The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  This was where NASA would showcase many of its most important launches. It was the site from which Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off toward the moon in 1969. Then in 1972, the pad was where Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, took off. Liftoff after liftoff, 39A became the Broadway of the Space Age, an amphitheater large enough to fit even the most outsize ambitions. In 1981, it launched the first space shuttle into orbit. Thirty years later, it would host the very last shuttle departure, marking the final chapter of an extraordinary era of human spaceflight.

  But in 2011, the retirement of the shuttle came with a jolt, and was met with widespread disbelief—and denial—on the Space Coast, which could not fathom the new, hard truth: After fifty years of historic launches, the United States was suddenly, for the first time in decades, incapable of launching astronauts into space. Instead, the nation would have to rely on Russia—which it had bested in the race to the moon—for rides to the cosmos.

  The dreams of Apollo were decaying, as were its stomping grounds.

  Left behind on the Cape were the ruins from a once-great human space program—abandoned spires of launch towers, grown over bunkers that once housed launch crews—clues for future archaeologists of what had once transpired on this sacrosanct ground. Then there were the artifacts that were no longer visible, the rusted launch site skeletons that had been torn down or buried, their existence only hinted at by the paths beneath the brush leading to nowhere.

  At Launch Pad 14, not far from 39A, a forbidding gate with a curious sign proclaimed it protected the “launch site of the free world’s first man in orbit.” That would be John Glenn, who had mimicked the feat performed by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, the year before for the Soviet Union.

  The tour buses stopped coming, and so rarely anyone saw the museum-like exhibit, faded by the relentless Florida sun and clouded by the salt air. It explained all that had happened here at Pad 14, which began not with John Glenn, but with a chimpanzee named Enos, from Cameroon, who was trained as an “astrochimp” at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

  “He became the first living creature launched by the U.S. to orbit the Earth when he flew aboard Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961,” the exhibit read. “Enos logged a total of 3 hours, 21 minutes in space and paved the way for the first U.S. manned orbital flight just three months later.”

  Inside, just before the overgrown launchpad, there was another curious clue in the parking lot. Four parking spots each had a plate bearing the name and military rank of one of the four Mercury astronauts who had launched from Pad 14—“John H. Glenn Jr. LT. COL.,” “M. Scott Carpenter LCDR,” “Martin M. Schirra Jr. LCDR,” and “L. Gordon Cooper MAJ.”

  The parking spots, though, sat empty and waiting, as if the ghosts of the astronauts would one day return.

  LAUNCH PAD 39A, left dormant, was rusting away in the salt air. Weeds grew in the flame trench, spurts of new green grass breaking through the remnants of char. Up in the scaffolding, the astronauts’ phone sat forgotten, with no one on the other end to receive its calls. Its oversize gold buttons faded to brown.

  Outside the gates of Kennedy Space Center, the Space Coast faltered, the underpinning of its economy gone. The Miracle City Mall inevitably succumbed, too. By the last shuttle flight, it was home to just two businesses, JC Penney and a hot dog stand. Eventually, it was torn down.

  After standing as a monument to American ingenuity and the embodiment of John F. Kennedy’s lunar aspirations, 39A was now a symbol of the degradation of the US human spaceflight program. To keep down maintenance costs, which were $100,000 a month and climbing, NASA had already disassembled much of it. And a spokesman admitted, “It’s not in a hazardous situation, but it has not been kept up.”

  Now, in 2013, some forty years after it was erected, NASA wasn’t sure what to do with the launchpad. The structure was on the National Register of Historic Places, and couldn’t be torn down.

  Unused, 39A was now a tower of obsolescence, a burden to NASA and taxpayers and a painful reminder of past glory. The only solution was for NASA to find someone to take it over. Someone crazy enough to be willing to spend the money to strip it down to the studs and breathe new life into a faded beauty.

  NASA officials knew not too many people were in the market to lease a fixer-upper launchpad, but they had their eye on one possible tenant: an eccentric billionaire who had started a space company from scratch with absolutely no experience with rockets, but talked about colonizing Mars—a wild card named Elon Musk, who was now on an improbable, but epic, roll.

  THE FALCON 9 had flown successfully. And SpaceX was moving ahead with developing a more robust version of its Dragon spacecraft that would carry astronauts, not just cargo. It was talking about building an even bigger rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, which would allow it to pursue Musk’s original goal of colonizing Mars. Musk even put a price tag on it, telling the BBC, “Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket—half a million dollars. It can be done.”

  In May 2012, the company was aiming for yet another major milestone when it flew its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Launching a rocket was one thing; flying a spacecraft to orbit and having it berth, or dock, with the orbiting station was a far more difficult feat, one that had been accomplished only by three countries—the United States, Russia, and Japan.

  The pressure to get it right was enormous, and some SpaceX employees had been working nonstop for months. In the hours leading up to the Dragon’s arrival at the station, one exhausted engineer, who had been up all night, slumped against a wall in the company’s headquarters holding a sign, like a homeless person begging for change: “Hungry and tired. Please berth.”

  Flying above Australia, American astronaut Don Pettit maneuvered the International Space Station’s 57-foot-long robotic arm to reach out and grab Dragon, the world’s newest spacecraft. As the orbiting laboratory careened around the globe at 17,500 mph, the astronauts aboard the station carefully guided the Dragon capsule into position, making it the first private company to accomplish the task.

  “Looks like we’ve got us a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit told the NASA administrators in Houston.

  At SpaceX’s headquarters just outside of Los Angeles, employees broke into raucous applause, chanting their boss’s name, “We love Elon!” Musk was now developing a cultlike following, and SpaceX had swelled to more than two thousand employees with an average age of thirty, with $4 billion in contracts.

  “This is, I think, going to be recognized as a significantly historical step forward in space travel,” he said afterward. “Hopefully, the first of many to come.”

  ON MARCH 1, 2013, the Falcon 9 lifted off for its second official cargo delivery to the station. While the rocket did so smoothly, within an hour it was clear that its Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.

  “It appears that, although it achieved Earth orbit, Dragon is experiencing some type of problem right now,” John Insprucker, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 principal integration engineer, said on the company’s webcast before signing off. “We’ll have to learn about the nature of what happened.”

  Inside mission control, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what was wrong, and soon pinpointed the problem: a valve was stuck.

  Steve Davis, SpaceX’s director of advanced projects, started to prepare for the worst—aborting the mission entirely and bringing the spacecraft back to Earth. But the crews wondered, “Is the vehicle even functioning enough that you can bring it back?” he remembered. “We weren’t sure. That was the only time we had ever planned for an emergency re-entry, which is like a big thing because you have to whip it through air space. You have to reroute planes in real time. It’s not awesome. And so we were in that panic mode.”

  They had been in that panic mode before. In late 2010, on the eve of the Falcon 9’s second launch, and the first test flight of the Dragon spacecraft, a last-minute inspection of the rocke
t revealed a crack in the nozzle, or skirt, of the second-stage engine. That was not good.

  “You’re not going to fly with a crack,” Davis said. “We’re like, ‘What do we do?’”

  The normal thing would be to take the rocket apart, replace the engine skirt, reinspect it, and then “you’re up and launching in a month,” he said. No one wanted to lose that much time.

  Instead, Musk had a wild idea that he put to his team: “What if we just cut the skirt? Like, literally cut around it?” That is, what if they trimmed off the bottom as if it were a fingernail?

  “He went person by person and said, ‘Would this have any adverse effect on you?’”

  Davis said that because the skirt would be shorter, they’d get less performance from the engine. “But we had so much margin built into it, it didn’t matter.” Everyone else concurred, and “literally within thirty minutes, the decision was made.”

  The company flew a technician from California to Cape Canaveral; armed with a pair of shears, like the kind used to trim hedges, he cut around the crack. “And we flew the next day successfully,” Davis said. “That could have been the dumbest thing we ever did, but it was amazing.”

  That was not how NASA would have handled it. But its officials agreed with SpaceX that there wasn’t any reason why it wouldn’t work, and approved the launch, astounded by how quickly SpaceX was attacking the problem.

  Now, as Dragon was in trouble with the stuck valve, NASA was similarly hands-off.

  Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, and Michael Suffredini, the space station’s program office manager, were in the launch control center watching over SpaceX’s shoulder as they tried to figure out how to “burp the valve.” They were two of the agency’s most senior officials, with nearly sixty years at NASA between them. They had served through the shuttle disasters, had seen all sorts of problems in space, and now, as NASA faced another potential crisis, they were just talking softly between themselves.

  Standing nearby, Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, could barely contain herself. SpaceX’s Dragon was in trouble—deep trouble, it seemed. If it didn’t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, the critics would come out again to blast Obama’s decision to rely on these contractors. This mission had to work. They had to find a way to rescue Dragon, and fast.

  There were no better people to come fix this than Gerst, as he was known, and Suffredini. But there they stood, two of NASA’s elder statesmen just watching, offering a bit of advice, a whisper here, a suggestion there, to the SpaceX kids—and really, they looked like kids. But mostly, both were staying out of the way, letting the kids figure it out.

  Garver desperately wanted them to take over, to swoop in and save SpaceX. But instead they stood back.

  “They were like grandparents instead of parents,” Garver recalled. “And it was almost like grandpa taking them fishing: ‘Try over there. There might be some fish over there.’” A soft touch designed to let the kids learn to fish on their own, rather than an impatient dad’s just grabbing the pole and catching the fish for them.

  “If there was something we saw that we could have interjected, we would have done it,” Gerstenmaier recalled. But it wasn’t NASA’s spacecraft. The wise elders weren’t in control.

  “We really were in an advisory role,” Suffredini said. “We couldn’t give them any help but high-level guidance.”

  As they watched, the kids in the control center were making progress on the problem. The valve was stuck, so they’d need something to make it unstuck. On a spacecraft circling the globe at 17,500 mph, that was no easy task. But the SpaceX team knew that if pressure could be built ahead of the valve, and then it was suddenly released, that might just deliver the kick needed to jar the valve open.

  “It’s like the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver,” Musk said later.

  One of the engineers wrote a command, right then, on the fly, programming the spacecraft to build up the pressure. Then, they tried to beam the new command up to the Dragon, as if it were an iPhone update. At that moment, the folks at NASA knew they were witnessing something special. It wasn’t that they had fixed a problem with the spacecraft; that happened all the time. It was how fast they did it.

  “The SpaceX mind-set had always been about adapting quickly, and it really shined that day,” Suffredini said. “They had really an in-depth understanding of that system and the software, and that’s one of the secrets of their success. They probably had the kid in there who wrote the original code.”

  But the SpaceX crew was having a hard time communicating with the spacecraft. The code wouldn’t transmit. So, someone got the air force on the phone, which then gave the company access to a more powerful satellite dish, which allowed, at last, the uplink.

  The code worked. The valve opened. Dragon was able to dock with the station.

  The whole SpaceX team could take a deep breath.

  “That was nerve-racking,” Musk said later. “For a while there, we thought we’d have to abort the mission. But we were able to upload new software and make it work.”

  Watching from a distance, the grandparents were pleased. SpaceX had caught a big fish all on its own.

  It was a turning point, SpaceX’s rite of passage, an entry into adulthood. It had matriculated and was now granted membership into the rarefied, old-boys club. But nothing would symbolize the apotheosis of SpaceX, and by decree the emergence of the New Space movement it was now clearly leading, except the transfer of 39A into private hands. By 2013, Musk had set his sights on winning 39A, and it seemed inevitable that he would add the world’s most venerable launchpad to his growing trophy case.

  As far as some in NASA’s leadership were concerned, the agency should just sign the pad over to SpaceX, no questions asked, and be grateful that someone was willing to take it over. But others knew that would be a problem. They needed to bid it out, if only for the sake of procedure. Of course, they’d get no other takers. Who would want a used launchpad that would require millions to restore?

  Then, from out of the blue, NASA received another bid, this one a surprise from a little-known company that had for years remained quiet and secretive. But now Blue Origin was slowly emerging from the shadows.

  A YEAR EARLIER, in October, Garver had visited Blue Origin again, this time at its facility in West Texas. By now, almost a decade after Bezos had begun buying up the land in secret, there was a fully functioning launch facility, complete with an engine test stand and a launch site.

  Garver was particularly interested in the test stand, since NASA was looking into refurbishing one of its own at a cost that seemed astounding to her: $300 million. As she toured Blue Origin’s test stand, she asked her guide, a young engineer, whether he knew how much it had cost to build. His answer: somewhere in the range of $30 million.

  Ten times cheaper. She was stunned, and reminded again of how efficient private industry could be. “Can we test our rockets here?” she asked the people at Blue, who demurred, not wanting to deal with the government bureaucracy.

  In addition to the test stand, Blue had an odd chart to show her. On the wall in one of the offices was a grid laid out with a series of squares. Each square represented a plot of land in the Texas desert. In a couple of days, the company was going to perform what was essentially a fire drill in rocketry—a pad escape test. The idea was to demonstrate that if anything went wrong with the rocket, the capsule sitting on top, holding the astronauts, would be able to fly away to safety.

  For the test, they’d put the capsule on the launchpad, and then fire its motor to ensure that, in the case of a problem with the booster, the spacecraft would be able to get the crew away as fast as possible. The grid that Garver was now looking at represented the spots where Blue’s employees thought it would land, after flying a couple thousand feet into the air and then parachuting back safely to the ground. The Blue Origin team made a game of it. For $5 you could pi
ck a square, and then if the capsule landed there, you’d win.

  Garver made her pick, but told them that if she won, she’d donate the winnings back to the team. A few days later, on October 19, 2012, Bretton Alexander, Blue’s director of business development, sent her an e-mail.

  “Success!!” read the subject line.

  “Awesome pad escape test!” he wrote. “Need to review data but looked beautiful!”

  “Oh my… congrats! I was just going to write u!!!” she responded.

  “Btw you are one of 11 winners who picked the winning square!! We were 11 feet from the predicted mean location!! And we’ve spent your winnings on beer, scotch and tequila ;)” Alexander wrote back.

  “You got a great shout out for your game AND accuracy :).”

  A FEW MONTHS later, in January 2013, Blue had some more news. In an e-mail, Rob Meyerson, the company president, wrote to NASA administrator Charlie Bolden and Garver to say that the engine that would power its New Shepard rocket was making significant progress.

  “My apologies for not making it up to the Museum of Flight today for your visit,” Meyerson wrote on January 15. “I had planned to go (even had my coat on at one point) but decided to stay back in Kent so I could watch the first test of our new BE-3 engine, which was conducted at our West Texas site. The BE-3 is a Blue-developed 100,000 lb thrust rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as its propellants. After overcoming the usual first test obstacles, we were able to get the test off around 4:00 pm today. It was a tremendous milestone for Blue Origin and the result of many years of effort.”