innovative ways it had built its rockets in-house. What, she wanted to know, was Blue Origin’s secret?

  The answer, in part, was citric acid.

  For a while the company had been using a toxic cleaner for its engine nozzles, which it intended to reuse. But that cleaner was expensive and difficult to handle—it had to be used in a separate, clean room because it was so toxic. Then someone discovered that citric acid worked just as well. So, the company started buying it by the gallon, an easier, less expensive solution that worked better.

  “Now I’m the largest purchaser of lemon juice in the country,” Bezos told her, letting loose one of his trademark cackles.

  After about an hour it was clear that Garver, inquisitive, passionate, and supportive, had earned her way into the circle of trust. And so as they sat in a conference room, Bezos leaned in and said, “I want to tell you about my big rocket.”

  Beyond the PM 2 test vehicle, and even beyond the suborbital rocket that would take paying tourists just past the edge of space, Blue Origin was already sketching out plans for an orbital rocket, one capable of challenging SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

  Garver wished the company would come out publicly about it. She couldn’t help but think of the headlines it would generate, and the support for Obama’s space plans. Here was private industry going off on its own to build a new rocket with an American-made engine here in the United States. And it wanted to partner with NASA. That’s why Bezos was telling her about it.

  But there was no way he would talk about it publicly. It was too early. And part of the company’s credo was to only talk about things after they’d been accomplished.

  Bezos did, however, invite her to see the company’s launch and testing facility in West Texas. That was where it had been testing its engines for the new suborbital rocket, and where the magic happened.

  But just because Blue Origin was opening up for the number two at NASA didn’t mean it was in any way changing its obsessively secretive culture. The NASA photographer that accompanied Garver on the trip was not allowed on the factory floor. He was forced to wait outside until the tour was over and it was time for the photo op.

  He snapped plenty of pictures of Bezos and Garver, along with company executives, including Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson, and Bretton Alexander, its director of business development and strategy. But before the images could be released to the public, company officials insisted they review them.

  In the end, they approved just one.

  10

  “Unicorns Dancing in the Flame Duct”

  THE BIRTH OF the Space Age at Cape Canaveral in the late 1950s was so mesmerizing that the people in nearby, sleepy Titusville were not only starting to believe the United States might just put a man on the moon, but sensing a branding opportunity. “Miracle City,” they’d call their town.

  Following the government’s infusion of Cold War cash, th
e community had grown from a population of 2,604 in 1950 to more than 30,000 by 1970, and the developers of Titusville’s new 330,000-square-foot Miracle City Mall were ready. “Miraculous profits await you,” boasted a brochure designed to attract new tenants to a shopping center described as “as modern as the space age activities of its neighbors.”

  “Miracle City” may have sounded like the slick marketing department hype of a coastal Florida real estate development firm. But it was apt. What was happening along this stretch of quiet beach was indeed miraculous. NASA didn’t even exist until 1958. Three years later, after the United States had built a space program almost from scratch, Alan Shepard had become the first American to reach space. A decade later, he would hit a makeshift 6-iron, smuggled onto Apollo 14, in a lunar dust trap.

  With unprecedented investment throughout the 1960s, NASA put on an amazing show, building new rockets and spacecraft, training a generation of astronauts who would pull off the impossible, and, while beating the Russians to the moon, inspiring the world. For the backdrop to this improvisational drama, NASA had built a suitably grand stage: Launch Pad 39A.

  It stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching nearly 500 feet high. Before launch, the astronauts zipped to the top in an elevator, getting one last view of the waves lapping the earthly coastline. And there, atop the scaffolding, just before the bridge that took them to the rocket, there would be a telephone for the astronauts to make their final calls, as if they were facing a prison sentence. Like a child’s toy, the phone had extra-large buttons, all a shiny gold, designed specifically for astronauts outfitted in bulky spacesuits and gloves.

  If Launch Pad 39A was the stage, the star of these explosive performances was the Saturn V, a monster of a rocket with five engines—hence the V—that generated enough force to power New York City for more than an hour, consuming fuel at a rate of 15 tons per second. Fully fueled, the Saturn V weighed more than 6.2 million pounds. It had 3 million parts and to this day remains the most powerful rocket ever built. At ignition, flames and thick billowing plumes of smoke gushed from its engines, each nearly two stories tall, and surged through a flame trench the size of a subway tunnel. The roar reverberated like an earthquake for miles, and the people of Titusville joked that they weren’t sure whether the Saturn V took off or that Florida had suddenly sunk into the ocean.