by Tim Fernholz
This was still a bigger ask than many knew at the time, as journalist Julian Guthrie describes in her account of the X Prize. The first vehicle had carried just one passenger and barely made it to the key altitude before veering off its flight path. To satisfy the requirements of the prize, SpaceShipOne would need to fly with six hundred pounds of ballast, equivalent to two passengers plus the pilot. As it stood, the rocket motor on the vehicle would not get the vehicle high enough, and indeed might leave it with a trajectory that came dangerously close to populated areas.
Scrambling for a solution, Rutan settled on air-to-air missiles like the Sidewinder and the AMRAAM, which were essentially small solid fuel rockets launched by NATO fighter jets during aerial battles. Two such missiles, with their warheads removed, attached to SpaceShipOne at the correct angle and fired at exactly the same time, could hypothetically provide enough oomph to get the vehicle over its invisible finish line in the sky. As last-minute changes go, it was a dramatic, even dangerous, plan.
Rutan’s team was used to his approach, but even they thought this idea was nuts. They had no concept of how the space plane would handle with missiles strapped on its sides, and if they got anything wrong with the angle of attachment or the timing of ignition, the most likely outcome was the plane spiraling out of control. Rutan and one of his test pilots went hunting for spare missiles, calling up friends at defense contractors. The rest of the engineers desperately searched for a way to find enough additional power in the engine to prevent Rutan from going through with the missile alternative.
They found a way just in time: by cutting mass from every part of the vehicle they could—sanding down metal surfaces, replacing steel fasteners with titanium ones, trimming out spare upholstery, removing test wires and sensors—they reduced the need for more thrust. And they further made up the deficit by filling the tank that stored the oxidizer for their custom-made rocket engine—they used liquid nitrous oxide—all the way to the brim. This was risky: as the liquid nitrous warmed, it would expand, and if it expanded too much, it would crack the tank. But they needed to wring every last bit of performance they could out of the rocket engine. The SpaceShipOne engineers were convinced that if they monitored the temperature and pressure of the tank attentively and stuck to their procedure of fueling and flying in the early morning, before the sun warmed the desert, it would be safe.
Safer, at least, than strapping missiles to the rocket. Rutan acceded to his team’s wishes.
The first flight was an exercise in anxiety. Again piloted by Melville, SpaceShipOne went into a punishing roll almost as soon as the engine was fired. It flew straight up toward space but spun disorientingly around its axis. On the ground, it was clear from the rocket’s corkscrew contrail that something was off. But the veteran pilot held his nerve, and by the time the engine’s burn had completed, he was in space. There, he could use control thrusters—canisters of pressurized air, essentially—to reorient his plane. Floating in microgravity, he opened a bag of M&Ms and watched them scatter around the cockpit.
Six days later, the second flight was picture perfect. Former Navy pilot Brian Binnie took the yoke this time, and he made it to space without incident—in fact, he broke the altitude record set by the X-15 in 1963. This was an enormous moment for the men and women of the “new space” community. One of their own had succeeded—“a band of people who believe in something,” as Binnie put it after his flight. On hand to witness the flight were Allen and Richard Branson, who had stepped in to license the intellectual property behind SpaceShipOne; he paid Allen $2 million to stencil Virgin’s logo on SpaceShipOne before its record-breaking flight.
His plan was to create a bigger vehicle capable of carrying seven paying passengers—space tourists—on flights where they would experience weightlessness before gliding back to earth. Sufficient further evolution might allow rocket planes to make suborbital passenger transit a reality—rocketing off from Los Angeles and gliding into London Heathrow three hours later instead of twelve. He called it Virgin Galactic.
As for Musk, he had invested some money in the contest itself, as part of his agenda of keeping the public eye on space projects. But he had never directed his company to participate. A month after the prizewinning flights, he told a reporter that “at the end of the day, it would have been a distraction. I can make more money in contracts and revenues than I could winning the X Prize.”
Despite the optimism that the X Prize produced, the reality was that the private rocketeers still lagged behind the US government. After all, Rutan had essentially replicated what the military had done four decades before. The edge of space remained just that—the edge. Getting there was symbolic but hardly monetizable in the way putting a satellite into orbit was. SpaceShipOne’s maximum velocity was just over one thousand miles per hour, hardly enough to escape earth’s gravity and reach orbit. It was purpose-built to win a contest, not to sustain a business. That would become apparent as Branson’s Rutan-led team attempted to build out a larger version of the vehicle for space tourism. More than a decade later, no passengers have ridden on the space plane.
“It was a brilliant design for what Rutan was trying to do, and it’s not that traceable to future things other than potentially a suborbital tourist ride,” Griffin, the polymath who had brainstormed with Musk about a private rocket business and joined him on his trip to Russia, told me. “But, you know, the Spirit of St. Louis was not a scalable or traceable design to the Pan Am Clipper.”
Even if winning the X Prize was not as impressive as it seemed on its face, the flight of SpaceShipOne provided a compelling counterpoint to a dismal string of recent space disappointments, and a lever to wedge commercial companies into the US space program.
Rutan had confronted then–NASA administrator Dan Goldin in person at the X Prize announcement in 1996, asserting that “NASA” should be pronounced “nay say” for its lack of risk-taking. Goldin, who had spent much of his tenure battling just that attitude to get the agency to move faster and accept the chance of failure, could only protest that things had changed. After all, he had endorsed the X Prize and stepped in with NASA support as Diamandis worked to keep the contest alive.
After the winning flight, President George W. Bush called from Air Force One to congratulate the team, saying that their plane was cooler than his. His administration was about to take NASA in a new direction. The biggest success in private spaceflight so far would provide a rallying cry as the government worked to solve an increasingly pressing problem: how would they replace the space shuttle in just six years? The International Space Station would be finished, but the United States would need some way of getting people and supplies to the orbiting laboratory. Otherwise it would be dependent on its junior partners to sustain and benefit from the ISS, as though the government had built a $100 billion hotel that it could not visit without paying someone else for the privilege.
In 2004, Bush charged Griffin with dragging NASA into the new century. He would catalyze an effort that would change SpaceX and, indeed, the American space program forever—to his eventual regret.
Griffin came out of the gate at a gallop. At his confirmation hearing, the new NASA chief told lawmakers that the space station alone was not “worthy of the expense, the risk, and the difficulty” of human spaceflight. He was there to endorse President Bush’s call for a return to the moon in ten years, an achingly similar goal to the one set by Bush’s father in 1989. Just as they did then, members of Congress in 2004 questioned how NASA would do this without spending enormous amounts of money it did not have. The lawmakers, and NASA itself, were committed to seeing through the construction of the ISS, which also had geopolitical import as a joint venture between fifteen countries. Griffin replied that NASA could do more than one thing at a time. He pointed out that, alongside the Apollo program, NASA had launched planetary missions like Mariner and Viking, flown earth-observing satellites, and created the X-15 rocket plane that had inspired Burt Rutan.
But hi
s key influence was the Reagan-era program known derisively as Star Wars but properly called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It had arisen as something of a parallel space program to satisfy the new president’s ideological objectives. The Reagan administration wanted to find a trump card in nuclear strategy to replace the deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction,” which theoretically forestalled nuclear war by presenting it as a murder-suicide. This program would develop new technology to escape this situation. It considered everything from missiles to lasers to magnetic rail guns in its search for tools to eliminate an incoming wave of nuclear-tipped missiles.
For example, one of the most well-known schemes under the SDI umbrella arose after it was observed that a ballistic missile would only need to be hit by a small rock to be destroyed, so fast were their flight speeds—recall the devastating effect of the foam block on Columbia. But any antimissile rocks would need to be smart enough to find their target, hence the name of the antimissile satellite constellation: Brilliant Pebbles.
To make these science fiction weapons real meant, in practice, giving a lot of young geeks a lot of money and a level of urgency that comes only with nuclear crisis. James Maser, at the time a young engineer on the project, remembers scavenging parts from a spacecraft hanging in the offices of Rocketdyne as a marketing prop to use on an operational rocket. “We worked six days a week for six years straight,” Maser says. “We had so much responsibility, we were going as fast as we could . . . Once I had that, I found I was almost incapable of work in a traditional sort of bureaucratic environment.” The organization launched and operated three satellite missions in the eighties that pioneered new technology cheaply and at speed.
Their success led them to look skeptically at claims NASA made about the difficulties of executing exploration missions in space, even as NASA loyalists looked askance at how much space funding was being poured into ideas popularly seen as far-fetched. Worden, the former Air Force officer, would derisively rechristen the agency “Never a Straight Answer” and famously call it a “self-licking ice-cream cone.” (This was before he led one of its research centers.)
This is a popular view among critics of NASA, who see it trapped in a vicious cycle of delays and budget overruns. The space centers, many of which originated in the pre-NASA competition between military services to develop rocket weapons, were tightly bound in a web of influence among NASA employees, government contractors, and lawmakers. None of these parties were positioned to provide real accountability on complex, multi-million-dollar technology projects. What was needed was the discipline of military necessity or, lacking that, the market.
It wasn’t always easy to make that happen. Mark Albrecht, another SDI proponent who was George H. W. Bush’s top space adviser, had recruited Dan Goldin, an executive at space contractor TRW, to become NASA administrator in 1992. Goldin emphasized the idea of “faster, better, cheaper,” with NASA using nimbler, targeted missions in place of multi-billion-dollar projects. Goldin would go on to be the longest-serving NASA director in history, but his attempt to shift the culture at the agency was damaged by several failures, including the Mars Polar Lander, lost when engineers at Lockheed Martin forgot to convert imperial measurements to metric in a vital piece of guidance software. Despite other successes, like the Mars Pathfinder mission, the failures were used not as a chance to improve the process but to revert to old norms. “The old guard at NASA staged a counterrevolution and they overthrew all the new people who were trying to do things differently,” one aerospace engineer told me of the end of Goldin’s tenure.
The agency still hadn’t begun to solve its budget problems by the time the second Bush administration came into office in 2001. Bush tapped Sean O’Keefe to run the agency. With little background in space, O’Keefe was a green-eyeshade budget man. He led a redesign of the planned space station to cut billions from the final project. While the agency was a “very can-do place,” he felt it lacked focus. “If you asked anybody in the elevator to tell you what NASA was doing,” he told me, “you couldn’t get through the first two stanzas by the time you got to the floor you were getting off at.” The shocking loss of Columbia made any kind of normalization impossible, especially after the scathing accident investigation report put the blame squarely on cultural failures at NASA. After winning reelection in 2004, the Bush administration brought Griffin on for a reset, and he was eager to provide it. The Reaganauts were back.
“Everybody was told to come up with a vision that they thought was the right one, and the Council of Economic Advisors came in and their vision was to disband NASA except for the top few hundred folks and put the money out to the private sector,” one Bush White House adviser recalled.
They didn’t go that far, but the attitude signaled a new approach. Griffin had spent his teens and college years watching the Apollo program, but by the time he entered the industry, there was no big rocket to build. His work on the Strategic Defense Initiative had been vital to developing technology for the US missile defense program, but he never realized space systems on the scale that were imagined at the outset. A stint as NASA deputy administrator under Goldin hadn’t left a huge mark. Now he was in charge, with the mandate of his dreams: design and launch a vehicle to return humans to the moon, and send them beyond. It would be called the Constellation program.
Before that, Griffin had to get the space shuttle flying again and build the ISS, the very programs he criticized as unworthy upon his debut. “Mike was about exploration, not about the ISS,” one of Griffin’s senior staff said, wondering if his new boss saw the station as “a huge rat hole we’re just throwing money down?” Regardless of his views, to protect the Bush administration’s vision of lunar exploration, Griffin would need to see the two major programs through. In any case, too much money had been sunk into the ISS to abandon it now.
Under the urging of cost-conscious, free-market fans in the White House budget office, Griffin backed a plan to outsource access to the space station to the private sector. Meanwhile, NASA could build a rocket for deep space exploration. What Griffin needed was a taxi to the most expensive place in the universe, and all he had to do was hire one. The stumbling block? “There was nothing to buy,” said Alan Lindenmoyer, whom Griffin tapped to solve the problem. Lindenmoyer had experience in government purchasing and had worked on the space station for years, but a key reason that Bill Gerstenmaier, who ran NASA’s space operations at the time, insisted he get the job was his creative problem-solving. “If [Griffin] would’ve picked a typical NASA person, they would’ve ran into the first roadblocks, and looked at the financing and looked at how little funds were available and said, ‘There’s no way this would ever happen,’” Gerstenmaier said later.
While the rockets developed after Challenger, like the Atlas V and the Delta IV, were powerful enough to carry cargo to the space station, they were not designed to meet the safety standards for carrying humans. And without the shuttle orbiter, neither the space agency nor the companies had a vehicle that could send astronauts or even cargo to the space station.
This is exactly the kind of market problem that Griffin had contemplated in his previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. It put money into satellite ventures that might develop pathbreaking technology for snooping on geopolitical foes. NASA aimed to do the same thing by creating a new market for orbital taxi services and providing seed funding to likely competitors. In-Q-Tel had a budget of about $50 million; his new program, dubbed Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), would have a budget of $500 million. Why? “Truthfully, I just made it up,” Griffin would say later. “I just multiplied what we had in In-Q-Tel by ten . . . a couple of hundred million dollars is very significant to smaller enterprises, but it’s not a lot of money in the space arena.”
In 2000, NASA tried something similar with a program called Alternate Access to Station. The agency had given just over $900,000 to four rocket start-u
ps, none of which was able to convince anyone it was positioned to deliver the promised access. There was also culture shock. NASA was used to having a certain relationship with its contractors: spelling out down to the last detail what would be delivered, how, when, and by whom, and rigorously enforcing these prerogatives. That made it hard to attract companies that did not specialize in government contracts, in turn making it difficult to do business differently. The new companies promised cost savings if they could work their way, but this approach exacerbated divides between the space station program at Johnson Space Center, in Houston, and the space shuttle program at Kennedy. “The space station program was giving this a shot and heard from industry that there was a lot of interest in developing this capability; [they] sent it down to Kennedy, but it didn’t get any traction,” Lindenmoyer told me.
With Griffin as administrator, there was a leadership team in place that was interested in NASA becoming a customer, not an overseer. Musk and Bezos had said a few years before that venture capital wasn’t interested in space, and the government wasn’t interested in risk. Now a venture capitalist, or as close as one could get, was in charge of the biggest government space agency on the planet. The plan was to subvert the NASA—and, indeed, federal government—guidelines that helped make other technology developments so ponderous. This would mean eschewing control of the designs and ownership of any resulting intellectual property.
But the new program would be a commercial partnership at fixed costs, rather than a cost-plus contract. In the view of Griffin and the scrappier side of the industry, getting to the space station—that is, to low earth orbit—wasn’t difficult enough to warrant a guaranteed profit. After all, orbital transportation had been accomplished by many countries, using many vehicles; the Gemini program, which flew humans in space for the first time, had taken just over three years and cost less than $3 billion. The success of Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne a week before Griffin’s confirmation hearing showed that the private sector was, at least, capable of executing on the designs and theories of previous space programs and doing so at a far lower cost.