The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Competition had driven the original space race. Without the Soviets threatening to own the ultimate high ground, the United States would have never made it to the moon. After the Soviets had made Yuri Gagarin the first man to orbit Earth, President Kennedy had been anguished, running his hands through his hair and nervously tapping his teeth with his fingernails during a meeting at the White House.

  “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there,” Kennedy had pleaded, adding later that “there’s nothing more important.”

  Less than a decade later, as Neil Armstrong crossed the finish line, the first man to walk on the moon was magnanimous, proclaiming the victory as “one giant leap for mankind.”

  The race complete, the victor triumphant, the loser vanquished, there was then a long fade in human spaceflight, a retreat even. The lack of competition led to complacency. A comfortable wither. Despite the repeated promises of presidents hoping to channel Kennedy and summon a “because they are hard” call to arms, the next giant leap—Mars, moon bases, a civilization in the stars—never came. Hope and dreams may have sounded great at the podium. On the launchpad, they only went so far.

  If Musk and Bezos were going to be the true heirs to Apollo, if, at long last, they were going to push humans further into the cosmos, building that railroad system to the stars, they would have to crouch down alongside each other, get on their mark, get ready, and go. One eye focused clearly on that distant, impossible goal; the other, on the competitor just over their shoulder.

  For all the conciliatory talk, the truth was they needed each other.

  Rivalry, it turned out, was the best rocket fuel.

  14

  Mars

  THE FAITHFUL STARTED lining up hours before the show was to start. The first ones huddled early at the conference hall in Guadalajara, Mexico, in small clusters as die-hard adherents to the vision. They were like groupies camped out for tickets to the new Star Wars movie, making the wait part of the May-the-Force-Be-with-You ritual, a curbside tent party with costumed storm troopers, Han Solos and Yodas.

  Behind the locked doors, their Yoda was getting ready. Elon Musk wanted to get the details right. This was his big moment, and he wasn’t going to rush it. For months, he’d been teasing the speech he was to give today, September 27, 2016, at the International Astronautical Congress, an annual space conference. The hype had built to a fever pitch to the point where Musk had overshadowed everything else, turning the days-long international space convention into the Elon Show.

  When he founded SpaceX a lifetime ago in 2002, Musk was an unknown eccentric with a wild idea to privatize space that even he didn’t think would work. Now, he was a worldwide celebrity, Tony Stark in a Tesla, with a space company that had attracted a cultlike following that clicked on the company’s launch and landing YouTube videos by the millions.

  SpaceX had transcended corporate America the way NASA had once transcended government bureaucracy, becoming an institution of hope and inspiration. Now Elon—always the one name—was the new face of the American space program, the embodiment of exploration, a modern-day amalgam of JFK and Neil Armstrong, with 10 million Twitter followers.

  The press room in Guadalajara was overflowing with reporters who had come from all over the world for this long-awaited speech, titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” in which Musk would, finally, lay out his plan to colonize Mars.

  In the months leading up to Guadalajara, he disclosed some of the details, telling the Washington Post that he intended to build a transportation system to the Red Planet like the railroads that traversed the United States, with the goal of the first humans landing on Mars in 2025. NASA had already announced that it would partner with SpaceX to fly its Dragon spacecraft, without any passengers, to the surface of Mars. Then, every two years after that, when the orbits of Earth and Mars were at their closest points, SpaceX would send additional supplies, all ahead of what would become the first human settlement.

  “Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” he told the Post. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going to happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station.”

  Mars had been the goal since SpaceX’s inception, the reason he founded the company. Steve Davis, one of SpaceX’s earliest employees, remembered memos he received from Musk as early as 2004 that asked, “How much propellant do we need to land on Mars?” And at his first performance evaluation review, they didn’t talk about Davis’s performance: “We talked about Mars. That was the entire conversation. How do you get to Mars?”

  Now it was coming together, at least in Musk’s mind. In the interview with the Post, Musk was so excited about the prospect that he could barely contain himself. “I’m so tempted to talk more about the details of it,” he said, catching himself, not wanting to scoop his Guadalajara speech. “But I have to restrain myself.”

  For the first missions, SpaceX would launch its Falcon Heavy rocket, a twenty-seven-engine beast that was essentially three Falcon 9s strapped together. But for the human colony, it would build the Mars Colonial Transporter, or what was known inside SpaceX as the BFR—Big Fucking Rocket.

  “BFR is a pretty good name for this, it’s very big,” he told the Post. “Obviously I want to reserve the details of that for September. But this is going to be mind blowing,”

  “Mind. Blowing,” he repeated, in rhapsodic tones. “It’s going to be really great.”

  Now the moment had finally arrived. Finally, the doors to the convention hall opened and the crush ran frenetically for seats close to the stage. For a few minutes, it was so chaotic that those with seats filmed the people swarming around them.

  Finally, it calmed down and Musk, wearing a dark blazer and white shirt and with a several-day-old beard, took the stage, standing before a giant, illuminated photo of the red planet.

  “So,” he said, “how do we figure out how to take you to Mars?”

  IN THE DAYS before the speech, many thought Musk would cancel. That even he didn’t have the temerity to go through with it. Not when, just three weeks before, another of his rockets had blown up in a spectacular fireball—and SpaceX still didn’t know why.

  This time, the explosion happened as the rocket was being fueled on the launchpad in preparation for an engine test fire, days before it was to launch. But something went horribly wrong and suddenly the rocket detonated, sending a plume of thick, dark smoke billowing over the Florida coast. No one was injured, but the blast could be felt for miles.

  For the second time in just over a year, SpaceX had lost a rocket in a disastrous explosion. But this time, instead of carrying cargo to the International Space Station, its payload was a $195 million Israeli satellite that was going to be used, in part, by Facebook to beam the Internet to developing nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

  The explosion was bad enough. But in an effort to save time, SpaceX had loaded the multimillion-dollar satellite on the rocket ahead of the test fire, a decision that in retrospect looked foolish and needlessly risky. Standard practice, and perhaps common sense, said to wait until after the fiery test, when the rocket had been cleared to go. But SpaceX liked to push the envelope, and was trying to move fast to get through its backlog of launches.

  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was in Africa when he got the news. “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” he wrote on Facebook.

  On the Late Show the following night, Stephen Colbert showed a clip of the explosion. “BOOOM! It blowed up real good!” he said. “Now, it was unmanned, okay. Very important: No one was harmed. But it was carrying a satellite that was supposed to bring the Internet to sub-Saharan Africa. So, yeah, I know now not only do they not have clean drinking water
, but they can’t bitch about it on Yelp.”

  As investigators began their probe into the cause, SpaceX was grounded again. After the explosion the year before, Musk had been confident shortly afterward that the company knew what had gone wrong and how to fix it. But this was a mystery. What causes a rocket suddenly to blow up while just sitting on the pad?

  Musk was apparently dumbfounded, and a week after the explosion vented on Twitter that the loss of the rocket was “turning out to be the most difficult and complex failure we have ever had in 14 years.”

  He added that it was “important to note that this happened during a routine filling operation. Engines were not on and there was no apparent heat source.” He pleaded with the public to come forward with any recordings of the explosion. He then added an element of intrigue by saying that the investigators were “particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off. May come from rocket or something else.”

  On the Internet, where conspiracy theories were already percolating, some speculated that the “something else” was a projectile, maybe even a bullet or UFO. On Twitter, Musk was asked about the possibility of something hitting the rocket, and he fueled speculation even further by saying, “We have not ruled that out.”

  Although they didn’t say so publicly at the time, SpaceX investigators were looking seriously at sabotage.

  “We literally thought someone had shot the rocket,” Musk recalled later. “We found things that looked like bullet holes, and we calculated that someone with a high-powered rifle, if they had shot the rocket in the right location, that exact same thing would have happened.”

  At first, the company was baffled about the cause of the explosion and so, “the first thing you do is think it’s some outside force, right,” said SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell afterward. “Because we couldn’t figure out how in the world this could have happened.”

  If someone did shoot the rocket, SpaceX knew it needed to collect whatever evidence it could as fast as possible. “So, for sure, we put pressure on the air force and the FAA to go collect whatever forensic data was possible,” Shotwell said.

  Early indications were that something caused an upper-stage helium bottle to explode, but at the SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, engineers were trying to replicate the explosion. But “we were having a hard time blowing these bottles up,” she said.

  So, instead, they got a rifle, “and we shot it,” she said. “And the signature on the bottle was just like the signature on the bottle that we recovered. That was an easy test to do. It’s Texas, right, everybody’s got a gun and you can blow stuff up.”

  WITH SPACEX HOBBLED, the United Launch Alliance pounced, hoping to poach some of SpaceX’s customers by offering an expedited launch schedule to get its payloads in orbit. And it boasted an impressive track record, one its new competitor could not match: more than one hundred consecutive launches without a single failure.

  “The priorities of all of our customers include ensuring their spacecraft launches on schedule, securing the soonest possible manifest date and completing the mission with 100 percent success,” said the Alliance’s chief executive and president, Tory Bruno, in a statement. “To address these priorities, we have been working on this offering for more than a year, which allows our customers to launch in as few as three months from placing their order.”

  Competition between the companies was as intense as ever. After years of lawsuits, SpaceX had finally won the right to bid on the Pentagon’s lucrative national security launch contracts. For a decade, the Alliance held a monopoly on that work, but now SpaceX was threatening the Alliance’s main revenue stream.

  But two weeks after the Falcon 9 rocket exploded, the long-running feud between them took a bizarre twist. A SpaceX employee suddenly showed up at one of the Alliance’s facilities on Cape Canaveral with an odd request: Could he have access to the roof?

  The reason, he explained, was that SpaceX had still images from a video that appeared to show a shadow, then a bright white spot, coming from the roof. The Alliance’s building was about a mile away from the launchpad and had a clear line of sight to it.

  Although the SpaceX employee was cordial and not accusatory, the implication of sabotage was explosive, and to the Alliance, incredulous. The latter refused to let the SpaceX employee in, and called the air force, which found nothing amiss.

  As Musk took the stage in Guadalajara, the mystery continued, as did the conspiracy theories.

  “So, how do we figure out how to take you to Mars?” Musk asked during the introduction to his speech.

  The answer was: a big rocket. To demonstrate just how big, Musk’s presentation started with a drawing of a person standing next to it. As the view zoomed out to capture the size of the rocket, the person got smaller and smaller in comparison until he was barely perceptible.

  “It’s quite big,” Musk deadpanned.

  Since it would be able to go beyond Mars, some were now calling what had been known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, the Interplanetary Transport System.

  Whatever its name, it was a behemoth, more than 400 feet tall, with forty-two engines and a spacecraft that could carry one hundred people or more, refuel in orbit, and then cruise to Mars at 62,634 mph before touching down. On stage, Musk painted an optimistic portrait of the future, vowing that a “self-sustaining city on Mars” of a million people could be achieved within forty to one hundred years of the first flight, and he talked about a “Mars Colonial Fleet” departing en masse for the Red Planet.

  The trip there has “got to be really fun and exciting,” he said. “It can’t feel cramped or boring. But the crew compartment, or the occupant compartment, is set up so that you can do Zero-G games, float around. It would be like movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant. It will be, like, really fun to go. You are going to have a great time.”

  The highlight of his presentation was a fantastic four-minute video that showed the massive booster taking off, and the spacecraft cruising through space until Mars showed up in its massive windshield as an inviting red and golden orb, a promised land with an atmosphere glowing around it like a halo.

  The video ended with a time lapse of a desiccated, dead planet, which scientists believed could have once supported life, transforming into an Earth-like planet, with green and blue oceans replacing the vast red deserts of Mars.

  Musk was right. It was mind-blowing. All of it. The supersize rocket. The spacecraft with a windshield that showed the Red Planet looming large. The idea that Mars could be heated up and made habitable, like Earth.

  But it was also all a bit too fantastic, crossing into the surreal with the same characteristics as good science fiction: “plausible but not probable,” as one noted space expert later observed. Especially since, at that very moment, SpaceX’s launchpad was in ashes and its rocket was grounded. Not to mention that the company had only flown satellites and cargo and had yet to fly a single person anywhere, not even in low Earth orbit, let alone Mars.

  The timeline was almost laughably improbable—with first flights in 2018 on the Falcon Heavy, a rocket that had endured repeated delays and technical problems and had yet to fly. Mars remained an exceedingly difficult mission. On average, it’s 140 million miles from Earth, though the two planets come much closer to each other every twenty-six months. And of the forty-three robotic missions to Mars, including flybys, which were attempted by four different countries, not companies, only eighteen were deemed a complete success.

  If Musk were going to be able to pull this off, it “would be a gigantic human engineering endeavor, greater in scope, scale, and cost than the Manhattan Project,” said Gentry Lee, the chief engineer for solar system exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  For a human Mars colony on Musk’s timeline to be successful, it “would have to develop and infuse new technologies at a much faster rate than we have ever achieved before on any project.”

  The experts weren�
�t the only ones who were skeptical of Musk’s dream. Loren Grush, a top space journalist working at the Verge, pressed Musk after the presentation on a key detail that he hadn’t addressed.

  “You didn’t touch much on how you will keep humans safe on the way over there for either deep space radiation or how they will live on the planet,” she said. “Can you give us some insight into the life support system, habitats, stuff like that?”

  For someone as detail-oriented as Musk, he responded with an almost blasé approach, ignoring the crux of the question and simply saying that “the radiation thing is not too big of a deal.”

  Another big question hanging over the presentation was: Who was going to pay for all of this? Musk said he would “make the biggest contribution I can” of his own personal wealth. But at one point he joked that SpaceX might have to use Kickstarter, the online fund-raising platform, to raise money.

  “As we show this dream is real… I think the support will snowball over time,” he said, without offering any details.

  But that was more of a wish than a concrete business plan. And his idea that this would ultimately have to be a “public-private partnership” also seemed improbable. NASA had its own plan to get to Mars, and it was building its own rocket and spacecraft to get there.

  Although Obama killed the Bush-era Constellation program, Lockheed Martin’s Orion crew capsule had survived the chopping block. In 2014, it flew to an altitude of 3,600 miles, farther than any spacecraft designed for humans had traveled in more than forty years. Although no astronauts were aboard for its maiden test flight, NASA cheered the mission as a “new era” in human space exploration.