The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  By now, SpaceX had flown the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft to the station multiple times. But Musk was eager to move to the next phase in his quest to get to Mars—flying actual people in his new version of the Dragon spacecraft. It looked like a sleeker, sexier version of the capsules that had taken the Apollo astronauts to space. Outfitted with reclined seats, giant screens, and a shiny interior, it could have passed for the VIP, bottle-service section of a nightclub. (In addition to being SpaceX’s founder and chief executive officer, he had the title of lead designer.) But unlike traditional spacecraft that splashed under parachutes into the ocean, the Dragon had its own engines, giving it the ability to land propulsively—using engine thrust to slow itself down—virtually anywhere on Earth.

  “That is how a 21st century spaceship should land,” he said.

  The White House’s risky bet to rely on the commercial sector, now being led by SpaceX, seemed to be playing out just as the Obama administration had hoped.

  Four days after winning the commercial crew contract, SpaceX had flown yet another successful cargo flight to the station, and the Dragon was about to return home. Orbital Sciences, which along with SpaceX had been hired by NASA to fly passenger-less cargo missions to the station—had launched its Cygnus spacecraft to the station three times.

  And now, on October 28, they were about to fly again. Leading up to the launch, Frank Culbertson, Orbital’s executive vice president and a former NASA astronaut, joked that the astronauts aboard the station might need “some of those red and green wands they use on the deck of an aircraft carrier” to direct all the spacecraft traffic coming and going.

  Like SpaceX, Orbital was ready to fly to the station “more and more frequently and do it for many years to come,” he said. The goal was to make access to the station routine—“a stepping stone to what we’re going to do next, which is to go beyond low Earth orbit, go out to the moon, continue to explore that, and eventually go to Mars and to asteroids and to continue to explore our solar system.”

  The weather was perfect for the launch, and the mood was upbeat. NASA—and the commercial sector—had momentum now and were eager to keep it going, even if some were concerned about allowing the still-young industry to fly NASA’s most precious resource: its astronauts.

  FOR THE EVENING launch, crowds gathered along the Virginia shoreline, several people deep. Kids sat on parents’ shoulders for a better view. Some even crept on top of cars. The air was full of the illuminated screens of cell phone cameras ready to record the rocket blasting off. They counted down in unison: “Five. Four. Three. Two. One!” And cheered as Orbital’s Antares rocket lifted off over a ball of yellow-orange fire and smoke at 6:22 p.m., 15 minutes after sunset.

  But within seconds, the majesty of the liftoff morphed into a menacing flash as the rocket exploded into a shrapnel-spewing fireball. A massive mushroom cloud filled the sky, scattering bits of debris like fireworks. A few miles away, the spectators could see it—and feel the heat—before they could hear it. Then, the blast arrived like a cannonball, knocking some off their feet and sending others running for cover.

  The explosion incinerated the rocket and the 5,000 pounds of cargo it was to ferry to the International Space Station. It devastated the launchpad, leaving a crater 30 feet deep and 60 feet across that would cost $15 million to repair.

  The hole it left in NASA’s plans to rely so heavily on the commercial sector, however, was even bigger.

  THREE DAYS LATER, on October 31, 2014, Branson was home on Necker Island, his retreat in the Caribbean, talking on the phone to his son, Sam, who had just completed training in a centrifuge near Philadelphia, preparing for his spaceflight.

  For years, Branson had been promising that the “world’s first spaceline” would soon be flying tourists to space. The first flights were supposed to start in 2009, but the date slipped again and again, until the company stopped providing dates. Instead it said that while it “expects to be the first company to provide sub-orbital flights to the general public (and certainly the best!)” it would launch only “when we are happy with the results of the exhaustive WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo flight programme.”

  It didn’t, however, tone down its promotional materials. For $250,000, Virgin promised quite a thrill: “Astronauts tell us that nothing can really prepare you for your first experience of space, but we will ensure that you are fully equipped to savour every second of an experience which will be intense, wonderful and truly unforgettable,” it declared.

  Now, after years of delays, Virgin Galactic was getting ready to finally fly. Although company executives had warned him not to reveal a timetable for flights, Branson couldn’t contain himself. The company was so close that he’d told the media the first human test flights to space would take place by Christmas. Then, he and his son would go together in the early part of 2015, followed by paying customers.

  The spacecraft had completed more than fifty test flights, but most of them were just unpowered “glide flights.” It had tested the “feather system,” the Rutan invention that would help it gently return to Earth, ten times. But even though it had conducted only four powered test flights by firing the engine, Branson and Virgin Galactic had gone into full marketing mode.

  Virgin Galactic had signed up sponsorships with Grey Goose, the vodka maker, and Land Rover, which had sponsored a contest to send four winners to space. It had inked a deal with NBC to broadcast the first flight “in a primetime special airing on NBC the night before the launch, and a 3-hour live event on ‘TODAY,’ hosted by Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie,” the companies said in a press release. And it had signed a deal to fly its paying customers out of Spaceport America, the futuristic spaceport in New Mexico that cost taxpayers $220 million to build.

  The first flights were nearly here—just weeks away—and Branson was already looking ahead to the future.

  “I think we can in the years to come bring the price down so that a lot of people will have the chance to become astronauts,” he told an interviewer.

  Like his son, Branson had also been training to go to space. Less than two weeks earlier, he had taken an acrobatic flight in a stunt plane to get his body used to the additional g-forces.

  Flying above the Mojave Desert, he was ever the showman, asking his pilot, “Are we able to do a loop? Why don’t we do a little show-off over the runway.”

  “You feel okay?” the pilot asked as they spun upside down, Earth swirling beneath them.

  “Absolutely perfect,” Branson enthused. “That was brilliant!”

  But now at Necker Island, he was talking with his son about his experience in the centrifuge, when he got an urgent note. It was from George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. There had been a catastrophic accident. Branson had to go.

  PETER SIEBOLD WAS in the cockpit again. The forty-three-year-old test pilot for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, which had built and designed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, was ready to fly this time.

  A decade earlier, during the Ansari X Prize, he’d had misgivings about the safety of SpaceShipOne, and dropped out of the program. But he had stuck with the SpaceShipTwo development, and on the morning of October 31 strapped himself into the copilot’s seat, alongside Michael Alsbury, the other test pilot.

  They were close friends whose children played together on weekends. Both were self-taught flying obsessives who wanted their pilot’s licenses far more than their driver’s permits. They had gone to the same university, and jumped at the chance to become a test pilot for Rutan, trying out his latest inventions. Alsbury had been picked to fly the last vehicle Rutan built—a flying car—before he retired in 2011. Siebold had grown up flying in his father’s plane, from being perched on a stack of pillows when he was five years old so that he could experience the thrill of flight as if he were the pilot.

  Now it was a bright October morning, and SpaceShipTwo was attached to the belly of its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, which was taking the spacecraft up higher and h
igher. When it came to 50,000 feet, it was released and the pilots ignited the engines.

  Siebold had considered the mission “high risk.” When asked why, he said they were “doing a significant envelope expansion that day. Flying an unproven rocket motor in an unexplored aerodynamic regime… classic test hazard assessments would categorize that as a high-risk flight.”

  Also, the crew was “using a propulsion system that history has shown can be unreliable, or much less reliable than a turbine or reciprocating engine.”

  Given how risky the flight was, Siebold took a moment to collect himself just before the spaceship was to be released from the mothership. He ran his hands over the rip cord of his parachute and his oxygen mask and his seatbelts, as if rehearsing the steps he would have to take in an emergency and to improve his “muscle memory.”

  After WhiteKnightTwo released the spacecraft, Siebold and Alsbury fired the engines and soon they were soaring toward the heavens, breaking the sound barrier, 10 miles high.

  “Ignition! #SpaceShipTwo is flying under rocket power again. Stay tuned for updates,” the company tweeted at 10:07 a.m.

  The update six minutes later wasn’t good: “#SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming.”

  THE LAST THING Siebold remembered of being in the spacecraft was a sickening jolt, grunting noises, a loud bang, and then cabin depressurization. The aircraft pitched up violently, he would tell investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board. The sound of the spacecraft coming apart was odd, delicate even, like “paper fluttering in the wind.” Then the crushing g-forces caused cerebral hypoxia, a lack of oxygen to the brain, and he blacked out.

  When he came to, Siebold was outside the spaceplane in a free fall, his helmet askew, his oxygen mask shifted. The wind howled in his ears. The extreme cold air engulfed his body. There was something bothering his eyes, and when he opened them, he saw the wide expanse of the desert below.

  The Mojave Desert floor rising fast.

  Just as he had rehearsed a few minutes before, Siebold used his hands, Braille-like, to find the buckles of his seatbelt and release them. Falling through wispy cirrus clouds, his training kicked in, and he went into the free-fall position, opening his arms and legs out spread-eagle-style, to create drag.

  The next thing he remembered was another jolt that surprised and possibly woke him up. He told investigators he wasn’t sure whether he had gone unconscious again. But if he had, the snap of the bright red parachute deploying automatically brought him back. His shoulder was killing him—he thought it was dislocated. As he floated under the parachute, he tried unsuccessfully to shove it back in place so that he could use it to steer.

  He braced for a hard landing, right into a windswept creosote bush in the middle of the desert. As he waited for help, he noticed his chest was covered in blood. His arm was broken in four places and his right hand was numb, “as if he were out throwing snowballs without gloves.” He had corneal scratches in his eyes and he later had a piece of fiberglass removed from his left eye when at the hospital. But he was alive.

  Emergency crews would find Alsbury’s lifeless body not far away in the wreckage, still in his seat. The coroner determined the cause of death was “blunt force trauma to the head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvic area and all extremities and internal organs.”

  He was thirty-nine years old, with two children, aged ten and seven.

  AFTER HANGING UP on the call with his son, Branson hopped in a plane and headed to the crash site. He knew he had to get there as soon as possible.

  This was the second fatal accident for the program. In 2007, three employees of Scaled Composites had been killed during a ground test of the engine’s nitrous oxide system. The explosion had charred the desert floor, which had looked like a war zone, with debris scattered everywhere and multiple people injured.

  The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Scaled Composites $28,870, later dropped to $18,560 after appeal.

  The explosion was “obviously horrendous for the families and a big setback for our program as well,” Branson recalled later. “And after that I think we decided to take the testing in house and have our own team do it.”

  That same year, his train company had had a fatal derailment in northeast England. He had gotten to the scene as soon as possible, racing over from a vacation in Zermatt, Switzerland.

  “I knew the importance of getting there as fast as possible and being there as fast as possible and confronting it head on whether it’s your fault or not—actually particularly if it’s your fault,” he recalled.

  Once he arrived, he spoke to the Virgin Galactic team before talking to the media.

  “I addressed them all and reassured them as best I could that they had built a beautiful craft,” he said. “We had the biggest hug in history, and I made it clear we would continue knowing the spaceship was fundamentally fine.”

  But the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board was only just beginning. And questions from the press were mounting.

  On the Today show, three days after the crash, Matt Lauer pressed Branson on the future of the company.

  “People are already wondering whether this accident and the death of this copilot is a crippling blow,” Lauer said. “There have been delays; there have been setbacks in the past with this program. Can Virgin Galactic survive the image that has been seen around the world of that vehicle coming apart at forty-five thousand feet?”

  Was it, Lauer wanted to know, worth the risks?

  Branson had thought about this very question on the plane ride to the Mojave Desert. He’d been happy to risk his own life in hot-air balloons, in speedboats, and in all manner of stunts, that were daring and dangerous and good for business. But this was none of that. This was a sobering stop to a carousel that had perhaps spun too fast and too loudly for too long.

  Maybe he should give it up. Maybe space was too hard. The company had spent $500 million or more on the venture and had still not flown a single person to space. But as Branson landed and met the team, they’d urged him on. He began to think he owed it not just to Alsbury who wouldn’t have wanted them to quit, but to them. Hadn’t every explorer faced such difficulty? This was the moment Virgin Galactic and the industry had feared—and prepared for. This was their crucible, their Apollo 1 moment. The time to decide whether they would retreat or reassemble and attack again stronger, if scarred.

  “Absolutely, it’s worth the risks,” Branson said. “It’s a grand program, which has had a horrible setback. But I don’t think anybody watching this program would want us to abandon it at this stage.”

  He’d made his decision. They’d carry on.

  UNTARNISHED AND SEEMINGLY invincible, SpaceX ended 2014, one of its most successful years, with a massive holiday party. Why not celebrate? It had proved it could fly reliably to the International Space Station. It had won the right to fly astronauts, which combined with the cargo contract amounted to more than a $4.2 billion investment from NASA. It was signing up new commercial satellite customers, had added 39A to its mantle, was winning the war in Washington over the national security launches. And it was getting closer to landing a rocket safely so that it could be reused.

  It was on a roll.

  The holiday party was so big that a map detailed the various venues—including an indoor beach with hammocks and trucked-in sand, a casino, an “unclean room” where employees put on a full-body white suit and painted away. There was a dance hall with swirling lights and circuslike acrobats who swung from giant hula hoops from the ceiling. Rickshaws and a mini-train, the “SpaceXpress,” ferried partygoers across the great bacchanal, from the stocked bars to the game room with glowing foosball table and the “Candy” room with treats to be nibbled from the wall and a giant desert display. There was also a wall of donuts laid out in the form of the SpaceX logo and an adult-size ball pit that was, of course, right next to a bar.

  �
��My favorite part of the @SpaceX X-Mas party—definitely the ball pit!” tweeted Garrett Resiman, a SpaceX executive and former NASA astronaut, who flew on two space shuttle missions and spent three months on the International Space Station.

  SIX MONTHS LATER, they filed into SpaceX’s headquarters around dawn on a Sunday, ready to party again, ready to celebrate yet another milestone. They packed in several deep around mission control for the launch of the Falcon 9 scheduled for just after seven a.m. Pacific time on June 28, 2015. It was a lovely morning in Florida: mid-80s, light wind. There was only a 1 percent possibility of calling off the launch because of weather.

  The drama leading up to the flight wasn’t the launch, but the landing. Or rather, the landing attempt. For months, SpaceX had been practicing an unprecedented maneuver, flying its first stages back to land on what it called its “autonomous spaceport drone ship.” Although each of the previous two attempts had ended in fireballs—“rapid unscheduled diassamblies”—the company was getting very close.

  On both tries, the rocket had actually hit the ship, an incredible achievement considering the booster had to fly back to Earth after screaming into space. But each time, something had gone wrong at the last minute, giving the company enough material for a fiery blooper reel.

  Now, Musk felt that SpaceX had finally figured out how to do it, and was confident about its chances. He had invited a crew from National Geographic to film at SpaceX’s headquarters to capture what would be a significant moment in the history of spaceflight.

  If SpaceX could successfully land the first stage, it would be the first time anyone had done it—a huge leap forward for the company and the industry as a whole. And it would send a defiant message to the Alliance and Blue Origin. It was also Musk’s forty-third birthday—what better way to celebrate than to make history, while defying your critics?

  The launch, too, was critical.

  Seven months after Orbital Sciences’ rocket blew up on its way to deliver supplies to the space station, a Russian spacecraft, laden with thousands of pounds of cargo, supplies, and food, started spinning wildly, as if it were an out-of-control amusement park ride in zero gravity.