Rocket Billionaires

by Tim Fernholz

  16

  Beyond Earth Orbit

  Water in space is the new oil.

  —George Sowers

  The gold rush to space started the moment when Jeff Bezos announced the Blue Moon program,” space engineer and Bezos collaborator Joel Sercel told me. “The second-wealthiest person in the history of humanity staked out a claim on the ring of Shackleton Crater.”

  Blue Moon was Blue Origin’s first truly outlandish space business pitch—as the name implies, the company proposed sending a lander back to the lunar surface, which could make it the first private company to touch down on an astronomical body. Since Sercel told me that, Bezos had become the wealthiest man in the world in one heady day of stock trading driven by a particularly positive Amazon earnings announcement. Why shouldn’t the richest man on earth have a moon base?

  By 2016, Amazon was one of the most powerful companies in human history, simultaneously mastering logistics, retail, and software tools to earn hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Even though for years Amazon had plowed almost all of its profits back into expansion, its stock was a Wall Street favorite, because it grew like some terrifying science fiction blob, eating entire industries in a gulp. This led investors to overlook various controversies at the company, like antitrust disputes with book publishers, armies of low-wage temps at its distribution centers, and privacy questions about its always listening home assistants. Whatever doubts may have nagged them about the future consequences of Amazon deals, consumers consistently rated Bezos’s everything store the most well-regarded among the tech giants.

  That was the year Bezos told reporters the business model behind Blue Origin: “I sell about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.” This wasn’t entirely true: According to his SEC filings, Bezos hadn’t come close to selling that much equity since 2010—the year that coincides with the company’s reinvigoration. He did make good on his promise in 2016 and 2017, however, selling more than $1 billion in stock both years. And for the first time, he was forthcoming about where the money was going.

  Two weeks after the Falcon 9 caught fire, Bezos announced that Blue would be building the world’s largest orbital rocket, which he dubbed the New Glenn. Like the New Shepard, it was named after an American space pioneer, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. Blue’s new rocket would be its first to reach orbit. The New Glenn that Bezos described would be huge: in its first iteration, 283 feet tall, with a fairing 23 feet in diameter and about three times more lifting power than the Falcon 9—the biggest rocket since the gigantic Saturn V that carried Americans to the moon. The New Glenn’s booster stage would be reusable, incorporating what the company had learned from flying the New Shepard. And it would fly into the air on the rocket engine Blue was making for United Launch Alliance, the BE-4. “I don't know how anybody is going to be able to compete, fundamentally,” if you don’t have a reusable rocket, Blue CEO Smith told me, describing his vision of New Glenn capturing a large part of the launch market, from NASA to national security to commercial satellites.

  SpaceX’s team was hardly surprised, but the news caused some anxiety at ULA, which now would be buying the single most important technology for its primary product from a direct competitor. Smith says this kind of awkward cross-collaboration is a part of the tightly knit aerospace industry, conceding that “it’s not the clearest thing, but we know that it’s pragmatic at this point.”

  George Sowers, the former ULA executive who helped spearhead the engine partnership between his company and Blue Origin, told me that his board wondered about the possibility of direct competition. He replied that “the only thing they’ve ever launched is the New Shepard; it’s a rocket that can’t even get to orbit. It’s a rocket that would fit inside an Atlas payload fairing. We could launch intact to orbit on an Atlas.” But now Bezos was plotting a rocket that, if not capable of carrying the Atlas, at least dwarfed it.

  Blue expects to fly this huge rocket for the first time before the end of the decade. Sowers, a veteran of rocket design who masterminded the Atlas V, is skeptical. He noted that SpaceX had gone from a small orbital rocket to a small version of the Falcon 9, which it upgraded several times more before it reached its current size and capacity. Skipping ahead to a monster rocket would be much more difficult. “It would be nuts to try and do it that way,” he told me.

  Bezos, on the other hand, sees his approach as fairly straightforward. “In the long run, deliberate and methodical wins the day, and you do things quickest by never skipping steps,” he wrote in one email to fans, noting that his company had spent four years designing the huge rocket. His favorite talking point was the military adage “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

  He pointed out that the New Shepard had taught his team a good deal about the problems of reusable rockets. “The reason that I like vertical landing is because it’s so scalable,” he said while unveiling the New Glenn. “Vertical landing is the inverted pendulum problem—you know, if you balance a broom on your hand, you can do that; if you try to balance a pencil on your hand, it’s very difficult, because the pencil has a very low moment of inertia. As the vehicle gets bigger, that inverted pendulum problem actually gets a little easier to solve.”

  “It’s just going to be a matter of ‘Can we marshal the resources?’ as opposed to ‘Is there some Nobel Prize–winning technology that I need to go fix?’” Smith, who had been hired to scale the company from engineering development to fully operational, told me. The scale of the New Glenn factory–cum–operations center at Cape Canaveral suggests they won’t have trouble with the marshaling. The $250 million–plus facility stretches over 140 acres outside Kennedy Space Center. It includes two different operations centers, one for launch and another for on-orbit missions; customer observation decks; training rooms; and a massive manufacturing facility, longer than two football fields, where the enormous rocket will be welded together and robots will construct carbon-fiber fairings for satellite launches. “It doesn’t feel like an aerospace production facility. It feels like Silicon Valley—or Seattle, Washington,” Scott Henderson, the company’s launch operations director, told me. In the course of complying with environmental rules, the company will plant 300,000 shrubs; it will also plant “space seeds” flown past the Kármán line by New Shepard.

  What about the moon?

  Brett Alexander, the Blue Origin executive who had worked on commercial programs at NASA, elaborated on the company’s lunar ambitions in congressional testimony. One of the space advisers in George W. Bush’s White House and a key author of that president’s Vision for Space Exploration, which called for the astronauts to return to the moon and then Mars, Alexander was now helping shape Blue Origin. “We are prepared to bring private capital to partner with NASA for a return to the lunar surface,” he told lawmakers in 2017.

  The company had designed a vehicle that could carry ten thousand pounds of payload to earth’s nearest neighbor—the equivalent in weight of five Mars Curiosity rovers. The Blue Moon lander could, hypothetically, carry all kinds of scientific payloads to the moon and even bring them back again. It would use a similar engine than the one employed in the New Shepard. It’s not a coincidence that James French, the veteran space engineer who envisioned the New Shepard for Blue Origin and continued to advise the company, had begun his career working on lunar landing modules for the Apollo program.

  Alexander noted that until the New Glenn was completed, Blue’s lunar lander could be launched on top of the Space Launch System—the big rocket being built by Boeing for NASA. It was a savvy move for Blue to ally itself with an incumbent competitor and a program favored within the space agency, just as it was smart to invest in building a factory for its new engine in Alabama, home to influential lawmakers. But its ambitions are far bigger than simply carting science projects to the moon for NASA. The partnership that Blue offered was intended to tap into NASA’s knowledge and find opportunities for repeated missions, but, like Spa
ceX’s partnership with the space agency, it had far broader ambitions.

  Which may be a good time to stop and ask: Why go back to the moon at all? Isn’t it fairly barren? Humans have already been there to check it out, after all. That’s why Musk is obsessed with Mars: because it’s the next big thing. But there’s another narrative at work here. Namely, NASA didn’t do a very good job of hunting for anything useful on the moon the first time around, and it was quite on purpose. For safety and simplicity’s sake, the Apollo program sent humans to the brightest, most visible spots. “They landed mostly on the equator and sure as heck didn’t land in any permanently dark craters,” Sercel told me. “And they didn’t have the instrumentation to find the frozen water on the moon.”

  Ironically, it was only after Apollo, when more sophisticated space probes and satellites began examining the lunar surface, that space researchers discovered the presence of “volatiles”—scientist-speak for compounds like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, so called because they have a low boiling point and thus are prone to dissipate. These chemicals are also, however, the stuff of life. “One of the unheralded discoveries of space science in recent years is that there is water everywhere, including the moon,” says George Sowers.

  The former ULA executive, who is now leading a program at the Colorado School of Mines, aims to prepare students for the future world of space resource extraction, which is to say, mining all that water in space. For Sowers, water is the oil of space. The most difficult part of launching a rocket is getting it out of earth’s gravity and into orbit. Once there, it’s easy to move even heavy weight around. But the more propellant you bring with you from the ground, the bigger your rocket has to be, and you enter a vicious cycle—remember the tyranny of the rocket equation?

  The discovery of water in space, however, means that you could make all the propellant that a rocket needs outside the reach of earth’s gravity. Chemically speaking, it’s fairly easy to derive oxygen and hydrogen—two common rocket fuels—from water. Humans could also breathe that oxygen and, if they combined it with copious solar power, could grow food. In the view of experts like Sowers and Sercel, whose company TransAstra is focused on space mining as well, this would enable humanity to remain in space and undertake far more economic activity. “The big game changer becomes when you can start utilizing space resources,” Sowers says.

  While at ULA, Sowers led the design of a reusable second stage for its next-generation rocket. It would function as a kind of space tug, powered by propellant produced on the moon. A rocket could lift a heavy satellite—or an orbital factory—to low earth orbit, and the tug could come down and get it. That architecture could lower the cost of doing big business in space, exactly what Blue Origin is aiming for.

  “The lunar South Pole’s Shackleton Crater contains ice for fuel and logistics support, mineral compounds for developing structures, and near-continuous sunlight for power generation,” Alexander told the lawmakers. “Shackleton Crater, and other locations like it, offer a realistic proving ground for testing of critical deep space exploration technologies in close proximity to Earth.”

  Blue is hardly alone; the lunar dreams of BlastOff are alive and well today. A half-dozen private companies have been working on returning to the moon. The X Prize organization even created a new version of its space competition, called the Google Lunar X Prize, eventually promising $20 million to the first group to accomplish basic tasks on the lunar surface. As a testament to the great difficulty of visiting another astronomical body, the deadline for this prize has been extended multiple times because competitors have lacked the money and know-how to get off the ground.

  Yet several efforts are taken seriously; one is Moon Express, a start-up funded by another Silicon Valley internet billionaire, Naveen Jain, and led by Bob Richards, a veteran space engineer. It is developing its own lunar vehicle with the hope of earning money by carrying scientific payloads to the moon and returning with moon rocks that could be sold as souvenirs. Jain sees a “tremendous amount of parallels between the internet and space” as economic ventures, and his company was the first to win government permission to return to the moon. Another is Astrobotic, a firm spun out of Carnegie Mellon University that is also eager to partner with NASA in sending its Peregrine vehicle to the moon. Astrobotic says it already has a manifest of academic research worth $1 billion to deliver to the lunar surface.

  Despite the commercial interest, it’s not yet clear whether humanity’s legal framework for using space, still stuck in a Cold War framework, is ready for capitalism. New laws are being written and debated that would allow companies to claim property rights, or something like them, in space. Some worry that these laws could kick off a potentially destabilizing “land grab” in space as companies and countries compete for chemical and mineral resources on the moon, in asteroids, or beyond.

  More prosaically—and profoundly—there is a debate in the space community over whether humanity should explore the moon or choose to aim for Mars, with vociferous takes on either side. “Mars became a target in the twentieth century, before we had good planetary science,” Sercel told me. “We thought Mars was earthlike, where people could live. We have to get off this romantic, stupid notion about Mars and think pragmatically about how we are going to justify the expense. The reason Apollo died was because we sent people to the moon and they didn’t have anything economically useful to do.”

  For Mars advocates like Musk, the moon is insufficient for the broader goal of settling the solar system. It might be a nice place for an outpost, but you couldn’t call it home. “We could conceivably go to our moon, but I think it is challenging to become multiplanetary on the moon,” Musk said in 2016. “It is much smaller than a planet. It does not have any atmosphere. It is not as resource-rich as Mars. It has got a 28-day day, whereas the Mars day is 24.5 hours.”

  The atmosphere is key because, in Musk’s vision, humans will terraform Mars and change its atmosphere to make it breathable for humans and the ecosystems of plants and animals that sustain them. His first major presentation on SpaceX’s Martian colonization plans featured an animation of the Red Planet turning green over time; he joked during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that it might be a good idea to use nuclear weapons to accelerate changes in the Martian atmosphere. One thing is for sure: humans have mastered the technology for heating up a planet. Space resources still play a big role in Musk’s vision: the next big engine Tom Mueller’s team is building for SpaceX, called the Raptor, will use natural gas and oxygen as fuel, because it’s efficient—and because SpaceX’s team believes it can manufacture methane on Mars.

  Yet even the most opinionated advocates will admit that arguing over destinations creates a false choice. The work of getting back to the moon and spending longer periods of time there will provide important information about what humans will need to survive on the far longer journey to Mars. Most of all, producing propellant on the moon could make longer journeys among the planets more feasible, for the same reasons it makes schemes for space industry cheaper: you don’t have to bring all of your propellant with you from earth. “To me the moon makes sense no matter where you’re going,” Sowers says. “Cutting the cost of a Mars mission by a factor of three using lunar-mined propellant could be the difference between having a mission and not having it.”

  After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, his administration pointed NASA back toward the moon. The space agency plans to use the Boeing-built SLS to send Lockheed’s Orion space capsule on a manned lunar orbit in 2019, to begin assessing the feasibility of an outpost in lunar orbit. That could provide a stepping-stone to Mars, and beyond. Still, despite Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s boast that “the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there on a Boeing rocket,” delays still plague the SLS program, and one of the heavy rockets being built by SpaceX or Blue Origin may beat it into space. NASA has also set up a public-private partnership for lunar research akin to the COTS space taxi prog
ram; Jason Crusan, the space agency’s head of advanced programs, told me that the government will purchase landing services on the moon from private companies like Astrobotic, Moon Express, or Blue Origin.

  Musk, ever the pragmatist, updated his own plans in response to this shift. After the Falcon 9’s evolution was complete and the still delayed Falcon Heavy demonstrated, SpaceX would build a huge rocket: the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket—or, more crudely among staff, the Big Fucking Rocket. It would be some 330 feet tall and thirty feet in diameter, powered by thirty-one Raptor engines. It would be able to lift 150 tons to low earth orbit—six times the capacity of the Falcon 9. Notably, it was designed to compete for lunar missions that NASA might undertake, though Musk’s goal was to launch an unmanned mission to Mars in 2022, when earth and the Red Planet are next aligned for a convenient journey. He also added the possibility of flying passengers anywhere on earth in half an hour: “If we’re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go to other places on earth as well?”

  Blue Origin remains focused on the New Glenn, its new engine—and the New Shepard vehicle. Having successfully flown its first iteration five times in a row, the company says it wants to begin flying test pilots and then human passengers in 2018. It hasn’t shared the price of admission, but if it can become operational before Virgin Galactic, Branson’s rocket company may find itself in trouble. Bezos is passionate about bringing people into space for just a taste of microgravity and a peek at the globe below, even if it seems like a crazy luxury for the rich.

  “Entertainment turns out to be the driver of technologies that then become very practical and utilitarian for other things,” the Amazon founder said in 2017. “Even in the early days of aviation, one of the first uses of the very first planes was barnstorming; they would go around and land in farmers’ fields and sell tickets. Likewise, more recently, the GPUs that are now used for machine learning and deep learning: they were really invented by Nvidia for video games. New Shepard, that tourism mission, because we can fly it so frequently, is going to be a real driver of our technology.”