The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  He went on to thank NASA for its support, saying it helped the company save about a year in development time.

  This was indeed a tremendous milestone—and huge news, a Henry Ford moment: Jeff Bezos was building a rocket engine. Garver immediately sensed a public-relations opportunity for NASA and the White House. Since they had backed Blue with $25.7 million in contracts, and were supporting the private space industry, she wanted to shout this success to the rooftops. Let all those doubters in Congress, in industry, even in NASA’s own leadership, know that these companies, with help from the government, could succeed.

  “Your note about NASA’s assistance saving you a year of development time is especially welcome,” Garver wrote to Meyerson. “I’d really like to be able to communicate that message more broadly in upcoming speeches, testimony etc. Are you folks open to coordinating on such a message?

  “I know you are the ‘quiet company,’” she continued, “so I don’t want to presume to be able to share the information. And either way, it is really wonderful to see the government/industry teams working with such synergy.”

  There would be an announcement, but not until more than a month later. And the news of the engine test was mentioned only in passing, as part of a broader press release from Blue about how it was continuing to test its engine through a partnership with NASA, though without receiving any additional funding.

  Through 2014, the company planned to continue to test its rocket and capsule methodically, “putting emphasis on power and actuation systems, in-space propulsion, multiplex avionics and flight mechanics. The company also will progress the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control systems.”

  In other words, Bezos was getting ready to fly.

  BEZOS WANTED 39A for the new rocket it was developing in secret that went by the nickname “Very Big Brother” in-house. The launch site was a national treasure, one he had been fascinated with since he was a five-year-old kid watching the crew of Apollo 11 take off, a “seminal moment for me,” as he later commented. If Musk won the exclusive rights to it, it would be as if NASA was saying it had chosen SpaceX as the rightful heir of Apollo.

  Blue Origin had remained content to be on the sidelines for the better part of a decade. But no longer. That silence ended now. Launch Pad 39A, and all that it represented, were too big a prize. If NASA was giving it up in its will, Bezos would make a bid.

  Bezos’s team had tried to win the rights to 39A by arguing in 2013 that the venerable pad should not be operated exclusively by any one company. Unlike SpaceX, Blue Origin promised to share it with others, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin and even SpaceX.

  NASA looked at both proposals, and studied the pros and cons. Musk and NASA had already had a long-running relationship. NASA was investing billions in SpaceX. Even President Obama had blessed the company, if implicitly, by visiting Pad 40, a few years before.

  The fact was, Blue Origin didn’t yet have a rocket capable of launching from 39A. The hare had sprinted far, far ahead. The tortoise’s slow, deliberate approach might, one day, allow it to catch up. But now, it was too far behind. The competition wasn’t even close. Musk won, hands down, adding the iconic pad to a long list of triumphs, which now included besting Bezos in their first high-stakes head-to-head clash.

  It might have ended at that. But Bezos wasn’t about to give up. Blue Origin sought to reverse the award by filing a legal protest, arguing that the criteria NASA used to come to its decision were flawed. It argued that the launchpad should be a “commercial spaceport” that several companies could use.

  Then to bolster its case, Blue Origin enlisted the support of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing—SpaceX’s chief competitor, which was eager to join the fray in a move it knew would only antagonize Musk.

  The Alliance jumped wholly into a nice, convenient partnership with Blue, a marriage that brought together the heritage of a legacy contractor, with the innovation of a new startup—not to mention one backed by one of the wealthiest men in the world. In a statement to SpaceNews, the Alliance said that it would “continue to share our technical expertise in launch infrastructure with Blue Origin,” which, in turn, would allow 39A to have multiple tenants.

  It enlisted the aid of friendly senators, who in a letter to Bolden, the NASA administrator, wrote that “blocking use of the pad to all but one company would essentially give that company a monopoly, stifling competition in space launches and therefore raising costs.”

  The legal protest was a case of “launch site envy. That was annoying,” Musk said later. “Filing a lawsuit for 39A when they haven’t even gotten not so much as a toothpick to orbit.… So, it was absurd for [Bezos] to claim that Blue Origin should get 39A.”

  The protest, the lobbying in Washington, and the sudden, back-channel union between the Alliance and Blue infuriated Musk, who had also grown agitated that Blue Origin was beginning to poach some of his employees. In his biography of Musk, Ashlee Vance reported that SpaceX even designed an e-mail filter designed to search employees’ e-mails for “Blue Origin.”

  The dispute over 39A wasn’t their first entanglement. In 2008, SpaceX sued Matthew Lehman, one of its former employees, alleging he had violated his contract—that Blue Origin used the information he provided “to attempt to recruit multiple SpaceX employees with specific and detailed knowledge of SpaceX’s design efforts and of extensive confidential SpaceX information relating to those design efforts,” the lawsuit claimed. “Blue Origin utilized extreme measures to entice these carefully targeted SpaceX employees to leave their SpaceX employment and join Blue Origin.”

  The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. But the tensions lingered. And now the fight over 39A only inflamed them. Musk fired off an e-mail to SpaceNews in September with an epic takedown of his new competitor, deriding the protest as a “phony blocking tactic and an obvious one at that.” Even though Blue Origin had been around for a decade, it “has not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft,” he wrote.

  “It is therefore unlikely that they will succeed in developing an orbital vehicle that will meet NASA’s exacting standards in the next 5 years, which is the length of the lease. That said, I can’t say for sure whether [Blue Origin’s] action stems from malice. No such doubt exists about ULA’s motivation.”

  There was a subtle jibe laced in there, one that most people would miss but that was of great importance to Musk. As he would point out again and again over the years, Blue’s New Shepard rocket would be suborbital, and therefore not nearly as powerful as the boosters he was building that were capable of reaching orbital escape velocity, the speed needed to break Earth’s gravity and stay aloft, in orbit. Blue’s New Shepard, by contrast, would go up, and then come straight down, like a ball tossed into the air.

  “However, rather than fight this issue, there is an easy way to determine the truth, which is simply to call their bluff,” Musk continued. “If they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.”

  Unicorns in the flame duct. Whether he meant it to be or not, this was a rallying cry to his troops, who delighted in how bold their leader could be. There was, however, an irony: Musk was treating Blue the same way Boeing and Lockheed had treated SpaceX a decade earlier, when it was filing lawsuit after lawsuit, trying to enter the market. The legacy contractors had derided SpaceX, calling it an “ankle biter,” saying it wasn’t a serious challenger because it did not have a proven rocket.

  Blue could have responded to Musk’s taunt by announcing that it was also developing an orbital vehicle, “Very Big Brother,” thank you very much, one that would be powered by new engines, made in-house. But it didn’t take the bait. Musk’s insult didn’t produce anything but more of the same obsessive, discip
lined silence.

  Bezos was sticking to his own advice written in Blue’s founding letter a decade earlier: “Be the tortoise and not the hare.”

  VICTORIOUS, SPACEX STARTED work immediately, renovating 39A. The Kennedy Space Center was to space what the White House was to politics. Only now, one of the jewels of the space center had a corporate insignia on it, a giant SpaceX logo spread across the side of a massive warehouse. It hadn’t yet gotten to Mars, but SpaceX had planted its flag on some of the most sacrosanct soil of the Florida Space Coast.

  The company was moving on, looking to the future. But the spat with Blue Origin left many at SpaceX angry. The launch site director took a photo of about one hundred blow-up unicorns that he had placed in the flame duct. And in a tucked-away conference room in its Washington office, there was a picture of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a follow-on to Bezos’s favorite childhood television show.

  A bubble coming out of his mouth read: “What the fuck does Blue Origin need a Florida launchpad for?”

  PART III

  INEVITABLE

  11

  Magic Sculpture Garden

  JEFF BEZOS BLAMED the bananas.

  In early March 2013, he had quietly stolen away from his growing Amazon empire for a three-week expedition at sea, with a team of some of the best deep underwater ocean explorers in the world. Yet despite its vast experience, the crew had somehow violated one of the oldest seamen’s superstitions: never bring bananas on a boat.

  The crew of the Seabed Worker, a Norwegian salvage ship outfitted with the most advanced underwater robots money could buy, had packed in bananas by the bushel. And now, as the ship was getting battered by a late winter storm the Weather Channel had dubbed “Saturn,” the curse of the bananas had come to haunt them.

  Saturn had swept from the Rockies east through the Midwest, coating a vast portion of the country in snow before coming out at sea, where its winds were churning the Atlantic Ocean into frothy, menacing waves. Some 15 miles off the coast of Maryland’s Assateague Island, the storm pummeled a 67-foot fishing vessel, shredding the hull and killing two members of its three-man crew.

  Soon it was rocking the Seabed Worker and its crew of sixty, which included not only the all-star team of explorers Bezos had assembled for this secretive mission, but several members of Bezos’s family as well: his parents, brother, and brother-in-law.

  This was supposed to be a family-friendly trip of adventure and discovery, a quest for lost treasure on the high seas. But then the storm stalled overhead. The winds howled and waves towered over the ship, spraying in thick, drenching sheets that cascaded over the hull as the ship bobbed to and fro like a metronome.

  They considered trying to escape to the south. But the storm was too big. They had no choice but to ride it out.

  IT WAS A slow day in July 2010 when David Concannon got the call in his law office in Philadelphia’s Main Line. The caller would only give her first name, and though she said she was calling on behalf of a client, she didn’t say who it was. Concannon had been getting a lot of crazy calls lately—just the other day, someone had urged him to go search for a secret fort, down by the airport, which had been built by the Knights of Templar, a twelfth-century Christian military order.

  This woman seemed like just another crackpot. “But I was bored that day, so I talked to the person,” he recalled. Finally, she allowed that she worked for a “high net-worth individual,” and came out with her question: Would it be possible to recover the F-1 engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean?

  Concannon had no idea what she was talking about. He Googled it and realized that F-1s were either from a racecar or the Apollo-era Saturn V rockets. The former meant nothing to him; but recovering the engines from the rockets that took astronauts to the moon, well, that would be a coup, especially for an explorer like him.

  In addition to being an attorney, Concannon ran a consulting firm for explorers. For years, he had helped put together expeditions to Mount Everest, and to the bottom of the ocean, where his teams had helped recover artifacts from several sunken ships, including the Titanic.

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” he responded. “Anything’s possible.”

  BUT IT WOULD be exceedingly difficult, as he discovered researching what it would take—even more challenging than finding the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titanic was 883 feet long and weighed more than 52,000 tons. On the ocean floor, it stood six stories high. The explorers that found it in 1985 had decent information on where precisely it sank. And, perhaps more important, previous expeditions had searched hundreds of square miles, so they knew where not to look.

  The F-1 engines, by contrast, were tiny. “Like finding a deck chair or a boiler on the Titanic,” Concannon later recalled.

  No one knew where they were, at least not exactly. Once the Saturn V took off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A, its first stages separated and fell back to Earth, where they eventually splashed down into the ocean. But no one had tracked their descent. NASA had only a vague sense of the impact point based on the flight path. But the space agency didn’t track them on radar, and didn’t even issue a “Notice to Mariners” warning ships to steer clear of the area where a rocket booster would be falling from the sky.

  Even if the engines could be found, it was unclear what kind of condition they’d be in. Maybe, red hot, they’d torn apart when hitting the cool Atlantic, shattering to pieces. Maybe after forty years on the bottom of the ocean, they had deteriorated away. When Concannon first saw the wreckage of the Titanic sitting off the coast of Newfoundland at a depth of 12,460 feet, where the pressure is more than 6,000 pounds per square inch, he was shocked not by its grandeur but rather by its “appalling condition.”

  “The Titanic looks like it is made of wet sand,” he once wrote in an account of the mission. “The ship looks nothing like I imagined. Instead, it appears to be rotting away, like a candle melting from the top down. It’s easy to believe that the Titanic will be nothing more than a stain on the ocean floor in a few years.”

  The Apollo engines could be in similar condition, or worse. And that was assuming they could be found.

  Whoever was behind this mysterious phone call would have to have immense amounts of patience, not to mention money. The person would also have to be comfortable with attempting a mission most people would classify as foolhardy, if not impossible.

  A MONTH LATER, the mystery woman called back. Her boss was interested in proceeding, and now she was ready to reveal his identity: Jeff Bezos. Concannon wasn’t surprised. He was not aware that Bezos had interest in space or even ran a space company, but he had worked with lots of rich people and even some celebrities, including James Cameron’s Titanic trip, to know that wealth often fueled eccentricity.

  To Bezos, the engines were the embodiment of the Apollo missions that had inspired him as a five-year-old. He was fascinated with the F-1s, their brute power, and called them a “modern wonder.” The engines had 1.5 million pounds of thrust each; all five together burned through 15 tons of fuel per second, and fired for just two and a half minutes before the rocket’s first stage separated and fell into the ocean.

  “It’s hard to find something more profound as an engineered object than the F-1 engine, the most powerful single chamber rocket engine ever designed and manufactured,” he said. “Sixty-five of these engines flew, and there were zero failures.”

  While they might have been hunks of steel to others, with no real significance, to Bezos they were important artifacts. “These are the actual objects that first took humankind to the moon,” he said. “They’re a marvel—for me, they conjure the memory of the thousands of passionate engineers who brought the Apollo program into existence.”

  But they had been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for more than four decades, “and they weren’t going to last forever down there,” he said.

  At the time, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket was well under development. Co
mpared to the 363-foot-tall Saturn V, it was a pipsqueak—just 65 feet tall. Its single BE-3 engine was capable of just 110,000 pounds of thrust, compared to the F-1’s 1.5 million.

  But the little New Shepard was being designed to do something that the Saturn V could not. It would be able to launch to space, and then fly itself back to Earth, autonomously, adjusting its course on the way back down, able to guide itself precisely back to a landing pad, so that it could fly all over again and again.

  To Bezos, then, the F-1s not only represented the Apollo era’s gargantuan feats of engineering—but would also be reminders of how rudimentary they were, of a time when rockets were expendable, never to be used again. Once recovered, they’d be showcased where they belonged: a museum, representing perhaps humanity’s most historic achievement. But hopefully, they would also come to be seen as a relic, as antiquated as a horse and buggy.

  “Blue Origin is determined to write a new chapter—reusability,” Bezos would later say. “That’s the key to making space travel affordable. No more throwing engines away in the ocean. We don’t want anyone to be able to recover our engines from the Atlantic fifty years from now!”

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, Concannon’s crew took off from Newport News, Virginia, in a former navy spy ship, the 224-foot-long Ocean Stalwart, which had been overhauled as a research and surveying vessel.

  This was a reconnaissance mission, dispatched by Bezos in an attempt to see whether they could find the engines. The ultimate goal was to find an engine used during the Apollo 11 mission; Bezos wanted a piece of the historic lunar landing. If the crew was successful, it’d come back at a later time in a separate expedition with Bezos to recover what they had found. The 180-square-mile search area, a few hundred miles off the Florida coast, where they thought they would have their best luck, was going to be at extreme depths, more than 14,000 feet, about 2 1/2 miles down—deeper than the wreckage of the Titanic. There the ocean floor was like a moonscape, ghostly and largely devoid of life. Sunlight didn’t penetrate at that frigid depth, making it completely black. The water pressure was 7,000 pounds per square inch.