The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  In the history of the galaxy, the human race has been around for a tiny fraction of time, a mere blink. Life and the rare gift of consciousness did not come with a guarantee that it would continue forever. Asteroids are nature’s way of saying, “How’s that space program going?” as astronomers like to say.

  MUSK BEGAN THINKING seriously about that question, and the probability of an “eventual extinction event,” as he called it. The solution: Find another planet to live on. Make humans a multiplanet species, and create a backup hard drive for the human race there, just in case Earth crashes like a faulty computer. The atmosphere on Venus is too acidic. Mercury is too close to the sun. The best bet, he thought, is to colonize Mars.

  One night he was driving home from a party on Long Island to New York City with his college friend Adeo Ressi. It was late, and people were asleep in the backseat. But the two friends were deep in an animated discussion.

  “We were both interested in space, but we dismissed it as soon as it came up. ‘Oh, that’s too expensive and complicated.’” Ressi told Esquire. “Then two miles would go by. ‘Well, how expensive and complicated could it be?’ Two more miles. ‘It can’t be that expensive and complicated.’ It kept going on like this, and by the time we made it through the Midtown Tunnel into New York City, we’d basically decided to travel the world to see if something could be done in space.”

  That night, Musk went back to his hotel, and logged on to NASA’s website, looking for the plan to get to Mars.

  “Because, of course, there had to be a schedule,” he said later. “And I couldn’t find it. I thought the problem was me. Because, of course, it must be here somewhere on this website, but just well hidden. And it turned out it wasn’t on the website at all. Which was shocking.”

  It wasn’t on the website because there wasn’t a schedule.

  Although it had achieved enormous success sending robots to the corners of the solar system, NASA’s human space program was in a rut. Underfunded, overshadowed by 9/11 and the two wars that followed, space travel had become an afterthought. Since Eugene Cernan became the last man to walk on the moon in 1972, NASA had not sent an astronaut any farther than what’s known as low Earth orbit, a few hundred miles up.

  Musk, a ravenous reader of science fiction, had expected that by this point in his life there’d be a base on the moon and trips to Mars powered by the robust space program built on the Apollo lunar missions. If in the 1960s, the United States could send a man to the moon in less than a decade, surely there were more great things to come.

  He was overcome with what he called a “feeling of dismay.”

  “I just did not want Apollo to be our high-water mark,” he said. “We do not want a future where we tell our children that this was the best we ever did. Growing up, I kept expecting we’re going to have a base on the moon, and we’re going to have trips to Mars. Instead, we went backwards, and that’s a great tragedy.”

  The more he studied the state of the human space program, the more dismayed he grew. The International Space Station was a marvel, but the way NASA sent astronauts there was, he thought, seriously flawed. The shuttle was mounted on the side of the rocket, like a baby perched on a mother’s back, with no way to abort. As a winged spaceplane, it had to reenter the atmosphere at just the right trajectory, and “even a momentary variance in that can break the vehicle apart. And then, of course, you’ve got no escape system, so if anything does go wrong, you’re toast.”

  Then there was the cost. NASA was spending billions a year on a limited program flying a handful of times each year, mostly to the space station, which was only some 240 miles away, the same as an Amtrak commute between Washington, DC, and New York. As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, the shuttle program “had gone boldly where we had gone hundreds of times before.”

  Musk had studied physics and economics, and saw all this as a big problem set, a challenge that could be overcome with creative thinking—and his newfound wealth. What separated the Apollo era from now was a Cold War rivalry. But also it was money—and political will. After Apollo, NASA had been routinely starved of funding. Space just didn’t capture the public’s attention anymore. Shuttle missions had become routine, boring, noteworthy only when there was a tragedy.

  Space was still the exclusive domain of governments, but maybe he could pull off something so audacious it would reignite interest in space, get people’s attention, and boost funding for NASA.

  Musk planned a P. T. Barnum–like stunt he hoped would grab headlines and reinvigorate interest in space. He’d go out and buy a rocket and launch a greenhouse full of seeds in a nutrient gel that would hydrate upon landing on the surface of Mars. He would create a life support system on the barren planet and then beam back images of a leafy green plant rising against the lifeless, red landscape. He dubbed the gambit Mars Oasis, and figured he could accomplish it for $15 million to $30 million.

  He gathered some of the country’s top aerospace minds for a meeting at the Marriott near the Los Angeles airport. Michael Griffin, who later would become NASA’s administrator, was there; so was Rob Manning, of NASA’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who served as the chief engineer of Mars Pathfinder, the 23-pound rover that had landed on Mars in 1997. Michael Lembeck, who worked for several aerospace companies, figured Musk’s plan would cost far more than Musk suspected. He scribbled the figure $180 million and passed the note to Manning, who had scribbled down his own number.

  The two guesses were within $10 million of each other. There was no way Musk could do this on the cheap. Mars was just too difficult—and far. Lembeck had worked in the space industry for a long time, and was skeptical of the whole gambit, he said, because he had seen “a bunch of bright-eyed folks trying to bring the numbers down to commercial prices” while forgetting the axiom that is drilled into every space engineer: “Space is hard.”

  He calculated that Musk was “at least $100 million off from what was doable.” But Musk “didn’t want to hear the no word,” Lembeck said.

  Despite the bad news, Musk came out of the meeting undeterred, vowing to press on.

  But the cheapest rocket he could find in the United States was the Delta II, which had cost about $50 million. So, he went to Russia three times in search of a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile. But that, too, was pricey, and too risky for his taste. Buying a rocket, it turned out, was not such an easy endeavor.

  The more Musk studied, the more he realized that there had been very little advancement in rocket technology in the past forty years. The rockets being flown by the Russians and the United States at the early part of the twenty-first century were very similar to those used during the Apollo era. To a self-made Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, this was stunning.

  “The computer that you could have bought in the early ’70s would have filled this room, and had less computing power than your cell phone,” he said during a speech at Stanford in 2003. “Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved? So, I started looking into that.”

  He gathered a group of engineers and began to meet on Saturdays to figure out “what would be the best way to approach this problem of not just launch cost but of launch reliability.”

  Musk had read every book he could find on the subject, as Beal had. And he came away convinced that the best way to acquire a rocket was to build it himself, no matter how many times friends told him he was crazy. He shared the banker’s zeal of lowering the cost of space travel, and decided he’d try to upend the government-dominated business model that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and others had been feasting on for years.

  On March 14, 2002, Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies. Many of his close friends felt the need to stage an intervention. Even Cantrell, one of his earliest advisers, bailed. As impressed as he was with Musk, “I honestly didn’t see this whole thing succeeding,” he said.

  Musk was trying to triumph where even whole countries struggled. At t
he dawn of the Space Age, from 1957 through 1966, the United States attempted to launch 424 rockets into orbit. Of those, 343 made it successfully—meaning there was a failure rate of nearly 20 percent. During that time, the average number of annual failures—often rockets exploding into angry, red-hot fireballs—was eight. After 1966, there were between one and three annual failures on average, and then one or less a year after 2000. In other words, it took the government’s space program nearly five decades to approach anything even close to reliability.

  But it was still prone to catastrophic disaster. In early 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts.

  A billionaire with no experience in space could not start up a rocket company and a manned space program.

  Just ask Andy Beal.

  KNOWN AS SPACEX, Musk’s new company started out in an old El Segundo factory at 1310 East Grand Avenue, not far from the Los Angeles airport. Musk had sketched out the design of his first creation, a workhorse of a rocket, with a single engine that was purposefully nothing fancy. If others thought of their rockets as racecars, he was happy to compare his to a Honda—utilitarian, reliable, and cheap.

  “I would bet you 1,000-to-one that if you bought a Honda Civic that the sucker will not break down in the first year of operation,” he told Fast Company magazine. “You can have a cheap car that’s reliable, and the same applies to rockets.” For about $6 million it would be able to launch over 1,000 pounds of payloads, such as satellites, to low Earth orbit, far less than what competitors charged.

  It wasn’t long before the company’s first Falcon 1 rocket was assembled—“Falcon” an homage to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, “1” denoting the number of first-stage engines it had. But even though Musk had built a rocket in just over a year, he couldn’t get anyone at NASA to pay attention.

  Washington snubbed Musk just as it had Beal. The establishment—the large contractors, members of Congress, even many in NASA—saw him as just another multimillionaire with a toy space company. A dilettante who couldn’t possibly succeed. Few took Musk seriously.

  “At the beginning, we had to beg NASA to even pay attention,” recalled Lawrence Williams, SpaceX’s vice president of strategic relations at the time.

  By the end of 2003, Musk decided that if NASA wouldn’t come to him, he would go to it. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was preparing to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight with a party at the National Air and Space Museum, and Musk decided he’d show up—and bring his new rocket.

  For the event, SpaceX loaded the seven-story rocket onto the back of a custom trailer and hauled it cross-country to Washington, DC. With a police escort, it paraded down Independence Avenue, along the National Mall, hallowed ground that had been witness to myriad spectacles, marches, protests. But it had never seen anything quite like this.

  As Musk, then thirty-two years old, parked his rocket outside the headquarters of the FAA, tourists who were headed to the National Air and Space Museum stopped to gawk at the streetside exhibit, even in the freezing temperatures. A shiny, white missile that stretched seven stories long, squatting in the real estate usually reserved for hot dog vendors. A cabbie stopped, agog, as the trailer took up an entire lane of traffic—at rush hour. The spectacle was pure Silicon Valley swagger, like an Apple product unveiling, but before Steve Jobs had perfected the art of hyping a new gadget to the masses.

  This was Musk’s opportunity to show off what his little startup had accomplished—to NASA; to the congressional staffers clamoring for free drinks; to the press, eager for a glimpse—even if it had yet to fly.

  But it could fly. It would fly. And its presence on the curb created a stark juxtaposition that was clear and calculated. Inside the museum was NASA’s grand past—the lunar lander, the Mercury capsule, the echoes of Apollo enshrined alongside the orphaned dreams it had spawned. Outside was the man who would create a new future—cheap, reliable spaceflight, all with the goal of one day colonizing Mars—a promise as improbable as the young eccentric making it.

  He wasn’t just selling his rocket, but what it represented—the crazy idea that a small startup could succeed in space. Beal had gotten further than many had thought, and he’d put a nice dent in the wall that kept untraditional players out of the space business. But if Musk was going to avoid Beal’s fate, he didn’t just have to build reliable rockets—he had to upend the industry’s entrenched hierarchy. That would take more than just sound engineering. It would take bravado and guts—a delusion fueled by ego, luck, and an appetite to fight the establishment relentlessly.

  The press release announcing the Independence Avenue stunt not only hyped the new rocket as “a major breakthrough in the cost of access to space.” It derided the competition as being four times more expensive and far less reliable. SpaceX also exploited the fact that NASA was still grounded ten months after the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up, killing all seven astronauts on board.

  “With the grounding of the Space Shuttle creating a backlog in hitchhiker satellite deliveries, there is a great need for new means of access to space,” it read, touting the Falcon 1’s ability to eventually be reusable.

  At the eight p.m. reception, as the NASA officials, congressional staffers, and FAA officials milled about, Musk made his case in a short speech that SpaceX was the answer to a stagnant space industry.

  “The history of launch vehicle development has not been very successful; there really hasn’t been a success, if you define success as making a significant difference in cost or reliability,” he said. “We have a shot with SpaceX, I think, for the first time in a long time.”

  He invited a small gaggle of press outside, where spotlights highlighted the rocket and a podium had been set up. “We’re very proud to debut this vehicle, and to do so here in D.C.”

  The self-appointed master of ceremonies had even more news to share. This Falcon 1 was just the beginning, he said. The company was already working on a Falcon 5, a far more powerful rocket that would have five first-stage engines instead of just the one. It, too, would disrupt the competition by being far less expensive, he vowed: “It’s going to set a new world record for the cost per pound for access to space. That’s a huge improvement over anything else.”

  The Falcon 5 would be big enough to allow SpaceX into the more lucrative market for larger satellites, one dominated by big government contractors. And so this spectacle on the National Mall was more than just a debut for his new rocket. It was a warning shot to such companies as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Beal had not been able to break their vise grip on the industry. But Musk was armed with a new rocket, and a newly minted fortune that he was ready to burn.

  He was coming for them.

  3

  “Ankle Biter”

  A MONTH AFTER MUSK paraded his rocket down Independence Avenue, Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, had a twenty-one-page report on his desk, detailing SpaceX’s capabilities and prospects. “Contains company private data,” the title page of the January 29, 2004, document began. “Eyes only. Do not distribute.”

  Of those in NASA who had heard about SpaceX, few took it seriously. But O’Keefe had grown curious about Musk and his merry band of rocketeers, and wanted to keep an open mind. So, he dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.

  Sarsfield was a huge proponent of the commercialization of space and had written a report calling for the agency to rely more heavily on the private sector. Although he’d been looking for a company just like SpaceX to come along, he vowed to give the firm an unbiased assessment and brought a few seasoned colleagues with him. When they walked through the doors of Musk’s shop, the quartet became the first NASA officials ever to visit SpaceX’s El Segundo headquarters.

  It was unlike
any rocket company Sarsfield had ever seen. Employees had set up Ping-Pong and air hockey tables and rode around on a Segway. Musk would drive his $1 million McLaren F1 sports car through the hangar door close to his cubicle right onto the factory floor. But the employees were doing real work, building engines and hardware. And as Sarsfield looked around at the small team that was then just forty-two employees—most engineers and technicians—he saw some faces he recognized from some of the top aerospace companies in the world.

  “Aggressive hiring,” he noted in his report. “Highly talented, hand-picked team.”

  Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined.

  “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.

  Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.

  Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.”

  “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.”