The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  But soon afterward, government watchdogs were warning that the same sorts of cost overruns and schedule delays that had plagued the Constellation program were weighing down the Obama administration’s plans as well. The new rocket that replaced the Bush-era Ares V was known as the Space Launch System (SLS). But it had yet to fly and was derided by critics as the “Senate Launch System” because it appeared like it was more of a program designed to create jobs in congressional members’ districts than actually fly to Mars.

  The $23 billion SLS/Orion program came as NASA faced “struggles with poor cost estimation, weak oversight and risk underestimation,” the US Government Accountability Office warned. NASA’s Mars mission, slated for sometime in the 2030s, seemed so implausible that veteran space journalists, weary of NASA incessantly promoting its “Journey to Mars,” openly mocked it as a journey to nowhere. Support in some corners of Congress was waning.

  “We made a wrong decision when we went down this road,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican.

  But that didn’t mean they were ready to just cancel NASA’s SLS/Orion program and fund Musk’s Mars mission instead, even if he was promising to get there first.

  FOR WEEKS, MUSK and a small SWAT team of SpaceX employees had spent their Saturdays working on the Mars architecture, and the presentation. But they seemed to overlook a key detail—the Q & A session that would follow.

  The organizers left the microphones accessible to anyone in the audience, and it soon took a turn into the absurd, as general audience members took the opportunity to ask Musk whatever they wanted. Someone named Aldo, who sounded as if he was stoned, said he had just gotten back from Burning Man, the annual pilgrimage in the Nevada desert, where he said it was cold, dusty, and uncomfortable—and compounded by overflowing sewage.

  “Is this what Mars is going to be like—just a dusty, waterless shitstorm?” Aldo asked.

  Another guy told Musk he wanted to give him a comic book about the “first man on Mars, just like you.” But he couldn’t get by the guards protecting the stage, and asked, “Should I just throw this onto the stage?”

  Then there was the woman who asked, “On behalf of all the ladies, can I go upstairs and give you a kiss, a good luck kiss?”

  Musk shifted stiffly as the crowd started whooping and hollering, as if at a brothel.

  “Thank you,” he offered, awkwardly. “Appreciate the thought.”

  IF THEY DIDN’T take him seriously, many were, at least, inspired. The long lines were a testament to that. As was the rush into the hall, a reignited enthusiasm for space and science and exploration, topics that hadn’t galvanized the American public quite like this in a long, long time.

  Maybe Musk’s Mars mission was an illusion, pure fiction fit for the comic book that the joker in the convention hall tried to throw on stage. But maybe that didn’t matter. What if the point of the whole exercise was to make it seem real, as if it could be done?

  SpaceX was, after all, a place where the motto was, as Shotwell had said, “set audacious, nearly impossible goals and don’t get dissuaded. Head down, plow through the line—that’s very SpaceX.”

  If achieving the impossible was the goal, then a single rocket explosion was a mere speed bump, not a roadblock—a temporary inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

  If the tortoise was content with slow is smooth and smooth is fast, the hare was ready to embrace all the virtues of impatience. It had been long enough. The country had wasted enough money trying to repeat Apollo, only to fail time and time again.

  Those who knew Musk and the company he had built understood that this moment, the nadir—a launchpad in ashes, rockets grounded, investigators probing, skeptics tsk-tsking, competitors pouncing—was precisely the time to unveil the most audacious plan of all.

  Cancel the speech? Never.

  SPACEX HAD RECENTLY designed retro-style travel posters showing Jetsons-like tourists on Mars, meandering through Valles Marineris with a jet pack, taking a tram to the top of Olympus Mons, “the solar system’s highest peak,” and gazing out on the expanse where they could “take a space age cruise of the moons of Mars.” They were a mix of marketing and fantasy that went viral, a sign of the emergence of a new leader in human space travel.

  For all its accomplishments, NASA could no longer lay exclusive claim to the title. The space shuttle program had been a compromise that didn’t deliver on its goal of providing reliable, low-cost access to space. It was pricey and dangerous, taking the lives of fourteen astronauts. Bush’s Constellation program, which was supposed to take humans back to the moon, had been killed. NASA’s replacement program, which was supposed to get to Mars, didn’t seem within decades of doing so with the overbudget, behind-schedule SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft.

  Musk, then, filled a void that was larger than his space company.

  “His job is to provide inspirational leadership not just for SpaceX, but for the larger space community,” said John Logsdon, the noted space historian who had written books about Kennedy’s and Nixon’s space programs. “There hasn’t been someone like that for a very long time.”

  Or ever. The fact that SpaceX existed at all was an improbable triumph of an aggressive and relentless business strategy, innovative engineering, and, perhaps above all, imagination. The idea that a private individual could start a space company and be successful seemed about as outrageous as what Musk was now trying to accomplish.

  As if to prove the point, Musk had showed the audience in Guadalajara a ridiculous picture of the early days of SpaceX, when it had just a few employees and had invited a mariachi band to a company party.

  “Just to show you where we started off in 2002, SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band. That was it. That’s all of SpaceX in 2002,” he said. “I thought we had maybe a ten percent chance of doing anything, of even getting a rocket to orbit, let alone getting beyond that and taking Mars seriously. But I came to the conclusion if there wasn’t some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn’t seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars.”

  Now, he had more than five thousand employees working in Hawthorne, McGregor, and Cape Canaveral. The company also had a launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and was building its own private launchpad in Brownsville, Texas, where it would be free to launch as it saw fit without worrying about the sometimes hectic schedule of the government-owned facilities.

  After SpaceX sued the US Air Force over the right to compete for the national security launches, the parties finally settled and the Pentagon finally certified the Falcon 9 for the missions. Musk had been pursuing the lucrative launches for years, and now it was finally able to compete against the Alliance, which had held a monopoly on the billions of dollars’ worth of contracts for a decade.

  The victory was the end of what Tim Hughes, SpaceX’s general counsel, called a “decade-long grind.”

  “Our mantra from day one was: allow us to compete. And if we lose on the merits so be it,” he said. “But you’ve got to let competition flourish, and you need to let what we perceive to be the home team, play. And by home team we mean this is an all-American rocket. No reliance on Russian engines or other major component parts.”

  But the first time the air force held a competition for one of the launches, the Alliance balked, saying it was unable to submit a bid. It claimed that the procurement was set up so that the competition was weighted toward who had the lower price—SpaceX—and not who had the most experience and record of past performance, which would have given the Alliance the edge.

  Congress had limited the use of a Russian-made engine that the Alliance used in its Atlas V rocket, and those restrictions made it impossible to bid, the company said.

  SpaceX and others weren’t buying it.

  “I thought it was a coward’s move. You can quote me,” said Shotwell. “They did not want to lose. And
they knew they would lose.”

  FROM THE MOMENT he founded SpaceX, the hare had been blazing a trail, and along the way clearing the path for others. Musk had gotten NASA to trust companies like his. He had taken on the air force in court and won. He had made space cool again. And he had done it first. In his wake, a new commercial space industry was beginning to emerge in earnest.

  Investors, long leery of the risky industry, started to wade in. In 2014, the global space economy totaled $330 billion, a 9 percent jump from the previous year and up from $176 billion in 2005, according to the Space Foundation, a nonprofit space advocacy organization. In 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in SpaceX, backing another of Musk’s ventures: a bold plan to build a constellation of thousands of small satellites that would swarm over Earth, beaming the Internet to remote parts of the world.

  SpaceX had gotten so attractive that the company had to actually turn away money, telling Steve Jurvetson, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists and an early backer of SpaceX, to hold off.

  “There’s so much interest, they can’t take it all,” said Jurvetson.

  By mid-2017, after raising $350 million in a new round of funding, SpaceX was valued at $21 billion, “making it one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world,” the New York Times reported.

  The prospect of reusable rockets dramatically lowering the cost of launch fueled the growth, as did the revolution in small satellites. For decades, satellites had been big, as large as a garbage truck, and expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But now the technology had changed, and like an iPhone, they had shrunk in size, to the size of a shoebox, costing far less.

  Musk wasn’t the only entrepreneur looking to cash in on the new satellite technology. OneWeb, a company backed by Richard Branson, also planned to put up a constellation of hundreds of miniature satellites that it said would connect the billions of people without Internet access to the digital economy.

  Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt invested in Planetary Resources, which planned to mine asteroids. Filled with precious metals, the asteroids are the “diamonds in the rough of the solar system,” Eric Anderson, the company’s cofounder, told CNBC.

  Asteroids have “rare metals, industrial metals and even fuels,” he said, “so we could create gas stations in space that would enable us to travel throughout the solar system just like Star Trek.”

  It sounded like something out of a James Cameron movie. And maybe it will be. The Hollywood director served as an adviser to the company. But it also is the subject of a law signed in 2015 by President Obama that gives US companies the rights to the resources they mine in space. And it has gotten the attention of investment bankers.

  “We believe space mining is still a long way from commercial viability, but it has the potential to further ease access to space and facilitate an in-space manufacturing economy,” an analyst for Goldman Sachs wrote in a note to investors. “Space mining could be more realistic than perceived… a single asteroid the size of a football field could contain $25 billion to $50 billion worth of platinum.”

  Robert Bigelow, the multimillionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, had developed a space habitat, made of a Kevlar-like material that inflated, like a balloon, once in orbit. Another venture called Made in Space had put the first 3-D printer on the International Space Station, as it worked toward creating manufacturing facilities in space.

  The wave of new companies touched off an Apollo-like renaissance in the top aerospace engineering programs. At Purdue University, applications for the undergraduate aerospace engineering program jumped 50 percent.

  “The demand for our program has increased dramatically because of companies like Virgin and SpaceX and Blue,” said Stephen Heister, a professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “We can only absorb so many people. We have to turn away some who are really very qualified.… I’m an old guy. I graduated in the early 1980s, and in my entire career, this is the most exciting time.”

  MUSK WAS THE benefactor of much of that excitement. He was the face of this new industry, its de facto leader. He was the one on stage, taking unfiltered questions from the masses. He was the hare. Head down. Plow through the line. Anyone who followed, Blue Origin included, owed a measure of their success to SpaceX and its relentless march toward Mars.

  As Musk had told the Washington Post, his goal was to reignite people’s interest in space, to “get people fired up.” Mars, he said, would be “the greatest adventure ever.” In Guadalajara, his goal was to “make it seem possible. To make it seem like it’s something we can do in our lifetimes. That you can go.”

  He would take you for the low, low price of $200,000. The ticket price that Branson had originally charged for suborbital jaunts to space would, one day, be enough to get you to Mars—return flight included. Of course, it would be hard and dangerous and, as Musk had said, “people will die.”

  But like all of the great dreams, as Superman actor Christopher Reeve said, it would first seem impossible, then improbable, and then inevitable. You just had to believe and see through the dense forest of disbelief to a point in the distance where doubt gave way to an improbable question: What if everything Musk was saying was true?

  15

  “The Great Inversion”

  THERE WAS NO sign on the outside. No company logo. Nothing but the address on a nondescript warehouse. Inside, past the front desk attendant, who asked whether you’d been here before and whether your nondisclosure agreement was already on file, and up a flight of stairs, visitors were greeted by a scattering of space memorabilia that was more like an eccentric museum collection than a corporate lobby.

  In the center of the hardwood floor was a model of the Starship Enterprise used in the original Star Trek motion picture. There was a Russian spacesuit on display, a proposed space station that was never built, and a model of a domed habitat, as if on Mars. There was a poster of a monster rocket engine, and a nod to the past: an anvil ca. 1780 from Troyes, France.

  On the walls of Blue Origin’s lobby were inspiring quotes, including one from Leonardo da Vinci: “For once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”

  But the centerpiece of Jeff Bezos’s collection was a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, which stretched up to the open floor above. A Jules Verne–inspired, Victorian-era vision of a rocket with room for five and engines directed to a fire pit below, making it seem as if it were blasting off from the lobby. Inside were plush, velvety couches, a bookshelf with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon, a stocked whiskey cabinet, and a pistol. It was a quirky and detailed accoutrement, designed to make the foreign familiar.

  The lobby was a great big Valentine to adventure, the early days of the Space Age and the intersection of science fiction and art, a childhood dream come alive. If a rocket-cum-employee lounge wasn’t enough to convince visitors they had entered a strange and curious place—where employees’ dogs roamed about freely—there was the corporate coat of arms, as if Blue Origin was laying down its heraldry for future generations, not on a shield but on the wall, like a mural.

  It was an involved piece of art, loaded with trippy symbols from Earth to the stars with the velocities needed to reach various altitudes in space. There were a pair of turtles gazing skyward, an homage to the winner of the race between the tortoise and the hare, celebrating the deliberate and methodical approach. But there was also an hourglass symbolizing human mortality, and the need to move expeditiously.

  Before he had made his fortune at Amazon, Bezos had been outbid at the Sotheby’s auction of space memorabilia. But in the years since, he had more than made up for it. Here was a Mercury-era NASA hard hat, an Apollo 1 training suit, and a heat shield tile from the space shuttle.

  Then there was the curious piece of art tucked away in the corner. It was composed of 442 spools o
f thread stacked vertically on top of one another, as if in a spice rack. Together they looked like nothing more than the inside of a massive sewing kit, the random assortment of colors amounting to nothing. But if you looked at it through the glass sphere hanging from the wall, the spools morphed into a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, appearing as if by magic.

  Amid the assortment of space artifacts, the piece seemed out of place, as if the curators got confused and hung an impressionist painting in the Air and Space Museum—Degas’s ballet dancers hanging next to the F-1 engine hardware. But here in Bezos’s wonderland, where Dr. Seuss’s quote was painted on the wall—“If you want to catch beasts you don’t see every day, you have to go places quite out of the way”—it made sense. Going to space required looking through the prism to see that which was otherwise invisible.

  IN A CONFERENCE room called Jupiter 2, Bezos settled into a chair with a cup of black coffee and nibbled from a small bowl of assorted nuts. After years of secrecy, Blue Origin was starting to finally open up, and had even invited a small group of reporters to the headquarters a year before. But Bezos rarely granted one-on-one interviews like this, even to the Washington Post, the newspaper he had bought in 2013. It had taken me months of persistent cajoling to get this meeting.

  The key, it seemed, was a press release from 1961 I’d discovered in the archives, highlighting the service of his grandfather, Lawrence P. Gise, as he left the Advanced Research Projects Agency to go back to the Atomic Energy Commission. Buttonholing Bezos after an event and handing him the press release was a last-ditch effort to get him to sit down for an interview. His grandfather was an important figure to him. Perhaps I could win him over with my level of research.

  The world had seen him almost exclusively through the lens of Amazon, but to truly understand him, it also had to see him through another of his real passions: space. This was an important moment in the history of human space travel, one that needed to be more thoroughly chronicled. Would he be willing to sit down and talk about his ambitions building rockets?