Idea Man

by Paul Allen

  BURT SET THE second X Prize flight five days later, on October 4, 2004. Beyond commemorating the forty-seventh anniversary of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, the schedule would give us room for another try within the two-week limit if something were to go wrong. The team was ready ahead of time. On Sunday night, the eve of the flight, Burt invited everyone to his home to watch the Discovery Channel premiere of Black Sky, our own Vulcan Productions film about SpaceShipOne. (The two-part documentary later won the Peabody Award for distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.)

  A lot rode on Monday morning: the $10 million prize, plus a critical jump start for Branson’s SpaceShipTwo. An unsuccessful flight, let alone a disaster, would jeopardize all that we’d worked for. I assumed that Mike would be in the cockpit again, but I didn’t know that Doug had asked him to take Brian Binnie under his wing. Starting in late August, Mike took Brian up in his Long-EZ to simulate runway approaches at the optimal speed and sink rate for SpaceShipOne. To replicate the spaceship’s portholes, an engineer lined the canopy of Mike’s plane with a black cardboard cutout mask. Two days before the flight, after the two pilots went up one last time together, Mike told Doug and Burt, “Brian can do this.”

  I arrived early at Mojave on Monday, but not before the crowds and camera crews. For the next several hours, the world’s attention would be on this remote corner of the desert. Despite my confidence in the team, I couldn’t quite block out a little voice inside my head. With each powered flight, something unexpected had occurred. The voice said, What’s going to happen this time? Different pilot, different day, different angle of attack—will it all work?

  There was one unscripted moment just after separation, when Brian ignited the rocket motor especially quickly. Sound carries poorly at 47,000 feet, and the people piloting White Knight, including flight engineer Matt Stinemetze, hadn’t heard the rocket’s roar on the earlier runs. This time Matt picked it up loud and clear, and he shouted, “Holy crap, that was close!” But he wasn’t really worried. Given SpaceShipOne’s higher rate of acceleration, the two ships couldn’t have collided if their pilots had tried.

  Brian followed the flight plan to the letter. He pushed Space-ShipOne’s nose up to 88 degrees and ascended with minimal roll. In the control room, all eyes were on the altimeter. As I watched and paced, Richard Branson sat down near me and said, “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?”

  And I thought, If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much.

  “Three hundred thousand,” Doug called out on the radio, based on his altitude predictor. And just eight seconds later:

  “Radar is three twenty-eight.”

  “Copy that,” Brian replied. Edwards Air Force Base confirmed that we’d made it to space. A cheer went up in the room.

  Seven seconds after that: “Three fifty, suggest shutdown,” Doug said.

  “Roger. Shutdown.” In fact, Brian let the motor burn another few moments, eighty-four seconds in all.

  The feather was up by 7:52 A.M., but Brian climbed higher still. “X-15 record!” Burt broke in. SpaceShipOne had surpassed 354,200 feet, the X-15’s forty-one-year-old mark. It had gone higher than any airplane in history.

  “X-15,” Doug echoed.

  And Brian said, “Outstanding!”

  Getting that record meant a lot to Burt, and I was happy for him. The flight’s official apogee would be 367,500 feet, nearly 70 miles straight up—7 miles more than we needed.

  On the way down, Brian reached Mach 3.25, another record for a civilian craft. After he retracted the feather and began his glide, I drove out with Burt to watch the landing. It’s hard to see a ship as small as SpaceShipOne from a distance, especially without a contrail to guide the eye. Most of the crowd wouldn’t spot the plane until it was almost overhead. But Burt picked it up early, and he brought Richard Branson and me close to see where he was pointing. There’s a great candid photograph of us standing side by side with our left arms raised high and index fingers extended, shading our eyes as we looked to the east to see that little white speck coming home.

  Twenty-four minutes after the drop from White Knight, Brian’s plane touched down: a spotless landing. We finally had our perfect flight, start to end.

  After popping champagne on the tarmac, Burt and Richard and I sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck that slowly towed the stubby, homebuilt spaceship back to Burt’s hangar, or what I called the world’s greatest garage. There was something wonderfully unpretentious and non-NASA about that scene. SpaceShipOne was a small plane built by a modest operation, but it had been to space and back with a person inside. And no one had been hurt; I felt a huge burden lifted. As we made our way down the taxiway to the roars of the crowd, it struck me that SpaceShipOne was more than some momentary spectacle. It offered hope to everyone who aspired to journeys beyond the earth.

  There was a reception in the hangar and a call from President Bush, who congratulated Burt and me for “opening up the space frontier.” I stammered out a thank-you. Burt’s biggest thrill had come in June, with the first private manned spaceflight. For me, though, nothing could top the X Prize. When the pressure and scrutiny were most intense, our team had come through.

  One month later, I flew everyone out to the X Prize award ceremony in St. Louis, where Burt and I held aloft a gigantic check for $10 million. Based on an incentive clause I’d put in our contract years earlier, half the money went to Scaled Composites. Burt distributed bonuses to every person in his company, including the guys who swept the floors.

  I could have happily closed the book right there, content with the X Prize and the 2004 Collier Trophy for “the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America.” But an even greater honor was in store. Before Branson came on board, Burt’s original plan was to launch SpaceShipOne once a week for five months to lure investors and strengthen the public’s confidence in commercial space flight. But after Mike made history in June, we received a letter from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. They wanted to add SpaceShipOne to the Milestones of Flight gallery, home to the 1903 Wright Flyer and the Apollo 11 command module. With nothing left to prove and a legacy to preserve, Burt and I canceled all further flights.

  In July 2005, with SpaceShipOne strapped underneath, Mike Melvill piloted White Knight to Dulles Airport in Washington. As he dropped below the clouds, the pilot of a nearby airliner said, “What’s that hanging under that airplane?” The air traffic controller, who hadn’t gotten the memo, ordered Mike to descend to 6,000 feet, make a 180-degree turn, and leave the area. At that point, a supervisor intervened and directed Mike to go ahead and land. Our craft was lifted onto a truck and hauled to the Smithsonian.

  That October, SpaceShipOne was hung between Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1. To comply with the museum’s guidelines, our craft was repainted to look exactly as it had for Mike’s first trip into space. There was the name of the maker (Scaled Composites), the name and number of the airplane, and in small black letters on the fuselage: “A Paul G. Allen Project.”

  I haven’t had any days prouder than that one.

  AS PREDICTED, SpaceShipOne wound up taking longer and costing more than we’d planned. The final price tag was $28 million, money well spent. Adding up the X Prize, the tax credit from our Smithsonian donation, and the Virgin licensing revenues, we achieved a net positive return by 2006.

  For a time I was tempted to stay involved in the effort to commercialize space tourism. Burt and I had worked together well, and he asked me to continue. But I stepped back some months before we won the X Prize and watched from afar as Branson began development for SpaceShipTwo, a craft designed to take two pilots and six passengers beyond the atmosphere. While the plane’s feathered design is similar to our original, accommodations will be a lot plusher: reclining seats to mitigate the g-forces, bigger windows for a better view. By ear
ly 2006, Virgin Galactic had $13 million in deposits for rides on the VSS Enterprise at $200,000 per head.

  On July 26, 2007, during a routine nitrous oxide flow test for SpaceShipTwo’s engine, an explosion killed three Scaled employees and injured three others. It was the kind of accident that could happen in any space program, at any time.

  Burt has since semiretired from day-to-day operations at Scaled, passing the baton to Doug Shane. In October 2010, the Enterprise completed its first glide flight. Its test program is slated to continue through 2011, and I’m betting it will succeed. There’s a real chance for large-scale orbital space tourism within a decade, though it’s hard to predict the cost of a ticket. The Russians currently charge as much for one ride to the Space Station as we spent altogether on SpaceShipOne. (In the spirit of competition, Elon Musk’s SpaceX operation is working to lower that price.)

  More than forty years ago, Neil Armstrong changed the way we looked at the moon, and voyages to other planets suddenly seemed within our grasp. Since then our aspirations seem to have contracted. I’m well aware of other urgent social priorities, from health care to global warming. But I also believe that the drive toward new frontiers is integral to our humanity. A Mars program would demand billions of dollars, decades of development, and a willingness to accept failure and tragedy. If our government steps back from the challenge of planetary exploration, private initiatives will face a hard road.

  I’m reminded of what Wernher von Braun replied when someone asked him, “What’s the hardest thing about going to the moon?”

  And von Braun said, “The will to do it.”

  IN MARCH 2009, I traveled to Kazakhstan to wish Charles Simonyi bon voyage on his two-week holiday: a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station. (In characteristic style, Charles carried takeout from Alain Ducasse and Martha Stewart into orbit with him.) As the rocket took off from the very same pad that launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961, I revisited the rush and trepidation that I’d known at Mojave.

  There was a time when I thought I’d be in Charles’s place. But seeing up close what’s involved in spaceflight gave me pause. I’m not an edge walker. I’ve never done a parachute jump, for example, because it just doesn’t seem worth the downside. Yet when I peered into the sky that October day to track our spaceship’s homeward glide, I recaptured my boyhood sense of wonder when I’d looked up at the starry night. I never really lost that feeling, but in the whirl of life, I’d almost forgotten it. It was good to get it back.

  While I may never be an astronaut, a part of me is up there nonetheless. A small piece of SpaceShipOne was placed inside the New Horizons robotic probe to the outer reaches of our solar system. In 2007 it passed Jupiter en route to Pluto, the Kuiper belt of asteroids, and beyond.

  CHAPTER 17

  JIMI

  I grew up with music. Our family never missed the visiting Romanian dancers or Spanish flamenco troupes at the Seattle Opera House. Our record collection was mostly classical, heavy on Beethoven. By age seven, I was air conducting the Fifth Symphony with bravura.

  My parents rarely splurged on presents, but they never passed up opportunities for us to learn. My sister was a great lesson taker: ballet, piano, clarinet, flute. I started violin in the second grade, with mixed results. A nice minuet was heaven, but my teacher was big on scales. Major scales, minor scales—I hated them all. I practiced sporadically, never got past first position, and my tone was awful for some time. As I sawed away, our dog Jett would start howling. “It’s good that you’re practicing,” my mother would say, backing out of the room. “You have to keep at it.”

  I didn’t quite want to quit, but I understood the deal: My parents would pay for the lessons as long as I applied myself. At age nine I wrote:

  Dear Father,

  I wish to continue the study of violin for one year for the following reasons: It gives me pleasure sometimes, I can hardly wait to play a Mozart, etc. I will try my best to practice every day.

  Your son,

  Paul Allen

  In fact, my parents were disinclined to let me stop until I got beyond grade school and was “old enough” to decide if I wanted to continue. My swan song was a chamber music performance at our sixth-grade graduation, which I might have enjoyed if I hadn’t been so nervous that I lost my place in the score.

  IN 1964, walking home from Ravenna School and fiddling with my transistor radio, I came across the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”: my earliest memory of popular music. I watched the Supremes and other Motown groups on The Ed Sullivan Show and thought they were fabulous. When I first heard live rock at a seventh-grade dance, loud enough to reverberate under my skin, it made a lasting impression.

  Every August my parents took a vacation and left Jody and me with the Catania family up the block. In 1966, when I was going into eighth grade, Terry Catania—one year older—knew the Top 40 cold. I’d listened to some of her prized 45s, like Neil Diamond’s “Cherry, Cherry,” and now she had something new. “You know the Monkees?” she asked.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t heard about the prefab band whose hit single had taken the charts by storm. “Listen to this,” Terry said, and soon I was bopping to the beat of “Last Train to Clarksville.” I bought the Monkees’ album and played the heck out of it. Then I started watching their sitcom. I’d been too young for Beatlemania when the Fab Four invaded North America two years earlier. (I was with my family in Vancouver, Canada, just after the Beatles played there, and was amazed to hear that someone had bought the hotel sheets they’d slept on.) But my timing was right for the Monkees.

  The following August, Terry was wild about a new album that had broken out in Britain that spring but was still little known in the United States. “Paul, you’ve got to hear this!” she exclaimed. I stared at the cover as she slid out the vinyl. A swerve of psychedelic purple letters ran together against a yellow background:

  areyouexperienced

  Was I experienced? I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I guessed the answer was no. Even the group’s name was strange: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. A fish-eye photo showed a black musician in an orange scarf flanked by two white sidemen, in itself unusual. The back cover was equally arresting, a black-and-white backlit photo of the group that showed off their big, glowing Afros. I knew then and there that you could not get cooler than Jimi.

  Once Terry dropped the needle on the first cut, “Purple Haze,” I wouldn’t have cared if that record had come in a plain brown wrapper. I was floored by the introduction, a back-and-forth “devil’s interval” between Hendrix and his bass player, Noel Redding, weird and dissonant. This was Jimi with a sledgehammer: Here’s what I’m about, check it out. Then he set up his vocal with a swooping guitar riff. Jimi’s playing was funky and aggressive, but smoothly inflected. No one else sounded anything like him. (As Carlos Santana once said, “Most people play fast and shallow. But Coltrane played fast and deep, and so did Charlie Parker, and so did Jimi.”)

  The sound itself blew me away. “Purple Haze” was heavy with deliberate distortion and feedback, a swirling stereo soundscape, yet the guitar runs were like lace, clear and distinct even with so much going on. And what to make of those lyrics, thrown out there in that husky voice?

  Purple haze all in my brain

  Lately things just don’t seem the same

  Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why

  ’Scuse me while I kiss the sky

  Whoa, what was he talking about? What kind of poetry was that? The singing was even stranger because the deep reverb on Jimi’s voice made him sound as though he was in the next room. There were African-inspired grunts and clicks, à la Miriam Makeba, and a stop-and-start phrasing that kept you off balance. At the end, he used his customized Octavia pedal to boost his notes by an octave and fly off into the stratosphere with a shimmering guitar solo.

  I didn’t have the background to dissect “Purple Haze” back then, but I knew it felt fresh and wonderful. While Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger were
also bending old blues forms, Hendrix took those same root elements (along with R & B and jazz, a little flamenco, and George Frideric Handel) to go faster, deeper, right out of the solar system. Are You Experienced spoke to me in a new language. (And with Electric Ladyland, his masterpiece released a year later, he would go further still.)

  I got off the last train to Clarksville; once I heard Hendrix, I was hooked. He wasn’t for everyone, which made him even more special. I remember another neighbor, Paulette Cotton, a protohippie at the time, who wore funky clothes and burned incense and liked Hendrix almost as much as I did. I felt avant-garde, even if I still looked like a conventional middle-class kid from Seattle. (I wasn’t ready to emulate the flower children and hippies in the University District, though I did have a buddy at Lakeside who wore a paisley scarf.)

  I bought Are You Experienced and played it nonstop on our living room stereo. My mother was dismayed: “How can you stand that, Paul? It’s just noise!”

  And like generations of teenagers before me, I’d respond, “But mom, listen to it. Give it a chance.” But when I tried to explain why I loved it, she shook her head and left the room.

  My tastes were changing. I bought records by bluesmen like Buddy Guy and B.B. King, and I switched to a progressive FM station that played Hendrix and the Velvet Underground and Cream. Lakeside had a stereo reel-to-reel setup in the basement of what used to be the school chapel. Whenever I had the chance, I’d use it to record Hendrix songs off the radio: “Like a Rolling Stone” from the Monterey Pop Festival or the feedback-laden national anthem that had astonished people at Woodstock. I was playing the latter back one day when the music department chairman rushed in and said, “Turn that off—stop it! Those are the most awful sounds I have ever heard from an instrument!”