The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Instead of searching the ocean floor with cameras, they’d use sonar, pulses of sound that would reflect off objects on the seafloor and measure their distance and bearing. Sonar would allow them to scan greater distances, as much as 4,000 feet, or even something as small as an airplane propeller from a distance of more than ten football fields.

  But getting the sonars to the seafloor was a tremendous undertaking. The ship had to be able to keep its position, without an anchor, by using its engine thrusters while being pushed around by the currents, waves, and winds. The side-scan sonar system affixed to a 15-foot-long, 6-ton “tow fish” that looked like a mini torpedo. The tow fish were lowered to the bottom of the ocean by a spool of cable 32,800 feet long that, by itself, weighed more than 20 tons. In all, the sonar system cost more than $1 million.

  Once the boat was in position and ready to search, it took five hours to lower the tow fish into position, where it would begin scanning the ocean floor, identifying anything that could be a rocket engine. Over two weeks, with crews working around the clock, the team created a map of the ocean floor across the search area. The painstaking effort paid off: they found thousands of man-made objects and more than three hundred so-called high-value targets they felt could be rocket engines, clustered in eighteen different areas.

  After studying the data, Bezos announced the discovery several months later in a blog post: “We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in—they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”

  The engines were found. Now they had to get them up to the surface.

  IN FEBRUARY 2013, as the White House was fighting to kill the Constellation program, and Musk was about to meet President Obama at Pad 40, a Norwegian ship took off from Bermuda, ready to recover the engines.

  Funded entirely by Bezos, it had the best of everything in what was surely a multimillion-dollar undertaking. Concannon had assembled an all-star team, including John Broadwater, the former chief archaeologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Vince Capone, one of the world’s leading underwater search experts. The team brought along a doctor as well, Ken Kamler, a specialist in expedition medicine who had served on many perilous adventures, including to Mount Everest, where he treated the survivors of the trip chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.

  In all, about sixty people were aboard, including Bezos himself, who would spend as much as three weeks at sea, away from his Amazon empire, though he’d spend stretches in his cabin with his computer working during the downtime.

  Later he would say, it was “so fun” having members of his family along. “It was meaningful to share the experience” with his parents, Jackie and Mike; his brother, Mark; and his brother-in-law, Steve Poore. Since Jackie was the only woman on board, the captain jokingly told Bezos that he would remove all pornography from the ship’s common areas.

  For this mission, the team acquired a recovery ship known as the Seabed Worker, a marvel that towered six stories over the ocean, was 290 feet long, and weighed almost 4,000 tons. The cockpit, or bridge of the ship, looked like the command center of a massive spaceship, with a large, plush chair for the captain as well as joysticks and several computer screens that relayed all sorts of data in real time. And it was outfitted with what’s known as a dynamic positioning system, which uses GPS to keep the ship precisely over a target.

  Perhaps most important, the Seabed Worker had two remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), essentially underwater robots that could be controlled from the ship. These $7 million ROVs were able to work at extreme depths.

  “We’re working three miles down in the deep ocean,” Capone said. “And our robots are like marionettes on three-mile-long cables. Being able to control those robots is a fantastic deep water ballet.”

  The weather was rough as the ship powered its way 500 nautical miles southwest from Bermuda to the recovery site, but the Seabed Worker was a gallant trooper, able to absorb the waves, allowing the crew to operate the ROVs in seas as high as 15 feet. By the time they got to the search site on March 2, 2013, the weather had calmed. They were ready to start plucking metal from the depths. “You can feel it walking around the ship everyone’s excited,” said Jeff’s brother, Mark. “There is some level of trepidation because we know there are no guarantees.”

  The ROVs made it to the seafloor at eleven a.m., Sunday, March 3, and almost instantly beamed back images of engine parts that were broadcast in high definition on large-screen TVs installed just for this mission. “We found the first artifact within minutes and found the first engine within the first hour of that first day,” Concannon said.

  There on the ocean floor were the thrust chamber, turbo pumps, and heat exchangers. To some, they’d look like twisted hunks of metal, fit for a junkyard. To Bezos, they were art and history combined.

  “Three miles below where I’m standing right now is a wonderland that is testament to the Apollo program,” he said in a video recorded on board the ship. “It looks like a magic sculpture garden, with all of these pieces from different missions that are in some cases perfectly preserved and in other cases twisted into the beautiful shapes.”

  Within a couple of hours, they found even more about 330 feet away. One was buried into the seabed floor so deep they nicknamed it “lawn dart.” Over the next couple of days, they surveyed the area, taking photographs, cataloging location and conditions. Meanwhile the weather was deteriorating and the seas were rising. Winter Storm Saturn was moving to the east, and they knew they had to move fast.

  “It was very rough when we got there. And it had been very rough during the transit,” Concannon said. “The seas laid down for the first couple of days so that we could work. But they were building, and we knew they were going to be getting worse. So, we were racing the weather and racing the clock to get… something on board. Recover something so we could do something on the ship while we were shut down by the weather.”

  On March 6, the same day the storm smashed the fishing boat off the coast of Maryland a few hundred miles to the northwest, the crew of the Seabed Worker pulled up the first engine they had come across—though it wasn’t clear which Apollo mission it was from.

  Then the storm shut them down. All they could do was wait and hope that it would soon be over.

  SATURN RAGED OVER them for five days, forcing the crew to keep the rovers out of the water. On the radar, the storm seemed to engulf all of the East Coast and much of the Atlantic, where the waves swelled and rocked the ship. The motion sickness scopolamine patches “were being distributed freely, that was for sure,” said Capone.

  They thought about trying to escape farther south to escape the storm. “The problem was the storm was so big that we couldn’t get away from it,” Concannon explained. There was no choice, so they “hung out and weathered it.”

  For those who weren’t laid up sick, there was a darts tournament, which Bezos’s father won. They caught up on sleep. And they lamented violating some of sailors’ unwritten rules—especially the bananas.

  “Mariners all over the world have a number of superstitions,” Bezos said. “You’re not supposed to ring the ship’s bell. You’re not supposed to bring backpacks onboard a ship, which unfortunately we did. We’ve got lots of bananas, and you’re not supposed to bring bananas on board either. We are in the Bermuda Triangle. Somehow we now have the longest weather hold this experienced crew has ever seen.”

  But most of all they used the time to research the artifacts they had pulled aboard, and the ones that lay down some 3 miles below them.

  “You don’t just sit there and puke,” Capone said. “You work.… Jeff put forth this vision and it was our challenge to make it happen. And I can tell you, none of the crew were daunted by the storm. Yeah, it was a pain in the neck. It wasn’t comfortable. And this is a large ship, almost three-hundred-foot ship, getting battered around pretty good. But none of
us was going to give up.”

  BY MARCH 11, the storm finally cleared, and the crew got back to work, deploying the rovers to the ocean floor. Soon they were hauling all sorts of metal aboard, working day and night. Bezos, unshaven, donned an orange jumpsuit, a hard hat, and protective goggles, and helped clear the mud from the engines.

  The long hours, the isolation of the sea, and the hardship from the storm stripped away status, as they adhered to a credo true in all expeditions: if you’re not contributing, you’re taking away.

  “We were hosing off artifacts and cleaning mud. We were all working,” Concannon said. “We didn’t have the CEO of Amazon. We just had Jeff and his mom [and dad] and his brother and his brother-in-law.… And everybody got their hands dirty. Everybody got little sleep. Everybody played darts when we were shut down by the weather.”

  After several days, they had a treasure trove of engine parts—enough to declare the mission a success and head home. They had chosen to bring the engines back to Port Canaveral, returning them to the place where they had blasted off more than four decades before. After three weeks on the ocean, the Seabed Worker approached the coast shortly after sunrise. The crew gathered on the deck and could make out Pad 39A in the distance.

  They suspected that at least some of the engine parts they had recovered belonged to Apollo 11. But they didn’t know for sure.

  THE PARTS WERE brought to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, a museum that had worked for years with the Smithsonian Institution to restore and conserve aerospace artifacts. The staff there kept the parts constantly wet to prevent further corrosion, while gently rinsing the objects, blasting them with dry ice, and even removing sediment with dental picks. But they did not find any of the serial numbers that would identify what engine parts went with what mission. Based on the search area, Bezos’s team was sure they had an engine from Apollo 11. They just needed to prove it.

  Finally, one of the conservationists had an idea. Perhaps the serial numbers they were searching for were invisible to the naked eye, but would show up under a black light.

  On his way to work one morning, he stopped to buy a black light and goggles. Later, as he shined it over a thrust chamber, he eventually saw “2044.” He was so excited that as he ran to the phone to report his discovery, he tripped and fell, then scrambled back to his feet.

  Bezos announced the news to the world in another blog post on July 19, 2013:

  “When we stepped off the Seabed Worker four months ago in Port Canaveral, we had enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. We brought back thrust chambers, gas generators, injectors, heat exchangers, turbines, fuel manifolds and dozens of other artifacts—all simply gorgeous and a striking testament to the Apollo program. There was one secret that the ocean didn’t give up easily: mission identification. The components’ fiery end and heavy corrosion from 43 years under water removed or covered up most of the original serial numbers. We left Florida knowing the conservation team had their work cut out for them, and we’ve kept our fingers crossed ever since.

  “Today, I’m thrilled to share some exciting news. One of the conservators who was scanning the objects with a black light and a special lens filter had made a breakthrough discovery—2044—stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the massive thrust chambers. 2044 is the Rocketdyne serial number that correlates to NASA number 6044, which is the series number for F-1 engine #5 from Apollo 11. The intrepid conservator kept digging for more evidence, and after removing more corrosion at the base of the same thrust chamber, he found it—‘Unit No 2044’—stamped into the metal surface.”

  At a depth of nearly 3 miles, some 450 miles off the Florida coast, they had found the center engine of the rocket that first took men to the moon.

  SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 1904, the Explorers Club had been celebrating the truly adventurous, and have counted some of the world’s most courageous explorers as members, from Adm. Robert Peary and Matthew Henson, the first to reach the North Pole, to Ronald Amundsen, the first to reach the South. Charles Lindbergh was a member, as was Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mount Everest with his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. And, of course, it also celebrated those who pioneered space, including the crew of Apollo 11—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.

  Every year, the club threw a lavish, black-tie awards banquet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the cuisine was as adventurous as the expeditions its members routinely undertook. On the menu were such delicacies as Earthworm Stir Fry, Maggot-and-Bug-Covered Strawberries, Scorpions on Toast, Duck Tongues on Belgian Endives, and Sweet and Sour Bovine Penis.

  One year, the club’s president made an entrance by riding a white horse onto the stage. The horse proceeded to poop onto the dinner plate of Edmund Hillary, who was seated on the dais.

  For the 2014 dinner, on March 15, there was no horse. But there was the usual exotic fare: skewered cockroaches, North American beaver, an ostrich egg, tarantulas, goat and goat penis, and a pair of alligators, heads still attached, that were carved up before the guests like a pig.

  After the feast, Buzz Aldrin came to the stage to introduce Bezos, who was accepting an award on behalf of the F-1 recovery team.

  “Would you believe those rocket engines, those big F-1 engines that took us to fulfill the dreams of centuries and centuries,” Aldrin said, apparently in awe. “The center engine of the first stage. Can you imagine—of all these engines, Jeff happens to find that particular engine.”

  The famous astronaut ribbed Bezos a bit about how secretive he and his space company had been.

  “Jeff is trying to get people up to space,” Aldrin said. “But he’s not telling anyone about it. He’s keeping pretty quiet. But I think he’s going to tell me a little bit about it.”

  Bezos arrived on stage beaming, and joked, “I’m still making sure there’s no cockroach in my teeth.” In a short speech, he said that the team had “the feeling that we were recapturing history and making some history at the same time. I can tell you for sure we had a lot of fun doing it. It wasn’t quick. It was difficult to find the engines, and the hard work of finding them with the side-scan sonar had to be done very painstakingly over a very large search area.

  “I was blown away by the professionalism and the skill of the entire team. This isn’t something that can be done by a small group. You need a bunch of professionals. The group who located the engines, they were just amazing. The ROV pilots—these guys are surgeons except they’re working three miles down. The crane operators. Have you ever seen a crane operator work in heavy seas? The pitching deck. The whole crane starts to swing like a pendulum. These guys are such pros and it was a joy to watch every single person on our mission. This award is definitely accepted on behalf of the entire team.”

  He asked the crew to stand, urged the guests to applaud them, and then gushed, “These guys totally crushed it!”

  THE F-1 TEAM wasn’t the only space-related award of the evening. The president of the Explorers Club had become fascinated with Elon Musk, and what he was accomplishing in space, and had decided to present him with a special President’s Award. As an image of Musk in a tight-fitting T-shirt, arms crossed, biceps bulging, showed on a huge screen, Musk hopped onto the stage to accept his award.

  Like Bezos, Musk had come to the conclusion that the way to make spaceflight affordable was going to be re-creating a reusable rocket, one that could fly as frequently as an airplane. Only then would there be the big breakthrough that would allow space to open up to the masses—and allow him to get to Mars. SpaceX was getting close, and, unlike Bezos, who would never have discussed Blue Origin’s plans so publicly, Musk used the speech to update the guests on the company’s progress.

  “I think what we’ve done thus far is evolutionary but not revolutionary,” he began. “And the thing that needs to be accomplished by SpaceX or by somebody else is a fully reusable rocket system. That’s the thing that really prevents us from establishing life on Mars. />
  “The way rockets work right now is they are all expendable. So, you fly them once, and you throw it away. You can imagine if any mode of transport was expendable, it wouldn’t be used very much. But whether it’s a plane, a boat, a car, a bicycle, or a horse—they’re all reusable. If a 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars and you need two for a round-trip, nobody is paying half a billion dollars from London to New York and back.”

  SpaceX had been working on developing the technology, and, as Musk said, “we’re starting to do the bit where we bring the booster back.” The rocket to be used in the company’s next launch would be outfitted, for the first time, with landing legs. SpaceX would try to land it on a ship at sea first—not on land—“because we’re not a hundred percent sure we can land it with pinpoint accuracy,” he said. “So, coming back to land would be a dodgy prospect. But it’s going to try to land to a fairly precise location, deploy the gear and then get recovered with a barge.”

  WHILE MUSK WAS talking publicly about how SpaceX planned to launch, land, and reuse rockets, Bezos was quietly laying out his plans as well—in an application with the federal government that had largely escaped notice.

  On March 25, 2014—ten days after Musk detailed SpaceX’s plans at the Explorers Club awards dinner—the United States Patent Office approved patent no. 8,678,321, titled “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles and Associated Systems and Methods.”

  The ten-page patent laid out a system for recovering rockets that mimicked the approach that Musk had detailed in his speech. It laid claim to a system in which “a reusable space launch vehicle is launched from a coastal launch site in a trajectory over water.” After the first stage’s engines cut off and it separates and begins to fall back down, “the booster reenters Earth’s atmosphere in a tail-first orientation. The booster engines are then restarted and the booster stage performs a vertical powered landing on the deck of a sea-going platform.”