The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Another launch to the space station. Another failure.

  Now, it was SpaceX’s turn.

  After the back-to-back failures, the increased competition from the Alliance and Blue Origin, and the heightened expectations that came with winning the award to fly astronauts to the station, the pressure was on for SpaceX. Another disaster would undermine the Obama administration’s bold experiment to contract out missions to the space station so that NASA could pursue the more grandiose mission of flying to Mars. And it would fuel questions about a still-nascent industry where failure is common, expensive, and measured in mushroom-cloud plumes of smoke.

  Then there was the question of what two failed missions had cost the space station. In the summer of 2015, NASA officials maintained that the astronauts aboard the orbiting lab were in no danger. But a NASA slide showed that with current food levels, the space station would reach what NASA calls “reserve level” by the end of July and run out by September 5.

  AT T-MINUS 13 minutes, the launch director conducted the go/no-go poll of the thirteen members of the launch readiness team, a last check of all the systems and stations to make sure the rocket was ready. It was a call-and-response ritual passed down from NASA, and at SpaceX they did it now with ease and confidence.

  “All stations verify ready for launch,” said the launch conductor into his headset, as he began the poll, surveying the teams in a call and response, each ending with an affirmative “Go!”

  Propulsion was go. So was Avionics. It was a go from Guidance, Navigation and Control, and the chief engineer, go all the way down the line until the mission director said, “MD is go!” and the launch director said that the “LD is go to initiate terminal count.”

  THE COUNTDOWN WENT smoothly, and soon: “We have liftoff of the Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 has cleared the tower.”

  The employees gathered at SpaceX’s headquarters cheered wildly, as if at a football game, pumping their fists at another successful liftoff. Ready to party once that thing landed.

  As the rocket climbed, it looked excellent—or “nominal,” which in rocketry means everything is going fine.

  “Stage one propulsion is nominal,” the propulsion engineer said shortly after liftoff. “Power and telemetry nominal,” said the avionics engineer.

  At T-plus 1 minute and 30 seconds, the Falcon 9 passed through what’s known as Max-Q, or maximum dynamic pressure, the moment when the rocket is under the most stress as it screams skyward. Still, the status was good: “Stage one propulsion is still nominal.”

  At T-plus 2 minutes, the Falcon 9 was at an altitude just shy of 20 miles, racing to space at 0.6 mile per second. The fiery plume of smoke and fire behind it had expanded, which was normal given the reduced air pressure at that altitude. Everything was going smoothly.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Just over two minutes after liftoff, the rocket exploded, engulfed by a white, wispy cloud. After a little while, the smoke and debris dissipated, leaving only the pale blue sky. It was as if a magician had somehow made the rocket, and the 4,000 pounds of cargo it was carrying, disappear.

  On the space station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted that he had watched the launch from the station. “Sadly, failed Space is hard.”

  The crowd at SpaceX headquarters went silent, some with their hands over their mouth. The National Geographic team kept the cameras rolling, capturing the devastating silence in what was supposed to be a birthday victory celebration but now felt more like a funeral.

  A FEW WEEKS after the launch, SpaceX would identify the cause: a single faulty steel strut, 2 feet long and 1 inch wide at its thickest point. It was supposed to be able to withstand 10,000 pounds of pressure, but had buckled under 2,000, causing helium to overpressurize an oxygen tank in the second stage, which had led to the explosion.

  In a call with reporters a month later, Musk was every bit the rocket scientist he had become, giving a preliminary but detailed analysis of the failure. But it was also as if he were delivering a business-school lecture on how a successful startup can retain its innovative culture and edge as it grows into a corporate behemoth.

  He would point to another possible cause, saying that as the company continued to grow, it may have lost some of the inherent paranoia that fueled SpaceX in its early days, when it was unclear whether it would ever be able to launch rockets reliably.

  After a string of successes, the explosion was the “first time we’ve had a failure in seven years” outside of the test flight, Musk said. “To some degree I think the company as a whole maybe became a little complacent.”

  When the company lost a string of rockets in its early days, only a few hundred people were working at SpaceX. Now, there were four thousand. “The vast majority of people at the company today have only ever seen success,” he said. “You don’t fear failure as much.”

  And so, when he sent out his wedding officiant e-mail before each launch, asking people to come forward, it didn’t “resonate with the same force” as it had when the company was small and scrappy and feared going out of business.

  The reaction became “There’s Elon being paranoid again,” he said.

  But now even the uninitiated knew the driving power of failure—and fear—“and we’ll be the stronger for it,” he said.

  13

  “The Eagle Has Landed”

  FOR YEARS, JOURNALISTS had been banging at Blue Origin’s door, trying to get a glimpse into a mysterious company that operated like the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, on the morning of November 24, 2015, Blue Origin was reaching out to them, ringing their cell phones in the predawn darkness. The groggy journalists were told to check their e-mail for a press release that just went out, and that they’d be assigned a slot to speak with Bezos later that day.

  He had news to share.

  The day before, Blue Origin had launched a rocket deep in the West Texas desert that traveled past the threshold of space, hitting a top speed of Mach 3.72. New Shepard, the suborbital vehicle named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had flown to 329,839 feet, or 62 miles, past the 100-kilometer “Kármán line” that’s widely considered the edge of space.

  The capsule on top of the rocket, which had no passengers in it, separated from the booster and landed softly under the guidance of parachutes. More important, the rocket landed after falling back and enduring 119 mph high-altitude crosswinds. Using a GPS guidance system, and a fin system that helped stabilize it on the descent, the booster fired its engine to slow itself down before deploying its landing legs and touching down softly on a concrete landing pad.

  It hit 4½ feet from the center. For a first landing, that was a bull’s-eye.

  At the Blue Origin headquarters, employees had gathered together to watch the landing on television. And as the rocket stood there, pandemonium broke out, some four hundred engineers cheering wildly, pumping fists and hugging one another.

  From the beginning, Blue Origin had been trying to build a reusable rocket, one that could be launched, and then fly again, like an airplane, a breakthrough the industry had long been waiting for. It would, at last, lower the cost of space travel, and make it accessible to the masses. Now Blue had pulled off the landing, a triumphant crescendo of more than a decade of work.

  Bezos was beaming. In interviews afterward, he called it a “flawless” mission and “one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.”

  He had founded the company fifteen years earlier, and had decided to build a chemically fueled rocket that would be reusable a few years after that. Now, Blue Origin had finally done it.

  Later, he said that the joy the landing gave him reminded him of the saying “God knows how to appropriately price his goods.”

  “The things that you work hardest for, for the longest periods of time, always bring you the most satisfaction,” he explained. “If you do something and it takes you ten minutes to do how satisfying can it actually be? You work on something for a decade and it finally comes out t
he pipeline. And for me, in a sense I’ve been working on that since I was five, so it was incredibly satisfying. And I think the whole team felt that. The people who go into this business do it because they are missionaries.”

  As it stood on the landing pad, charred from the flames, the rocket stood as a testament to math, engineering, and science. It was unlike any rocket that had ever flown before.

  Traditional rockets were all brawn and no brain, powerful boosters with a single job: to wrest their way out of gravity’s grip. Once they had done that, they were expendable, falling into a watery grave.

  But the New Shepard was brains and brawn, an autonomous robot that could fly itself. Guided by computer algorithms, sensors that measured the wind speed, and a GPS system, it fell back to Earth until its engine refired at 4,896 feet above the ground, slowing it down on its approach to the landing site.

  There the most remarkable part of the descent happened. For a short moment, the rocket hovered over the pad, taking a moment to check the coordinates to make sure it was in the right spot. Its system decided it wasn’t, so it used its thrusters to nudge itself over just ever so slightly, a maneuver that caused the New Shepard to sway over and then back, as if it were scooching over a seat on a couch. Once it was apparently pleased with its location, it touched down in a plume of dust and smoke, kissing the pad gently at 4.4 mph.

  This would put Blue Origin on the path to its first goal of flying paying tourists past the threshold of space, allowing them to enjoy the view from above, the curvature of Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, the vast darkness of space beyond. For this flight, the company had also tested the crew capsule, without passengers in it. It landed as well, under parachutes, eleven minutes after lifting off.

  Bezos said the flight was also a significant step toward its longer-term goals of building an even more powerful rocket, which at the time they were calling only “Very Big Brother.” In his taunt two years earlier, Musk had said that the chances “of unicorns dancing in the flame duct” were greater than Blue Origin’s building a rocket capable of delivering a payload to orbit. But now, here was Bezos saying they were doing exactly that.

  It would launch in full view of SpaceX’s Pad 39A. A couple months earlier, Bezos had announced that Blue Origin was taking over Launch Complex 36. While its pedigree was not as rich as that of 39A, Pad 36, located just down the road at Cape Canaveral, had been used for forty-three years before it was shuttered. It was home to 145 launches, including the Mariner missions, designed to be the first US spacecraft to fly by other planets, such as Venus and Mars. Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, also launched from there.

  But like much of the Florida Space Coast’s infrastructure, it had been abandoned and was rusting away. “The pad has stood silent for more than 10 years—too long,” Bezos said at the unveiling ceremony. “We can’t wait to fix that.”

  Now, with the landing of New Shepard, he had another victory to celebrate. And he took to Twitter—Musk’s preferred medium—to announce the endeavor to the public:

  “The rarest of beasts—a used rocket,” Bezos wrote in his first ever tweet, even though he had joined Twitter in July 2008. “Controlled landing not easy but done right can look easy.”

  To Musk, the level of celebration surpassed the height of the accomplishment. And now, after the fight over 39A, the patent dispute, the teaming up with the Lockheed-Boeing alliance, and the tensions of employee poaching, he was fuming.

  Bezos’s celebration was not only unseemly showboating, Musk thought, but factually inaccurate.

  Years before, SpaceX had repeatedly flown a test rocket called Grasshopper a few hundred feet into the air and then landed it, with one flight as high as nearly half a mile. So, technically, Musk had done it first.

  “@JeffBezos Not quite ‘rarest’. SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around,” Musk tweeted in response. He added, “Jeff maybe unaware SpaceX suborbital VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] flight began 2013.”

  But the highest any of those test rockets had traveled was 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). New Shepard’s rocket hit an apogee of 329,000 feet and its capsule went even higher. No rocket had ever made it to space before and then landed vertically. That was a first—and a record for the history books.

  What also bothered Musk was that the general public didn’t seem to understand the difference between what SpaceX was doing and what such companies as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were attempting. SpaceX’s rockets were launched into orbit; theirs went only to suborbital space and then came back down.

  For years, Musk had tried to make interviewers, and the general public, understand the distinction. He even had SpaceX’s press people call reporters to impress the difference upon them. Reaching the threshold of space in a simple up-and-down endeavor was—“like shooting a cannonball up and then the cannonball falls down for four minutes of freefall,” he once said. Orbit and space “are different leagues.” In 2007, he had whipped out a notepad to calculate the difference for an interviewer. And now, on Twitter, he was again playing the role of Professor Musk, delivering a physics lesson:

  “It is, however, important to clear up the difference between ‘space’ and ‘orbit,’” he wrote. “Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO (geostationary transfer orbit) requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit.”

  To get to orbit required a massive amount of energy so that the outward acceleration of the spacecraft balances out the force of gravity and essentially falls around Earth. Given the massive amount of velocity required to get an object into orbit—the space station flies at 17,500 mph and circles the globe every 90 minutes—it makes it that much more difficult to land an “orbital-class” rocket. As Musk once said, “You need to unwind that energy in a meteoric fireball, and if there’s one violation of integrity, you’re toast.”

  Musk’s tweets caused a frenzy in the media, which wanted a response from Bezos to keep the rivalry going, to let these two billionaires in space duke it out. But Bezos kept quiet. The tortoise wasn’t going to respond to the hare—at least not yet.

  TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS AFTER New Shepard’s landing, Musk jumped outside the launch control center onto a causeway at Cape Canaveral, and set his eyes on the launchpad about a mile away. This one he was going to watch live. There was just too much at stake. It was the first launch since the Falcon 9 blew up, and the first since his Twitter taunting.

  The company could survive one failure; two would be devastating. Musk was also anxious because he was going to make another landing attempt—this time on land—a chance for him to deliver on his promise that he’d be able to pull off one of his own.

  In the days leading up to the return to flight, on December 21, 2015, things weren’t looking good for a launch, let alone such an audacious landing. SpaceX was forced to delay by a series of technical glitches related to the temperature of its liquid oxygen fuel, which the company was struggling to keep at an unusually low temperature of minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The low temperature was part of an innovative new version designed to give the rocket a higher performance. It was supercooling the fuel to make it more dense. The denser the fuel, the more SpaceX could pack into the rocket. The more fuel, the more power it could generate.

  Another landing attempt would need every ounce of fuel that could be jammed into the booster to enable the engines to fire again on the return. But keeping the fuel at such a low temperature was something new for the company, and could pose problems.

  Then there was a glitch with a valve, requiring an adjustment of the ignition sequence by 0.6 second. This was a new, upgraded rocket SpaceX was trying out for the first time since the explosion—more powerful, yes, but also immature, a young buck of a rocket that apparently was fidgeting at the gate.

  It was getting closer to Christmas, and some in the industry predicted Musk would have to delay until after the holiday
s. But he was under pressure from his customer, a commercial communications company, to launch its eleven satellites into orbit by the end of the year. Despite the delays, he remained confident SpaceX would be able to pull it off.

  So, here he was at eight thirty on a cloudy, drizzly night on the Florida Space Coast, listening to the flight commander count down. Then came the roar of the engines, the fire, the plume of smoke, and finally, “We have lift off of the Falcon 9,” said the announcer on SpaceX’s live web broadcast.

  About a mile from the launchpad, SpaceX had built a first for Cape Canaveral—a pad that resembled a massive helicopter landing zone, with the X from the company’s logo marking the target where the rocket should land. The site happened to be located right next to the launch site where John Glenn had become the first American to launch into orbit during the Mercury program. It was a sacrosanct stage for a potentially historic space feat that would solidify SpaceX’s status as the darling of the commercial space flight industry, and Musk as its pied piper, leading his merry band of rocketeers past a threshold no one thought was possible.

  Even though he projected confidence in his Twitter lashing of Bezos, Musk would later say he was only 60 to 70 percent sure he’d be able to pull off such a difficult landing. The choreography for this particular maneuver was daunting and complex.

  After powering the rocket into orbit, the first-stage engines would cut off after just 2 minutes and 20 seconds. The first and second stages would separate four seconds later, while traveling some 3,700 mph, 50 miles above Earth. Then, as the second-stage engine ignited on its way to orbit, the first stage would fire its nitrogen thrusters, flipping the booster so that it was now facing the opposite direction—flying tail end first.