The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  Space tourism, then, was not just a way for people, albeit wealthy people, to experience space, but it was a way to make space more accessible.

  “Tourism often leads to new technologies,” Bezos said at the Washington Post forum. “And then those new technologies often circle back around and get used in very important, utilitarian ways.” Graphic Processing Units, or GPUs, for example, were invented for video games. But now they’re being used for machine learning, he said.

  In addition to the ten-minute jaunts to space, the future for Blue Origin involved a much larger, more ambitious rocket. Internally, it had been called “Very Big Brother,” but now it had a more formal name: New Glenn, after John Glenn, the first American in orbit.

  Compared to New Shepard, the new rocket would be a beast, with seven engines, capable of 3.85 million pounds of thrust, towering as high as 313 feet, almost as tall as the Saturn V.

  Eleven days before John Glenn died at the age of ninety-five in late 2016, he wrote Bezos a letter, saying he was “deeply touched” that the rocket was named after him. In 1962, when he took his historic flight into orbit, “you were still two years from being born,” Glenn wrote. When Glenn returned to space in 1998 on a space shuttle mission at age seventy-seven, he noted that Blue Origin wouldn’t be founded for another two years, but “you were already driven by a vision of space travel accessible not only to highly trained pilots and engineers and scientists, but to all of us.…

  “As the original Glenn, I can tell you I see the day coming when people will board spacecraft the same way millions of us now board jetliners. When that happens, it will be largely because of your epic achievements this year.”

  Coming just days before the death of an American icon, the letter served as a bridge from the halcyon days of NASA’s manned space program, Glenn’s era of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, to this new era, a time Bezos had started to call a new “golden age of space exploration.”

  New Glenn, the smallest orbital rocket he’d ever build, would be capable of not just flying satellites and humans to low Earth orbit, but beyond. In Florida, Blue was building a massive manufacturing facility where it would build New Glenn. It was also revamping Pad 36, the launch complex just down the road from SpaceX’s 39A. Over the past year, the company had gone on a hiring spree, and now had about one thousand employees.

  Even though New Glenn was still at least three years from flying, in early 2017 Bezos announced that Blue had signed its first customer for the rocket, Eutelsat, a French satellite company. The deal would give Blue something that had been scarce in its history—actual revenue—and it marked the company’s entrance into the market, where it would now compete against SpaceX.

  NEW GLENN WAS yet another demonstration in the step-by-step approach. First came New Shepard, named after the first American in space. That took about ten years to develop. Then, New Glenn, which by the time it was scheduled to fly in 2020, would mark the culmination of another decade of work.

  “We get to do a major thing every ten years,” Bezos said, sitting in the conference room at Blue Origin’s headquarters. “I think before I’m eighty, we have time for two more major cycles, maybe even two and a half. And so what those things will be I don’t need to decide that now. It’s premature. But if I can stay healthy, I’d like to see it. I’ll make sure somebody will continue the work even if I’m not around to see it. I’d love to see it. I’m very curious about the future.”

  Working just one day a week at Blue meant time was precious. He stood up and headed out to his next meeting. Wednesdays were for space.

  “And now I’m going to return to building rockets!” he said, as he walked out through the lobby.

  It was hard to know what the future would look like, hundreds of years out. But he had big plans for how he’d fulfill the dreams of his five-year-old self. And he had recently given a very big hint about where he wanted to go.

  His next rocket would be named New Armstrong.

  EPILOGUE

  Again, the Moon

  PAUL ALLEN COULDN’T stay away.

  After SpaceShipOne had made history as the first commercial vehicle to reach the edge of space, he had licensed the technology to Richard Branson, unnerved by the danger of the endeavor and ready to turn his attention, and fortune, elsewhere.

  But space, and aviation, had been passions ever since he was a kid, and in 2011, he announced he was going to build the world’s largest airplane. With a wingspan wider than a football field—end zones included—it would be larger than even the Spruce Goose, the famous aircraft Howard Hughes built during World War II that was designed to carry as many as seven hundred soldiers, but only flew once, in 1947.

  Allen’s plane wasn’t designed to carry passengers; rather, rockets that would drop from the plane’s belly at 35,000 feet and then launch into space. Because of its size, it would be capable of carrying rockets far more powerful than SpaceShipOne as well as carrying satellites, experiments, and eventually astronauts into orbit—not just to the threshold of space.

  With the Ansari X Prize, Allen had been at the vanguard of the commercial space movement, which was now dominated by his fellow billionaire tycoons—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Branson, all of whom were pushing ahead with their own plans, showing it could be done. Allen wanted back in the game.

  “You have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,” he said at the time. “And this is a dream that I’m very excited about.”

  His announcement came shortly after the space shuttle had flown its last mission and NASA was suddenly unable to fly astronauts into space. Despite the progress made by SpaceX and others, it was an uncertain time for the future of human space travel, and he noted, “with government-funded spaceflight diminishing, there is a much expanded opportunity for privately funded efforts.” His new venture would, he said, keep “America at the forefront of space exploration.”

  Five years after that announcement, the plane was not yet ready to fly. But it was taking shape. Burt Rutan had retired from Scaled Composites, but Allen had hired his old company to build Stratolaunch in a massive hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port which was so big the company had to apply for special construction permits just for the scaffolding.

  Sitting in his Seattle office in August 2017, with views of the harbor, with the Seahawks’ Super Bowl trophy nearby, he said that the plane was getting close to flying. Even unfinished, it was a behemoth. The wingspan seemed as long as a runway, and at 385 feet was longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers on their first powered flights at Kitty Hawk. Its landing gear had a total of twenty-eight wheels. It had twin fuselages, and fully loaded it would weigh as much as 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 747 engines, and have 60 miles of cable coursing through it.

  In the history of aviation, there had never been anything quite like it. In addition to his fascination with space, Allen was a connoisseur of antique planes, and had amassed a collection of World War II relics that he had painstakingly refurbished. He recovered them from old battlefields—a Messerschmitt, a German fighter plane, was dug out of a sand dune on a French beach where it had been buried for decades; an Ilyushin IL-2M3 Sturmovik was pieced together from the wrecks of four planes recovered in northwest Russia.

  To showcase his collection, Allen created a museum, the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Washington, which featured a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat, and a B-25 Bomber, among others.

  “I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes,” Allen recalled. “I was trying to understand how things worked—how things were put together, everything from airplane engines to rockets and nuclear power plants. I was just intrigued by the complexity and the power and the grace of these things flying.”

  Now he was building a plane as powerful and complex as any of them, built for opening up the cosmos. Allen’
s vision was like that of his fellow Space Barons—to lower the cost of space travel and make it more accessible. Bezos had said that inexpensive, reliable access to space would touch off the kind of “dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last twenty-one years on the Internet.”

  Allen also saw parallels between the space frontier and the Internet.

  “When such access to space is routine, innovation will accelerate in ways beyond what we can currently imagine,” he said. “That’s the thing about new platforms: when they become easily available, convenient, and affordable, they attract and enable other visionaries and entrepreneurs to realize more new concepts.…

  “Thirty years ago, the PC revolution put computing power into the hands of millions and unlocked incalculable human potential. Twenty years ago, the advent of the web and the subsequent proliferation of smartphones combined to enable billions of people to surmount the traditional limitations of geography and commerce. Today, expanding access to LEO [low Earth orbit] holds similar revolutionary potential.”

  Just as computers had gone from the size of refrigerators to being able to fit in your pocket, once-massive and expensive satellites were smaller and cheaper, some even the size of a shoebox. Being able to put up constellations of thousands of them at a time would allow for all sorts of endeavors, from beaming the Internet to every spot in the world, opening up communication, to better monitoring the health of the planet, allowing farmers to keep a close eye on crops—and the Pentagon to monitor its enemies.

  “The capabilities of these small satellites is something that’s really interesting and fascinating, both for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites and for monitoring the challenged health of our planet,” he said, sitting in his office. He’d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keep an eye on “things like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.”

  In mid-2017, Heather Wilson, the new US Air Force secretary, visited the company’s hangar in Mojave to discuss how it could be used to launch satellites for national security. Stratolaunch, able to take off and land at airports, could be a key player in launching those satellites quickly and affordably, as space was quickly becoming the next frontier in war.

  While the X Prize flights had terrified him, Allen had begun to think about human space travel again. “I had to think long and hard about taking the plunge again,” he wrote in his memoir. “Over time, my interest began to outweigh my reservations.”

  “Most exciting, for me, was the prospect of putting people into space for days and weeks at a time,” Allen wrote. “I’d been happy to leave suborbital, high-volume space tourism to Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. But there was something incomparably thrilling about orbital flight, going back to John Glenn’s ride on the Friendship 7. It’s an experience that goes way beyond a six-minute suborbital flight.”

  Richard Branson was building SpaceShipTwo for suborbital trips, but the company had been discussing the development of a more powerful rocket capable of sending humans into orbit. By 2017, Branson and Allen started discussing the possibility of launching that rocket off Stratolaunch in what would mark an extraordinary reunion.

  The talks were preliminary, but “we hope we can work together on it,” Branson said. “It would be quite nice, actually, since we started together, if we could end up working together again.”

  Allen didn’t rule that out. But he also had plans of his own. In addition to creating a more reliable and efficient way to launch satellites, he was thinking bigger. Stratolaunch was so massive it could carry not just one rocket at a time but three, clustered under its belly like missiles on a fighter jet. But even three rockets wouldn’t get close to the plane’s capacity. He was also thinking about a reusable space shuttle called Black Ice that would be capable of flying to the International Space Station, taking satellites and experiments to orbit, and maybe one day, even people.

  The ultimate goal was to have “airline-style operations,” but for space, said Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch’s chief executive officer. “You make your rocket a plane,” he said. “So, you have an airplane carrying a plane that’s fully reusable. You don’t throw anything away ever. Only fuel.”

  A spaceplane—capable of not just delivering satellites to orbit, but of staying up for at least three days—that could be launched from virtually anywhere in the world. It was still in the development phase, a risky, push-the-envelope theory that might not pan out.

  “I would love to see us have a full reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, airport-style, repeatable operations going,” Allen said, while sitting in his Seattle office.

  Returning to human spaceflight was a possibility sometime in the future, he said. “If you caught the bug back in the Mercury era, of course it’s in the back of your mind. But I think you’re seeing right now, other than [space station] resupply missions, most spaceflights are about launching satellites. That’s the reality. And they are extremely important for everything from television to data all over the world. You can get data in the Kalahari desert because there’s a satellite up there.”

  VIRGIN, MEANWHILE, HAD been taking out its new SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Unity, for test flights. Again and again, the mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, would hoist the spaceplane aloft, dropping it high above the Mojave Desert floor. Each test pushed the envelope further, until the company was finally getting close to the point where the testing program had been in 2014, when its spacecraft had come apart in midair.

  As the testing progressed, Branson played the refrain he’d been singing for years: first flights were just around the corner. Always, just around the corner. After more than a decade of waiting to fly, Branson was nearing seventy, and getting itchy—as were his customers.

  “I’m getting on, so we’re going to have to hurry up,” he said.

  Now he had competition in Bezos’s Blue Origin, which he relished. The space tourism experiences would be markedly different—Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane versus Blue Origin’s more traditional rocket.

  “My guess is that quite a lot of people will want to try one and then try the other,” he said. “And it’s going to be interesting to see which passenger experience people enjoy the most.”

  He made clear, though, who he thought had the advantage: “We believe that going into space in a spaceship and coming back in that spaceship, on wheels, will be a customer experience that people would prefer than perhaps one or two other options that are being considered. And we’d love to see whether we’re correct about that.”

  IN FEBRUARY 2017, SpaceX bounced back from its explosion with a mix of aplomb and audacity. It christened historic Launch Pad 39A for the first time since the last of the shuttle missions, resurrecting the once dormant site with a fiery flight of the Falcon 9 on a cargo mission to the space station.

  A month earlier, the company had announced that it had found the cause of the explosion: not a rifle shot but a problem with a pressure vessel in the second-stage liquid oxygen tank. The tank had buckled, the company reported, and supercooled liquid oxygen propellant had pooled in the lining. The fuel had been ignited by breaking fibers or friction.

  The Federal Aviation Administration had ruled out sabotage as a cause, and granted SpaceX a launch license. Musk concluded that “it was a self-inflicted wound. It took us a long time but we were able to re-create the failure. But it did alert us to the fact that sabotage was a real thing, so we upgraded the security.” (A few months later, when a crew from CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which was being escorted by Boeing officials, stopped outside the gates to check out SpaceX’s use of 39A, SpaceX called security on them. They were stopped, questioned, and had to show identification before being allowed to go.)

  Without proof of foul play in the rocket explosion, SpaceX pressed ahead, confident that it could endure another failure—even if the pair of explosions had been a blow to the company’s
finances and reputation.

  “We’ve got cash in the bank, and we’ve got no debt,” Gwynne Shotwell said at a press conference at the time. “So financially we’re fine. It’s hard to make money, though, in a year when you have a failure. So, I’m not going to kid anybody to say that wasn’t a painful financial year for us last year, and frankly 2015. But it doesn’t mean we’re not a healthy and a vibrant company. We could withstand another failure for sure. I would not have done my job properly had we not been prepared for that.”

  Nothing cemented its status as the leader of the rising new industry than when the Falcon 9 lifted off from the same hallowed ground as the Apollo-era Saturn V—a launch that Musk called “an incredible honor.” Shortly after nine a.m., the rocket rose with a thunderous, bone-rattling roar and then disappeared into a veil of low and dense clouds. Ten minutes later, however, it reappeared, as it flew back toward the landing pad, where it touched down softly.

  By now, booster landings had almost become routine for SpaceX. It had a growing collection of so-called flight-proven first stages, all of which had landed successfully either on the landing pad or on the droneship at sea. What SpaceX had not done, however, was to re-fly one of those used rocket boosters. Landings were a wonderful bit of performance art that got millions of clicks on YouTube. But from a business standpoint, they were meaningless unless the rockets could be flown again and again.

  As much as 70 percent of the cost of launch was in the booster stage, as Musk liked to say. It housed the most expensive and important part of the Falcon 9—its nine engines.

  The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.”