Idea Man

by Paul Allen

  The postmortem pointed to a newly installed vibration damper with an unfortunate side effect. It had made the flight controls less responsive when they got “cold-soaked” in the frigid temperatures of high altitudes. As Brian approached the runway, he found himself wrestling with his stick. Fearing a stall, he dropped his nose and came in too fast. (For future flights, the damper would be wrapped in electric blankets and cut to one-third power.)

  Though it wasn’t all his fault, I could tell that Brian’s mishap had shaken the team’s confidence in him, and he dropped a notch on the depth chart. He’d have to redeem himself to get back in the mix for another shot.

  BURT HAD FOLLOWED a cardinal rule since founding his business in the mid-1970s: no press or public at any test flight when the envelope was expanding. On June 21, 2004, six months after Brian’s misadventure, he broke his own protocol for SpaceShipOne’s trial to become the first privately funded craft to pierce the boundary of space. For Burt, this was more than a dress rehearsal for the X Prize. It was a chance to make history, and he wanted the public to be part of it. Spectators began arriving Saturday morning, two days before the launch. By early Monday, while it was still dark, tens of thousands of people had mobbed the grounds around the newly renamed Mojave Air and Space Port. There were children, dogs, bicycles, telescopes, lawn chairs, barbecues—a spaceflight tailgate party.

  In the weeks leading to the launch, the pilots had worked as a team in the simulator, taking turns and critiquing one another. As it came time to decide who would fly, Doug Shane argued that Pete Siebold would find the optimal trajectory and give us the best chance to reach 100 kilometers. “Yeah,” Burt replied, “but Pete might quit.” He was referring to an earlier flight, the first with a full load of nitrous oxide, when Pete had considered aborting after an early stall. They finally settled on Mike, a gutsy call. Despite Mike’s 6,400 hours of flight time, this would be well beyond anything he had done.

  When I watched the pilots in the minutes before takeoff, it felt as though they were on their way to war. Brian Binnie’s wife handed him a lucky ring. For Mike’s wife, Sally, it was a silver horseshoe pin that Mike had given her when they were teenagers in South Africa, engraved with their names and the date they’d met. Sally fixed it to the left side of her husband’s flight suit, and it hit me that no one knew for sure if Mike would return. As I shook his hand and wished him a safe flight, Sally was plainly terrified. A pilot herself, she knew the hazards too well.

  Mike squeezed into his five-foot-diameter cabin and waved a thumbs-up. At 6:47 A.M., he was in the air. Inside mission control, tension built as the time approached for the drop and separation, and the violent boost phase that would follow within seconds.

  Lacking a NASA-style centrifuge, our pilots couldn’t fully simulate a rocket boost. Their aerobatic practice plane could roughly simulate the four g’s (four times earth’s gravity) produced when they pulled back on the spaceship’s stick to go vertical, or “eyeballs down,” in pilots’ parlance. But it couldn’t begin to mimic the initial three g’s of forward thrust, or “eyeballs back”; only a rocket motor could do that. Together, those forces were so disorienting that a pilot had to trust his instruments over his body.

  Mike lit the rocket. Within ten seconds, he had nearly hit Mach 1, and that’s when his first problem arose. In designing Space-ShipOne, Burt had set the wings high over the fuselage to optimize the feather’s supersonic performance when it folded. The tradeoff was poor lateral stability when the plane was “transonic,” or moving from subsonic to supersonic speeds. While the pilots were trained to compensate, there was no way to prepare for wind shear, a sudden change in wind speed as a plane climbed through the atmosphere—which is just what Mike encountered at 60,000 feet. SpaceShipOne rolled 90 degrees to the left. Mike stamped on the rudder and overcorrected. The plane rolled to the right.

  Watching on a monitor linked to a camera on the plane’s tail, I jumped off my chair. I’m a pacer when I get wired up, a habit from the days when Bill and I walked in circles while talking about our software. Now I was wearing a path in Burt’s thin carpet as I waited for Mike to abort the boost and live to fly another day. But Mike hated to quit. In his previous powered flight, after his avionics screen blacked out, he’d amazingly kept his craft aligned by sighting the horizon. I knew that Mike wouldn’t shut down a mission unless his life seemed in danger, and even then he might think twice.

  With the atmosphere thinning and his stick and rudder useless, Mike tried to correct the plane’s orientation by angling the horizontal stabilizers, the electronic control surfaces on the craft’s tails. They promptly froze, a potential catastrophe for reentry, but came back on seconds later. Mike got the plane straightened out and quickly pulled up its nose, but the delay had squandered energy and thrown him off trajectory.

  Still pacing behind Burt and his team, I kept an eye on the digital altimeter as the plane climbed straight up and the simulated needle spun in a blur. I thought about Mike, that warm-hearted guy inside a very small projectile at close to Mach 3. I can honestly say that all thoughts of the X Prize vanished. I kept repeating to myself: I just want him safe on the ground again.

  Then I heard Burt remark that Mike hadn’t cut the motor. He didn’t shut it down until his “energy altitude”—his predicted apogee, reading out in thousands of feet—blinked once at 328, the official threshold for space. When he finally cut off the engine, the plane was actually at 180,000 feet, barely halfway there; it coasted up the rest of the way and then down again on a ballistic arc. Our eyes stayed glued to the altimeter as it edged toward 100 kilometers. The needle slowed, then barely crossed the line before stopping and reversing. We were jubilant but a little uncertain. Had he really made it? I shook hands with Burt, who was glowing.

  On his way into work that morning, Mike had stopped at a convenience store and on impulse bought a bag of M&M’s. As he began his descent and entered three minutes of weightlessness, he opened the bag and watched the colored candies float and sparkle about his cabin. (I have a few of those M&M’s encased in plastic, along with a pine tree growing outside my house that was hauled in the ship as a seedling, my “space tree.”) Peering through the portholes, he marveled at the view: the jet-black sky, the blue curve of the earth, the white fog over Los Angeles, the red Mojave Desert.

  SpaceShipOne kept gaining speed on the way down, reaching Mach 2.9, or 2,150 miles per hour. The feather did its work upon reentry, quickly slowing the craft to subsonic speeds. At 57,000 feet, as Mike defeathered into the glide phase, I couldn’t help but notice that he was nearly thirty miles off course. When I asked if he’d have to land at another airport, Burt assured me that the plane was well within its glide range.

  Moving outside for Mike’s approach, I saw him land on the runway (“like falling into a feather bed,” he’d tell us) to huge roars from the crowd. SpaceShipOne’s entire flight, from drop to landing, lasted barely twenty-four minutes. I felt like I had aged several years.

  As White Knight and the chase planes buzzed over our heads, Sally Melvill ran to the little spacecraft and leaned into the cockpit to embrace her husband. Mike emerged, hands raised. He hugged Burt and then flung his arms out wide for me. There are moments in life that deserve a hug, and that was one of them.

  Mike was towed up and down the runway for twenty minutes, standing atop his plane as he waved to his fans. Then Burt and I brought him back to the hangar and to Sally. He completed their ritual by unpinning the horseshoe and returning it to her. “Thanks for coming home,” she told him. “We’ll get old together in rocking chairs.”

  We still weren’t certain that SpaceShipOne had gotten to space. Mike told Sally that he didn’t think he’d made it; Burt was more confident but still had concerns. According to the low end of our in-house calculations, we’d cleared it by an infinitesimal sixteen feet. At last we received word from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, which had tracked us on radar. SpaceShipOne’s apogee was officially 328,491 feet, ba
rely a tenth of a percent over the threshold. After flying sixty-two miles straight up, Mike had passed the magic line by the length of a 5-iron to the green. If the plane had been eight ounces heavier, Burt said, we’d have come up short.

  We set lots of records that day. The 433rd person to make it into space, Mike was the first commercial pilot to do so. He earned his astronaut wings from the FAA, the first ever awarded for a nongovernment space program. SpaceShipOne was the first privately built plane to exceed Mach 2 and the only U.S. craft to leave the atmosphere that year, NASA’s space shuttles having been grounded in the wake of the Columbia disaster.

  The world took notice. On June 21, 2004, a color photograph of SpaceShipOne sat above the fold on page one of nearly every newspaper around the globe.

  A MONTH BEFORE Mike’s historic flight, Richard Branson had come to see me. When we met years before, I’d found him very sharp and very restless, one of those people who can’t stop moving. Now he said he wanted to license our patented technology and take our program to the next level: full-fledged space tourism. In September 2004, three months after Mike’s flight, we signed a contract with Branson’s Virgin Galactic that could net me up to $25 million over the next fifteen years. A master of branding, Branson was eager to close the deal to get his lipstick-red Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne for the first X Prize flight, which was scheduled three days later.

  Burt’s early assessment of our competition was on target. On a single day in August, unmanned test vehicles from both Space Transport and Armadillo Aerospace crashed beyond repair. Rumor had it that the da Vinci Project would launch their balloon in a prize-eligible flight on October 2, but I didn’t believe it. They hadn’t done a single test flight, and there was no historical example of going from zero to a launch of that magnitude in one shot. No one else had given the required sixty-day notice for a prize-qualifying flight. It was up to us.

  Our biggest concern was that SpaceShipOne would be carrying an additional four hundred pounds, in line with the X Prize rule that stipulated a three-person vehicle. Fiberglass boxes filled with wrenches and other ballast would be strapped into the plane’s two rear seats. (We wouldn’t put three people in the plane, I was told, “because if something goes wrong, you’d rather have one fatality than three.”) The extra weight was a legitimate worry. Would our rocket motor have enough juice to make it back into space?

  In fact, SpaceShipOne hadn’t been pushed as close to its limit in June as it had seemed. Mike’s shutdown time had been preset as a precaution; he could have run the motor at least another five seconds. (Burt chose to limit the burn because too much altitude would make reentry more hazardous.) With a cleaner run, the plane might have made it into space with ten thousand feet to spare. Even so, we knew we couldn’t afford a flawed trajectory on the X Prize flight.

  To minimize the risk, Burt exploited the ship’s robust design. NASA’s unmanned rockets are built to withstand 25 percent more than the maximum aerodynamic loads, which translates to a safety margin of 1.25. In the space shuttle, the margin is 1.4; on commercial airliners, it’s 1.6. But in SpaceShipOne, the wings were built with a margin of 2.1 and the cabin, 3.0. (Burt wanted higher margins in the cabin because his pilots would be flying without pressurized spacesuits.) Both the nitrous oxide tank and the rocket motor, the components most vulnerable to catastrophe, were also overengineered by a factor of 3.0, which now gave Burt crucial leeway.

  For Mike’s spaceflight in June, up to 15 percent of the rocket’s nitrous oxide tank had been reserved for ullage, the empty space that allows heated fuel to expand and prevents a tank from cracking. That was standard. But with White Knight scheduled for takeoff just a half hour after sunrise, when it would quickly climb into cold air, Burt realized that he could safely top off the tank for a longer burn and extra boost. It was a typical MAV solution, simple and clean. For insurance, Burt wrapped an insulating ring around the tank, to be removed just before takeoff.

  For more of a margin, the team reduced the craft’s weight; for every pound removed, it would go 150 feet higher with the same amount of thrust. Small holes were carved out of overbuilt parts. And when the X Prize lawyers decided that optional safety items, like parachutes, could be counted toward the required payload weight, we saved thirty-six pounds.

  One issue remained. Which pilot would get us halfway to the $10 million prize? Mike having earned his wings, Doug and Burt chose Pete Siebold for the first prize flight and held Brian in reserve for the second. Believing his job was done, Mike cut back on his simulator training to give more time to the other two. But less than a week before the launch date, Pete pulled out. In the previous month, he’d experienced a health scare and the birth of his second child. The health issue was a false alarm, but Pete felt unprepared to be the man in the cockpit.

  We were left with one obvious choice. Doug went to Mike’s office and said, “I hate to tell you this, but we need you to fly.” Mike quickly said he’d do it. He went to see Sally, who took one look at her husband and burst into tears. She’d been assured that Mike wouldn’t be asked to go again, and was beside herself that he’d have to push his luck one more time.

  Mike flew sixty simulator runs a day over the next several days, with a focus on getting the plane’s nose up aggressively to convert the rocket’s thrust into pure altitude. He made a series of runway approaches in White Knight and in his own homebuilt Long-EZ, another Rutan design. And he used the aerobatic plane to condition himself for forces that would exceed 5 g’s. By September 29, he was ready.

  Peter Diamandis told the assembled crowd that morning, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the start of the personal spaceflight revolution—right here, right now. What is happening here in Mojave today is not about technology. It is about a willingness to take risk, to dream, and possibly to fail.”

  Takeoff was on schedule at 7:12 A.M. Seated behind Burt in mission control, I watched the video monitor as White Knight reached the release point. Mike fired the rocket motor and abruptly “turned the corner” from horizontal to vertical. His trajectory and contrail looked perfect. I watched the altimeter whiz around: 100,000 feet, 110,000, 120,000 …

  By that point, I’d learned to read the team’s body language. Normally they sat relaxed in their chairs, checking their computers and following the exchanges between Doug and Mike on their headsets. But a minute into the burn, when Mike was at Mach 2.6, I saw them all lean forward and hunch over. I did a double take at the monitor, which showed what the team had picked up on their displays. The straight-line contrail was now an ominous corkscrew. SpaceShipOne was spinning rightward like a top on its longitudinal axis, in uncontrollable supersonic rolls. Erik Lindbergh, Charles’s grandson and an X Prize Foundation trustee, said he was convinced that “the craft was going to break up and [Mike] was done.”

  For a brief and awful time, I feared the same thing. Then I saw Burt calmly polling the room without a hint of panic. He’d seen similar rates of roll in the flight simulator, and had every confidence that the ship could handle the dynamic loads and make a safe reentry. “We should be able to ride this thing out,” he said after a bit. “We should be able to control it once we get out of the atmosphere.”

  Test pilots feel fear like the rest of us, but the best of them don’t let it affect them. Inside SpaceShipOne, whirling at nearly one revolution per second, Mike’s left hand came off the trim control and poised over two toggle switches beneath red plastic guards, the motor shut-off. (In the flight video, you can actually see his hand shaking.) He knew there was no easy way out of the jam. True, SpaceShipOne had an emergency exit route. The pilot could crank a handle, push out the nose plug, and parachute down. But a parachute does you no good much above 50,000 feet, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that air in the lungs expands until the organs rupture. Mike was at 220,000 feet. He withdrew his hand from the toggle switches. He would see the flight through.

  Battling vertigo, Mike kept his eyes fixed on his avionics display. As the sun strobed in
and out of the cabin’s portholes, he worked his stick and rudder against the direction of the roll. After eight or ten revolutions, he stopped feeling dizzy. By around 300,000 feet, where the atmosphere was so thin that his manual controls no longer functioned, the roll had slowed to a manageable half a revolution per second. With SpaceShipOne’s GPS disrupted, Mike’s altitude predictor lagged behind Doug Shane’s at mission control. After Doug called out, “Three-twenty-eight, shut down,” Mike stayed with the burn another second or two, until his predictor read 334,000 feet. He didn’t want another close call. The spaceship actually topped out at 338,000.

  Mike feathered the wings just before apogee and activated his gas jets to damp out what was left of the spin, which stopped after twenty-nine full rotations. His trajectory was perfect; the rolls had effectively stabilized the plane’s course, like a bullet’s spin out of a rifle. He retracted the feather at 61,000 feet and began his glide back to earth. At 40,000 feet he added a signature to his performance, in the style of a World War II pilot returning from a combat raid. He did a victory roll, to make it an even thirty.

  In the conference-room postmortem, we learned that Mike had been hurt by his own success. He’d flown exactly as he’d been trained, pointing SpaceShipOne dead vertical as he turned the corner. No one had realized that a straight-up, 90-degree angle of attack would result in rotational instability. Once the rolls started, there wasn’t enough air left to resist them with the rudder and ailerons.

  Burt was delighted. Mike’s flight had certified SpaceShipOne’s structural integrity; the little craft was tougher than it looked. What’s more, the plane would need no adjustments for its next try. Pete Siebold and Jim Tighe, the team’s aerodynamicist, quickly determined that a more gradual pull-up, stopping a couple degrees short of vertical, would avert the rolls the next time.