The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

Then it would reignite three of its nine engines in what was known as the boost-back burn, acting like a giant brake and leaving skid marks in the sky, until the booster started flying back in the opposite direction toward the Cape.

  The preprogrammed GPS coordinates in its computers would aim it at the landing site. As it would fall through the increasingly dense air, it would deploy what are called grid fins, wafflelike small wings just 4 by 5 feet wide, which would be used to manipulate the air like a kid putting his hand out of a car on the highway.

  Then, the booster would just fall, plummeting like a perfectly poised diver, piercing the clouds as the ground rose. The rocket would then fire its engine once again in what was called the landing burn, as the GPS system would orient the craft toward the landing zone.

  SpaceX compared it to “trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.”

  No wonder people said it was impossible.

  The Federal Aviation Administration had signed off on the landing, granting SpaceX a license to go for it. The air force had, too, but its controllers were on station just in case. If there were any sign that the rocket was going off course, such as about to head toward downtown Titusville, they could blow the thing up remotely, letting the pieces fall into the Atlantic.

  Even so, the Brevard County Emergency Operations Center upped its alert state to Level 2—its second highest—just in case. Adding to the drama was the fact that SpaceX was live broadcasting the launch and landing on its website—reality TV of another kind, where the thousands who tuned in would witness either triumph or failure. It was a huge risk. Failure would broadcast a giant fireball that would surely be played, and replayed, by the media.

  It stood in stark contrast to the controlled way that Bezos had announced the landing of the New Shepard booster, which had happened the day before the company’s PR messengers woke up journalists to deliver news that by then was nearly twenty-four hours old—and now packaged in a scripted press release and a slick, produced video.

  The tortoise might have been deliberate and careful. But the hare was letting it hang out for everyone to see, writing the script live and in public, not knowing the outcome. The hare might have been brash and, at times, offputting. But it had guts.

  AFTER THE FALCON 9 made it safely to space, Musk stayed out on the causeway, waiting for it to reappear. About ten minutes later, it did. At first, a distant glimmer, small like a streetlight illuminating the fog on a cloudy night. It lowered as if on a string, as SpaceX employees on the Cape gasped and broke into tears. Those gathered at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, just outside of Los Angeles, cheered wildly.

  “History in the making,” one of SpaceX’s commentators said on the livestream broadcast.

  Musk watched from the causeway, and could hear and feel what the others at the headquarters could not. An ugly, massive boom that thundered with the force of an explosion hit him like a punch in the chest. Musk assumed the worst.

  “Well, at least we got close,” he said to himself.

  STANDING ON THE causeway, Musk waited for the fireball that surely would follow the boom that had made him think the rocket crashed.

  It never came.

  He rushed inside the launch control center, where people were cheering what they could clearly see on their computer screens: the Falcon standing triumphantly on the launchpad. “The Falcon 9 has landed,” the launch conductor announced. The concussive blast Musk had heard had been a sonic boom, not an explosion.

  Whether intentional or not, the words used by SpaceX—“The Falcon 9 has landed”—echoed Neil Armstrong’s “The Eagle has landed,” after the spacecraft touched down on the moon.

  At the company’s headquarters in California, it was pandemonium, with hundreds of employees hugging one another, and jumping up and down as if they had just won the Super Bowl. It was like the unbridled celebration at Blue Origin after its landing—only bigger, with more employees. Sitting in the front row of the mission control center, company president Gwynne Shotwell had her hands above her head, touchdown style, and hugged everyone around her. The throng of employees outside the glass-encased control room broke into spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!”

  It was perhaps an odd choice for a cheer—this was the feat of a single, private company, not a nation. But in the unbridled exuberance of the moment, it also felt right, as if what they had accomplished extended far beyond the company’s headquarters. It reflected an optimism for the future, an affirmation that the impossible goal they had long been working toward might not exist solely in the outsize imagination of one billionaire’s head. And it channeled the enthusiasm and similarly grand ambitions of another generation, forty years earlier, that had pulled off what many said could not be done.

  For Musk, it was the validation that what he had been talking about for years now might actually be possible: “It really quite dramatically improves my confidence that a city on Mars is possible,” he said. “That’s what this is all about.”

  The partying continued until dawn. Musk showed up at the Cocoa Beach site by the beach after visiting the landing pad, still wearing his reflective vest and hard hat. He was greeted like a hero by drunken employees, many in their twenties and thirties, giving out high fives and hugs, soaking it all in, a smile plastered on his face.

  In Hawthorne, they partied hard as well. Shotwell dubbed herself the “party mommy” to make sure everyone got home okay. “I was trying to be the grown up managing all the people celebrating the launch,” she recalled. “That was a challenge.”

  Nothing could diminish this high. But underneath the joy, they were furious that their new rival—Bezos—couldn’t help taunting Musk, the way Musk had taunted him.

  Blue Origin had always practiced an extreme form of discipline, enforced by its ubiquitous nondisclosure agreements and Corleone-like “it’s strictly business” ethos.

  But now it was personal, if not for Musk’s “not quite rarest” tweet, then for the “unicorns dancing in the flame duct” crack. Or any other of the indignities and perceived slights that had fueled what was now a full-blown rivalry.

  “Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage,” Bezos tweeted soon after the landing. “Welcome to the club!”

  Whether it was meant sincerely or not, it came off as a counterpunch: he had done it first.

  As the tweet spread, SpaceX employees were increasingly angry, as was Musk.

  “That was a pretty snarky thing for him to say,” Musk said later.

  Shotwell said she “rolled [her] eyes and kept quiet. It was a silly thing for him to say.”

  But before Musk could go on a rampage, his team showed him what was happening on Twitter: their fans were retaliating for him. They had understood from Musk’s repeated statements that space was not orbit, and they responded to the slight with a call to arms.

  “@JeffBezos @SpaceX not even in the same league buddy. Nice try.”

  “@JeffBezos @SpaceX If you want to gain supporters—be gracious. Perhaps being an antagonistic dick is not the way to go?”

  “@JeffBezos @SpaceX enough said,” one tweeted with an image of the companies’ rockets, side by side, designed to illustrate how the endowed Falcon 9 made the New Shepard look prepubescent by comparison.

  Once Musk saw the reaction on Twitter, he recalled, he relaxed and decided that “I’m not going to respond to such absurdity,” especially after the “Internet spanked him pretty hard for that one.”

  It was all good. There was a rocket standing tall on the landing pad. There would be no tweet storm tonight.

  BRANSON HAD WATCHED the budding rivalry between his fellow billionaires unfold from a distance, and cringed. He was all for impulsivity, and living in the moment, but he made a point of avoiding conflict. This was distasteful, a war that no one could win.

  “Rivalry is generally good, I mean definitely good from a consumer point of view,” he said. Over the years, he and Musk had for
med a bond—“I’m friends with Elon, and know him relatively well. He comes down to Necker on occasion.” But he wouldn’t meet Bezos until years later, and when asked about the Twitter spat, he paused, searching for the right tone.

  “Tweets are not necessarily becoming if you use them for rivalry purposes,” he said, then catching himself. “Anyway, I’d rather stay above the fray.”

  The best way to compete was to stay focused on your own product, not your competitor. And with the breakup of SpaceShipTwo, Branson’s had taken a blow. But now, more than a year later, he was back. His team had rebuilt SpaceShipTwo, making it safer and more reliable, and he was again ready to show it off.

  HE MADE HIS entrance standing through the sunroof of a snow-white Land Rover, blowing kisses and waving to the crowd like a triumphant Caesar riding a chariot into the Colosseum. The last time Branson had appeared publicly in Mojave, his spacecraft had shattered into pieces on the desert floor. Now, he had a new spaceship to christen in a baptism that he hoped would cleanse away the pains of the past failure and reinvigorate new hope.

  The National Transportation Safety Board had wrapped up its nine-month investigation, concluding that a “lack of consideration for human factors” led to the midair breakup of the spacecraft. It found that Scaled Composites, which had built the vehicle for Virgin Galactic, had failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the accident.

  Yes, Michael Alsbury, the pilot killed in the crash, had unlocked the feather system prematurely. But he never should have been able to do so, the safety board said, and the company’s failure to even consider that possibility was one of a series of systematic failures that had led to the crash. As board member Robert Sumwalt said, Scaled Composites “put all their eggs in the basket of the pilot doing it correctly.” Unfortunately, humans inevitably make mistakes, “and the mistake is often times a symptom of a flawed system.”

  Virgin Galactic responded by implementing an inhibitor that would prevent the pilot from unlocking the feather prematurely. And it fired Scaled Composites, saying it would build the spacecraft itself.

  “From now on, we’ve taken everything in house and anything that happens from today will be down to Virgin Galactic,” Branson said.

  Now, on February 19, 2016, he had a new SpaceShipTwo to unveil. And his entrance—to the requisite pumping music, swirling lights, and chilled champagne—fulfilled the Branson stereotype and satisfied those who had come expecting a red-carpet show from one of the world’s most celebrated playboys. Branson was more than happy to play the part, with his rock star leather jacket and jeans, flowing hair, perma-white smile, and British charm. Harrison Ford, Han Solo himself, was sitting in the front row. But the real star power of the day came from the world’s premier celebrity physicist, Stephen Hawking.

  Inside the company, its officials were worried about coming off as too cavalier in the wake of the fatal accident. They wanted to put on a show glamorous enough to erase some of the pain, and to restore confidence, but they were also very cognizant of crossing a line—especially when they were years behind schedule and had still not flown a single paying customer. The crash and the subsequent delay also meant that Spaceport America, the futuristic facility that had cost taxpayers $220 million to build, continued to languish in the New Mexico desert, waiting for Virgin Galactic to fly.

  The company’s mishap had consequences far greater than an empty spaceport that had been a drain on government coffers; it had cost a life, and now Virgin’s executives had to show they were sober and serious in their pursuits. Hawking, then, was a brilliant choice, a sign of restraint. Although he was unable to travel to the event because of illness, his distinctive, computerized voice filled the hangar.

  “I have always dreamed of spaceflight,” Hawking said. “But for so many years I thought it was just that—a dream. Confined to Earth and a wheelchair, how could I experience the majesty of space except through imagination and my work in theoretical physics?”

  He said that, years before, Branson had offered to give him a ride to space, and added, “I would be very proud to fly in this spaceship.”

  Instead of trying to erase the past, Virgin Galactic embraced it. One executive choked up when discussing Alsbury’s death and legacy. And the company’s chief executive, George Whitesides, didn’t shy away from it, either.

  “It’s now been sixteen months since our flight test accident. That was a hard day,” he began.

  He recalled meeting Branson in “this very hangar” just after the crash. “It was a moment when years of hard work were put into public doubt, and the life of a brave test pilot, a family man, and a friend to many of us, was lost. We walked through this hangar, and we stood in front of the partially built serial number two space ship. It was positioned right over there. And we wondered, does this collection of carefully constructed parts represent our past—or our future?”

  The answer, in this choreographed event that trod the fine line between celebration and memorial, between rebirth and the funereal, was obvious. But as the company charged forward, it was clear that the once immature and impatient rush to the cosmos had been slowed down and chastened, with a renewed sense of care replacing exigency.

  Even before the event, in an effort to manage expectations and assure potential customers that it was moving deliberately and making safety paramount, Virgin Galactic released a statement warning: “If you are expecting SpaceShipTwo to blast off and head straight to space on the day we unveil her, let us disillusion you now: this will be a ground-based celebration.”

  For a company built on exploding expectations rather than managing them, it was an extraordinary statement. Branson and his Virgin brand had never been in the business of “disillusionment,” but of making the illusory real. Death, however, was sobering, and Virgin Galactic was faced with the delicate balance of promoting its newest spacecraft, and the once unthinkable prospect of routine space travel, against the dangers and difficulties inherent in that endeavor.

  First, the new spacecraft would go through a series of rigorous tests, and even before the vehicle was assembled, the company would lay out how it “poked, prodded, stretched, squeezed, bent, and twisted everything to be used to build these vehicles.” It was as if Virgin Galactic was unveiling a baby’s car seat, not a spacecraft.

  People who know Branson well often said the playboy image was something of a myth. That he is, at heart, a family man, surprisingly earnest and disarmingly self-deprecating. Unlike Musk and Bezos, who liked nothing more than to rattle on about the technical aspects of their rockets, Branson would come across as a bit insecure, making sure engineers were close by to answer any detailed questions. He provided the vision, not the technical specifications.

  Branson may have still been a playboy, but he was also a grandfather now, sixty-five years old, and at the unveiling he was surrounded by four generations of his family. His mother, nearly one hundred, was in the audience, as were his son and granddaughter, who was celebrating her first birthday.

  In the back of the hangar there was plenty of champagne, but SpaceShipTwo would not be christened with bubbly. Instead, the Bransons huddled around the newest member of their family, Eva-Deia, an innocent cherub with bright eyes and blond hair, and baptized the spaceship with the baby’s milk bottle.

  IN THE MONTHS that followed, Musk and Bezos started to play nice, at least in public. Their Twitter spat had touched off an irresistible media frenzy that pitted the pair against each other—a pair of tech billionaires fighting for cosmic domination—a made-for-large-font headline neither wanted.

  For someone who cultivated his image as meticulously as Bezos, it wasn’t dignified even to be perceived as feuding with Musk. When competitors came after Amazon, it only drove him to want to succeed even more. That was as true in the world of online retail as it was in space. Bezos would take the high road and remain focused on the immense challenge of getting off the planet, just as at Amazon
he urged his team to stay relentlessly focused on the customer.

  “At Blue Origin, our biggest opponent is gravity,” he said during an awards ceremony. “The physics of this problem are challenging enough. Gravity is not watching us and saying, ‘Uh-oh those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I’m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.’ Gravity doesn’t care about us at all.”

  The cosmos stretched far and wide, with plenty of room for lots of companies to live long and prosper. The business of space didn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

  “Oftentimes, it’s very natural to think of business competition like a sporting event,” Bezos said during a Q & A with Alan Boyle of Geekwire at an annual space conference in 2016. “Somebody leaves the arena a winner, and somebody leaves the arena a loser. In business, it’s usually a little different from that. Great industries are usually built by not just one or two or three companies, but usually by dozens of companies. There can be many winners, even hundreds and thousands of companies in a truly great industry. I think that’s where we are headed toward here.

  “From my point of view, the more the merrier. I want Virgin Galactic to succeed. I want SpaceX to succeed. I want United Launch Alliance to succeed. I want Arianespace to succeed. And, of course, I want Blue Origin to succeed. And I think they all can.”

  While it bothered Musk when people compared the accomplishments of SpaceX to Blue Origin’s, he, too, became more conciliatory.

  “In general, I think it’s important that we advance spaceflight for the good of humanity,” he said. “If I could press a button and make Blue Origin disappear, I would not press that button. I think it’s good Jeff is doing what he’s doing.”

  They were driven by the business opportunities in space, by adventure, and by ego—imagine the Promethean legacies they’d leave after opening up the Final Frontier.

  But there was no motivator quite like head-to-head competition. No one knew this better than Musk and Bezos. Amazon wouldn’t have become Amazon if it didn’t have Barnes and Noble to set its sights on. Tesla wouldn’t have been Tesla if it wasn’t taking on all of Detroit. And SpaceX, from its inception, had targeted the Alliance, seeking to disrupt the cushy monopoly it had held for years and crowbar open the lock it had on the Pentagon’s golden chest.