The technology was necessary, the patent explained, to bring down the costs of spaceflight and allow industry to push further more efficiently.
“Despite the rapid advances in manned and unmanned space flight, delivering astronauts, satellites and other payloads to space continues to be an expensive proposition. One reason for this is that most conventional launch vehicles are only used once, and hence are referred to as ‘expendable launch vehicles’ or ‘ELVs.’ The advantages of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) include the potential of providing low-cost access to space.”
The vision in the patent was expansive, detailing plans to land rockets not just in the ocean but on “other bodies of water including, for example, a lake, a gulf, ocean, sound or possibly even a large river.” It covered the ability to launch rockets not just from land but “from sea on an ocean-going platform.” And it discussed how the rockets would be serviced quickly, sometimes while on the barge being shipped back to sea, or how the booster would be transferred to smaller, faster ships in an effort to get them back to land quickly.
When Musk found out about it, he was furious. After the dispute over the rights to Launch Pad 39A, the patent was yet another indignity from what he felt was an inferior competitor. The idea of landing on ships at sea “is something that’s been discussed for, like, half a century,” Musk recalled. “The idea is not like unique. It’s in fictional movies; it’s in multiple proposals; there’s so much prior art, it’s crazy. So, trying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.”
It was years later, but the dispute still stayed with Musk.
“Jeff ‘One-Click’ Bezos,” he said, referring to another of Bezos’s controversial patents. “I mean, come on, Jeff. Leave it alone.”
SpaceX promptly filed suit, challenging the patent. The idea for landing rockets on ships wasn’t Blue Origin’s invention, Musk’s lawyers argued, it had been around for years, even if Blue Origin’s patent only paid “lip service” to the existence of prior art.
If Blue’s patent went unchallenged, it would hold exclusive claim over the ability to land rockets on ships—a potentially devastating blow to SpaceX. Like the Wright Brothers, who had won a sweeping patent for their flying technology in 1904, Blue would be able to freeze everyone else out—or demand licensing fees for the technology.
In its challenge, SpaceX demonstrated that others had conceived of the idea long before Blue Origin’s patent—and had drawings to prove it. There was even a Russian sci-fi movie from 1959 that showed a rocket landing on a ship at sea.
Blue Origin withdrew the majority of its claims—a win for SpaceX. The ultimate victory, though, would come when the first rockets started landing.
DURING HIS SPEECH at the Explorers Club, Musk predicted that SpaceX would be able to pull off the feat of landing on a ship at sea in one of its upcoming launches. The odds weren’t going to be great for its first attempt—“I think we have probably a forty percent chance of making that work,” he said.
But the company would keep at it, like a gymnast working on his or her dismount, getting better with each attempt. “We’ve got a bunch of launches later this year, where the probability increases with each of those,” he continued. “But I’m starting to feel a little more confident that this could work.”
That, in turn, would help lower “the cost of moving to Mars to under a half a million dollars,” a figure that he thought those who wanted to move to Mars could afford.
At the end of the evening, the president of the Explorers Club asked all the award winners and the presenters to come to the stage and be recognized once more. They came up one by one, more than a dozen in all. Musk was at one end of the stage. Bezos was at the other. They did not speak.
12
“Space Is Hard”
THE ROCKET DETONATED suddenly into a giant orange fireball, sending a mushroom cloud floating ominously in an otherwise pristine, sun-drenched Texas sky. Bits of debris scattered, trailing smoke and fire on the way down like fireworks in a display as beautiful as it was violent.
As it climbed a few hundred feet over the company’s McGregor test site, the rocket had suddenly spun out of control and started falling back down. Before it could get too far off course, its “flight termination system” kicked in, blowing the rocket up a few hundred feet above the prairie. No one was injured. And it was only a test, one that SpaceX stressed “was particularly complex, pushing the limits of the vehicle further than any previous test.” Elon Musk even had coined an acronym for such spectacular failures: RUD, or rapid unscheduled disassembly.
But it was also a reminder that for all the advancements in rocket science, launches were really just controlled explosions of a combustible mix of propellants. As Musk knew as well as anyone, one small error, even something as small as a corroded nut, could send the whole thing up in flames. “Still so damn intense,” Musk had tweeted after a recent launch. “Looking fwd to it feeling normal one day.”
After the rocket test explosion, he tweeted: “Rockets are tricky.”
Still, SpaceX had rattled off an improbable string of successful launches of the Falcon 9 without a single failure. It was an amazing streak stretching over four years that was beginning to make the exercise feel routine. But Musk still sweated every one, shooting an e-mail to the entire company, urging employees to step forward if anyone had a reason to call off the flight. He was the CEO-cum-wedding officiant—speak now or forever hold your peace.
SpaceX’s success had raised expectations, but its brashness had attracted criticism. Its fan base was huge and growing. The SpaceX page at Reddit, the social media site, had ten thousand subscribers in June 2014. More and more people were buying the $22 “Occupy Mars” T-shirts from the SpaceX online store. And Musk had become something more than a business executive; he was now a cult figure, whose legend was growing well beyond Silicon Valley.
With Tesla and Solar City, the solar energy company, he had set out to transform American transportation and energy use. SpaceX was an improbable success story that was not only disrupting the industry but singlehandedly reigniting interest in space. CBS’s 60 Minutes declared that Musk had built an “industrial empire.” Time magazine put him on the cover of its “100 Most Influential People” issue. The Atlantic canonized him as “perhaps this era’s most ambitious innovator.”
“In the spirit of inveterate and wide-ranging tinkerers like Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin, Musk has transformed virtually every field he’s taken an interest in, from electronic payments to commercial spaceflight to electric cars,” the magazine wrote. “The range and scale of Musk’s ambitions have attracted skepticism, but over time, he has proved himself to be not only an ideas man but an astute business thinker.”
But within the somewhat clubby space community, SpaceX was becoming the company people loved to hate. At a space industry party, there was a photo Musk taped to the inside of the toilet so that his competitors could take turns pissing on him.
Once dismissed as an “ankle biter,” SpaceX was now a formidable competitor, one to reckon with. It was also gunning for the United Launch Alliance’s breadbasket—the lucrative launches for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
For a decade, the company had a monopoly on the contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A decade earlier, Musk had sued, arguing that SpaceX should be allowed to compete. But without a rocket capable of flying, the suit was dismissed.
Now he had a rocket. He just didn’t yet have the US Air Force’s certification required for the launch—and the Pentagon was about to award another big batch of contracts to the Alliance, effectively locking SpaceX out for years. Filing another lawsuit would be risky—it’s usually not the best business practice to sue the agency you’re trying desperately to get to hire you.
The list of cons was long. But the pros were substantial as well. National security launches paid big money—the multiyear program could be worth as much as $70 billio
n—and SpaceX knew it could undercut Lockheed’s and Boeing’s prices, disrupting the market, giving it a stream of revenue that could sustain it for years and help it get to Mars. But the clock was ticking. If the company was going to protest the contract, it had to act quickly.
“Suing the military industrial complex is something you do not take lightly,” Musk recalled.
During a visit to Washington, DC, while sitting in the back of a sedan after a speech, a pair of his advisors asked him what he wanted to do.
Musk went quiet, closed his eyes, and put his head back. He stayed that way for two minutes, then three. A long time. He had several quirks, and his sudden retreat into his own mind was an eccentricity the people at SpaceX were used to. People coming in to interview with Musk were sometimes warned that when he goes silent, it was because he’s thinking and it’s best not to interrupt him. The advisors knew not to say a word. Six minutes passed. Then eight. An eternity.
“I’d seen him go Zen before, but I’d never seen him go this Zen,” one of the advisors recalled.
Then Musk opened his eyes. “File the lawsuit,” he said. He got out of the car and went to the next event.
The advisors looked at each other and one of them said, “He just teleported himself into the future!”
ONCE THE LAWSUIT was filed, Musk continued to attack throughout the spring and summer of 2014, delighting the press corps in the nation’s capital, who were unaccustomed to such a bombastic character. “Musk is,” one defense reporter wrote, “a good interview.”
Which meant he was unfiltered, a refreshing change of tone in a buttoned-up town where officials rarely deviated from the script. At an event at the National Press Club, Musk defended the lawsuit, saying SpaceX should be given the opportunity to compete, and he derided the air force’s certification process, calling it a “paperwork exercise.” If his rockets were good enough for NASA, he said, they should be good enough for the Pentagon.
He purposefully picked a fight with the United Launch Alliance (ULA). It was the dominant player, but it had a big weakness. The RD-180 engines it used for its Atlas V rocket were made in Russia, and this was coming at a time of increased tension between the United States and Russia over the latter’s annexation of Crimea. Musk went after the Alliance relentlessly.
At a reception at the Newseum near the Capitol that spring, as he showed off the crew version of Dragon, Musk stood in the middle of a massive media scrum to deliver an indictment of the entire process.
“Our toughest competitor on the international launch market is the Russians, and the US Air Force sends them hundreds of millions of dollars every year for Russian engines,” he said. “It’s super messed up. I mean, what the fuck, you know?…
“Can you imagine if you went back forty years ago and told people that in 2014 the United States would be at the mercy of Russia for access to low Earth orbit, let alone the moon or anything else? People would have thought you were insane. It’s just incredible that we’re in this position. Something needs to be done to get us out of this.”
In response to a question about the wisdom of going up against the Alliance, he said that “Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, and he ought to know. Has it gotten better or worse since Eisenhower? It hasn’t gotten better.… Lockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they certainly tried to stomp on us. I think we’ve got a shot at prevailing. We’re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.”
The bombast, the lawsuit, the media attention began to tick off the Pentagon. The head of the air force’s space command at the time told a reporter, “Generally, the person you are doing business with you don’t sue.”
For the first time, the Alliance began to fight back publicly, highlighting its long history over SpaceX’s inexperience in a marketing campaign—what it called “results over rhetoric.”
“The whole tenor of the campaign is to make perfectly clear that there is a lot at stake when it comes to successful space launches—literally lives are at stake,” Mike Gass, the CEO of the Alliance, said at a press conference. “We also want to make clear that there is a big distinction between a company that has a hundred-year combined heritage in successfully delivering satellites into orbit and a company that is not yet even certified to conduct one [national security] launch.…
“SpaceX is trying to cut corners and just wants the USAF to rubber stamp it,” Gass said. “SpaceX’s view is just ‘trust us.’ We obviously think that’s a dangerous approach and, thankfully, so do most people.”
SpaceX didn’t have anything to lose, and was ready to get into a fight.
“ULA doesn’t believe in competition. Monopolists never do,” spokesman John Taylor said in a statement. “In ULA’s case, it would rather call a press conference to announce an inside-the-Beltway lobbying campaign aimed at distracting lawmakers from the benefits competition brings to the marketplace: better technology, improved reliability and affordable prices.”
Two months later, Gass was ousted. Tory Bruno, the Alliance’s new chief executive, was brought in to make the company leaner, more efficient—able to compete with SpaceX, which was now threatening its business. Bruno vowed to “literally transform the company” by cutting the price of launch in half and developing a new rocket.
In addition to streamlining the business, the Alliance had a secret weapon in the war against SpaceX: Jeff Bezos.
FOR YEARS, BLUE Origin had been building a monster of a new rocket engine, one that stood 12 feet tall and had 550,000 pounds of thrust—even more than the engines that powered the space shuttle. The BE-4, as it was known, was not as robust as Bezos’s beloved F-1s, the most powerful rocket engines ever built. But it was designed to be a reliable workhorse, one that could fly again and again at a relatively low cost.
The fact that Blue Origin was developing its own engine, and building the infrastructure in West Texas to test it, was yet another sign that Bezos was dead serious about space, and that he had poured a vast amount of resources—perhaps even as much as $1 billion—into the development of the engine alone.
At a press conference at the National Press Club, Bruno and Bezos sat side by side before a banner with the phrase “Igniting the Future” to announce they were joining forces—Blue Origin would sell the BE-4 to the Alliance. That would allow the Alliance to avoid using the Russian-made RD-180—and just as important, take away Musk’s line of attack.
It was a shocking and unlikely marriage—the Lockheed Martin–Boeing conglomerate, which together had a century of experience in space, with Blue Origin, the quiet upstart that had plodded along carefully in the shadows. But now for one of the first times, Blue Origin was standing squarely in the spotlight—and it was doing so with SpaceX’s archenemy.
“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” Bruno beamed. “We have their innovative, entrepreneurship together with ULA’s solid track record of success, certainty and reliability.”
Bezos praised his new partner and its long heritage, noting that the Alliance “has for the last eight years put a satellite into orbit almost once a month. It’s an unmatched record of success and an incredible tribute to detail orientation and operational excellence.”
He geeked out over the technical details of the engine, discussing how its “oxygen-enriched stage combustion cycle” was better than a “gas generator” and how the engine has only a “single turbo pump” and had just “one shaft, so it’s as simple as it can be while still being high performing and highly reliable.”
Later that day, when Musk was asked about the United Launch Alliance–Blue Origin partnership, he was, as always, blunt: “If all your competitors are banding together to attack you, that’s, like, a good compliment,” he said. “I think a very sincere compliment.”
It also increased the pressure on SpaceX. Musk couldn’t afford a misstep. Not now. Not with his rivals gunning for him, and the Obama administration investing heavily in SpaceX, and Musk now a celebrity with the ability
to move markets and make the media swoon with a single tweet. All of it was building to a Hollywood-like crescendo that was propelling Musk and his space company higher and higher, to a rarefied altitude where it finally had something to lose.
SEPTEMBER 16, 2014, was the 1,167th day since NASA had launched an astronaut from American soil, an embarrassing streak that stretched back to the last shuttle flight in 2011. Every day without a crewed launch brought NASA closer to breaking an ignominious record: the 2,098-day hiatus in human spaceflight between the last of the Apollo launches and the first shuttle flight in 1981.
But on the 1,167th day, the space agency had good news: its plan of how it would fly astronauts once again, an announcement that NASA administrator Charlie Bolden said set “the stage for what promises to be the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human spaceflight.”
Two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, had won the contracts as part of NASA’s “commercial crew” program to fly the next generation of astronauts to the International Space Station, the agency announced. The companies would fly the same number of flights, and be required to hit the same milestones. But SpaceX had simply bid less, and as a result laid out in stark contrast the difference between itself and its rivals.
Boeing’s award was $4.2 billion. SpaceX would receive $2.6 billion.
Musk had been saying for years that SpaceX could fly cheaper and more efficiently than the traditional contractors, and NASA was taking him up on it—while also hiring Boeing, the more expensive, and experienced, company.
The Space Barons Page 23
