by Chris Impey
Like Richard Branson, Peter Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur and a Trekkie. He started young. By the age of eight, he was lecturing friends and family on the space program and at twelve he won first place in a rocket design competition. As a sophomore at MIT, he founded a space organization for students that spread nationally. He went to Harvard Medical School—mostly to please his parents, who were both medical professionals—but the pull of space was stronger. Before attaining an MD, he started the International Space University, an institution that has produced 3,300 graduates and has a $30 million campus in Strasbourg, France. He also started a company named International MicroSpace to launch microsatellites, winning a $100 million contract from the US Defense Department. But Diamandis was overstretched and the company couldn’t deliver on the contract, so he sold it (for a fat profit, naturally).
In 1994, Diamandis read Charles Lindbergh’s memoir The Spirit of St. Louis and was inspired. He learned that a hotel owner named Raymond Orteig had put up a $25,000 prize in May 1919 for the first nonstop airplane flight between New York and Paris. Nine teams spent a total of $400,000 trying to win. Lindbergh was considered a dark horse, an outsider with no backing and little aviation experience. He had quit college and spent his early twenties as a “barnstormer,” crisscrossing the country in a small biplane giving joy rides and doing aerobatics. He spent a year flying for the Army and another year flying mail for the US Post Office Department. He heard about the Orteig Prize and was immediately interested.
Six famous aviators had died trying to win the prize by the time Lindbergh entered the competition. He had never even flown over a large body of water. The press dubbed the twenty-five-year-old “the flying fool.” He made the epic flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three hours, with his fuel-laden plane barely clearing the telephone lines at the end of the runway, having to deal with fog and ice along the way, and landing by dead reckoning on the darkened Le Bourget airfield.12 Flying was still dangerous when Lindbergh won the prize in 1927, but excitement and heightened interest propelled a new industry. It had taken eight years for the prize to be won, but within three years passenger air traffic increased thirtyfold. The prize spawned the $250 billion aviation industry.
Diamandis had found his business model.
The cost of going into space hadn’t changed for thirty years, so it was the natural target for his “incentive prize.” When he announced the X Prize, he had no funding and most of the people to whom he pitched the idea thought he was crazy, which only encouraged him. After five years, he persuaded the Ansari family to fund a $10 million prize—competition spurs innovation (Figure 20). The head of the family is Anousheh Ansari, who was born in Iran and trained as an engineer. She moved to the United States after the revolution in 1979 and founded a series of telecommunications companies.
Seven organizations spent $100 million trying to win the prize. Burt Rutan succeeded in 2004, and his SpaceShipOne now hangs above Apollo 11 and next to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in the Smithsonian. Two years later, Anousheh Ansari herself became the fourth space tourist when she traveled to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Since then, X Prize challenges have proliferated. After giving a talk at Google, Diamandis was approached by a guy in a T-shirt who said, “Let’s have lunch.” It was Larry Page, the Google CEO, who has since helped extend the scope of the X Prize to address humanity’s broad challenges in health, energy, and the environment. In addition to Larry Page, the board of trustees includes film director James Cameron, media guru Arianna Huffington, and astronaut Richard Garriott.
Figure 20. The X Prize and emerging commercial space ventures are keeping NASA on its toes. This prototype for a lunar electric rover is designed to support a future lunar base. It will allow two astronauts to eat, sleep, and travel for two weeks, and the rover will be able to cover thousands of miles and navigate slopes of up to 40 degrees.
The current competition Diamandis is most excited about is the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, awarding $10 million to a working version of Dr. McCoy’s medical device from Star Trek. By talking to the device, coughing into it, or doing a skin prick, it will measure vital functions and diagnose fifteen diseases more accurately than a board-certified doctor. A true tricorder device hasn’t been developed, but there has been a recent explosion of health-monitoring and diagnostic apps for smartphones. “Ultimately this is about democratizing access to health care around the world,” says Diamandis, and he notes that, as with space travel, “The technology is evolving much faster than the regulations are.”13
The only “failed” competition was the Archon Genomics X Prize to accurately sequence 100 genomes in ten days or fewer, at a cost of less than $1,000 per genome. In that case, burgeoning progress in the biotech sector rendered an incentive prize moot.14
The quintessential experience of an astronaut is zero gravity. To whet people’s appetite for space, Diamandis founded a for-profit company called the Zero G Corporation to give paying customers a taste of weightlessness in parabolic flight. It was 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s epic voyage, and the Bush administration’s Moon–Mars initiative had just fizzled out. Diamandis thought governments would never have the nimbleness or stomach for risk to take on the challenge of space. Worse, they prefer to smother innovation in red tape. When Diamandis presented his idea to the FAA, they said regulations wouldn’t permit passengers to be in a diving airplane with their seat belts unstrapped. It took eleven years for him to overcome the objections and offer the public a nauseating but exhilarating experience.
His most noted passenger was the iconic physicist Stephen Hawking. Diamandis had met Hawking through the X Prize Foundation, and the physicist told him of his dream to go into space. Diamandis offered a zero-gravity experience instead, and Hawking accepted on the spot. But the aircraft partner said, “Are you crazy? We’re going to kill the guy!” The FAA said, “You’re only licensed to fly able-bodied people.” (Hawking has ALS and is confined to a wheelchair.) An exception was granted in 2007 and the scientist was liberated from his withered body for eight parabolic dives. Hawking controls very few of his muscles, but Diamandis described him as having had “a shit-eating grin” on his face.15
At a press conference for the flight, Hawking said, “I think the human race doesn’t have a future unless it goes into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.”
Diamandis is utopian in his belief that galloping progress in technology will solve human problems. This is best embodied in the Singularity University, an unaccredited educational institution in Silicon Valley that he founded in 2008 with inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. If he didn’t have so much tangible success, it would be easy to pigeonhole Diamandis as a wild-eyed dreamer. He would empathize with what Robert Goddard said after the New York Times had declared his goals unachievable: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once achieved, it becomes commonplace.”16 In humanity’s future, Diamandis foresees “nine billion human brains working together to a ‘meta-intelligence,’ where you can know the thoughts, feelings, and knowledge of anyone.”17
The Transport Guru
Elon Musk wants to die on Mars.
Like Peter Diamandis, he’s sure that our future is in space and that we must become an interplanetary species. He was influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, but his vision has a darker, dystopian slant, since it’s also a hedge against threats to our survival: “An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but over the last 60 years, atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later we must expand life beyond this blue and green ball, or go extinct.”18
Musk made his name and his fortune starting Internet companies, but rockets are in his
blood. His father was an engineer, so he was used to getting explanations of how things worked. He built rockets as a kid, but he grew up in South Africa, where there were no premade rockets, so he went to a drugstore, bought the ingredients for rocket fuel, and stuffed them into a pipe. Thirty years later, he was building rockets efficient enough to lead the budding private space industry.
He also showed personality traits that would serve him well later and propel him into the top echelon of innovators and entrepreneurs. His mother said he had devoured the entire Encyclopædia Britannica by the time he was nine, and he remembered much of it. She had to check that he was getting something to eat and wearing fresh socks every day. He alienated his schoolmates by correcting their minor factual errors, and he retains that blunt intensity as an adult. Musk has a reputation as someone made of cold steel, so it’s not surprising that he’s the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s depiction of Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies, the playboy inventor in a flying, weaponized suit.19
Musk has a lot in common with Richard Branson. Both are billionaires who like to take risks and challenge conventional wisdom. Both have made their mark in multiple transportation industries—Branson in rail, aviation, and space; Musk with electric cars, spacecraft, and his hyperloop aviation concept. They’re both committed philanthropists. But it’s hard to imagine Musk admitting to a debilitating weakness, as Branson did with his shyness, or getting up in drag to pay off a bet, as Branson did when he lost a bet with the boss of Air Asia and served as a stewardess on a charity flight from Perth to Kuala Lumpur in 2013.
Musk received degrees in business and physics from the University of Pennsylvania; he spent only two days in an applied physics PhD program at Stanford before leaving to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations. He said he was just trying to pay the rent when he started a web software company with his brother to market online city guides to the newspaper industry. He sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year, he founded a company for online financial services and e-mail payments. He built the PayPal brand and three years later sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion. Good ideas are contagious—the creators of Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn all worked with him at PayPal.20
Musk stands out even in the overachieving cadre of space pioneers. He has the technical background to develop new technologies, he is a hands-on manager, and he has the personal wealth to fuel his dreams.
The pace of Musk’s activities is breathtaking. In the consecutive years beginning in 2002, he started SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and SolarCity. The latter is the largest provider of solar power systems in the United States, riding a market that has grown by a factor of ten since 2009. SolarCity also makes charging stations for electric vehicles, helping solve a chicken-and-egg problem in which people are reluctant to buy electric cars when there isn’t the infrastructure to support their use. Every Friday, Musk drives 20 miles from his 20,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion to the converted hangar south of the Hollywood Park racetrack where Tesla Motors has its research facility. He normally drives a Tesla Roadster, but his guilty pleasure is a 1967 E-Type Jaguar, which he says is like a dysfunctional but exciting girlfriend. Tesla only sold 2,500 Roadsters in its first nine years, but Musk is confident he can take on giants in the “green” car market like Toyota, which sold more than 600,000 hybrids in 2012.
Musk also commutes to the SpaceX facility, where visitors are greeted by a life-size statue of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit. Here the company develops and manufactures the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets and the conical Dragon spacecraft (Figure 21).
An entrepreneur’s life can be an extreme roller coaster. Late in 2008, Musk was close to despair. The first three SpaceX launches had failed, financing for Tesla Motors fell through, the bank behind SolarCity reneged on an agreement, and he’d just suffered a publicly acrimonious divorce. But the next day, NASA called with a billion-dollar contract offer to service the International Space Station. In 2009, SpaceX became the first privately funded company to put a satellite in Earth orbit, and in 2012 it became the first commercial company to dock with the ISS. SpaceX has a backlog of $3 billion of orders through 2017. Musk’s life, however, continues to be a white-knuckle ride. In late 2013, his net worth dropped by $1.3 billion after reports of weak earnings by Tesla and SolarCity, and he separated from his second wife.
Figure 21. The Falcon 9 rocket is designed by Space X and built in California. Its two-stage rocket can carry 15 tons to low Earth orbit and 5 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Space X was founded by Elon Musk, the South Africa–born inventor and investor who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal. Musk has also been an innovator in terrestrial travel with his car company Tesla Motors.
We see in this progression of space entrepreneurs the march toward youth: Rutan is in his early seventies, Branson in his early sixties, Diamandis in his early fifties, and Musk in his early forties. Yet they’re all connected. Rutan is designing spaceships for Branson and he won the X Prize from the organization that was founded by Diamandis, with Musk serving on the board of trustees.
These four hard-driving men get the most publicity about commercial space travel, but there are other entrepreneurs shaking up the traditional order. Bill Stone is a sixty-one-year-old engineer who started a company to look for microbial life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. He’s also a professional caver who has led expeditions to some of the world’s most inaccessible and dangerous places. Stone has seen twenty-three colleagues die in his various adventures. He’s funded by NASA to test technology for a follow-up to the proposed Europa Clipper mission, which will map the icy surface of Europa and identify places where the ice is thinnest. Then another of Stone’s concepts will come into play: an ice-penetrating robot that can explore the ocean beneath and search for the chemical signatures of microbial life. He thinks discovering life on Europa would be one of the most momentous events in the history of science.21
Stone and the “big four” are unrelated, but they might be linked genetically. Nobody has tested them for the 7R variant of the DRD4 gene, which controls dopamine, to see if their novelty-seeking is a heritable trait. But a research group led by Scott Shane at Case Western Reserve University has studied 870 pairs of identical twins and found a clear genetic component in the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur.22 Neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge, who has correlated risky or impulsive decision making with entrepreneurial success, notes: “Our findings also raise the question of whether one could enhance entrepreneurship pharmacologically.”23
There’s no single template for being a space entrepreneur. Each of these examples has a different mix of strengths and blind spots. But in an age where cynicism is widespread and many people are scared or bewildered by technology, they share an unshakable faith in its power to improve the future.
6
Beyond the Horizon
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Space Is Heating Up
After years in the doldrums, space is heating up. For decades, NASA was the only option, but now it’s getting hard to keep up with the activities of American private companies that are trying to create a new business model for space travel.
We’re witnessing an exciting paradigm shift. NASA has always been a technocratic institution, an agency designed to manage research and development for the good of the nation. The best parallel is with the Atomic Energy Commission, which was formed in 1946 to move assets from military to civilian hands and to regulate the peaceful use of atomic energy. During the 1960s, the race to land men on the Moon established NASA as an engine of American international prestige, but that was a unique historical occurrence.1 NASA’s share of the federal budget has since shrunk from 5 percent to ½ percent. The “military-industrial complex” still has a lot of clout, but power is shifting to private and commercial organizations. Now they vie for government contracts, but eventually the government will be reduced to the levers of regulatory control, as it is with the aviation industry.
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bsp; Figure 22. The first commercially developed spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon capsule approached the station and was grabbed by a robotic arm.
The first high-profile success for the private sector came in May 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (Figure 22). Elon Musk’s gumdrop-shaped capsule is made by a company with fewer than 3,000 employees with an average age of thirty. It’s a minnow compared to NASA, with 18,000 employees and 60,000 contractors and an average age of over fifty. The docking was not without incident. Dragon aborted on its first approach to the station and then had sensor problems, but eventually astronaut Don Pettit reached out 10 meters with the robot arms and grabbed it, as wild cheers erupted at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston and the SpaceX control center in California. “We’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” said Pettit. When he went through the air lock the next day to inspect the cargo, he said, “It smells like a new car.”2
Early in 2013, and again in 2014, Dragon was back in low Earth orbit, fulfilling the first stage of a twelve-mission, $3.1 billion contract with NASA to haul cargo to the ISS. In September 2013, the business became competitive for the first time as the Orbital Sciences Corporation docked its Cygnus capsule (after an aborted attempt a few weeks earlier), unloading hundreds of pounds of valuable supplies, including chocolate for the astronauts. Orbital has its own contract to ferry supplies to the station, valued at $1.9 billion.3
On the same day that Orbital was ferrying candy into low Earth orbit, SpaceX made a bold move with the first launch of a beefy version of its Falcon 9 rocket. After it successfully carried up a Canadian weather and communication satellite, flight controllers tested a new method of lowering costs by reusing the rocket. But it didn’t work as planned. The goal was to leave a little fuel in the rocket, reignite it, and fly it back to the launchpad. But the restarted rocket began spinning and sloshing the fuel against the side of the rocket, which starved the engines and made the rocket crash. Musk was chipper. He tweeted, “Between this flight and Grasshopper tests I think we now have all the pieces of the puzzle to bring the rocket home.”4 Grasshopper has metal struts for legs and is designed to land back on its launchpad, like a cartoon rocket. A small prototype made eight successful test flights between 2011 and 2013, and the full-size Falcon 9 version made its first test flight early in 2014. Grasshopper is designed to fly to 90 kilometers (54 miles), just short of the Kármán line, and land as accurately as a helicopter.